Engineering is one of the highest-paying fields. Entry-level Facebook computer and software engineers receive a $100,000 salary and a $50,000 signing bonus. The question is where do you find these jobs? And if you’re a company, where do you find these engineers?

On this episode of The Valley Girl Show, we sit down with Gary Swart, CEO of Odesk, an online platform that helps you find the right contractors remotely. Swart says his company is focused on small businesses “leveling the playing field” and to “get access to talent that they can’t find in their local geography.” Many small businesses can’t afford the likes of Facebook or Google engineers and must look elsewhere for their talent. And most small businesses are not located in Silicon Valley.

In business, an incubator helps fledgling start-ups that were launched prematurity to land on their feet.

The concept of business incubation started more than three decades ago with entrepreneurs who sought help covering overhead costs. During those times, when the cost of technology was high, business owners would pool together to share the cost burden of fax machines, printers, computers and even office space.

An international team of scientists have identified for the first time a key factor responsible for declining muscle repair during ageing, and discovered how to halt the process in mice with a common drug. Although an early study, the findings provide clues as to how muscles lose mass with age, which can result in weakness that affects mobility and may cause falls.

The study, to be published in the journal Nature, involved researchers from King’s College London, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital.

At colleges and business schools across the country, the new academic year is just getting under way and with it a new recruiting season for talent.

At my venture firm, Cue Ball, our day job is to be seekers of great talent with whom we can partner, invest, and grow exciting new ideas and businesses. We try to stay true to the principle of a founding figure of venture capital, George Doriot, who was fond of saying that it is always better to back an A-team with a B-plan than an A-plan with a B-team.

We are entering the age of the strategist. As our colleagues Chris Bradley, Lowell Bryan, and Sven Smit have explained in “Managing the strategy journey,” a powerful means of coping with today’s more volatile environment is increasing the time a company’s top team spends on strategy. Involving more senior leaders in strategic dialogue makes it easier to stay ahead of emerging opportunities, respond quickly to unexpected threats, and make timely decisions.

This is a significant change. At a good number of companies, corporate strategy has long represented the bland aggregation of strategies that individual business unit heads put forward.1 At others, it’s been the domain of a small coterie, perhaps led by a chief strategist who is protective of his or her domain—or the exclusive territory of a CEO.

Seven years ago, I changed the focus of my strategy teaching at the Harvard Business School. After instructing MBAs for most of the previous quarter-century, I began teaching the accomplished executives and entrepreneurs who participate in Harvard’s flagship programs for business owners and leaders.

Shifting the center of my teaching to executive education changed the way I teach and write about strategy. I’ve been struck by how often executives, even experienced ones, get tripped up: they become so interested in the potential of new ventures, for example, that they underestimate harsh competitive realities or overlook how interrelated strategy and execution are. I’ve also learned, in conversations between class sessions (as well as in my work as a board director and corporate adviser) about the limits of analysis, the importance of being ready to reinvent a business, and the ongoing responsibility of leading strategy.

Placing a dollar value on a private company – determining its “valuation,” in investment-industry parlance – isn’t easy, especially when the company is barely more than an idea in the minds of inexperienced entrepreneurs.

So how do investors value fledgling start-up?

Many venture capitalists, such as Rick Heitzmann, will tell you “it’s more art than a science.” Mr. Heitzmann, managing director of New York-based early-stage technology investor FirstMark Capital, says factors include the track record of the founding team, the size of the market opportunity and whether the company’s product or service has already gained users or begun making revenue.

It depends on the stage of your business, how much money you need to raise and the terms that you are hoping to secure. Venture capital is usually not available to pre-revenue or very low revenue businesses or in amounts lower than $2 to $3 million. As a result, if you are very early stage or need a smaller amount of cash, venture capital investment may not be an option. Angel capital is typically used to help a company prove out its technology and/or business model, secure customers and start its growth trajectory. Angel investors will invest smaller amounts and tend to be more patient with their investment (i.e., willing to wait a bit longer for an exit than a VC) and offer somewhat more company favorable terms.

Founder Institute, the accelerator with a goal to “globalize Silicon Valley,” graduates its 650th startup today.

In its three-year life span, notable alumni include companies like CakeHealth, Udemy, and Retailigence. The program for early-stage companies is the largest in the world; presently there are chapters in 32 cities across 19 countries, including New York, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Israel, Vietnam, and Puerto Rico.

Europe is neck-deep in one of its largest financial crises ever. In the midst of this nuclear winter of finance, European startups are jealously reading about mega seed and hyper A/B/C funding rounds taking place across the Atlantic. Funding is a well-known and well-documented issue for European startups, even in the good times. According to the Economist it is one of the prime reasons why European startups lag their American counterparts, while The New York Times recently stated it’s why Europe is unlikely to produce the next Facebook. Therefore local founders have been looking at ways to overcome the issue; turning to crowdfunding, accelerators, and New York for solutions. My startup, Favour.it, found a smart way to make funding easier and faster, even in Europe.

CHICAGO (TheStreet) -- The many struggles of entrepreneurship have been well covered in news stories and personal blogs: the late nights, the financial uncertainty, the pressure to attract customers or clients. Starting a venture is inherently risky and therefore inherently stressful.

And yet, starting up and running your own business also comes with some very tangible rewards. A study by the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business found a strong correlation between entrepreneurship and happiness, one that held even if the start-up in question wasn't phenomenally successful.

Sunday night, crammed into an airplane seat, tired, with a headache banging through my forehead, I feel miles away from the topic I planned to write about this week: passion. But I’m going to give it a shot because I’m armed with reams of notes and if I can connect to my passion now, I can do it any time I want.

Finding your passion is an essential ingredient of winning armies, companies, and individuals. It is not a soft nice-to-have, but a strategic requisite.

Madison, Wisc.—The Association of University Research Parks (AURP) named the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus as the 2012 Outstanding Research Park as the 17th Annual AURP Awards of Excellence were presented in Madison, Wisconsin on September 19th at the AURP 2012 International Conference. The awards recognize the achievements of outstanding research parks and industry veterans and encourage the development of best practices among university research and science parks  

“AURP honors university research parks, individuals and companies who have demonstrated exceptional leadership in innovation,” said AURP President Kevin Byrne.

We first discovered Don Tapscott (Canada) years ago with his seminal books: From Paradigm Shift (1992) through his latest Macrowikinomics (2012). For decades he has been our guide – providing insight and clarity to our evolving complex, networked world. Amidst several global E100 colleagues, was presented with the 2012 Ken Practitioner Award at the World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (WSIE) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA (26th September 2012).  

  "There is growing evidence that we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decade. Many pillars traditional economic and social pillars of the industrial age have come to the end of their life cycle and must be reinvented on a new, networked model."

If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s common to find yourself speaking to people who also want to start a company, but haven’t yet found an idea.

If you look at successful entrepreneurs, you’ll quickly see that they typically figure out something they personally do or understand very well and build a business around it.  Fashionistas help you pick the right style.  Tech wizards build your software.  Retailers launch e-commerce shops.  Companies are simply extensions of the founders.

After the announcement late last month from Science Applications International Corp. that it will split into two publicly traded companies, CEO John Jumper said Thursday that the spinoff “technical services” company will be located in the Washington area, while the second company is likely remain at its corporate headquarters, an 18-acre Tysons Corner campus. "It's reasonable to think that some of them will stay there," Jumper said after speaking at a breakfast event held by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. "It's reasonable to assume that the other company will be somewhere in the Washington area. ... It's very safe to say it'll be very close to where we are right now.

An entrepreneur is literally “one who creates a new business.” The best new businesses are ones that have never been done before, so mastering creativity and recognizing creativity are key skills and mind-sets. But how does one recognize and nurture creativity in a person or team?

Recently, I was reviewing a new book by Bryan Mattimore, “Idea Stormers: How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs,” which outlines well eight attributes of the most creative people, which seem to match the mind-sets of some of the best entrepreneurs I know. Investors look for these in the people they fund, and you should be looking for them in yourself:

Businesspeople love to talk about building "entrepreneurial cultures." The very term evokes the excitement and success of Google, Apple, and Facebook. The problem is that large established companies are often lousy at actually being entrepreneurial. Need I remind you about New Coke? Or Crystal Pepsi? Or the Ford Edsel and other failed launches?

PROVO, Utah — The first sign that Provo got through the Great Recession better than most places shows up quickly, when a driver heading south from Salt Lake City comes upon an army of workers and machines widening the main interstate highway exit into town.

The frenetic pace continues upon entering downtown. A tower crane soars above the expansion of the world headquarters of NuSkin, makers of anti-aging products. Nearby, workers are rebuilding a 114-year-old Mormon tabernacle destroyed by fire nearly two years ago. The four-month-old convention center is preparing to host the Siberian Husky Club of America annual show.

A collaborative research team, including nine experts from NCATS, was honored last month for its work on an investigational treatment for Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC), a rare genetic disease of cholesterol storage that eventually leads to neurodegeneration. Comprising investigators from four NIH institutes and one pharmaceutical company, the team won the Excellence in Technology Transfer Award for its work with 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HPβCD) as a potential treatment for NPC ― a disease for which there are no Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapies.

It is the first award of its kind to NCATS, recognizing laboratory employees and their partners who have outstanding accomplishments in transferring federally developed technology to the marketplace. The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) of the mid-Atlantic region presented the award to the investigators at a ceremony on Aug. 30, 2012, in Cambridge, Md.