Life science in the Sunshine State. None of its cities made our list of top 10 medical cities, but BIOtechNOW insists Florida is going strong in biotech innovation. Initiatives during former Gov. Jeb Bush’s tenure pushed the state into Ernst & Young’s top 10 ranking in 2006, and recent news from Palm Beach hints that the life sciences are still a priority in the Sunshine State. A November ranking from Jones Lang LaSalle mentioned the state as one with strong life science representation but also “fragmented framework, most notably lackluster funding from NIH and VC sources.” Maybe next year, Florida?

In many ways, individual U.S. states are like 50 laboratories where differing public policy, industry focus, and economic development strategies are tried and tested. Different approaches yield different results and some states become more competitive – gaining a larger share of total job creation — while others struggle and lose share. This phenomenon has been evident over the past few years as our nation struggles to recover. Some states have been doing quite well while others are still limping along.

In this post we have produced a side-by-side analysis of every state to show how they stack up against each other. The goal is to see which states are becoming more competitive (that is, gaining a larger share of the total job creation), and which are losing their share of the jobs being created. The table and graphic each rank the states based on the overall competitive effect and what percentage of jobs (from 2007-2011) are based on competitive effects.

Harvard Business School is taking on the challenge of finding a comprehensive solution to strengthening the nation’s ability to compete.

The U.S. Competitiveness Project, announced Tuesday by Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, is a research effort to “understand and improve the competitiveness of the United States,” according to the project’s Web site.

“Our ambition at HBS is to engage deeply with the most important questions facing society, and one of those questions concerns the future competitiveness of the United States as a business location and its influence on the rest of the world,” said Nohria via a news release. “As we continue to move from an American century in business to a global century in business, people are wondering what this country’s role will be. There is no more appropriate time than now for us to explore this question deeply and develop answers that will allow America to remain a competitive place to conduct business in the international economy.”

Americans are a mobile people. Instead of making a life where we were raised, we often pick up and move far from our families, hoping to make our fortunes elsewhere. But because we left our hometowns with no shame or malice, when the holidays come around we all--as consistently as birds heading south--brave the crowds at various transportation hubs and slowly shuffle back home. A new map created from check-ins on Foursquare paints a picture of this holiday travel and how Americans get from one place to another in different parts of the country.

The map shows plane flights (in blue, based on two consecutive check-ins in different airports), train rides (in red, based on same-day check-ins in different train stations), and car trips (in white, based on check-ins on roads). Together, they form an outline of how America travels and even how America’s population has spread across the country.

A claim by Wikileaks that documents it released last week provide evidence of a "secret new industry" of mass surveillance was as breathless as previous pronouncements from Julian Assange's organization. But the material does provide a stark reminder that our online activities are easily snooped upon, and suggests that governments or police around the world can easily go shopping for tools to capture whatever information they want from us.

The take-home for ordinary computer users is that the privacy and security safeguards they use—including passwords and even encryption tools—present only minor obstacles to what one researcher calls the "cyber security industrial complex."

Fail to innovate and you will simply be left behind. As I previously noted, this is especially the case for the African continent. Africa has, for the longest time, been relegated to the back of the classroom, the backward, war-torn, black sheep of the world.

But today it is emerging, and African nations are betting big on technology and innovation as the stepping-stones to rebuilding themselves. But what will it take? What are some of the components that are necessary for African states to innovate into the future?

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is well-known for his brilliant and colorful quotes on investing.

But one his best quotes ever may have been about parenting.

In a 1986 Fortune magazine article titled Should You Leave It All to the Children?, the Oracle of Omaha shared some parenting wisdom.

Says he: ''My kids are going, to carve out their own place in this world, and they know I'm for them whatever they want to do.'' But he believes that setting up his heirs with ''a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb'' can be ''harmful'' for them and is ''an antisocial act.'' To him the perfect amount to leave children is ''enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.''

What is the best community college in America? Ask a similar question about universities and you'll prompt a vigorous debate. Caltech and MIT would duke it out for engineering supremacy while Harvard and Princeton compete for maximum selectivity and prestige. Amherst is near the top of everyone's liberal-arts-college list, with Swarthmore close behind.

There will never be unanimous agreement about who's No. 1. But the fact that the question makes sense at all shows something important: In the four-year higher-education sector, we embrace the idea of excellence.

As the University of Connecticut attempts to morph itself into a major player in the technology transfer field, the school has a ways to go before it competes with the big names.

In fiscal year 2010, which ended earlier this year, UConn spent $157.8 million on research and brought in $898,141 in license income, according to the annual U.S. Licensing Survey recently released by the Association of Technology Managers.

The numbers are an improvement from a year earlier, but don’t compare favorably with major players in the industry.

New research—and a request for your insights—on innovation networks around the world

Julie Anixter of Innovation Excellence (IE) recently interviewed Professor Robert C. Wolcott (RW) and Research Fellow Michael J. Lippitz (ML) from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, about their cutting-edge research on the emerging phenomenon of “INets:” communities of innovation leaders who learn from each other about innovation management, primarily through mutual sharing of experiences and new techniques.

Rob and Mike are seeking suggestions from our Innovation Excellence community about INets that should be included in their research.

The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed its first significant crowd-funding legislation, in the form of H.R. 2930, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act.

The bill (now in the Senate) amends the Securities Act of 1933, by allowing entrepreneurs to crowd source (online) up to $2 million per year in investment capital directly from individuals without having to register the investors with the SEC.

However, the commencement and completion of the raise do need to be filed with the SEC.

Entrepreneurs (the “issuers”) must provide potential investors with audited financial statements in order to qualify for the $2 million cap, otherwise you are capped at $1 million.

I spent the past couple hours watching videos from Le Web in our family room. I love to queue up videos from the prior week and spend sunday morning watching them on the couch instead of sitting at my desk.

Of all the video I watched, the one that made me stop and think the most was this talk by Forrester CEO George Colony. In it, he predicts the end of the web and the emergence of "post social." If you have 20 minutes this morning, give it a watch and let's discuss his predictions in the comments.

Start-ups in the United States will gain increased access to capital and resources, after US President Barack Obama announced a $2 billion package to aid budding entrepreneurs.

The US Small Business Administration has launched a $1 billion Early Stage Innovation Fund, providing matched capital to early-stage small businesses seeking private institutional capital.

The SBA is a government agency that provides support to entrepreneurs and small businesses. The agency’s activities are often referred to as the three Cs: capital, contracts and counseling.

2010 was a bit of a bounce-back year for U.S. technology transfer programs, as licensing income inched up 3 percent to $2.4 billion, compared with the prior year.

Still, that level of licensing income was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2008, when technology transfer programs reported $3.4 billion in licensing income, according to the latest annual survey from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). 2010′s tally represented a 30 percent drop from 2008.

AUTM blamed the weakness of the last two years on a lack of large one-time payments such as litigation settlements, which helped boost numbers in previous years.

Every list of the best healthcare cities in the country reads like my grandfather’s history teacher wrote them. They’re usually based on the same metrics: which city has the most NIH dollars, the most venture capital and the size of the healthcare workforce in that city.

The best report in recent years came from the Milken Institute, which in 2009 ranked Boston, Philadelphia, greater San Francisco, greater New York and greater Raleigh-Durham as the best five life sciences cities.

A report last week from Jones Lang LaSalle also had Boston, New York-New Jersey and San Francisco in its top five, but also included Los Angeles and Washington, D.C./suburban Maryland (I’ve placed each study’s full list at the bottom of this story).

Here’s a quick tip for individuals who are conducting venture capital intelligence research.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (with the collaboration of National Venture Capital Association) has a pretty nifty tool for digging for insights regarding venture capital investments via The MoneyTree Report.  The report provides ” information on emerging companies that receive financing and the venture capital firms.“   The information that is available in The MoneyTree Report is only for the United States provided by Thomson Reuters.

Once you have obtained free access by registering online, the following pieces of quarterly capital related data are available by:

• Region
• Industry
• Stage of Development
• Financing Sequence
• VC Firm
• Investee Company

When Facebook IPOs at a valuation around $100 billion next Spring, it will create more than 1,000 new millionaires, Reuters's Alexei Oreskovic and Sarah McBride report.

Where will these new millionaires spend their money? Oreskovic and McBride have talked to some sources, and so have we.

In the world of inbound marketing, integrating tactics provides marketers with incredible leverage. However, integration can often be challenging because individual marketing tactics sometime exist in silos with little collaboration. This is especially true with an unlikely power couple, search engine optimization and email marketing.

Search engine optimization is likely a strong source of traffic and leads for you already. And email marketing is most companies' primary inbound lead generation channel. While both tactics rock on their own, they experience some exciting amplification when combined. Let's look at a few ways we can combine search and email for even more leads!

I'm sitting outside of a cafe in Greenwich, Conn., enjoying some free time and unseasonably warm weather, before boarding a 14-hour flight to Beijing. In this era of uncertainty, with the fear of Chinese and Indian economies eclipsing the U.S., of Europe doing too little too late, what we need is some perspective. We need to lift our gaze from in front of our feet and look up, and think about the long term.

I got a precious opportunity to do just that last week at an investor conference hosted by a man who Forbes says is worth about $1.5 billion, who runs a series of funds valued at over $15 billion. I won't give you his name because I have not yet formally interviewed him and would like to, but he laid out a formula for the few of us willing to look for opportunity in trouble. He has a long record. His formula must work. So it’s worth something.

Technology firms frequently require workers to sign non-compete agreements, which typically bar their employees from joining rival companies for one to two years. For firms, the agreements keep workers from taking the knowledge and skills they have acquired and using them to help a rival.

But a new study of more than 1,000 engineers, conducted by an MIT professor, shows that non-compete agreements come with a high cost for employees: When those workers do shift jobs, roughly one-third of them end up leaving their chosen industry altogether, often at significant financial cost to themselves.