It used to be that top corporations picked up MBA graduates as fast as schools could slap mortarboards on their heads. These young guns drove corporate reorganization, product innovation and marketing and implemented new styles of leadership. They were a symbol of a new culture, and anyone serious about a career in business aspired to earn those three letters.

Today, the power of the MBA is not so certain. Many in corporate America and academia say the degree that once defined bright, snappy leadership now symbolizes a discipline that has lost touch with the business world. They argue that MBA programs have become too focused on research, and that in-house training at large firms has more practical applications. They claim the programs have failed to create the types of leaders who can deal with globalization; some say they don't develop leaders at all, just functionaries. Other critics think a focus on profit and share value, rather than on ethics and sustainability, fostered the type of narrow-minded thinking that led to the fall of Enron and the last recession.

There’s little debate that the market for seed and angel funding has exploded in recent years. What is debatable is whether it’s here to stay or just a cyclical trend.

Last year venture capitalists poured $332.8 million into seed-stage companies, more than triple the amount they invested in 2005 and over $100 million more than the year before, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

Bloomberg News A reduction in the cost of building companies and marketing products to customers, due in large part to the ability to gain cheap technology and marketing from companies like Amazon.com and Google, is a big reason this is happening, said Jon Sakoda, who leads the seed investment program at New Enterprise Associates, speaking on a panel at Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Conference in New York on Thursday.

“Varun, you tell me one thing ya, if you behave like this, which girl will marry you?” an ‘Aunty’ asked Varun Agarwal in distinctive Indian aunty-like language in his book, “How I braved Anu Aunty & co-founded a Million Dollar Company.”

Further along in the narrative, which Mr. Agarwal says is a true account of his life although it is published as fiction, his mother sobs as she tells her friend, “I don’t know what to do.  Who will marry him?” She then drags him off to see a counselor.

As you can see below, the entrepreneurship ecosystem is complex. The short-term goal of the map is to raise awareness of the organizations/individuals in different parts of the entrepreneurship ecosystem. The longer term goal is to help build relationships between different segments. The initial version was created based on the network of Empact. However, its growth and maintenance will depend on curators.

If you've been following the media trail on fish oil lately, you've probably been tempted to forgo the smelly capsules. A systematic review of 20 studies published last week in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that neither eating extra helpings of fish nor taking fish oil supplements reduces the risk of stroke, heart attack or death. In June a review of studies published on behalf of the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent, not-for-profit organization that promotes evidence-based decision-making, concluded that fish oil pills fail to prevent or treat cognitive decline. And a 2011 meta-analysis by Yale University researchers debunked the idea that omega-3s alleviate depression. These proclamations run counter to what we have been told about fish and fish oil for decades. So why is the consensus changing? Is it time for us to toss out our pills for good?

This post is Part V, the conclusion in the five part series titled ‘The Startup of Start-up Communities: the Power of Clones in Russia—& Beyond.’

Last time in Part IV, I discussed two subjects: 1.) Clonentrepreneurship or Alternative Paths to the Startup of Start-up Communities? 2.) Change the Culture & Amazing Things Happen

In this final post to the series I answer the question: “What are the small but meaningful steps you can take to impact the culture to change the culture for more investment, entrepreneurship and innovation?” I give initiatives for entrepreneurs, investors, Government staffers and investment officers at development finance institutions to ‘Scale Up Investment—Finance the Startup of Start-up Communities.’

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is seeking approval from the White House for a prototype of a reporting system that would encourage patients to report medical mistakes and unsafe practices by health care providers, the New York Times reports (Pear, New York Times, 9/22).

AHRQ already has funded the development of the prototype patient reporting system. The agency is seeking approval from the Office of Management and Budget to test the prototype's efficacy (iHealthBeat, 9/10).

Maryland will be giving away $300,000 to promising entrepreneurs as part of a business competition. The InvestMaryland Challenge is part of the state’s venture capital initiative that raised $84 million for seed and early stage companies earlier this year. The challenge will award $100,000 prizes to the most impressive companies in three categories: information technology, life sciences and general.

ON SEPTEMBER 22nd, the beer started flowing at Oktoberfest in Munich, an annual Bavarian beer festival which confusingly begins at the end of September. Last year, over the course of the 16-day event, visitors glugged 7.5m litres of beer, sold at an average princely price of €9 ($12.50) a litre, which is what a typical large stein holds. Germans love beer and down around 100 litres per person a year. Away from the Oktoberfest beer is readily affordable. Analysts at UBS, a Swiss bank, have calculated that it takes a German earning the national median wage just under seven minutes of work to purchase half a litre of beer at a retail outlet. At the bottom of the pint glass, low wages and high taxes mean that boozers in India must toil for nearly an hour before they have earned enough to quench their thirst.

South Bend, Ind., avoided $120 million in upgrades and conserved millions of gallons of water by becoming one of the first cities on the globe to use cloud computing to manage its water systems.

In Oregon, local officials cooled down water from wastewater plants by planting trees near riverbanks rather than using cooling equipment, lowering investment costs at the same time.

Silicon Valley is the world’s iconic ecosystem of innovation, the “Florence” of our time.  Yet the lessons that most people draw from it are often wrong. It is not simply the result of mashing talented people, great ideas, and lots of money together, as many assume.  Those are just the starting ingredients.  Many places around the world also have smart, creative, rich people.  What is special about the Valley is the mixing of those ingredients, and that requires a recipe, which is the unusual culture. That recipe, however, has remained elusive to most outside observers.

To really understand Silicon Valley, we must attempt to “see” what is invisible.  Why?  Because the stuff we can’t see—the pattern of behavior among its players—is just as important, if not more important, than the stuff we can see.  The Valley is not like a plantation assembled through the precise, controlled farming of cropland. It’s more like a “rainforest” ecosystem that thrives because its many elements mix together to create new and unexpected flora and fauna. The system thrives when the elements are rapidly combining and recombining, just as they do in a natural biological system.  And the unwritten code of behavior—like a set of invisible laws—is what makes that mixing possible.

Argentina has been in the news lately for its expropriation of a Spanish oil company and other strong regulatory interference, such as price and import controls. With this image reflected in the media, we decided to check back on activity that Argentine entrepreneurs and the organizations that support them are carrying out to sustain and promote entrepreneurship.

I was glad to find that Argentina’s “bottom-up” entrepreneurship culture I reported on in September 2010 very much alive and well. According to recent data, Argentina saw further increases in its entrepreneurial activity in 2011 and also stood out when it comes to the participation of women in entrepreneurial activities. By 2011 estimates, one-third of Argentina small businesses are started by women who credit aggressive networking. Further, despite the unfavorable environment for foreign investment, global entrepreneurship gurus like Dave McClure with his 500 Startups and Geeks on a Plane, now appear to be looking in Argentina for high-impact start-ups.

If you want to strengthen your abdominal muscles, you can do sit-ups. Tone your upper body? Push-ups. To flex your intellectual muscles, however, or boost your children's academic performance, the answer is less clear. An exercise to stretch memory, tighten attention and increase intelligence could improve children's chances of coasting comfortably through life—and give adults a leg up as well.

The very notion flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most people presume that no matter how hard they work, they are not going to get any smarter. Some subjects in our research laboratory, though, have increased their IQ scores after training their brain for as little as three weeks. The improvement can be significant enough that, anecdotally at least, a few participants

$7 Million Investment Supports Projects Spurring Technology Commercialization and Small Business Development in Seven States 

The Obama Administration today announced the winners of the third round of the i6 Challenge, a national competition to advance American innovation, foster entrepreneurship, increase the commercialization of ideas into viable companies, and create jobs. The initiative seeks to accelerate innovative product development, spur the formation of start-ups, and create small businesses by supporting Proof of Concept Centers at universities and research consortiums across the country, which are helping to jumpstart the production of emerging technologies and revolutionize manufacturing processes.

It’s easy to see the benefits of being an entrepreneur in the Silicon Valleys and the Seattles of America, but in the midst of those metropolises, the benefits of starting in a smaller town are overlooked. Cozier, entrepreneurially-focused communities provide ecosystems that help startup companies thrive.

Here are three of the attributes small towns boast that help startups find their footing.

It’s been a pretty good week for the Philadelphia regional life sciences ecosystem. A new health IT accelerator Tigerlabs Health has sprung up an hour away in Princeton, New Jersey. Philadelphia will soon be home to TransCelerate Biopharma R&D nonprofit to streamline drug development.

But Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE) executive vice president and managing director James Datin points out that if Philadelphia is to be a health IT and life sciences hot spot on par with a Silicon Valley of life sciences, it needs to do more.

Microsoft announced a new youth-based global program that serves to close the "opportunity gap" for young people, reports The Seattle Times.

The announcement for the initiative, called YouthSpark, came on Thursday by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, according to the company's blog.

The company plans to invest $500 million in the initiative, its biggest philanthrophic step in the 37 years of the company, said Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith, The Seattle Times reports.

Over the last decade, Ty Hallock has steered his business from Web site creation to social media to mobile apps. In three more years, he expects to be back at the drawing board again. Enlarge This Image

To prepare, Mr. Hallock, 29, spends an hour or two a day at his business, TopFloorStudio in Asheville, N.C., tracking venture capitalists and start-up news, trying to divine the next frontier. He created TopFloorUniversity, where experts teach his employees and clients the latest in app development. When he could not find a good curriculum for information architecture, he and a colleague developed one themselves. As a pretext to learn from the luminaries in his field, Mr. Hallock even produces his own podcast.

“You’re always reaching for something that’s kind of like unknown, because you don’t know what is really going to be the future,” Mr. Hallock said. “I’m not in my 30s yet, and I’m sure at some point I’m going to be like, ‘Enough.’ ”

How do you get leaders, employees, customers — and even yourself — to change behaviors? Executives can change strategy, products and processes until they're blue in the face, but real change doesn't take hold until people actually change what they do.

I spent the summer reviewing research on this topic. Here is my list of 10 approaches that seem to work.

1. Embrace the power of one. One company I worked with posted 8 values and 12 competencies they wanted employees to practice. The result: Nothing changed. When you have 20 priorities, you have none. Research on multi-tasking reveals that we're not good at it. Focus on one behavior to change at a time. Sequence the change of more than one behavior.

One of the first lessons in geometry I learnt in school was Pythagoras' Theorem, which mesmerized me with its simple yet compelling logic. It was Pythagoras who also taught me one of my first lessons as a manager. I still remember the profound wisdom of his statement: "The oldest, shortest words — "yes" and "no" — are those which require the most thought."

Many of us have agonized over the right way to say "no." As leaders, we learn to be careful about making negative statements, so we don't dampen people's initiative, demoralize them, or undermine the chances of getting something done.