Legislation creating a public-private economic development enterprise cleared House and Senate committees on Wednesday. If it passes the General Assembly it is expected to be signed by Gov. Pat McCrory and start operations in July.

The aim is to create a nonprofit corporation that contracts with the state Department of Commerce to attract jobs and promote international trade and tourism. It would strive to be more like private industry, faster and more flexible than state government bureaucracy.

The Business Accelerator Network for Southeast Michigan recently announced that its four key technology business accelerators have helped create 7,225 technology jobs and 225 tech companies since the first accelerator was created in 1999.

The BANSEM group came together in 2010 and is made up of Ann Arbor SPARK, Automation Alley, Macomb-OU INCubator and TechTown Detroit. The report said that the 225 new companies have gone on to secure more than $300 million in follow-on investment.

Image: A conglomerate of Southeastern Michigan tech incubators recently released a report saying that the group of four incubators has produced more than 7,000 jobs since they all began, and have secured more than $300 million in follow-on investments after the companies launched. (MLive file photo) 

Since the war for talent  changed how companies manage talent worldwide, HR approaches that focus on high performers have become deeply entrenched. Now, after the economic crisis, the war for talent is back – and companies that rethink their tactics stand to gain more competitive ground as a result.

The inability of established firms to come up with breakthrough innovations is a truism today. It wasn’t always so. Joseph Schumpeter, the 20th century economist known for heralding the role of innovation in the evolution of society, argued that established firms were best positioned to innovate because of the resources available to them. Edith Penrose, one of the most prominent management thinkers of the 20th century, agreed.

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The tech industry has become one of the biggest interests lobbying for immigration reform, for a straightforward reason: they say they can't find enough qualified workers here in the US. If the government issued more high-skilled visas, they say, they could hire immigrants to fill their vacancies — and the greater capacity would allow them to hire more US-born workers, and pay them more, as well. Some economists and others question whether that's true, or whether companies simply prefer to hire immigrant workers (over whom they have more control) rather than native-born ones.

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More than ever, public policy issues are having a big impact on angel investing, the startup companies we support, and the startup ecosystem.  Stay up to date on ACA's policy focus and work in key legislative and regulatory issues and also learn more about the members and experts behind ACA's efforts.

An invention can be the subject of a number of patent applications worldwide, in a variety of languages. Patent equivalents are a list of similar patent documents; with the same priority dates from throughout the world (for example see here). Searching for Indian patent equivalents is a herculean task! I’ve always wondered why Indian patents never featured in free online databases like WIPO’s Patentscope or EPO’s Espacenet. Thankfully that’s going to change. As reported by Business standard, Indian patents will soon be a part of European patent office huge database, which currently covers patent information of 90 countries!

Jonathan Bush is CEO and coFounder of athenahealth, Inc., a cloud-based health technology and services company. In his recently published book entitled Where does it Hurt?: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care he shares his fundamental belief in the need for systems-changing innovations in health care. Ashoka approached Jonathan to draw him out on his vision and driving principles.

No one can deny that starting out on your own requires hard work and courage, but as with anything in life, where there is risk, there are often rewards. All you need to decide is whether you are willing to overcome the challenges to find out what a future of independence might hold.

Dell today announced the results of the second annual Gender-Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), revealing that more than 75 percent of countries surveyed are not meeting the most fundamental conditions required for female entrepreneurs to prosper.

Commissioned by Dell, the Gender-GEDI is the world’s only diagnostic tool that comprehensively measures high potential female entrepreneurship by analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems, business environments and individual aspirations across 30 developed and developing economies spanning multiple regions, providing a systematic approach that allows cross-country comparison, benchmarking, and identifies data gaps. The goal of the research is not to provide a headcount of female entrepreneurs worldwide, rather it is future-oriented and designed to be a tool to guide leaders, policymakers and law-makers in identifying country-wide strengths and weaknesses and developing strategies to create more favorable conditions in their countries to enable businesses founded by women to thrive. 

Massive open online courses are not currently cannibalizing tuition-based programs at top business schools, according to an enthusiastic report from the University of Pennsylvania. Rather, MOOCs could become a recruiting tool for tapping new pools of potential students.

Business schools that offer MOOCs should also figure out how to charge the many students who sign up for the online courses without intending to complete them, write the authors of the report.

There’s lots of talk lately about the talent shortage – how employers, especially small ones, can’t find workers with the skills and experience they are seeking. But maybe the problem is that small business owners are putting too much emphasis on the wrong things. A recent survey from Hyper Island, Tomorrow’s Most Wanted, reports that when it comes to finding the right employees to hire – personality matters more than skills.

Hyper Island surveyed more than 500 leaders and employees and discovered that overwhelmingly, companies rated “personality” as the most desirable quality in a job candidate. More than three-fourths (78 percent) of respondents rate personality as important, while 53 percent say cultural fit is key. Just 39 percent say “skill set” matters most.

Whenever a carmaker decides to release a new model name, it’s taking a pretty big risk. Focus too much on design and engineering in the pursuit of a driver’s car and you could end up with something that only people with adenoids and an abundance of fireproof racing suits could handle. Focus too much on consumer research meanwhile and you end up with the Ford Edsel.

It’s pretty remarkable therefore when one of those names sticks and goes on to become an icon. Sure there are good years and bad, but overall the name still evokes something primal in all of us. You only have to look at the Mustang’s history to see that.

One of the greatest challenges for almost every entrepreneur worldwide is access to financing.

There’s a very logical reason for why this is the case: loans — at least those from traditional institutions such as banks — are given out based on a number of metrics such as credit rating, financial records, proof of income, collateral — basically historical evidence as to whether someone has the ability to pay back a loan.

Accenture, along with Yahoo, has launched ‘Innovation Jockeys: The Hunt for India’s most Innovative Minds’, a contest for undergraduate, graduate and post graduate students across India.

The 2014 National SBIR/STTR Conference is the largest and most important event specializing in helping small businesses learn about participating in SBIR/STTR programs. At this Conference, representatives from all 11 federal agencies with SBIR programs will attend, in addition to other SBIR/STTR experts and trainers. Conference highlights include:

• Presentations from all SBIR Agency Program Managers
• Learn how to successfully submit competitive research proposals
• Hear from government, industry and academic experts on successful commercialization strategies
• Interact with SBIR Agency Program Managers, technology entrepreneurs, large company representatives, and researchers in Roundtable discussions, sessions and 1-on-1 meeting 

Problem shared is a problem solved. That’s the theory behind crowdsourcing — people coming together to respond to demand for just about anything, from financial services and labor to information sharing and materials. A subset of that, crowdfunding — any finance that’s been aggregated online — is an exploding online marketplace that rang up a whopping $5 billion in transactions last year. 

There’s just one problem: Opportunities in this “crowd economy” are growing at such a fast clip in number and variety that data analysis has lagged, leaving investors and industry wading into uncharted territory. As crowdfunding expands — revenue could hit $100 billion by 2018 if the annual doubling continues — the need to make sense of the trend grows along with it. 

Proposed amendments to the Delaware General Corporations Law (DGCL) for 2014 aim to significantly streamline routine questions that often prove vexing for emerging growth companies and newly formed subsidiaries of larger companies.

It is a fact of life that people leave jobs. They move to other cities, whether for family or lifestyle. They quit for perceived greener pastures. They retire. Or they are hit by the proverbial bus. Forming a company under Delaware law historically has had a pitfall: a “sole incorporator” (often a paralegal) forms the initial company, one assumes promptly appoints one or more directors and then, one further assumes, immediately resigns.

At a ThirdPath Institute conference a few weeks ago, a great discussion arose around the fact that workloads tend to ebb and flow, and it’s important to know how to alternate between periods of peak effort and recovery. Before long, someone noted the analogy to high performance in sports, and used a phrase that piqued my curiosity: Corporate Athlete. I loved the term so much I jotted it down, thinking I might make something of it in my writing and consulting. Then I Googled it.

Well-crafted strategies are road maps to places that yield competitive advantage and generate value for the firm. But once you’ve arrived, they don’t take you anyplace else. That’s a problem for companies under continual pressure from investors to find new sources of competitive advantage.

I recently had lunch with the CEO of a large privately held corporation that illustrated this dilemma. After two decades of strong growth, he recognized that that his strategy had run its course. In the minds of his investors, his success was baked into his company’s current value and they wanted to know where he was going to find more.