Kent is the English county called the Garden of England. Plant a seed in Kent and it will grow and flourish — apples, pears, cherries, grapes, strawberries, blackcurrants, almost every vegetable imaginable, oats, barley, grain … Kent feeds millions of people on a daily basis.

Non-agribusinesses also grow and flourish in Kent, but sometimes bad news comes along.

By David Jardin, CPA

Companies are always looking for ways to improve performance. These talent management best practices can not only drive continuous high performance, they’ll also go a long way toward building a high performance culture.

• Review and adapt. The integration of strategy, organization, and talent should be routinely reviewed and adapted with the Board, and during quarterly business reviews. It may need to be done even more often if the pace or scale of change warrants.
• Focus intensely on building critical capabilities. Identifying, measuring, and narrowing critical capability gaps drives consistent high performance.

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Aspiring and early-stage founders of life science startups have until April 2, 2012 to apply for the Kauffman Life Science Ventures Summit being held June 22-23, 2012. The comprehensive two-day conference will provide practical answers to founders seeking solutions to the daunting hurdles facing life science enterprises. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is hosting the inaugural Summit, which will be held at QB3 at the University of California-San Francisco.

Industry experts and successful entrepreneurs will provide practical guidance on commercializing innovations in each of four sectors: medical device, therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health. Speakers and panelists representing each industry sector will share lessons, advice and insights. Speakers include Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur and author; Stephen Spielberg, deputy commissioner for medical products and tobacco at the Federal Drug Administration; Paul Yock, founder, Stanford Biodesign; Karl Handelsman , managing director, CMEA Capital; Sean Duffy, CEO of Omada Health and more.

Visit www.kauffman.org/lifescienceapp to learn more.

The world is on track for around four degrees Celsius of global warming under current carbon emissions trends, says the EU’s chief climate negotiator, a trajectory that some scientists say risks a planetary mass extinction event. "When you look at the global emissions, with the current pledges which are on the table … we are probably heading towards 3.8 or 4.2 degrees (warming),” said Artur Runge-Metzger, speaking at a roundtable hosted in Brussels by the Institut français des relations internationales on 14 March.

The EU official then asked US and Japanese officials at the roundtable: “Are you making preparations in your countries to tell your industries and households what it means to adapt to a four-degree (change) and have you made estimates of what these costs are that will be born by the public sector and households?”

Silicon Valley has led the world in innovation and entrepreneurship because of its culture of information sharing and mentoring. No other region in the world is like it. But things are changing. In my travels to countries like India, China, and Chile, I’ve witnessed a noticeable evolution in entrepreneurial culture over the past five years. Networking groups are emerging, and entrepreneurs are becoming more open. One of the most impressive examples of this is in Campinas, Brazil—a small university town on the outskirts of Sao Paulo.

In June 2010, ten startups at the Softex incubator at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas decided to break free from the university incubator they were housed in and form an entrepreneurial co-op of sorts, called the Associação Campinas Startups. Instead of relying on local business executives and professors to guide them, the entrepreneurs decided to learn from each other. The university was very supportive, and business mentors went out of their way to share their knowledge and experience. But the advice was always too theoretical or geared towards big companies. In short, it wasn’t relevant to the leaner, fast-paced technology world. Instead, the entrepreneurs found the greatest value in brainstorming sessions and casual information exchanges with each other over lunch or drinks after work.

Hi, Gladys, Can an entrepreneur suffer from burnout? For 23 years I have owned a successful health and fitness center. Don't get me wrong. I am grateful for the clients and customers and for the money I make. However, for the past few years I have had a ho-hum attitude. I remember the excitement of starting and growing the company, but I no longer feel that way. Please don't tell me to expand; I have no burning desire to make the company bigger. My wife thinks I might be depressed and suggested I see a therapist. I don't feel depressed. But I am also tired of the day-to-day grind. What's up with this feeling?

GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) are forming a $200 million fund with Index Ventures to invest in early-stage biotechnology companies, a move that may entice venture capitalists back to the industry.

Glaxo and New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J will each put in $50 million, while Index Ventures will contribute $100 million and make investment decisions, the two drugmakers and the venture-capital firm said today. Moncef Slaoui, head of research and development at London-based Glaxo, and Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chairman of pharmaceuticals, will sit on the fund’s advisory board.

March 20 (Bloomberg) -- Patrick Fung, a partner at New Enterprise Associates Inc., talks about the venture capital firm's New Experiment Fund, a seed-stage fund for financing student startups and investing in the U.S. East Coast. He speaks with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West."

To an outsider, Facebook’s one million-square-foot Menlo Park campus, opened in Dec. 2011, might look like just another tech geek’s toybox--full of touchscreens and graffiti and free bikes and liquor and gear. But it’s all designed to serve creativity and make navigation and access to people and tools as easy as a Like button (and to provide a few creature comforts). As part of our research that lead to Fast Company's April cover story on Mark Zuckerberg, we took a stroll through the new Facebook Friend factory--still a work in progress--and asked a few questions about the features that make it a hackers haven.

Here is a list of entrepreneurs from iOL Scitech who have changed the way we live today.

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook; £11bn

Facebook connected 500 million people across the world and inspired a Hollywood film along the way – as well as generating £11bn for its founder – not bad for a college drop-out.

At 27, Mark Zuckerberg is the second-youngest billionaire in the world.

Name: OneID Inc.

Quick Pitch: Goodbye user names and passwords.

Genius Idea: OneID has created single-click login so users don’t have to enter a user name, password, credit card number or billing information. OneID also has no centralized data storage, making it extremely difficult for hackers to access confidential information.

I’m often approached by people who claim to have invented the next big thing, and ask me how much it’s worth, or complain that they can’t find an investor who will fund it. The honest answer is that ideas and new technologies are worth nothing, outside the context of a specific entrepreneur and a specific business plan that meets a market need for a fair price.

Invention is the process of creating a new technology. Business innovation is taking that technology and successfully bringing it to market in a way people want. There is a variation on an old quote that sums it up for me: "Invention is turning money into technology. Business innovation is turning technology into money."

The graph below, via urban planner Dan Taylor, attempts to chart the biggest shifts in North American job trends over the past 100 years, highlighting the previous shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy during the 20th century, and from an industrial to what he's calling the Creative Age today. The graph, by Carrie Taylor, is based on data put together my colleague Kevin Stolarick of the Martin Prosperity Institute and includes data for the United States and Canada.

When New York City recently announced the creation of a major new applied science and technology campus, it was hailed as a transformative event with the potential to spur economic growth, job creation and high-tech entrepreneurship. While no one can argue about the value of developing the city's strengths in the science and technology sectors, there is another sector that brings tremendous opportunities to the city's growth and development: design. A new report by the Center for an Urban Future brings to light the important, yet undervalued, role that design schools have and will continue to play in strengthening the innovation economy.

Harsh economic realities mean trouble for college leaders. But where administrators perceive an impending crisis, investors increasingly see opportunity.

In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger.

Anyone who has made sure their sites are as search engine optimised as is humanly — or mechanically — possible should be quaking their boots right about now. Google has announced a major algorithm change that is going to penalised overly optimised websites. (Are you sweating yet?)

This change comes on the back of another algorithm change made recently where Google blocked search results from the co.cc domains.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the change as follows: “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”

It’s going to happen. It’ll happen because it’s March and you’ve run through all your “good topics” already. It’ll happen because you’re busy and mentally fried. Or sometimes it’ll happen because it’s simply too sunny and beautiful outside to be working. Whatever the case, at some point you are going to look at your blog and decide that you have absolutely nothing left to write about it. And then you’re going to close your laptop and step away.

Don’t do that!

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get the feeling that the excitement surrounding the green business movement is starting to lose its luster.

Before I share some of the reasons why, read The State of Green Business from Kelly Spors, as it will help set the table for this post.  While Kelly’s report paints a mostly positive picture about green business, I’ve been noticing a few hiccups as of late, including;

Solyndra - this was the solar panel manufacturer based in California that declared bankruptcy last August. Now, Solyndra is not the first solar panel company to declare bankruptcy, but it’s the one that has garnered most of the publicity. That’s because US taxpayers helped fund it through loan guarantees that were part of the 2009 stimulus package.

We are tremendously excited by the recent reauthorization of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program.  The program is an important one to small businesses, each year providing more than $2 billion of R&D funding to innovative small business across a broad range of technologies.  After a long series of temporary reauthorizations, Congress voted to reauthorize the program and the President signed the bill into law on December 31, 2011.

At SBA, we are now laser-focused on implementing the reauthorization. I thought it would be helpful for the small business community and other stakeholders to lay out our basic plan of attack for implementation.

Expect the Unexpected! Here’s an opportunity to voice your comments to the SBA on new SBIR reporting requirements.

In our last issue we led you to Sean Greene’s (SBA Associate Administrator for Investment, and Special Advisor for Innovation), blog posting about the SBA’s plans for creating the SBIR and STTR policy directives (see www.sba.gov/community/blogs/official-sba-news-and-views/open-business/implementing-sbir-and-sttr-reauthorization ). We also cautioned you and Mr. Greene about "The best-laid plans of mice, men and bureaucrats." I fear that is coming to pass because this new action was unforeseen.