Ten years ago, writing in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, a professor in the management school at the University of Toronto and now a senior editor at The Atlantic, set a meme in motion: the idea that artists, writers, designers, and other creative workers helped improve the quality of a place, collectively serving to promote innovative businesses, tourism, a thriving housing market, ethnic and cultural diversity, mobility, and other aspects of a desirable economy. He set off a touch of controversy as well with some of his correlations, which now seem commonsensical but were then so new as to be heretical. All are part of the conversation now surrounding other memes, among them the idea of the “good city,” the creation of arts districts in distressed downtown areas, and the use of civic and cultural tourism as a means of bringing people—and dollars—into communities.

If you're a small-time entrepreneur who aspires to shake up the world of oil and natural gas technology, you could be one sales pitch away from dramatically scaling up your budget to reach that goal.

A series of events held regularly in New York City and Boston offer energy investors a forum for making that happen, and it may be expanding to a city widely considered the nexus of the world's energy industry.

Bryce Roberts, the cofounder of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, says startup pitches have never been worse than they are right now. "In all of my 11 years as a VC, I'd argue we're at the low watermark for startup pitches," he writes in a post titled "The Sad State of the Startup Pitch." Roberts says that most founders are coming without any sort of presentation in hand—no slides, no executive summary, no planned product demo. Demos usually consist of pulling up the website and poking around with no plan or direction.

After Kim Osterhoudt lost her human resources job at a financial services firm in a 2009 downsizing, she tried to eke out a living selling homemade jam near her home in Belle Mead, N.J. To improve her odds of success, she enrolled last year in Entrepreneur University, a free, 60-hour, local entrepreneurship training program. Launched by the New Jersey Department of Labor in partnership with the nonprofit Intersect Fund, the program supports small business development in poor and distressed areas of the state.

Today Osterhoudt’s 18 varieties of jam are popular at farmer’s markets and distributed at a handful of specialty markets. Osterhoudt says her business is on track to hit $60,000 in revenue this year—double that of 2011—but she has yet to turn a profit and has been living off the proceeds of a home she sold shortly after she lost her job. Her goal this year is to pay back the $15,000 she withdrew from her retirement account in order to start the company.

Steve Blank is one of Silicon Valley’s most well known entrepreneurial educators, and one of its most active opinion leaders. He teaches entrepreneurship at both Berkeley and Stanford, spending much of his time these days showing entrepreneurs how to avoid the mistakes that he made during much of his long career, and to increase their odds of success. Eric Reis of “Lean Startup” fame was originally one of Steve’s students, and together with Alexander Osterwalder they have made a crusade of educating the startup world.In typical Silicon Valley fashion, Steve graciously met with me at a coffee house in Menlo Park to discuss the state of entrepreneurship, and the most important trends in building startups that work.

Before Endeavor, the word entrepreneurship did not exist in certain languages like Portuguese. Endeavor Entrepreneurs did not know they were entrepreneurs until they entered the Endeavor Search & Selection process. We’ve come far in 15 years since the Argentine taxi cab driver with a PhD asked Endeavor co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg, “How can I possibly start my own company when I don’t even have a garage?”

There has been a long-held notion about entrepreneurs that they begin their path to superstardom by tinkering in garages, coding in coffee shops, and networking in Silicon Valley. While this is an accurate definition of some entrepreneurs, we know that you don’t need to do these things to be defined as an entrepreneur.

The US with the EU Commission and local agencies are looking to spur job creation and this starts with equipping Europe’s 28 million Small and Medium-size Enterprises and startups with economic tools and political solutions to some of the challenges of cross border trade.

The focus of recent discussions at the TransAtlantic Economic Council have been around enabling easier access to capital, removing red tape and allowing streamlining of education and capital formation.

These days, everyone thinks he’s a mentor.

With accelerators, incubators and innovation events sprouting everywhere, there’s plenty of opportunity for seasoned entrepreneurs to pass on their knowledge to a new generation of startups. But according to the people who work with them, not every good entrepreneur makes a good mentor.

I (informally) polled leaders at a couple Boston incubators, as well as some of the entrepreneurs they work with, to see which qualities are valued most in a mentor. What they told me is that you might be a good startup mentor if you have these five qualities:

Circadian rhythms dictate the 24-hour shifts in gene expression, protein levels, and various cellular processes throughout the day, such as melatonin affecting our sleep-wake cycle. Such changes in cell activity—in particular, cyclical changes in metabolism— can greatly influence the effectiveness of a drug and the severity of its side effects, depending on when it is administered.

However, each individual has unique circadian timing, with “body time” being offset by as much as 6 hours between people, making it difficult—if not impossible—for doctors to take into account when giving drugs. Previous attempts to assess a person’s body time have relied on intense, repeated sampling procedures that were impractical for clinical applications. But in a study, published yesterday (August 27) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have demonstrated a new method that requires only two blood samples, taken 12 hours apart.

It's back-to-school season, and you know what that means: It's time to pick classes.

Though, few people wind up pursuing exactly what they study during college (English literature and history majors, ahem), what you learn now can help prepare you for a future career. For would-be entrepreneurs, that means studying, well, entrepreneurship. Learning the building blocks of business -- marketing, accounting and management -- as well as gaining skills like perfecting an elevator pitch and numbers crunching can do wonders for those who aspire to go it alone after college.

Ask an entrepreneur or venture capitalist to name the center of technology entrepreneurship and they’d probably all say the same thing—Silicon Valley. For the past three decades the region has had a lock on the creation of dominant technology companies, from silicon to search to social.

Ask the same group to name the next Silicon Valley and you are likely to hear a variety of answers. Some will offer up New York. Others stick with Boston and New England. But if we project forward based on trends in the data and structural advantages, it is Los Angeles that is emerging as the next Silicon Valley. Over the last three years the Los Angeles region has quietly built momentum, establishing the foundation to become the next hub for technology entrepreneurship.

This morning, I joined economic development leaders from around the country to discuss ongoing efforts to create jobs and grow the U.S. economy. The Economic Development Forum was hosted by the U.S. Commerce Department’s SelectUSA initiative, in partnership with the White House Business Council and the International Economic Development Council (IEDC), the world’s largest professional organization of economic development practitioners.

The forum provided an opportunity to discuss the Obama administration’s efforts to support U.S. businesses and encourage companies to bring good jobs back to America, a trend called insourcing.

The National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) announces a University Startup Showcase (USS) as part of its 7th annual University Startups Conference on March 20-22, 2013 in Washington, DC.   Each year U.S. universities create around 600 new companies based on the almost $35 billion dollars of federally funded research conducted at universities. The USS will showcase the best university startup companies, as nominated by the country's major research universities, to leading venture capitalists, angel investors, strategic investors and SBIR program managers. The showcase is supported by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and the University-Industry Demonstration Project (UIDP) at the National Academies of Science.

We invite U.S. universities to nominate their best companies in any field, including but not limited to: Chemicals, Materials, Electronics, Energy, Environmental, Healthcare/Biotech, Industrial, Information Technology, Manufacturing, Media/Communications, Software/Services.

Only Massachusetts has more workers with a college degree but Colorado's research and development "intensity" lags the nation.

Those are two of a number of findings released Wednesday by the recently established Colorado Innovation Network, in what was billed as the first-ever state report detailing innovation activity in Colorado.

The Colorado Innovation Index offers what is supposed to be a comprehensive look at how Colorado is creating an environment in which innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation can thrive.

PHOENIX, Aug. 29, 2012 -- The Arizona Technology Council in conjunction with the Arizona Commerce Authority, today announced Student and Teacher Awards as well as Individual Award winners and Company Award finalists for the 2012 Governor's Celebration of Innovation Awards (GCOI) presented by Avnet, Inc. Honoring the state's centennial year, the event has the theme of "100 Years of Innovation: 1912-2012" and will take place November 8, 2012 from 3:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. at the Phoenix Convention Center, 100 North Third Street, in the North Building, 100 Level.

"The GCOI awards event honors leaders whose vision, passion and dedication are helping to change the world and propel Arizona to a position of economic strength," said Steven G. Zylstra, president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council. "I congratulate this year's teachers, students, company finalists and individual award winners, all of which are truly making a difference." The winners and finalists were evaluated and chosen by a selection committee of experts independent of the Council. Committee members included: Hunter Bennett, OneNeck IT Services Susan Engle, Avnet, Inc.

The 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was intended to – not surprisingly, given its name – stimulate the economy by making it easier for companies to raise money and comply with reporting requirements. Among other provisions, the Act raises the threshold at which private companies with shareholders need to register with the SEC, boosting the number from 500 to 2,000 shareholders, according to this summary from McGladrey. It also exempts from registration “crowdfunding,” or limited size offerings sold in small amounts of large numbers of investors, typically via the Internet.

When the Act passed, it was praised as “a giant step for entrepreneurship in America” and “a fantastic development in early stage finance that has the potential to disrupt the very way in which early stage startups get off the ground.” The very cost of going and being public has been seen as a significant deterrent to many companies. Indeed, a 2011 survey by Ernst & Young found that companies spend an average of $2.5 million just to be a public company, plus the cost of IPO itself.

No matter how many times a business leader has to fire an employee or deny a bonus, having tough conversations doesn't get any easier. However, you can increase your confidence and maintain strong relationships by learning to lead the conversation respectfully and productively.

“You want to convey the information in a way that the person can hear, learn from and act upon,” says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and founder of Dattner Consulting. “Not in a way that’s going to make them shut down.”

For four decades I have worked with small business entrepreneurs, helping them grow their businesses by keeping stakeholder success and consciousness of how they do business in the forefront of their minds. I have seen how, by developing the characteristics of what I call The Responsible Entrepreneur, anyone helping to bring new business into the world can fulfill the promise of entrepreneurship and contribute to the creation of a better world.

Every Responsible Entrepreneur represents one of four archetypes, each with a unique role to play in the entrepreneurial system. Cultural anthropologists have identified all four in every healthy culture, and all four are needed to ensure the health of our own evolving social system. Each takes on change differently in search of different outcomes. All four approaches can also be found inside established organizations, among intrapreneurs who lead change.

The extent of the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean has shrunk. According to scientists from NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., the amount is the smallest size ever observed in the three decades since consistent satellite observations of the polar cap began.

The extent of Arctic sea ice on Aug. 26, as measured by the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager on the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program spacecraft and analyzed by NASA and NSIDC scientists, was 1.58 million square miles (4.1 million square kilometers), or 27,000 square miles (70,000 square kilometers) below the Sept. 18, 2007, daily extent of 1.61 million square miles (4.17 million square kilometers).

In a study to decipher clues about how prostate cancer cells grow and become more aggressive, Johns Hopkins urologists have found that reduction of a specific protein is correlated with the aggressiveness of prostate cancer, acting as a red flag to indicate an increased risk of cancer recurrence.

Their findings are reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Aug. 27, 2012.

The team focused on a gene called SPARCL1, which appears to be critically important for cell migration during prostate development in the embryo and apparently becomes active again during cancer progression.  Normally, both benign and malignant prostate cancer cells express high levels of SPARCL1, and reduce these levels when they want to migrate. The team correlated this reduction or “down regulation” of SPARCL1 with aggressiveness of prostate cancer.