Knowledge@Wharton: Vivek, I wonder if you could tell our audience about your own immigrant experience and the role it played in shaping your research and your book.

Vivek Wadhwa: I was in New York in the 1960s as a child, and being in America is quite an experience. I left (the U.S.) in the late sixties, but I'd always wanted to come back. The first chance I got was in 1980, when my father got transferred to the consulate in New York City. I joined Xerox, and within a year and a half of coming here, I was able to get a green card. In my mind, the day I got my green card, I became an American. I started thinking like an American, behaving like an American, working like an American. There was no other country for me in the world. It was that easy.

When Pete Kistler was a student at Syracuse University in 2008, a digital doppelganger with the same name and a history of drug dealing kept him from getting an internship.  Later, after realizing that it was a Google search that was hindering his career prospects, he and two former classmates launched Brand Yourself, a DIY online reputation management tool that enables anyone to improve their personal search results.

Now, a handful of U.S. colleges are snapping up the program for their own students, to make sure that digital blemishes don’t discourage offers from potential employers.

All venture capitalists are not created equal. The common denominator in our fundraising venture capital equation is capital, or investment dollars. That is the “what” in our equation — the known. Yet there are several variables: the “how,” the “where” and, to a certain extent, the “why” — which all lead us to the “who.”

Answering these questions is a process of applying a filter against the universe of venture firms to determine the subset that is most likely to have an interest in your opportunity. It is essential for entrepreneurs to do their homework in advance. Time is your most precious commodity and you can waste a lot of motion while creating little or no momentum if you don’t approach the venture community with a deliberate plan.

After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”

In the end, the money that towns across America gave General Motors did not matter. When the automaker released a list of factories it was closing during bankruptcy three years ago, communities that had considered themselves G.M.’s business partners were among the targets.

For years, mayors and governors anxious about local jobs had agreed to G.M.’s demands for cash rewards, free buildings, worker training and lucrative tax breaks. As late as 2007, the company was telling local officials that these sorts of incentives would “further G.M.’s strong relationship” with them and be a “win/win situation,” according to town council notes from one Michigan community.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear, for a second time, a lawsuit challenging patents held by Myriad Genetics on human genes implicated in breast cancer.

The court, in an order today, said it would consider only the question of whether human genes can be patented, meaning it plans to dive straight into one of the most contentious — and elusive — questions in patent law, which is the difference between an invention and a natural phenomena. Opponents of the patents say they prevent researchers from even examining naturally occurring genetic material that companies have patented. Supporters say the law allows patents on any process that isolates a valuable substance, even if it’s naturally occurring, citing industrial processes to create useful products out of hydrocarbons and plant material.

Art Geigel and Christopher Armenio illustrated the "game changing" quality of their technology by showing off the feature that first impressed them: Its ability to pour a beer.

A few taps on a touchscreen activated the software application, which talked to the tap, which dispensed eight ounces of Great Lakes Christmas Ale into a plastic cup at a demonstration table.

North Carolina's Rex Healthcare has joined the growing number of health care organizations—from large systems to smaller community hospitals—that are launching venture funds, Dave Chase writes at Forbes.

Venture funds were initially the province of deep-pocketed health systems, like HCA and Dignity Health, or academic medical centers. But more hospitals are investing in venture funds or launching their own in hopes of getting ahead of the industry's changing dynamics, as well as planning for their organizations' rising reliance on IT and medical devices.

If you talk to startup CEOs about raising capital, you get the idea that they won't give up control of their company to just anyone. If entrepreneurs are going to sell a piece of their company, they want “value added" from their investors.

I learned this from the startup CEOs I interviewed for my new book, Hungry Start-up Strategy. There's a new generation of venture capitalists now populating Silicon Valley.

After talking with hundreds of startup teams around the world, from the ones we are accelerating at 1871 in Chicago to a new stealth startup in India, I have found that, sometimes the best advice is to tell them to stop meeting so often at their favorite cafe/coffee shop, and instead, get out there and  work on the actual startup idea!  Waiting until everything is “just right”  can be a entrepreneurial trap. In reality, is OK to shift and pivot along the way–some of the most successful startups have. A great Sketchbook video from our friends at Kauffman Foundation puts this into a simple perspective…”just go be an entrepreneur”. Enjoy!

Mohali (Punjab), Dec 1 — It was a promise delivered floor by floor. In just 48 hours, an entrepreneur has constructed a 10-floor building in this suburban town in Punjab.

The red and grey facade building, Instacon, stood tall on an industrial plot in Mohali, 10 km from Chandigarh, Saturday, two days after Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal had laid its foundation stone.

Work on the building's construction started around 4.30 p.m. Thursday. By Friday evening, the building saw seven floors in place.

Have you ever tried to visit a South Pacific island near New Caledonia called Sandy Island? A team of Australian scientists attempted just that and found no sign of the supposedly sizeable landmass. Instead, the team from the University of Sydney were greeted by open ocean and nothing more.

In the 21st century, stories like this are rare. Exciting tales of exploration surface from time to time, like Curiosity’s ongoing scientific expedition to Mars. Such occurrences on Earth are now fleeting – it feels like we have discovered almost everything there is to discover. So, maybe it shouldn’t prove too surprising that the Australian scientists actually ‘undiscovered’ some charted and documented territory.

If you just ate candy off the floor, I’ve got some bad news: you probably just consumed a whole lot of germs too.

You probably knew that but ate it anyway because it was only on the ground for a short amount of time. Well, the “5-second rule” isn’t really true because contact with the floor spreads germs to food immediately. And think about this: 93 percent of shoes have fecal matter on them, so … ew.

Venture capitalists are paying more attention to the structure of the marketing teams they invest in. Why? Because marketing plays an increasingly influential role in the success of their portfolio companies. To ensure that the marketing department can generate the kind of leads that drive sales, they want to see a particular profile in a marketing exec.

Whether you’re a company seeking venture capital or a marketing exec looking to make the leap to a startup or expansion-stage company, it’s important to understand what VCs look for in a marketing leader. At Software Advice, I recently caught up with a couple of VCs to ask them what their ideal marketing candidate profile looks like. Here are five characteristics they prioritize in a candidate.

Kickstarter's high-profile launch in the UK last month marks yet another step towards ubiquity for a thoroughly 21st century funding model. Driven by the simplicity of making online payments, crowdfunding sidesteps the limitations of traditional investment channels, instead harnessing the collective power of thousands of small-scale donations from the general public.

Kickstarter might have played host to more than $400 million in crowdfunded pledges since its launch in 2009, but one glance at the site's top ten funded projects – video games, fancy consumer tech, more video games – gives an indication of the relatively narrow scope of the crowdfunding model. Crowdfunding's main niche remains funding creative projects like albums, films and games, where the passion of fans can prompt huge surges in mass donation to bankroll new projects. But as this grass-roots funding method gains traction, new possibilities are beginning to open up.

With 18,500 jobs caught up in the liquidation of Irving, Texas-based Hostess Inc., a group of local entrepreneurs' crowd funding concept could offer help to the employees who may soon find themselves without work.

The group also hopes to make a statement about the new funding process.

Royal Oak-based crowd funding firm eRaise.com LLC recently launched its "DoughforHostess.com" campaign, which has a goal of $500 million.

Cindy Kim, Wharton MBA 2013, Interned with Memebox in Seoul, South Korea.

How did you find the position? I found the position at Memebox through a VC friend of mine in Seoul.

What was your motivation for working at a start-up this summer?

I wanted to work at an early-stage startup over the summer in order to gain insightful exposure to the daily operations and growing pains of a startup. I felt that the lessons I would learn at Memebox would be invaluable for when I started my own company.

While lack of resources is not always the problem, sometimes money matters. Cases in point are the numerous federal agencies that play a key role in innovation but that are woefully underfunded. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office used to be the envy of other nations for its effectiveness and efficiency. But today a backlog of more than 700,000 patent applications at the USPTO means that most applicants will wait at least three years for a decision.

Likewise, there have been increased delays at the Food and Drug Administration for drug and device approval and difficulties in upgrading the scientific expertise needed to expeditiously and effectively evaluate new drugs and biological submissions. The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office brings relatively few cases before the World Trade Organization to challenge the mercantilist practices of other nations. And the U.S. statistical system needs to do a better job of providing the kinds of data that would help policy-makers understand the true condition of the U.S. innovation system.

The U.S. biomedical “innovation ecosystem”—encompassing the universe of stakeholders and activities directed toward understanding disease areas and developing novel treatments for them—is in a period of stress. As noted in the September release of a report  by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), significant scientific advances over the last 25 years have moved us toward a better understanding of the biologic underpinnings of some of the most debilitating diseases that affect the U.S. population. While novel treatment options for many of these disease areas have been developed over this time period, recent history has demonstrated that advances in basic research have not consistently translated into substantial progress in the production of novel treatments and cures. The rate at which new biomedical products are entering the market has remained relatively constant over the last few decades, while the cost and time associated with the development of new products appears to have steadily increased. Seeing the advances in novel treatments that have been made during this time may lead many to believe that increased funding for early stage research and development can relieve the stress on the innovation ecosystem. In today’s economy, however, this notion may well prove unachievable as additional public funds are unlikely to be available and private investment is constricted. These trends point toward the need for novel strategies to improve productivity in biomedical innovation and efficiently move medical products from scientific discovery to clinical practice.

Nine startups from Montréal accelerator FounderFuel’s recent graduates are coming to Silicon Valley. The temporary move is funded by the Consulate General of Canada in San Francisco, and the goal is to help the startups build relationships, raise capital, and grow faster as a result of living and working in the startup capital of the world.

As part of the Canadian Technology Accelerator program, each team will be getting fully paid office space in one of four facilities: Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, RocketSpace and CTA@Mission Bay in San Francisco, or Environmental Business Cluster in San Jose. In addition, the startups will be introduced to mentors and potential partners in the Valley.