You know the feeling, when you arrive home after a long day at work, kick off your shoes, and hit the couch? Exhausted, you know you’re not getting up anytime soon, especially once the TV’s on.

You, my friend, have just gotten swept up in “the current.” According to Dr. Susan Biali, a medical doctor and life coach from Vancouver, it’s very easy to get “caught in the current,” getting swept up in the natural drift toward what we don’t want, pulling us away from the things we do want.

Image: Free Digital Photos

RALEIGH, N.C. - How do you create cultures of innovation?

The Red Hat-Citrix news capped the eight-hour long Innovate Raleigh summit, now in its third year. Amidst a series of keynote speakers that included Lyle Estill, founder of Piedmont Biofuels, and Troy Henikoff, managing director of TechStars Chicago (a new business accelerator), attendees were guided to brainstorm innovative ideas for the collective group to tackle within the next year.

Image: Talking innovation at the Summit. (Photo by Jason Parker) 

Where would millennials be if the economy didn't crash in 2008? Most would probably think a lot better off... working for an established company, getting paid a decent wage, getting married, buying a house. You know... the "stable" life. But would we be happy? There is something to be grateful for in the wake of the crash... a whole new era of entrepreneurs.

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Americans no longer perceive that their schools and universities are training them to become entrepreneurs the way they did only a few years ago.  Between 2009 and 2012, the percentage of Americans who believe that their education made them more interested in becoming an entrepreneur; helped them to develop an entrepreneurial attitude; improved their understanding of the role of entrepreneurs in society; and gave them the skills needed to open a business, has dropped substantially, a survey by TNS Custom Research reveals.

Over the course of three days at the Mayo Clinic‘s annual Transform conference, featuring scores of healthcare’s top names, several themes stood out. Here’s what I gather were the main points.

1. Economic factors and barriers are just as important in determining health outcomes for the population as a whole. It stands to reason – people with fewer financial resources are often forced to choose between paying for a costly lab test or doctor visit or putting food on the table, among countless other instances and examples.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Startups have more funding options than ever before with the myriad of crowdfunding platforms, accelerators, angel investors and micro-VC funds. Determining the best option for your company is not  easy but can be critical to success or failure in the early days.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to companies about what goes into deciding if an accelerator makes sense for them and what factors they took into consideration when choosing between accelerators. The responses were invaluable for us and I thought would be helpful to a wider audience of entrepreneurs. You should seriously consider an accelerator if you fit into any of the descriptions below:

Join the global contest for incubators competing for the “Best Knowledge Based Incubator Award 2014” and compare your incubator’s performance on a global scale!

This globally leading incubator award is organized by the Technopolicy Network and the Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services (CSES) in its 12th year and it includes winners from all continents. Last year ATP Innovations from Australia was awarded the Best Science Based Incubator 2013.

One hard lesson I had to learn pretty early on as an entrepreneur is that ideas by themselves don’t matter. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone tell me they had the idea for Facebook or Seamless years before it was created.  And that’s just it.  There is nothing special about realizing that food delivery could be easier and more efficient.  Figuring out the operational logistics, developing the business relationships, and figuring out the revenue model is where all the complexity is.

The educational aspirations of the nation’s elite students are shifting towards Silicon Valley: Introduction to Computer Science is now the most popular class for Harvard freshman. The Harvard Crimson reports that nearly 12% of first year students enroll in CS 50, making it more popular than the finance-track intro course, Principles of Economics.

Image: Flickr - Harvard Medical School - jeanbaptisteparis

In the beginning, or at least following the Big Bang more than 14 billion years ago, there was hydrogen, some helium and a little bit of lithium. A grand total of three elements.

Today, there are nearly 100 known naturally occurring elements, with hundreds of variants.

Figuring out how the universe went from three elements to 100 is the focus of new research being led by a Michigan State University physicist and funded by a five-year, $11.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Sparking growth in business investment and jobs has proven more difficult than expected for states as they have emerged from the Great Recession. Capital spending and, especially, job creation have remained below par as corporate chiefs and business owners stick with a conservative philosophy until they perceive signs of a true boom. So the fight for the attention of site consultants and CFOs is more pitched than ever.

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Many medical researchers with ideas not tied to a drug backed by the pharmaceutical industry often find themselves without funding; patients with diseases or other medical conditions, particularly those that are rare, are without much power. That is, until recently.

Now, scientists are turning to crowdfunding to launch their research. Donors won't get a free CD, T-shirt or other giveaway like they do on Kickstarter. But what fundraisers give in return is hope for a treatment and at least insight into medical conditions.

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Most new tech companies simply would not work without consumer trust. People wouldn’t get into an Uber, list their home on Airbnb, or even buy shoes on Zappos if they didn’t trust those companies to deliver a high quality, secure service. UrbanSitter sets the bar even higher: It connects families with babysitters on the Internet. There are few things that require more faith.

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Leading a team of 700 people through an enterprise-wide change management process on a tight schedule is formidable enough when undertaken in the business world. Imagine, then, the difficulty of doing so in the Afghanistan war zone. Such was the leadership challenge of Col. Matthew Fritz, who just returned to the U.S. last week from a stint as Chief of Staff of a 16-nation coalition.

Image: http://itssaulconnected.com

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently named the 50 winners of the first Growth Accelerator Fund competition, which recognizes accelerators building stronger entrepreneurial ecosystems in underserved parts of the country. Each organization will receive $50,000, in exchange for providing SBA with quarterly reports on their activities, impact and partnerships. SBA hopes to use the data to build a national database of information about accelerator programs and forge long-term relationships within the accelerator community.

AMES, Iowa- Iowa State University broke ground Wednesday on a brand new section of its Research Park on the southern edge of Ames. Governor Terry Branstad, ISU President Steven Leath joined a host of officials to break ground on a new building to bring economic development activity at ISU under one roof.

Image: Governor Terry Branstad, along with ISU President Steven Leath break ground on the new segment of ISU’s Research Park

America’s unemployment rate — most recently reported as 6.1 percent — has long been used to gauge the country’s economic well-being. But a new working paper released by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs highlights the difficulty in estimating the exact unemployment rate, though changes in the official measure still signal important movements in the economy.

There has been a long-running debate in the pharmaceutical industry about the value of being first to market. Companies spend considerable resources seeking to increase the odds of beating their competitors to market and often fret about the commercial disadvantage of being late. In the high-stakes race to market for a novel drug class, companies firmly believe that every month of lead time ahead of a competitor is significant.

As companies seek to find the optimal place to locate, it has become challenging to find geographies offering long-term labor scalability and access to a growing customer base.These challenges consistently impact the majority of operation types including manufacturing plants, distribution centers, retail, call centers, shared service centers and headquarters operations. Therefore, Site Selection Group has carefully evaluated regional population clusters across the United States and identified 10 mega-regions that could be future “Megalopolis” areas to consider for your next project.

Why do teams and organizations often fail to achieve their goals and fall short of delivering on their good intentions?

Leaders often focus on securing commitment and buy-in, yet commitment is rarely the problem. Also, the issue isn’t just understanding the goal and knowing what needs to be done. Teams and individuals often understand and know, yet aren’t successful at doing (the “knowing-doing” gap).