Rapid urbanization is propelling growth across emerging markets and shifting the world’s economic balance toward the east and south. By 2025, it will create a “consumer class” with more than four billion people, up from a billion in 1990. Nearly half will live in the emerging world’s cities, which are set to inject almost $25 trillion into the global economy. Yet business leaders mostly ignore them. To learn about 440 largely obscure urban areas that will account for close to 50 percent of expected global GDP growth between 2010 and 2025, read “Unlocking the potential of emerging-market cities” (September 2012). Then browse through an interactive map to find city-specific highlights about these new economic hot spots.

The Association of University Research Parks (AURP), the world's leading network of university research, science and technology park professionals, invites you to share your knowledge, expertise and experience by presenting at the 2013 International Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This year's theme is Inventing the Future.    

Proven engines for economic growth and development, university research parks influence their communities in significant ways. AURP's 2013 annual conference, hosted by The University City Science Center, will feature experts who will examine university research park best practices and the strategies which will develop a knowledge-based economy by increasing ties between university, research parks, government, and industry partners.    

Likeable Media CEO Carrie Kerpen argues for measured decision-making when it comes to hiring--even when you're talking startups--so you don't get burned by employees who don't work out. One woman's cautionary tale.

I recently read Danny Boyce's piece in Fast Company titled, "Why Hire Slow, Fire Fast Is A Bunch of BS ." As someone who has worked both in corporate America and has launched a startup, I respectfully disagree.

I remember the first time I ever had to fire someone. She was a 55-year-old radio salesperson. I was a brand-new manager, and my boss was on maternity leave, and had asked that I let her go, as she wasn't making her quota. I was terrified, and delivered the good old "this is actually better for you in the long run" speech. Afterwards, I felt a combination of relief and nausea, and I called my business mentor, who told me--"If firing people ever feels to easy, get the heck out of the business. You've been doing it too long." I think that's true no matter how necessary the fire is--it sucks to let people go.

Do you cringe when you see a Hotmail address? Laugh at terrible email signatures? It's time to take a closer look at email as a branding opportunity; here are some of the best and the worst.

It’s something you take for granted, something seemingly trivial, even mundane. When executed thoughtfully, however, it makes a splash. It says, “This guy is sharp--I want to work with him!”

What is this opportunity, obvious but overlooked? It’s the bookends of your emails: your address and signature block--often, the first and last thing your recipients will see. For better or worse, your email bookends are powerful purveyors of your brand. What are yours conveying about you?

This chart shows the pharmaceutical drugs with the most patents still in force.

The drugs with the most active patents are COMBIVENT RESPIMAT, KALETRA, ADVAIR HFA,FLOVENT HFA, VIVITROL, THALOMID, VYVANSE, REVLIMID, VENTOLIN HFA, andCHILDREN’S ALLEGRA ALLERGY.

In the recent past, there has been a spurt in grassroots innovation utilising the traditional knowledge bank. Grassroots innovation is ideation and development with only frugal resources at the innovator’s disposal. India has a distinctive expertise in developing and marketing frugal innovations to the world. An outstanding example of frugal innovation would be Dr. Devi Shetty who made cardiac surgeries extremely affordable by applying mass production techniques without compromising on the standard of healthcare. A more endearing term used by us Indians is jugaad innovation.

Most recently, BBC documented the success story of a farmer in rural Haryana who on an average used to lose 30-40% of his produce owing to its perishable nature. To counter this problem he developed a machine to process the produce in his backyard and market it immediately – a cost-effective local solution using frugal resources to solve a local problem. With the help of National Innovation Foundation (NIF) the farmer patented his innovation and now markets it in Africa and Latin America. Such innovations may occur at a farm, in a manufacturing unit, or any such environment with a scope to creatively alter a product or service to increase its efficacy i.e creation of value added technologies. NIF operates across a diverse set- from the farmer to young inventors innovating gadgets for women’s safety. To accelerate such innovations, the Foundation runs a Grassroots to Global program. Facilitating the use of our indigenous knowledge bank i.e. identifying, nurturing, sustaining and scaling up such innovations are NIF’s driving principles. More specifically, it helps innovators get due rewards, in the diffusion of existing technologies through various channels, and providing innovators with risk capital for incubation (Micro Venture Innovation Fund at NIF has provided risk capital for 178 projects). NIF was launched in 2000 with the aim to develop, nurture, and protect emerging innovations at the grassroots level in India. It has assisted in filing more than 555 patents, out of which 39 have been granted in India and four in the USA, which is a commendable figure. Prof. Anil Gupta of IIM-A, a prolific figure in the grassroots innovation field heads the Foundation.

Clive Mayne, Managing Partner at Exetec Consulting writes about how the UK is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to commercialising our technology innovations, and what can be done to change this.

Rightly or wrongly, a perception has emerged, in recent years, whereby entrepreneurs of growth companies in the UK technology sector, believe that seeking and obtaining investment, and the commercialisation of that technology, is getting far more difficult.

The widely held view amongst British industry practitioners, is that in order to seek the necessary funding needed for R&D, production and commercialisation, firms need to be based in the US where funding is readily available from investors who are less risk-averse and more in tune with IT and technological innovation.

Entrepreneurship is all about leading – leading customers to a new product or service, leading a startup team to peak performance, and leading a new business to the market opportunity, while providing maximum return to stakeholders. Most entrepreneurs feel they have innate leadership talents, but struggle with how to nurture these abilities and measure their effectiveness.

Since I believe that a large part of leadership is personal confidence and initiative, I was drawn to a new leadership book by Robert S. Murray, “It’s Already Inside.” His focus and belief is that anyone can nurture their innate leadership abilities, to achieve business and life success. The key is learning from the life lessons of others, something you never get in classrooms.

On April 11-13, 2013, 42 top university teams from around the world will compete in front of over 250 judges for more than $1 million in prizes.   On April 13, 2013, we will crown the 2013 World Champion of the Rice Business Plan Competition, the richest and largest intercollegiate business plan competition in the world.  

Deadline to apply is Monday, February 18, 2013 at 5pm CST.  The Rice Business Plan Competition is open to all currently enrolled university students from around the world who are seeking funding for their new venture.   Simply submit your startup company's executive summary to apply.   Forty-two finalist teams will invited to compete in person at Rice University in Houston, Texas on April 11-13, 2013. Apply Today!!

An interview with Daniel Pink, author of To Sell Is Human and the article A Radical Prescription for Sales.

Social enterprise is great and has grown, but I think it could have spread faster and done far more if we hadn't tried to define it. Right now in a room somewhere a group of social enterprise advocates are wasting their time arguing about what social enterprise is. You can understand why "What is social enterprise?" is a question often asked, but after years of trying to pin it down the result has been confusion, stilted growth and dogged disagreement.

We attempt definitions because we want certainty and so we grab the social enterprise tape measure and try to describe something tangible. But social enterprise is an activity, not a thing. It constantly evolves, adapts and grows and so a degree of ambiguity is inevitable, indeed it is part of the attraction and dynamism of this social revolution.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve covered many aspects of guiding students in their use of information and communication technologies for their courses.

For example, Ethan discussed electronic communications policies. Amy wrote about encouraging students’ problem-solving skills. Ryan covered digital etiquette in class. Jason offered 5 tips for dealing with gadgets in the classroom. And Billie provided advice regarding technology policies on course syllabi.

This semester, I’ve begun maintaining a list of tips and links under the heading “Basic Technology Advice.” The more frequently I teach in a computer classroom, the more frequently I identify things that students do (or don’t do) that can make using a computer a slower or more frustrating process than it needs to be. One example is the use of the keyboard instead of the mouse. I was somewhat surprised that most students don’t use keyboard shortcuts for commons tasks like copy, cut, paste, and save (clicking, instead, on the application menus at the top of the screen). But I was really surprised that few of them knew to use ALT-TAB to quickly switch between applications in Windows. It’s not that using keyboard commands represents some kind of super-seekrit expertise; rather, it’s that tasks can take so much longer when you rely on the mouse (over and over and over again) instead of relying on keyboard shortcuts.

"Would you take a look at my business plan?"

Some member of our staff at Echoing Green, an angel investor and grantmaker in social enterprise, hears this request every week. And we are often happy to review these start-up plans — which include the typical elements such as a product description, competitive analysis, estimate of market size, and projected financials. But we are interested in much more than these traditional plans. We use other criteria to find new people and ideas that can create large-scale social change.

In short, the business plan is overrated.

Like the vast majority of start-ups, most new social enterprises are bootstrapping efforts. As Amar Bhide said in "Bootstrap Finance: The Art of Start-ups" (a 20-year-old HBR article that is an uncanny precursor to today's "lean startup" meme), traditional business planning processes are less relevant to bootstrappers — where resilience trumps planning and energy trumps experience.

Willingness to take a risk is the hallmark of a serious entrepreneur. That’s why one of the first questions that potential investors ask is “How much of your own money, and friends and family, have you put into the new business?” If you won’t risk yours, you won’t get investors to risk theirs.

A while back I read the book “When Turtles Fly” by Nikki Stone, an Olympic champion, which explains this well. She provides many examples of success stories from entrepreneurs to Olympians. She proclaims that if you want to be successful, you need to be soft on the inside, have a hard shell, and willing to stick your neck out (“Turtle Effect”).

Success. It's a relative term. Essentially, it refers to the accomplishment of a goal or aim. For some, that might mean finding happiness or wealth. For others, it could mean improving other people's lives.

So, what are the keys to success for technology entrepreneurs? Arguably, all these things -- with some innovation, creativity and fast growth sprinkled in. When interviewing some of the industry's most significant players, we've made it a point to pick their brains about what's key to being a successful tech entrepreneur and launching a successful tech startup.

The news that electric car company Fisker Automotive could potentially be acquired by Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor for about $425 million reminded me of an article that’s been eating at me for some time.

VentureBeat published the Top 15 venture capital deals of 2012 where Fisker was rated as the year’s “top” deal. This top rating despite the fact that Fisker has raised more than $1 billion in capital and is now likely to be sold for a fraction of that amount.

So what’s with the article? To be fair to the writer, the list is actually a compilation of the year’s largest venture capital funding events based on data provided by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and National Venture Capital Assocation. But the headline pulls no punches and proudly equates size with best. Yes, size matters but in reality, the larger a deal the less likely it is to deliver outstanding venture returns.

Qualys founder and CEO Philippe Courtot has been leading companies to multimillion-dollar exits for decades. He just did it again in September when he took Qualys public, raising $72 million for the company. But along the way, as he's invested in startups and advised their founders, he's seen entrepreneurs continuously making the same mistakes that crash their companies, he says.

Steve Jobs was one of those entrepreneurs who seemed universally either loved or hated, but not many will argue with his ability to innovate in the technology product arena over the years. He was instrumental in creating Apple, which has pioneered a dazzling array of new products, and even surpassed Microsoft, to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

The number of angel investors in the U.S. has jumped 60 percent since 2002, and the number of dollars they’ve invested in companies has gone up even faster. Not to mention that a few new angel groups have sprouted just within the last year to invest especially in life science companies.

Given all of this activity, Cleveland non-profit entrepreneurship group JumpStart Inc. (disclosure: JumpStart is an investor in MedCity Media) gathered a panel comprising two local technology entrepreneurs who have raised angel funding and the manager of an angel fund to talk about how entrepreneurs should prepare for this kind of investing and what they should expect when a deal goes through.

Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Michigan Strategic Fund, Detroit business incubators Bizdom and TechTown are partnering with Invest Detroit on a new initiative called the Detroit Technology Exchange (DTX). DTX will consist of programs geared toward strengthening Detroit’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, attracting and retaining talent, and getting investment money flowing through the local startup pipeline.

“The Detroit Technology Exchange partners are coming together to solve Detroit’s macroeconomic challenges, instead of saying we’re partners and taking a chunk of money and then going our own separate way again,” explains Leslie Smith, TechTown’s president and CEO. “The talent and pipeline were needs we all agreed on.”