Generally speaking, I like traveling and usually don’t mind not having super reliable access to the Internet while waiting for flights. This, of course, is the complete opposite if it’s a business-related trip and I’m having to work from afar.

It stands to reason that when I travel for work, I either breathe a sigh of relief or roll my eyes in frustration when I see the itinerary for work trips showing which airports and airlines I’ll be in and on.

For the last few years, I was teaching startups to think like designers. But I eventually realized that you need someone to model and inspire design thinking within the company. If you don’t have a designer in your founding group, it’s harder to have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies.

This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.

The Edward Lowe Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship as the strategy for economic growth, has contracted with the University of Central Florida’s successful GrowFL team to provide economic-gardening services for other communities and states.

The Florida Economic Gardening Institute at UCF, which administers the GrowFL Program, is the first organization in the nation to be certified by the Michigan foundation as a Level III top-ranking economic-gardening provider.  As a result of that certification, the UCF program was selected to work as part of Lowe’s National Strategic Research Team to help share techniques about economic gardening.

Name: J. Craig Venter Title: CEO, Synthetic Genomics Location: La Jolla, Calif.

Why algae? You look at the potential output from algae, and it’s one to two orders of magnitude better than the best agri­cultural system. If we were trying to make liquid trans­portation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S., and you try and do that from corn, it would take a facility three times the size of the continental U.S. If you try to do it from algae, it’s a facility roughly the size of the state of Maryland. One is doable, and the other’s just absurd.

Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring alga that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven’t found it. We hope we’re different. The genetic tools give us a new approach to being able to rewrite the genetic code and get cells to do what we want them to do.

Supporting small business was among the top economic stories of the year, and the rise in lending to those growing companies was the most important development in 2011.

It’s a story we saw developing since the credit crunch tightened the spigots on funding for small businesses. When the big banks said no, small banks and non-bank lenders increasingly said yes. Over the course of 2011, big banks rejected loan applications about 90 percent of the time. Smaller banks approved nearly half of small business funding requests, while alternative lenders granted approvals more often than not.

Where is social entrepreneurship heading in 2012?

There has been a shift in the entrepreneurial movement over the past decade in both the aims of new businesses or how entrepreneurs-to-be would like their business to operate and generate income. The growth of social entrepreneurship is driven by the urge to identify innovative solutions to pressing social issues, and to operate as a financially self-sustainable organisation. A social entrepreneur typically focuses on the potential of the entrepreneurial activities in creating social capital to further social and environmental goals. Below are some of the general trends of social entrepreneurship that I believe will be seen in 2012.

This report is part of a series of co-publications between the Directorate General Information Society and Media, Directorate for ICT Addressing Societal Challenges and the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG). OISPG is an industry-led industrial group to support policies for Open and Service Innovation, towards open innovation ecosystems and user-centric service architecture, at the European Commission.

Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE), argues, "key to achieving many of our competitiveness and innovation ambitions in the coming years (…)" is "to embrace open innovation and platforms, so that we avoid wasteful platform competition,and anti-competitive lock-ins, as well as stimulating development and investment in new generations of online services" (Neelie Kroes, 2010).

The last two years have seen the idea of a "green economy" float out of its specialist moorings in environmental economics and into the mainstream of policy discourse. It is found increasingly in the words of heads of state and finance ministers, in the text of G20 communiques, and discussed in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.

This recent traction for a green economy concept has no doubt been aided by widespread disillusionment with the prevailing economic paradigm, a sense of fatigue emanating from the many concurrent crises and market failures experienced during the very first decade of the new millennium, including especially the financial and economic crisis of 2008. But at the same time, there is increasing evidence of a way forward, a new economic paradigm—one in which material wealth is not delivered perforce at the expense of growing environmental risks, ecological scarcities, and social disparities.

Going out to eat has become a major part of our culture. Frequently eating out and consuming high-calorie foods in large portions at restaurants can contribute to excess calorie intake and weight gain. However, a study in the January/February 2012 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior demonstrates that individuals can eat out and still lose weight.

Investigators from The University of Texas at Austin enrolled 35 healthy, perimenopausal women aged 40 to 59 years who eat out frequently. Participants took part in a 6-week program called Mindful Restaurant Eating, a weight-gain prevention intervention that helps develop the skills needed to reduce caloric and fat intake when eating out. The focus of the program was on preventing weight gain in this population, not weight loss. It is important to prevent weight gain in this population as increasing abdominal waist circumference from weight gain is greater during the perimenopausal years, which in turn increases the risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Even though the focus was on weight maintenance, the researchers found that participants in the intervention group lost significantly more weight, had lower average daily caloric and fat intake, had increased diet related self-efficacy, and had fewer barriers to weight management when eating out.

Pour more funds into basic research. Open up federal data stores. Ramp up technical skills education. Open up export markets. And most of all, unshackle and boost the entrepreneur. These are some of the recommendations in a new report on innovation issued by the US Department of Commerce, in consultation with the National Economic Council.

The Competitive and Innovative Capacity of the United States outlines 10 key action items that policymakers need to undertake or support. The underlying assumption is that it’s up to government action and oversight to make innovation happen. Government can get out of the way or lay the foundation for competitiveness. But there also needs to be more recognition that innovation is something somewhat messy and failure-prone that arises from the grassroots as well, by inspired — or discontented — entrepreneurs, professionals and rainmakers both outside and inside organizations. Often, it’s people going against the grain, against the best-laid plans of policymakers, and even against their own corporate managers’ wishes.

Conventional wisdom says that investors are fleeing biotech and cleantech. So it's surprising to hear that Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures has raised its biggest fund so far — $270 million — explicitly to invest in those two sectors, where companies can require large amounts of capital and long gestation periods.

Flagship managing partner Noubar Afeyan told me last night, "I think the remaining limited partners who want to be in venture capital" — the pension funds, wealthy individuals, and university endowments that give VCs money to manage — "are looking for differentiated strategies, and they're looking for track records."

Infographic provided by Business Opportunities Weblog.

Small traditional businesses? They’re already ‘inside’ the startup world, aren’t they? No. They typically know nothing about such things as Lean Startup, Startup Weekend or Y Combinator, and even when they do, they think it has nothing to do with them. Are they right?

No, they’re utterly wrong.

Small traditional businesses are often the first to complain about the state of the business world, claiming that the market almost unfailingly tends to favour their gargantuan counterparts, who can effortlessly deploy enormous purchasing power and leave the hapless small trader perpetually struggling for survival.

Researchers have discovered a natural hormone that acts like exercise on muscle tissue—burning calories, improving insulin processing, and perhaps boosting strength. The scientists hope it could eventually be used as a treatment for obesity, diabetes, and, potentially, neuromuscular diseases like muscular dystrophy.

In a paper published online today by the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, showed that the hormone occurs naturally in both mice and humans. It pushes cells to transform from white fat—globules that serve as reservoirs for excess calories—into brown fat, which generates heat.

Maryland lawmakers convened today for the 2012 General Assembly session facing a familiar challenge of having to close a projected $1 billion deficit. But Maryland's long-term future will be shaped by how lawmakers act, or defer action, on issues relating to what has to be their overriding priority this year - economic growth and job creation, says Donald C. Fry, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

A core message the GBC is sending lawmakers this year is: ensure that policy actions relate directly to eight core pillars for a competitive state business environment that was published by the Greater Baltimore Committee in a report entitled Gaining a Competitive Edge.

It’s no secret that in the past decade the pharmaceutical industry has been spending more and more on research and getting less and less in return.

One consequence has been the many and varied attempts to remodel R&D operations and to pull in more innovation from universities and young biotech companies.

This is now raising the question of whether there is more value in sourcing early-stage assets externally than doing the work in house, challenging corporate R&D operations to show they are worth the huge amounts of cash invested in them.

In 2010 the consultants Deloitte set out to lend a hand in helping heads of R&D to justify the investment in R&D, carrying out a benchmark assessment of the value of all the drugs in the pipelines of the 12 leading pharma companies and how much had been spent on them to date.

Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that their primary motivation is to “change the world” and to build something lasting, not to make a lot of money. But the conventional wisdom is that employees work for money, above all else. Yet my own experience, and a recent McKinsey survey, leads me to believe that non-cash motivators may be more effective in the long term than financial incentives.

I agree with Charles P. Garcia, who ties motivation most strongly to leadership, in his book “Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows,” based on this group of more than 600 prominent leaders from every sector of American society. They assert that employees value having strong leaders, who incent them to do their best, just as much if not more than money.

The “crowd funding” craze hit the Internet with a splash a few years ago as a way of harnessing social media to raise money for causes or projects that strike an emotional chord with donors. In New York, sites such as Kickstarter and RocketHub provide a platform for the likes of inventors, independent filmmakers and young fashion designers to get their creations off the ground.

Donors get a nominal payback, such as an early version of a product or a mention in the credits of a film, in addition, of course, to the feel-good perk of helping someone pursue a dream. And the idea has caught fire with dozens of sites exploiting the trend in the U.S. and abroad. Three-year-old Kickstarter says that a million people have backed projects on its platform, donating some $84 million for 13,000 projects.

One of the least favourite things about raising money from VCs is having to deal with board meetings once you’re funded. Most board meetings suck. I’ve sat through my fair share on the company side. To date, as an investor, I’ve tried to avoid them favouring regular informal interactions.

But since board meetings are inevitable companies and investors need to work better to get the most out of them. Done right, they can be of huge value.

I’ve included some readings on how to do boards right below. In addition, I have prepared a model board package. This draws VERY heavily on the amazing board packages that portfolio company Localmind puts together.

Adam Hasler looks like a footloose millennial. He's worked as a model, waited tables, and lived all over the world. But at 28, there's more to his résumé than meets the eye.

He earned a dual degree in history and international relations at American University. After graduating, he and two partners--boosted by a $10,000 stake from his parents and an investment from a local restaurateur--took over the coffeehouse where he had worked since age 19: Modern Times, inside the Politics and Prose bookstore, a beloved Washington, D.C., institution. "I was 22 and naive," he says now. "We got our asses handed to us." Still, working 16-hour days for weeks on end, "living on cookies and beer," Hasler and his partners increased the shop's revenue in three years from less than $200,000 to $500,000.