I joked at our last CEO Tales that I was launching a crowd-funded project on Kickstarter for an ‘accelebator’ for ‘accelebators’. Accelebators of course, combine the best aspects of an accelerator programme with the best bits of an incubator programme to guarantee the creation and development of relentlessly-scalable, robustly value-creating startups that will takeover the world.

My vision did actually involve maybe some educational events for the people running the programmes etc. And probably some other stuff. People were enthusiastic about backing it.

New research led by Michigan State University’s Zach Hambrick finds that a copious amount of practice is not enough to explain why people differ in level of skill in two widely studied activities, chess and music.

In other words, it takes more than hard work to become an expert. Hambrick, writing in the research journal Intelligence, said natural talent and other factors likely play a role in mastering a complicated activity.

“Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn’t enough,” said Hambrick, associate professor of psychology.

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

Emotional Abuse …

Frustration because your needs are not met…

Lack of Support…

Emptiness …

Distance…

Five things you want to avoid in relationships.

The best way to do that?

Respect is demonstrated by our actions, not our words. When those actions are absent, especially at a trivial or simple level, there is also a distinct lack of respect. In every relationship respect goes hand-in-hand with love and commitment. You cannot love someone you don’t respect or are not prepared to commit to, even for a short time. Otherwise you will resent the time spent with them, or spent doing things on their behalf, when you could be doing something else or be with someone else. Neither can you love someone you really do not trust. Once trust is gone, the feelings become superficial as the relationship shifts in terms of both emotion and power. You would no longer respect that person, tending to be suspicious of their actions instead of celebrating and enjoying their presence.

So you’re busy running a company or you haven’t read enough Under30CEO to figure out how to break away from your 9 to 5 job….

You wish you had time to for excitement and adventure but bills and responsibility always seem to bring you back to reality.  Your brain is caught in a rut, and on your way to work everyday you think the same thoughts… You want to travel, but your excuses are too big to overcome…

It’s easy to understand why most discussions about the state of venture capital investing paint a pessimistic view. Access to institutional equity dollars is increasingly limited for new entrepreneurs and early stage companies, and an anemic fundraising environment for VC firms is contributing to the long-anticipated “VC shakeout.” We’re also at a cyclical low in reported M&A events and the IPO window isn’t as open as we all would like, stretching out the time to exit.

But it’s not all bad. In fact, now is actually a great time to be a later-stage growth company seeking capital.

Tornado season has been relatively quiet this year. There were only 72 tornadoes nationwide in April, 70 percent below the 10 year average, according to the Weather Channel. But within in the last week, tornado outbreaks have been erupting from North Texas to Minnesota.

Why do these tornadoes seem to be hitting all of a sudden?

The Management Innovation eXchange is the world’s first open-innovation platform, where we’re trying to elicit bleeding-edge practices in the world of management and organization and leadership. Every so often, we run a McKinsey–Harvard Business Review management prize (M-Prize) to pull those amazing new practices and those bleeding-edge ideas up to the surface.

A third of London’s Tech City business leaders say their company is hindered by a lack of capital, whether sourced from institutional or private investors. The finding is revealed in the most extensive survey of TechCity senior executives to date, carried out by GfK in conjunction with business advisers Grant Thornton UK LLP.

The Tech Futures Report found that nearly one third (29%) of respondents believe their company is missing significant business opportunities because they cannot secure funding in time. Worryingly, 19% said they had to make people redundant because they couldn’t secure the necessary funding.

IBM’s jack-of-all-trades supercomputer Watson now has a new trade: customer service.

IBM announced a new application for Watson today, called Watson Engagement Advisor, that applies all of Watson’s brainpower to answering questions from regular people rather than, say, doctors or Alex Trebeck. Think of it as Siri, but on a much larger scale.

Optimistic and confident in their abilities, a diverse and growing percentage of U.S. citizens engage in entrepreneurship, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)

(Babson Park, MA) May 22, 2013…Entrepreneurship in the United States climbed to its highest level in more than a decade according to the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) U.S. Report issued today by Babson College and Baruch College. In 2012, the average Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity rate (TEA) increased to nearly 13 percent, an all-time high since GEM first began tracking entrepreneurship rates in 1999.

“Despite a sluggish economy, 2012 was marked by U.S. entrepreneurs reporting greater optimism and confidence in their abilities to start new businesses,” commented the GEM Report’s lead author, Donna J. Kelley, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson College. “In fact, nearly 13 percent of the U.S. adult population was engaged in entrepreneurship with the vast majority starting businesses to pursue an opportunity rather than out of necessity. On the downside, Americans closing businesses were twice as likely as those in other innovation-driven economies to cite difficulties financing their ventures.”

“We found that entrepreneurs in the U.S. exhibited a type of closeness,” commented Abdul Ali, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson and one of the Report authors. “More than two-thirds start at home, over 80 percent fund their efforts from personal, family, and friend sources and many employ family, nonpaid workers, and part-timers. Further, little more than one-tenth make a significant portion of their sales from foreign customers. While this may demonstrate an ease of getting started in the United States, entrepreneurs with expansive ambitions are required in order to make a contribution to job growth and global competitiveness.”

Ah, getting older. It's not always fun, but at least it's one of those inevitable things we can count on in life. Fortunately, another thing we can count on is the investing prowess of the PE industry, which has had its eye on the aging population for some time. Since the beginning of 2003, in fact, PE investors have backed 138 senior-related companies based in the U.S. or Canada, according to the PitchBook Platform. Predictably, many of those companies operate in the healthcare industry, but not all. South Shore Venture Enterprises (detailed below) specializes in direct marketing campaigns aimed at senior citizens. Also making the list was Life After 50, an online magazine and website community developed exclusively for seasoned citizens.

Venture capitalist Brad Feld, who co-founded TechStars, says there isn’t a startup accelerator bubble—and that every U.S. city with at least 100,000 people should have an accelerator program, according to Lora Kolodny. (Wall Street Journal)

Serial entrepreneur Brian Shuster, whose current project is an online game called Utherverse, relocated from the U.S. to Vancouver, Jose Pagliery reports. Canadians have a better work ethic, and the government supports his business, Shuster says. (CNN Money)

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said Thursday it has named 14 teams to its Global Founders' Skills Accelerator, which aims to help student entrepreneurs with succeeding at their startups. The program will run from June to September and will be hosted at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Eight of the teams come from MIT, with the rest from universities outside the U.S. — Canada, China, Germany, Russia, Scotland and Turkey. Among the teams is 3dim, a startup developing software which recognizes three-dimensional gestures on mobile devices, which on Wednesday took the grand prize in the 2013 MIT $100K competition.

Some entrepreneurs and investors subscribe to the creed “failure is not an option.” I’m not one of them.

I strongly believe that there are times you should call it quits on a business. Not everything works. And — even after trying incredibly hard, and for a long period of time — failure is sometimes the best option. An entrepreneur shouldn’t view their entrepreneur arc as being linked to a single company, and having a lifetime perspective around entrepreneurship helps put the notion of failure into perspective. Rather than prognosticate, let me give you an example.

The emergence of social networking and the Internet has caused a new focus and value on “openness,” which leads to a new element of leadership, called “Open Leadership.” The mantra of open leadership is “Be Open, Be Transparent, and Be Authentic.” This is counter to the traditional business premise of “control,” so many companies are still pushing back.

Charlene Li, in her book “Open Leadership,” shows leaders how to tap into the power of the social technology revolution and use social media to be “open” while still maintaining control. I support her ten elements of the basic framework and vocabulary of open information sharing and open decision making:

In the weeks leading up to BlackBerry's splashy unveil of a new line of smartphones this year, the company fought hard to keep a major part of its launch a heavily guarded secret.

Many details about BlackBerry's new mobiles had already been leaked to the public, so few of its employees were made aware of how the company's presentation would ultimately unfold. A carefully rehearsed ending, in particular, was largely a ruse.

"We actually did a run-through for our management team with an alternative ending," says Heidi Davidson, a spokeswoman for BlackBerry.

Silicon Valley has long been at the forefront of the tech startup scene, but due to the growth of emerging companies in other areas of the U.S. and worldwide, it's hardly the only hub sparking innovation. And in recent years, there's been a greater spotlight on New York City.

In fact, according to a report by financial research analyst firm PrivyCo., more than 100 acquisitions of tech startups occurred in New York City last year, amounting to $8.3 billion. The city is now only second behind Silicon Valley in terms of startup acquisitions.

The University of Virginia announced this week the creation of a university “crowdfunding” portal designed to enable alumni and other donors to support research projects.

The university is one of the first to start such a fund-raising effort through a partnership with a crowdfunding start-up company. UVa is teaming up with Useed, a company focused on promoting fund raising in higher education by soliciting donations for university research projects or student-proposed entrepreneurial projects.

A business card creates a physical connection and bond between you or your business and your customers.

Just like in a website, business cards can become great interactive elements, but with the added ability to have real textures, different materials and shapes.

Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”

Intel Labs, the company’s R&D arm, is launching an initiative around what it calls the “data economy”—how consumers might capture more of the value of their personal information, like digital records of their their location or work history. To make this possible, Intel is funding hackathons to urge developers to explore novel uses of personal data. It has also paid for a rebellious-sounding website called We the Data, featuring raised fists and stories comparing Facebook to Exxon Mobil.