Nominations are due in one week for the 2015 Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program. Communities large and small, urban and rural, in developing and industrialized nations are all invited to apply. Nominations are accepted from local governments, institutions, companies, non-profit organizations, national government agencies and consular offices. There is no cost to submit a nomination. On average, the Intelligent Community Forum tracks the progress of 400 communities each year through its own research as well as nominations submitted by communities. 

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) announced today that Roche Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) and BHI have entered into an agreement to advance healthcare technologies coming from academic institutions, federal laboratories and startups based in Central Maryland. Under the terms of the agreement, BHI will identify health technologies that Roche will evaluate for potential research, development and commercialization opportunities. Priority areas of interest will include oncology, neuroscience, ophthalmology, rare diseases, immunological and infectious diseases. Financial terms for the agreement were not disclosed.

As a venture capitalist with DFJ, lecturer at Stanford and self-proclaimed long time recovering entrepreneur, Heidi Roizen, who was born and raised in Silicon Valley, could teach us a thing or two about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. She hit the ground running with her first business right out of Stanford business school, sold it after 14 years, worked at Apple, and then transitioned to the world of venture capital, where she has been ever since.

Joining “The Innovation Engine” podcast this week is leading analyst and innovation expert Doug Williams. On this week’s episode of the podcast, we explore “the language of innovation,” i.e. a common vernacular that companies can adapt to help ensure innovation success.

Doug Williams is the Chief Research Officer and Principal Analyst at InnovationExcellence.com, the world’s go-to destination online for writing and conversation on the subject of innovation. Innovation Excellence gets more than 1.3 million page views per month, and there are nearly 25,000 members in their LinkedIn group.

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The Ohio Report Cards are now all out, and the news is worse for Ohio’s embattled Charter Schools than it was last year. Charter Schools received more Fs than As, Bs and Cs combined. Their percentage of Fs went up from about 41% last year to nearly 44% this year. Meanwhile, Ohio’s public school districts saw their As jump to the largest percentage and number of grades. This chart shows the breakdown:

You’ve seen the numbers. And they’re not good.

At Apple, Twitter, Google, and Facebook, women are vastly outnumbered by men. When it comes to technical positions like coders, men occupy 80 to 90 percent of the positions. Which isn’t a great sign if these represent the jobs—and skill sets—of the future.

The startup scene is also dominated by men, and most studies show that fewer that 5 percent of venture capitalists are women.

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Atlanta is one of the best cities in the country to be an innovator. It's the second most affordable city in the country, while entrepreneurs in other cities cram themselves into small "hacker hostels" to make ends meet. Over the past five years, the city attracted over $700 million in private investment through InvestAtlanta, and Atlanta added nearly $100 million to its cash reserves.

In our culture, there are two diametrically opposed beliefs. The first is that we are powerful and strong creatures that have the ability to shape our biology and destiny in any way we want. This belief comes from the Romantic school of thought which sees human nature as malleable, and thus society and the man-made environment as the problem. The second belief is that we are puppets being controlled at the behest of corporations and other special interests that have done a masterful job of shaping our perceptions and environments to do what they want.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Roads_to_Heaven_and_Hell,_religious_tract,_1896.jpg

I wrote a version of this post four years ago but given the hectic nature of today’s tech markets I thought it was worth revisiting and updating. Canceling meetings is a part of modern day life.  I seem to get so over programmed that if I ever want to have a “break-out” unplanned trip somewhere I seem to have to reschedule meetings. Not fun, but a reality.

Considering how important proprietary deal flow has become as a tool for differentiation within venture capital, it’s surprising that more VCs aren’t shopping in the South. They simply aren’t looking at the concepts and companies coming out of Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Chattanooga, and other Southern startup hubs. At best, VCs might have a token startup on their roster from outside the Valley, mainly for bragging rights about geographic diversity and risks taken. It hardly counts as truly investing in the region, much less diversifying a portfolio.

The European Competitiveness Report, published annually since 1997, gives a quantitative assessment of the competitive performance of EU industries. It contributes to evidence-based policy-making by looking at knowledge gaps in industrial policy. Therefore it supports microeconomic decision-making at EU and national levels.

The Report uses empirical research to examine EU competitiveness, working across the whole economy as well as in selected sectors. It also assesses the impact of structural reforms on EU competitiveness, and the need for further reforms.

When we say “startups,” we think about bootstrapped, edgy, adaptive, and agile cultures that don’t get caught up in the way things have always been done…and don’t really want to. That frequently means they look at “strategy” like the plague and written plans as nothing more than a vehicle for dust.

After all, a lot of startups can’t think beyond a single month in advance, and not just because they’re wildly busy or just ADD. In some cases, they are pioneering market areas or business models that are truly changing week-by-week, and keeping pace means not being too attached to any specific roadmap or tactic.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53323105@N02/6705350609

Most entrepreneurs spend far too much time thinking negatively about competitors, and can’t resist making derogatory statements about them to their own team, investors and even to customers. This approach only makes these important constituents question your integrity, intelligence and your understanding of business basics. Pointing out flaws in others does not give you strength.

IN 2005, Randall Munroe, a young NASA robotics expert, posted to the web a comic about the mystical number pi. Among the infinite string of digits were letters that spelled out, “Help I’m trapped in a universe factory.”

His pi comic spread quickly, and nearly a decade later Mr. Munroe sits atop a small empire built around xkcd, an online comic revered by science students, computer programmers and Silicon Valley workers.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com

The boom times for venture capitalists investing in tech keeps on cranking.

Indeed, cash raised by VCs in the first half of this year has peaked at an eight-year high with $17 billion flowing into investor coffers. Fund performances are also behaving admirably, and so are the portfolios of the VCs making many of the investments. And why wouldn’t they?

Back when I worked at Microsoft and Amazon, I spent a lot of time hiring and building teams. I had the methodology down: Get referrals from strong people already on the team. Look for someone who is uniquely great at something, preferably something that makes them different from the rest of the team. Don’t let problem personalities past the first step no matter how capable they are.

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China faces an inflection point: The ingredients that propelled its rapid expansion and unprecedented development over the past 30 years will not fuel its expansion over the next three decades. Instead, China faces an opportunity to transition to a new wave of prosperity, according to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

To move up the "value chain", China must evolve from relatively commoditised manufacturing and lower-skilled assembly to a more innovation-based economy, which includes design, logistics, financial and business services, high-tech industries and life sciences, says Deloitte Global's report "Competitiveness: Catching the Next Wave in China".

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Nicole Glaros is managing director at TechStars, a startup accelerator based in Boulder, Colo. Before joining TechStars in 2008, she founded three successful companies and suffered a couple of failures. I asked her about the challenges of working in the male-dominated world of tech investing and what traits she brings to the approach that may be different from her male counterparts. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Image: Nicole Glaros, managing director, Techstars

A little more than a decade ago, it used to be a much costlier undertaking to start a new technology business, particularly in software. The cloud and distributed computing has changed all that.

So has the growth of accelerators, like Y Combinator and TechStars and others that provide small amounts of seed funding to startups in exchange for some equity in your business. But in contrast to a decade ago, that small amount of money goes further.

Image: http://www.inc.com

Judge for yourself whether these business ideas have a future:

PizzaBot: An app-driven service that delivers pizza assembled and baked in self-driving trucks.

Trashnado: An app to request on-demand garbage pickup instead of waiting once a week.

Pray It Forward: An online "marketplace" for group prayer.

Those are just three of the nearly two dozen business ideas posted on a San Francisco startup named IdeaMarket, which bills itself as a virtual crowdsourced business incubator.

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