When Congress comes back in September to work on the budget, they will have to address not one, but two deficits. That’s because America suffers not just from a yawning fiscal deficit but also from a terrible backlog of needed investments, including for research and development, education, and infrastructure. It, too, is a deficit that threatens America’s long-term prosperity. In fact, these twin deficits often reinforce each other in confounding ways. Cutting spending can ease the near-term fiscal deficit while depressing long-term growth and raising our debt in proportion to our income. Yet borrowing money merely to increase regular spending is likely to worsen the fiscal deficit without doing much for the nation’s long-term growth.  

Last night I wrote a post about how the fall in the stock market over a 3-day period may affect the venture capital markets. If you’re an entrepreneur or VC who wants somebody else’s view on that you should read it. This morning the US stock markets are rallying. So now what?

Do you ever wonder if there’s some secret sauce you can add to your campus and voila, you’ve got a fully formed innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem? Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with faculty and administrators from across the country who have decades of experience integrating I&E into engineering education on their campuses: Ray Vito from Georgia Tech, Nathalie Duval-Couetil from Purdue University, Liz Kisenwether from Penn State University, Andy Singer from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, David Whitney from University of Florida, John Ochs from Lehigh University, Phil Kaminsky from UC Berkeley, Brent Sebold from Arizona State University, and Tom Byers from Stanford University.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Some venture-backed private companies have been taking their sweet time to going public lately, but with the recent market roller coaster, will they now rush toward an exit?

Onlookers have marveled for months at the eye-popping valuations coming out of the venture capital industry. According to The Wall Street Journal, there are currently 115 venture capital-backed private companies valued at more than $1 billion, including ride sharing app operator Uber, which is valued at more than $50 billion, and travel booking platform Airbnb, worth over $25 billion. According to data from Preqin, a provider of data and intelligence on alternative assets, there have been a total of 1,066 venture capital-backed initial public offerings since 2007, valued at an aggregate $148.3 billion. In 2015 already, there have been 123 such IPOs totaling $9.5 billion.

Heading up the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, Gorkem Sevinc, MSE, CIIP, focuses the bulk of his attention on partnering with clinical and research personnel within Hopkins Medicine to collaboratively build innovative Health IT tools. Software development, IT infrastructure, workflow and collaboration tools are all part of his purview.

Image: Gorkem Sevinc, MSE, CIIP, Manager, Technology Innovation Center, Johns Hopkins Medicine  

When Stevens Institute of Technology hired me a decade ago, it installed me for several months in the department of physics, which had a spare office. Down the hall from me, Albert Einstein's electric-haired visage beamed from a poster for the "World Year of Physics 2005." The poster celebrated the centennial of the "miraculous year" when a young patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, revolutionized physics with four papers on relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. "Help make 2005 another Miraculous Year!" the poster exclaimed.

Image: “I am no Einstein,” Einstein once said. On top of all his other qualities, the man was modest. Photo by Oren Jack Turner courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

Now that just about every business seems to have realized that it is unlikely to survive, let alone flourish simply by doing what it has always done, the word “innovation” has become a standard part of the executive’s lexicon. Because of this – and the related fact that it means too many different things to different people – it has become something of a “motherhood” and “apple pie” issue. Just as it has become commonplace to talk of employees as “the greatest asset” and, latterly, as “talent,” so it is standard for companies to claim to be innovative. Even when they are serious about it, much of the discussion focuses on the mechanics of idea generation and exploitation – R&D pipelines, brain storming, market research and the rest – rather than what actually makes it happen.

As we all know, young workers are a contemptible bunch. They’re “lazy,” and lack the admirable work ethic of their elders. They have an overblown sense of entitlement, believing they have some kind of right to walk right into a plum job in their early twenties rather than working their way up. They might even be a generation of narcissists, a consequence of their over-indulgent helicopter parents and a culture that favors giving every kid on the soccer team a trophy just for showing up.

One of the obstacles to bringing "adaptive learning" to college classrooms is that professors, administrators, and even those who make adaptive-learning systems don’t always agree on what that buzzword means.

That was a major theme of a daylong Adaptive Learning Summit held here on Tuesday. Several people interviewed at the summit, held by the education-innovation group National Education Initiative, noted that part of the problem is a proliferation of companies that make big promises based on making their technologies adaptive, yet all use the term slightly differently.

Memphis Bioworks Foundation will help lead a new agri-tech accelerator program thanks to seed funding from the state and U.S. Department of Agriculture. AgLaunch, aims to establish 100 “investable” agricultural businesses across Tennessee by 2020 via the efforts of what is expected to be 200 entrepreneurs. The USDA Rural Development and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture announced $220,000 in initial funding. Memphis Bioworks is trying to get an additional $10 million in private and public funding over the next five years.

The transformations in healthcare have gotten the attention of many healthcare investors, including private equity firm NaviMed Capital. It closed a $110 million healthcare fund last month. I recently spoke with Managing Director Bijan Salehizadeh about its investment priorities and how he regards the digital health sector.

This month’s Forbes cover story calls attention to the contributions and growing need for liberal arts majors in tech, an industry widely regarded for its engineering talent. The author of the story, George Anders, wrote, “The more that audacious coders dream of changing the world, the more they need to fill their companies with social alchemists who can connect with customers—and make progress seem pleasant.”

Image: http://blog.linkedin.com 

Startups and their founders often tout the value of failing fast and, more importantly, failing forward. It’s a concept surrounded by the assurance that through trial and error, most early-stage companies will find their way and grow.

The reality is a bit different, according to a massive multiyear study of over 158,000 startups across the globe. The researchers found that nascent enterprises are more fraught than we are led to believe when we rely on success stories such as Facebook or Twitter to provide a picture of what it’s really like. Most startups struggle to consistently provide revenue and employment growth in the first five years, the researchers observed.

So you’re stuck in a horribly long meeting at work, feeling like there’s just. no. way. you could possibly pay attention any longer. We’ve all been there. We won’t pretend that paying attention in meetings is always easy, but having good listening skills is definitely important—after all, the information being discussed could end up being crucial in completing your next project, and it totally impresses your coworkers when you actually understand and respond to what they’re saying. But how does one become (and stay!) an active listener?

An increasing number of venture capital investors are sounding the alarm on what the current public markets downturn could mean for private valuations. One recent warning came from Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners:

“I believe a lot of the private deals that have (been) getting done recently are providing very poor risk-adjusted returns for investors. Perhaps the dramatic cool-off in the public markets over the last week will start to change things in the private markets.”

Nobody starts a new project without a few commitments. When you decide to strike out on your own and become your own boss, the only person you can rely on is yourself. Giving yourself the chance to go far with your vision by establishing some ground rules.

I promise to learn from my mistakes

Mistakes can be crushing, no matter how prepared you are for them (and we are so seldom prepared!). However, making a mistake is only a true loss when one fails to learn from it. Therefore, it would be foolish to promise yourself that you won't make mistakes; it's far more productive to go ahead and try something new, and then learn from its effects. In the immortal words of Mark Zuckerberg: "Move fast and break things."

The TransformationThe strategy for knowledge production is driven by key principles. These principals include building strong values and achieving the right outcomes for the UAE. Emiratization is one of the key principles for developing role models and sustainability. In addition a key guiding principle involves developing a holistic system-wide perspective that looks at all levels of education as an integrated and seamless system.

We need leaders that are able to change the future. Creative leaders. The paradox with these leaders is that those that seem to be best at shaping the future are all firmly rooted in the now. These leaders really know how to connect to what is happening in the present, and can feel and use how it affects them on a deeper personal level. They are not just reacting on impulses; they are giving true answers to themselves and to the people around them, continuously. This ability goes by many names, call it being in the here and now, call it Mindfulness, Connected or Aligned. We prefer to simply call it Presence.

It’s been a while since a mobile manufacturer made a big deal about wireless chargers, but apparently they’re about to become a lot more common.

In fact, according to a new report from Juniper Research, nearly 40% of households in the US and over 20% in Europe will use wireless charging by 2020.