WASHINGTON — President Obama challenged Americans on Tuesday night to unleash their creative spirit, set aside their partisan differences and come together around a common goal of outcompeting other nations in a rapidly shifting global economy.

In a State of the Union address to a newly divided Congress, Mr. Obama outlined what he called a plan to “win the future” — a blueprint for spending in critical areas like education, high-speed rail, clean-energy technology and high-speed Internet to help the United States weather the unsettling impact of globalization and the challenge from emerging powers like China and India.

Two Democrats from Ohio’s House of Representatives have reintroduced a bill that would expand the size of a state-backed venture capital program.

House Bill No. 43 would increase by $170 million the value of tax credits that can be issued by the Ohio Venture Capital Authority (OVCA) to $550 million. A similar proposal passed the House by a vote of 98-0 in the state’s last legislative session, but didn’t make it to a vote in the Senate.

The OVCA expansion bill is a high priority for the state’s biomedical industry. The OVCA program makes it easier to recruit out-of-state venture firms to set up offices in Ohio, said Baiju Shah, president of Cleveland-based biomedical advocacy group BioEnterprise. Shah mentioned the OVCA expansion proposal earlier this month when asked about the industry’s top state legislative priorities in 2011.

Terri Maxwell uses the term “reluctant entrepreneurs” to describe the budding business owners she coaches through Succeed on Purpose, the business incubator she founded in Los Colinas, Tex. The incubator is intended for former employees, most of them forced from corporate jobs by layoffs, looking to recast themselves as entrepreneurs. The transition requires them to embrace a new mindset, said Ms. Maxwell, who has long enjoyed being her own boss.

Her introduction to the start-up world was rocky. She joined her first new venture, a systems integration company, as vice president of sales and marketing in 1995, invested $50,000 of her own money, and promptly lost it all. “I was broke and in debt, but bitten by the start-up bug,” she said.

Last night President Obama gave his State of the Union address, and how could we resist? We had to run his words through our usual text analysis process and dig into the speech.

The annual presidential address to Congress is key for each incumbent: It reveals their stance on recent news items and hot-topic issues, and its reception by politicians and the public can be regarded as a barometer of how well the President is doing--both from a political and personal standpoint. What were people expecting Obama to say? There was anticipation he'd make a call for more "civility" in U.S. life, as several presidents have done before him, in the wake of the Tucson shooting. And he did: "Amid all the noise and passions and rancor of our public debate, Tucson reminded us that no matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is a part of something greater--something more consequential than party or political preference." Speculation also surrounded how Obama would tackle the health care issue--forever embroiled in a bi-partisan political war.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that we've been eagerly anticipating the day when infographics finally crossover into everyday life, as a first-class tool. Well then, today brings something of a watershed moment: LinkedIn, the work focused social-networking site, has unveiled InMaps, a tool that maps your entire social network, color coded by associations. The idea is that the maps will allow you to see the prime connectors in your network -- and spot areas ripe for connecting, given the right introductions.

The structural changes roiling the pharmaceutical sector are driving innovation of biotech business models. With shrinking operating margins, patent expirations, a paucity of new product launches, significant reimbursement pressure, and an unpredictable regulatory environment—Big Pharma’s high risk bets on early stage biotechs of the past decade look cavalier through the lens of the current market environment.

The days of multi hundred million dollar upfront payments to acquire early stage biotech companies are likely gone for good, creating an exit trap for early stage private company investors. This trend is proving challenging to the sustainability of the venture capital model of the past. Various prognostications are that one quarter to one half of venture capital firms will disappear in the coming few years. The old biotech model of building early stage companies with loads of venture capital in the hope of a rapid Big Pharma acquisition at a large multiple to the invested capital, now seem oddly prosaic. Risk-sharing, earnouts, and contingent value right (CVR) agreements are the order of the day. The strategy of going public looks even more remote in today’s market. So, with that gloomy backdrop what does the future hold for those of us not ready to hang it up and head to the golf course?

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially with the success of the company. The logical solution? “Re-architect and re-write” the product.

For a company in a rapidly changing market, that’s usually the beginning of the end.

Is venture capital going back to the future?

Wikipedia

With its reputation tarnished by poor returns and bloated funds raised over the past decade, the industry is rapidly downsizing. In the last two years, 252 venture firms only raised $25.2 billion - a big drop from the $68.7 billion raised by 419 funds in the two years before that.

It’s clear that investors in venture funds are reconsidering their relationships with poor-performing firms, or eschewing venture capital altogether. At the same time, these limited partners are also taking a closer look at a new breed of fund managers - which some call “super angels” or “micro VCs” - who are preaching a return to the earlier days of venture capital when funds were small and former entrepeneurs ruled the land.

When will the Labor Department come up with a statistic (GEP or Gross Entertainment Product) to measure to extent to which the economy is dependent on fun? The Pittsburgh Steelers are, at the very least, the emotional heart of Pittsburgh. In season on Sundays, the faithful wear their jerseys to church, and the city takes a reverential pause during the games, as it did during last Sunday’s AFC championship competition. Football wins in Pittsburgh are best understood as divine rapture, delivered by Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, despite his pre-season time in purgatory.

The football industry has its factory lines across the river from downtown Pittsburgh. A joint venture between the Pittsburgh Steelers, the University of Pittsburgh, and local government accounted for the financial package that replaced Three Rivers Stadium with Heinz Field, a hulking monolith that, instead of producing steel by night, hosts football games on about twenty days a year.

The first elevator reportedly dates to the first century, when Roman gladiators rode crude lifts to reach the floor of the Coliseum. The first elevator speech may have occurred not long after… possibly as a pair of combatants exchanged trash talk before an upcoming fight?

There’s no doubt that today’s small business owner doing battle in the marketplace can ill afford to miss a chance to make the right impression on a potential customer, investor, supplier or other possible partner when they happen to cross paths. This is the genesis of the modern elevator pitch, a 30- to 60-second presentation suitable for delivery in the brief interval when two people find themselves in close proximity between floors.

It's one of the most iconic photos in American business.

A ragtag group of bearded weirdos assembled for a family portrait in Albuquerque.

Usually, there's a question above the photo: "Would you have invested?"

It's a trick question. You're supposed to answer no – because well, look at those people – but then you learn it's a company portrait of Microsoft from 1978.

It was taken just before the then startup left Albuquerque for Seattle. (Microsoft couldn't find anyone willing to move to New Mexico.)

In a world filled with social media, it's hard to choose which one to focus on to spread the word about a business.

Ad-ology surveyed 752 US-small business owners to see which social media sites were the most beneficial for the success of their companies (via eMarketer.com).

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all saw increases in the percentage of small business owners who found their sites beneficial.

As entrepreneurs, we have an ever increasing number of fantastic tools at our fingertips that allow us to run our business from anywhere, at any time. How great is that?!

I’m not actually sure what I’d do without some of my absolute favourites that you can check out on my site’s tools page–and I highly recommend you do.

I’m always on the hunt for more that will help me streamline my business, save time and money and generally get more efficient.

I sat down with Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen at the World Economic Forum to talk about how technological innovations are reshaping industries and business models. I was prepared to do something new from my standard interview process–which tend to be all on-camera interviews. Instead, I was planning to absorb the information he had to say and then write about it. But low and behold, I found myself deviating from this new strategy as soon as he mentioned three words within the first few minutes of our conversation, “explosion of video.”

I turned on my flip camera and immediately started rolling. In my interview Verwaayen told me, innovation is going to be led by video and many companies are not prepared to capitalize on its power. ” Everywhere around you people have smart phones and they do something with it that has an element of video. That is very different than we did a couple of years ago.”

If you want to innovate, the best place to do it is the United States, senior business executives say.

According to a new “Global Innovation Barometer” report from GE, which polled 1,000 senior execs from 12 countries, the U.S. is the clear “innovation champion” in the world, followed by Germany, Japan and China.

The top 10, along with the percentage of agreement, below:

1. U.S.A. (67 percent)
2. Germany (44 percent)
3. Japan (43 percent)
4. China (35 percent)
5. Korea (15 percent)
6. India (12 percent)
7. Sweden (8 percent)
8. U.K. (7 percent)
9. Israel (6 percent)
10. France (4 percent)

The European Commission has taken steps to simplify EU funding for research and innovation to cut costs and attract more participants, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Accounting burdens and costs for SMEs in the EU's FP7 research programme have been reduced immediately, said Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EU commissioner for research, innovation and science.

A new steering group made up of senior Commission officials has also been set up to tackle inconsistencies in the application of funding rules across EU member states, the commissioner announced yesterday (24 January).

Canada and Scotland have deep historical ties, so the Scottish Government’s recent announcement that it is to forge even closer commercial, cultural, educational and governmental links with Canada is very welcome news.

Our relationship goes back centuries. More than four million Canadians claim Scottish ancestry and generations of Scottish migrants brought their ideas, inventiveness and ingenuity across the Atlantic. The Scots helped make Canada what it is today. They explored and opened up vast tracts of land, they built railways, bridges and shipping lines, they developed our banking system and took leading roles in education and politics – indeed, the first Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John A Macdonald was born here in Glasgow.

In December, the environmental group Greenpeace put Cisco Systems at the top of its twice-yearly Cool IT leaderboard for the second time a row. The group praised the Silicon Valley-based company for keeping detailed measurements of its environmental impact and for its advocacy of green practices. Darrel Stickler, a leader of Cisco's "green task force," works with customers and every part of Cisco's business to make sustainability a priority. He talked to Technology Review about how Cisco works to reduce its own environmental impact and that of its customers.Tom Simonite

Some of the most popular gadgets and services from 2010, like Google’s Android and Google TV, and Apple’s iPhone and Mac OS X platform, are predicted to be major targets for cyberattacks this year.

McAfee and its researchers also predict acts of “hacktivism” to be more common, as more groups commit politically motivated cyberattacks like those of Wikileaks.

“With more users adopting social networking for both personal and business ac

It seemed an easy project: write an article for Anthill on Succession Planning. Yet for some reason, it just wasn’t taking off.

I pride myself on being a proficient writer and love getting involved in blogs, tweets and so forth. I know the subject, but the words were not appearing. I tried analogies and putting the owner in the buyer’s seat, but it didn’t gel.

Why was I struggling with this topic?

Then the irony hit me. I was trying to write an article about needing to start Succession Planning, yet I couldn’t get started. Is this our problem, starting, and, if so, why? For me, I was getting bogged down in too much detail.