The combination of the Affordable Care Act and the desire to generate new revenue streams have led to a growing number of physicians becoming entrepreneurs. And one nonprofit group wants to cultivate these hybrid professionals by organizing local chapters around the world.

The Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, has chapters in Washington, D.C., New York Tri-State area and Denver.

At a recent meeting of the Villanova Entrepreneurs Network, Jeffrey N. Hausfeld, a co-founding member of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, said it’s launching SoPE chapters this year in seven cities: Philadelphia, New York City, Toronto, London, Sacramento, Boston and Tampa Bay.

Any discussion of higher education inevitably comes back to money: the rising cost of tuition; the burdens of student loan debt; the budget cuts public universities are forced to make due to state funding shortfalls.  

There is also a growing expectation that a college education should lead to real, measurable results. Learning for its own sake is all well and good, but today's students also want to know there will be a job waiting for them after graduation day. If not, they want the skills necessary to create their own opportunities -- which is why entrepreneurship training is such a hot trend on campus, expanding even as other disciplines are forced to cut back.  

Do you thrive on excitement, like seeking thrills, embrace the idea of never knowing if you'll fly or fall? Well, you might take up sky diving. Or you can own your own small business -- because running your own business is a white-knuckle roller coaster ride. One day you're up; the next, you're down. MORE: Rhonda Abrams' column index I'm not just talking about entrepreneurs who start multi-million dollar Internet companies that grow fast then suddenly flop. Even owners of very small businesses know what I mean.

While everyone acknowledges the importance of entrepreneurship to economic growth, experts are less certain about what it takes to figure out who can be successful and what are the components that make up an entrepreneur. In Gallup-speak, the search is on for “the innate talents that successful entrepreneurs bring to the task of building a business, the focus of a new study of how successful entrepreneurs behave.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in your business, you’re far from alone.

Small business consultant Barry Moltz says that every business gets stuck from time to time.

And he believes it can happen for several reasons:

“Sometimes it’s the sales “glass ceiling” where your sales just won’t budge in spite of your best efforts. It doesn’t get much more frustrating than this.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is making its patent and trademark examining manuals more accessible to the public through a new, user-friendly search tool. The Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) and Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP) search tools, which work like an Internet search engine, are available at tmep.uspto.gov and mpep.uspto.gov.

The new tools are part of a larger, agency-wide effort to better connect innovators to the USPTO’s many free resources and to make the agency’s procedures as transparent as possible. Individuals will be able to navigate through the manuals using a table of contents, or perform searches by typing words in a search box. Search results will be ranked by relevance and search terms highlighted in the body of the document. Sections of the manual can be printed or exported to PDF using typical browser functionality. The primary benefit of the new system to users and the USPTO is that the manuals can be updated within hours, rather than months.

Starting and building a company is all about leadership – formulating an idea, building a unique plan based on vision and experience, and forging a path over and through all obstacles. Yet the image of leadership in business is at an all-time low, according to national leadership experts, considering the political debacles, record business bankruptcies, and executive fraud cases.

If the country is to recover financially and politically, new leaders will have to emerge to fill the leadership deficit – new leaders who understand that leadership is a privilege, not an entitlement, according to executive coach Michael Schutzler, author of the book “Inspiring Excellence – A Path to Exceptional Leadership.”

Stanford University is continuing a high-profile push into online education with a new open-source platform called Class2Go, which will host two massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, during the fall quarter. Beginning in October, non-Stanford and Stanford students alike will be able to use the platform to take classes on computer networking and on “Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, and Batteries.”

The idea for the software started with a six-member “skunkworks” team in Stanford’s computer-science department, said Jane Manning, product manager for Class2Go. Over the summer, the team built Class2Go using code from Stanford’s existing course-hosting platform, called Courseware, and a similar platform from the nonprofit Khan Academy, along with software for integrated online classroom forums hosted by Piazza. Other colleges may add to the platform or adapt it for their own purposes, said Sef Kloninger, engineering manager for Class2Go.

A lot of people are developing mobile-first products. They're bypassing websites and going straight for the App Store, or they're building hardware for mobile devices. Some are skipping iPhones and Androids altogether and building tablet-first products. Here are a list of the most promising mobile-first startups we've encountered.

If you want to meet Mark Zuckerberg, all you need to do is build something. More specifically, start a promising company that connects to Facebook's open graph, and Zuckerberg will likely reach out. At a tech conference this week, Mark Zuckerberg said that's how he met Instagram's Kevin Systrom. He likes to meet entrepreneurs and help them. He especially likes to meet entrepreneurs who are building cool things on Facebook's platform.

The growing number of business incubators will soon include one dedicated to women.

The Women’s Small Business Accelerator, a new nonprofit organization set to launch by the beginning of October, is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Mary McCarthy and Caroline Worley.

While women make up the largest percentage of small-business owners, they still lag men in average sales, employee numbers and funding, McCarthy said.

The incubator is an attempt to help correct that disparity.

Are you the biggest fish in your small pond? Have you already raised tons of cash? Are you ready to step it up to the next level and play in the big leagues?  

If so, then 500 wants YOU to come to the valley and CRUSH IT. Join the Fall 2012 batch of the 500 Accelerator Program!  

How, you ask? Well, today we’re doing something we’ve never done before. An open application process. (Pause for reaction)  Starting today through Sunday September 23, you can submit your application for the 500 Accelerator here: http://angel.co/500startups

Philadelphia citizens who are passionate about civic projects now have a way to show their support — with their wallets. Philly is trying out a crowdfunding platform called Citizinvestor, which allows people to donate money to efforts that benefit and improve the community.

Individuals sign into the Citizinvestor site and pledge an amount to help meet a project’s fundraising goals. Fully approved projects are submitted to the Citizinvestor site and the public can choose what projects matter the most to them by donating. Once the goal is achieved, the money is released to the appropriate party.

Children of immigrants are outperforming children whose family trees have deeper roots in the United States, learning more in school and then making smoother transitions into adulthood, according to sociologists at The Johns Hopkins University.

Researchers Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo tracked nearly 11,000 children from as young as age 13 into their early 30s, coming from families with diverse backgrounds. When comparing children with similar socioeconomic status and school conditions, Hao and Woo found that the best students, and later the most successful young adults, were born in foreign countries and came to the United States before reaching their teens. American-born children whose parents were immigrants followed closely in terms of achievement.

When your wireless carrier charges you for the amount of data you used on your cell phone in a given month, how do you know the bill is accurate? It very well might not be, according to a new study.

This question is more important to consumers than ever. Over the past year, the growth in the popularity of smartphones has led the largest U.S. mobile carriers to replace unlimited data plans with ones that place caps on data usage, and charge extra for exceeding those limits.

On January 19, 2012, after 131 years of operation, the Eastman Kodak Company filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. bankruptcy court. No doubt some people were surprised by this filing, because they grew up at a time when bright yellow boxes of film accompanied every family vacation and celebration. Those who were paying more attention offered many explanations for the bankruptcy. Central among them was that Kodak was late to recognize that it was not in the film and camera business: it was in the imaging business. With the advent of digital imaging, Kodak was outpaced by other companies that could better achieve consumer goals.

This lesson has been repeated many times over. In 1960, the editor of the Harvard Business Review, Theodore Levitt, wrote that the failure of railroads could be explained in part by the myopic view that they were in the railroad business and not the transportation business, which left them vulnerable to competition from cars, trucks, and planes. Levitt argued that it's always better to define a business by what consumers want than by what a company can produce. Kodak had built a successful enterprise producing cameras, film, and photographic paper and chemicals, but what people wanted was images, and so when a better way to get those images was found, its customers followed.

In our design issue last year, the Co.Design 50 laid out 50 of the most influential designers in America. This year, as a sequel, we took it upon ourselves to highlight 50 people who are shaping the future of design.

That sounds like a funny task. But our staff was after people pushing the boundaries of their discipline into promising new directions. Thus, you’ll find people like Jochen Zeitz, the chief sustainability officer overseeing PPR’s myriad brands, which include Puma and Gucci. You’ll find Evan Sharp, the cofounder of Pinterest, which just might be the next big paradigm in online shopping. And you’ll find David Holz, the CTO of Leap Motion, a company making gestural interfaces a reality for PCs.

U.S. federal laboratories, government-owned and either government-operated (GOGO) or contractor-operated (GOCO), spent $40.4 billion on research and development (R&D) in 2009. This represents 30% of U.S. federally funded R&D obligations (1). Federal labs offer unique resources, including multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers, large and complex facilities, and ability to work on classified research. Given these resources and increasing calls for greater returns on federally funded R&D investment, the U.S. government has solicited the labs to engage and facilitate partnerships with businesses to produce commercial technologies

The Angel Capital Association (ACA), the North American trade association of angel groups and private investors that invest in high growth, early-stage ventures, has named David Verrill, co-founder and managing director of Hub Angels Investment Group (Cambridge, MA), as Board Chair.

ACA also elected three new directors. Newly elected to the ACA board are Mike Eckertof Atlanta Technology Angels (Atlanta, GA), Christopher Mirabile of LaunchPad Venture Group (Newton and Cambridge, MA) and Jean Peters (Richmond, VA) ofGolden Seeds. Board member Jamie Rhodes of Central Texas Angel Network (Austin, TX) was elected as Board Vice Chair, while Jim Connor of Sand Hill Angels (Sunnyvale, CA) and Katherine O’Neill of Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network (Mt. Laurel, NJ) were elected to additional terms.

“At MIT, we reject the idea that you can’t be both a student and an entrepreneur” stated Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, as he opened up the first Founders’ Skills Accelerator (FSA) Demo Day this past Saturday. Bill emphasized the importance of utilizing MIT’s resources to start your own business—to counter the challenge posed by Peter Thiel, one of the early investors in Facebook, who offered to pay college students to drop out of school to start their own business in 2011. As a recent graduate of MIT, I can personally attest to the critical role that staying in school has played in introducing me to the co-founders of my startup, developing and ultimately incubating our idea, and eventually launching it to obtain seed funding.