Colleen Worthington has been working at this university for more than 24 years. It wasn’t until this year, however, that she received her first promotion.

“No matter how much better I got or more I contributed, it was the same title from 1990 until last (semester),”

Worthington said. Worthington’s problem represents a gap in University System of Maryland policy tht made it difficult for faculty off the tenure track to move up the promotional ladder — policy that is now being scrutinized. On Oct. 7, system Chancellor Brit Kirwan approved the non-tenure-track faculty framework that will reorganize and create promotional titles for these employees.

 

More than two years ago, President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law. Among its provisions were several significant changes to the way small private companies could find potential shareholders. 

In a nutshell, the act did two major things. First, it allowed private companies to openly solicit investors, on the Web and elsewhere. Secondly, the act paved the way for unaccredited investors (basically, people who aren't professional investors, don't have more than $1 million in assets, and don't make more than $200,000 a year), to take part in these private placements. 

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth (know as the Peter Principle). Much less has been said about when the technical CEO is the best person to run the company.

It’s already happening: Machines, spurred by massive gains in processing power and versatility, are poised to change life as we know it. Thanks to ever-improving algorithms and the ability to make a multitude of calculations per second, these machines can operate autonomously and with precision and speed. More importantly, they can learn, and perfect in a few hours what a human being would need years to accomplish.

We’re all too busy, spending our days in back-to-back meetings and our nights feverishly responding to emails. (Adam Grant, a famously responsive Wharton professor, told me that on an “average day” he’ll spend 3-4 hours answering messages.) That’s why people who waste our time have become the scourge of modern business life, hampering our productivity and annoying us in the process.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Board meetings can be incredibly stressful, but you can alleviate some of that stress by preparing ahead, familiarizing yourself with key talking points and of course, anticipating important questions about your company's progress.

Since it's an activity we all have to face at some point, I asked 8 founders from YEC about the most important thing they do to prepare for upcoming board meetings:

Image: Free Digital Photos

The process of bringing skilled immigrants to the U.S. via H-1B visas and putting them on the path to eventual citizenship has been a political football for at least a decade. It has long been bad news for those immigrants trapped in this callous process. Now the U.S. economy is beginning to suffer, too.

It’s been two years in the making, but a digital portal now connects 10 Kansas City-area research organizations with one another and with the outside world. It’s a novel concept designed to allow the organizations to more easily share and seek out scientific resources.

Image: Wayne Carter, CEO of Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute Inc.

In their outstanding book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema argue the only way to achieve market leadership is through a singular focus on one of three strategies: Product leadership, cost leadership or customer intimacy leadership. The most common of the three strategies pursued by technology companies is product leadership. Here's how you can achieve it, and why you need it to win big.

I think it’s a GREAT time. In fact, in some ways, it’s the best time. Here’s why:

 1. You’re already poor, so adopting the entrepreneurship lifestyle of eating ramen for all meals is a breeze. Plus, you can use some of your student loan money as seed money for your startup. Just kidding.

2. You only have 15 to 20 hours of classes, so what else are you going to do with your time? Okay, you have to study and write papers and all that good stuff, but in my experience, you really do have more free time as a graduate student compared to as a full-time employee. And perhaps, most importantly, you have more control over your time. So if you want, you can make the time to work on your startup.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

Many developing countries have resisted proposals to implement national innovation strategies, failing to recognize that innovation is a driver of sustainable growth and prosperity.

With Indonesia’s increasing international importance as a G20 country, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has the opportunity to embrace innovation based development as a catalyst for Indonesia’s future.

Why should Indonesia do this? The answer may lie in this simple statistic: 89.5 percent of all patent filings in the world are from inventors domiciled in one of ten countries in the following order of volume: Japan, United States, China, South Korea, Germany, France, Russia, United Kingdom, Switzerland and Italy. If you add the next five — Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Australia and Finland — the percentage of the top 15 rises to 94.5 percent of the 185 member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization that reported statistics for 2011.

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We all cringe when we hear that clichéd job interview question: Tell me about your biggest weakness. Candidates learn to spin their answers (“Sometimes I’m just too passionate about working hard to make my employer succeed!”).

The impulse behind this question, though, isn’t misguided. You want to work with people who can reflect and learn from mistakes. So what’s another way to get at the same concept?

Image: Free Digital Photos

On November 3, the Utah Science Technology and Research initiative (USTAR) will kick off its inaugural two-day review of research teams. 

USTAR Confluence: Where Research Meets Commercialization will be held in the auditorium of the James L. Sorenson Molecular Biotechnology Building: A USTAR Innovation Center at the University of Utah. The symposium will feature talks on commercialization initiatives and services, as well as keynote speaker Stacy Pierce, principal engineering manager for Rockwell Collins. 

It’s not just the FDA that is making life difficult for medical device companies. Executives are having to follow sales opportunities as medical care shifts out of hospitals into homes and physician offices. They are having to revamp their entire business model to survive in the new world of the ACA.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

I’ve been reporting on crowdfunding since it first started to take off in the U.S., around the time crowd-lending site Prosper.com debuted here in 2006. Now, it seems every startup owner and creative artist I meet has a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign going on.

Unfortunately, most of these crowdfunding campaigns are doomed to fail. Why? Because the people who created them have no idea how crowdfunding works.

With a population of more than 1.2 billion, India has obvious potential to become the world’s leading tech ecosystem. Unfortunately, that opportunity has been undermined by poor infrastructure, hefty bureaucracy and the divide between the nation's urban and rural areas. To the east, China has risen across a landscape of shiny highways, while India’s untrammeled ruts are clogged and slow-moving. But India is nonetheless changing, and a new generation of startups is throwing aside the red tape to produce products with global, as well as domestic, impacts.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Here’s some news that might surprise you: Uber will lower America’s gross domestic product .  In fact, it has already started.  The more Uber grows, the worse our GDP will get.  And it’s not just Uber.  Many of its startup cousins—like Lyft, Airbnb, and others—are also guilty of shrinking our economic growth numbers.  The trend is about to become an epidemic.

How could that possibly be, you might ask?  How could new technology that gives us better, higher quality services diminish our economy?  Isn’t innovation supposed to make economies grow bigger and stronger?

Lisnr Inc. isn’t new to the startup game. The Cincinnati audio-beacon company has raised more than $4 million in venture capital, has 21 employees and expects to generate upwards of $1 million in revenue this year, more than double the amount it got last year.

Yet on Monday, Lisnr is joining a startup accelerator that Techstars is running in conjunction with design and advertising firm R/GA. Accelerators traditionally have been intended for entrepreneurs just learning how to turn an idea into a business, not more established businesses like Lisnr.

Image: Techstars Managing Partner David Brown says the accelerator is planning a second program with R/GA. Techstars

In a few weeks I’ll be finding out what medical conditions I am predisposed to thanks to a kit from 23andMe, a company that boasts the largest collection of spit in the world being the largest independent, saliva-based DNA service that is pretty much akin to the FBI’s database (CODUS).

Image: http://memeburn.com

Employing authority marketing as a strategy to grow your brand and increase your reach as a business has many benefits. Authority marketing, which could also be referred to as expert marketing, simply means that you become known as an expert within your field. Most of the time, the process involves you helping customers overcome a problem, writing a book or articles, or it could even include an appearance on podcast broadcasts.

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