On his first-ever earnings conference call, newly christened Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins seemed to come to terms with the bad hand he’s been dealt and admitted that the company was in need of “substantial change.”

“I’ve been the CEO of RIM for just over 10 weeks now,” Heins said on the call. “It is now clear to me that substantial change is what RIM needs.”

Change is indeed in order. RIM reported disastrously bad quarterly results today, with lower-than-expected revenues. And in a shock, former co-CEO Jim Basillie resigned from the company’s board of directors. Major execs David Yach, Software CTO, and Jim Rowan, COO of Global Operations, were also let go.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,1 found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”: the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person’s reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line.2 People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.

Rock Health founder Halle Tecco tells me that she's planning to launch a Boston edition of the well-regarded incubator program for startup teams using technology to tackle healthcare problems. The program will be held on the campus of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and will accept about six startup teams. Each chosen team gets a grant of $20,000, without having to cough up any equity. This year's program will start in June and conclude in August with a "demo day" for investors.

Ed Coburn, director of the health media group at Harvard Med School, helped Tecco expand the program from its San Francisco base to Boston. Already signed on to mentor are local entrepreneurs like Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Ben Rubin of Zeo, Erika Pabo of Harvard Med School, Sonny Vu of Misfit Wearables, and Jacob Sattelmair of WellFrame. Former MIT Media Lab director Frank Moss, a co-founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, has been a mentor for the San Francisco program and will participate in Boston as well.

A new, so-called stock exchange in Boulder called SSX, or The Story Stock Exchange,  has formed to “create a portfolio of listed projects” that are too small for venture capital or bank backing but it plans to introduce to mentors, advisors, and investors, as well as help to grow.

SSX was co-founded by John Metzger, founder of a tech-focused public relations agency in Boulder called Metzger Associates.

The recently passed JOBS Act may go down as one of history’s most revolutionary pieces of legislation, relative to the future of planning and investing for retirement.  The bill is designed to make it easier for small business to access investment capital and, by doing so, will create a new, Crowd-funding asset class as well as bring self-directed IRA’s out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

Small companies will soon have a new option to obtain financing through crowdfunding, but there are some cautions to consider.

The so-called crowdfunding term essentially means pooling resources or money together from a group. Under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act, small companies will have the ability to raise up to $1 million in equity on an annual basis through crowdfunding, without having to go through the rigorous disclosure process by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The House and Senate recently passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation initiated by House Republicans that will help right the U.S. venture capital industry. And they did it in a presidential election year no less!

To grasp the importance of this legislation, you have to be aware of the moribund state of the U.S. venture capital industry. For the past decade, the industry has been in decline. In 2010, the real dollar amount of money the industry raised from its limited partners was 44 percentof 2001 levels; the number of active venture capital funds was 63 percent; and the number deals venture capitalists undertook 73 percent .

If you look closely at the cover of Steve Blank’s new book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, you’ll see that it shows an exploded view of the transmission from an automobile engine. Leonardo da Vinci invented the exploded view more than 500 years ago, and it has stayed with us as a visualization tool, because it’s great for showing relationships between the parts of an object. But it’s also utterly unrealistic (as many of Leonardo’s fancies were). In the real world, once you’ve taken apart something as complex as an engine, you’ve usually got a huge mess on your hands, and no obvious way to put it back together.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) recently announced the launch of a new training initiative for patent examiners. The USPTO/AUTM Patent Examiners Training Initiative aims to improve the strength and quality of U.S. patents through specialized training between patent examiners, innovators, and scientists.

Through the USPTO/AUTM Patent Examiners Training Initiative, AUTM members working in university technology transfer offices will identify key faculty members to participate in specialized training programs for patent examiners. The initiative will enhance USPTO’s existing Patent Examiner Technical Training Program (PETTP) by providing patent examiners with additional training opportunities from scientists and experts across various technology sectors.

Surprise, surprise — Johns Hopkins University    spent more money on medical, science and engineering research than any other university in fiscal 2010.

Hopkins topped the research and development spending list, compiled by the National Science Foundation    , for the 32nd consecutive year. The 2010 data is the most recent available.

Hopkins also tops the foundation’s list for federally funded research and development.

Selecting just the right name for your new life’s endeavor is definitely not as simple as it may seem. In reality, the name of your business is the first impression you’ll make on your new customers and it’s the very basis for the brand you’ll be working to build.

The best way to begin the process of selecting the perfect name for a new business is to start with a nice big list of possible ideas. Sitting down and brainstorming keywords, phrases, and topics related to your business can be a very productive course of action. Be playful with this process and toss around even those seemingly ‘weird’ names. Don’t be afraid to ask friends or family their opinion on possible names or what they think about your own list of possibilities.

Perhaps you remember the 1966 comedy film "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming." Well, the Russians indeed are here, in Silicon Valley, seeking venture capital for high tech start-ups.

North San Jose has lots of buildings where start-ups have traditionally worked to expand and develop their ideas. Now, a lot of that activity is going on overseas, yet Silicon Valley venture capitalists are more than anxious to help fund them.

They paced nervously as they waited their turn. Many admitted the anticipation kept them up all night. They are entrepreneurs from Russia, Brazil, even Norway, vying to win a competition to get venture capital. It's not the quality of their English that counts. Brazil, Russia, India and China, known by the acronym "BRIC," are actively incubating start-ups and they need American seed money to grow. "I couldn't even imagine when we won the first round, that we would get so much exposure to real venture capitalists," Svetlana Velikanova told ABC7.

Tech coming from the Nordic countries--think Linux or Skype--often level social, technological, and commercial playing fields. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s just part of what being Scandinavian means.

As a venture capitalist, I naturally spend large amounts of time thinking about business and technology models and their evolution and propagation. I also happen to be interested in culture and history. In the course of my reflections, I noticed a curious trend among many technology businesses that either materialized directly out of the Scandinavian region or were created by entrepreneurs of Scandinavian origin that had had exposure to their cultures in a meaningful way, even if they no longer lived in the region.

A small investment from the city is paying major dividends, and Mayor Bloomberg hasn’t been shy about touting it.

The mayor says that New York’s very first city-sponsored, small-business incubator has had remarkable results from its home in Hudson Square, reports WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb.

“A total of 22 new companies that have incubated here have either already left their nests here on Varick Street or will be leaving between now and July,” Bloomberg announced on Tuesday. “They’re all going to be establishing themselves throughout the five boroughs.”

In a world where image is key, start-ups often find themselves playing catch up.

Marketing advice for start-ups is now available through relatively new "incubator" programs, like the Brandery, a Cincinnati-based program that pairs tech start-up founders with mentors from big marketers like Procter & Gamble Co. PG -0.31% as well as major branding agencies.

Rob McDonald, the 28-year-old son of P&G's chief executive, teamed up with a Twitter employee and a former P&G brand manager to create the Brandery, which is open to early-stage entrepreneurs around the country seeking marketing and branding advice as they also try to get their business ideas off the ground.

With the success of Y Combinator there has been a steady rise in the number of accelerator programs available for start-up entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs can now seek assistance from accelerator programs specifically designed to help build cause-based businesses that generate profit and seek to operate beyond a single bottom line. Here are a few we came across. Feel free to add others in the comments section. Also, you can find a list of 50+ fellowship programs for social innovators here.

Start-Up Accelerator and Incubator Programs for Social Entrepreneurs

Crowdfunding is now just a small piece of the startup funding pie. Just wait. An imminent law change could transform the donate-to-my-cause-for-a-tote-bag industry into a popular way for small companies to raise the cash they need to grow.

The legislation, which Congress passed yesterday and awaits President Obama’s promised signature, is expected to unleash a wave of crowdfunding platforms, according to a crowdfunding industry organization.

Prof. Henry Chesbrough, the leading scholar of ‘open innovation’ management, is launching a European industrial forum to discover, discuss and share the most effective ways to organise business innovation.

The European Innovation Forum is a by-invitation gathering of senior innovation managers at leading companies across industries in Europe.  The forum, launched with Prof. Wim Vanhaverbeke, is in collaboration with ESADE Business School in Barcelona, and the Science|Business Innovation Board, a Brussels not-for-profit association. First meeting of the forum is in June, at ESADE in Barcelona.

Open innovation is a term, first coined by Chesbrough in 2003, for one of several approaches to managing innovation. With it, big companies collaborate openly on R&D in networks of universities, small companies, suppliers, government institutes and other parties - both to get ideas out of the company labs and into the marketplace, and to get new ideas into the companies.

Double Fine, the game developer, raised $3.3 million for its adventure game, Double Fine Adventures. InXile, a game development company, made $500,000 in 17 hours for its role-playing game, Wasteland 2. Both did it on Kickstarter, the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Naturally, it would be easy to think of Kickstarter as a virtual Gold Rush. That would be a mistake.

Kickstarter has its challenges. Even as a successful participant, I’ve hit some bumps along the way. The lessons I’ve learned from this experience are worth observing. If you’re looking to get funded on Kickstarter, here are ten tips to help you succeed.

Lance Parker is building something he says will bring a new level of convenience and security to on-the-go computing — and he’s funding the project through Kickstarter.

His product is called Compude, a tiny device that allows users to take a data-locked version of their personal computers’ contents with them, then plug in and work on any smartphone, tablet or other computer. He says it’s the smallest fingerprint authentication device in the world.