Description As Match Capital and SME continue to collaborate with North Carolina, Georgia and a few other states towards the implementation of state regulated unaccredited equity offerings, I find myself more interested in the correlation between the crowdfunding industry and the Mutual Fund industry.

Fears are growing over the lack of regulation of equity-based crowdfunding, with some experts warning of a scandal waiting to happen.

In the past few years, crowdfunding websites – which allow investors collectively to fund small firms – have become an increasingly popular way for fledgling enterprises to raise money. The sector has already grown into a £500million industry.

Crowdfunding can be an effective tool for accomplishing your startup goals. Whether you’re looking to jumpstart your marketing efforts, expand your customer base, or reach out to friends and family for funding, crowdfunding provides a platform to rally support around you and your company. Having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs who have conducted successful fundraisers, we have distilled seven key strategies for launching a successful crowdfund:

The digital tools and services remaking media, commerce,  education, and most other parts of our lives, are finally starting to stream into science.

Over the past few months, online marketplaces and communities for scientific researchers have gained more attention (and money). And on Friday, Mozilla became the latest to offer up a web service for scientists, with the launch of its Science Lab, a project meant to encourage worldwide conversations among researchers on how the web could improve the way scientists work.

Here’s a bit of disappointing but not-so-surprising news: according to a new report from the nonprofit think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), U.S. schools aren’t doing enough to enable technology in the classroom to live up to its potential.

Not only are students across the country frequently using technology for basic skills (for example, middle school students are mostly using computers for drills and practice exercises, not data analysis or other activities that really take advantage of computing power and sophisticated software), schools aren’t looking at the returns on their technology-related investments. The CAP also found that students from high-poverty areas were less likely to get access to rigorous science and technology learning opportunities.

Last December, Nike announced a visionary new program called the Nike Accelerator. The program gave 10 tech startups three months to breathe new life into the Nike+ and NikeFuel product lines. On June 10, all their hard work was put on display at the Nike WHQ Demo Day, where three companies offered particularly compelling mobile solutions.

San Francisco-based NewME, is working with Memphis-based StartCo to host Memphis PopUp Accelerator June 28-30 at the FedEx Institute of Technology on the University of Memphis campus. NewME, which was founded in 2011, is hosts a 12 week entrepreneurial bootcamp in San Francisco. It has hosted its PopUp accelerators in Miami and Washington D.C., before selecting Memphis for the three-day event. NewME works with Google for Entrepreneurs to host the events. Google for Entrepreneurs works in different communities to support entrepreneurs with skills and resources to pursue their business ideas.

Hunting and attraction efforts are returning to the Michigan Economic Development Corp. with a renewed focus this year.

The MEDC has created an export and attraction team that will focus on targeted industries and high-priority markets as part of a new strategic plan guiding the agency through 2017.

Variations on a theme are easier to create than the theme itself.  (That’s our fancy way of saying it is easy to improve an existing idea than to start one from scratch.)  But what makes an entrepreneur go out and create those variations?

It is no idle question.  There are literally tens of thousands of people who have ideas for what could be worthwhile companies, and yet they have done virtually nothing to develop what could very well be viable concepts.

One hundred years ago only two out of ten of the world’s population were living in urban areas. By the middle of the 21st century, seven out of ten people will be living in cities. Already global business is beginning to plan strategy from a city, rather than a country, perspective. Understandably so: well over half of the world’s population lives in cities, generating more than 80% of global GDP. Standard population projections show that virtually all global growth over the next 30 years will be in urban areas. The number of people living in the world’s cities is growing by nearly 60m every year. The key findings of the research are as follows.

Growing up, I never understood why anyone would want to become an entrepreneur. Between the long hours, constant uncertainty, and grueling pace of life, it just didn’t strike me as something that I would ever want to put myself through. My father, Vivek Wadhwa, founded several technology companies, and even though I deeply admired and looked up to him, I never quite understood why he had chosen that path.

Instead, my dream was to become a lawyer. It wasn’t that I was particularly attracted to that lifestyle either — I just believed that law was the most direct way to impact the world around me. I thought entrepreneurs only worked on improving small issues, while lawyers focused on solving the big problems. It didn’t take too long for me to realize that I had it backwards.

It’s obvious from human history that people have long found unique value in living and working in cities, even if for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. Put people together, and opportunities and ideas and wealth seem to grow at a more powerful rate than a simple sum of all our numbers. This has been intuitively true for centuries of city-dwellers.

"What people didn’t know," says MIT researcher Wei Pan, "is why."

Growing up, I never understood why anyone would want to become an entrepreneur. Between the long hours, constant uncertainty, and grueling pace of life, it just didn’t strike me as something that I would ever want to put myself through. My father, Vivek Wadhwa, founded several technology companies, and even though I deeply admired and looked up to him, I never quite understood why he had chosen that path.

Instead, my dream was to become a lawyer. It wasn’t that I was particularly attracted to that lifestyle either — I just believed that law was the most direct way to impact the world around me. I thought entrepreneurs only worked on improving small issues, while lawyers focused on solving the big problems. It didn’t take too long for me to realize that I had it backwards.

Entrepreneurs Need Fatherhood Skills

I joined the fatherhood tribe last year. I embraced the entrepreneurial tribe 20 years ago. And I am in the thick of my start up Toilet Hackers and loving the lessons I am learning from being a Dad. I think every entrepreneur needs fatherhood skills.

In the build up to my daughter’s arrival, I called on every father I knew and met along the way. I wanted to learn as much as I could about being a Dad. As I compiled and reviewed the stories I heard, a useful list of lessons learned emerged. What struck me was how directly applicable they are to the start-up world. Here are the lessons learned.

It’s a popular sport among startups and the mobile vendor community to figure out what physicians are willing to do on their tablets and smartphones. It has to be said that some of them have come up with some pretty compelling approaches to deepen the relationship between physicians and their mobile devices.

But what is really going on in their practices? In two studies generated from a survey by AmericanEHRPartners of 1,400 with responses from about 696 physicians and 150 allied health professionals has uncovered some interesting information. AmericanEHRPartners was formed in 2010 by formed by Cientis Technologies and the American College of Physicians to help physicians compare and implement electronic health records.

The concept of the Innovation Ecosystem is very important to our overall economic health.  I thoughtI would share this compelling presentation here for anyone interested in better understanding how we move from translational research at Universities to mature products and capabilities that change our lives.

At a meeting in Chicago, the China-United States Exchange Foundation released a report "U.S.-China Relations in the Next Ten Years'. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel opened the meeting, chaired by CH Tung, the former Hong Kong chief executive, as well as Henry Paulson, the former U.S. treasury secretary. The mood was celebratory, especially after the overnight announcement that the presidents of both countries would be meeting in California in June, sooner than expected.

While in graduate school, a close friend asked me how I became an entrepreneur. As I reflected on the question, I was embarrassed to confess that I had never identified the influential factors that led me to start two companies in my twenties. How did I grow so comfortable with risk? Where did my view of, and passion for, business come from? When did I gain the confidence that I could beat the odds?

As a child, I saw both the power and perils of striking out on your own. My father’s printing company in Menlo Park, American Printing & Copy, was the engine that propelled our family from survival mode to economic stability. Our family’s humble beginnings and unpredictable household income meant that my parents had many sleepless nights spent worrying about how they would pay rent. But over time, their financial conversations shifted from meeting basic needs to giving their kids better educational opportunities and achieving other shared aspirations. While I will always celebrate my mother, this article is a Father’s Day tribute to my dad, whose love and example empowered me to become an entrepreneur. Here’s how he did it:

Last week I sat in a meeting where a senior executive of the organisation made the comment: "Innovation is an overloaded and clichéd term". This literally sent shivers down my spine, so I want to take a break from my planned list of topics for this week and dissect this statement and also provide an "unofficial" answer to this statement.

I wisely decided not to go into a discussion over the person's statement at the time when it was uttered, and so I made a mental note and decided to review and think about the statement first and then re-visit the executive to discuss. The executive under discussion did not struck me as the "anti-innovation" type, which is usually easily identifiable, so I decided to go from the angle of first understanding why he would make such a statement.

Thanks to loads of compelling research studies and best practice cases in open innovation (OI) carried out over the last decade, several companies nowadays begin to embrace and partially apply the new principles and methods OI offers. However, when managing open innovation at the project level, even experienced managers still go blank at the question: how to assess, control, and measure the performance of these activities? In this series of articles, we will address the above issue by discussing a general framework for an open innovation performance measurement system (Part 1). Given this framework, a metricsbased management toolkit will be presented that provides a suite of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a specific set of OI methods that demonstrates the key results of our Open Innovation KPI 2012 Study (Part 2).