Forget hospitals. Forget doctors’ offices. Heck, forget even the Internet.

If you really want to influence people on healthcare, look no further than your local Target store.

It makes sense, when you think about it. Target and its rival Wal-Mart already offer everything under the sun — health clinics, pharmacies, groceries, exercise-related merchandise. You name it, they sell it, and sell it well.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A state-owned technology and research park in South Charleston could become a "signature center" that spurs the development of West Virginia's chemical, energy and materials industries in West Virginia, according to a preliminary report released Friday.

"It will really enable West Virginia to step up on the national stage," said Mitch Horowitz, a consultant hired to help plan the tech park's future.

Horowitz, who works for the Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute, issued a series of recommendations Friday, providing a blueprint for the tech park's development.

Bob Compton and I finally have something to agree about.

The Washington, D.C.–based venture capitalist produced a provocative documentary, 2 Million Minutes, which tracked six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. It showed the Indian and Chinese students slogging to learn mathematics and science, and the Americans partying and playing video games. Bob concluded that the Indians and Chinese will eat our children’s lunch since they are better educated. I was featured in the documentary and agreed that Indian and Chinese children do indeed work much harder than American children; that they are brought up to believe that education is everything and will make the difference between success and starvation; and that most of their childhood is spent memorizing books on advanced subjects. I argued, however, that things aren’t nearly as dire for U.S. competitiveness as they might appear to be in the documentary. My team’s research into global engineering education showed that more than 95% of Indians and Chinese do not receive a good education, and even those that do receive one take much longer to develop crucial real-world skills than do Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They innovate from the get-go.

For all the fuss about “super angels” and “angels are the new VCs,” a report out this week from the University of New Hampshire says angel investors are putting less money into companies overall, especially at the seed and startup stages, compared with previous years. Of course, there are many factors at play here.

The numbers cover the first half of 2010, and they come from a report released by the Center for Venture Research at UNH. According to the report, angel investments in this period totaled $8.5 billion, a decrease of 6.5 percent over the same period in 2009. Angel investors put money into a total of 25,200 entrepreneurial ventures in the first half of this year—a 3 percent increase in the number of deals from the first half of 2009. But the number of active individual investors was 125,100, an 11 percent drop from last year.

Perhaps more telling was that only 26 percent of angel investments were classified as seed or startup stage. This continues a downward trend that saw seed/startup investments make up 45 percent of deals in 2008, and 35 percent in 2009.

Cellular carriers' competing claims as to what constitutes 4G (fourth-generation) cellular data networks got me to thinking about how speed is only one part of the story about why allegedly faster networks are being built. I've been writing about Wi-Fi since 2000, and that informs my thinking, because Wi-Fi has matured to a point where raw speed doesn't have the same marketing value it once did, because networks are generally fast enough. Instead, multiple properties come into play.

I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another.

Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity's sake, let's consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir's capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances.

You may find yourself in a panic before breakfast, and it’s baffling to you because, hey, you’re livin’ the dream.

And by “the dream” I mean building your business as an entrepreneur. “Isn’t this what I wanted?” you ask yourself anxiously. “Isn’t this what I’d been planning for when I was in that cubicle?”

Yes, this is what you wanted, and sure, this is what you’ve been planning for since those days spent in that box. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I’m sure life has taught many of us that getting what we want doesn’t always result in insta-joy. On the contrary, the work, the next round of it, at least, begins anew at every turn.

I often get asked the age-old question (by men) of “Who are the best entrepreneurs, men or women?” Women already believe they know the answer, so they never ask. I always try the diplomatic answer of “It depends”, but that doesn’t satisfy anybody.

First, here are a few facts to set the stage. Only one in four companies in the USA today are run by women, but the number of female-owned firms is growing twice as fast as all businesses. Overall, female-run businesses grow slower, so create fewer jobs.

You can find lots of research facts on this subject, with much hedging on meaning. An SBA research study a while back is typical in concluding that gender is not a factor in new venture performance.

You'll notice something funny about the worst states to do business, which were identified by the conservative Tax Foundation. They include some of America's biggest state economies, like New York and California.

But whatever your politics, it's clear that these states tax the hell out of local businesses.

States were ranked based on analysis of taxes for corporations, individual income, sales, unemployment insurance and property.

On a sunny morning, Al Maurer dons his favorite brown sport coat and takes a three-hour train ride from Long Island all the way to Philadelphia for a trade show. He figures the tech companies at the convention might be looking for a salesman or corporate trainer. And he’s armed with a smooth approach. At the first booth he visits, he cracks a few jokes and soon has four company reps chatting and laughing. Only then does he mention that he’s looking for new opportunities. As it turns out, the company might be hiring. Everyone trades cards. Maurer is pleased. “I’m pretty good, am I not?”

Within the hour, he collects three more leads. But the exercise wears on him—after all, he’s been hunting for four months. Not so long ago, when he was president of his own company, he stood on the other side of the booth, flanked by pretty models. His exhibit in Las Vegas was two stories tall, Maurer recalls: “It had a conference room on the second floor!” He looks around the thinly populated hall, taking in the puffy-faced reps, the lame signage, the sad bowls displaying free candy. “You’d think I’d have a job by now.”

Rich Bendis Hosts New Series Focused On Growing Tech-Based Businesses

November 8, 2010 PHILADELPHIA, PA – Innovation America and ASME (the American Society for Mechanical Engineers) announced today the launch of a new series of videos featuring the best practices and tips from six leading national practitioners on growing technology-based businesses.

ASME and Innovation America jointly produced this video series based on the theory that engineers upon a series of videos focused on the fact that engineers have long been the drivers of innovation. They are the source of new concepts, technologies, materials, applications, processes and systems, and they are whom we look to for better, faster, and more affordable ways that enable our society.

“It is one thing to invent and another to reap the economic value of the idea formation, technology development, and launch of new products and applications,” commented Ethan Byler, ASME’s Manager, Entrepreneurism & Innovation.  “Furthermore, growing technology ventures from the conception of the idea to the commercialization of a product can be an arduous undertaking that requires knowledge of product development, financing, valuation, marketing, and many other key components of building a business,” stated Byler.

“ASME Innovates is an exciting new way for emerging technology enterprises to learn from the experts who have been there and done that,” said Rich Bendis, President and CEO of Innovation America who is the host of ASME Innovates and a former ASME Senior Fellow. Conversations include the topics of intellectual property, university incubators, SBIR grants, social entrepreneurship, venture capital, and state agency assistance.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Janice Presser has been focused on teams — how healthcare teams service those in need, how families “team” with one other and how organizations enable (or inhibit) human synergy in the workplace. All of these pursuits have had, at their core, the desire to understand what really happens among people during group activities; to create a reliable way to structure and support coherent, productive teams; and to measure — qualitatively as well as quantitatively — their business value.

What are you working on right now?

I work most of the time and multitask while I sleep, so this may take a while.

Most important to me is developing the technology that will allow a business leader to view and understand their entire human infrastructure the way they seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their business infrastructure, their technology infrastructure or their supply infrastructure. This new technology will allow leaders to immediately see where the “teaming” issues are, and more importantly, how to fix them.

I’m also working on advanced training to teach consultants and coaches how to apply TGI’s human infrastructure management concepts to the problems they are working on.

I have a long list of articles, blogs and rants I want to write.

In the the sixth annual study of corporate innovation spending, the 2010 Global Innovation 1000, released today by global management consulting firm Booz & Company, total R&D spending among the world’s top spenders on innovation dropped in 2009 for the first time in the 13 years studied.  The study revealed that the 1,000 companies that spent the most on research and development decreased their total R&D spending by 3.5% to $503 billion in 2009.  This followed a relatively strong 2008 during which R&D spending continued to grow despite the recession.

Apple, Google and 3M are the innovation leaders of the pack in the aftermath of the global recession — yet none were among the 10 biggest R&D spenders in 2009. Pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding took the top position for innovation spending, having boosted its R&D spending 11.6% to $9.1 billion, replacing Toyota Motor, which cut spending nearly 20% and fell to fourth place. Microsoft, Nokia and Pfizer rounded out the top five. The top 10, as a group,  spent $75.0 billion on R&D in 2009, down 5% from 2008.

I was asked recently what to do if, after achieving a certain level of seniority in your career, you suspect you are becoming a NO to innovation within your company and/or among your staff?

As in many situations, recognizing you may be part of the problem is a HUGE first step. If you don’t think it’s a major issue yet, here are some strategies you can use to destabilize your experience and force you and those around you to contribute with more innovative perspectives and to grow in new ways:

• Tear Apart What You’ve Done in the Past - Go back to a seeming successful past project and really tear it apart, looking for even subtle flaws you could improve upon next time. Doing this can be an important input into forcing you to raise some personal performance standards which may have naturally softened over the years.
• Make It Harder on Yourself – When you’re experienced, it’s a lot easier to know what all the steps are on a project, along with all the necessary resources. Push yourself to perform differently by consciously and dramatically reducing resources available for a project. Shorten the time, reduce the size of the team deployed on it, or rule out use of certain tools you’d usually fall back on for routine success. With a different resource set, you’re going to have to think of innovative strategies to get an effort completed.

What is the right genetic profile for an astronaut—someone who’s going to spend months living on the moon, or years traveling to an asteroid or Mars?

Craig Venter has an answer. The biologist told a group of scientists at NASA Ames on Saturday that NASA already does genetic selection when it picks astronauts. He just suggests that the space agency get even more systematic about its process.

“Inner ear changes could allow people to escape motion sickness,” Venter said. “(You could have genes for) bone regeneration, DNA repair from radiation, a strong immune system, small stature, high energy utilization, a low risk of genetic disease, smell receptors, a lack of hair, slow skin turnover, dental decay and so on. If people are traveling in space for their whole lives, they may want to engineer genetic traits for other purposes.”

Fall is the unofficial start of conference season for professionals looking to get together, learn more and network with one another. I've personally been to four conferences in the last month alone, some about technology and business, and one for journalists.

Regardless of industry, there is one age-old relic of professional networking that refuses to die: the business card. Even at the most high-tech and cutting edge of events, you still can't mingle without collecting a pocket full of paper cards. Surely, this can't go on forever. The business card is ripe to be disrupted. But what will replace it?

Ireland earned the nickname of the Celtic Tiger for its digital prowess during the 1990s IT boom. Subsequently bursting economic bubbles left the country looking for new opportunities.

Many Irish still look to the multinational IT powerhouses that continue to be a dominating presence in Ireland, like Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, for answers. But Tom Collins, the newly appointed President of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth (NUIM), has been thinking about how his nation can be its own powerhouse.

“Our economic policy has been to make Ireland an attractive location for transnational enterprise,” Collins said. It did so, in part, he said, by creating a workforce educated in “a system that needed to produce passive workers” instead of an educational system that “requires a very different kind of graduate who is self-driven and self-directed.”

Twitter is the preferred channel for quick banter for over 175 million users around the world including our political leaders. Over half of the heads of states and governments of the G20 meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12 have an official Twitter account (http://twitter.com/Davos/G20).

Some like @BarackObama have 5.5 million followers, while others such as the French Presidency only have 6,600. All other G20 leaders are somewhere in between and yes, you’ve guessed it, none of them tweet personally.

What’s interesting though is not who has the most followers, but rather who follows who.

Gettysburg Address from Adam Gault on Vimeo.

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the best-known speeches in history: The Gettysburg Address. To pay homage to it, designer Adam Gault and illustrator Stefanie Augustine have rendered the immortal words in beautiful black-and-white typographic animation that visually captures the essence of Lincoln’s words as they are spoken.

For more on The Gettysburg Address, the Library of Congress has a fascinating exhibition of materials related to the address, including the earliest known draft and a short video on how the speech came to be. And for another visual treat, we recommend Jack Levin’s Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Illustrated — a poignant and powerful selection of images which, coupled with Lincoln’s equally poignant and powerful words, are bound to put a lump in your throat.