Last summer, when regenerative medicine company Stem Cell Theranostics went through the StartX accelerator program at Stanford University along with one other biotech company, the team members realized that many aspects of their experience were much different than those of the other companies. For example, they weren’t moving as quickly as the other companies, and they faced regulatory hurdles that the others didn’t have to deal with.

Several months later, one of Stem Cell Theranostic’s student founders, Divya Nag, became the founder and CEO of the healthcare-focused accelerator track StartX Med, which launched its first class this summer comprising 11 health IT, medical device and biotech companies. The six-month track provides select students and faculty with education, community and mentorship for their startups.

If social media consultants are doing their jobs, they should put themselves out of business. I speak as one of their kind. Before joining Fast Company last spring, I was the social media editor at the New York Daily News. So I'll say it even bolder: At some point, Fast Company should fire me. (Just not too soon, please!)

Your company will never be truly social if you silo social activity within a consultant or a staff manager. To facilitate proliferation, your consultant should learn how your company works, then create a strategy to spread social throughout your organization. But in the meantime, here's what you should be hearing from your consultant:

1 "What's your goal?" Some social media gurus think the big prize is community. That's a fine start, but for a business, it's also a means to an end--which is whatever your company's larger goals are, whether they be sales, brand awareness, or traffic. Your social strategy should not end with the creation of an online conversation.

With the Games of the 30th Olympiad officially closed, the mass exodus from Olympic Stadium and greater London begins (except, perhaps, for those Cameroonians). As attention shifts to Russia and Rio for the next Games, what happens in the East End and other areas touched by 2012 Olympic construction? As the excitement of medals, world records, and pageantry fades away, what's left behind is an important part of the outcome of any Games.

The London Legacy Development Corporation has been thinking about this since 2009 and has plans for 8,000 new homes, as well as schools and other community spaces. And as part of the "green" Olympics, roughly a third of London's venues were designed for temporary use. Now, we'll see if all the forethought pays off.

For all the mantras, encouragement, and even training companies provide in the name of improving customer service, the wrong performance metrics will undermine good intentions every time. "Rate employees along metrics of time or cost, and they will respond in kind, even if cutting cost makes for a poor customer experience," write three Bain consultants on the Bain Insights blog on Forbes. Take call centers, which all too often focus their performance reviews around cost-driven data like "average handle time." When representatives then try to keep calls as short as possible, they’re unable to solve complicated customer problems, driving up the number of repeat calls and the level of customer frustration.

But then consider Belgian telecomm provider Belgacom, which switched from using average call time to a combination of two different metrics, one focused on customer satisfaction and another on resolving the issue on the first call. The new approach helped to reduce the overall volume of calls by 20%, while driving both higher customer advocacy scores and employee engagement scores. In other words, put your metrics when your mouth is.

A dozen states had an adult obesity rate above 30 percent in 2011, and no state was below 20 percent, according to new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Mississippi recorded the highest obesity rate at 34.9 percent. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia also posted rates above 30 percent. Colorado had the least obese population in the country, according to the CDC, at 20.7 percent of adults. 

The figures were based on the CDC's Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System survey. The CDC noted that the survey's methodology changed in 2011, including the inclusion of cell phone-only households and an adjustment to the survey's weighting, that make the 2011 numbers uncomparable to previous estimates.

If anything good can be said about this agonizingly slow economic recovery, it is that there is growing interest in helping startups launch and succeed, because we know that new firms create new jobs. There are an increasing number of initiatives seeking to support entrepreneurs as they launch their businesses. I am focusing in this post on the outcomes of so-called startup accelerator programs. Are they helping new firms succeed and, therefore, having a healthy impact on the economy?

First, let's define some terms. Many people conflate business incubators with accelerators. We need to make a distinction between the two. A business incubator in the purest sense refers to an office park or building complex that charges businesses, typically new businesses that cannot afford their own offices, some rent in exchange for space within the incubator and some administrative services and infrastructural support. Over time, the term business incubator has accrued some negative connotations for not actually helping to start businesses.

The 20th annual SXSW Interactive Festival is now open for business as the Festival begins accepting registrations for the 2013 event. Today also marks the start of the application process for SXSW Accelerator and the SXSW Interactive Awards.  

Last year the Festival programmed compelling talks including notable speakers: Ray Kurzweil (Kurzweil Technologies), Baratunde Thurston (Jack and Jill Politics, The Onion), Amber Case (Geoloqi), Eric Ries (The Lean Startup), Ben Silbermann (Pinterest), danah boyd (Microsoft), Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger (Instagram) and Peter Diamandis (X Prize). SXSW Interactive will take place March 8-12, 2013 in Austin, Texas.  

The Young Entrepreneur Council asked 12 successful young entrepreneurs about how to better balance the demands of growing children and a growing business. Here are their best answers.

1. Schedule, Schedule, Schedule

As an entrepreneur who is also a mom to a 19-month-old, I understand balancing work and kids while running a business. The key is to schedule out as much as you can but maintain some flexibility. I have a set workday, but I also know that if I wake up and my daughter is sick, it's going to mean shifting things around. Most days, though, I work my full day and then leave to be with her 100%.

Often, our biggest mistakes are the ones that we learn most from. Committing pricing errors, picking the wrong vendors, or failing to identify the right markets are examples of blunders that hit us hard but we learn quickly from. These mistakes are obvious, so we know not to do them again in the future.

However, there are certain types of mistakes that are more subtle and aren’t as easy to learn from. These insidious errors may look harmless because they seemingly don’t have any effect on your business, but the truth is, they are just as deadly as the above-mentioned mistakes.

The article is an attempt to draw attention to some important policies that need to be put in place to stimulate an entrepreneurial economy. These are simply some suggestions that could further enhance what the government is currently doing to stimulate the economic growth of the nation by a focused policy on entrepreneurship.

For the culture of  entrepreneurship to thrive, to provide the environment where budding entrepreneurs can develop into expanding and innovative enterprises,  and to assist those in the informal economy, the polices in place must be focused. It is also a means of highlighting some broad guidance to employers in advocating for policy change.

We can call it open innovation, crowdsourcing or co-creation – or something else. In short, it is about bringing external input to an innovation process and this is no longer a buzzword.

Companies are learning that they must embrace this paradigm shift of innovation in order to keep up with the competition and those that are lagging behind, well, they will find themselves to be in big trouble in the coming years.

This list of corporate initiatives is worth looking into if you want to get an idea of what is happening with the open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation today.

When most businesses think about incorporating, they consider S corps, C corps or LLCs. But there’s an emerging alternative for business owners who want to tie their corporate goals to not just finances, but societal good.

The B Corp, officially called Benefit Corporation, is a legal structure that requires businesses to not only generate profits but also create social and environmental benefits.

Starting with Maryland in 2010, eight U.S. states now offer the B Corp structure and several more are considering legislation to adopt it. (A nonprofit called B Lab, which advocates for B Corp laws, also allows any business to be voluntarily certified as a B Corp.)

Bootstrapping stories always excite me, and what Sean Broihier has done with Fine Art America is nothing short of amazing. Let me start by saying that Broihier doesn’t have an art background. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in mechanical engineering.

His first venture, Local Automation, a website designed for engineers, still exists today. Broihier followed that with the company he heads today, Fine Art America. One thing that sets Fine Art America apart from other online companies is how few people it takes for a company to generate $5M+ in revenue.

People ask me if they really need ANY business plan, unless they are looking for an outside investor. In fact, a business plan is needed more by you than investors, as the blueprint for your company, team communication, and progress metrics. Things that make it investment-grade for outside investors will also benefit you, since you are the ultimate investor.

First of all, any good business plan should demonstrate that you have done the homework to be an expert in your industry, and in what it takes to build a successful business from your idea. I’ll skip the basics here, and highlight only key elements that investors focus on:

CANCÚN, Mexico — Most people head off to an art exhibit with comfortable shoes and a deep appreciation for creativity. Jason deCaires Taylor’s work requires flippers and, to really appreciate it, a depth of at least 12 feet.

Mr. Taylor labors over his sculptures for weeks, five-ton concrete figures of men, women and children, many of them modeled after people in the fishing village near here where he lives and works. The little boy Carlito sitting on a rock. The proud Joaquín glancing skyward. The old man everyone knows as Charlie Brown clasping his chin in contemplation.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts will provide $50,000 in seed capital to each of 10 health services startups that are part of the Healthbox incubator in Cambridge.

The emerging companies are focused on wellness, patient engagement and helping doctors better manage their practices.

Nina Nashif, founder of Healthbox, said in a news release that the company is "thrilled to be partnering with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts who has embraced our vision of supporting health care entrepreneurs and unlocking the industry knowledge needed to build game-changing companies."

Innovation is impossible to achieve without taking a necessary amount of risk. In a world where the success rate of new product entries in the grocery business is 1 in 100, it is inevitable that every success sees failures along the way. An effective innovation leader should encourage creativity and risk taking, while also practicing a tolerance for failure.

In order to foster initiative and innovation, ask yourself these questions.

* Do you allow free research and development (R&D) time?

If you’re an entrepreneur who watched the 2012 Olympics, I hope you recognized all of the similarities from your life and what you were watching on TV.  The Olympic games and launching a successful business have a lot in common. From the bigger than big productions that were the opening and soon to be closing ceremonies, to the smaller than small spectacles that were the uniforms of the U.S. Women’s Beach Volleyball team, teaching moments in business were evident everywhere. So here’s a brief look at lessons any entrepreneur would do well to learn from the 2012 Olympics.

Why is feedback so powerful and essential to our success? We often fail to see in ourselves what is perfectly obvious to others. The following is a set of 10 steps that any individual can take to learn how to accept and effectively implement feedback.

Realize That Feedback Is A Gift Most people dread receiving feedback because they fear it will all be negative. However, these gifts give an individual guidance and direction by telling what they can do to improve and how they should do it.