Twenty-five U.S. institutions have been selected by the NSF-funded National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter) to join the Pathways to Innovation Program.

The Pathways to Innovation Program is designed to help institutions fully incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship into undergraduate engineering education. The program is run by Epicenter, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Stanford University and VentureWell (formerly NCIIA).

Image: Leaders of the 25 new Pathways to Innovation Program teams met at Stanford for the first time on January 14-15, 2015. 

If Stop Subsidizing Big Pharma by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones in The New York Times was intended to derail a pending White House announcement it failed spectacularly. Two weeks later President Obama unveiled “The Precision Medicine Initiative” in his State of the Union address.

However, the article did exploit a prominent platform to promote the idea that the only fair drug development system is one that the government controls to regulate prices. It must come as a shock for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to find itself attacked for funding a breakthrough drug promising to cure, not just treat the disease with its own money.

Silicon Valley Bank’s annual healthcare M&A report, Trends in Healthcare Investments and Exits, examines the merger and acquisition and IPO activity of private, venture-backed biopharma and medical device companies.

Among the findings:

Healthcare IPOs triple in 2013, leading to record potential IPO/big exit returns of $12.5 billion. Venture fundraising and investment stabilize to drive innovation Large biopharma companies are essentially outsourcing early-stage R&D by investing heavily in young venture-backed companies. Biopharma big exit M&A activity reaches record valuations

Growth is once again top of mind for business executives. As they turn their attention from improving the operational performance of their companies to making those companies grow again, many of them will follow the standard message: consistently strong, value-creating revenue growth lies within reach of major corporations that pursue best practice in strategy, marketing, operations, and organization.

In the beginning all businesses are just people playing out an idea. It’s never the other way around – there is no idea so big that it doesn’t need people to make it succeed. Investors know this, hence the saying “Bet on the jockey (founder), not the horse (idea).” A great jockey is a great role model.

There is nothing worse than being sick—except, perhaps, having to go to the doctor when you’re sick. You know the drill: While tending to your drippy nose and hoping your scratchy voice is comprehensible, you call the clinic to schedule a doctor’s visit only to be put on hold for twenty minutes, then given an appointment for three weeks from now. As your fever rises, you decide to take matters into your own hands by dragging your weary self the emergency room, where you sit in the waiting room for hours before finally seeing someone who can help you. By the end of this ordeal, you’re pretty sure that visiting the doctor has made you even sicker than you were before.

My startup was accepted into the DreamIt Ventures accelerator program on a Thursday afternoon and my Co-founder and I had 48 hours to decide whether or not to participate. It wasn’t a decision we took lightly, since the accelerator takes 6% equity. We asked ourselves, ‘was $25K and access to the DreamIt community of entrepreneurs, mentors, and investors worth it?’

There is an impression, both in the press and among some urban analysts that as cities become larger they become more densely populated. In fact, the opposite is overwhelmingly true, as Professor Shlomo Angel has shown in his groundbreaking work, A Planet of Cities. This conclusion arises from the fact that, virtually everywhere, cities grow organically so that they add nearly all of their population on the urban fringe, which has considerably less expensive land. As their physical form of cities (the urban area) expands, the residents per unit of developed area generally falls.

It’s the question missing from so much of leadership development: “What kind of leader do you want to be?”

We facilitate and encourage self-awareness among up-and-coming leaders (what kind of leader you are), get them to map their journeys so far (what has made you the leader you are), share knowledge and ideas (what kind of leader you should be), and help them acquire new skills and adopt new behaviors (this is how you can become that kind of leader).

On December 16, 2014, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander (the "Minister") announced that Canada will unveil its Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Pilot Program (the "IIVC") at the end of January 2015. The IIVC is designed to attract experienced business immigrants who will actively invest in the Canadian economy and will be available to approximately 50 investors and their families (presumably each year). Although full details of the IIVC have not been announced yet, what is known so far is summarized below.

Amid debate about whether Silicon Valley is in a bubble or not, fresh numbers keep coming in that show significantly higher amounts of funding being thrown about into newly-minted startups, or private companies in general (e.g. - Uber wouldn't exactly be a startup).

Increasingly, exuberance for anything that's new seems to be catching fire across the globe.

Image: http://vator.tv/ 

WASHINGTON, DC – Venture capitalists invested $48.3 billion into companies located in 160 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in 2014, according to the MoneyTree™ Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters. The geographic distribution of venture capital investment in 2014 spanned the highest number of MSAs of the past five years, and represented a 7.5 percent increase from 2013, when companies in 148 metro areas received venture capital investment.

What do mountain climbers, surgeons, and business leaders have in common? They all are members of high-stakes teams, and hierarchical structures within these groups can both benefit and devastate them.

Fast Company spoke with Adam Galinsky and Eric Anicich, management professors at Columbia Business School and authors of a December 2014 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to find out why hierarchy is a mixed bag, and what organizations can do to strengthen their teams in high-stakes situations.

An accelerator, the latest buzzword used at economic-development agencies and universities, is a short-term, high-intensity program led by mentors. It may provide seed capital for participating enterpreneurs to test a business model.   

On the surface the growth in accelerator programs may seem to benefit entrepreneurs -- and in many cases it does. But this also means entrepreneurs need to be more selective and diligent than ever. 

Five teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE have just been awarded a combined $5.25 million for meeting significant milestones in developing a robot that can safely land on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send mooncasts back to the Earth. A tiny startup from India, Team Indus, with no experience in robotics or space flight just won $1 million of this prize. It stood head to head with companies that had been funded by billionaires, had received the assistance of NASA, and had the support of leading universities.

Boy, did I ever step in it last week.

I was speaking to a group of payments professionals in Denver and followed someone who had just extolled the many great virtues of Denver – the abundance of sunshine and microbreweries per capita, the fact that it’s home to the world’s largest rodeo, and that it’s credited with inventing the cheeseburger (who knew?).  As a Boston gal and New England Patriots fan, when it was my turn to speak, I couldn’t resist reminding the group that, although all of that was true, what Denver didn’t have this year was an AFC Championship team.

Image: http://www.pymnts.com/ 

With India's entrepreneurial ecosystem growing steadily, angel investors and investments are increasing rapidly, giving the country the second highest percentage of angel and incubator participation in the world.

According to a report by the professional services firm EY - earlier known as Ernst & Young - the percentage of angel and incubator participation in India rose to 17 per cent in 2013, from three per cent in 2011. This has been bettered in just one other country - Canada, with 20 per cent in 2013 (see 'A global picture').

It's nearing the end of Day 2 of the World Economic Forum in Davos of 2015. I have attended 20 sessions and multiple round-table dinners and lunches. It's almost too much to take in, but I've been doing my best. Here are 10 of the most interesting things I've learned so far.

1. First of all, from the picture above, you can see they have a LOT of security here. There are about 2,500 attendees, but nearly 5,000 army, guards, and police. There is full TSA-like security every time you enter the building and many of the hotels.

The Massachusetts Securities Division has recently joined a number of other states in adopting a “crowdfunding” exemption from securities registration requirements for certain offerings made within the Commonwealth, with the stated purpose of enabling startups and entrepreneurs to more easily use the Internet to raise capital.  Adopted as an emergency regulation that took effect immediately, the exemption permits companies that are incorporated in Massachusetts to raise capital from Massachusetts investors.

Rick Yang, who recently moved up to partner at New Enterprise Associates, has been heavily involved in the firm's seed investing. He is a member of the Startup Showcase Advisory Board for the annual South-by-Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, and is a mentor at Plug and Play Startup Camp.