I'm fascinated by the different types of people I meet in the business world and the way that their personalities show up in what they do. I'm drawn to people who have a quiet inner confidence that is expressed in their interactions and their output. I am comforted by their sense of self. They know who they are and they operate with a kindness of spirit that makes shared time and conversation pleasant. They exude confident energy to everyone they come into contact with.

Matthew Larson is the chief of product design for one of the surf industry's most exciting new brands, Matuse, which designs incredible, high-end wetsuits. Larson is a soft-spoken, kind-spirited design thinker who is passionate about surfing and technology. Through the following 10 ideas, you'll learn how Matt has combined his love for surfing and design while building a company he loves.

Very important, as it turns out — but don’t forget traditional teaching methods completely. At least that’s the opinion of America’s university students.

Some 36%, for instance, consider the optimal conditions for learning to be small classes with some online components. Just over 80%, meanwhile, consider their laptop to be their most important device.

Perhaps surprisingly for a developed country like America, nearly half of all students agree that their institutions could be making better use of technology, while just over a third claim their lecturers require assistance in getting technology working in the teaching space.

Cambridge University and Cambridge Biomedical Campus can help the local biotech cluster chase down the lead opened up by the city’s hi-tech and ICT companies, according to the University’s vice-chancellor. Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, speaking at Cambridge Network’s 'Cambridge going forward - healthcare' event last week, told an audience of over 200 that although the hi-tech, physical sciences and engineering sectors had out-performed biotech in recent years, conditions were now right for a resurgence.

“Has biotech done as much as those other sectors? No I don’t think so. Do I think it could overtake those sectors? Yes, but it does mean it requires particular investment,” Prof Sir Leszek

One of the most difficult and frustrating problems organizations face is identifying the customer. The problem isn’t the classic identification of the customer as the buyer rather it is knowing and understanding the internal customer. The internal customer is the person(s) who use your process, your technology or have to live with your decisions. The end customer cannot be fully engaged, served and fulfilled until the internal customer is engaged, served, fulfilled and enabled.

Enabling employees is difficult to accomplish when management manages with 20th Century philosophies which weren’t inclined to  trust employee capabilities or intents. Enablement means any approach which provides means or opportunity to solve problems that directly effect an individuals ability to engage, serve and fulfill an organizational purpose.  In other words let the people solve the problems rather than allowing management to think they know enough about the processes employees use to decide what solutions would actual improve said processes.

With the 2011 edition of The Global Innovation Index (GII), edited by Soumitra Dutta, INSEAD eLab is steering the global debate on innovation to new dimensions where ingenuity and creativity are recognized, and where efficiency matters.

At the core, the GII benchmarks 125 countries/economies by averaging out their innovation conditions (input sub-index) and results (output sub-index), details below. The GII adopts a broad definition of innovation aimed at capturing, among others, outputs in copyright-related industries, as well as emerging markets’ breakthroughs in so-called frugal, reverse, and inclusive innovations. This year, Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore top the ranking, followed by Hong Kong (SAR, China), Finland, Denmark, the US, Canada, the Netherlands and the UK in the Top 10.

The Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index, a monthly analysis of 1,000 loan applications, found that approval rates of small business financing requests by small banks and non-bank lenders increased to their highest levels of 2011 during December.

The big story in small business lending continues to be the activity of alternative lenders — credit unions, as well as Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI), micro lenders, and others. They approved 62.2% of the funding requests , a rise from 62% in November. Within the alternative lender category, credit unions became increasingly active in small business lending in 2011. Credit unions granted 57.4% of small business funding requests up from 57% in November. December loan approvals by small banks increased to 47.1%, their highest rate of the year, up from 47% in November.

Today’s VC post of the day is from Albert Wenger (USV) and titled Presenting Option Grants to Boards. This is feedback I give to CEOs 98% of the time after my first board meeting. While there is no standard for how to present option grants, Albert lays out a very clear set of eight pieces of data he likes to see. The first four are the the columns in the spreadsheet and each employee / option grant are the rows. The next two are footnotes for options grants that aren’t standard. And the last two are contextual data that should always be included since board members are on multiple boards and won’t remember this from company to company.

Here’s are the eight pieces of data – go read the post for more details on why all eight are necessary.

In long days packed with back-to-back meetings last week, Tillman Gerngross pressed drug company leaders from around the world to farm out some specialized research and development to his New Hampshire start-up, Adimab LLC.

Gerngross even bought advertisements promoting his biotech firm on this city’s fabled cable cars to catch executives’ attention as the cars rumbled down Powell Street past the Westin St. Francis hotel, where more than 8,000 life sciences movers and shakers congregated for the 30th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

Sure, having a website for your business serves a practical need: to draw net-surfing users to your product or service. However, it’s also much more than slapping on a run of the mill two-column template and calling it a day. Nothing kills an online buzz like a poorly designed or drastically outdated website. Dry and boring default templates, broken assets, confusing pages and invasive widgets do nothing but harm a page’s style, which in turn reflects poorly on the company.

2012 is heralding a new wave of innovative web technologies and design, and a page that stays in step with these trends is bound to pique interest and lower your bounce rate. Even more, a well done and on-trend website remains effective well after the year is over, reeling users in with thoughtful design and building a design-conscious and taste-making reputation. Keep these tips in mind when you clean up your company’s website, and stay ahead of the curve for the new year.

Las Vegas—At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025.

During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won’t be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can’t yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. “We’re beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don’t have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that,” said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. “These are really early days,” agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard.

This is the third and final post on the subject of the management team. The final phase of company development I am going to cover is "building the business." Building the business largely means building the management team. They are one and the same.

Many founders are naturally talented at building product and building the user base. But building the company comes harder to them. I once discussed this with Roelof Botha and he made a fantastic suggestion. Founders should think of the business as yet another product they are building. It is the penultimate product they are building because from the company can come any number of additional products and any number of additional initiatives. The company, if built correctly, will be more important than any single product it can create. Think about Steve Jobs and all the amazing products he created. But Apple is the most important thing he created. So building the business requires a deep commitment from the founder. At the appropriate point, they must turn their attention to it and make it their top priority.

MUMBAI: India plans to launch a $1 billion fund by June-July, with an initial capital of Rs 5 billion, to invest in innovations that can generate services and products to uplift the poor, a top government official told reporters on Monday.

"We need to provide money to those who have ideas but no seed capital," Sam Pitroda, adviser to prime minister on public information, infrastructure and innovation, said on the sidelines of an industry event.

The fund, named India Inclusive Innovation Fund, will invest in sectors such as agriculture, water, energy and healthcare, Pitroda said, after delivering the keynote address at Grid Week Asia Summit, organised by Indian Electrical & Electronics Manufacturers' Association.

It’s certainly not Breaking News that M&A deals are an important source of liquidity in biotech VC today.  But last year did mark an important milestone for biotech over the past few years: in 2011, the capital returned to investors from private M&A alone likely exceeded the total capital invested into private biotech companies.

2011 was a banner year for private company M&A.  Based on the data compiled by BioCentury, and Walter Yang in particular, deal values were up over 3x since the nadir of 2008.  Here’s the snapshot:

• 64 private M&A deals closed in 2011, representing $23B in proceeds (upfronts and milestones).  This includes great deals like Plexxikon/Daiichi, Calistoga/Gilead, Amira/BMS, BioVex/Amgen and Advanced BioHealing/Shire, among others.
• Only 45 of these 64 deals disclosed financial information

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's pledge of a $1 billion job-creation fund for Buffalo raises a simple question: Big or small?

One school of thought is to use the fund to attract one or two "game-changer" corporations. Another idea is to spend the money -- grants, tax breaks and other forms of incentives -- on "clusters" of one or more specific industries that would spawn additional growth.

Overlooked in some of the early discussions, though, is the concept of "economic gardening." That involves investing the money in companies already on the ground and growing -- sometimes off anyone's radar screen -- to expand at home instead of beyond New York's borders.

Last week, four VentureBeat reporters and our videographer braved the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They covered 1.861 million square feet of show floor, visited many of the 3,100 exhibitors, and sorted through the 20,000 new products that were launched at the event to find the most interesting stories and gadgets.

They also took a lot of photographs. Here are some of our favorite images and finds from the CES 2012 floor, including an Atari controller for the iPad, exciting in-car computers, and the hottest new laptops and mobile phones. For even more images, check out the VentureBeat Flickr photostream.

Fact or fiction? Online commenters who use their real names will leave higher quality comments.

Before you respond with a “well duh, that’s a fact” retort, you might want to take a look at new data from online conversation startup Disqus.

The company analyzed nearly 500,000 comments made via its platform and found that the digital denizens using fictitious names, or pseudonyms, are actually responsible for the highest quantity and quality of comments on the web.

Parasitic worms may be useful in treating lung disease and healing wounds, according to a study published online today (Jan.15) in Nature Medicine.

Although far from benign — these intestinal parasites infect more than a billion humans worldwide and kill or sicken hundreds of millions of people yearly — the worms appear to trigger key elements of the immune system responsible for repairing damaged tissues and reducing inflammation.

These live worms could be used someday in a controlled setting to treat serious lung injury caused by respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, according to the senior author on the report, William Gause of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, N.J.

The signs are all there: Essays that insist that incessant phone staring at dinner is the wave of the future, New Yorker cartoons painfully highlighting the phone-fixated state of socialization today, the fact that I broke my toe once because I was too busy tweeting via mobile to notice a sharply angled door, blogs about clever ways to prevent phone staring at dinner and now this …

As it matures, the driving force of the sharing economy will become time, and the companies that can do business in real-time will occupy a more strategic, and profitable, place in the ecosystem.

Fresh off its $1 billion valuation, Airbnb is the most common reference point for all manner of “this for that” pitches bouncing around the Valley right now, with many new ventures proposing to be the “the Airbnb of X.”

A SIMPLE formula exists for writing about entrepreneurs: humble beginnings + fighting against the odds + eventual success = inspiring story. The fairytale profile certainly has its place, but entrepreneurship is a subject that deserves a bit more rigour. After all, it’s entrepreneurs that help create the future for the rest of us.

The significance of the subject doesn’t escape Eric Ries, the co-founder of IMVU – an online social entertainment website, in which users have literally created their own virtual world, including an economy. He is driven to improve the process of starting a business by getting under the bonnet – or hood, as the San Franciscan would say – of the process, as my interview with him (right) makes clear.