It’s a criticism that’s often heard in Michigan tech circles: The biggest challenge in growing the local IT sector is a glaring lack of talent. It’s not that we don’t produce people capable of filling the many open tech jobs here, it’s that we have a hard time keeping them in the state. A new program launched last week called IT in the D aims to reverse that trend.

IT in the D, a partnership between Detroit’s biggest tech companies—Quicken Loans, GalaxE.Solutions, Compuware Ventures, Fathead, and Marketing Associates—and local universities, is a training program designed to help students transition between the classroom and the workplace by offering mentorship and a chance to work on real-world IT projects.

Georges Doriot's grand experiment in venture capital had just notched a third straight year in the red.

It was 1949. The Frenchman-turned-American headed American Research & Development, a unique company at the time.

It had invested in 13 firms ranging from a shrimp processor to a developer of water filter membranes to a maker of household furnaces based on jet-engine technology.

Adding 1,500 new jobs to the McLean County area is among the goals of an economic development campaign that successfully raised more than $3.5 million.

The pledges, spread over the next five years, will be used by the Economic Development Council of the Bloomington-Normal Area to improve the business climate in the Twin Cities.

The EDC said Tuesday it slightly exceeded its $3.5 million goal for its Forging Ahead capital campaign, which kicked off in the fall. Sixty percent was given by private businesses and 40 percent from the public sector.

Turned down for a bank loan but determined to get her knitting book business off the ground, Shannon Okey joined the growing ranks of entrepreneurs raising start-up money online.

She sent out an appeal to her 7,000 Twitter followers and offered books, knitting designs and even a custom-knit sweater to people willing to pledge their support on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.com.

Within a month, she'd raised $12,480 from 283 backers. Two years later, Okey has grown Cooperative Press into a six figure business.

In recent years, new legal structures have emerged, including the LLC (Limited Liability Company). That’s good news for small businesses — because let’s face it, not all businesses are the same, and the same corporation structure isn’t right for everyone.

Yet new options bring new questions about which business structure to use, and for many entrepreneurs, the process of picking a business structure is uncharted territory.

That headline is a big promise. But here it is: The economic history of the world going back to Year 1 showing the major powers' share of world GDP, from a research letter written by Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan. 

I'm guessing that your first question, if you started scanning from the left, is: Wait, India was by far the biggest economy at the dawn of AD? Yup, India.

European settlement had a longstanding positive effect on economic development in countries that were colonies, notwithstanding the terrible effects of Western diseases and political oppression that often resulted, according to new research.

The paper, titled “The European Origins of Economic Development,” was written by New York University’s William Easterly and UC Berkeley’s Ross Levine, who set out to build a new comprehensive database of the European share of the population in the early phases of colonization. It also looked at the impact of the settlers on the former colonies’ economic development today.

A little extreme? Maybe. And sorry for offending any VCs out there.  But have you heard the news from across the pond?

Two entrepreneurs + one startup + 70k followers + 14 days = $933,342.00 in funding (600,000 British Pounds)

And not a venture capitalist in sight.

Call it “crowdfunding”.

Now please understand I am not knocking the VC racket.  (Oops, did I just call it a racket?)

Historically the greater part of a healthy economy comes from small businesses, BoomStartup is accelerating the growth of small tech businesses.

The purpose of BoomStartup is to help great tech ideas find an optimal business model, create a minimal viable product that is revenue-ready, execute into revenue generation, make connections to customers and build a sustainable business. The goal is that at the end of the summer program the companies will warrant investment from angel investors, venture capitalists, and banks to take them to them to the next level and greater economic impact.

Money to build the business is the number one challenge for most startups. Don’t believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and professional investors will throw money at you. In reality, only 3 out of 100 companies who apply are successful with Angels, and the success rate with VCs is even lower. A large percentage of startups never apply to either.

You need to explore more common and more productive approaches for getting your startup moving forward. Of course, every approach has pros and cons. For example, with any outside investment, you give up some ownership and control, and with bootstrapping your growth curve will likely be longer and more organic.

Google and Facebook get a whole lot of hype. But what are the real best tech companies to work for in the world?

Does Google have the best benefits and job security? Which tech company has a jazz quartet during lunch hour?

With help from Glassdoor.com, we've put together a list of the 25 best tech companies to work for right now.

The drug discovery business is going through tough times. Drug candidates aren't moving through the pharmaceutical industry's pipelines fast enough. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs struggle to get the funding they need to bring their new ideas to fruition. These issues are driving new alliances and partnerships between academic researchers, venture capitalists, and big pharma, but whether the new models will solve the problem was a question on the minds of many of the 15,000 attendees at this week's BIO International Convention in Boston.

The themes are familiar: venture capitalists are limiting their investments in biotech, in part because it's hard for fledgling life-science companies to go public, and although big pharma is desperate for innovative ideas and depends heavily on small biotechs for new drug candidates, these larger companies don't want to take on risky, early-stage projects. The new alliances, some of which involve direct collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and academics, are a response to what one panelist called this "crisis."

They look a bit like communally written Wikipedia pages. But these articles—concise profiles of people and organizations, complete with lists of connected organizations, people, and events—were in fact written by computers, in a new bid by the Pentagon to build machines that can follow global news events and provide intelligence analysts with useful summaries in close to real time.

The prototype system is part of a nonpublic site built for intelligence agencies by Raytheon BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and scheduled for delivery to the government later this year. It gathers information from 40 news websites written in English, Chinese, and Arabic, and eventually it will cover hundreds of news sites in all major languages. Ultimately the system will be linked with an existing TV broadcast monitoring network.

Vancouver’s Momentum Management Group (MMG Network) is a “young” consulting firm that is probably a harbinger of one aspect of the future working world in Canada.

MMG was started by several experienced managers from a variety of disciplines who turned to consulting after years spent working in companies. Some were “retired” in that they had left long-time jobs; others were nearing the age when they had to think about retiring.

None wanted to stop working as they neared or passed traditional retirement age, so they took up entrepreneurship.

The world is changing rapidly and fundamentally. Among other things, this means that business as usual is no longer an option. Far-sighted leaders know this, and are already adopting new purposes for their organisations that reflect the need to be kinder to society and the planet. Although this shift builds on concepts such as the triple bottom line, it goes far beyond this: first, it is about transformation, i.e. deep systemic change, rather than reformation, trying to make current outdated systems work better; and second, it will involve significant changes in our own personal beliefs, mindsets and behaviours.

This question has baffled many executives for quite some time. Management tries to replicate the special event or circumstances that created a successful innovation project but often fails. Companies have created positions such as Chief Innovation officer, innovation teams, and organizational strategies that promote innovation through diversity, team dynamics, and social networking. However, failure rates of 90% are common when innovations occur due purely to chance. What distinguishes whether an innovation is hit or miss?

Author Malcolm Gladwell appeared at SHRM's 2012 annual conference in Atlanta today to talk about generational diversity and how Millennials are different from previous generations.

The gist of his argument is that we're in the middle of a fundamental shift in how people communicate with each other, and this has spawned a new type of social organization, according to Susan Avello at HR Virtual Cafe. 

He focused on the differences between Occupy Wall Street and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

The Federal Government of Canada created the Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program (CICP) to help support businesses in commercializing their innovative products and services. This is a new government procurement program for business initiative and was launched to promote Canada’s economic growth. This Canadian government funding initiative is an acquisitions program where the government purchases the goods or services.

Arguing against immigration policies that force foreign-born innovators to leave the United States, a new study to be released on Tuesday shows that immigrants played a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities. Enlarge This Image

Conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonprofit group co-founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, the study notes that nearly all the patents were in science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM fields that are a crucial driver of job growth.

An increasing share of American businesses have no employees.  That trend makes it difficult to understand what’s been happening to American entrepreneurship over the past 20 years. Because non-employer businesses are so numerous and so different from employer businesses, the sliding share of businesses with employees makes it difficult to compare apples-to-apples over time in the small business sector.

The most recent data provided by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration shows that, in 2010, 21.7 million U.S. businesses were without employees, while only 5.6 million had them. At 79 percent of all American companies, the characteristics of non-employers swamp the overall data.