Just before Christmas this past year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a recommendation for Natalya Brikner, one of its aerospace engineers and doctoral students: If she wanted to get her ambitious start-up company off the ground, using the university's own patents, it was time to drop out.

Image: M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle - Louis Perna and Natalya Brikner are Ph.D. candidates at MIT working on a propulsion system to maneuver very small satellites in space. They formed a company to commercialize their project, but the work has robbed time from their graduate studies.

RALEIGH, N.C. — A new corporate accelerator and incubator program emerged from stealth mode in Raleigh on Wednesday with a new venture already launching.

Sageworks, a provider of financial, risk analysis and business valuation tools, disclosed the launch of an internal accelerator and incubator program called the Sageworks Innovation Lab.

Called I-Lab for short, it is based in Raleigh and New York., a spokesperson explains.

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Cristian Rennella is really good at email. He responds to my messages within minutes, an especially quick turnaround for a CEO. (Rennella co-founded the South American travel comparison site, El Mejor Trato.)

His secret: He banned email at his company. Without clutter and requests from colleagues, he gets less than five emails per day. With so little to do in there, it doesn't take him long to get to my communiques.

In this episode of Brand Evolution, we look at the evolution of one of America’s cornerstone brands, Coca-Cola. From its origins in an Atlanta pharmacy through the creation of the iconic bottle and the development of its classic advertising, we look at the pivotal moments in the history of one of the world’s most instantly recognizable, and valuable, brands.

The ever expanding market for mobile apps presents technology transfer offices with a tremendous opportunity for new revenues as well as new relationships with students and faculty creating apps on campus. But how do you capitalize most effectively and create an ongoing, meaningful revenue stream – as well as a great way to build good PR and new relationships – without overloading your already stretched TTO staff?    

Though it seems like everyone you meet has an app idea, most don’t know the first thing about how to actually get their idea into the fast-changing and unique mobile apps marketplace.

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“If people aren’t calling you crazy, you aren’t thinking big enough,” says Linda Rottenberg, cofounder and CEO of Endeavor, a nonprofit organization supporting high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets. She defines high-impact entrepreneurs as people with “the biggest ideas, the likeliest potential to build businesses that matter, and the greatest ability to inspire others.”

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Six months into founding my dream toy company, Build & Imagine, I landed a meeting with the Venture Capital firm I had most admired.

These weren’t the biggest players in Silicon Valley, but they had a fresh entrepreneur-friendly approach and had invested in early stage companies in my product category. I like them so much I had even applied to intern with them a few years back when I was wrapping up my MBA at Berkeley. So, I was prepared to give the pitch of my life to get the funding my startup desperately needed, right?! Wrong. I was there just for advice.

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You can check out the ranking of the top 25 graduate programs for entrepreneurs in the US released by Princeton Review in collaboration with Entrepreneur magazine.

The first place takes Harvard Business School. HBS offers 33 entrepreneurship-related courses. Moreover, since 2009, HBS graduates have started 182 companies and have raised $1.2 billion in funding.

The geography of innovation is changing in the United States. For decades, the innovation economy was dominated by places like Silicon Valley—suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation. Recently, though, cutting-edge companies, research laboratories and universities have begun to cluster in urban areas alongside start-ups, business incubators, and accelerators. These areas, called “innovation districts,” are often transit accessible and compact, and support mixed-use housing, offices and retail. Such districts facilitate and intensify the knowledge-exchange and dialogue of innovation.

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Three years after its artificial-intelligence engine Watson made its high-profile win on Jeopardy!, IBM is adapting the technology as it seeks practical commercial uses, an IBM executive explained yesterday at EmTech, a conference organized by MIT Technology Review.

The original version of Watson was built around a question-and-answer format optimized for the game show, but that turned out to be “just the first building block” in an emerging artificial-intelligence system, said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group.

Image: Michael Rhodin speaks with MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief Jason Pontin yesterday at EmTech. - http://www.technologyreview.com

OTTAWA — There are plenty of signs suggesting that John S. Chen, chief executive of BlackBerry, should sprint as fast as possible away from making phones.

Handsets drove the company’s initial success, but they then brought it to the edge of financial ruin, an also-ran behind Apple and Samsung. Even Mr. Chen, who was brought in last November to salvage BlackBerry, has made it clear that the company’s future lies mainly in selling mobile data management security and services to governments and corporations.

Image: John Chen, chief executive of BlackBerry since November, introducing the Passport phone in Toronto on Wednesday. Credit Mark Blinch/Reuters

Stanford Graduate School of Business returns to Bangalore with Stanford Ignite, the 11-week certificate program for innovators and entrepreneurial thinkers. Prospective applicants for the 6 March –24 May 2015 program may apply online by 7 October 2014. Designed to deliver the same highly personal and immersive instruction that executives and students at Stanford experience, the Stanford Ignite-Bangalore program is aimed at technical professionals, innovators, and entrepreneurs with no previous graduate management education; it is also appropriate for non-business graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, engineers, and scientists.

When it comes to maintaining your business, negotiations play a key role in growing and pleasing your audience. Whether it be haggling over the price of a car or changing your brand name to better suit your niche, everything is a negotiation in business.

In a recent podcast by Grit, host by Dan Benjamin says:

“Any kind of agreement that you ever make with anybody is a negotiation of one kind or another. Whether it’s how much you’re willing to pay with a car, how much you’re gonna be making at your job, how much your raise is going to be for…The biggest mistake you can make in any negotiation, ever, is to stand up and walk away.”

 

Many new entrepreneurs are so excited by their latest idea that they can’t resist contacting every investor they know, assuming the investor will be equally excited and want to contribute immediately. Others will work hard on a business plan, and then mail it indiscriminately to every potential investor they can find on the Internet. Both of these approaches are a waste of your time and theirs.

This post is sponsored by Life Sciences Trainers & Educators Network (LTEN).

Nearly a hundred training leaders from across the country, including Siemens, B. Braun, Medtronic, Orthofix, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, ResMed, Zimmer and St. Jude Medical will convene at the LTEN 3rd Annual Medical Device & Diagnostic (MD&D) Trainers Summit to address the future of medical device and diagnostic training. The executive forum will be held November 4-5, 2014 at the Hilton San Diego in San Diego, CA.

Most employers think they follow laws to a tee. However, many business owners and their employees are unknowingly breaking federal employment laws, which can lead to time-consuming and costly legal lawsuits. Below, we address the most common forms of employee lawsuits and spell out tips to help you maintain a safe working environment and avoid becoming embroiled in the court system.

Oklahoma City has been selected to host the 2015 State Science & Technology Institute (SSTI) Conference. The event will be held October 26-28 at the Cox Convention Center. More than 250 individuals from 40 states attend the annual conference, which offers an opportunity for tech-based economic development practitioners to discover successful approaches to building tech-based economies, gain information about new and existing federal programs and reach a better understanding of trends in tech-based economic development.

As machine learning advances at exponential rates, many highly skilled jobs once considered the exclusive domain of humans are increasingly being carried out by computers. Whether that’s good or bad depends on whom you talk to. Technologists and economists tend to split into two camps, the technologists believing that innovation will cure all ills, the economists fretting that productivity gains will further divide the haves from the have-nots.

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NEW YORK — What do the light bulb, the polio vaccine and the Internet have in common? They were all considered failures at first, but later became extremely successful.

The fear of failure tends to make people risk averse, but sometimes it's important to fail and learn from those mistakes, experts say.

During the past 25 years, I've asked more than 10,000 people where and when they get their best ideas. I get all kinds of answers, but the one that has always fascinated me is "the shower" -- maybe because I also get so many of my good ideas there. And so, at the risk of overstating my case, I hereby offer you 20 reasons WHY the shower is so conducive to idea generation.

1. Showering signals "a new day" or "new beginning."