The California HealthCare Foundation’s state of the union for health accelerators is filled with interesting insights about the strengths and weaknesses of these organizations from the perspective of entrepreneurs that participate in them. New York Digital Health Accelerator, StartUp Health and Rock Health have each had acquisitions among their accelerator companies. Many other portfolio companies have raised funds and created jobs. But two years after its initial report on seeding startups, called the Greenhouse Effect, the “Survival of the Fittest” report raises some critical questions for accelerators from measuring their success to how sustainable the approaches to the accelerator model are going forward. Here are some of the most interesting insights from the report to chew on.

Venture capital activity descended from the stratosphere during the third quarter, but it was still flying high, as venture firms invested nearly $9.8 billion in 879 deals across the United States, according to a report released today by the financial data firm CB Insights.

The amount invested during the quarter was down 30 percent from the $13.9 billion that VCs deployed in the previous quarter, and the deal count was down by 10 percent from the 974 deals that CB Insights counted in the second quarter. But it still marked the third consecutive quarter when VC funding exceeded $9 billion, according to the report.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com

As yet another barrage of data leakages makes news headlines – most recently publicly exposing FNB and Gautrain customers’ personal details – businesses need to consider whether these security incidents are as a result of data hoarding issues or due to operational oversight, especially as the new POPI legislation and its strict guidelines loom.

You have a brand new idea for a small business and the funds to start it off right. Good for you! The next step is to cultivate your brand from which all other decisions will flow. Brand consistency, brand identity, and brand persona or personality are all terms we hear being thrown around, but what does all of it really mean?

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

David Leppan is the co-founder of Wealth-X, a provider of information on ultrahigh-net-worth individuals. He has founded four other businesses, including World-Check, a database of individuals and companies known to represent a money laundering, fraud or compliance risk.

Q. Do you remember the first time you became a manager?

A. When I created World-Check with my ex-wife in 2000. I was 24, working for Thomson Financial, and I was responsible for their sales in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Austria. At the time there was a Swiss bank scandal over money transfers from the Nigerian general Sani Abacha;

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Risk-taking is almost synonymous with entrepreneurship. To start and support your own business, you’ll have to put your career, personal finances and even your mental health at stake. 

For most, the prospect of making your own decisions and being in charge of your own destiny is worth it. But if you’re going to be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to be prepared for the risks and challenges that come with it.

To the untrained eye, an entrepreneur may appear to be a person who has started his or her own business. While this is technically true, there's so much more to the journey of entrepreneurship than just bringing a business idea to fruition. It takes unwavering passion, dedication and innovation, and it's certainly not the right path for everyone. Business News Daily spoke with 14 company founders and business leaders to find out what they believe entrepreneurship is and, perhaps just as important, what it's not.

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When it comes to jobs in the Impact Economy, much of our attention is in the wrong place. With burgeoning interest in impact jobs, and a scarcity of impact job listings, we like to push people toward social entrepreneurship; the launch of new and socially-minded ventures. But there are already 4.8 million job openings in the American labor market, and we know that entrepreneurship isn't the answer for everyone. To meet this growing demand for impact jobs while helping build the next generation of impact leaders, we'll need to focus on intrapreneurship. Teach those impact-seeking young professionals the skills to shape something new, inside of existing organizations, and create a playbook for how to teach it. There are two reasons I've started thinking about this:

On a massive bus in the heart of America, a group of tech entrepreneurs and investors are spreading glad tidings about entrepreneurship and startups in cities that don't exactly scream innovation. Many people have tried to jumpstart the innovation engine across the country, but few have as much experience and clout to pull it off as Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, and chairman of DC-based investment firm Revolution.

Image: credit: Andy Stoll

Since the mid-1990s, the source of competitive advantage has been shifting. Leading companies used to be diverse conglomerates that based their competitive strategy on assets, positions, and economies of scale. Today’s market leaders, by contrast, are more focused enterprises. They do not follow the traditional portfolio strategies of seeking short-term profitability or growth wherever they can find it. Rather, they recognize that value is created by their distinctive capabilities: what they can do consistently well. Their strategic approach, which is based on a single powerful value proposition backed up by a few mutually reinforcing capabilities, gives them a continuing advantage over their rivals. As they consolidate their efforts around this approach, they fundamentally reshape their industries.

Image: Illustration by Javier Jaen

Campuses’ career counselors have been seeing encouraging signs, and now a major survey of employers backs them up: The coming year looks to be a much better one for new college graduates seeking jobs.

Job openings for those graduates are projected to grow by double digits in 2014-15, following several years of smaller increases, according to key findings from the survey, which was released on Tuesday. Hiring of new bachelor’s-degree recipients will increase by 16 percent, the survey projects; hiring among all degree levels will grow at the same rate.

Mentoring is one of those things, like exercise and reading, that people say they’d love to do if only they had more time.

Most people, once they reach a certain level of success start fielding regular requests for help and informational interviews. But the good news is that, with these smart tweaks, mentoring can fit in anyone’s schedule.

If there’s one story that’s been beaten to death by the media in search of feel-good news from what’s been a pretty tepid economic recovery, it’s that of the supposed manufacturing renaissance in the U.S. Both Time and the Atlantic have promoted its success with recent cover stories. I’m guilty, too.

Image: http://www.businessweek.com

Standing on a glacier in Iceland, I really didn't want to go back to my cramped New York City apartment. But that's where I was running my startup, and what was waiting for me. How did life after college only exist on a 13-inch screen that sits within arm's reach, 12 to 14 hours a day?

Here I was in Iceland looking out at the Eyjafjallajkull volcano (the one that famously stopped all air traffic between North America and Europe), watching the sun set at midnight, wondering how I became so out of touch with the world around me.

Image: http://www.inc.com

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA -- Innovation is the lifeblood of any great university. But transforming the results of basic research into a commercial product that can benefit society is a path strewn with many obstacles. The new Fund for Innovation is intended to make that road smoother for Penn State faculty and student entrepreneurs to travel.

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Megan Zengerle had a problem. For months, her company had been courting a hire from Brazil. They loved him. He loved them. Her team had filled out all of the paperwork and submitted them to the H-1B pool as planned, but they missed the April cutoff by a number of hours. If they still wanted the hire, they’d have to wait an entire year to apply again — meaning he wouldn’t actually start until the following October.

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Wearable tech, from Google Glass to PUSH, has garnered plenty of attention in the tech industry. It’s clear that what makes wearables so fascinating is their potential to disrupt how we live our everyday lives.

With the entrance of the much-anticipated Apple Watch into the market, the wearables industry is expected to grow even more in the consumer market. In many ways, the industry is at a precipice. It’s beyond its days as the ‘hot new thing’ but still new enough that wearables have not yet been adopted on a mass scale.

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Chairs: we sit in them, work in them, shop in them, eat in them and date in them. Americans sit for most of their waking hours, 13 hours every day on average. Yet chairs are lethal.

This grim conclusion may surprise you, but 18 studies reported during the past 16 years, covering 800,000 people overall, back it up. In 2010, for example, the journal Circulation published an investigation following 8,800 adults for seven years. Those who sat for more than four hours a day while watching television had a 46 percent increase in deaths from any cause when compared with people who sat in front of the tube for less than two hours. Other researchers have found that sitting for more than half the day, approximately, doubles the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular problems. Overall, when you combine all causes of death and compare any group of sitters with those who are more active, sitters have a 50 percent greater likelihood of dying.

Image: Scott Brundage

This week, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter) opened the application process for its University Innovation Fellows program for U.S. college and university students. The application deadline is October 31, 2014.   The University Innovation Fellows program empowers students to become agents of change at their schools. The Fellows are a national community of students in engineering and related fields who work to ensure that all students gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to compete in the economy of the future. To accomplish this, the Fellows advocate for lasting institutional change and create opportunities for students to engage with entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, design thinking and venture creation at their schools.  

Image: The University Innovation Fellows at their annual meeting in Silicon Valley in March 2014. - http://epicenter.stanford.edu

Q&A | Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove & Kent Lineback Aha moments are overhyped—innovation is often a messy process of articulating, rejecting, marrying and testing multiple ideas with contributions from many people. In Collective Genius: The Art And Practice Of Leading Innovation, authors Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback give examples from companies like Pixar Animation Studios, HCL Technologies and Volkswagen to show how several smart people and genius ideas come together for creative problem-solving and innovation within the organization.

Image: Ideas pool: (from left) Authors Emily Truelove, Kent Lineback, Linda A. Hill and Greg Brandeau. Read more at: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/ZRTiiQKoPh9w19hSMdfpWN/Innovation-is-a-collaborative-effort.html?utm_source=copy - http://www.livemint.com