Tapping into New Jersey's vast life sciences ecosystem, the state Economic Development Authority recently unveiled an Executive-in-Residence program that will connect the a broad pool of life science talent with promising companies located at the EDA's Commercialization Center for Innovative Technologies in North Brunswick.

The esidence program is a win-win for New Jersey's technology community, said EDA President-COO Tim Lizura in a news release.

Image: PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY

Tomorrow, the FCC is expected to vote on a proposal for new rules around Net Neutrality. The vote is likely to be 3-2 in favor of the rules, split along partisan lines (3 democrats, 2 republicans – shocker…). There has been an enormous amount of bombastic rhetoric in the past few months about the issue that has recently become especially politicized in the same way the debate about SOPA/PIPA unfolded.

It was a snowy and frozen January in northeastern Pennsylvania, and all I could do to drown my post-holiday blues was daydream of beach adventures and subtropical weather. It was 2010 and I was unemployed, living at home with my parents on unemployment checks and buried under $100,000 of student-loan debt.

It’s people — not cities — who innovate, invent and create things that benefit all of us. Still, cities play a central role in innovation by providing the necessary ecosystem that allows ideas to flow, take root and flourish.

“The Innovative City” is one of five topics featured in the Dallas Festival of Ideas, presented by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and The Dallas Morning News. We asked four panelists on the Innovative City team to offer their thoughts on this question: What makes an innovative city?

You’ve got a great idea. But somewhere along the way, your brain just fizzles. You’ve got no energy left to finish what you started. It’s happened to us all. You need to stay creative, but it’s just not happening. The inspiration that got you started is gone. Well, below are ways that you can get those creative juices flowing again and, hopefully, get your project or task finished.

If there is one thing we can never get enough of, it’s time. In our youth, time seems to move slowly, with each year feeling like that of an entire era. And as we age, we feel as if it speeds up exponentially and without restraint. Each and every one of us has exactly 168 hours a week at our disposal. Subtract the 56 hours we’d (hopefully) use for sleeping, and that gives us 112 hours. How we use that time and what we do or do not accomplish with it, is entirely up to us.

A shortened, better edited and with nicer pictures version of this post first appeared on TechCrunch. But if you want it in it’s full V1 glory read on … You’ve never been a CEO but might like to be one some day. But how? Nobody sees you as a CEO since you’ve never been one? I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “personal branding.”  If you don’t create the message about yourself, the market will. And if you want to be a CEO one day you need the messaging to reflect that.

Babson Professor Heidi M. Neck and Alumnus Anton Yakushin ’08 have launched an educational tech company called VentureBlocks, created to serve as a new and innovative resource for higher entrepreneurial education. The company’s first educational “block”, ‘The Nanu Challenge’, was officially released in January 2015.

The Nanu Challenge is an immersive 3-D simulation for customer and opportunity discovery meant to be played as part of a related classroom curriculum. Within the gaming experience, students are given the opportunity to interview consumers and develop insights by identifying their needs. By role-playing within the fictional setting of a small town called Trepton, students assume the role of a nascent entrepreneur pursuing a potential business opportunity, and learn the necessary habits and skill-set it’ll take to make it as a successful entrepreneur outside of the classroom.

Startups leave Philadelphia for family reasons or for industry reasons (and that churn is fine), but sometimes Philly loses a startup that seems like it could have flourished here.

Drop Diagnostics, a health IT company founded by recent Penn grads, left Philadelphia for San Francisco last month, shortly after graduating from DreamIt Ventures’ DreamIt Health accelerator.

Image: Drop Diagnostics founders, left to right: Peter Bacas, Nishant Neel and Max Lamb. (Photo courtesy of Drop Diagnostics)

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is seeking nominations for its annual Tibbetts and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Hall of Fame Awards. 

For details on how to submit nominations, visit http://www.sbir.gov/news/2015-tibbetts-and-sbir-hall-fame-award-nominations. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. EDT, April 10, 2015.  Please note that for the first time, there is an option for nominations to be made by video presentation.

As more Millennials assume leadership positions around the world, organizations are becoming increasingly concerned with how to ensure their success. However, most existing research on those born between the early ‘80s and late ‘90s is skewed toward understanding what a narrow, typically Western, population wants. Conclusions based on such a limited sample could lead to bad decisions (and missed opportunities) around attracting, retaining, and developing millennial leaders in a global business environment.

Image: COURTESY OF NASA GSFC

There’s a hushed quiet in the waiting room at a midtown Manhattan fertilization clinic called Reproductive Medical Associates as a dozen women flip through magazines, the glossies a welcome distraction from their scheduled treatments and consultations. But just down the hall, in a window-rimmed corner office with views of Central Park, conversation ping-pongs back and forth as Piraye Yurttas Beim, a scientist and entrepreneur, updates the clinic's co-director on her startup's progress.

Last week I wrote about the death of Austin Ventures, which once was one of the country’s largest venture capital firms (and easily the largest in Texas). Much of the ensuing conversation — including this outstanding post by Joshua Baer — has been about what this development means for Austin-area startups. The general consensus is ‘not much,’ suggesting that AV’s star had been fading for years before formally imploding.

JumpStart has hired someone tasked with uniting Akron’s entrepreneurial community.

Tobin Buckner is now JumpStart’s Akron Entrepreneurial Community Manager — a role that will require him to “build strong bonds between the local organizations that promote entrepreneurship and assist small businesses,” according to a news release from JumpStart, a Cleveland-based nonprofit that works with entrepreneurs in Northeast Ohio.

Unless you’re drinking at least three cups of coffee a day, you should consider upping your java habit.

The US dietary guidelines advisory committee, which makes recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration and other federal agencies, released a report this week that points to the health benefits and minimal risks of drinking three to five cups of coffee a day, including a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

There’s an interesting article in USA Today this week about how IBM approach to its Watson division led to it playing a critical role in making big data less unwieldy, supporting digital health startups and becoming a resource for the healthcare industry. Not bad for a computer brain that got its start as a Jeopardy contestant.

Mike Rhodin, who heads up IBM Watson, did the interview from the University of Michigan where he was scheduled to speak to a couple of entrepreneur groups. He noted that the freedom the Watson team had within IBM was key.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Warren Buffet once said “when the tide goes out, you get to see who’s been swimming naked.” The sudden drop in oil and mineral prices along with the ensuing lowering of the Canadian dollar exposes our economy and seriously threatens our high standard of living. In this period of cheap oil, and reduced government revenue as a result, we urgently need to balance the prosperity created from our natural resources with more from commercializing our innovative ideas.

Image: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

So-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy, according to a Stanford intellectual property expert.

Stephen Haber, a Stanford political science professor, suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.

Image: In a new study, political scientist and intellectual property expert Stephen Haber says so-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy.

The faces here, which look a bit like video game avatars, are actually portraits drawn from DNA.

Each rendering was created by plugging an individual genetic profile into a predictive tool created by Mark D. Shriver, a professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State University. Dr. Shriver and his colleagues have studied the ways that genes influence facial development.

Image: Predictions of what people look like using a DNA analysis tool compared with photos of the actual people. Credit The New York Times; Images and renderings by Mark D. Shriver/Penn State University

Even though it’s looking increasingly likely that humanity will find a way to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, there’s a chance that our creative output may live on.

Servers, hard drives, flash drives, and disks will degrade (as will our libraries of paper books, of course), but a group of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have found a way to encode data onto DNA—the very same stuff that all living beings’ genetic information is stored on—that could survive for millennia.