Is the Gold Coast the next Silicon Valley? Should we be a city of entrepreneurs and innovators?

After Bernard Salt presented his vision for 2050 recently, it's clear the Gold Coast needs to plan now for the city's transition to more than 1 million people by 2050.

Entrepreneurs and innovation could be the key and the idea of an entrepreneur being someone who builds a business out of their garage and goes on to make millions is passe. 

Image: http://blogs.abc.net.au

At The MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum hosted at Chicago’s Fairmont Hotel on March 10 and 11, Healthbox’s Maria Siambekos will host a session about the growing role of healthcare accelerators. Do investors invest in them?

“Accelerators have become as common as Band-Aids on the healthcare scene,” said Lisa Suennen of Venture Valkyrie Consulting, who will be moderating a panel on the topic at the MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum (MHVF). “What started as a movement is now having to progress to a business model.  It is interesting to see how the field is segmenting and shifting to better define its value proposition to entrepreneurs, investors and the marketplace.”

There’s only one thing that matters when you’re starting a business, and it’s not your product, and it’s not your team.

If you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.

First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.

Like aviators, experienced innovators use checklists. It’s how they make sure they haven’t left out any critical steps when assessing new ideas. This approach, described in our recent HBR article, also helps company strategists and innovation leaders evaluate investments and advise new-growth teams in a disciplined way. We’ve created this brief interactive checklist to help you vet the possibilities in your innovation pipeline. Think of a project proposal you’re considering, and answer the questions below to determine whether it’s worth pursuing.

That's right: I only spent about six seconds looking at that meticulously written, brilliant resume of yours. That might sound crazy, but I'm not alone. If your job application was lucky enough to have been screened by a real live human, that human is likely not spending much longer than I am.

Before you scoff, it's worth noting that six seconds is all anyone really needs to decide whether a resume is worth considering. Yes, it can really be that obvious! Don't believe me?

In our Mid-Atlantic region $6.6 billion in grants has been awarded to our innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists and researchers. The highly competitive SBIR/STTR programs provide the needed impetus for many advanced technology firms to move from ideation to commercialization and support this nation’s innovation driven economy. Since the programs’ inception, there have been over 150,000 awards totaling about $40 billion that have helped this nation’s innovators de-risk technology and keep the nation competitive. The SBIR/STTR programs have provided seed funding to companies including Qualcomm, iRobot, Symantec and Genzyme.

As anyone who has been on the job market knows, reading the flat, convoluted prose of corporate job listings can be an intimidating and demoralizing experience. Postings often don’t describe an organization’s actual needs, but rather a generically perfect candidate—one that companies don’t actually expect to find.

Comparisons of the educational levels of Americans with those of other industrialized nations rarely reassure those in the United States. And a new analysis released today by the Educational Testing Service is likely to be unsettling to many. The new study makes use of data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development through a project called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (or PIAAC). The data look at the capabilities of all adults (and of groups of adults) rather than comparing those at certain grade levels, as is the case with many international comparisons.

From Lincoln’s inclusive approach to human resource management to Washington’s lead-by-example strategy, we honor President’s Day by sharing leadership lessons from our nation’s leaders that all small businesses can learn from. Abraham Lincoln: Building a Winning Team A strong team is key to business success, but it takes more than a paintball tournament to foster a team-oriented environment — one in which your employees are loyal and as committed to the success of the business as you are (even during turbulent times.)

These world leaders had more contributions to our country than just foreign policy and a great head of hair.

Many things we still use today were invented or inspired by these presidents, including household staples like air conditioning and teddy bears. Others, like jazzed-up walking sticks and steamboat improvements, have sadly fallen out of favor.

An impressive video has emerged of what it is like to park your bicycle in Japan, proving once andfor all that the technologically-advanced country has thought of everything.

A man in the video posted to YouTube can be seen putting his bike into an elevator-like contraption, just before it is sucked into a metal shaft with rows and rows of bicycle holders. A metal arm places the bike in its position, until the owner comes for its retrieval.

Head-and-shoulders portraits of four individuals decorate the cover of The Innovators, Walter Isaacson’s new book on the men and women who set the digital age in motion. Even technology-averse browsers are likely to recognize two of them: Steve Jobs, wearing his trademark black turtleneck and messianic intensity, and Bill Gates, delivering a close-mouthed smile that makes him look simultaneously affable and awkward. 

Image: http://www.popmatters.com

The global elites who congregate each year in Davos, Switzerland, are hardly representative of humanity, but you can still learn a lot at the annual conclave about who’s up and who’s down in the world. One of the biggest take-aways of the 2015 meeting was this: America is back. The world’s movers, shakers, and opinion shapers have stopped resenting and ridiculing the U.S. for its leading role in the financial crisis of 2008-09. “When you look around the globe, it’s just very hard to find a lot of big, bright lights on the economic horizon” except for the “amazing” U.S., says Michael Sabia, chief executive officer of the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec. He’s recently put his $173 billion pension fund’s money where his mouth is, buying a Manhattan skyscraper and participating in the purchase of Phoenix-based PetSmart. The Chinese have changed their tune a bit, too. Instead of restating the desire for what Beijing’s leadership calls “a new type of great power relationship,” Premier Li Keqiang told an audience in Davos, “China has no intention to compete with other countries for supremacy.”

This month, America celebrates the birthday of one of the country’s earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.

During a time period of America’s existence as a British colony and then a young nation—when communication and transportation faced challenges, to put it mildly—this businessman built an enterprise with international reach. He opened a mill that ground 278,000 pounds of branded flour annually that was shipped throughout America and, unusual during colonial times, exported to Europe. And in the 1790s, late in his life, he built one of the new nation’s largest whiskey distilleries.

Image: Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 (Wikimedia Commons)

“Entrepreneurship is not for everybody,” says Ini Onuk, CEO and Lead Consultant at This- tlePraxis,” the technicalities of running a business is different from your talent and creativity,” she adds, citing an example that qualified medical doctors, do not necessarily possess the requisite skills to manage a hospital. Speaking on the Mara Mentor Talk Show,…

All entrepreneurs know the curse.

The agonizing frustration from never having enough spare time to enjoy life outside of your business and the frightening supposition that something is wrong with the business when you do.

My first endeavor into entrepreneurship taught me this painful lesson firsthand. I had just come from an international consulting position where I had learned to artfully augment my vacations by capitalizing on local holidays, layovers and a number of other strategies. More important, while I took my job very seriously, I was adept at turning off the job completely to fully enjoy my holiday.

Is there really a perfect time to take the plunge and become an entrepreneur? Sure, there are ideal circumstances -- like having endless amounts of startup capital and an all-star team already assembled, but those ideal conditions are few and far between. If you are waiting for the stars to align you are wasting valuable time. 

There is never a better time than right now to decide to become an entrepreneur. Seriously, what are you waiting for? Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Not for me, not for you -- not for anyone. Success isn’t going to fall in your lap and your dreams and aspirations aren’t going to magically come true without hard work.

I read a lot of articles about entrepreneurs, and sometimes I get a kick out of it. That’s because I am an entrepreneur, and it’s funny to figure out how I’m supposed to do things.

There are articles dealing with how entrepreneurs sleep, eat, read, live, love, party, work, and whatever else. There are entire books dealing with the entrepreneur’s leadership, work ethic, personality, and habits.

BHI to Provide Qualified EIRs to NHLBI and NINDS 

ROCKVILLE AND BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, February 18, 2015 – BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) announced today that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has signed an agreement to extend and expand its entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) program with BHI. Under the terms of the new agreement, BHI is providing the services of five EIRs to the NIH starting with two lead institutes: the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

“BHI is excited to extend its existing relationship with NIH. By adding new EIRs within multiple institutes, we expand our ability to both support breakthrough technologies and to help identify new commercial opportunities working with national scientific experts,” said Richard Bendis, BHI President & CEO. “These new breakthroughs can then turn into new health-related products, many of which will come from the cutting-edge startup companies fostered by BHI that are focused on further enhancing the future of healthcare for all.”

If you’re spending a lot of time sifting through resumes looking for the perfect candidate, you might be spinning your wheels.

Resumes provide hiring managers with two pieces of information—education and experience—but Tim Stevens, author of Fairness Is Overrated: And 51 Other Leadership Principles to Revolutionize Your Workplace, says those are two things a company should care about least.