I didn’t come to terms with the fact that I was graduating from college until I entered the football stadium at my university in my cap and gown.

As I walked to the bleachers, I was greeted with messages from my fellow graduates on the stadium’s large jumbotron screens. Students shared their favorite memories from the past four years, including meeting their freshman year roommates for the first time and celebrating the end of final exams with their closest friends.

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A new Stateline analysis of recently released Census population estimates identifies the cities that grew the most between 2010 and 2013. The following list ranks the top 10 growth cities, as measured by the percentage-point growth in the city’s share of the total U.S. population.

For more information on the nation’s population shift toward the South and West, see this Stateline story on state-by-state shifts with an interactive map.

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Choosing to become a business owner – and employer – is choosing to take on greater responsibility, greater risk, and inversely, a greater potential for reward. Such a decision is not an easy one and most people find they would rather secure a stable job working for someone else than take the risk of going out on their own. But not for me; for me, the decision to become a business owner was an easy one.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Institutes of Health has awarded $25 million to the J. Craig Venter Institute to back an initiative to study infectious diseases like malaria and influenza at the genetic level to help find better treatments and preventive measures.

The institute, with offices in Maryland and California, will use the 5-year grant from NIH to establish the Genome Center for Infectious Diseases to study the genetic secrets of a wide range of bacteria, viruses and parasites, officials said on Thursday.

Image: http://medcitynews.com/ 

A biotech entrepreneur wants to arm physicians with an electronic companion diagnostic tool to help hospitals reduce hospital-acquired infections.

Last year, antibiotic-resistant infections caused more than two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control. About 70 percent of those antibiotic-resistant infections were caused by hospital-acquired infections.

Image: http://medcitynews.com/ 

Jane Muir is the director of the Florida Innovation Hub at University of Florida (UF) and associate director of the Office of Technology Licensing. She is also the current president of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). AUTM is a nonprofit organization with an international membership of more than 3,200 technology managers and business executives. AUTM members come from more than 300 universities, research institutions and teaching hospitals.

Image: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/ - Jane Muir 

MADISON (WKOW) -- If jobs are a key to the race for governor, then the growing debate over Wisconsin's $25 million venture capital fund could prove pivotal in deciding a winner.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin) is touting his success establishing that fund, but challenger Mary Burke (D) says it is too small and exclusive.

FluGen Inc. is one of several companies keeping a close eye on what happens with the fund.  FluGen is developing what it hopes will be a world-changing vaccine to protect people against every kind of flu. It relies on investors for its very survival, but the state won't be making an investment in FluGen at this point, solely because it is a biotech firm.

Image: http://www.wxow.com/ 

Five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has finally regained the nine million jobs it lost. But not all industries recovered equally. Each line below shows how the number of jobs has changed for a particular industry over the past 10 years. Scroll down to see how the recession reshaped the nation’s job market, industry by industry.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com/ 

With all the new technology available today for video conferencing, interactive social media, and webinars, you may think that travel is no longer a requirement for starting a small business. You would be wrong. According to a recent industry report on travel spending, small businesses buy 37% more airline tickets than big business travelers, and spend 24% more when on the road.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/ 

Keeping a good attitude will help you weather the storms of entrepreneurship. The daily life and grind of entrepreneurship can be filled with big highs and lows, but staying focused on the end goal and seeing the opportunity in your challenges will take you far.

It’s no secret that words have power. For example, you probably wouldn’t say to a potential vendor, “I’m not hiring you because your product sucks.”  Instead, you might say, “I don’t think your offering is the right fit for us at this time.” There is a big difference in how the recipient of that information hears the first one over how he hears the second, and, as professionals and decent human beings, we are sensitive to that.

Complaining, gossiping and lying are just a few of the worst traits of disengaged employees.

Everyone has worked with a disengaged employee or coworker at one time. They're easy to spot once you chat with them for a few minutes: they just don't care about whether the company succeeds or fails. Instead of helping your business grow, they're dragging it down.

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The public ‘disengagement’ with science and the difficulty of funding research seem to be very different problems, but science project ‘crowdfunding’ may be one way of solving both. Life science and healthcare researchers now have a new incentive to ‘reach out’ to society and to ‘connect’ via the internet. The incentive is the potential for raising money for research, directly from the public.

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This article provides an overview of the literature on the management of open innovation. Elaborating on what exactly ‘open’ innovation comprises, this article integrates efforts by scholars who have studied this topic from a variety of perspectives. In doing so this article highlights that despite the virtues of openness having been stressed by much of the literature in this field, many companies still struggle to be successful with their open innovation strategies. A big question therefore for both theory and practice is under which contingencies openness is beneficial, and the article reviews internal and external factors that shape the rewards companies can derive. This results in a number of theoretical and managerial implications and suggestions for avenues of future research.

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After launching my career in and around the high impact entrepreneurship space and venture capital in Silicon Valley in 1985, I moved on to North Carolina in 1990.  After an .. exhilarating? … run as a venture capital investor (fund class of 1999 which, if you know the history of the business, is more than enough said) I proved to myself, at least, that sometimes you can just go home.  In my case, home was Neenah, Wisconsin.

While small businesses make up the majority of firms in every state, they employ a small share of the state's population.

Large firms, on the other hand, employ many workers, but there are few big companies in each state.

In a Wichita Eagle op-ed, Dane Stangler and Jason Wiens of the Kauffman Foundation highlight the importance of yet another category of businesses: young firms. These companies are responsible for the creation of nearly all net new jobs.

In case you have not heard, the ocean is not doing so well. In fact, it is in a state of crisis. It is being assaulted physically, chemically and biologically—making it warmer, more acidic and polluted. It has been overfished to the point that many fisheries are on the brink of collapse. As a result of these changes, weather patterns have changed, coral reefs are dying and species are becoming extinct.

Image: We need our ocean to be healthy, and for this it needs our help. Credit: DVIDSHUB via Flickr 

Disruptive change is now a fact of life for many industries. Healthcare is no exception. Although healthcare has been changing for decades—think about the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) or the initial push toward managed care in the 1980s—the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promises to accelerate both the rate of change and the level of uncertainty confronting the industry. Payors face navigating a difficult transition: from an industry in which the customer is often a corporation or small company and the business is paying claims to one in which consumers make healthcare purchasing decisions, the direct provision of care may be necessary for success, and consumer and retail capabilities really matter. Furthermore, payors must make this transition amid regulatory and consumer uncertainty and in a fairly short time frame. This industry and business-model shift is on a scale that few companies and few sectors in the economy have been through.

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Business leaders and entrepreneurs with superb people skills have a competitive edge over others. These skills often take more time to learn than technical abilities, but the results are well worth the investment.

Everyone wants to work with people they enjoy being around. If you’re extremely likable, you’ll be able to attract new clients and retain long-standing relationships with minimal effort.

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For a while there, it seemed like the station wagon was on the verge of disappearing entirely, consumed by a wave of SUVs and crossovers. On the face of it, that was something that made sense.

Why would you buy a car whose only real strength was a big boot, when you could get that plus good ground clearance and, with the right SUV, the option of extra seats? But when the allure of SUVs eventually fades (people tend not to feel like their car’s so unique when it looks like everyone else’s), could the station wagon be poised to make a comeback?

Image: http://motorburn.com/