A new venture capital fund has been established for Kentucky companies. The program, VenCap Kentucky, will provide up to $500,000 in matching funds to companies that already have a lead investor but need additional funds, according to a news release from Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear. The program will use funds from the U.S. Treasury to match private investments.

In the first part of the series on corporate venture capital I explored how the disruption of institutional VCs (IVCs) and the imperative for corporations to innovate provide an opportunity to corporate VCs (CVCs) to make their mark in the startup ecosystem and be viewed as viable and valuable financing sources to private companies. In the second part I provided more context on CVCs by presenting a brief history of corporate venture capital, and detailing the characteristics of CVCs during the dot-com period and today. In this blog I discuss when corporations should be establishing venture funds, I introduce a framework for creating venture funds and discuss two of the dimensions in this framework.

The University of Washington, its medical complex and branch campuses generate $12.5 billion in jobs, sales of goods and services, and other economic impacts for the state, according to a new study of the university’s economic contribution to the local economy.

In fact, the UW’s state economic impact is larger than that of any of the other 200-plus colleges and universities that the consulting firm Tripp Umbach has ever studied, said Paul Umbach, founder and president of the Pittsburgh-based company.

Harvard University has long played an outsized role in spurring the growth of the Boston area’s life sciences industry, but the school’s contributions have largely unfolded behind the scenes.

Unlike the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge’s Kendall Square — the beating heart of biotech — Harvard has been known less for spinning off startups than for licensing cutting-edge research and grooming the industry’s business leaders.

Image: DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFF -   A Harvard School of Public Health facility in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. The university plans a campus in Allston that could house biomedical companies.

I’ve been employee #4, #5 (twice) and employee #6 at startups. I’ve also hired people for these early roles twice as a founder. While the focus is often on startup founders, the first few hires are often make or break in a startup’s success.

That’s why I’ve always been amazed at the lack of attention and care that founders place on how to treat early stage employees. Rather than focusing on bad behavior, I thought I’d focus on how the optimal way for founders to treat early employees who sign up for their vision.

We see a lot of cap tables at eShares. For every new company we onboard we clean up the table and verify it against the legal documentation. These days we onboard about 100 cap tables each month. I want to share the four things we learned in the last year that surprised us most. They are:

Image: https://medium.com

Hundreds of research papers are published every day worldwide. But which articles are most discussed and in which circles? To find out, Altmetric in London traced how often papers were noted in 14 digital channels, ranging from the serious (5,000 research blogs and Mendeley, an academic citation network) to the trendy (Twitter, Facebook) and everything in between (including 1,000 news outlets). Altmetric poured data for 2014 into an algorithm that created scores; the top 200 articles are mapped here. The results reveal a divide: the papers discussed most in serious channels (bluish circles, which trend to the left of the page) are different from those discussed most on social networks (red, orange and yellow, which trend to the right). (Scientific American is part of Macmillan, which is an investor in Altmetric.)

Ten core tenets for a successful global strategy in the coming year.

The changing global brandscape is indeed a double-edged sword. It confers unheard of opportunities on companies while at the same time bringing in hitherto unheard of challenges. Top executives and CEOs should actively manage such a volatile environment by following some fundamental features of any corporate strategy.

There are ten crucial aspects that CEOs should focus on in 2015 in order to create winning strategies and global brands.

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A year ago, pundits were declaring the personal computer dead. Smartphones and tablets were cannibalizing sales, and the once-revolutionary PC seemed unnecessary — and boring.

Sure, a smartphone is great for checking emails, snapping photos and playing games. Tablets are perfect for watching videos and shopping online. But don’t count the PC out just yet. Manufacturers are crafting high-resolution, curved screens for desktops and other new features you can’t get in a hand-held device, while trying new laptop designs that mimic the tablet’s appeal.

Image: The ATIV One 7 Curved computer is on display at the Samsung booth during the International CES, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2015, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

For a few, delegating comes easily, maybe too easy. For others who are perfectionists, letting go of even the most trivial task is almost impossible. If you are in this second category, you probably don’t like the references behind your back that you are a “control freak” or a “micro-manager.”

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW BRINGS TENS OF THOUSANDS OF NEW PRODUCTS TO OUR SHELVES. HERE ARE THE NINE YOU ACTUALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT.

You won’t find a journalist alive who covers the annual Consumer Electronics Show and doesn’t find it a miserable experience. You’re basically trapped in the bowels of Las Vegas casinos, staring at 200 identical TVs and trying to distinguish the difference.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain’s Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade’s worth of research into the ways children play. The group, which is called the Future Lab, is the Danish toy giant’s secretive and highly ambitious R&D team, charged with inventing entirely new, technologically enhanced "play experiences" for kids all over the world. Or, as Lego Group CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp puts it, "It’s about discovering what’s obviously Lego, but has never been seen before."

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

A new $75 million investment fund has been created by Connecticut-based HealthInvest Equity Partners, according to a filing with the SEC.

The investment firm, formed in 2013, focuses on a wide range of areas within healthcare, from woman’s health companies to urgent care providers to medical imaging.

Selling cars is big business. And video advertisements have a major role to play, from exposing consumers to new products to generally just increasing awareness around the brand.

Think back a few years and you’ll no doubt be able to vividly remember a commercial that likely still serves to define – in some manner, at least – that automaker for you. In South Africa, that may well be Volkswagen’s iconic “Memories” advert or indeed Toyota’s original RAV4 spot.

Image: http://motorburn.com

Right now, there are more than two-billion smartphone subscribers in the world, making up an increasingly large chunk of its near 5-billion mobile subscribers. And in the past 20 years we’ve gone from brick phones barely capable of sending and receiving text messages to carrying around what effectively amount to pocket computers so essential to our daily lives that we treat them more like prosthetic limbs than gadgets.

Image: http://memeburn.com

All the memorable and newsworthy moments are what make a year. As we begin 2015, many of us are still finding it worthwhile to look back at what events made 2014 what it was. Filmmaker Jean-Louis Nguyen created a touching compilation video to help all of us reflect on the past year and what made it special.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

The SEC has recently intensified its enforcement efforts against crowdfunding portals. The SEC's main focus is on these two legal issues: whether the crowdfunding portals offer and sell securities in unregistered transactions to US persons in violation of the Securities Act, and whether the crowdfunding portals act as unregistered broker-dealers to US persons. A recent example of an enforcement action against Eureeca Capital SPC is a good illustration.

A plastic storage crate filled with backyard dirt might have yielded the most powerful antibiotic discovered in decades.

Employing a novel microfluidic device to grow soil bacteria, researchers in Boston and Bonn, Germany, say they have identified a new type of antibiotic that kills the bacteria that cause pneumonia, staph, and blood infections.

The antibiotic, named teixobactin, has yet to be tested in people. But it cured mice of these infections, and it is so different from current antibiotics that the scientists, who reported their findings today in the journal Nature, said they hoped germs might never become resistant to it.

Image: Hard-to-grow bacteria flourish inside this microfluidic device incubated in a pool of dirt. - http://www.technologyreview.com

Lynda Rae Harris was in her 20s and the owner of a Los Angeles–based ad agency when she met her second husband, Stewart Resnick. He was an entrepreneur who had built a successful janitorial business from scratch after his father won an industrial floor scrubber in a contest. Together, the couple made their first joint acquisition—of the floral wire service company Teleflora—in 1979. They followed it with acquisitions of agricultural land in California, and of the Franklin Mint, all chosen because of Stewart’s penchant for service businesses with repeat customers.

Image: Illustration by Andrew Bannecker

It took Kickstarter nearly five years to top $1 billion in total pledges. Last year alone, it did more than half that amount.

Kickstarter announced Monday that 3.3 million backers pledged more than $500 million (about $529 million, according to a rep) to projects on the site throughout 2014. All in all, 22,252 projects were funded successfully on the crowdfunding platform.