Only 5.8% of the student population is enrolled in the Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Sciences programs at Purdue University, but healthcare startups make up half of the university’s new Startup Class of 2014. Twelve of this year’s 24 class members are working on healthcare challenges. Doctoral students, professors, and engineers are using technology licensed from the university to bring personalized medicine closer to reality, help people with autism and Parkinson’s communicate more easily, and create 3D maps of arteries.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Business owners are a unique breed -- and they have to be. If entrepreneurs don’t keep their foot on the accelerator, they or anyone who works for them will not be going anywhere.

The traits required for being a successful entrepreneur all boil down to basically always knowing that he (or she) knows best in all circumstances. This works great in business, but entrepreneurs can’t let it take over their outside life or push away potential partners and suppliers.

After profiling visionary individuals like Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson has turned his attention to a whole group of creative minds, weaving the tale of the many inventive thinkers who launched the digital revolution. Judy Woodruff sits down with Isaacson to discuss his latest book, “The Innovators,” and what set these people apart.

TEL AVIV– Israel-based Vintage Investment Partners has closed Vintage Investments VII, its latest fund of funds, with $144 million of commitments. Having operated mainly in Israel in previous funds, Vintage now plans to invest in funds that focus on Series A investments in the U.S., Europe and Israel. Vintage previously invested in Wilocity Inc., a developer of a chipset that enables gigabit wireless connectivity, acquired in July by Qualcomm Inc.QCOM -0.92% Other investments include international online payments company Borderfree Inc.BRDR -2.11% which went public on the Nasdaq NDAQ +0.05% in March, content recommendation platform Outbrain Inc., and TabTale Ltd..a developer of apps for children.

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2015 FLC Awards. Since its inception in 1984 the FLC Awards have become one of the most coveted honors in the technology transfer field, with over 200 Federal laboratories honored for their work in projects that advance the mission of technology transfer. To reflect the diversity in scope and number of technology transfer efforts undertaken by federal laboratories and their partners, seven categories of awards will be presented...

As Aristotle stated, ‘A great city should not be confounded with a populous one’. No other places in the world are so great by reason of their beauty as the many small- and medium-sized towns and the thousand and more villages of Italy. Travelling between one such place and another it is easy to behold in wonder so much beauty. ‘Beautification’ is the name of the current of beauty that throws light on the aesthetic values of those towns and villages, enhancing their knowledge. ‘Knowledgefication’ is the name we shall give to the current of knowledge that arouses love for beauty. The two currents together promote a harmonious social and aesthetical order that enhances the quality of living. Policy makers and civil society have a responsibility to keep intact the beauty of the Italian cultural heritage and its landscapes, relentlessly pursuing the objective of providing power to these two currents.

Wonderful places to visit certainly attract tourists, but what matters most is the attraction of the right kind of citizens and the best talents from all over the world. Traditional and digital tourism on the one hand and, on the other, brain circulation (mobility in a physical sense that stimulates face-to-face communication) and brain waves (mobility in a virtual sense that takes advantage of new, open-space technologies) are reflective destinations capable of arousing emotion in a game of crossed eyes. It would be a manifest error of appreciation to consider digital tourism and brain waves as an alternative to the decay of beauty caused by feeble-mindedness, indecisiveness and wrong and inefficient decisions. 

Entrepreneurship is not easy. According to the April 2014 Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 0.28 percent of adults per month started a new business in 2013.

Out of those new businesses, the majority will not survive. So what sets the successful businesses apart from the failed ones? And what tools does a budding entrepreneur need to succeed?

As graduating students begin to enter a post-recession job market, many still struggle to find employment in their desired field. However, there is one group of graduates that has a higher success rate than most.

Students pursuing degrees in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are entering a job market in which the demand for educated workers far outpaces the supply. STEM occupations are projected to grow faster than all other fields, and the average starting salary for STEM graduates is more than 30 percent higher than for those earning other degrees.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

President of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County since 1992, Freeman A. Hrabowski III thinks he knows what students need: lots of support. Morally, colleges owe it to students to do everything possible to help them succeed, he said in a recent visit to The Chronicle, and a higher retention rate means more tuition dollars, too.

Through good times and bad, the churning of businesses and jobs is a hallmark of any dynamic capitalist economy. This “creative destruction,” where some firms enter the market or expand while others contract or close, is the cause of much debate among policymakers and anxiety throughout the workforce.  Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Business Employment Dynamics (BDM) data series to determine the 10-year survival rates of establishments born in 2003, this article assesses the states in which these new businesses were most likely to survive. Overall, California had by far the highest survival rate between 2003 and 2013 while Northern Plains states such as the Dakotas also fared quite well. Establishments born in 2003 in the Southeastern U.S. and in smaller New England states comparatively struggled to survive this 10-year period. 

Image: http://ssti.org/ 

Over the next three years, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) plans to hold open competitions for MEP center cooperative agreements in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. The process will begin with a demonstration program this summer, in which competitions will be held in six to 10 states in each of MEP’s six regions. MEP notes that the recompetition is being undertaken to comply with guidelines calling for new competitions at least every 10 years, and will allow MEP to reduce the variation in funding levels across the country.

Today, at the Super Bowl for Google news, Google I/O, the company rolled out the latest version of its mobile OS, Android L, which is almost entirely predicated around the final step in its amazing design evolution: a formalized, unified design language across all their products, platforms, and devices called “Material Design.”

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com/ 

Breaking away from its image of being just pro-farmer and for the AHINDA (minorities, backward classes and dalits), the state government has begun to speak the language of IT and technology. Targeting at least 10,000 start-ups by 2020, the government has come forward to set up four 'warehouses' in various parts of the city to help techies 'plug and play' their ideas.

Microsoft announced a new accelerator this week, in partnership with medical technology company Becton Dickinson (BD), that will be focused entirely on health startups. Microsoft expects this to be a one-off, health-focused class of startups and it doesn’t plan to host another health-focused accelerator program again.

Image: http://mobihealthnews.com/ 

SAN DIEGO, Jun 25, 2014 (Canada NewsWire via COMTEX) -- BIO International Conference - BDC Venture Capital and the Accel-Rx Health Sciences Accelerator (Accel-Rx) announced today a collaboration to provide critical seed funding to new and emerging Canadian health sciences companies. Together, Accel-Rx, BDC Venture Capital, and CDRD Ventures Inc. (CVI), which will provide the initial management to launch Accel-Rx operations, will focus on maximizing new health sciences company creation, and ensuring start-ups have the resources they need to grow and become a new generation of strong health sciences companies.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Industry after industry is being transformed by IT-enabled disruptive innovation. These include not only information-based industries, such as banking, media, real estate, and education, but also "atom-based" industries like transportation, agriculture, and health care.  

BEIJING, July 21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Microsoft Ventures Accelerator (MVA) Fourth Class Demo Day took place in Beijing, with 10 startups in the accelerator class demonstrating their achievements in the past six months to venture capital firms, industry experts, partners and media. Microsoft Venture Accelerator also announced the names of the 19 startups selected for its fifth class as it marked the second anniversary of MVA in China. In addition to continuing its commitment to providing free support for the class members, Microsoft Ventures Accelerator reiterated its commitment to providing comprehensive resources and support to Chinese startups and a growing number of partners in order to build a global startup support ecosystem to help Chinese startups to grow and expand worldwide.

The old ditty ‘when Mother Nature gives you lemons you make lemonade’ tells us a lot about about being creative, particularly when innovation is critical to your corporate strategy — and survival. In the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, the lemons in questions are the hundreds of rockets being fired into Israel on a daily basis. Israel’s ‘lemonade’ was the development of the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which has quickly become one of the most impressive weapon-defence systems of the past 20 years. What lessons can businesses glean from the development of this world-class technology?

Image: Israeli soldiers lie on the ground as an Iron Dome missile is launched near the city of Ashdod, Israel, Monday Nov 19. 2012. - AP Photo/Moti Milrod