As anyone who has been on either side of a venture capital deal knows, a fund raising agreement usually has so many provisions that someone inexperienced needs a glossary to read it.

Often one of these provisions discusses “drag along rights.” As Investopedia explains, these rights allow “a majority shareholder to force a minority shareholder to join in the sale of a company.”

The inclusion of drag along rights in VC agreements is becoming more common, according to data assembled by the law firm Cooley LLP. The figure below shows the share of venture capital agreements for which Cooley provided the legal work in which drag along rights were included. While the proportion of agreements with drag along rights never exceeded 50 percent before 2006, it has never fallen below 50 percent since then. And since the second quarter of 2009, it has exceeded 60 percent in every three month period measured.

Every investor is looking for the “dream team” of executives to put his money on. Often I find that experienced investors flip to the management page of a business plan, even before they read the product description. That’s how important the people are. What are investors looking for in the CEO and the rest of the top executives?

• Been there, done that, and won. This may not seem fair to all you first-time entrepreneurs, but wouldn’t you choose to bet on a horse that has been in races before, and won, rather than an unknown in his first race? The size of the race is also important. Fortune 1000 CEOs usually don’t make good startup CEOs, and vice versa.
• Experience and expertise in this business area. You may have great credentials as a public servant in your home town, but that won’t get you money to build a social network on the Internet, or start a software company. You can learn a lot about a new technology from Wikipedia and scouring the Internet, but probably not enough to qualify you as CEO of a new company in that area.

The Angel Investor Management (AIM) Group announced today the formation of the Central Alabama Angel Network (CANN) to serve the capital needs of entrepreneurs and investors in a seven-county region.

"The Angel Investor Management Group is bringing together a single network of angel investor groups in Alabama. By banding together to share the expenses of operations, the economies of scale will work to benefit all," said AIM Group CEO Dick Reeves. "In this way we expect to increase the number and quality of investment opportunities available to investor members, and to speed up the process for entrepreneurs seeking capital for their companies. The result for Alabama will be increasing angel capital availability to early-stage companies throughout the state."

Purdue officials reported Friday (Feb. 3) that the university has doubled its annual research expenditures to $600 million since 2006-07, supporting its goal to increase economic development for Indiana and revenue streams for the university.

At the same time, new sponsored program awards totaled $420 million for 2010-11 - most of them research related - a 4 percent dip from the previous year's record high of $438 million, which included stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. If ARRA funds are not included, the increase in sponsored program awards is 19.3 percent - from $331 million in 2009-10 to $395 million in 2010-11.

Deerfield, IL — The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) – an association for academic technology transfer professionals – today launched a dynamic new web-based resource to facilitate networking, partnership and licensing deals among corporations and universities.

AUTM’s new Global Technology Portal (GTP) accelerates how universities and corporations are able to match available cutting-edge technologies with emerging market needs. Located at the web address www.gtp.autm.net , the portal also helps quicken the pace of product development by making it much easier for corporations to identify potential university partners equipped with needed research capabilities.

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Sweden was the highest-ranked EU member state in this year's Innovation Union Scoreboard, unveiled today (7 January) by the European Commission. But Europe's best innovator, Switzerland, lies outside the EU, and the Union as a whole lags behind the United States, Japan and South Korea.

After Sweden, the three highest EU countries on the list were Denmark, Germany and Finland. Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Latvia were the lowest-ranked member states.

European countries and international competitors were judged on three main categories: whether they have a strong base for innovation to grow; whether firms are investing in innovation; and whether innovation is leading to benefits for the economy.

The European Commission published the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2011 which shows that although almost all Member States have improved their innovation performance according to the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2011, innovation performance growth is slowing down and the EU is not closing the persistent gap with global innovation leaders US, Japan and South Korea. According to European Commission Vice-President Antonio Tajani, enterprises have already proven to be the key to success in innovation.

The Innovation Union Scoreboard 2011 published by the Commission shows that firms' innovation activities stand out as an important factor to achieve top positions at EU and international level. The Scoreboard also publishes that the largest gap for the EU remains in terms of private sector innovation. The EU still maintains a clear lead over the emerging economies of China, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. However, China is improving its innovation performance and is catching up progressively. The Innovation Union flagship initiative celebrated its first anniversary in October 2011.

Concussion, the most common among traumatic brain injuries, which occurs 1.7 million times a year in the U.S., represents a major public-health problem. It occurs when there is a sudden acceleration or deceleration of the head, a process depicted here in this animation.

A blow can produce a brief loss of consciousness, headaches and impaired cognition, among other symptoms. Symptoms can last for days or sometimes longer. And a person who experience one risks another and may find recovery takes longer.

Honey soothes a sore throat. Now research suggests that it could also help fight serious skin infections.

People have used honey's antibacterial properties for centuries. Now, scientists are discovering just how it works—and that it might be even better than antibiotics.

Despite a still sluggish economy, venture capital firms poured a total of $28.4 billion into 3,673 deals last year—one of the highest levels of dollar investments of the decade—with the majority of deals going into the software and biotechnology industries.

The annual figures represent an increase of 22 percent in dollar terms and a 4 percent increase in the number of deals compared with the 2010 figures, according to The MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

This year’s VC funding figures represent the third highest annual investment (in dollar terms) of the past decade.

This is the second edition of the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS). Based on the previous European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), the tool is meant to help monitor the implementation of the Europe 2020 Innovation Union1 flagship by providing a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of the EU27 Member States and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their research and innovation systems.

The IUS includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU27 Member States, as well as for Croatia, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. It also includes comparisons based on a more reduced set of indicators between the EU27 and 10 global competitors.

The IUS 2011 distinguishes between 3 main types of indicators and 8 innovation dimensions, capturing in total 25 different indicators

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Eric Kuhn, 41, is the founder and CEO of FoundersCard, which offers networking opportunities, discounts, and perks for entrepreneurs and innovators. Since its founding at the end of 2009, FoundersCard, which is profitable, has been growing steadily--but more slowly than Kuhn might let it, since part of its value comes from its exclusivity.

How’d you get the idea for FoundersCard?

It was when I was on the roadshow for Varsity Books (his first company), which was going public, back in the Internet 1.0 days. The investment bankers were coordinating all the travel. Every night I stayed in a different city. I remember staying at amazing hotels: the Mandarin Oriental, the Four Seasons. I remember talking to (the bankers), asking, How much does this cost? It turned out they could travel in this kind of style because they received these incredible deals because of who their companies were. That struck me as odd, that it was the investment bankers--who leeched off the entrepreneurs, the value creators--that were getting these amazing benefits and rates. I thought it was the entrepreneurs and founders who should have this kind of access.

Once again, one of the main themes of Rio+20, a UN summit held twenty years after its predecessor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is ‘green economy’. Back in 1992 the discussions were focussed primarily on environmental issues. More recently, this focus has shifted almost exclusively towards an economic approach to sustainable development. The key question being asked in 2012: how do we reshape our current economy in order to become a green economy?

Considering the urgency of many sustainability issues, the promising concept of a green economy should very rapidly be turned into a set of concrete actions, with both short and long term effects. But how do we go about doing this?

In order to contribute to this discussion, we (Jan Jonker, Jos Reinhoudt and Harry te Riele) will take the opportunity at the final meeting of the Dutch Platform Rio+20 to present our essay Transitions towards sustainability, in which we suggest seven principles we believe could speed up the development of a green economy.

Question Number One

Co-founder relationships: do the founders of your startup actually get along?

My thoughts:

Founder matching is now a recognised startup investment and formation discipline, with its own systems, social networks, software, business models and startups (e.g., StartupWithMe, CoFoundify, Cofounderslab and FounderDating) addressing it as a lucrative and growing requirement.

In case you were wondering, ‘Solo-founder’ applicants to accelerators are now almost universally seen as profoundly problematic, so Drew Houston, as solo founder of what many consider to be Y Combinator’s ‘biggest hit’, DropBox is seen (especially by Y Combinator themselves) as an unrepresentative anomaly and is not accepted as being a reason not to insist on startups having co-founders.

Job Summary: The KAUST Entrepreneurship Center offers incubation support and advisory services for entrepreneurs who are transitioning their innovative "big idea" into a commercial entity. For qualified teams, the Center offers assistance through coaching and mentoring programs, outreach activities such as the MENA and Global speaker series, partnering with domestic and international entrepreneurship centers, and other organized initiatives and services .

Major Responsibilities: Provide one-on-one and team-based coaching to KAUST and non-KAUST entrepreneurs in developing a professional business plan, building relationships with customers, getting ready to commercialize the product, preparing for venture fund raising.

Meet regularly with the entrepreneurs to develop milestone plans, provide coaching and advice, and connect them with resources to accelerate their business.

If you are looking for an outside investor, you need to know how they see you. Different types of investors look for startups at different levels of maturity. If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, fishing for money is a waste of time for both of you.

For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts. It wouldn’t work anyway, since your valuation at that stage would be less than the funding, meaning you would have to give away all ownership for the money.

Dean David Thomas, who took the helm of Georgetown University’s school of business in August, has been making the rounds lately pitching prospective donors on a plan to raise $50,000 for what he describes as a university “seed fund.”

The fresh money won’t be used to bankroll fledgling student ventures or faculty’s groundbreaking research ideas; in fact it won’t even stay in the business school for very long. The money is to be distributed to professors in other departments who design courses rooted in entre­pre­neur­ship.

Women make up nearly half the Canadian work force and more than 50 per cent of postsecondary students. Yet, when it comes to entrepreneurship, they fall short of men – and the gap between the sexes hasn’t closed much over the past decade.

The relative lack of female entrepreneurs is unusual because Canada enjoys a high rate of entrepreneurship relative to other developed nations, a factor that helps drive our economic growth. But while Canadian men start businesses more frequently than their international counterparts, Canadian women are only average.

Here is advice on writing a business plan from the 2012 Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge judges:

“Your customer is just as important as your ‘idea.’ Be clear about who they are, how many there are and where they are. Make sure you have personally talked with some of them, really understand how they will ‘see’ your product and convey that in your plan.”

John Fleming, FIU Track

“Across the board, the weakest section of last year’s submissions was financial projections. Many entrants left them out of their applications altogether. Others just included one or two line items. The key to understanding an emerging business is understanding the financial drivers of the business. Show the judges that you understand your operating metrics and how the numbers scale over five years. And don’t forget to include your net revenue, EBITDA, cash flow, and net income figures.”

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Extroverts and introverts are not different in the ways we usually consider them to be. Introverts want lower-stimulation environments—less noise, less action—while extroverts crave stimulation to feel their best. Introverts may be very outgoing people, just as an extrovert may actually be shy. The big difference is the kind of environment they thrive in, says Susan Cain, author of a new book on the creative power of introverts. Now more than ever before, says Cain, Western society approves more of extroverts.