Last week, the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Sigmar Gabriel, the Chief Executive of the European Investment Fund Pier Luigi Gilibert, and KfW board member Dr Ingrid Hengster launched two new large-scale instruments for funding venture capital.

The Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships (IIP), within the Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation, announces a nationwide search to fill multiple Program Director positions for the Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program.

Formal consideration of interested applications will continue until these positions are filled.

Program Directors have an unparalleled opportunity and responsibility to ensure the NSF SBIR and STTR programs fulfill their mandate as "America's Seed Fund", and that these programs support the next generation of innovative, high-growth technology enterprises.

HubSpot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah, whose 128-slide presentation "Culture Code" has tallied over 2 million views online since its 2003 debut, flips a popular line from the movie "Fight Club" and says company culture is more like software than hardware. "You should be iterating on it and building on it just like a product," says Shah, who likens a company's culture to its "operating system."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital, describes seeing the telltale traits of successful entrepreneurs in Lisa Sugar and her husband, Brian, who co-founded the women's interest site Popsugar. Those qualities include a clear sense of product, a strong connection with the audience, and an obsession that drives entrepreneurs to devote everything they have to building their business. Emily Ma, a lecturer in management at Stanford, interviews.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Blue Bottle Coffee Founder James Freeman discusses the realization that the coffee he started making need not be perfect. While musicians practice till they play perfectly, Freeman says what served him well in the early days were other hallmarks of performing artists: being in service to an audience, imagining sensory outcomes and repeating an activity to improve incrementally.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Be Part of the Exciting New Changes in 2016! Each year, UEDA members compete for our prestigious Awards of Excellence, which recognize outstanding, leading-edge higher education projects and initiatives promoting economic development and engagement. Never content to rest on our laurels, however, this year we are significantly revamping the Awards program to reflect UEDA’s new research on economic development and engagement in higher education. We hope you will join us in this exciting new endeavor!

Image: http://universityeda.org 

A question I often get asked as an advisor to startups is how to recognize and attract the best people to grow the business. The reality is that entrepreneurs usually don’t have the money or time for executive recruiters to do the filtering and selection for them. If your primary source of candidates is friends, family and Craigslist, is it possible to get any high-quality team members?

When I first tried to raise money — in 1998 for a company called 360merch — a handful of plucky angel investors agreed to trust me with one million of their dollars. I wore my fingers to the bone in that business, hawking lenticular stickers and logo’d baby doll t-shirts using affinity marketing models — and then promptly lost them all of their money when the market crashed.

Image: Dave Balter, founder of Mylestoned  - http://www.businessinsider.com

Perhaps your company has worked hard to cultivate diversity. Or, maybe you’re part of a multicultural organization that prioritizes the contributions of a diverse workforce. Now, you’re managing a culturally diverse team and you want to maximize the contributions each member can offer.

"The potential for misalignment or different expectations goes up exponentially when you have people coming from different cultural backgrounds," says consultant David Livermore, founder of Cultural Intelligence Center, a cultural intelligence consultancy, and author of Driven by Difference: How Great Companies Fuel Innovation through Diversity.

How do you recognize a great entrepreneur? It comes down to a handful of key personal characteristics.

Recently, I took a look back through fifteen years of our investments. A half-dozen stand out as companies that made a huge difference for our fund and our investors, as well as their management teams and their customers. As I looked at the performance data, my thoughts gravitated to the question: What did these highly successful companies have in common?

A few years back, I made a presentation on “Trends in Venture Capital” at a Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland event. Every few months or so, I receive an email from someone asking me if I have updated the tables and charts in that presentation. Even though much of the data I used for that talk is available from the National Venture Capital Association, creating the charts takes a little reorganizing of the data. So, I don’t update them regularly and no one else seems to either.

Attempting to free people with diabetes from frequent finger-pricks and drug injections, researchers have created an electronic skin patch that senses excess glucose in sweat and automatically administers drugs by heating up microneedles that penetrate the skin.

The prototype was developed by Dae-Hyeong Kim, assistant professor at Seoul National University and researchers at MC10, a flexible-electronics company in Lexington, Massachusetts. Two years ago the same group prototyped a patch aimed at Parkinson’s patients that diagnoses tremors and delivers drugs stored inside nanoparticles.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

Dreams are the order of business today in Asheville, North Carolina.

So are science, and technology, and entrepreneurialism, and venture capital, and risk, and vision, and social good, and  . . . well, just about every ingredient you need for a decidedly innovative and human-centered culture.  In fact, it’s not at all far-fetched to think of this small city, nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, as an emerging Silicon Valley.  Or, quite possibly, the city is creating a new model of how innovation cultures can operate in the 21st century.

The shadow of gloom cast over the global economy shows no sign of abating. More than 70 percent of CEOs believe growth will remain static at best over the next 12 months, according to PwC’s most recent CEO survey. In January 2016, the IMF shaved another 0.2 of a percentage point off its global growth forecast for both this year and 2017, now projected at 3.4 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively. Even the typically supremely confident attendees of the annual World Economic Forum were subdued; Davos still offered plenty of snow this year, but otherwise precious little to write home about.

Entrepreneur Vivek Garipalli has a dim view of the way health insurance companies treat providers and patients. Patients develop trust with doctors and hospitals, and he thought insurers should be the “glue” between them instead of creating friction.

So Garipalli persuaded a couple of venture funds to pump $135 million into his own bid to build an insurer he describes as a technology-based clinical company, rather than “an actuarial engine” like the big legacy players.

Image: “There's a big difference between spending a lot of money on technology and being a technology company,” said Vivek Garipalli, CEO of Clover Health.

It’s a big week for American-Cuban relations this week with President Obama in the middle of a three-day trip to the island nation-–the first visit from an American president since 1928. The visit marks the symbolic end to the U.S. trade embargo that has blocked the countries from exchanging goods and services for the last 50 years. The ending of this embargo officially began on December 17, 2014 and since then American companies have slowly begun getting a footing on Cuban soil.

Image: Flickr user Olivier Monbaillu

For about a year, Sam Fox-Hartin had worked for an on-demand concierge startup called GoButler as a "Hero," the company's term for employees who field users' requests, via text message, and then complete tasks such as booking tables at restaurants, scheduling appointments, or ordering food for delivery on their behalf. Most of these tasks, like the ones I watched Fox-Hartin maneuver when GoButler invited me to visit its New York headquarters last year, were fairly routine.

Image: Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

If you had one extra hour every day, what would you do with it? Maybe you’d catch up with a friend over coffee, take your kids for a bike ride, try out a new dinner recipe, or even just grab 60 more minutes of shut-eye. Whatever you’d choose, your plans would probably bring you significantly more satisfaction than staring at a spreadsheet and writing status reports back at the office.

Image: Photo: Chiara Pinna via Unsplash

It’s a conundrum faced by scores of recent graduates: You can’t get a job without experience, but you need have a job to gain said experience. Internships can help, but nothing spells "qualified" on a resume better than an actual full-time position.

Which is why many graduates accept the first job they’re offered, regardless of fit. A report by advisory firm CEB found that as many as one in five graduates apply for jobs that aren’t a match for their interests. It’s no surprise that CEB also reports that a quarter of all graduates leave those positions within the first year.

Image: Flickr user Andy

While the JOBS Act turns four years old on April 5, we won’t have the final rules for Title III equity crowdfunding for non-accredited investors until May 16. That’s less than sixty days from now. What should entrepreneurs do to take advantage of this new avenue for capital?

This past October, the SEC made the following significant changes for business owners (issuers in the rules), which should lessen the cost of Title III: