The Canadians may have beat them to it, but DreamIt Ventures is launching a digital health accelerator in Philadelphia and is seeking applications not just from the region, but from all over the country.

DreamIt Health is a collaboration of DreamIt, Venturef0rth, a workspace for early stage companies, Independence Blue Cross and University of Pennsylvania. It’s a four-month program for 10 companies — one month longer than DreamIt’s other accelerators.

Up to $50,000 will be allocated to each company depending on the number of individuals from the company participating in the accelerator. In exchange, DreamIt Health takes an 8 percent equity stake. Other programs provide up to $25,000 in exchange for a 6 percent equity stake. The deadline for application submissions is Feb. 8 and the program is expected to start in April.

CONVENTIONAL wisdom calls the 2012 presidential race the “demographic election,” attributing President Obama’s victory in large part to his commanding advantage among rapidly growing groups like Latinos and millennials.

Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. But if demographics is destiny in politics, it is even more true for policy. Far from the headlines, the debate over the budget deficit, taxes and unemployment is being driven by large-scale changes in the American population — and in this case, it’s not the new demographics of the young that are important, but rather the old demographics of the baby boom.

For decades we have known that the retirement of the baby boomers would be a monumental event for the economy. But now that it’s happening, many fiscal policy makers are acting as if the boomers are eternal teenagers and are turning a blind eye to how the boomers’ aging changes how we should approach economic policy. And this affects two of the central issues of the negotiations: how much the government should spend and how we can cut unemployment.

Television has been left behind, eclipsed by mobile and tablet technologies. Sure you get great television sets with fantastic screens yada blah etc., but what do you do with a television? You switch it on and later you switch it off. Not so anymore, if Apple CEO Tim Cook has anything to do with it.

Lately the humble TV set has seen some changes happening. Similar to smartphones and tablets, TV is becoming more connected and reaching into the online social world. Apple has been planning to go head-to-head with other competitors like Sony, Samsung and LG in bringing a more interactive TV experience for a while now. In an interview with with Brian Williams, Cook said: “it’s a market that we have intense interest in, it’s a market that we see that has been left behind”.

Children’s National Medical Center researchers hope the general public’s generosity can fill in the gaps left by dwindling governmental and philanthropic support.

Following a business trend that is exploding in the technology and nonprofit medical community, Children’s Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation launched in late November a “crowdfunding” initiative — the process of raising small amounts from a massive pool of individuals, often nationwide and mostly through online and social media routes.

The institute is hoping to raise a slew of small donations to support limited, highly specific research projects that aren’t likely to be funded otherwise.

So there have been times that I’ve been a really sucky entrepreneur.  Our first company, OpenVote, was a web 2.0 company that built Facebook apps. For years, I’ve said that it failed with all the other web 2.0 apps of the time, but really that’s just a convenient excuse. It failed because I sucked as an entrepreneur. Now, when I’m talking to entrepreneurs that are making a lot of the same mistakes I was making then, I’m shocked how naïve they are to their degree of suckiness. Just as I was.

When most people think of design, they usually think of industrial design… which includes objects like forks, furniture, phones, and appliances.  But what happens when we take the underlying principles of design thinking and apply them to other, more abstract concepts?

For instance, can we think about how to design startup companies?  Or how to design entire innovation ecosystems?

Ade Mabogunje of Stanford’s Center for Design Research has been a pioneer in tackling these questions for over a decade, and what he has discovered might be surprising.  (Full disclosure: I’ve been working with Ade on numerous projects, including recently the Rainforest Architects, a new course on how to design ecosystems.)

John Yap, BC's Minister of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology wrote an opinion-editorial in the BC Government Newsroom this week outlining how the province's government is supporting innovators in the technology sector.

"It is often said that governments don't create jobs—that is the role of the private sector. But governments can indeed support innovators and B.C.'s burgeoning technology sector is a prime example," he wrote. "More than 10 years ago, our government began creating an atmosphere, a strong foundation as a jumping-off point for researchers and businesses in the technology sector. Today those efforts are paying dividends. We're seeing strong economic growth and well-paying jobs for British Columbians. Job growth in this sector is increasing at twice the rate of overall employment rates in the province, and wages are well above the provincial average."

CLEVELAND (Dec. 6, 1:10 p.m. ET) -- There is a major paradigm shift taking place in the health-care and medical-device industry that is influencing the direction of innovation, according to Dr. Joseph Iannotti, chairman of the Orthopedic and Rheumatology Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.

“We’re going to be judged based on value,” he said at the recent Medical Innovation Summit in Cleveland.

Innovators and inventors of new technologies and medical devices need to answer complex questions such as what value does the technology bring to the market? Where should it be used and where should it not be used?

And that onus, said Iannotti, is on the innovator of the technology.

There are three fundamental ways that companies can improve their processes in the coming decade: (1) expand the scope of work managed by a company to include customers, suppliers, and partners; (2) target the increasing amount of knowledge work; and (3) reduce cycle times to durations previously considered impossible (as I discussed in my last post).

So how do you do this? As science fiction writer William Gibson said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." This is to say that you don't have to wait until the end of the decade for some breakthrough technology to emerge; it's already here, albeit in bits and pieces.

I'm collectively referring to these process improvement approaches as "Process Strategy 2.0". They stand on the shoulders of the methods of "Process Strategy 1.0": Lean, Six Sigma, and Business Reengineering. Let's explore what Process Strategy 2.0 is all about:

1. To streamline customer experiences in end-to-end processes, Process Strategy 2.0 will require aligned goals and supporting systems to manage work between partners.

HAVE YOU USED GOOGLE TO SEARCH FOR COLD SYMPTOMS, OR A HOME REMEDY? THEN YOU’VE UNWITTINGLY HELPED THE SEARCH GIANT TO PREDICT THE OUTBREAK OF FLU ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE.

You’re definitely going to get the flu this year.

Alright, sorry, maybe not definitely. But as the CDC is reporting, the flu season is off to an “early start,” and will likely be one of the worst in the past decade.

But how does the CDC predict such things? With cold, hard clinical evidence: the organization publishes a weekly FluView report based on the number of patients who have reported flu-like symptoms and the number of hospitalizations. But as CDC Director Thomas Frieden noted, the spread of the flu is fairly “unpredictable,” and FluView has a one- to two-week lag.

Due to technology and employee preferences, working remotely and flexible schedules are more common than ever. There are some potential pitfalls, but there can be great benefits for productivity and employee happiness as well. An infographic from Compliance and Safety highlights that workers are putting more and more pressure on employers to offer these sort of options.

The design experts over at frog design have taken a look at the current accessibility of broadband, cheap electronics, tablets and the rise of 3-D printing and see a new world that we might recognize from science fiction, but is really just a year away. The firm released its 20 tech trends for 2013 on Thursday, and the surprise for me is how many of these things I already see happening and how many of them are familiar form my teenage (and yes, current) reading.

For example, the trend report says that the rise of 3-D printing will bring about a new re-mixing culture that enables real customization at the individual level of any device or product. It also will lead to a rise in more small-time, on-demand manufacturing operations. On the device side, things like tablets replacing the printed word in magazines and books may draw some criticism while the idea of ubiquitous facial scanning and image recognition may creep others out. Smarter smartphones that can be biometrically secured by scanning a fingerprint might be welcome for making mobile payments actually happen, while the idea of driverless cars will begin fundamentally changing how our society is developed.

The Bay State has fallen one notch to become the third best destination for technology venture capital funding, according to a new report analyzing the “Tech IPO pipeline” from CB Insights.

New York has trumped Massachusetts by one company — the Empire State has 41 VC- and private-equity-backed technology companies with valuations, real or rumored, over $100 million, compared to Massachusetts’ 40 companies.

California took top honors, as it is home to nearly 50 percent of the 472 U.S. tech IPO pipeline companies, according to the report. Texas and Washington rounded out the top five.

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. said Thursday that it is seeking fund managers who might be interested in participating in a venture and angel capital program the state may start in 2013.

The program would likely involve $150 million to $200 million of taxpayer money over about six years, and its goal would be to boost investment in young businesses that would create jobs, and to expand the number of venture funds and fund managers in the state, WEDC documents said.

A Hunt Valley venture capital firm is the first to receive funds from the state’s new $84 million InvestMaryland program.

Grotech Ventures will receive $12 million to invest in early-stage companies. If the recipients are successful, Grotech will return 100 percent of the principal investment and 80 percent of its profits to the state’s general fund.

This week’s announcement marks the next major step for the program, a key economic development initiative of Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) that the General Assembly approved in 2011. The state raised the $84 million this year through an online auction of tax credits to insurance companies that operate in Maryland.

Even just a quick cruise of top startup blogs makes one thing pretty clear; if you’re a non-programmer, a “non-technical co-founder”  if you will, then you are gonna have to move mountains to convince some programmer that your paltry, embryonic-stage startup is worthy of any more than 2 seconds of their time.

In other words, they doubt you and probably don’t like you.  If you’re not a fellow coder, you’re sure as hell not going to get them on board your startup.

So, I’m going to help you out.

We hear a lot of talk these days about so-called “global cities.” But what is a global city?

Saskia Sassen literally wrote the book on global cities back in 2001 (though her global cities work dates back well over a decade prior to that book). She gave a definition that has long struck with me. In short form, in the age of globalization, the activities of production are scattered on a global basis. These complex, globalized production networks require new forms of financial and producer services to manage them. These services are often complex and require highly specialized skills. Thus they are subject to agglomeration economics, and tend to cluster in a limited number of cities. Because specialized talent and firms related to different specialties can cluster in different cities, this means that there are actually a quite a few of these specialized production nodes, because they don’t necessarily directly compete with each other, having different groupings of specialties.

3:37PM EST November 25. 2012 - Income from invention royalties at the University of Minnesota and University of Iowa has plummeted faster the past two years than at all but a handful of U.S. research institutions, an analysis of royalties data shows.

Of universities that earned more than $2 million in royalties in 2009, the University of Minnesota saw the biggest drop in revenue over the next two years, Association of University Technology Managers data show.

Minnesota lost $75 million in licensing revenue from 2009 to 2011. An expiring anti-AIDS drug patent dropped its income last year to $10 million. Iowa's royalties plummeted from $43 million in 2009 to $6 million last year, also because of a single expired drug patent.

Hardware has long been the outcast of startup society, pushed to the fringes by popular social networks, e-commerce platforms, and enterprise jocks. But now the nerdy kids spending their free time in science club, tinkering with robots and playing with math, are making a comeback.

Today, Lemnos Labs held an event called Hardware 2.0 at its SoMA warehouse to bring entrepreneurs, investors, experts, and innovators together to stimulate discussion about the state of hardware. Lemnos Labs is a hardware startup accelerator that provides financial backing, space, tools, mentorship, connections, and guidance to its portfolio companies. It was founded by two MIT grads who wanted to create an empowering environment where these exiles and underdogs could get their ideas off the ground.

It’s been there for a while, gnawing at the back of your mind: the creeping suspicion that technological devices have reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to productivity.

Oh sure, being able to edit documents on a phone or create presentations on a computer the size of a dinner plate has been amazing and made us much more efficient than we were. But these devices work so well, we’re having trouble turning them off, and that’s hurting our output. If you’re having trouble convincing yourself, here are 10 reasons to yank the cord and take back your work day.