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Through the “Accelerating Industry-Led Regional Partnerships for Talent Development” Federal Funding Opportunity (FFO) published today, the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) is now accepting proposals for a national partner to help develop and implement a new learning exchange program that will focus on building critical public-private partnerships to accelerate job skills development across America.

Are you too messy? Instead of a filing cabinet, do you have piles of folders bursting to the seams? Is your Rolodex covered with doodles, while your drawers are full of loose business cards? Do memos arrive at your desk only to be tossed in an overstuffed trash can or linger in eternity amid a heap of their forgotten brethren?

We're trained to think that messiness is evil and unproductive. But there might be a method to all that madness.

Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

They say the only constant in life is change, yet so many people struggle with it. Why is that? How do you respond to extreme change effectively? And how do you lead a team of employees through it?

These are some of the questions I have pondered recently since my own organization is about to join forces with another economic development organization in town. The move is an incredible step forward for both organizations, but also a dramatic change for all individuals involved.

Board seats are incredibly expensive real estate. Given that expense, do you have the right people in those seats? To drive the question to an even more fundamental level, are you framing the right challenges as you seek individuals to join your board of directors, so you do not base your board makeup on flawed assumptions?

I submit that the challenges facing boards today can only be met by directors who are “3D”—digitally savvy, well-versed in disruptive technology, and diverse in their mindset when it comes to stewardship.

Image: Free Digital Photos

These days, early stage investors — who are almost always angel investors and not venture capital funds — want more of their funding to go toward proving market feasibility and less to be spent on building risky prototypes.

These first investors are increasingly looking for deal flow with mitigated product development risk, especially in bioscience and advanced manufacturing startups where the product development time and costs to prove regulatory milestones or alpha and beta trials are significantly greater than in other industries.

In this difficult recovery, many of the strongest local economies have been those with a high share of educated people in their workforce, particularly areas where technology companies and other knowledge-based industries are growing most rapidly.

To determine the metro areas that are gaining brainpower in the 21stCentury, we scored the nation’s 380 metropolitan statistical areas based on three criteria. We started with the growth rate in the number of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree from 2000 through 2013 (25% weighting in final score).

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Today 500 Startups is announcing a $10 million fund built for mobile startups, seven years after Apple kicked off the mobile app revolution with the iPhone.

This fund — entitled “500 Mobile Collective” — isn’t the first of its kind. 500 Startups isn’t new to the mobile industry, nor has it only just realized the significance of smartphones. New 500 Startups investing partner Edith Yeung laughed off jokes about the staleness of “going mobile” in a call with VentureBeat last week.

What is Peter Thiel, the man who pays innovative college students to abandon their degrees and pursue their own ventures, doing speaking at Wharton? A lot of good, it turns out.

The author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, opened his recent speech at Penn by tackling the big question in his book title: How do we get “zero to one” moments? That is to say moments that lead us from an idea to a success.

Image: Photo credit: Wharton Leadership Program Flickr

The US healthcare industry is undergoing a major transformation as healthcare reform encourages consumers to play a far more active decision-making role. Yet despite this traditionally business-to-business industry moving quickly to a business-to-consumer model, companies have been slow to join the digital movement. Unlike successful B2C companies in other industries—which offer mobile solutions, provide personalized product recommendations, and empower customer-service agents with a 360-degree view of the customer—most healthcare providers and payors are lagging, as are pharmaceutical companies and medical-device manufacturers. That’s problematic when customers are increasingly expecting a better, more personalized experience from companies taking advantage of the host of digital tools and analytics at their disposal.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Reading the headlines, you might think that the most urgent question about national success in innovation and growth is whether the U.S. or China should get the gold medal. The truth is: Germany wins hands down.

Germany does a better job on innovation in areas as diverse as sustainable energy systems, molecular biotech, lasers, and experimental software engineering. Indeed, as part of an effort to learn from Germany about effective innovation, U.S. states have encouraged the Fraunhofer Society, a German applied-science think tank, to set up no fewer than seven institutes in America.

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Early-stage (Angel-Series A) financings reached their highest monthly total in two years at $1.25B. We looked at the trends and momentum of the companies involved.

The report below details early stage (angel – Series A) technology financings and some of the hottest early-stage companies that were funded in October 2014.

Image: https://www.cbinsights.com 

In the first half of this year, the level of venture-capital investment hit its highest quarterly mark since Q2 2001. Big M&A deals like WhatsApp, Oculus and Zillow have become prolific. And more and more companies are getting financing at eye-popping valuations.

For many startups, the hot venture-capital and exit markets mean an increase in deal leverage when negotiating with venture investors. (Editor’s note: Venture capitalists have noticed, and are trying to differentiate themselves.) As a result, founder-favorable terms are increasingly a part of formation and financing documents where they wouldn’t have been just a year or two ago.

 

More than 1.5 billion people around the world suffer from chronic aches and pains. Often these discomforts are felt daily, and their effects can be debilitating.

Unlike the agony associated with a specific injury or illness, chronic pain often persists regardless of any evident damage to the body. The underlying cause can be mysterious—and treatment is therefore challenging. Fortunately several approaches to chronic pain management may bring some relief.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Each generation thinks the next one is more self-centered. A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences supports this perception: American society has steadily become more egocentric since the nation's beginnings. An overall rise in economic prosperity may play a role in this egotism, according to a different study: people who were young adults during hard times are less narcissistic than those who came of age during economic booms.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Doctors tell us that the frenzied pace of the modern 24-hour lifestyle — in which we struggle to juggle work commitments with the demands of family and daily life — is damaging to our health. But while life in the slow lane may be better, will it be any longer? It will if you’re a reptile.

A new study by Tel Aviv University researchers finds that reduced reproductive rates and a plant-rich diet increases the lifespan of reptiles. The research, published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, was led by Prof. Shai Meiri, Dr. Inon Scharf, and doctoral student Anat Feldman of the Department of Zoology at TAU’s Faculty of Life Sciences, in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Pincheira-Donoso of the University of Lincoln, UK, and other scientists from the US, the UK, Ecuador, and Malaysia.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Most businesses are in need of finding new ways to grow. It might be a matter of finding new markets, even creating new markets, or just finding new space in your current markets through new technology and products. It doesn’t matter which of these it is, the pressure is always the same. And it’s unrelenting.

Given a business environment characterized by rapid change and global economies, the best ways to find growth at a scale that has strategic significance is through innovation.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

One of the vivid memories I have from being a startup CEO is the feeling that most people in your company have a look in their eyes that like they can do your job as well as you. How hard could it be? You just assign out tasks to all of us.

In the early days the CEO is the jack-of-all-trades, doer-of-all, famously the “chief janitor” or coffee maker. But if you level up, raise capital and grow customers, revenue and staff – life changes. Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. Most companies that are scaling have CFOs, heads of HR or talent. The “span of control” for a growing tech startup is probably 6-9 people. The “doers” in your organization.

I’ve held the title of entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at four different organizations, so I get asked this question frequently. There’s no unambiguous answer because the job has to fit the priorities of the institution. Still, I can shed some light.

Each time I’ve been EIR, it’s been a newly created position. I’ve never had a predecessor, and in each instance I wrote my own job description. Despite the name of the position being the same, the duties, responsibilities and compensation were different.

Sleeplessness, obsession, scanning your surroundings for opportunity or danger; moments of exultant triumph and euphoria; ditches of disappointment and anxiety—the life of a committed entrepreneur can sometimes seem like that of a junky. To some , the peaks and valleys of the life can come to feel like home—and sometimes even develop into something akin to behavioral addiction.

Image: Habitual entrepreneurs can exhibit the behavior of an addict, says a new report. (image credit: Herval on Flickr)