In many ways, Michigan looks a lot like Wisconsin.

It shares hundreds of miles of the same Great Lakes shoreline and usually votes blue in presidential elections and red for governors and members of its state Legislature. It also boasts major research universities that rank among the nation's best.

Unlike Wisconsin, however, Michigan began investing in its emerging economy years ago — even as the state's automobile manufacturing base was teetering on the edge of collapse.

Patients struggling with obesity can have a tough time finding the right doctor, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"Patients often complain that their primary care doctor is too judgmental or harsh with them about their weight," says Dr. Kimberly Gudzune, an internal medicine physician at Johns Hopkins. She sees lots of overweight and obese patients who want to lose weight, but feel that their doctor isn't supporting them in that effort. Because of that, she says, patients want to find another doctor. And they often do.

When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard.

But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code — the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave.

A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just tweeted an interesting data point about the valuations of YC startups. As of now, Graham says that 37 Y Combinator companies, out of 511 startups, have valuations of or sold for at least $40 million. Currently the total valuation for the 511 startups is $11.5 billion, as Graham writes on Hacker News.

My first thought when reading Graham’s tweet was which companies are included in this group. Graham says that Rap Genius is on the list. And there are a number of obvious ones because of acquisition numbers and valuations from past funding rounds of some YC alums. Facebook just bought Parse for $85 million. In its last round, Dropbox was reportedly valued at $4 billion. Heroku was bought by Salesforce for over $200 million.

Today's scientists are scrambling to develop technology to cope with climate change; carbon capture technology, renewable energy and drought-resilient crops are just a few examples.

But researchers recently learned that ours isn't the first civilization to innovate as the Earth's climate shifts. A new study suggests "pulses" in technological innovation that took place between 280,000 and 30,000 years ago in present-day South Africa could have been driven by dramatic shifts in the region's weather conditions.

The world of search is about to be flipped completely on its head. As part of that sea change, today's reactive Web-based searches are about to give way to proactive, geo-fenced answers that will pop up before you even frame the question.

In many cases, you won't be searching for content - content will be searching for you.

The buzz about entrepreneurship is everywhere nowadays -- from magazine covers to conferences, hotel lobbies to the White House, and of course, kitchen tables. The French word entrepreneur first appeared in the French dictionary in 1723 to describe a person who organizes and operates a business by taking a financial risk. Since then the word entrepreneur -- and the world -- has completely changed. Today, entrepreneurship is celebrated like never before and it is defined in so many ways -- social entrepreneurship, intra-entrepreneurship, knowledge entrepreneurship, micro-entrepreneurship -- you name it.

In 1975, Harvard professor Howard Stevenson defined entrepreneurship as "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled." "Resources currently controlled" can be interpreted as limited resources. From that point of view, almost all of us have some level of entrepreneurial challenges.

Your health is not solely in your doctor’s hands. As mobile technology improves and health care providers reach out to consumers, many apps are popping up to help people manage their own health.

The problem is that too many of these apps are useless.

At HealthBeat 2013 today, David Levin, chief medical information officer of Cleveland Clinic explained what he sees all too often when reviewing new technology: “CrApps,” or crappy apps.

Our main focus here is entrepreneurial productivity and it can teach you how to be strong and financially powerful, so you can free yourself up to go on to other, more important things in life. With that in mind, I am going to fill you in on 3 important steps to increasing entrepreneurial productivity. These three steps will help you take action to build skills and create an environment that supports consistent focus, business growth and profit.

1. Know what you want to achieve with your business

If you haven’t reached your financial goals in life, then I recommend that you keep your business goals specifically clustered around how much you to want to grow, how much you want to earn in profit, and how much you want to take home in the form of income.

GlaxoSmithKline has created a contest for academic researchers that it hopes will accelerate the speed by which academic research can be turned into novel therapies.

The London pharmaceutical company, which has large operations in the Philadelphia region, on Tuesday launched a competition program it is calling Discovery Fast Track.

Your business is thriving. You’ve managed to stay ahead of the competition. But staying on top requires a strong and consistent connection to your audience (i.e., your current and potential customers). While a blog offers an excellent forum to build this relationship, it seems everyone’s got one––or more. Like stars in the sky, there are now so many blogs vying for eyeballs, with thousands upon thousands more coming online daily, that creating a successful blog (translation: one that people actually read and come back to) takes skill and a whole lot of proverbial elbow grease.

Whether you haven’t set foot into the blogging atmosphere or you’re a blogging veteran, know this: Building and maintaining a high-traffic blog can be a daunting and anxiety inducing task even for the most highly successful and productive of individuals. Yet surprisingly, building a popular blog comes down to a few simple, elemental steps:

Hey, developers! Do you feel like you're in demand? Apparently you should.

HubSpot, a Cambridge-based marketing software-as-a-service venture, has started a new initiative to handsomely compensate anyone who can refer a developer friend. “If you do, and we end up hiring them, we’ll thank you with a big, fat check for $30,000,” its Refer A Dev program promises. 

Who needs a boring office park when you have a 65,000-square-foot glass dome?

If you’ve ever dreamed of working in a lush, greenery-filled dome, consider moving to Seattle. That’s where Amazon is building a biosphere (made out of three intersecting domes) alongside a new skyscraper project. Plans for the 65,000 square foot structure, unveiled earlier this month, call for a general temperature range of 68 to 72 degrees and plants from high-elevation climates (that’s the "montane ecologies" below) that can thrive in the weather.

Limited partners had a chance to praise and lambaste the venture industry during a no-holds-barred panel at the National Venture Capital Association’s VentureScape annual meeting last week. They delivered more rants than raves.

A sample: “The truth is many of you in this room won’t get to raise another fund,” said Jamey Sperans of Morgan Stanley.

The relentless parade of new technologies is unfolding on many fronts. Almost every advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of “next big things” grows ever longer. Not every emerging technology will alter the business or social landscape—but some truly do have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange value pools. It is therefore critical that business and policy leaders understand which technologies will matter to them and prepare accordingly.

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.

An engineering graduate, aged about 22, is already unfit to become a startup employee, said an entrepreneur to me last month. He is too old, too tired and has too much baggage.

“Really! What are you saying?”

His logic goes something like this: Say you finished college and most of your peers are at large services companies like Accenture. By this time, you’ve invested quite a bit of time and energy on the degree.

Cool ideas for new businesses are a dime a dozen. That — plus all the new tech enablers such as instant websites and e-commerce platforms — makes it deceptively easy to start up a new venture. The bigger challenge is to start up a big venture that just happens to be small at first.

Fortunately, real entrepreneurs are growth-obsessed: they cringe when you call them "small." In fact, I don't think you can call something entrepreneurship unless it is driven by big vision, big aspiration, and a burning desire and ability to grow — that is a key message in my new book, Worthless, Impossible and Stupid (due out in July). In the book, I tell the stories of scale-up entrepreneurs from around the world, and how they beat the odds to make a mark on their markets.

I met Slovenian entrepreneur, Sandi Cesko, in 2007 when his Ljubljana-based multi-channel retail operation, Studio Moderna, had about $70 million in sales. Not bad. I met him again two months ago: six years later he had scaled up by a factor of ten — all the result of organic growth — and employs over 6000 people. Even better.

Scale-up means growth, and growth means jobs, wealth, and tax revenues. In a recent post on HBR.org, I called attention to the fact that we entrepreneurship promoters are too focused on start-up, and need to re-balance the dialog to support scale-up as well. That dialog includes all stakeholders, from the entrepreneurs themselves to investors to government policymakers. For you entrepreneurs, the challenges of scale-up are first and foremost the responsibility of managements and boards. Don't go looking to public officials for help in growing your venture ten times bigger. But you policymakers can still play a key role in fostering an entrepreneurship ecosystem that supports scale-up entrepreneurs. So here are some suggestions, most of which by the way, happen to be essentially cost-free:

Summary: The White House issued an Open Data during the first week of May. Last year the FCC detailed how valuable its open data policy had been to the country in a case study of broadband mapping put together by the Woodrow WIlson Center. The executive summary and a video provide an introduction to what the agency learned.

In the Broadband Data Improvement Act of 2008, Congress directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to produce an interactive and search- able map detailing broadband avail- ability nationwide. This mandate was part of a comprehensive effort toward utilizing broadband to drive economic growth and improve social welfare. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the National Broadband Plan, proposed in 2010, were also part of this effort. The former authorized funding to provide focused broadband invest- ments to reinvigorate an economy that had faced numerous challenges. The latter identified broadband as a vital ingredient in lasting infrastruc- ture improvement. Through these actions, Congress clearly recog- nized that Internet connectivity has become a vital part of our society for all members. To ensure that no one is left behind, it is necessary to pinpoint the gaps in Internet avail- ability across the United States and to identify priorities for action.

If you think it's hard being an entrepreneur trying to raise money from a venture capitalist, consider the challenges facing the VC. It's typical for a VC to meet with between 500 and 1,000 entrepreneurs a year and invest in two or three companies at most. That means investors -- who may take about 60 minutes with each entrepreneur -- meet with a lot of people whose companies they never fund.

But just because you have someone's attention for an hour, doesn't mean the pitch is going well. In the pitches I have listened to over the last 15 years, I've shared the tension VCs feel when they want to shut down the conversation after a few minutes but feel obliged, out of politeness, to stay silent. Within the first three minutes of meeting an entrepreneur, a VC decides whether the next 57 minutes are going to be excruciating or whether he will want to spend four more hours with the entrepreneur.