European schools must teach students to become more entrepreneurial and develop a positive attitude towards risk-taking, EU Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou said in an exclusive interview with EurActiv. “Entrepreneurship education is rarely based on a textbook course and there is much more to it than teaching someone to run a business," said the Cypriot commissioner in charge of education, culture, multilingualism and youth.

"Educational systems should continue to embed entrepreneurship. We need to instil our young people with a positive attitude towards risk-taking and not to be afraid to start again if they experience failure.” 

In the Innovator’s DNA we discussed whether innovators are born or made. Research has shown that creativity is not a genetic predisposition but a result of a pattern of behaviors - so it can be concluded that all innovators must share a certain set of characteristics that have lead them to success. While innovators speak different languages, come from different cultures and various industry backgrounds, they all have fundamental traits in common. Robert’s Rules of Innovation suggests three key traits that all innovators possess right off the bat.

1. Innovators are not afraid to fail. Fear of failure is the first innovation killer. In order to achieve a culture of successful, sustainable innovation, leaders are always searching for ways to break down the barriers that derail innovation, encourage creativity and introduce new procedures that lead to breakthrough products. Make failures learning experiences…

For the last six years, I’ve written this blog under the title “Medinnovation” with the tag line, “Where Innovation, Health Reform, and Physician Practices Meet.”

The novelty of use of word “innovation” is wearing thin.  And for good reasons.

Sad to say,  as a piece in the Wall Street Journal says. “Companies love to say they innovate, but the term has begun to lose its meaning.” Companies are touting chief innovation officers, innovation teams, innovation strategies, and even innovation days.

Governor Bob McDonnell ceremonially signed six bills to make Virginia more competitive in creating and retaining high-tech jobs today at the grand opening for the new Acentia headquarters in Fairfax. He was joined by legislators, local elected officials, Northern Virginia Technology Council President and CEO Bobbie Kilberg, Acentia CEO Todd Stottlemeyer and other technology industry representatives.

The bills expand a data center sales tax exemption, encourage investment in technology startups and extend the Virginia telework tax credit. After signing the bills, the governor cut the ribbon for the new corporate headquarters of Acentia, which announced its move from Silver Spring, Maryland to Falls Church in January of this year. The project will create 60 new jobs.

The age of big corporations doing whatever they want is over. Now companies must find ways to give back, and to do it in ways that consumers find authentic. How can a company get there? Follow these rules.

The refrain’s all too familiar. We live in a time of radical transparency and thanks to the rise of social media, brands are now co-owned. Look no further than the recent twitstorms engulfing Kenneth Cole (spring collection causes Cairo uprising?), Bank of America ($5 monthly debit fee, anyone?) and Netflix (Nutqwakflikster?). It’s only going to get more challenging as technologies empower consumers to “purchase with a purpose” and the paradigm shift becomes more pronounced.

This summer the Regents of the University of California can expect to be formally presented with plans by University of California, San Diego for a $110 million research center designed to speed up development of new treatments by the university and its industry partners. UC San Diego expects the Center for Novel Therapeutics (CNT) to promote interaction between private company researchers and their university counterparts based at nearby clinical facilities, namely UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center and the UC San Diego Health Sciences campus.

“There’s a huge gap between the discovery at the bench and the application of the discovery and development of a new therapeutic,” Thomas Kipps, M.D., Ph.D., the cancer center’s interim director, pointed out to GEN. “And this is intended to make that gap a little less onerous to bridge.”

Universities have historically been on the front lines of translating innovative research into novel medicines and technologies useful to patients. With that in mind, the 2012 BIO International Convention will look to highlight the role of academia in the advancement of the biotechnology field through the BIO Academic Park and the Translational Research Forum. Hosted by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), this year's global event for biotechnology will take place June 18-21, 2012 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, MA.

"The BIO Academic Park will give Convention attendees the opportunity to connect and start conversations that could lead to partnerships, and most importantly, establish a tighter link between academic, industry representatives and investors," said Dr. Abigail Barrow, Founding Director of the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center and Program Co-Chair of the 2012 BIO International Convention.

Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Matt Erskine today joined U.S. Small Business Administration Associate Administrator for Entrepreneurial Development Michael Chodos, U.S. Department of Labor Deputy Assistant Secretary of Employment and Training Gerri Fiala, National Science Foundation Division Director for Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Grace Wang, and National Institute of Standards and Technology Associate Director for Innovation and Industry Services Phil Singerman in hosting a teleconference to unveil the $26 million Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, a multiagency competition to strengthen advanced manufacturing and clusters and to create jobs across the nation.
 
“Advanced manufacturing is critical to the health of the national economy and provides essential goods and equipment directly to consumers as well as to a wide range of industries,” said Acting Assistant Secretary Erskine. “This competition will help foster innovation-fueled job creation through public-private partnerships that catalyze and leverage private capital, build entrepreneurial ecosystems, and promote cluster-based development in regions across the United States.”

Inventors, start your engines: the Obama Administration has just launched the $26 million Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, a cross-agency competition designed to fire up innovators in the private sector to develop the next generation of high tech, energy efficient manufacturing systems.

The Jobs Accelerator

This Innovation Accelerator is actually the third round of a broader program called Jobs Accelerator. Also styled in the form of a competition, Jobs Accelerator pulls together resources from the Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration, the Small Business Administration and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

For survival, the objective of every business should be to bring in revenues which exceed their costs. Even non-profits have to do this to cover overhead costs, unless they rely totally on donations. Yet I continue to see business plans, or even talk to founders, and can’t find the specifics of the business model anywhere.

As Guy Kawasaki says in his book “The Art of the Start,” if you can’t describe your business model in ten words or less, you don’t have a business model. Avoid whatever business jargon is currently hip, like strategic, mission-critical, world-class, synergistic, first-mover, or scalable. Try something like, “the product costs $X, and we sell it for $Y.”

The Software-as-a-Service delivery model has rapidly matured in the past few years, evolving from an experimental delivery method for niche audiences to a widely-practiced business approach. Investors are clearly enamored with it, in part, because it’s helped lower the barrier of entry for filing for an IPO.

That’s certainly been the case with the recent wave of IPOs and S1 filings from the likes of Eloqua, Cornerstone, and Bazaarvoice, all of whom had annual revenues well under $100 million at the time of their respective filings.

By Jean G. Morency, FASKEN MARTINEAU DuMOULIN LLP

Fasken Martineau is proud to have participated in QUÉBEC-SOLUTIONS 2012. We were among the original groups involved in the first edition in 2010 and 2012 will surely not be the last time we participate.

The comments made by the speakers from the United States, Finland and Germany confirmed our opinion that a company’s activities are greatly facilitated when its ideas are well protected or supported by legal and strategic advice.

For the past several months, the Developer Relations team has been participating in numerous events and activities targeted at the tech start-up community. For example:

• Since last fall, we’ve held at least 19 Hackathons focused on innovating on BlackBerry® platforms with BBM™, and more recently gaming. 
• We sponsored AppCircus pitching contests at BlackBerry DevCon EMEA, and at BlackBerry® 10 Jam in Orlando. In addition, we were sponsors and I was a judge at the Mobile Innovation Awards at Mobile World Congress, put on by AppCircus. 
• We’re limited partners in Relay Ventures’ (formally BlackBerry Partners Fund) latest fund, and spoke at their annual general meeting to some of the entrepreneurs present.

Sales professionals thrive on staying busy, but some sales proposal activity is just “busy work.”  Many sales executives think that getting to the proposal stage of a sale is a good thing, but if your sales team is constantly busy with writing sales proposals, you might be missing out on more lucrative opportunities. It’s time to re-assess the sales proposal writing process. Stop writing so many sales proposals, and focus on other ways to close the sale.

What’s wrong with writing sales proposals? 

The problem with writing sales proposals is that every one of your competitors also sees it as a “victory” to get to the proposal process – and so every sales proposal has to compete with several (dozen, hundred?) other written proposals. All this proposal writing can be counterproductive if too many of your proposals get caught up in “no man’s land” between the prospect saying “no” and “yes.” Instead of mindlessly churning out sales proposals, cultivate a larger sense of strategy and discipline in your B2B lead generation.

A new public-private partnership was announced today between CalCEF and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The goal of this new partnership – dubbed CalCharge – is to create a regional ecosystem to spur innovation in energy storage (battery) technologies. This group will bring together private technology companies, academic institutions, and government resources in California’s Bay Area to help accelerate the timeline from market to bench through technology assistance, workforce training and market education.

According to Venkat Srinivasan, head of Berkeley Lab’s energy storage research program and CalCharge champion:

“There’s a lot of battery know-how in California, specifically the Bay Area, but technology startups need an ecosystem to thrive…The Berkeley Lab battery program, long known for its deep expertise in solving the problems in advanced batteries, is ideally positioned to work with battery companies in the region.”

For the 800,000 people in the United States who suffer a stroke each year, the window for drug therapy closes in the first few hours after the attack. That leaves some seven million stroke survivors in this country alone with no medical alternative beyond physical therapy. A small pharmaceutical company in New York hopes to change that with a drug that may help patients regain some of their lost mobility six months or more after a stroke.

Strokes happen when blood stops flowing to part of the brain, often due to a blood clot. Without blood to bring new oxygen, cells in the affected region start to die. If the symptoms of stroke are recognized quickly enough and the victim is brought to a hospital within a few hours, doctors can administer a clot-dissolving drug to minimize the damage. But only a small fraction of stroke patients seek medical attention soon enough for this intervention.

Nearly 500 million adults worldwide are obese—close to 10 percent of men and 14 percent of women, an incidence twice as high as in 1980, according to the World Health Organization. Obesity, defined as a body mass index of 30 or greater, has been linked with higher rates of serious illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and diabetes. But an obesity drug hasn’t been approved in the United States since 1999.

The regulatory environment for this class of drugs remains extremely tough following high-profile failures in the 1990s. For example, the infamous fen-phen drug combo caused life-threatening side effects and became one of a number of approved drugs removed from the market because of health concerns. “Obesity is the toughest market to get into,” says Praful Mehta, a senior analyst from IHS Global Ltd., a market research company. This is in part because obesity is not an immediately life-threatening disease, so side effects that are acceptable for the treatment of diseases like cancer are unacceptable when treating obesity.

The value proposition is the collection of things a new business offers to the target market to satisfy a specific need, attracting customers away from the other competitors. Entrepreneurs must find solutions for the problems and needs that follow disruptive industry trends.

United States Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has introduced legislation that will revive the Therapeutic Discovery Project Tax Credit, which funneled $1 billion in tax breaks and grants to biotech companies across America in 2010. The program impacted about 3,000 small US companies that year. “Biotech labs employ dedicated scientists and researchers, whose discoveries could lead to a ground-breaking cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or HIV/AIDS,” Menendez said in a statement released last week. “Manufacturing these breakthrough therapies is already creating thousands of high-paying jobs, and extending this critical tax credit will not only create more good jobs here in America, but keep us at the forefront of life-saving innovation.”

The famed Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is indeed in the process of raising a total of some $1 billion for a series of several new venture funds, we’ve confirmed with sources close to the situation.

The new raise, on which Dan Primack at Fortune reported earlier today, is currently underway, and its structure as of now underlines the storied Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm’s increasing focus on having a global footprint. Legendary venture capitalist Michael Moritz may be stepping back from day-to-day operations at Sequoia, but one of the things he’s been most proud of over the years is making Sequoia a global firm — so this is just the latest evidence of his continuing impact there.