Boston's frigid winters can't stop its piping-hot entrepreneurial scene, thanks to an endless supply of top-shelf talent from area colleges. Here's the tea on Inc.'s No. 15 Surge City. 

Startup Neighborhoods Seaport: Overlooking the once tea-filled harbor, the fast-growing Seaport attracts new kinds of disrupters--like startup accelerator MassChallenge and business software firm Catalant Technologies. There's room for out-of-towners, too, like Glossier and vegan restaurant chain By Chloe. 

A new study published today by the European Patent Office (EPO) finds that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) rely on European patents to protect their high-potential inventions and that two thirds of these inventions are commercially exploited.

The study, entitled “Market success for inventions – Patent commercialisation scoreboard: European SMEs”, finds that SMEs depend heavily on partnerships with domestic or foreign partners. The report shows that half of all commercialised inventions protected either by a European patent application or a granted European patent are exploited in collaboration with an external partner via a licencing agreement (62% of the respondents), co-operation (49%) or spin-off (32%). Moreover, the partner is usually from another European country. This reveals how resource-constrained SMEs use partnerships as a way of entering new markets or sharing the financial burden of innovation.

As one of the biggest search engines in the world, and one of the biggest video libraries in the world, YouTube is also one of the best resources for self-education, motivation or just some good old fashioned inspiration.

These can be particularly useful in the fast-paced world of business and leadership. As anyone in the realm will tell you, that one word covers innumerable disciplines, across marketing, project management, psychology, and sales.

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To win in Industry 4.0, manufacturers need to change their approach to innovation. In particular, they must shift their focus from improving existing products and processes to developing genuinely new ones that target an unmet need in the market or value chain.

As for how they do it, the best way is to view innovation as a journey — one that begins with ideation but goes on to feature a series of continuous, iterative steps all pointing toward the same ultimate goal: commercialization .

College professors at the top public universities in the United States tend to do pretty well for themselves. That is to say, most of them are at least earning more money than the average K-12 public school teacher.

We took a look at the 2020 50 best public colleges and universities as ranked by US News and World Report and gathered data on the average salary for non-medical instructional staff normalized to a standard nine-month contract for the 2017-2018 school year from the Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey results. Many school rankings are tied. 

Your stomach drops to the floor. Your palms get sweaty. You begin to ramble incoherently, or worse, can’t come up with anything to say at all. Almost all of us know the feeling of making a big mistake during an interview.

Great. There goes that opportunity, you might think.

Don’t be tempted to wave the white flag of surrender just yet, though. Everyone stumbles in interviews once in a while—the trick is to handle it well, so that your interviewer is able to look past it.

Exactly two months ago, we shared our exclusive list of 40 interview questions from some of the most thoughtful company builders in our network. The Review's goal has always been to gather the best put-to-use-right-away advice for building companies—and this seemed to fit that mold. From the thoughtful, unconventional questions to the insightful advice on what to listen for in the answers, we hit the publish button hoping that this article would be one that you'd want to save and return to over the years.

One of the most impactful startups of this generation for entrepreneurs has been Kickstarter. It changed how their new companies and products got funded forever. On The Small Business Radio Show this week, Yancey Strickler who is the cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, the mission-driven global Public Benefit Company that helped pioneer crowdsourcing. He now has a new book out called “This Could Be Our Future”. The London Spectator called him one of the “least obnoxious tech evangelists”.

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Benji Jones: Oh, God! This is not attractive.

Jessica Orwig: No. It really does look like human fat.

Jones: That's me and my boss opening up a lava lamp. Oh! Are we getting these noises, guys? Our goal was simple: to figure out what's inside. As it turned out, it actually wasn't simple at all. And that's because companies don't want you to know.

If you’re sometimes frustrated about how little you accomplish during your work day, you’re not alone. Research indicates that only 26% of people often leave the office having accomplished the tasks they set out to do. It’s common to feel as if you’ve been busy but haven’t done anything important. Of course, life isn’t about being a productivity robot in which every second is optimized. But most of us do want to feel well-organized and efficient in pursuing key goals and solving critical problems. A good first step is to understand the mental mistakes that typically prevent us from focusing on and finishing meaningful work.  Here are five common ones:

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As a new business advisor and occasional investor, I get approached regularly by people who have a dream or a new business idea, and are looking for support and money to make it a reality. They are usually short on specifics required for execution, so I have to tell them that the idea is the easy part – and the real challenge is execution, even if someone gives you the money.

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There was a time in the late 1980s when I believed that the generation of children born between the baby boomers and millennials should be called the Sesame Street Generation.

Gen X, as we ended up being tagged (thanks, Doug Coupland), had a special relationship with TV. As the children of families where increasingly both parents worked, it was our babysitter, our after-school playdate, our dinner companion.

In my travels this year, the one comment I’m hearing is “we just didn’t see it coming.”

The grocery industry didn’t see it coming when Amazon suddenly jumped into their industry and 25 billion in market cap got erased overnight.

An insurance company in California didn’t see it coming when the effects of climate change fueled a raging wildfire that took out the entire town of Paradise, California, destroying 22,000 structures and rendering the firm insolvent.

“The Biggest Biotech Bombshell in Years,” declared The Motley Fool of Biogen’s market-moving announcement October 22 that it was planning to file for FDA approval of the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) candidate aducanumab, being co-developed with Eisai, despite halting two failed Phase III studies of the drug in March. Investors flocked to Biogen stock, sending the company’s stock price surging 40% before the start of trading that day. When the market closed, Biogen shares finished the day 26% higher at $281.87.

Growing up, I used to love to listen to Paul Harvey’s "The Rest of the Story" on the radio. The nuances he would bring to light with just a little deeper look were fascinating.

After reading Dale Denwalt’s article in The Oklahoman on Oct. 20 headlined “Insiders Report Flaws in State Startup Ecosystem,” I felt a Paul Harvey moment may be in order.

Oklahoma often gets knocked in national venture capital rankings based primarily on data that is collected by PitchBook or similar venture deal data collectors. These entities are “pay to report,” charging reporters like i2E oftentimes more than $12,000 a year just to provide data. That is money we do not have to spend.

The ranks of traditional-age students are stagnating, which means colleges are increasingly looking to recruit from other groups, including those who are older. A popular pool — for both institutions and policy makers — is people who have some college under their belt but no degree.

A new report, “Some College, No Degree,” shines a spotlight on a specific group of them: the ones who are most likely to re-enroll and finish.

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If your team could get more than one hundred creative new ideas, ranging from revenue-generating market expansions to ways to improve the health of your employees and reduce insurance costs, would you ask for them? What if virtually all those ideas could be executed and positively impact the bottom line… for a measly $2 million? Isn’t this what every management team wants? Of course it is.

You will be pivoting your business in your lifetime, whether you are a new startup, or a mature company like Motorola or IBM. You can count on it and plan for it, or you wait for the next survival crisis brought your way by this rapidly changing world. You can even give it a more elegant name, like “market-focused reinvention,” but it won’t be graceful if you don’t take the lead.

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Few PE firms systematically focus on pricing transformations, though such programs can create substantial value. Here’s how pricing value can be captured at any stage in the deal cycle.

Over the years, private equity (PE) firms have mastered the art of creating value for their portfolio companies through cost reduction, talent upgrades, and financial engineering. Moreover, they have built valuable experience in recognizing patterns that allow them to spot and invest in the best portfolio targets. In contrast, most PE owners do not display the same level of fluency or confidence in commercial productivity—especially in pricing.

There are 90 million Americans, which is 32% of the population, now listening to podcasts. From influencers to journalists, celebrities and your friends, podcasting is taking the world by storm. Irrespective of the subject you pursue or the length of the podcast, there’s a subject matter for virtually everyone.  Podcasts allow people to share their craft, campaign or simply share their passions to large audiences.