In good design and branding, we talk a lot about “simplicity,” so much so that the word begins to feel like a lukewarm cup of coffee on our tongues. But the Siegel+Gale Global Brand Simplicity Index attempts to actually define simplicity by polling more than 6,000 consumers on the brands they find most simple (from the clarity of promotional materials to the usability of websites to the actual experience with the company’s products). The report then quantifies simplicity’s dollar value across industries. Their findings are enlightening.

The Lit C-1 doesn’t look like any car you’ve ever seen, but it still can go 120 miles per hour and gets 200 miles on each charge. Will people embrace the futuristic design enough to make the startup a success? 

The first thing you see upon walking into Lit Motors’ three-story warehouse in San Francisco is the shell of a Land Rover Defender. It is, oddly enough, the inspiration behind the two-wheeled electric vehicle startup. When he was 23, Lit Motors Founder Danny Kim started a car production company and began the process of converting two Land Rover Defenders into biodiesel powerhouses that could get up to 32 miles per gallon. But then one of the Land Rovers nearly killed the now 33-year-old Kim when a vehicle stand failed while he was welding something onto the chassis. His next thought: Why do vehicles have to be so big and heavy?

Award winners highlight best practices in university-based economic development

CHATTANOOGA, TN - October 29, 2012 - The University Economic Development Association (UEDA) announced its 2012 Awards of Excellence winners during its Annual Summit held this month in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Awards of Excellence Program recognizes UEDA members who are transforming their campuses into engines of economic prosperity through leading edge initiatives in five categories: 1) Community Connected Campus: initiatives that promote the physical development of quality connected campuses and their surrounding communities; 2) Research and Analysis: initiatives that enhance the capacity of colleges and universities to provide new forms of research and tools for community, economic and workforce development practitioners; 3) Leadership and Collaboration: initiatives that support the development of collaborative economic development strategies and the leaders required to implement them; 4) Innovation and Entrepreneurship: initiatives designed to support startups, high-growth companies and clusters within a region; and 5) Talent Development: initiatives that promote the development of 21st-century skills.

The 2012 UEDA Awards of Excellence projects and winners are:

Community Connected Campus Category

“Kemper Military School Redevelopment Project” submitted by University of Missouri University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (UCIE)

The University of Missouri developed an innovative proposal for the historic, largely abandoned Kemper Military School, Boonville, Mo., repurposing it as an open source campus, maintaining its historic character while bringing jobs, students and economic activity to Boonville. The University facilitated town hall meetings, assisted in visioning and initiated discussions with higher education executives. As a result, State Fair Community College (SFCC), Sedalia, Mo., began offering classes on campus this semester. More than 50 jobs were created, portions of the campus saved from destruction and Boonville has a full-service junior college. After SFCC committed, the city received numerous complementary project proposals involving the campus.

Steve Jobs spent years designing his custom yacht. And now, a year after his death, the yacht has been completed, reports Dutch blog, One More Thing. The yacht has been named Venus. Perhaps the most unique thing about the ship is that it's controlled by a bunch of 27-inch iMacs from the control room, known as the wheelhouse. The roughly 250-foot long yacht has a large sun terrace, complete with a Jacuzzi, travels with its own speed boat and an aluminum hull and exterior, making it lighter (and presumably faster) than other yachts.

Many entrepreneurs are not prepared for conflict, or actively avoid it. Their vision, passion, and focus are so strong that they can’t imagine someone disagreeing, much less fighting them to the death. But the reality is that startups are composed of smart people, with emotions as well as intellects, working in close proximity under much pressure, so conflicts will occur.

In fact, most business conflict is constructive and should be embraced in steering through the maze of innovation and change that is part of every successful business. Surround yourself with “yes” people, and you may feel good initially, but the brick walls no one mentions will hurt later.

In hopes of spurring economic development, Gov. Dannel Malloy visited New Haven last week to announce a series of policies designed to foster new business growth and create “innovation hubs” throughout Connecticut.

Malloy’s policies are part of the state’s Innovation Ecosystem program, which aims to grow the Connecticut economy through an array of financial, technical and professional resource offerings for businesses. As part of the program, Malloy announced plans to start four state “innovation hubs” — local offices that will house Innovation Ecosystem resources and help businesspeople network. The hubs, which will be located in Stamford, Hartford, Storrs and New Haven, will cost $5 million initially and are funded through Malloy’s 2011 Jobs Bill.

We’ve all been subject to the breathless lore of startup lions like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk—pioneers who’ve repeatedly made high-profile impacts with innovative companies. The term serial entrepreneur meanwhile, when used to describe oneself, has morphed into an abused and meaningless moniker. The names above easily fit the bill, but we don’t always know them as such. That’s because they have—or had—real titles and real jobs: CEO, Executive Chairman, CTO.

Serial entrepreneur then has become a haughty, hazy stand-in for an actual occupation. How about “three-time entrepreneur”? Or just, “entrepreneur”? (The folks at AirBnB, however, who sold election-themed cereal boxes in 2008, can rightfully claim to be “cereal entrepreneurs”.)

My life after graduating from George Washington University in the spring of 2009 began inauspiciously: Like millions of Americans, I was on the front end of what would turn out to be an extended economic recession, with little in the way of opportunity and a deep desire not to move back into my parents’ house. To avoid that fate, I decided that I would start my own company — and I would make it work.

That same year I formed The Cutler Group, a public relations agency that helps innovative technology companies achieve high-value media coverage. In the beginning, the firm’s assets were limited to $200 in my bank account. My business supplies included a printer, a laptop and a desk. I worked out of my bedroom and some local coffee shops. This is what is called “bootstrapping,” though my friends on the Young Entrepreneur Council have always said that it’s really more like shoe-strapping — boots are too expensive.

NEW YORK – Deloitte Consulting announced Monday it has closed on a deal to acquire Recombinant Data Corporation, a Newton, Mass.-based healthcare data warehousing and analytics firm. The move signals the growing momentum toward using clinical data to transform healthcare, say Deloitte officials.

According to Andrew Vaz, principal and chief innovation officer at Deloitte, the move will expand Deloitte’s consulting capabilities.

“We’re definitely already in the analytic and strategic space,” Vaz told Healthcare IT News. “This will expand our interest into the asset space, and we’re very excited about that.”

Frankly put, enterprises have to use social tools both internally and externally in order to continue to be competitive businesses.

You’ve been hearing the call to action for years. And if you aren’t feeling it now, in a quarter or two you will begin to see it in your loss of revenues and in the sudden success of your competitors.

But, since I know we all “get” the impact of the social enterprise and its direct line to your company’s success, I won’t keep banging that drum. You already have programs and teams righting your company ship away from break waters and toward open, social seas — where opportunity lies.

Sandy is already the largest hurricane to ever hit the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions. How does it compare with Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, and is considered the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history? And what about Irene, which came ashore on North Carolina on Aug. 27, 2011, and caused record flooding across eastern New York and Vermont after several subsequent landfalls as a tropical storm? Here are some telling numbers. And see the links below for some of the best sites for tracking Sandy yourself.

The Innovation Value Institute (IVI) was co-founded in 2006 by the National University of Ireland Maynooth, (NUIM) and Intel to help drive the transformation of IT management. Through its consortium, IVI facilitates a collaborative community of like-minded peers committed to investigating, advancing and disseminating the frameworks, tools and best practices associated with managing IT Value and IT enabled Innovation. IVI is currently focused on extending the development and dissemination of the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF).

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Despite the obviously ‘cool’ images ‘indie’ conjures up – of the black and white, rebellious, unfiltered cigarette-and-guitar kind – it isn’t easy being an indie-anything in the land of the Khans. Filmmaker Sridhar Rangayan figured as much, while helping organise the third edition of Kashish in Mumbai, one of India’s most popular queer film festivals.

An LGBT festival in the home-ground of the Salmans and Shahrukhs, one that didn’t even demand a ticket from viewers – Rangayan and his team resorted to old fashioned crowd funding. They pooled in Rs 1 lakh from contributors.

In the last presidential foreign policy debate, Republican candidate Mitt Romney used the word “tumult” five times when discussing the Middle East. Employment in the region, on the other hand, was mentioned only once, sandwiched between President Obama’s guarantee of preserving Israel’s security and a non-sequitur on the US education system.

While there is no doubt that the civil war in Syria and the threat of a nuclear Iran present serious challenges for the region’s future, both candidates’ presentation of the Middle East as a violent and unstable monolith ignores a remarkable and important recent trend: the emergence of a thriving Arab tech startup scene.

Deerfield, IL — Commercialization of university intellectual property has steadily grown since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Historically, the focus has been on faculty inventors. Recent trends show increasing acceptance and encouragement of students in the economic development of their ideas.

In an effort to better understand this trend, several organizations that specialize in technology transfer education and data collection launched a survey focused exclusively on student IP. The survey, which was conducted by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), ACCT Canada, the National Collegiate Inventor and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), and PraxisUnico, collected data from 90 colleges and universities in 15 countries.

Sir Ronald Cohen is on a mission. Back in the 1970s he was one of the key players in the development of the venture capital industry in the UK, setting up Apax Partners.  But now he’s using the approach he developed financing businesses and delivering a return to investors to tackle social issues.

When you listen to Cohen (below) talk about it, the scale of the challenge is what interests him. He sees social problems getting bigger but charities and the public sector less able to try new approaches because their time is spent servicing existing needs. So 10 years ago he set about proving that ‘social investment’ could have an impact. He co-founded Bridges and the Social Investment Business and played a role in the creation of social impact bonds that are now spreading to other countries.

The Call For Entrepreneurship is a new initiative by Portugal Ventures which  aims to facilitate  the  access  of innovative scientific and technological projects, in their Seed phase, to Venture Capital. Applications for the First Call can be submitted until 15th November in sectors such as Information and Communication  Technologies, Electronics  and WEB,  Life Sciences and Endogenous Resources, Nanotechnologies and Materials.

In collaboration with its partners (Ignition Partners Network), Portugal Ventures intends to invest around 20 million Euros, per year, in projects stemming from the ideas of entrepreneurs which are product-oriented; innovative and distinctive; based on internationally recognized R&D work; positioned in global value chains, implementable with available resources; based on appropriable technology; and have significant global market potential. Projects selected by Portugal Ventures will benefit from an investment of  between 100 and 750 thousand Euros, until a maximum of 85%  of each project’s budget.

There are stories of famous entrepreneurs who never finished college - Bill Gates and Michael Dell come to mind - but the University of Michigan is banking that today students starting companies will want to stay in school if given the right resources.

Students from U-M's startup accelerator TechArb showed off their inventions Thursday night at a Student Startup Showcase held to highlight some of those school-bound CEOs who are earning patents and degrees simultaneously.

We've got more nerds than ever before.

Rogers famously described the ways products are adopted:

On the left, geeks and nerds and people who love stuff because the new is new and edgy and changes things. All the way to the right, the laggards, the ones who want to be the last to change. And in the middle, the masses, the ones who wait for the new idea to be proven, cheap and widely adopted. Most people are in the middle, and a few are on either edge. (Note that in every area of interest, different people put themselves into different segments. You might be a shoe geek but a movie laggard).

Marketers work to change the market. And for the last thirty years, marketers have been working to turn people into geeks, into people eager to try the new. And it's working.

Every entrepreneur seeking funding loves the challenge of getting customers and investors excited, but dreads the thought of negotiating the terms of a deal with potential investors. They are naturally reluctant to step out of the friendly and familiar business territory into the unfamiliar battlefield of venture capitalists from which few escape unscathed.

In reality, a financing negotiation is not a single-round winner-take-all game, since a “good” deal requires that both parties walk away satisfied -- with a win-win relationship. Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, in their book “Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist” emphasize that there are only three things that really matter in this negotiation: achieving a good and fair result, not killing your personal relationship getting there, and understanding the deal that you are striking.