As Iowa seeks to expand the number of homegrown technology businesses and the jobs they create, connecting potential collaborators would appear to be a logical move.

The state’s technology industry employs more than 76,000 workers. It accounts for $10.7 billion, or 8.8 percent, of the state’s gross domestic product.

While you can find an online list by Manta Media of more than 520 information technology companies in Iowa, there is no all-inclusive database of technology companies in the state and their products or services.

The Technology Association of Iowa tries to fill that role on a de facto basis with its membership roster, which lists organizations and links to its website.

“Our directory only includes businesses that are members,” TAI President Leeann Jacobson said. “We have been compiling a database as we go along, but we by no means have everything.

Compounds in blueberries might turn out to have a powerful effect on formation of strong, healthy bones, if results from studies with laboratory rats turn out to hold true for humans.

Jin-Ran Chen and his colleagues are exploring this idea in research funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) at the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center (ACNC) in Little Rock. Chen is a principal investigator and lead scientist at the center’s Skeletal Development Laboratory, and an assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, also in Little Rock.

Chen specializes in research on how what we eat during infancy, childhood and early adulthood affects growth and development of bones and the risk of developing osteoporosis or other degenerative bone diseases in later years.

Entrepreneurs are in love with their ideas. And oftentimes – especially in the case of first-time entrepreneurs – they want to run the resulting business. That’s usually because they think no one can care about the idea as deeply as they do and as a result, no one can run the business as well as they can. But sometimes, holding onto a business may not be in the best interest of the company – or the entrepreneur.

Here are 5 situations when that might be case:

1. You turned a hobby into a business. You may start your own business in order to transform something you love to do into a profession. In the beginning, you do everything because to you, it’s still a hobby. You make your product, sell it, clean up shop, balance the books, get your supplies, and update your website. You don’t mind all the hard work, because it’s your passion. As the business starts to grow, you may find yourself spending less and less time on what you love and more time in other functional areas of the business. If a lifestyle business is what you want, it may be time to refocus and hold tight to the small business that you’ve built. If you want to see the business take off and move beyond the hobby stage, something has to give and it might need to be your control.

I’ve often said that creating and building a business is not a one-man show, even though it usually springs from the mind and determination of one person – committees don’t start successful businesses. But taking an idea to a business success requires many people to work together effectively, and that requires entrepreneurial leadership.

Leadership is not a skill one is born with, but it can be learned and honed from experience and failures. We all start with what researchers term the “knowing-doing gap.” We know what should be done, but we don’t know how to get it done. Many people assume the solution is to find the recipe, or leader’s checklist, and follow it methodically.

Most entrepreneurs dream of taking an idea and turning it into a successful company, but that takes time and capital investment. Most startups don’t get funded by venture capital or angel investors; the money often comes from your savings, credit cards or friends. Because initial cash flow may be tight, you need to keep your budget realistic in order to stretch every dollar. That’s where bootstrapping comes in.

Bootstrapping means starting a company with little or no money, but utilizing the resources readily available to you. This means keeping your budget low, not taking a salary, working with your team to develop your product for sweat equity or outsourcing some functions altogether. It may take you longer to get your product to market because you are relying on your

Wait a minute. Charlotte, N.C., thinks *we’re* doing something right?

That’s what Pete Strange said this morning at the 2011 MBA Stakeholders Breakfast. The event showcased the success of the Minority Business Accelerator, the economic development initiative housed at the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber that works to grow sizeable minority-owned businesses in the region.

Strange, who is chairman of Messer Inc., also is chairman of the MBA’s Leadership Council. And he told the breakfast crowd that he got a call about three months ago from an executive at Bank of AmericabizWatch who asked him to visit Charlotte to talk about the MBA’s success.

Greentown Labs, a South Boston startup incubator focused on cleantech, has nearly doubled its number of resident companies since moving from East Cambridge in May, the incubator's founders said Tuesday.

Greentown now houses nine companies and a green business trade group, up from the five original founding startups — Airventions, Altaeros Energies, Coincident, OsComp Systems and Promethean Power. The incubator, located on Summer Street in the South Boston "Innovation District," was set to be opened to the public Tuesday night for a grand opening event.

Tuesday afternoon, the startups busily prepared their prototypes for display, including Altaeros' massive inflatable wind turbine system and Promethean Power's solar-powered milk chiller — which was being readied to cool beer for the evening.

Are you your business’s worst enemy? Let’s make sure that’s not the case.

Here are eight things entrepreneurs and small business owners should never say to themselves:

1. “I deserve a reward for all my sacrifice.” Taking needed cash out of the business as some form of reward for blood, sweat, and entrepreneurial tears will ruin your business. If your business spins off bundles of cash, great. You earned it. If it doesn’t, how hard you’ve worked doesn’t matter. “Deserve” has nothing to do with it: You only deserve what your business generates.
2. “I just need a great idea…” Ideas are exciting but relatively worthless. Executed ideas are priceless. Searching for a brilliant idea to save your business is a sign you lack the discipline to roll up your sleeves and do the execution dirty work. If your business model is sustainable, find ways to fix what is broken. Those are the only ideas you need.

Recently BNET colleague Donna Fenn listed 10 reasons a college grad’s first job should be with a startup. Great article, sound reasoning… but I disagree, if only because my first post-college job was with a Fortune 500 company. Starting and running a business would have been much harder without the skill and experience I gained in a corporate environment.

Would I want to work there today? No. But am I glad I once worked there? Absolutely.

If you hope to someday start your own business, here are great reasons to work for a big company first:

1. Entrepreneurs are sometimes crazy — and not in a good way. For every passionate and visionary entrepreneur who identifies an unmet need and taps the latent skills and expertise of otherwise-underutilized employees to create a thriving business that values people as much as profits… there are hundreds of small businesses run by people who are, well, nuts. Sure, many startups are run by solid businesspeople, but I’ve met way more entrepreneurs who use their business to serve their self-indulgent, narcissistic, “me first” needs. Work for one and you may never realize there’s a better way.

With an ever-growing mountain of health-related data and a federal mandate to make more of it digital and shareable, information technology is in high demand among hospitals, physicians, insurers, government administrators and other players.

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And that’s encouraging the formation of new health IT-focused accelerator programs designed to seed young start-ups. In the past couple of months, two such programs have started up — one in Chicago called Healthbox, the other in San Francisco called Rock Health.

Healthbox is operated by Chicago-based incubator and venture firm Sandbox Industries, which raised an $18 million fund in 2009 and also operates as fund manager for BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, the investment wing of the health-insurance giant.

Vivek Kundra’s resignation last week from his post as the nation’s Chief Information Officer is an ominous event.

Kundra’s goal was to set government data free via an expansive Internet effort called Data.gov, and encourage innovation with government-collected data through the Open Government Initiative. He had hoped to slash tens of billions of dollars from the government information technology (I.T.) budget by democratizing who and which types of companies can deliver I.T. solutions to the government. The most radical part of his program was to make public data available to entrepreneurs, allowing them to build new applications that solved problems for the government and their communities.

Did you happen to catch "America's Next Great Restaurant," which aired on NBC a few months back? In it, people who thought they had a great restaurant concept competed in front of a panel of investors - including celebrity chef Bobby Flay and Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle - for money to open their doors.

From the beginning, it was obvious some contestants had what it takes to be an entrepreneur - the ability to innovate, an innate sense of adventure - while others clearly did not.

It got my wheels turning: Are these qualities inborn? Or can they be learned?

So when a recent Cogswell College survey found that two out of three Americans don't think colleges are focused enough on teaching entrepreneurial skills - and only one in 20 think that college is where students become entrepreneurs - I asked Douglas Mellinger, a trustee at the Silicon Valley college and a seasoned entrepreneur, his opinion. His response was split: Clearly, certain qualities can't be taught. Among them are passion, a willingness to take risks and curiosity.

For many decades, Japan’s high-technology companies, nourished by innovative products and prominent consumer electronics brands, were the envy of the global sector. But that is rapidly changing. More recently, these companies have been losing ground around the world, undermined by a reluctance to make the aggressive moves and hard choices necessary to compete in new markets and against emboldened attackers.

Recent McKinsey research shows that Japanese high-tech companies lost a decade between 2000 and 2010 (Exhibit 1) and on current trajectory could see their global market share drop by 20 percent from 2008 to 2013. That represents a cumulative loss of more than $30 billion in potential revenue. Japanese companies have a global presence and reputation, but most remain surprisingly dependent on Japan’s domestic market for revenue, while struggling to capture a reasonable share of dynamically growing emerging markets. Our analysis shows that Japanese high-tech companies, as a group, still generate more than 50 percent of their sales in the home market, growing by a mere 1 percent annually, compared with growth of 5 to 10 percent in the developing world and 2 to 3 percent in other developed markets...

Today we publish our latest Spotlight on Overcoming gender barriers in science.

Despite gradual progress in gender balance in academia and in the workforce, women remain under-represented in the sciences in developing countries.

How wide is the gender gap in science? What are the main barriers to women's advancement? And what can be done to overcome them? Our Spotlight explores these questions through opinions, features and the latest facts and figures, alongside key documents and useful links. Scientists, science educators and South Africa's Minister of Science and Technology offer their expert views on the problem.

Russia’s startup scene is still growing but with a potential market size of 170 million users in the next 18 months, it’s white hot. There remain hurdles – like payment mechanisms and door-to-door delivery in a market known for corruption in the postal servce. But these are gradually being eroded by entrepreneurs.

Yesterday I had lunch with a VC who hits Moscow once a month now, such is the potential for even ‘normal’ business models like old fashioned e-commerce. Meanwhile, there are lots of categories in Russia waiting to be filled and one of them is travel.

LinkedIn has taken another deep dive on its user data, comparing women and men’s networking skills on the 100 million-plus member professional network.

The verdict: LinkedIn says that that men are overall more savvy networkers than women, but men and women behave differently in online professional networking. To evaluate LinkedIn “networking savviness” index, the Analytics Team diced data of current industry, current company, and professional connections for members in the US. While users don’t have to designate whether they are a male or female on their LinkedIn profile, the networked had to guess a person’s gender using their first name and matching this against a database of baby names.

LinkedIn measures networking “savviness” based on the the ratio of one-way connections that men have to connections that women have, and the ratio of male members on LinkedIn to female members. For example, LinkedIn will label an industry as “female savvy” when 45% of the industry is female and where women have 70% of the connections.

It’s no secret that working with a headhunter or recruiter can be an effective way to advance your career.

Headhunters often have access to jobs that are not advertised elsewhere and can speed up the hiring process between an employer and potential candidate.

The trick, however, is understanding how a headhunter operates. “As a career management coach, it is always surprising to me that even senior level job seekers often don't know that ‘headhunters’ work for the companies, not the candidates,” says Bettina Seidman of SEIDBET Associates.

It’s one thing to rank cities or countries on their economies or employment prospects, but most people don’t crave financial opportunity to the exclusion of all else. Most of us want to be happy, and in the past few years, a slew of studies, surveys, and research projects have been launched to figure out whose citizens are the most content.

The difficulty, of course, is that what makes one person happy may make another person miserable. Now, the Better Life Initiative, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), aims to fix that with a nifty, new tool that ranks 34 countries on 11 indicators. (The tool allows you to tweak criteria to fit your own stage of life.)

With graduation season just behind us, millions of members of the class of 2011 are just beginning their lives as employed, fully financially independent adults. Sure, many have worked part-time through college and have a basic grasp of the fundamentals of budgeting, but with their entry into the workforce young people enter a whole new financial era in which student loans come due, paychecks must last the full month and future expenses like mortgages begin to loom increasingly large.

How can they get on a firm financial footing? Entry-Level Rebel asked Jesse Ryan, Managing Director of Accounting Principals for some tips. In addition to reminding grads of the basics like cutting back on small, unnecessary expenses (no really, you don’t need a Starbucks mocha latte every day), avoiding high interest credit cards and saving for an emergency fund, Ryan offered these four tips:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Skolkovo Foundation on Saturday signed a preliminary agreement to establish Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (SIST), Skolkovo President Viktor Vekselberg said.

The agreement, which was signed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, plans a three-year collaboration between MIT and the Skolkovo Foundation. It is a preliminary statement of shared intention: MIT and Skolkovo Foundation will next prepare a definitive agreement that they anticipate signing in early fall.