If you are an ambitious young person and you want to make it in the movies, country music, or advertising, you know where to go: Hollywood, Nashville, and New York. If you want to get in line to be the next Zuckerberg or Jobs, you head for the Valley.

Why do people come to Boston?

The most common answer you'd hear, I think, is to get an education.

And that's wonderful if you're employed by one of our city's great universities.

But not so great if you work outside of higher ed, or care about Massachusetts' economic health over the long haul.

The IPO market might be looking a little frosty, but the M&A market so far this year has been positive enough to warm VCs’ hearts.

The median selling price through September was nearly $71 million – four times the median amount invested prior to liquidity, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. That kind of multiple hasn’t been seen since 2000.

Because M&A is affected by the stock market, the pace is likely to fall in the fourth quarter, but the total raised is sure to exceed last year. VentureSource pegs the amount raised in the first nine months at $37.3 billion, only slightly behind the $39.42 billion for all of 2010, which was the best year since 2007. (VentureSource is owned by Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of this blog.)

China's economic success in the last three quarters is mainly due to cheap labor and export-oriented economies of scale. However, the leadership is quite aware of the unsustainability of this approach, and as wages are rising in the country, they are working to increase the value chain of domestic production.

Their foreign technology transfer strategies and highly incentivized, state-sponsored private sector research and development support have started to pay dividends. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Chinese domestic patent filings increased from 15,600 in 1999 to 122,000 in 2006. An average 35 percent annual increase is not a bad accomplishment. This rate is 6 percent in America, 5 percent in South Korea, 4 percent in Europe and 1 percent in Japan.

Although they are often said to eschew monetary rewards, and have a great eagerness for rewards outside the monetary pay scale, many Millennials find their financial reality daunting.

Many Millennials are operating under crushing debt: Most college students graduate with close to $20,000 in student loan debt. Graduate and professional students easily can incur $100,000 in loans that have to be repaid as of day one on the job. These knowledge economy workers have made a great investment in higher education, where costs have multiplied by triple digits at both private and public colleges in the last decade and a half. And they're still escalating.

For artists, entrepreneurs, and any other driven creators, exercise is a powerful tool in the quest to help transform the persistent uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that accompanies the quest to create from a source of suffering into something less toxic, then potentially even into fuel.

For more than thirty years, Haruki Murakami has dazzled the world with his beautifully crafted words, most often in the form of novels and short stories. But his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008) opens a rare window into his life and process, revealing an obsession with running and how it fuels his creative process.

Real innovation isn’t common in higher education, especially at the most prestigious schools.

They are presumed to have gotten where they are because they have the formula right. Their nearest competitors try to be more like them, not to find novel ways of outdoing them. In an academic world where nothing succeeds like success, innovation is rare because it is seen as risky, even foolhardy.

But change is coming to higher education.

For-profit universities, which have nothing to lose in the prestige game, are testing powerful new learning technologies and operating models.

They’ve made mistakes, and they’re paying the price in onerous new regulations. But those regulations will make them stronger, more focused on helping students to learn and graduate with valuable capabilities. The for-profits will not only have to deliver these outcomes, as the best traditional institutions do, they’ll have to document them.

While the investment decision is critical to portfolio performance, VCs spend more than 60% of their time on post-investment activities in order to grow investments for lucrative exits. These activities can be separated into monitoring (protecting the interests of the investor) and value-adding activities (strategic influence, mentorship and access to networks).

It should be noted that because of the many different VC management styles, VC involvement post-investment vary greatly — ranging from informal interaction to stringent control.

Building a Trust Relationship

Let’s face it. If an entrepreneur could do it on his own, he would. It is a major inconvenience having strangers involved in your business that you’ve been conceptualising for ages and nurtured to life. The due diligence exercise is a distant memory, negotiation tactics lead to both parties having to compromise and you’ve gone from sitting on opposite sides of the table to being part of the same team with a vested interest in mutual success. If things work out, the money invested will be of much less importance than the value-adding activities of the VC.

Maybe Starbucks can give entrepreneurs more than just a daily jolt of caffeine… perhaps the coffee company can help kick-start small business lending. While the government’s much touted Small Business Lending Fund is widely viewed as a dud, Starbucks has begun its own small business financing initiative by teaming up with Philadelphia-based nonprofit Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) and starting a program called Create Jobs for USA. The coffee giant will pool donations from its customers, employees and concerned citizens into a nationwide fund for community business lending.

Calling small businesses “the backbone of America,” Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said, “We’ve got to thaw the channels of credit so that community businesses can start hiring again. Create Jobs for USA empowers Americans to help other Americans create and sustain jobs.”

We all know that small business lending is down. Still, despite the lending challenges facing small business owners, there are loans being approved and, although it’s never easy nowadays, qualified small business owners are getting approved for many different forms of financing to start, build and grow their businesses.

Here’s the question: Are you getting the right loan and borrowing the right way so you do all you can to ensure that you can get the next loan you’ll need for the continued growth of your business?

Last Friday was the last day of the Federal 2011 fiscal year, and award announcements were flying out of DC all afternoon. Several caught our attention including the announcement of the six winners of i6 Green Challenge, which is part of the Obama administration’s Startup America initiative.

The i6 Green Challenge is an initiative designed to leverage federal dollars and cost-share dollars to “drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in support of a green innovation economy, increased US competitiveness and new jobs.”

Translation: This is funding to prime the venture capital pump. Venture capitalists tend not to invest in early stage R&D, preferring to jump in later in the process after research demonstrates a promising, realizable commercial product.

Would you rather have a job that pays $80,000 a year that lets you get 7.5 hours of sleep a night, or a job that pays $140,000 a year and allows you time for only six hours of sleep a night?

According to a recent study from researchers at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, the result may depend quite a bit on whether you’re a student or whether you’re working full-time. Here’s what they found:

• Adults want sleep. A representative survey of 1,000 adults, conducted by researchers at Cornell, found that 75% of respondents preferred the $80,000 job that let them get 7.5 hours of sleep.
• Students want money. Some 69% of them said they’d take the job that paid more but allowed them less sleep.

In these challenging times, NGO managers and fundraisers are under more pressure than ever to diversify their funding sources. While sources of funding are numerous, identifying viable prospects, and navigating the complexities of applying can be extremely challenging.  As a consequence numerous sources are overlooked and NGOs get often discouraged by the complexity of donor’s systems ending up with not even applying for those funds.

While managers of NGOs may accurately realize the importance of fundraising, without thorough knowledge of the donors’ landscape they waste valuable time and money figuring out how the system works. Increased understanding of these different avenues however, can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of fundraising campaigns. This series of interactive web-based seminars aims to inform managers and fundraisers on types of funding available to them through the US foundations, the European foundations, the European Commission, and the Corporations.

The advent of cheaper sensors and wireless transmitters, along with ubiquitous computing power in the form of smart phones, is making it easier and easier for patients with chronic diseases to track their conditions at home. But many health-care providers seem reluctant to adopt these technologies.

Experts say this is, in large part, because of the reimbursement system in U.S. health care, where physicians are paid for each test or office visit they provide. Outside a few specialties, doctors won't get paid for monitoring data that's been gathered remotely.

The Lumoback, a Band-Aid-like sensor that is affixed to the back, could soon stand in for the legions of mothers commanding us to sit up straight. This wearable sensor monitors posture and sends vibrations to your lower back if you slouch. It connects wirelessly to a smart phone app that helps guide correct posture and tracks posture over time. It also connects users to other resources for a healthy back. The app won a competition for best health app at the Body Computing conference at the University of Southern California last week.

Next time your boss is extra snippy and impatient, take note of whether he or she has to take the stage any time soon.

A new survey out of the U.K. shows that public speaking has a marked negative effect on higher-ups (via Management Today).

It makes 41% of them irritable, 42% of them report losing their sense of humor, and 40% say they lose their appetite too. Almost half experience insomnia before a big speech, according to the survey, conducted by The Aziz Corporation, a communications consulting firm.

UK Conservative MEPs Marina Yannakoudakis and Vicky Ford called for more support to allow working mothers and other women to start up or grow their SME at their party's annual conference in Manchester yesterday, echoing similar calls made in the European Parliament.

Yannakoudakis recently drafted a report adopted by the European Parliament calling for seminars and training sessions to help women exploit the European Progress Microfinance Facility, a fund designed to help women and other under-represented groups.

The call came as new data supported the view that women – and especially those in rural areas – are better placed than men to exploit social media and the internet to set up businesses.

In 2009, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), companies sponsored over $4 billion worth of university research in the United States.  Universities, rather than industrial labs, conduct the majority of federally-funded research in cutting-edge fields such as biotech, clean energy, and nanotechnology, often giving them a clear lead in the race to create ground breaking new initiatives in these fields and at the same time making them high-value open innovation partners.  Some corporate innovation managers are surprised to discover that U.S. universities own large and diverse patent portfolios that originate from the cutting-edge scientific research that goes on in university research labs.  Today, universities own nearly one-quarter of new U.S. patents on the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology.[i] How do you tap into university know-how?

Northern European countries are reaping more than twice the benefits than their crisis-riven southern counterparts from the internet as a contributor to their net GDP, according to a new survey.

Between 5.8% and 7.2% of total GDP in Denmark, Sweden and the UK can be attributed to the internet-based economy, but Spain and Italy are lagging on 2.2% and 1.9% respectively, according to the Boston Consulting Group report, called 'Sizing the digital economy'.

The calculations were made on the basis of the consumption, investment and exports attributable to internet activity and display wide varieties in performance across the continent as well as untapped potential.

Special commercial embassies in Brazil and other fast-growing economies, easier terms for banking credit, and new investment funds designed to assist innovative businesses are likely to be touted in a European Commission action plan due later this year.

Drafts of the plan for SMEs' access to finance will be circulated next month with a view to final publication in December, EurActiv has learned.

The plan is a joint initiative of Michel Barnier and Antonio Tajani, commissioners for the internal market and enterprise respectively.

The main thrust of the action plan will involve the introduction of a long-touted initiative to facilitate venture capital for SMEs across Europe.

Clayton Christensen says that the most disruptive things start out as "toys." I was reminded of that yesterday as I was standing at the counter of a bike store in Calistoga filling out a list of bikes I was renting for our family and a few others. I had guessed the heights of everyone on my list and I wanted to take a copy of the list back to our house and make sure I had guessed correctly.