THE MODERN COMPANY HAS WORKERS TELECOMMUTING FROM ALL CORNERS OF THE GLOBE. THIS PRESENTS PROBLEMS LIKE SECURITY, EASE-OF-USE, AND ACCESSIBILITY. DON'T KNOW WHERE TO START? 

With business technologies advancing at lightning speeds, collaboration styles and workflow processes are evolving right alongside. Businesses of all sizes and vertical markets are always looking for ways to improve productivity, and the emergence of an always-connected workforce has inspired the creation of numerous tools that organizations can hand-pick.

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Seattle Times staff photographer Alan Berner explored the textures and scenes of driftwood for this Pacific NW Magazine Sunday cover story with reporter Susan Kelleher.

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With preppy good looks and a casual confidence, Hugo Van Vuuren moves effortlessly among the student body at Harvard University, holding court with undergrads in the Yard or in a Harvard Square coffee shop.

But Van Vuuren, 29, is not a student, or a faculty member. He is a venture capitalist with campus office hours.

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San Francisco, California Mayor Edwin M. Lee, in collaboration with the White House and other strategic partners, have launched the city’s Entrepreneurship-in-Residence (EIR) program. The program will select talented entrepreneurial teams and help them develop technology-enabled products and services that can capitalize on the $142 billion public sector market. Interested entrepreneurs can apply through a website established by the city.

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Biotech venture capitalists, as a group, haven’t had much to cheer about the past few years. But this is shaping up to be the year the storyline changes, thanks to the ripple effect from the biotech IPO class of 2013.

The story of biotech venture capital over the past few years, as many readers know well, has been mostly about struggle. Many firms haven’t been able to scrape out returns, and they’ve reacted by grasping for new investment models, pushing partners out, veering into other sectors, or shutting their doors. The historic shift, which came about a decade after the genomics bubble, left only a few firms with the desire and capability to make the edgiest, riskiest, and potentially most innovative investments in life sciences.

For years, Urban Omnibus has been collecting ideas to make cities friendlier and more comfortable places to live. Here are the cream of the crop, with a little design flair.

The Urban Omnibus, published by the Architectural League of New York, has been collecting good "citymaking" ideas since 2009. Earlier this year, the publication assembled 50 of them into a special Ideas For A New City feature, and commissioned eight posters to highlight some favorites (you can buy those here, and see them in the slide show). These are the eight highlights.

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Innovation: the final frontier. These are the voyages of your life. Your mission: to explore new ideas, to seek out new opportunities and new prospects, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

It’s your future. You can either go it alone – be the captain, first officer, communications officer, navigator, chief engineer, cook and bottle washer – or you can discover and develop your personal best way to make team contributions, trusting others to make their contributions with equal authority and responsibility.

Boston techies like to point to Cambridge’s jam-packed Kendall Square and  the seaport’s Innovation District as proof that the area is startup friendly. But they also say we need to do better. Startup execs tell me they can find cheaper office space in  San Francisco than they can in Kendall Square and that’s a problem for a locality that is sick of seeing promising entrepreneurs graduate from Harvard or MIT and head west to start their dream companies.

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Ecosystem for entrepreneurship has come a long way in India. Over past two years and so more young people have been taking route of entrepreneurship. Right from ecommerce to various technology startups are getting launched by budding entrepreneurs, and importantly these entrepreneurs are in early 20’s (age bracket 19-24). Startups like Oravel, Vidoofy,  BetaGlide and Bluegape have been founded by guys, who are in their early twenties. So what motivated them to hatch their own startup rather than going for usual way – job.

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A study by pollster Taloustutkimus shows that a significant number of Finns would prefer to work for someone else than for themselves. In spite of the apparent aversion to entrepreneurship, a majority believe that private business should be actively promoted in Finland.

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Becoming an entrepreneur 10 or 20 years back was an ambitious goal for anyone. It wasn’t easy just to go and make money by yourself, building a successful business. You needed a lot of money to start with.

However now it’s easier than ever all because of the internet. If you’re a freelancer, you’re an entrepreneur. If you sell goods on eBay, you’re an entrepreneur. If you make and sell digital goods, you’re an entrepreneur. The internet makes it a lot easier to become an entrepreneur. It enables you to learn new skills very quickly and you can easily start a business from basically nothing except your own time.

Eric Engelmann says the future of Iowa business lies in helping startup entrepreneurs build companies within the state. A business accelerator he will launch next year on the second floor of his company’s new building in Cedar Rapids will do that, he said.

“The communities in this state have to start inventing the next generation of businesses and that is going to be in start-ups,” said Engelmann, president and CEO of the software company Geonetric. “This is as much about building the startup ecosystem as it is about the long-term competitive nature of the state of Iowa.”

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Do you know where you’d like to live? To borrow from Aesop, are you a city mouse or a country mouse or perhaps, like me, a suburban mouse? What kind of weather do you enjoy, or wish to avoid, whether that’s blistering heat or months of dark, snowy days? Do you prefer the indoors, or do you crave fresh air?

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Maine must seize every opportunity to invest in our prosperity. At this time, we’re far behind in the vital area of research and development, which we need to grow innovative businesses that create the jobs of tomorrow.Democratic and Republican lawmakers need to come together for the long-term health of our economy. And we need Governor Paul LePage to join the effort.

Maine is 45th in the nation in research and development investment. We put only about 1 percent of our gross domestic product into R&D, rather than the 3 percent recommended by the Maine Economic Growth Council.We’re way behind other parts of the country. We invest at only half the level of the nation as a whole and not even at one-quarter of New England’s rate.

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“The TENN Roadshow” is underway!

Tennessee’s top 10 start-ups, selected two weeks ago in the first-ever “Statewide Demo Day,” launched their week-long journey yesterday afternoon at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. The statewide tour is an initiative of Launch Tennessee (LaunchTN) and sponsored by The Blackstone Charitable Foundation, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, Eastman Chemical Company, and First Tennessee Bank.

By last night, the 10 companies and LaunchTN team members had traveled to Northeast Tennessee in their specially wrapped bus to begin their activities this morning in Kingsport.

While U.S. job growth was less than economists expected in August – increasing by 169,000 – the healthcare sector remained a bright spot, adding 32,700 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report issued Friday.   In the healthcare sector, ambulatory healthcare services had the most growth, with 26,600 added jobs. Hospitals saw the least growth, adding only 900 jobs in August. Home healthcare services and nursing and residential care facilities continued to be solid, adding 9,500 jobs and 5,200 respectively.

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Europe is often seen as being less entrepreneurial than the United States, where studies consistently show that people are more willing to take risks.

Entrepreneurs can tap into national and EU funds to help get off the ground – but while some plead for state intervention to promote small businesses and start-ups, others would simply prefer governments to leave them to it.

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France is drafting a new law that aims to make the practice of pooling resources to fund private ventures easier and more competitive, but the lack of rules governing so-called 'crowdfunding' has prompted the European Commission to announce new legislation for "early next year". On 4 September, French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici presented a draft law which aimed to adapt the legal status of the participative financing platforms and improve their competitiveness in Europe.

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I visited cardiologist Eric Topol at the Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, California, one day this summer. He’d had a busy morning seeing patients and, by about noon, was claiming to have already saved the medical system thousands of dollars using his iPhone and a pocket-sized ultrasound machine. Then he pointed to the stethoscope in his pocket and said he hasn’t used it in three years. “I should just throw it out,” he said. “This is basically a worthless icon of medicine.”

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Proud to have beaten the odds arising from a transition to independence since 1991 and the legacy of a war that only ended in 1995, Croatia officially joined the European Union on July 1, 2013. Last month, I accepted an invitation to visit with President Ivo Josipovic at his retreat on the Brijuni Islands and found a nation already embarking on its next mission.