According to the consensus, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) will fall in popularity as young people grow up and demand chemical medicines.

But Morgan Stanley's Bin Li disagrees.

"TCM is becoming more popular.  According to CEIC, growth in the TCM industry is higher than in the western medicine industry. TCM industry sales reached Rmb423bn in 2011, representing a 24% CAGR over 2003-11, versus 21% for western medicines. Based on our AlphaWise survey, nearly 30% of doctors trained in western medicine use TCM as a first-line therapy and 46% use TCM alone or together with western medicines to treat patients. Because TCM has a long history in China, many Chinese people, including the younger generation, prefer to use TCM to combat chronic diseases. Given the strong endorsement from physicians, we believe demand for TCM will remain high, as drug choices are generally made based on doctors’ recommendations."

It’s dangerous to rely on your job description to tell you what to do, or to wait for your manager to fine tune your job. It’s much safer, valuable, and satisfying to do it yourself. Here's how.

Your job description gets stale the moment when it is first given to you. Then you need figure out how to evolve it. As we come up on the end of the year, it is a great time to evaluate your role, your company, and the market relative to your job description and your career.

Don’t give this extra work of figuring out how your job needs to evolve to your boss or wait for direction. That is both a danger and a missed opportunity to stand out and contribute more value. Sort it out on your own and make a recommendation.

Companies awarded the Phase I SBIR grant can apply for more non-dilutive financing. With funding amounts of less than $150K, these companies have developed their innovation based on leading-edge technology. Soon after this proving process, they can consider applying for the Phase II award – a $1,000,000 subsequent grant. Yet, company leaders may wonder, “Will it be worth the effort?”

“Free government money? Why NOT make the attempt at winning the Phase II award?”

The Phase II process requires extensive efforts to define, plan, and prepare a professional quality document outlining the commercial potential of their technological innovation. Inherent in the development of this document is a strong momentum in building the business structure and network to make that plan succeed. Certainly, there are challenges to relying on grants to fund a startup or new business venture. Time – this is not fast-turnaround financing, it takes time. Money – amounts awarded are supplementary in nature, other sources will be necessary.

Reaching adulthood certainly takes longer than it did a generation ago, but new research shows one way that parents are contributing to the delay.

A national study found that college students think 25 years old is the “right age” to get married, while a majority of parents feel 25 is still a little too soon. So it’s no coincidence that when Justin Bieber said he’d like to wed by 25, Oprah Winfrey urged him to wait longer.

“The assumption has been that the younger generation wants to delay marriage and parents are hassling them about when they would get married,” said Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University and lead author of the study. “We actually found the opposite, that the parental generation is showing the ‘slow down’ mindset more than the young adults.”

If you want to be a better communicator, take a moment to consider these five tips, then give them a try.

1.)   Be Concise:  Don’t use 100 words to say something you can say in 50 words.  It’s easy to become enamored of your own voice, which may cause you to drone on and lessen your effectiveness as a communicator.  I’ll leave it at that.

2.)   Have A Point:  Don’t speak for the sake of speaking.  Have a point, especially when you’re trying to be persuasive or explain something.  It’s one thing if you’re having a coffee or a beer with a friend; the importance of having a point in such a scenario is diminished.  In a business or teaching situation on the other hand, it’s very important to have a point in mind before you start talking.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The Obama administration's top immigration official says his agency is working to attract and keep more foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs who are seeking to start companies in the U.S., a move he hopes will help the nation retain its edge in an increasingly competitive global economy.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service Director Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged on Wednesday that his agency "has not been especially nimble" to adapt to fast-paced changes in the business landscape, even though it has been quick to respond to the humanitarian landscape.

When Startup Canada issued a national challenge to entrepreneurs and enterprise organizations to help mentor 10,000 Canadians during Global Entrepreneurship Week, it wanted to turn heads and showcase the value mentorship can have on both local and national levels.

Today, as Startup Canada names British Columbia’s Women’s Enterprise Centre as its 2012 Canadian Mentorship Challenge winner for overall reach, impact and inspiration, Laurel Douglas hopes this is just the start of something big for BC entrepreneurs.  

“One of the takeaways I got from this is that we’re going to have to host more events,” said Douglas, CEO of Women’s Enterprise Centre, from the organization’s head office in Kelowna. “There’s a pent up demand for mentoring.”

Should business leaders be political? Let me rephrase — should business leaders be involved in politics?

There is a difference, and it's not just a semantic one. At least in the US, we seemed to have developed a sort of allergy to the idea of a CEO getting into policy-shaping. Our only real debate on the issue has largely been confined to the issue of campaign finance reform, and there have really been just two dominant sides to that debate: either corporations are people (my friend) and money is speech, or business is a corrupting influence, a "special interest" that needs to be kept under quarantine (as if Washington DC were as pure as new-fallen snow).

For startups, your investor is about much more than money.

By Ricky Pelletier, contributor

FORTUNE --Taking a VC investment should not be viewed as a transaction – it should be approached as a partnership. After all, transactions are one-time in nature whereas partnerships are an ongoing concern. Changing one's thinking around this will not only shape the type of partner you select, and but also how you go about selecting them.

When a deal is viewed as a "transaction," there is really only one key component – value maximization. This type of mentality should occur in situations like:

The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) is seeking a new President and CEO to expand its organization and members. The organization seeks an inspirational individual who can further the organization’s global leadership in advancing business incubation/acceleration and entrepreneurship.

The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) is the world's leading organization advancing Business Incubation/Acceleration and entrepreneurship. It provides thousands of professionals with the information, education, advocacy and networking resources to bring excellence to the process of assisting early-stage companies worldwide. Founded in 1985, the association currently has over 2,100 members from more than 900 incubators around the world.

Candidates must have industry knowledge and the ability to work with a Board of Directors to accomplish strategic goals; attract and engage members, sponsors, and stakeholders; advocate for the industry; and effectively manage in a small team environment. The successful candidate must also have excellent leadership, communication and interpersonal skills that can accommodate the organization’s diverse economic and cultural constituency. Experience developing new revenue streams is required.

Detailed job description can be found at: http://www.nbia.org/job_postings/ceo.php

Deadline: Mon., Dec. 3, 2012

Creativity makes problem-solving and accomplishing projects that much easier. (Plus, it’s just really fun!)

Carla Sonheim, an illustrator, workshop instructor and author of the new book The Art of Silliness, compared neglecting your creativity to driving with a flat tire. “You might get where you’re going, but — oh! — how much smoother, faster, and painless it would be with all four tires inflated.”

After their daughter Annie was born, Gail McGovern and her husband established what came to be known as the "kitchen calendar rule." At the time, McGovern worked for AT&T overseeing 10,000 employees; her husband ran a large unit of Hewlett-Packard. They both needed to travel regularly for work, but one of them also needed to be home for Annie.

"We had two monster jobs," recalls McGovern, who today is CEO of the American Red Cross. "In the beginning, we fought about who got to take a (particular work) trip. Then we instituted the kitchen calendar rule: Whoever booked it first got to take the trip."

One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier.

Free: Startup tools If you’re building a startup, the Startup Tools tab on the top of this page has curated links to hundreds of startup resources.  Specific links are:

A list of startup tools is here Market research tools to help you figure out the size of the opportunity your startup is pursuing, are here Some of the best advice on founding and running a startup from other smart voices are here Updates and suggestions for tools I’ve missed are welcomed on the Startup Tools comments page.

For three days last month, at eight randomly chosen times a day, my phone buzzed and Google asked me: “What did you want to know recently?” The answers I provided were part of an experiment involving me and about 150 other people. It was designed to help the world’s biggest search company understand how it can deliver information to users that they’d never have thought to search for online.

Billions of Google searches are made every day—for all kinds of things—but we still look elsewhere for certain types of information, and the company wants to know what those things are.

On November 14, 2012, TechLaunch — the first tech accelerator supported by the state of New Jersey — graduated its first class of companies during a Demo Day that clearly showed how an intensive education and mentoring program can help entrepreneurs turn an idea into a business.

It goes without saying that the 10 teams enrolled in TechLaunch have come a long way since they presented their ideas, hoping to be accepted, to Mario Casabona and his group at the accelerator.

Some background: in the summer of 2011, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA), in conjunction with the New Jersey tech and angel investment communities, devised the idea for the Edison Innovation Tech Accelerator Initiative. Under the plan, the state would contribute $150,000 per year for three years to partially finance a program through which innovative tech start-ups could be nurtured and receive funding. An industry partner would contribute equity and administer the program.

Today, there seem to be more business accelerators than there are startups to fill their classes and cohorts. It seems that not a week goes by without the launch of another accelerator or seed starter fund. In fact, as Peter Relan said in a recent post (riffing on Chris Dixon), accelerators have become an industry segment in their own right. He also goes so far as to surmise that — just as it is for startups — 90 percent of accelerators are likely to fail.

Nonetheless, even if they fail, accelerators are still essential to the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems not only because they provide a petri dish for innovation, but because they create jobs. In an article on AllThingsD today, Jed Christiansen contends that the fundamental value of seed accelerators lies in their ability to both drive economic growth and foster an entrepreneurial culture within local communities.

University of Michigan has topped its public peers in research and development spending for the third year in a row, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Ann Arbor school spent $1.28 billion on research during the 2010-11 fiscal year, up 8 percent from the previous year, according to the NSF. Because NSF and U-M use different accounting standards, their tallies for research spending vary slightly. U-M reported a $1.24 billion research enterprise in 2011- lower than that reported by the NSF. The university, home to roughly 43,400 graduate and undergraduate students, ranked second among all universities in research spending, with Johns Hopkins University in Maryland ranked first.

Most of us suffer from it — and most of us don’t take it seriously. Yet back pain costs a fortune in terms of lost productivity, and a lot of the time, it’s our own fault. I’ve suffered from back, neck and shoulder pain for over twenty years now, and I’m only too aware of how my tech-related habits are a major contributor. My chiropractor loves me; my bank balance not so much.

The costs really are significant. Back pain sets the UK back around GBP5-billion (US$2.27-billion) a year. Even in an emerging market economy like South Africa it costs R2-billion (US$22.7-million) a year. So it has a substantial impact — and that’s not to mention neck and shoulder pain and associated tension headaches.

With the passing of President Obama’s JOBS Act this past April, the word of the day seems to be crowdfunding. While this concept has arguably been around for centuries, it is still formally recognized as a new industry to many consumers, particularly those outside the United States. Crowdfunding is by definition, “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.”  Check out this video to get a clearer idea of the step by step process of crowdfunding.

In a seemingly nonstop recession wave, small businesses are struggling more than ever to stay afloat, and entrepreneurs are not facing great odds. Crowdfunding offers these individuals a chance at success, by showcasing their businesses and projects to the entire world.

A young child makes his way home through a dense forest.  He’s keeping close to the trail when he notices some unusual bushes off to the side.  Peeking through the shrubs, he realizes that if he could walk directly through them, he would be headed in a direct line home.  Wielding his trusty pocketknife, he begins to cut away at the growth.  With the first small trees out of the way, the young boy is dismayed to see even denser vegetation behind them.  He doesn’t give up.  He hacks and slashes and begins to make his own trail.  Eventually, he’s cut right through the thick forest and arrives home in time for a pot roast.  Later, when other children are hiking through the forest, they see his home made trail, look at it in admiration, and step onto it.