A mobile phone turned into a glucose monitor for diabetes patients, a needle-free handheld device for testing anaemia among women in village, an ultrasound probe that can be attached to a smartphone via USB and a rapid blood test to detect a heart attack.

These are some of the bold ideas from Indian innovators which have won seed grants totalling $1 million (Rs 5.4 crore) in an international competition, Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the Canadian government.

This is the story of a startup that found itself at the bottom of its Y Combinator class--and pulled off a resourceful pivot just in time for demo day. Here’s what their story can teach the rest of us about the makings of a successful pivot.

57% of Israeli venture capital executives expect foreign investment in Israeli start-ups to increase over the coming year, and 43% expect that the number of high-tech exits will grow, according to Deloitte Brightman Almagor Zohar's VC Indicator for the first quarter of 2013. This is the firm's 43rd quarterly survey of Israeli venture capital managers and partners. Deloitte Israel Technology, Media & Telecommunications manager Tal Chen said, "The global giants understand that their survival in a dynamic market depends on their ability to constantly offer innovative products. They are therefore investing heavily in locating innovative technologies for both acquisition and investment."

Each year the Princeton Review reveals their study findings on the Top 50 Schools for Entrepreneurship Programs, an annual ranking of top colleges and universities for aspiring entrepreneurs at the undergraduate and graduate level.

For the fourth year in a row, Massachusetts-based Babson College ranks #1 in graduate entrepreneurship programs, and #2 in 2011 for undergraduate programs. Babson also ranked #1 in entrepreneurship education, according to U.S. News & World Report, for 19 consecutive years. It’s safe to say that when it comes to world-class entrepreneurship studies, Babson College is a front-runner.

Harvard University has received a $50 million gift from businessman and alumnus Len Blavatnik to support a major initiative aimed at bridging the “valley of death” — the gap between basic biomedical research and the emergence of new therapies for patients.

The gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, slated to be announced Monday, is one of the largest individual gifts to the university in recent years.

It is especially welcome because it comes as researchers are being squeezed by cuts in federal funding. Harvard Medical School announced last week that economic pressures led it to shut down its half-century old primate research facility in Southborough.

The world’s first smartphone for the blind is being made in India by the country’s young and talented innovator Sumit Dagar at the Incubation centre in Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad. Dagar holds a post graduate degree from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmadabad.

“We have created the world’s first Braille smartphone,” said Dagar. “This product is based on an innovative ‘touch screen’ which is capable of elevating and depressing the contents it receives to transform them into ‘touchable’ patterns.”

He is collaborating with IIT Delhi on making the prototype, which is currently being tested at L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad.

In almost every article and story written about entrepreneurship, I have found symptoms and traits which are common among all those who finally made it big. One of those is that entrepreneurship is not for everyone. I realised that entrepreneurs have some specific traits which should be closely observed. For example, if you are afraid of failures and adventure, then you should definitely keep out of this. So, here are nine symptoms that you will definitely find in an entrepreneur.

You have probably heard plenty of times that being an entrepreneur is a risky business, and investors talk all the time about reducing the risk. Yet everyone seems to have their own view of key risk drivers for startups, and I’m no exception. I don’t agree, for example, that the first priority is to avoid startups with a high attrition rate, like trendy restaurants and entertainment.

Here is my own priority list of key risk drivers that every entrepreneur and every investor should evaluate and minimize in starting a business:

Gone may be the days of fumbling for credit cards that can easily be lost or stolen. A new payment option is now at our fingertips — literally. PayTango allows you to pay with your fingerprints, linking your biometric information to your credit cards so you don’t have to carry plastic ever again.

The creators? Four Carnegie Mellon University students who germinated the idea in a 2012 school startup lab. They’ve since moved to Silicon Valley and been awarded a spot in Y Combinator. While the first college in the U.S. was established in 1636, the first college course in entrepreneurship didn’t emerge until about 310 years later. How bizarre it is that entrepreneurship — the heart of who we are as a nation — did not become a course until about 170 years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence? Business competitions, now an expected part of school landscapes, didn’t even exist until some ambitious students at The University of Texas at Austin launched one about 30 years ago.

A Boston-based company shows how it converts delivery trucks and other commercial fleet vehicles into hybrids.

PERSEVERANCE

“Cash will run low, clients won’t close, team members will leave, the product will have bugs, and the roof will fall on your head. There will be times when you seriously consider quitting. I’ve been there. But perseverance and dumbfounded self-confidence pushed me forward. Without perseverance, you’ll never reach success. “

- Jun Loayza | President, Reputation Hacks VISION COMMUNICATION

“First, an entrepreneur must have the vision, and then he or she must be able to communicate it. The communication will be to their team and employees, to their customers and clients, and even to outside sources like potential investors, sponsors, and collaborators.”

- Nathalie Lussier | Creator, The Website Checkup Tool

We’ve all seen it happen: People get trapped in the web of monotonous, boring, unhealthy lunches at work. They don’t leave enough time to prepare something healthy at home. Sometimes, they opt for a bag of chips and a can of soda right out of the break room vending machines. Other times, they splurge on something greasy or fried from the fast food place down the block. Some days, they’re just tired of the same old thing, so they skip lunch altogether. A few hours later, their energy and focus are gone. Unable to be productive, they’re left watching the clock, waiting for the end of the workday.

Now is the time to reclaim the most important hour in the day.

As a smart and successful employer, it’s your responsibility to encourage your employees to make healthier choices at lunchtime. The more employers care about the health, well-being, and productive stamina of company employees, the better off the company will be. If your company takes a vested interest in employee health by implementing a healthy food program at work, you will be rewarded with fewer sick days, fewer dollars spent on healthcare coverage, higher productivity, and more positivity within the workplace overall.

For entrepreneurs, business school presents a unique set of choices and opportunities that can drastically alter a founder’s chance of success — for better or worse.

I founded Troop ID while I was an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School in February of 2010. And while today we employ 17 people and sign up nearly 1,000 new members daily, our path to success would have been much swifter had I leveraged the resources at my fingertips while in business school.

Starting a business is not easy. Having resources at your disposal is invaluable, and one of the best places to get those resources is in college. With a lot of attention being brought to whether or not you actually need college, I would like to present a counter-point. I started my own business this year and these are the college resources I found most helpful.

10. Risk-reduced Environment

College is a time when people are trying many new things. It is a relatively safe environment. If you start something and it doesn’t work, you are still in school, you still have a house, you still have classes, you still have friends. Being at college provides a great place to test new ideas and have a safety net to fall back on if things don’t go as planned.

The Association of University Research Parks is proud to present the 18th Annual Awards of Excellence in research and science park development and practice. AURP will honor industry leaders at the 2013 International Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

These awards bring valuable recognition to the recipients and to the industry as a whole. To nominate a park, company or an individual who has demonstrated excellence in the field, please use the below links. Each link also provides criteria and details about the award. Nominations are due by May 20, 2013.

When I co-founded InMobi in 2007, we took a novel “east-to-west” approach to our growth, starting in India before moving into other developing markets, then finally into more traditional “Western” markets as well.

Because this method of expansion didn’t have any precursors, and mobile advertising was at the time still a very new field, we had to chart our own course and set our own example. And as a corollary, we would have to deal with a number of challenges as we discovered that the mobile landscape was different in each geography we entered, and learn to quickly recover from mistakes.

In the first year of business, you have literally no data for making decisions and predictions.

Even after the first hundred customers, half of those were serendipitous one-offs, not representative of repeatable, controllable customer acquisition, and the scale of the data isn’t statistically significant.

One of the root questions you have at the start, which is supposed to be data-driven (but you don’t have data) is: What’s the maximum I should bid for CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns like Google AdWords?

Remember your first business loan? Or, if you're like many entrepreneurs, you may have initially bootstrapped your startup by buying some stuff on your credit card. You were excited and apprehensive: Excited because now you had the cash to invest in your business, apprehensive because you had just taken on a debt you would have to repay.

But that was okay, because you were confident you could create more value than the interest you would pay. Even though you eventually have to pay off a financial debt, gaining access to the right resources now often marks the difference between success and failure.

Botswana is among Africa’s richest countries and the continent’s oldest functioning post-colonial, multi-party democracy. It has low taxes and a stable government that has been ranked as Africa's least corrupt. But it needs entrepreneurs.

While mining has been the pillar of Botswana’s wealth (diamonds account for about half the government's revenue and over a third of its GDP), the country has largely avoided the “resource curse” that stymies economic growth in similar nations. The country’s income from diamond mining is spread widely enough to provide almost half the population with middle-class status. Articles about the economy of Botswana always hail its development performance and the example of stability it sets for the rest of the continent, but warn that the country must diversify before the mines run out—a deadline that is currently estimated at 2030. Entrepreneurs will play an important part in this.

Way back in 1941, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were in their garage, working on what would become Hewlett-Packard.  During that time, they developed their “Twelve Rules of the Garage” to guide their work, their dreams and their daily environment.  Looking back, the rules are uncanny in how they anticipate the then-nascent Silicon Valley ethos and ecosystem, and they are worth revisiting today.  In case you don’t remember them, they are: