For the Global Innovation Series, presented by BMW, we’re focused on one simple question: In what ways is technology drastically changing our lives for the better? In a lot of ways, living in a city is challenging — urban citizens are constantly thinking about mobility, energy, shelter, safety and efficiency as they go about their daily lives. Many projects and startups in cities all around the globe are developing and implementing new technology to ameliorate these daily problems. If these concepts come to fruition, then the future of cities is looking bright.

Startups provide leadership in the market. Entrepreneurs provide leadership to their startup. There are many styles of leadership, like dictatorial, laissez-faire, and democratic. One that I hear discussed more these days, in this age of relationships, is called “servant” leadership.

What is servant leadership? The servant leader serves the people they lead through mentoring, direct assistance, listening, and acting on their employees input. It’s the opposite of self-serving, domineering leadership, and makes those in charge think harder about how to respect, value and motivate people reporting to them.

A plate of worms; a blood-pressure cuff sitting on a table near a housing project; an endoscope used to peer into the stomach. All are emblematic of the wide variety of Asian research I got a glimpse of in four days of interviews here. Why do so many scholars think that the 21st century will be the Asian century? The answer isn’t just that many Asian universities are racing to be research powerhouses. Depending on the country, there’s as much stumbling as there is running.

A different answer is that the focus of biomedical research, by virtue of population alone, will have to shift to Asia. About 4.1-billion of the planet’s roughly seven-billion people live in Asia. Demographic shifts in the Asian population will shape research: China’s one-child policy and family-planning programs promoted in many other Asian countries, for instance, have led to a larger proportion of the Asian population being elderly, with fewer young people to take care of them.

There is a lot of discussion these days about startup funding, whether there is a bubble or whether a crash is forthcoming. To get more perspective on the issue, we spoke with Eric Jackson, co-founder and CEO of CapLinked, an online platform for investors in private companies. Even though it's just one source of data, CapLinked's growing platform can provide a good overview of the startup funding landscape.

Here's what we learned:

Internet deals were up 30% Q/Q on CapLinked, which suggests strong activity, though of course one platform may not be representative of the sector. "People are definitely very active when it comes to looking for money in the sector," Jackson told us.

IS THE SCIENCE or engineering student wired differently to the business student? Tarring folk with the same brush is never smart, but there are some general differences between the person who voluntarily chooses the path of science over business.

The emphasis now placed on the commercialisation of scientific research means that science graduates at all levels need to know how to get their inventions to market, and modules in entrepreneurship are now a staple in schools of science, engineering and technology around the country.

“If they don’t do it right, then I can just do it myself.”  I’ve said and heard that phrase a hundred times (at least). But I’m convinced that replacing a low performing team member with yourself (the owner of the business) is a bad idea in the long run.

You need a team — a team that gets it. And that starts with you.

In a recent survey by eVoice, 90% of the 400 small business participants say they fill more than 3 roles within their company. Even though that’s a small survey audience, the results make sense to me. When it’s your company you do whatever you have to do to make it work.

I am developing a standard format for these MBA Mondays series. I do five or six posts on a topic and then I solicit four or five guest posts to wrap it up. Today we begin the guest posts on the Board Of Directors series we've been doing for the past six weeks.

Hopefully everyone who has been following this series on Boards understands the point that you want independent directors on your Board and that the best choice for independent directors are fellow entrepreneur CEOs who have been through what you are going through.

If you want to be charismatic, your mind can't wander while you're one-on-one with a customer or colleague. Here's a simple one-minute exercise to help you focus.

Charismatic behavior can be broken down into three core elements: presence, power, and warmth. These elements depend both on our conscious behaviors and on factors we don’t consciously control. People pick up on messages we often don’t even realize we’re sending through small changes in our body language.

The first sentence on Barbara Corcoran's website bio is a bit lackluster, referencing straight D's in school and 20-plus jobs before she turned 23. However, in the decades since, the real estate icon has made up for any poor performance earlier in life. In 2001 she sold her real estate business for $66 million. Today, she is the well-known female face on ABC's hit show, Shark Tank, an author, speaker, and investor.

During this episode of Work Flow, Corcoran shares how she divides and conquers her days in order to manage her many media appearances and her numerous businesses. Many of the people I've spoken with in this Fast Company video series talk about how they achieve work-life balance. Corcoran, on the other hand, professes that such a thing is not possible: "I gave up years ago on the concept that you could actually have balance in your life, I think it's a phantom chase," she says.

The Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) today announced nearly $450,000 in awards to three Washington non-profit organizations to foster commercial translation of new health and health-care products.

Two of the grants focus on infectious disease. Dr. Philip Fleckman at the University of Washington will assess the effectiveness of a novel material for reducing infections associated with kidney dialysis catheters. Dr. Timothy Rose at Seattle Children's Research Institute will develop a test to detect common respiratory infections in outpatient or point-of-care settings.

Innovocracyprovides crowd funding for academic research. In this interview, co-founder Mikael Totterman explains the concept and describes the first project:a promising toilet-training method for autistic children.

What is Innovocracy?

Innovocracy was created to bridge the gap between powerful ideas and beneficial applications of those ideas. We offer a funding source that connects people who want to support innovation in academic research and those innovators found on campuses around the world.

Flexible electronics promise some very cool products in the not so distant future. They include smart bandages that monitor the vital signs of a wounded soldier. Sensors that can detect where the weakest part of an airplane. Flexible glass that can display digital imagery. And smart trading cards that can transmit information to a digital display.

Flexible electronics combine graphics arts printing and microelectronics, enabling machines to literally print circuits on top of plastic materials in the same way that an inkjet printer sprays ink on paper.

The e-commerce industry has broadened in scope in recent years. Originally confined to transaction activity between large financial institutions, e-commerce then expanded in the 1970s and 1980s to include what was termed “EDI” (Electronic Data Interchange) between large companies who could afford the dedicated computing power and related IT department.

Since the rise of the Internet, the definition of e-commerce it has expanded to include Internet purchasing, mobile, and, more recently, social and peer-to-peer financial activity.

These days, every established company is at risk of having its industry--and its own business--disrupted by a startup. Cognizant of this, companies devote a lot of time to talking about how important it is to innovate. But here’s the truth: most companies can’t innovate because everyone is paid to maintain the status quo.

This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.

If I told you I had a way to create 10,000 new jobs in Minnesota, just by changing the investment strategy of one state agency, wouldn't your next words be, "Let's make it happen"?

What state wouldn't want to invest its own pension funds in high-return, job-creating, local businesses, while creating new jobs along the way? Minnesota, apparently.

Thirty-two other states have investment programs targeting local companies, our research shows. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, we sit idle. Those are exactly the kinds of investments that historically produce higher long-term returns than other assets. Right next door, the State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) in 2010 invested over $12.3 billion in companies with economic ties to Wisconsin. Minnesota's State Board of Investment (SBI), by contrast, invests only 7 percent of its $60 billion portfolio in private equity and 0.3 percent in venture capital, and very little of that in Minnesota firms.

In recent years, America's obsession with innovation has frequently focused exclusively on Silicon Valley—and for good reason. What Steve Jobs did for Apple—and what the leaders of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have done to drive their companies to the pinnacle of global commerce—offer important lessons for professionals across the full spectrum of the American economy.

But a new book by journalist Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, suggests that another firm is too often left out of the story: Bell Labs. A host of technologies that we now take for granted—transistors, solar cells, lasers, and the operating system Unix among them—were all invented by a firm that embraced an entirely different model of innovation, focused less on breaking out of existing paradigms, and more instead on nurturing a long-term collaboration. What can we learn from that story? More than that, what can it teach us about how to tackle America's most vexing long-term challenge: covering the costs of caring for members of the Baby Boomer generation as they age?

As part of our ongoing discussion about the globalization of the startup movement, we look today at one nation’s strategy that appears to be very effective. Present at the recently concluded Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Liverpool were the leaders of Start-Up Chile, an almost two-year old initiative that has rapidly gained traction around the world. However, while it carries a similar name to other national initiatives around the globe, it has a very different approach.

Unlike the Startup America or StartUp Britain movement, Start-Up Chile works more like a focused incubation program than a platform for initiatives or public relations. Startups from any part of the world can apply for the program and those selected receive a US$40,000 government grant as seed capital, a one-year work visa, office space and unlimited access to its extensive network of local and global contacts. The selected businesses must come to Chile for a minimum of six months, after which they are free to take whatever steps necessary to grow.

One of the most widespread misconceptions I encounter when talking to people about the current state of the web is that this is pretty much it. People can’t imagine some service ever replacing Google as the dominant search engine. People can’t imagine some other social network ever replacing Facebook. Yet it seems only evident that this is going to happen. When we look at the state of the Web ten years ago, everything was different and nothing was the same.

Heck, take this BusinessWeek article from 6 years ago. Digg was the hottest ticket in town, MySpace was THE social network and Twitter was 3-week-old(!) company.

*Actual numbers may vary.

Every year I speak to a number of would-be (and occasionally existing) entrepreneurs who want to pursue an MBA to ensure greater success in their post-graduate ventures. Before we go too far in our conversation, I grill them to see whether they have the DNA of an entrepreneur. If they can’t convince me, I doubt that they’re going to convince admissions committees, much less have fun (or success) starting and running companies. If they can convince me, I’ll have them weave some of their answers to the questions below into their applications:

I was in LA for the past three days hanging out at Oblong, meeting with a bunch of entrepreneurs I know, then spending time at MuckerLabs, giving a talk at SCVStartup, and finishing up my trip with a half day at LaunchPad LA followed by a dinner that LaunchPad LA and Mark Suster put on. Even though I still felt fried from my 50 mile run, I had a great time and I’m sure I fed off of the energy of all the people I spent time with.

At the dinner I gave a short talk on Startup Communities and then answered some questions. The first question was “what do I think of the phrase ‘Silicon Beach’ for the LA startup community.” I responded that I thought it was stupid. I hate Silicon Whatever. LA should be LA. When I was in downtown LA at Oblong I didn’t notice a beach. Before I could go on a rant about why you should call things “Silicon Blah” I got a round of applause.