I came out of a standard Keynesian economics education at Harvard College in 1979. It was remarkably closed: from what I could tell, we read Chicago economists, from whom the supply-side movement arose, exclusively to mock them.

But I graduated into an economy that was couldn’t be explained by applying the tools I had been taught. And within three years of my graduation, unemployment hit 10.8%, inflation 13.5%, and the prime rate 21.5%. It was supposed to be it impossible for all of those things to happen at once.

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Digital technology is the biggest agitator of the business world today. Mobile technology, social media, cloud computing, embedded devices, big data, and analytics have radically changed the nature of work and competition.  And digital innovations will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Technology has tremendous potential to be the engine of increasing human, organizational, and economic prosperity.

However, digital technology is not the true story. Digital transformation is. Fulfilling technology’s potential will require leaders to recreate the way their institutions operate in a world of digital ubiquity. Leaders need to engage their people in a process of redefining how they work and what their companies do. Digital transformation is therefore the key managerial imperative for today’s business leaders.

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More women entrepreneurs are gaining access to venture capital, but a wide gender gap persists, according to a new study released Tuesday from Babson College. According to the study, the amount of early-stage investment in companies with a woman on the executive team has tripled to 15 percent from 5 percent in the last 15 years. Despite this, 85 percent of all venture capital-funded businesses have no women on the executive team and only 2.7 percent of venture capital-funded companies had a woman as a CEO, according to the study.

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WASHINGTON - U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet today announced the SBA's support of four new Regional Innovation Clusters, adding to its portfolio of high-performing regional innovation networks across the country.

"Clusters are public-private partnerships that are driving innovation and job creation in our most promising regional hubs for innovation," Contreras-Sweet said. "SBA has built a strategic infrastructure of financing and consulting networks in key regions to help new companies launch and small companies grow, particularly in underserved communities across the country. We're unleashing the full potential of entrepreneurs who are developing cutting-edge products and processes that will help ensure American global competitiveness, creating support systems for small businesses in regions with the most need. "

As the chief operating officer of MolecularMatch, an online search platform that helps cancer patients find targeted drug therapies, Collin Brack said his goal is to grow the startup, rather than focus on revenue. "How can I help 1,000 cancer patients this year?" he said.

"Instead of tracking dollars and turning every patient into a dollar sign on a spreadsheet," Brack said, "you need to have a growth model based on how many people you've helped this month." By putting patients first, he said, the company also sees its revenues grow.

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Little academic research exists on the juncture of entrepreneurship and philanthropy. The Kauffman-funded book, Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurs' Engagement in Philanthropy, explores how and why successful entrepreneurs become engaged in philanthropy.

Available in hardcopy and ebook, the book includes a compilation of essays by 31 academics and experts who offer an understanding of entrepreneurs in their for-profit world and an understanding of the world of philanthropy. The essays address the motivations that drive entrepreneurs and philanthropists, and the social and political environments that are conducive to their success.

The Small Business Administration has just added advanced manufacturing to a national priority list for SBA backed investment. It has also raised a $200 million annual limit on the amount of funding to support investment in these sectors. The SBA’s Impact Investment Fund was initially launched in 2011 to support the growth and development of America’s impact investment industry.

Yelp Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker talks about the company's decision to turn down lucrative acquisition offers pre-IPO. While selling would've benefited Yelp's founders and early investors, Donaker says it was unclear what the effect would be for the rest of Yelp's employees and growing user community.

That’s a common assumption. For instance, take this recent Washington Post piece, headlined, “More businesses are closing than starting. Can Congress help turn that around?” Sounds ominous at first. But wait a minute – is starting more new businesses always a good thing? Isn’t it a basic economic tenet that well-functioning markets will have many entrances and exits, that weak businesses (including thousands of one-person enterprises) will get recycled quickly (fast failure) and that over time, vigorous, well-regulated markets will support strong and growing companies, which in turn provide dignified jobs and prosperity?

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Many of us are willing to regularly give from our own pockets to a worthy nonprofit or cause, but sometimes we may refrain from doing so, in part because we just don’t know which organizations are doing great work, and in part because we may feel as if we can’t afford to give enough to really make a difference.

But now, thanks to a side project from one of the creators of Kickstarter, Perry Chen, and a team of volunteers, supporting  and discovering great nonprofits can be as simple as donating a dollar a day.

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Here's a little known secret: Organizations don't innovate. People innovate. Inspired, creative, committed, collaborative, self-motivated people. What can YOU do to help people innovate? A lot. This 5-minute video tutorial tells you how.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture. Arthur Koestler

Do manufacturing and culture live in two separate and irreconcilable worlds – the manufacturing in the world of things and the culture in the world of ideas? The first called upon to solve production problems and the second pontificating about chief systems as in the Galileo’s "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems"? This is a common vision to those who identify the manufacturing with making and the culture with thinking: the manual labour of artisans and technicians as opposed to the intellectual work of professors and scientists. As a result, that fault line overlooks that the factory is a culture that can and should go hand in hand with the academies and research centres. Otherwise you will have two half-cultures that do not make a culture.

One need look in detail at the staging of an opera – a case only apparently extreme of a cultural embrace – to see how much that vision be a stereotype. A received idea at least nowadays when digital technologies work like a spider spinning its web of the Grand Unification between manufacturing and opera.

Every investor is looking for the “dream team” of executives to put money on. Often I find that experienced investors scan ahead to the management page of a business plan, even before they read the product description. That’s how important the people are. The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) role is usually considered second only to the CEO, because financials are critical.

Do you park in the first spot you see, even if it means a longer, grocery-laden walk back from the store later? When unloading the dishwasher, do you quickly shove all the Tupperware into a random cabinet, thereby getting the dishes-doing process over with faster—but also setting yourself up for a mini-avalanche of containers and lids?

In the world of startups, Silicon Valley is pretty the place everyone else has tried to ape. There’s a good reason for that too. The collection of Southern California towns has birthed some of the biggest technology companies the world has ever seen. And now, if you play your cards right, your startup could spend two months there soaking up all the knowledge on offer.

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Everybody loves a winner, right? No, unfortunately, not always. In my coaching practice, many executives and entrepreneurs vent their frustrations with the unexpected negative consequences of their success — such as their anxiety over being able to maintain their winning streak, the fear that they will be set up to fail, and the envy others feel toward them for their good fortune. Turns out that, according to recent research, these kinds of worries aren’t just in their heads — they’re very real. Here’s a summary of that research, along with suggestions for overcoming these traps.

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The year 2014 has not just started out on a good note for the digital health and health IT market, but it seems to be all set to be the best year ever. The top 20 venture capital firms have been busy right from the start of the year investing in this arena and giving a massive boost to deal activity here. A CB Insights data report indicates that funding to the tune of $2.65 billion has come into this sector over the past four quarters. What is even more significant is that the highest quarterly funding amount came about in Q1 of this year. With investors deploying $1,108.6 million over the first three months of 2014, this quarter has witnessed a whopping 210% increase in funding when compared with the same period last year.

Everyone needs mentors. But as a startup CTO, it can be hard to find other qualified entrepreneurs who have faced similar challenges. To find out where startup CTOs can go to find this much needed advice, I polled a group of entrepreneurs from YEC to hear their suggestions.

Mark Rolston used to be CCO at Frog Design. Now he runs his new consultancy, Argodesign. And as part of our Wearables Week, his firm generated a series of concepts based upon our simple mandate: No watches.

What Argodesign presented in response was “a provocation”--four wearable concepts that would not just track your heartbeat or put your email on your wrist, but give you what Rolston calls “superpowers.”

Image: Kineseowear is basically kinesio tape come to life. - http://www.fastcodesign.com