Everyone over 50 should take statins to lower their cholesterol, an editorial argued last week in The Lancet. The piece based its recommendation on a meta-analysis of 27 clinical trials published in the same issue that concluded statins significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events in healthy people without posing substantial risks. Subsequent articles heralding the meta-analysis's findings were published in the Guardian, Forbes and the U.K. Telegraph. But based on the numbers, many experts still aren't convinced that the drugs' benefits outweigh their risks.

Investors have taken note of the surging enterprise demand for tools that can manipulate and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data.

In recent months, top venture capital firms have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that make products designed to manage so-called big data, generally defined as very large and diverse sets of structured and unstructured data gathered from a websites, clickstreams, email messages, social media interactions and the like.

Sitting in the windowless basement level of a nondescript building in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, Andy Miller is doing one of his most essential -- and rewarding -- jobs: helping smart and talented, but young and inexperienced, entrepreneurs navigate the crucial steps needed to move their new company forward. After all, great technology can only get you so far. It takes great business strategy and decisions to build a truly successful company.

Miller, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners who once reported directly to Steve Jobs as Apple's vice president of mobile advertising, is seated across from David Holz and Michael Buckwald, the co-founders of Leap Motion. Earlier in the morning, the company announced it had closed a $12.75 million Series A round, led by Highland, and that it was leaving behind its original moniker, OccuSpec.

Only a few companies have ever been successful enough to call themselves Big Biotechs. If boards and shareholders lack vision and guts, we’ll look back in a few years and wonder why the Big Biotechs went extinct.

The group of Big Biotechs includes companies like Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Biogen Idec, and Celgene. They grew from scrappy venture-backed startups with a dream into big, independent, profitable, diversified enterprises. They have enduring ability to create new jobs and new medicines. They are like ballasts in a stormy industry.

In 2011, total bottled water sales in the U.S. hit 9.1 billion gallons--29.2 gallons of bottled water per person, according to sales figures from Beverage Marketing Corp. The 2011 numbers are the highest total volume of bottled water ever sold in the U.S., and also the highest per-person volume. Translated to the handy half-liter size Americans find so appealing, that comes to 222 bottles of water for each person in the country--four bottles of water for every man, woman and child, every week.

Charles Fishman’s book, Big Thirst, is now available in paperback with a whole new chapter. Indeed, bottled water sales aren’t just growing--it’s fair to say they’re booming. Volume increased by 4.1% in 2011--five times as fast as the 0.9% growth in the sales of beverages overall, according to Beverage Marketing. Bottled water sales, in fact, are growing twice as fast as the economy itself.

To accelerate, lean startups need a process that provides a natural feedback loop. When you’re going too fast, you cause more problems. Adaptive processes force you to slow down and invest in preventing the kinds of problems that are currently wasting time. As those preventive efforts pay off, you naturally speed up again.

Let’s return to the question of having a training program for new employees. Without a program, new employees will make mistakes while in their learning curve that will require assistance and intervention from other team members, slowing everyone down. How do you decide if the investment in training is worth the benefit of speed due to reduced interruptions? Figuring this out from a top-down perspective is challenging, because it requires estimating two completely unknown quantities: how much it will cost to build an unknown program against an unknown benefit you might reap. Even worse, the traditional way to make these kinds of decisions is decidedly large-batch thinking. A company either has an elaborate training program or it does not. Until they can justify the return on investment from building a full program, most companies generally do nothing.

Will China learn to innovate?

It is a question that has been discussed for a while, and was the topic of focus at the ISTA conference in Nanjing last week.

An organization that works to facilitate tech transfer developed in universities to the private sector, I was one of four panelists discussing different aspect of tech development and incubation in China. With my focus being on the market / business model side for tech development as in solving china’s largest issues of environment, economy, and society. the other three focused primarily on the role of university based incubators and of government funding.

Last week I spoke with Carl Esposti, CEO, and Gerrit Ahlers, Sr. Analyst, of Massolution, who played key roles in authoring Crowd Funding Industry Research, the first market research report on the crowd funding industry.  This document is available as a summary or as an entire report at www.crowdsourcing.org, and is also available through the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA).

I wrote about their findings earlier this month in Harvard Business Review:

There’s no doubt crowd funding will play a much larger role in the funding strategies of the next wave of entrepreneurial companies that emerge in the U.S.  Wishing to share additional information on this vital topic, this week I asked Carl and Gerrit to comment on  “crowd think” and how it relates to crowd funding investments.

Despite more research and data from the World Bank and OECD, while plenty of attention has been given to “SMEs” in the past, multinational government gatherings have largely ignored the importance of stimulating new high-impact startups as a prime global economic growth strategy. This needs to change.

Upon request, I provided thoughts below for this weekend’s G8 meeting hosted by President Obama here on the East Coast at Camp David. Next month I have accepted an invitation to travel to Seoul to help launch Startup APEC where, with so many nations racing to build better entrepreneurial environments that attract smart entrepreneurs with the best ideas and networks, leaders appear poised to do more than pay lip service to entrepreneurs and rather include them in their central strategy for building economies.

Below is an editorial suggesting the nation could become more economically competitive by helping remove some of the barriers to connect our federal lab technology, human and physical resources to the private sector. Maryland is home to the nation’s largest concentration of federal laboratories and many federal lab researchers make Maryland their home. To its credit, the state has launched new programs to support commercialization and partnering among the state’s considerable academic research and development assets . Since federal labs are creatures of federal legislation, these efforts need to extend to federal labs, augmented with federal policy reforms. Now is the time for the state to lead the Maryland Congressional delegation, working with delegations from other regions with federal lab concentrations, such as D.C., Va. , Colorado and California, to work on a bi-partisan basis to enact pathways for connecting the billions of federal r and d spending with our regions.

By

Brian Darmody & Richard Bendis

Each year over $30 billion is spent by federal laboratories for internal research and development, nearly as much as the federal government spends on university research. The approximately 1,000 federal research labs in the U.S. also employ tens of thousands of government scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, producing advanced technologies through their sophisticated research facilities.

Federal research labs, like the research university system, can be key players in helping the U.S. compete internationally through advancing technologies discovered at laboratories into the commercial marketplace.

But, the federal lab system is a government-run, complicated resource, choked by differing rules, oversight, authorities, experience, and motivation. A recent study by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) confirms the reality. In the IDA report, businesses cite negotiation times for technology licensing to be too long and also that labs don’t effectively understand markets. And, conflict of interest rules largely prevent federal researchers from interacting with private sector business representatives. In short, the technology commercialization effort is not business-like, but government-like.

Indeed, the National Governor’s Association has identified fed labs as unrealized entities for regional economic development in the U.S. Through an executive memorandum last fall, the Obama Administration has asked federal labs to suggest new ideas to improve their performance, which were due last month.

AlphaStripe will allow Videos, Pictures and Stories from Global Conflicts, Past and Present, to be viewed, shared and archived

(Scottsdale, AZ)

A new Arizona-based startup, which provides an online platform for military veterans and participants in wars and conflict situations to record and share their stories, has won the AppSumo Lean Startup Challenge, winning a prize package valued at $50,000 that includes software development from New Context. AppSumo is a daily deals website based in Austin Texas which was setup in 2010 that strongly advocates the Lean Startup methodology.

AlphaStripe involves a number of Arizona-based entrepreneurs, including US Marine and Air Force veterans, as well as previous student entrepreneurs of Arizona State University. AlphaStripe is a global, online networking platform for military service members, military families, civilians, and humanitarian organizations to share war-time and conflict zone stories in video, photo, audio, and journal formats. The site is currently in beta testing with a group of military personnel and veterans, and will officially launch in the coming weeks.

“We are honored to win the AppSumo competition and are excited to be launching AlphaStripe to the wider market very soon,” said Eli Chmouni, co-founder and CEO of AlphaStripe. “Based on our research, veterans want to share their stories of conflict but do not want to do it on public social channels, such as YouTube, where their serious and emotional video is posted next to videos of kittens.”

CloudTop, a startup that has created a new set of tools that enables developers of Web applications to integrate users' online content in a unified and simple way, was awarded the Robert P. Goldberg $100,000 grand prize Tuesday night after beating out seven other finalist teams during the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition finale held on the MIT campus.

This year's teams of finalists in the business plan contest -- whose offerings included, among others, the cryopreserving of fish eggs and new patent-pending wireless throughput-increasing technology -- emerged from a pool of 215 teams. A panel of judges made up of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, scientists, and industry professionals chose CloudTop on the strength of their business plan and presentation.

North­eastern is launching a new center that unites pro­grams and ini­tia­tives across dis­ci­plines to train stu­dents and alumni to become the next gen­er­a­tion of entrepreneurs.

The North­eastern Uni­ver­sity Center for Entre­pre­neur­ship Edu­ca­tion — made pos­sible thanks to a $5 mil­lion invest­ment by uni­ver­sity trustee Alan S. McKim, MBA’88, the founder and chairman of Clean Har­bors, Inc. — cre­ates a pipeline that teaches entre­pre­neur­ship and busi­ness skills; helps stu­dents and alumni develop new ven­tures; and brings together promising, viable start-ups with a well-connected net­work of angel investors and ven­ture capitalists.

It is the cry of every generation that moves from childhood and adolescence to the "real world" of adulthood. A work revolution built for the times, since the times are always a'changin' and parents just don't understand.

Young professionals are catapulting off the corporate ship that has characterized the working class for a couple hundred centuries into the cold dark waters of entrepreneurship, hoping to find paradise or at least freedom from the course they seem set for.

Yet these new generations of Millenials and Plurals are setting new rules for the games of career and advancement with a time-tested concept: Entrepreneurship

The average consumer associates 3M with tape – a product so integral to our daily lives that we barely notice it anymore. But in 1925, as an alternative to the unwieldy, glue-covered sheets of paper it made obsolete, the product was a stroke of genius. In fact, 3M is consistently innovative in an astonishingly diverse array of technologies, from drug delivery to post-it notes to cellphones to nanobots. And they’ve been at it for over 70 years, since a sandpaper salesman with the nascent company invented the concept of a roll of tape as a pet project, in his off hours. 

How do they do it? While researching creativity for his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer spent some time at 3M, studying the company culture that earned it the title of third most innovative company in the world in a recent survey of executives. 

Do social enterprise founders lack sufficient business rigor? Do they focus too much on the social part and not enough on the money part which, after all, is what fuels the venture (and makes investors happy)?

And, as a result, are they doomed to found companies that can’t, in business-speak, scale or get big enough to help a lot of the people they want to help?

Venture capitalists have been getting a black eye to go with their blue shirts. A recent report from the Kauffman Foundation slammed VCs for “shortchanging” investors, pointing out that public markets deliver better returns. The next day, Fred Wilson, general partner at Union Square Ventures and prominent VC blogger, suggested that a flood of crowdfunding money unleashed by the JOBS Act could sweep away venture capitalists altogether.

It could happen.

“The game has changed,” says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation who’s focused on entrepreneurship, innovation and the future of risk capital. “It’s obvious to everyone in the industry that crowdfunding is no longer just a toy.”

Following on the heels of two hospitals, the University of Notre Dame has become the first university to strike a collaboration with Cleveland Clinic aimed at commercializing medical innovations from its faculty and researchers.

Through the collaboration, Cleveland Clinic Innovations will essentially do for Notre Dame what it does for the Clinic — help turn employee ideas into marketable products that generate financial returns for the organization.

“By collaborating with Cleveland Clinic Innovations, we are hoping to create marketplace opportunities for our biomedical and health innovations to be a force for good,” said Robert Bernhard, Notre Dame’s vice president for research, in a statement.

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My last HBR blog post, How to Close a Sales Call, reviewed sales call closing techniques. Now let's analyze whether or not you are a natural born closer.

The drive to take command of a situation is instrumental to a salesperson's success. Salespeople with a weak dominance instinct are never quite in control of an account. They operate under the direction of customers or are at the mercy of the competition. They also find it more difficult to close the sale because they are uncomfortable exerting their will over the customer.

Dominance is gaining the willing obedience of the customer. The customer listens to your opinions and advice, internalizes your recommendations and agrees with them, and when you close the sales call follows your course of action. Your personality greatly influences the way in which you establish dominance during sales calls.

From blogging to handling a one-off PR project for a former client, today’s digital economy offers new opportunities for bringing in a little extra income. But when does a casual project turn into a business, and how do you keep that business legal?

According to the IRS, an activity is considered a “business” if it has made a profit in three of the past five years. Since you’re supposed to report all income, the IRS defines gross income as income “from whatever source derived.” This means that if you’re making money doing anything — whether that’s selling ads on your blog or selling items on eBay — the tax authorities will want their cut.