We often talk about innovation in terms of science and technology, but in today’s healthcare ecosystem, it’s just as important to innovate on the business side of things.

That’s what the $250 million Harrington Project for Discovery & Development, a national initiative based at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, is trying to do. It comprises nonprofit and for-profit entities aimed at helping new developments in biotechnology cross the “valley of death,” which lately has become more of an “uncrossable canyon,” according to Baiju Shah, the CEO of BioMotiv, the for-profit side of the project.

From diagnostics to regeneration to telemedicine, these young health technology companies are showing us some of the “medicine of the future” that’s taking shape now.

Poor diet, smoking and six other behaviors contribute to 15 chronic conditions that account for more than 65 percent of employers’ healthcare expenditures.

While statistics are weak on startup success rates, the worst one I’ve seen suggests that 2 in 1000 venture backed startups will ever achieve $100-million or more in valuation. Another stat puts that number at 2 percent rather than 0.2 percent. Either way, the “hurdle” for successful, scalable startups is high, and it gets higher every day as customer acquisition challenges continue to increase.

I’ve spent more than four decades founding, coaching, teaching and investing in startups, and nothing breaks my heart more than meeting a starry-eyed founder who says “we’re almost ready to show it to people.” The “it” is a physical or Web product they’ve often been locked-down, pounding away at, for many weeks.

DETROIT — Dan Gilbert is a billionaire entrepreneur, pro sports team owner, and massive real estate investor. He also personally runs employee orientation for new employees of his more than 50 businesses.

In other words, Gilbert is not your average billionaire.

I went to Detroit to find out what’s happening — what’s changing, and what’s growing in Detroit. The answer, to a large degree, is Dan Gilbert. He’s the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and a principal in Detroit Venture Partners, among about 50 other companies.

The rise of crowdfunding has created a misconception that Kickstarter is disintermediating venture capital. Suddenly VCs are useless and irrelevant in their roles as the gatekeepers of good ideas.

Now founders don’t have to desperately pitch themselves to the sweater vests — they can go straight to the people. The Pebble watch guys didn’t need VCs to believe in their idea. In fact, they were rejected by investors before raising millions of dollars from thousands on supporters online.

The Web has leveled the playing field on so many things; it’s about time that it democratized the flow of capital to tech startups. Who needs seed investors? The good deals will now go straight to the Web. Or so the thinking went.

I recently received an email from a young executive in Mali, Africa in response to an article I’d written for Forbes.  She asked, from a land far away, “Can everyone be a successful business builder? Is it a realistic notion?”

My daughter Megan at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, on the day she took the ride of her life.

“Surely not everyone can succeed at this most difficult endeavor,” she wrote.  “Why do some flourish and others fail?  Clearly, the odds of high achievement are challenging.”

Fundraising is brutal. Actually, according to Paul Graham, “Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want.” More startups may fail for that reason, but a close second is the difficulty of raising money. A while back, I outlined “The 10 Best Sources of Cash to Start Your Business” for startups, listing angel investors as alternative #6. I still get a lot of questions on these mysterious and often invisible investors, so here is another attempt to bring them out of the ether.

Wouldn’t you like to be one of the lucky people who joined Google and Facebook when these were startups, and now be a multi-millionaire? So people ask me “How many shares should I ask for when I join a startup today?” In reality, the number of shares doesn’t mean anything – it’s your percent of the total that you need to negotiate.

For example, 200,000 shares may sound like a lot, but if the startup has issued 20 million (a common starting point), that’s just 1% of the company. By the way, you will normally only be offered “options,” which vest over a 4-year period after a 1-year “cliff.” That means you will get none of these until after you work for one year, and the total only if you stay for four years.

I think I’ve read Paul Graham’s post on “Startup = Growth” three or four times now. And of course on Twitter I’ve seen the Tweets, ReTweets and superlatives on what a great post it is.

Viewing the article through the lens of a venture capitalist there’s much to agree with under the mantra of “growth!” And when you read the article carefully it allows for a period of discovery in your business.

Mad Men's Don Draper is exceptionally good at saving a deal gone sour. When a client dislikes an ad campaign, the fictional ad exec can weave the perfect tale to change their minds. His storytelling ability is a gift that no one else at his agency has. To become a successful business leader, identify your own strengths and talents and foster them.

Your strengths are ultimately the keys to your success. "When we do things we're already good at, our business acumen is quicker," says Todd Kashdan, a psychology professor at George Mason University and author of Curious? (William Morrow, 2009).

The answer may lie in Teamability™ which measures how, and in what way, people will 'team' with each other.

It’s been said that the only deal some salespeople are really good at closing is the one that gets them hired. High turnover rates in sales departments suggest this may be more common than anyone cares to admit!

Clearly, Sales management knows what it wants from salespeople. They test for it, background-check for it, and they interview endlessly for it, yet hiring errors keep happening. So there must be something missing in the process. Something that can tell when, even though it looks, walks, and talks like a sales pro, it’s not going to SELL like one.

In the past year, I have met with startup founders and government officials around the world. Everywhere I go, people are hungry to know how they can be clever like Silicon Valley. They assume that since I founded PBworks, a private wiki host and home to over two million groups, I must have insight into the smarts that make the Valley work, and they want to implement those good ideas in their regions.

But Silicon Valley works because it is stupid. The intelligence is distributed, and the ultimate arbiter of correctness is the market.

It’s over. The well documented litigation between Winklevoss twins and Mark Zuckerberg over the Facebook idea has been put to rest, said Cameron Winklevoss in an interview with The Daily Ticker.

The twins are using their $65 million settlement to move forward by starting Winklevoss Capital, a venture capital firm.

The Winklevoss twins and "ConnectU" partner Divya Narendra recently sat down with The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task to discuss whether they use Facebook, what's Facebook's problem and how they would run the social network differently.

Large cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, are important drivers in the global economy, but they are not for everyone. While for many, large cities are exciting and stimulating places, others are deterred by the noise, congestion, long commutes, high housing costs, and hectic pace of life. For many of these people, their preference would be for a small city or town, in an environment they see as friendlier, less hectic, and where housing costs are lower (Arif 2008). For those who prefer outdoor activities like skiing, hiking, or camping, close proximity to nature is a strong advantage.

In a qualitative study of perceptions of Vermont’s forested landscape by local residents, Elizabeth O’Brien (2006) concluded that such forests are an important source of local identity and pride, as well as a strong contributor to quality of life. Participants in the study stated that the forests and natural landscapes of Vermont were, among other things, an important source of recreational activity – including hiking and skiing among residents of Burlington, originally from out of state.

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Researchers have used a neural implant to recapture a lost decision-making process in monkeys—demonstrating that a neural prosthetic can recover cognitive function in a primate brain. The results suggest that neural implants could one day be used to recover specific brain functions in patients with brain injuries or localized brain disease.

While the results of today's study may take many years to translate into humans, they suggest that even cognitive processes, such as deciding whether or not to grab a cup of coffee or remembering where you left your keys, could one day be augmented by brain chips.

Here is a 4-minute video for your enjoyment. It is a collaboration between three students of Prem Rawat: Fernando Garcia (video editing), Stuart Hoffman (music), and Mitch Ditkoff (poetry). If you like it, LIKE it and forward it to your friends. Thanks!

Car manufacturers envision a mostly electrified European market by 2030, in which car sharing schemes will have taken off in city centres, new mobility operators will offer multiplatform transport packages, and the age of ‘the prosumer’ could be upon us.

But for now, they are staying focused on the bottom line. “We can imagine a world by 2030 where the majority of cars will be plugged in, and some form of hybridisation will be the dominant technology,” Ayoul Grouvel, head of Peugeot electric vehicles projects, told EurActiv.

Peter Mock, an environmental scientist at the International Council for Clean Transportation, agreed. “By 2030 we’ll all be driving hybrids,” he said. “We will already be in the phase where you go one step further, with an increasing number of electric cars in Europe.”

I'm a big fan of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire. One of the famous quotes from the show is "You can't be half a gangster." That line was said by one character urging the other to start acting like a full gangster and use all the tools at his disposal (violence) to resolve issues in their illegal endeavors; otherwise they’ll both probably end up on the wrong side of a gun barrel, since their competitors will be acting like "full gangsters".

Retirement isn't what it used to be. One in four Americans ages 44 to 70 are interested in becoming entrepreneurs and a majority of them plan to work in retirement. There are plenty of resources available to those who want to start their own business in their golden years.

50-year-old Scott Redd is watching his dream come true from the ground up. 

"In the back of my mind and my wife's mind, we always talked about starting a business and we just never really saw the perfect business we wanted to start," Redd said.