There has been a lot of SBIR action going on behind the scenes at SBA as work continues on the SBIR and STTR policy directives. Most of the SBA's work has been behind closed doors with federal agency SBIR program managers and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials.

To quote my grandmother, "There has been much to talk about, but nothing to say." For the last several weeks her idiom was correct, but now things are a changin'. We are seeing action and it is time to get you up to speed.

As mentioned in previous issues, the SBA's time sensitive mission for SBIR & STTR is the creation of Policy Directives (PD) which serve to guide the running of these programs. In our February interview with Sean Green

While Apple is often the most highly touted company for its innovation success, 3M is a global innovation company that has remained under the radar for its long-term innovation plans and succeses. With $30 billion in sales and products sold in nearly 200 countries, 3M has made significant contributions to the health care, communications and office business - including bringing the world’s most recognizable brands Post-it Notes and Scotch tape to market.

The root of 3M’s success is its business model; to foster organic growth by inventing entirely new, market-changing products. These disruptive technologies have not only led to new products but to the creation of new industries. In order to foster this growth, 3M has always emphasized the important of research and development (R&D) to which the company dedicates six percent of its yearly revenue. Although a high percentage in R&D spending does not guarantee success, 3M is doing very well.

While our nine rules for getting ahead are important for women to follow, they serve as helpful advice for anyone looking to climb the corporate ladder.

Keep reading for more from the "Women in the Workplace" special report:

People often say Silicon Valley is not like the rest of the world. We’re more tolerant of failure, embrace risk-taking more eagerly, get more enthusiastic about technical solutions, and have a huge, deep pool of engineering and marketing talent to draw from.

As a result, the region has produced some of the most disruptive, world-changing ideas: The semiconductor, the integrated circuit, the PC, the Internet, and the search engine, to name a few.

Scott Shane seems to delight in sharing harsh realities about entrepreneurship and economic development.

Shane, a Case Western Reserve University economics professor who authors a regular column for Business Week, castigates a culture that promotes a “naive view of entrepreneurship and starting businesses” in his 2008 book “The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By.”

The reality is very, very few entrepreneurs are successful. “We overinflate the positives and talk only about a small group of extremely successful start-ups like Apple, Google and Federal Express, but ignore the much larger number that fail,” he said in an interview with Case’s news center to promote the book.

New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently pointed out that the VC industry is at risk of being marginalized by the emerging crowdfunding industry. I agree that the provision of capital for entrepreneurs is about to change in a big way, but my sense is that the change is not going to hurt VCs.

Venture capital has always been geographically concentrated, resulting in the emergence of a few hubs of VC and entrepreneurial activity and support services — Silicon Valley being the best example.

But the majority of US entrepreneurs have not been able to benefit from the venture capital industry because they live in the wrong parts of the US. This wasn’t an issue in the early days, when VC was novel. But over time, this geographic concentration has become a limitation.

On Tuesday, HHS launched the Health System Measurement Project to allow policymakers, health care professionals and the public to track health care trends across the country, CMIO reports (Byers, CMIO, 5/15).

The website provides information on:

• Access to care; 
• Costs; 
• Disease prevention; and 
• Health IT (Daly, Modern Healthcare, 5/15).

The White House released a report entitled: Moving America’s Small Businesses & Entrepreneurs Forward. It is a comprehensive look at what investments the Obama Administration has made to keep small businesses moving forward. The report is attached and can also be found at this link:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/small_business_report_final.pdf

The 87 page report goes into great detail, but I thought you might be interested in some of the highlights:

The President has signed in to law 18 tax cuts that directly help small businesses. This includes new tax credits for hiring unemployed workers and veterans, and allowing small businesses to write off the full cost of new investments in things like new machines and computers against last year’s taxes.

Helping small, main street banks provide more loans to help small businesses grow their local community by investing over $4 billion in 332 banks and community development loan funds through the new Small Business Lending Fund.

Supporting nearly $80 billion in loans to more than 150,000 small businesses since January 2009; FY 2011 was a record year with $30 billion in lending supported through the 7(a) and 504 programs.

New Brunswick has always been home to innovative companies and an innovative government, where ideas have stretched the boundaries of what is possible. Global markets have taken notice.

A prime example in the early years is the first pioneer in our region in the telecommunications industry: NBTel and the internationally recognized Service New Brunswick “single window model.” Recent examples of innovative companies include Radian6 and Q1 Labs, which were acquired by technology giants salesforce.com and IBM in 2010 and 2011, respectively, have captured the attention of the national technology industry and put New Brunswick on the map. Accounting for just over $1 billion in commercial success in one year, the Radian6 and Q1 Labs acquisitions have together transformed “the image of New Brunswick from a have-not province to an innovation hotbed populated by smart technies and risk embracing investors.” 1 It is estimated that as many as 50 millionaires will have been created by the two deals, which generates not only short-term economic wealth, but potentially longterm gain with new seed capital and angel investors ready, willing and able to invest in New Brunswick innovations.

Despite the success of the province, to address several major challenges for the decade ahead, to transform the economic landscape for traditional and emerging industries, and to compete in an ever-changing global economy, a greater emphasis on innovation and the adoption of industry best practices is required.

Last November, Costa Rica joined the global movement to unleash startups by celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW). The response surprised its local champions. Costa Rica´s host, Yo Emprendedor, managed to get strong support from 28 key partners from across the private, public, NGO and education sectors—including the Ministry of the Economy, the largest media group in the country and angel investors.

Students responded enthusiastically to the campaign, judging by the wide participation in GEW events. The National Business Plan Competition Yo Emprendedor, for instance, brought to light 200 startup projects for everything from specialty foods to innovative wind turbines. This means something in a country where tradition dictates that university graduates should get a ‘real’ job with either an established, national company or with one of the many multinational corporations that came to Costa Rica for its educated workforce and proximity to the United States.

In the last episode of TechStars, we learned why it is so important for startup teams to have expertise in the businesses they are trying to create.

In this episode, we’ll see what happens when a startup realizes that its initial concept just isn’t working, and with help from mentors, pivots in a completely new direction.

Flickr was once a role playing game. Groupon was once a web community for mobilizing social actions. YouTube was once an online dating site. Some of the most successful startups of the past decade had to pivot toward a new idea before catching on. Will pivoting help any of the Techstars teams find success?

In Mashable‘s new video series, Behind the Launch, we’re taking cameras behind the scenes at Vungle, an in-app video advertising startup. Last week, we met the the founders and saw them bring on Colin Behr to head up business development.

Now that they have a promising platform and a “closer,” it’s time to chat with investors. Silicon Valley names, such as 500 Startups‘ Dave McClure, DFJ Esprit‘s Krishna Visvanathan and AOL Ventures‘ Adam Smith, appear in this episode, as Jack and Zain court investors and learn from the best. “They don’t want ‘Yes men,’” says Smith.

What would you want to get out of an investor? Watch today’s episode to see what happens, and join the conversation on Twitter, #BehindTheLaunch.

You can’t succeed in business without an operational model that delivers value to customers at a reasonable price, with an underlying cost that allows you to make a profit. There are no “overrides” – for example, businesses don’t thrive just because they offer the latest technology, or because everyone wants to be “green, or because their goal is to reduce world hunger.

I expect that should seem intuitive to all entrepreneurs, but every investor I know has many stories about startup funding requests with major business model elements missing. The most common failures are solutions looking for a problem, lack of a defined market, and giving away the product.

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

These six factors can erode the grandest of plans and the noblest of intentions. They can turn visionaries into paper-pushers and wide-eyed dreamers into shivering, weeping balls of regret. Beware!

 1) Availability

We often settle for what’s available, and what’s available isn’t always great. “Because it was there,” is an okay reason to climb a mountain, but not a very good reason to take a job or a free sample at the supermarket.

Just when you thought the employment picture for recent grads couldn’t get any worse. A report out today shows that students are increasingly having trouble landing internships — making the experience gap between recent grads and older workers even more pronounced.

Fifty percent of employers haven’t hired any interns in the past six months, according to a survey of 225 employers by the Boston-based Gen-Y consulting firm Millennial Branding, using data from career-services operator Experience Inc. The survey also shows that 91 percent of those employers think that students should have between one and two internships before they graduate.

Little by little, Hawaii’s iconic beaches are disappearing.

Most beaches on the state’s three largest islands are eroding, and the erosion is likely to accelerate as sea levels rise, the United States Geological Survey is reporting.

Though average erosion rates are relatively low — perhaps a few inches per year — they range up to several feet per year and are highly variable from island to island and within each island, agency scientists say. The report says that over the last century, about 9 percent of the sandy coast on the islands of Hawaii, Oahu and Maui has vanished. That’s almost 14 miles of beach.

Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are overweight.

We spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Dr. Chow, 49, gave a presentation on “Illuminating the Obesity Epidemic With Mathematics,” and then later by telephone; a condensed and edited version of the interviews follows.

You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?

John Herb came up with a business idea while he was still in high school. So when it was time to choose a college, he looked for one that would help him develop that idea: scanning people's old photos and creating a private social network around them. Syracuse University stood out for the Syracuse Student Sandbox, a business incubator, and other resources it offers to would-be entrepreneurs. Mr. Herb just finished his freshman year there,

Around this time each year, career-minded college students are busy sewing-up internships for the summer months. A new study by Millennial Branding illustrates that entrepreneurial experience is in demand by nearly 1 out of three employers.

The study, conducted with Experience Inc., compiled information from 225 companies about their hiring practices.

You might assume that experience would rank at the top of employer wish lists.  But for entry-level positions that students and recent grads apply for, employers say they place a high degree of importance on so-called ‘soft skills.’  Effective communication, a positive attitude and teamwork skills ranked as important or very important to employers.