Ground will be broken this week on Washington’s newest museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and in all honesty I’m of two minds about it.

Certainly if there is to be a separate national museum devoted to the history and culture of any group of Americans, this should be it. Americans have been arguing about slavery since before the founding of the republic. We fought a bloodywar over the enslavement of African Americans and we’ve been living with the social, economic, political and moral consequences ever since. African Americans also have had an outsize influence on American arts, culture and athletics. That this week’s cere­-mony will be presided over by the first black president of the United States should be a moment of national pride.

As Havard Business School professor Josh Lerner thanked the audience to conclude his interview of NEA Chairman and Co-founder Dick Kramlich, the keynote event this morning at this year’s HBS Venture Capital and Private Equity Conference, Kramlich interrupted him. Speaking to a room of hundreds of business school students, Kramlich took care to reemphasize the point he wanted to drive home: “The venture capital business is the largest single creator of jobs in the U.S.,” he said. And in his view it is alive and well.

Kramlich began his venture career in 1969, nine years before he founded NEA, in the period that he describes as beginning with Intel and ending with Apple. That period was a difficult one for the U.S. economically, with an oil crisis and years of “stagflation” – high inflation coupled with slow economic growth – but Kramlich called the climate “a great lesson” in how to succeed in venture capital.

Ken Malone and the board members of his startup biotech company gathered in a conference room at the University of Southern Mississippi last October to make a gut-wrenching decision.

Ablitech Inc.'s funding was slowly drying up, and it couldn't find new sources in Mississippi. If the company stayed, it would wither away. The only option left for Ablitech, they decided, was for the fledgling company to move.

"We called our shareholders together and said, 'Look, if we stay here, we're going to die,'" Malone recalled recently.

For months, Malone and one of the firm's co-founders scoured the East Coast, from North Carolina to Boston, for a new home. They chose Baltimore.

Being an entrepreneur these days requires an understanding of a thousand topics, many of which don’t even exist today in traditional learning vehicles, like schools and textbooks. The Internet and its information wave have changed everything – it’s the problem, with constant change, and it’s the solution, if you use it to navigate quickly and self-educate.

True entrepreneurs love to learn, unlearn, and relearn, whether they are 20 years old, or 60 years old. A new business means change, so they deal in change, and relish the journey. Usually it’s called initiative, dedication, and can-do attitude.

The Firm (TF), an international private members club and marketplace for business development and intrapreneurship, today announced that the Global Intrapreneurship Forum™ (GIFORUM) 2012 is set to take place in the Kingdom of Bahrain on May 27-28 at the Gulf Hotel.

GIFORUM 2012 will be the first global conference of its kind dedicated to supporting the growth and development of intrapreneurship within corporations and SMEs, and for corporate entrepreneurs from the MENA region and their counterparts around the world.

The Global Intrapreneurship Forum™2012 will focus on building further awareness of the concept of intrapreneurship. In essence, intrapreneurs are those individuals within large corporations or SMEs who have a deep knowledge and insights of business gaps and opportunities in their market and industries but who lack the business skills, acumen and network to effectively transform new ideas into viable commercial ventures for their companies or themselves. GIFORUM 2012 also aims to draw attention to the importance of intrapreneurship and the role it plays in driving economic growth and diversification both within companies and economies overall.

M. Prithviraj, Executive Secretary, Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology (KSCST), said on Friday that there was a need for aggressively harnessing the innovation potential of the country.

He was speaking at the inaugural function of a two-day workshop on “Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) – Practices and Management” organised by the Manipal Institute of Management here.

Mr. Prithivaraj said any innovation should impact everybody in the country, including the rich and the poor, the rural and urban areas. People should understand the importance of innovation. Innovation and invention were two different things. Invention was a step towards innovation. It was necessary to protect inventions. Hence, knowledge of IPR was essential.

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When Jason Goldberg set out to raise a new round of funding for his flash sales site Fab.com, he dispensed with the usual PowerPoint presentations and instead gave potential investors a look at the crown jewels: the "dashboard" of real-time analytics that can instantly spot trends and enable the site to tweak its offerings on the fly.

The company soon closed a $40 million round of funding from blue-chip venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz.

Such is the allure of big data, a buzzword that refers to the newfound ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of information on almost every dimension of the human experience. In sectors ranging from retail to healthcare to social media, the promise of Big Data has venture capitalists salivating.

Rockville's place as a hub for health care and bioscience makes it fertile ground for medical and scientific researchers from around the world to compete for jobs requiring specialized skills and experience—and often visas.

On Tuesday, at the Universities at Shady Grove, immigration law firm Taylor & Ryan, LLC will host a two-hour session on the immigration options available to workers seeking permanent resident status—aka green cards—for themselves and their families.

“These are people who may qualify for permanent residence for their significant contributions in the fields of science and medicine,” said Mary Ryan of Taylor & Ryan. “They’re already here and on Tuesday we’ll be talking to people who might want to consider these routes.”

Consider this: a successful innovation economy requires not just innovative ideas and the research and development to develop these ideas, but also financing to commercialize that R&D.

Canada's emerging technology companies generate an abundance of innovative ideas and rich R&D. Canada is among the world's most generous countries in its financial support of R&D for emerging technology companies. Canadian government support for business R&D as a percentage of GDP is the second highest of any OECD country and ahead of the U.S.

But Canada is facing a dire shortage of venture capital dedicated to commercializing that R&D. In 2010, the Canadian VC industry experienced its worst fundraising in 16 years and is virtually moribund. Without VC financing, the R&D of emerging technology companies cannot be commercialized into products and services to be sold in the global market to create jobs, revenues and exports. The shocking result: much of Canada's R&D is going to waste. The Canadian government's billions of dollars in annual R&D support has effectively become a vast program for creating advanced aircraft when there is no fuel to fly them.

The pictures of Athens on fire are making their way around the web. Crowds gathered in Syntagma square all of Sunday in protest of the new austerity measures, while hooded vandals burned buildings down with Molotov cocktails, causing absolute destruction to countless businesses.

Inside the parliament building lawmakers passed the second memorandum calling for more austerity measures to be put into place, a last ditch effort to somehow make Greece’s debt sustainable by 2020.

This is the second go at austerity; the first measures passed in 2010 were never really implemented. Since that time the situation has gotten a lot worse, leaving the country at the brink of a chaotic default on loans incurred during 20 years of endless borrowing.

Most people are more interested in organized crime than in organized business. Chambers of commerce do not often attract headlines except for the occasional, inevitable dustup with a public authority.  For that reason, this April’s 100 year anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may pass without much public attention.  This would be a shame, as groups of companies have left their fingerprints all over the American civic landscape, and were busy even at the birth of Tom Donohue’s organization in 1912.

President William Howard Taft, who called the U.S. Chamber into existence, was a frequent visitor to local chambers of commerce.  He once joked that even towns without any commerce had a chamber or a board of trade.  Indeed, during the Progressive Era these groups were proliferating wildly, and filled with excitement .

Fed up with low interest rates on your savings? Then go down the pub and earn 11% interest by handing your money to one of the biggest companies operating pubs in the UK. It's just one of the more exotic ways that savers, desperate to earn more on their cash, can now pick up a better return.

Britain's biggest financial advice group, Hargreaves Lansdown, has opened a new service that lets small savers buy high-interest corporate bonds that pay rates far above those available from accounts at the high street banks. The retail bonds of pub company Enterprise Inns, for example, are paying interest of 11.2% – and assuming it doesn't go bust, you'll be paid the interest, and your capital back at maturity. Bonds in Halifax, now owned by Lloyds Bank, are paying 9%, while insurance company Aviva is paying 8.3%. Even Goldman Sachs is paying a "coupon" of 6.5%.

In an attempt to improve the state’s economic climate, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced last week that the state will invest $250 million in startup technology companies over the next five years.

The money is set to come from both the state and Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public authority responsible for technology investing. The funds will then be distributed to both high-tech startup companies and other firms that assist startups in an attempt to make capital more widely available and fostering business-friendly environments, especially around universities.

“Small business ventures really provide the best potential for economic growth in the short and long term,” said Jim Watson, a spokesman for Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development. “It’s about these three things: innovation, entrepreneurship and startups.”

If you want to go beyond the status quo and innovate, you will need to make best use of available resources, adapt, stick your neck out, and have a really good sense of humor. Oh, a fast computer will also help.

WHEN China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, visited the White House on Tuesday, President Obama renewed calls for China to play more fairly in the world economy. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. echoed those sentiments, telling Mr. Xi that the two countries could cooperate “only if the game is fair.”

But while China’s industrial subsidies, trade policies, undervalued currency and lack of enforcement for intellectual property rights all remain sticking points for the United States, there is at least one area in which the playing field seems to be slowly leveling: the cheap labor that has made China’s factories nearly unbeatable is not so cheap anymore.

China has experienced sporadic labor shortages, which in turn have driven up its once rock-bottom labor costs. This trend is particularly evident in the weeks following China’s Spring Festival, or New Year, when more than 100 million rural migrants return to the countryside to spend the year’s biggest holiday with family. Coaxing those same migrants back into the urban work force has proven increasingly difficult.

Choosing the right business structure can be a daunting task for the small business owner or entrepreneur. You may have heard that the traditional C Corporation is overkill for most small businesses, and results in higher overall tax payments through something known as double taxation. But if the C Corporation isn’t right, then what is?

In my last post, I discussed how the LLC (limited liability company) and S Corporation are popular structures for small businesses since they avoid this double taxation burden. With these business structures, the company is taxed like a sole proprietor or partnership, meaning the company itself doesn’t file its own taxes; all company profits are “passed through” and reported on the personal income tax return of the shareholders or, in the case of an LLC, the members.

Boston has been home to two major "accelerator" program so far: TechStars Boston and Y Combinator. And both of them have focused almost exclusively on start-ups developing Web sites, mobile apps, and software-as-a-service offerings. (Y Combinator, of course, now operates exclusively in Silicon Valley.)

Ben Einstein wants to change that. He's out raising money and laying the groundwork for a new accelerator program, Bolt, that would focus exclusively on entrepreneurs who want to design physical products. Einstein, previously a principal at the product design consultancy Brainstream, moved from Northampton to Boston last month to make Bolt a reality.

Not only is the healthcare industry the fastest growing nationwide in terms of jobs, it pays its employees pretty well too.

In the list of Fortune magazine’s 25 top-paying companies nationwide, where the most common salaried jobs were compared, the healthcare sector held its own by taking three spots, including the no. 1 position. The list is derived from Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

A friend of mine recently asked me a simple question: “After four years as a VC, knowing what you know now, what basic tips do you have for guys like me who are growing venture-backed businesses?” It got me thinking about what I’ve learned being on the other side of the fence – and though I don’t profess to be an expert on how to be the perfect entrepreneur, I thought my own experiences might help some founders out in the trenches today.

1) Keep your options open. The smartest second- and third-time entrepreneurs I see raise capital in a very focused and efficient manner. They preserve option value at each stage of the company’s growth and make conscious decisions about how to proceed in each funding round. I learned this the hard way in my first company, where we raised capital at a $250M valuation and essentially priced ourselves out of an attractive M&A opportunity. I can’t tell you how many companies I see that would be terrific $50M-100M acquisition targets, but lose that option because they’ve raised too much capital.

Introducing personalised healthcare to stratify patient groups and ensure everyone gets the best, most appropriate care is seen as a cost, but actually it is an opportunity to have a fitter and more productive population, and to develop new companies, new products and new markets.

But times are hard, and the stumbling block is building a convincing argument for investing in the development and implementation of personalised healthcare at a time when governments across Europe are slashing budgets. “We can’t ask for more money,” said Alexander von Gabain, Chairman of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

Instead, it is necessary to be more innovative in how the available cash is spent and to put greater effort into leveraging the value of existing public spending on research. “We’ve got to get everyone in the ecosystem to work together,” von Gabain told delegates at the Science|Business conference, ‘Personalised Healthcare: from Theory to Practice’ in London last week (26 Jan).