A year from now, the 2016 presidential primaries will be over, and the nominees of both parties will need to focus in earnest on the broad interests of the American people, not just the parochial concerns of their respective bases. When that time comes, this ITIF campaign memo provides the draft of a speech that we believe is critically important for the US to hear on technology and the economy.

We are delivering this memo a year early because, frankly, it covers issues that partisans on both sides need to hear and understand. The big picture is, quite simply, that the country must embrace innovation to grow the economy for everyone. Below is an overview of the action plan we recommend to bring this agenda to life:

The plunge in oil prices may be taking a toll on some states’ economies, but lower energy costs also are spurring a surge in manufacturing in many states.

“Cheap natural gas has helped lower costs for producing plastic, fertilizer, and steel,” said Mark Perry, a professor of finance and business economics at the University of Michigan.

Every entrepreneur starts their business for a different reason. Some get laid off or want to use their skills outside of the corporate world. Others become entrepreneurs in the basement of their parent's home on accident. Case in point: Shawn Nelson.

Remember beanbag chairs in the '90s? And the mess they made if they got too worn out? Nelson wanted to make something better. In his parent's basement he made his own kind of beanbag chair: a HUGE one that all of his friends could sit on together. He bought tan and black fabric, found his mom's camping mattresses and chopped them up with a paper cutter, then used his terrible sewing skills to put it all together.

Every business needs to start somewhere and at some point it will be small. Does this mean that all small business are startups? No!

RELATED Small business does not mean startup How much can small business learn from customer self-service? The Asian giant arm-wrestle: Is India about to beat China at the VC game? The phrase startup has become very trendy and is heavily overused. With governments and incubators touting startup support services and growing the number of startups. Everyone seems to think that any early-stage business is a startup, which, in my opinion is very misleading. Most of the time what they’re talking about is a business starting up.

Compensating employees with equity has become the tech world’s go-to strategy for attracting talent and fostering loyalty, particularly for cash-strapped startups. It’s a powerful tool that can benefit both the company and employee. Yet equity-based compensation programs introduce significant complexities when it comes to taxes, accounting, legal, and personnel matters — often making things more complicated than early-stage founders are ready to face.

Below we’ll break down some of the most common advantages and disadvantages for equity-based compensation to help determine if it’s something your startup should consider. Note that the following primarily applies to privately-held companies.

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2015  — On June 15,the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) will induct Drs. Arthur & Judith Obermayer to the 2015 SBIR Hall of Fame and present the Tibbetts Awards to 23 small businesses, six individuals, and three supporting organizations for their critical roles in research and development and for successfully driving innovation and creating new jobs through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

Imagine you hire some employees, show them to their workstations, and leave them to it. What do you think their chances of success would be? I’m thinking pretty low. And yet, this kind of thing happens every day.

Employers hire people mostly for skill set. With this practice can come the belief that the person is ready to roll on day one.

by Michael Carter

Michael M. Carter is the Founder, President, and CEO of BizEquity. Their new online service was created to help usher in the new Data Democracy needed by the Small Business owner and their advisor, through powering the first and leading online valuation system and service of its kind. You can try it at www.BizEquity.com.

The global business data market is dominated by large data firms that have made their fortunes and built their architectures and infrastructures based upon data “about” an individual or a business and not “for” them. This data was first sourced, packaged, and sold to legions of financial services firms looking to extend consumer credit. This data was structured and one-dimensional.

Today, there is little argument that small businesses and entrepreneurialism are the engines that will drive the economy. There are nearly 200 million global small businesses that represent nearly 50% of the world’s GDP. Small businesses and their owners and entrepreneurs behind them represent a critical market segment for financial services firms of all kinds.

The technology industry is booming, and contrary to popular belief, it’s not just early-stage venture funding that’s steering the ship. Helping to propel this rapid expansion is actually another group of investors that specializes in growing established companies and taking them to the next level, aptly named “growth equity.”

In the ecosystem of funding options, growth-equity investors tend to strategically focus on companies with proven technologies and established market adoption — many of which are already generating revenues between $5 million and $100 million.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - North Carolina’s life science sector grew four times faster than that of the rest of the nation over the last decade.

Even so, a study of the state’s industry says the best is yet to come, as the state builds on its “SuperScieNCe” – its prodigious research and innovation strengths in such growing markets as medicine, agriculture, biomanufacturing and health informatics.

Image: http://wraltechwire.com

On-call schedules, patient monitors, diverse mobile devices and other healthcare IT systems all contribute to a web of information that is difficult to navigate and manage. This eBrief offers nine tips to bring order to the chaos and improve patient care.

You know what's cooler than lemonade stands? Artisanal lemonade stands.

119 SHARES ••• We traveled to the mean streets of Connecticut to study business technique under some titans of industry. Who were our masters? School-age children armed only with a lemonade stand and some killer business instincts. They taught us about margins, international appeal (limonata is so much more sellable than lemonade), and throwing in extras, such as magic tricks. We tried to incorporate these techniques, and challenged the children to a sell-off. Who won? You'll have to watch to find out.

My last blog, Consider Rightly, is about responding to random events by turning them into adventures.. Adventures take you places your never expected, or wanted, to go. They lead you to people you never expected to meet, connections you never thought you would make. Adventures push you to re-examine your beliefs. Adventures lead to subversive ideas. But adventures can be disruptive to your orderly world. They can be risky. And risk? Risk is frightening.

Risk is frightening because you put yourself in situations beyond your control. During the Ebola crisis I needed to go to Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire, countries sharing borders with Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia…the epicenters of the disease. What should I do, I asked myself, take the risk and help build food security for the countries and economic development for the poorest farmers or sit home just in case Ebola spread?

The truth about your success is pretty grim. Success shines a light on your mistakes. Success often comes from the lessons you learned. They are most often carved out of experiences where you did not win. Where you lost, but got back up. Where you failed, but stood up to take another chance.

Your victories owe a huge debt to whatever keeps you going. In a word, we might call that thing: Persistence. Resilience. Patience.

No matter how good you are at delegating, there will always be menial tasks clamoring for your attention. But updating spreadsheets shouldn’t derail your entire day when you have a business to run. To find out how to fix this issue, we asked 11 entrepreneurs the following:

“What is the best way to hand off time-consuming menial tasks (like data entry) so they are done correctly but don’t derail my core team members?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

Self-sabotage is any behavior, thought, emotion, or action that holds you back. Here's how to stop sabotaging ourselves. 

I believe we all have dreams to do the things that we love most—to feel alive and fulfilled in every way possible. We’re here to find tasks that give meaning to our existence and make this mundane life livable. Philosopher Richard Taylor says our life is meaningless—what gives it meaning is a sense of purpose: the will to survive.

Since the publication of our article that reviewed bioentrepreneurhip educational programs in the US in 2008, many more have appeared offering  workshops, courses, certificates and degrees. In addition, bioentrepreneurship educators and admininstrators have formed a community of interest at the Society for International Bioentrepreneurship Education and Research (SIBER) and just concluded their 4th Annual Meeting at the Copenhagen Business School. The next one is planned to be held in San Francisco.

With the uptick in the economy, as an active startup mentor, I’m seeing a new surge of entrepreneurs and startups, with the commensurate scramble for funding. There just aren’t enough Angel investors and VCs to go around. Thus I’m getting more questions on new mechanisms, like crowd funding, or going public through the backdoor as a reverse merger.

When Netflix’s founder Reed Hastings published the company’s Reference Guide on our Freedom and Responsibility Culture on SlideShare it made an unexpectedly huge impact. The slide deck itself was viewed over 11 million times, and newspapers around the globe picked it up. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called the deck the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.

Officials at one health professions campus think it's just common sense to encourage students and employees to make healthy decisions about what they drink. So the University of California at San Francisco, where all programs are in the health professions, is becoming the first college nationally to stop the sale of sugary beverages on campus. That means no Coke or Pepsi, or plenty of other products. But the policy wouldn’t prevent diet sodas, zero-calorie drinks or 100 percent fruit juices from being sold, nor would it impact the sale of unhealthy foods on campus, and students could bring the forbidden drinks onto campus -- after purchasing them off campus.