Clinical trials produce no shortage of data. Yet to insurance companies deciding whether to cover a new drug, it might not be enough. Or rather, it might not be the right data.

A clinical trial studies a carefully selected group of patients chosen to demonstrate drug safety and efficacy. But after a drug reaches the market, payers might see it doesn’t work for everyone or it doesn’t work as well as it did in trials. Payers want better information so they don’t end up covering a drug that doesn’t work. Meanwhile, a pharmaceutical company faces the prospect of falling short of the drug’s market potential after investing hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade or more in development, said John Doyle, vice president and managing director of the consulting practice at biopharmaceutical services company Quintiles.

Arnoldo Müller-Molina was planning to build his business in his native Costa Rica until he read about a St. Louis group that was giving away money.

Seven months later, he has a downtown St. Louis office to call his own, and he's about to begin recruiting U.S. clients, employees and investors.

Müller-Molina, 31, is the founder of simMachines, a pioneer in the field of similarity searching. Instead of finding exact search terms like a typical search engine, similarity software finds a “fuzzy” match.

In the heart of Dayton, Ohio, three rivers come together to form the Great Miami River. That’s the image that 62-year-old Sarvar Ispahi, an Ahiska Turk who moved here with his family in 2005, conjures to illustrate the sense of community that has developed in Dayton, this unexpected home for immigrants in the middle of the country. “If you’re neighbors, you come to know all people. You can make one culture,” says Ispahi, his broken English aided by his son Fergano. “If you are together, this is good. If you are separate, this is not good. But this is a good community.”

Ispahi, his wife and their children are among the several thousand Ahiska Turks who have settled in Dayton after escaping persecution in Russia. The Ahiskans have a long history of oppression, which Ispahi vividly recounts on a blistery summer day in the cool comfort of his New York Pizzeria on East Fifth Street, wearing a shirt that reads: “Dayton, Ohio: My Kind of Town.” In 1944, more than 90,000 Ahiska Turks were deported from Georgia into the Soviet satellites of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where Ispahi was born. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, his family moved to Russia, where they were granted safe harbor but no citizenship.

Everyone knows of the mythical elevator pitch. You find yourself in an elevator, rocketing towards the penthouse suite of a downtown office edifice, when you realize that the person standing next to you is a powerful and influential investor. She asks what you do, and you calmly deliver your pitch. Just a sentence or two, properly chosen.  The doors open, the conversation continues, the IPO is near at hand.

I’m here to tell you that the elevator is real. While you may not be trapped in a small ascending room, the potent entrepreneur’s life is full of inflection moments: brief opportunities to shift the destiny of your company. And a proper pitch is essential to take advantage of them. But contrary to what you might have heard, the solution isn’t the 60-second elevator pitch.  In fact, the elevator pitch is only a simple, basic example of a much more powerful tool: the Pyramid Pitch.

Q: What costs are considered reimbursable to the founder of a start-up company?  More specifically, if the founder has been boot-strapping his company since inception, and he agrees to a series a term sheet with a VC firm, are the operational costs incurred by the founder between this time and the closing of the round reimbursable to the founder? For example: The founder of a consumer product company and a VC firm agree to a term sheet in July.  The round doesn’t close until October or November due to raising additional capital for the round, attorney delays, etc.  In the interim, the founder continues to self-fund the day-to-day operations of the business – packaging design, inventory, PR firm, etc.  What expenses can the founder expect – if any – to get paid back out of the series a funding?

This varies widely and is fundamentally a negotiation between the new investors and the founders who have incurred the expenses. The four variables are:

Amount of expenses Amount of funding being raised How the expenses have been accounted for Attitude / style of the investor

“Entrepreneurship is by far the most demanding, low paying, pride swallowing, psychologically wearing career choice one can make. At the same time, one could argue that it is the most creative, challenging and rewarding career choice one can make.”

As an entrepreneur, there are many hurdles that you must overcome and many tasks that need completion prior to making the money that you want, but here are just a few considerations:

- Entrepreneurship is continuous learning: as an entrepreneur, you’re either learning or you’re behind the curve. Make sure you’re reading books. Make sure you’re reading the right books. There is always room for improvement.

For the first time, the public can vote on their favorite innovation from among the finalists of the HHSinnovates Program, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced this past Friday.

Launched in the spring of 2010 as part of HHS’s open government efforts, HHSinnovates is meant to recognize innovative projects from HHS employees aimed at helping solve thorny healthcare challenges.

Other than the beloved Idealist.org, where can someone looking for an impactful or innovative job begin their search? For all those looking to enter or shift within the social innovation space, however you define it, optimizing communities and networking seem to be predominant. Here’s a list of sites to bookmark or pass on to a friend on the hunt right now.

So far, 2012 has been a terrific year for our biotechnology portfolio. It’s been great for biotech investors in general, despite the weak global economy. The Nasdaq Biotechnology Index (NBI), for example, is up 35%. The biotech picks in my investment letter, Technology Profits Confidential, have outperformed even these stellar returns.

Forbes has produced its second World’s Most Innovative Companies list.  

"We set out to create something very different than other innovation rankings, which mostly end up becoming popularity contests based on past performance or editorial whims," Forbes noted, adding "our method relies on investors, who vote with their wallets, to identify the companies they expect to be innovative today and in the future."

Why are some companies able to create and sustain a high innovation premium while others don’t?

The answer is not complicated: People, process, and philosophies (what we call the 3Ps). They differentiate the best in class from the next in class when it comes to keeping innovation alive and delivering an innovation premium year after year.  

On the people front, the behaviour of leaders matters—big time. In our initial study on disruptive innovators published with Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s DNA, we found five “discovery skills” that distinguished innovators from non-innovators. Innovators ask provocative questions that challenge the status quo. They observe the world like anthropologists to detect new ways of doing things.  They network with people who don’t look or think like them to gain radically different perspectives. They experiment to relentlessly test new ideas and try out new experiences. Finally, these behaviours trigger new associations which allow them to connect the unconnected, thereby producing disruptive ideas.

With the Democrats now in charge of the state Senate, there's a new effort to draft a bill to create a state venture capital fund to help start-up companies grow and create jobs in Wisconsin.

Venture capital legislation stalled in the legislature last year under Republican leadership. Now there's an effort to build bi- partisan support for what's being called a fund of funds. It would use about 25 million dollars in state bonding money to attract private investment funds. Thirty other states already have such funds and Tom Still of the Wisconsin Technology Council told the committee Wisconsin is falling behind the curve. He says it's time for the state to do a better job of helping local entrepreneurs start new companies and create jobs .

In 2009, Argentinian entrepreneur Pablo Ambram spent three months at a prestigious business incubator in San Diego, Calif., developing his company, Agent Piggy, which uses technology to teach children about financial management. The Founders' Institute helped Mr. Ambram develop his business and introduced him to promising contacts. Mr. Ambram assembled a board of directors that included a former Oracle executive.

But in the end, Mr. Ambram did not incorporate in the United States. Why? Because he wasn't allowed to stay here. "I met with a few lawyers," he says, "and they said trying to sponsor myself as the CEO of ...

What happens when a scruffy bunch of startup scamps move into a posh neighborhood? Why, hijinks ensue, naturally.

See, San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood has something called “Billionaire’s Row,” where tech elites like Larry Ellison live. However, Businessweek reports that there is one mansion inhabited by an unusual crop of folks: not merely rentors, but entrepreneurs in their 30s, working on startup ideas. Nature took its course:

Starting Tuesday, entrepreneurs in Maryland are being urged to meet some people getting off a bus.

It’s not just any bus. It’s a bus that organizers say can help entrepreneurs take their businesses to another level.

Called “Pitch Across Maryland,” a group of entrepreneurs, investors and others will be on the bus and will dispense advice to representatives of fledgling businesses. They will listen to business owners pitch their ideas, with the best ones getting a chance for national exposure and prizes.

The campaign by Startup Maryland, the local offshoot of the Startup America Partnership that formed last year, kicks off Tuesday with a meeting in Howard County. Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of Baltimore sports apparel company Under Armour, is a member of national group’s board of directors, along with former NBA great Magic Johnson, computer giant CEO Michael Dell and top executives with FedEx, Netflix and LinkedIn.

Many scientists raise a skeptical eyebrow to traditional herbal treatments, but a new phylogenetic study suggests that such remedies may hold promise—for both medicine and drug development.

In the study, researchers from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom found that many medicinal plants used by nearly 100 cultures on different continents are related. Because these distant groups of people likely identified their plant therapies independently, such herbal treatments may be legit, the researchers argue, and the plants likely contain bioactive compounds that scientist could exploit for new drug therapies.

As your company expands or as you progress up the ranks in your company, you will likely move from having P&L (profit and loss) responsibility for one business unit to having P&L responsibility for several different business units (usually located in several different geographic markets).

To be successful in this role, you will have to balance three paradoxes.

1.  Centralization v. Local Autonomy

A health foundation has created a grant program to avoid funding gaps for research scientists that can happen between the seed stage and later stages.

New Jersey Health Foundation has allocated $500,000 for faculty at the eight schools that make up the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey: the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, New Jersey Dental School, New Jersey Medical School, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, School of Nursing, School of Osteopathic Medicine, School of Public Health and School of Health Related Professions.

A few years ago, there seemed to be a continental divide between the “old economy” and the “new economy,” and the state in which I live, Michigan, appeared to much of the world as the poster child for the former. Never mind that Michigan had been in the top 5 nationally for such important innovation bellwethers as university research, patents issued, and engineering workforce; to much of the U.S., we were still the “rust belt.”

Some of that reputation was earned, as the state was best known for a few very large auto companies whose success over the 20th century attracted a preponderance of our talent, sapping much of our entrepreneurial spirit and leaving Michigan’s economy subject to the wild swings of a single industry. Consequently, while we were advanced technologically, we were a region that lagged in the creation of innovative new companies and rarely strayed from the middle of the pack in terms of attraction of venture capital dollars.

The National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) has just launched into beta a revolutionary research crowdfunding platform at http://uStartups.com. This new research funding platform aims to continue university science and engineering projects to the point where they have real world impacts once government support for the project ends.

For our beta, we are looking for an initial 10 high-impact university research projects whose government funding has ended, but where the faculty and students are highly motivated to receive additional funding from public donors to continue to move their research forward.

If you are interested to be part of our beta, please register and submit your research project for consideration at http://uStartups.com. We expect to make our decisions about the first 10 projects in the next 2-4 weeks and then open those projects up for public donations immediately after. All submitted projects will be automatically re-considered for acceptance and publication once the beta period is over, so that all appropriately submitted and accepted projects will be open for donations within 8-12 weeks. Registration is free.