Here’s something big to think about….

How many times have organizations focused on hiring ‘the best and the brightest’ people, and how many times have those people failed? According to a recent three-year study by Leadership IQ, 46% of new hires were deemed failures within 18 months, and only 19% were considered unequivocal successes.

Why do people fail? More often than not, it is because they do not live up to the expectations that they created for themselves, and or the expectations that others have created around them. As it was stated so memorably in the classic film Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” and the failure involves the hire, the hiring process, and the person(s) responsible for hiring – and firing.

Four years in the making, the Discovery Channel/BBC co-production Frozen Planet ranks among the channels’ most ambitious undertakings. Here, producers walk us through the making of the series and how they captured those unbelievable scenes.

The folks who brought you Planet Earth return March 18 with the Discovery Channel/BBC co-production Frozen Planet, a seven-episode series (and book) on the world’s polar regions, narrated by Alec Baldwin and Sir David Attenborough.

A Colorado redevelopment authority charged with developing a bioscience district near the University of Colorado campus in Aurorahas appointed the head of Mayo Clinic Ventures as its new leader.

Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority announced that Steve VanNurden will become the group’s new president and CEO starting in late May. FRA was created in 1996 as a partnership between the University of Colorado and the city of Aurora. Now, FRA in partnership with the University, the city of Aurora and the Children’s hospital and other public entities have acquired land that is part of an ambitious effort to transform the area from an old army medical center into a thriving bioscience hub.

As CEO of FRA, VanNurden will work with universities, local economic development agencies, state and local governments, and the bioscience industry to promote the development of the 180-acre Colorado Science + Technology Park. The area is adjacent to the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

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Here’s something big to think about….

How many times have organizations focused on hiring ‘the best and the brightest’ people, and how many times have those people failed? According to a recent three-year study by Leadership IQ, 46% of new hires were deemed failures within 18 months, and only 19% were considered unequivocal successes.

Why do people fail? More often than not, it is because they do not live up to the expectations that they created for themselves, and or the expectations that others have created around them. As it was stated so memorably in the classic film Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” and the failure involves the hire, the hiring process, and the person(s) responsible for hiring – and firing.

Last weekend, Thomas Friedman wrote a provocative column in The New York Times about the relationship between a country's natural resources and its education level.

Friedman draws upon a major new study by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which examines the connection between student performance in math, science, and reading (based on their Program for International Student Assessment exam scores), and natural resource-related earnings as a percent of economic output.

What do you get when you gather 2,500 researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, large companies, startups and government officials in one place for three days to discuss energy innovation?  They immediately coalesce around the latest developments in advanced energy research, technology and applications.

This was the overriding theme at the recent ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy) Innovation Summit, which focused on the strong need for advanced energy research – research in new technologies, research in new ways to use existing technologies, research in new ways to live our lives.  If there was one point of agreement, it would be that there is no silver bullet to solve the nation’s or the world’s energy problems.

When Startup Maryland kicks off March 30, it will be confronted with a challenge unique to the region’s three Startup America subgroups: How to bring life sciences and information technology — the state’s two major tech industries — under one banner?

The pro-entrepreneurship effort is the last of the trio to get up and running. Startup Virginia got under way Jan. 31 in Arlington, and Startup D.C. followed later that day.

Lisa Johnson, the Madison entrepreneur who is vice president of innovation for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., had a front row seat at a recent gathering of angel investors from across the United States and beyond.

Her takeaway: Many of those investors envy what Wisconsin has done to stimulate angel investing over time.

“There was no question that we’re viewed as being an innovative state when it came to (investor tax credits) and other programs related to angel investing,” said Johnson, who attended the March conference of the Angel Capital Association. “At the same time, there’s so much more we can do to improve our programs and to help more startups.”

Microsoft Corp. will launch a Windows Azure Accelerator in Israel, the company's first incubator in the world.

That's according to Globes business news of Israel, which reports the incubator will be a four-month program for startups and the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) program will include direction from top industry experts, including its own research and development center.

The incubator will be based at Microsoft Israel's R&D center in Herzliya Pituah.

Meet Roy Gilbert, a former Googler and the CEO of "social learning" company Grockit, who finds similarities between his experience aboard a nuclear attack sub and the world of Silicon Valley.

Roy Gilbert is the CEO of Grockit, a 3-year-old social learning company that aims to make test prep more fun, and in the process hopes to democratize what companies like Kaplan typically peddle to the relatively well-to-do. Grockit's users are on track to soon answer their collective 15 millionth question, and each day the site gains more users than would fill the chair-desks of a pair of American high schools. Fast Company spoke with Gilbert to talk about education in India, his ambivalence over the term "gamification," and his experience working on a nuclear attack submarine.

To start or expand a business, you need to raise money—and it can be harder to raise the money than to actually build a business. Banks now balk at lending to small businesses; their balance sheets remain in tatters from the mortgage meltdown. Entrepreneurs, unable to borrow what they need from banks, tap their credit cards, and then they must search elsewhere for the capital they need.

Enter "crowdfunding"—the latest innovation in raising capital. Crowdfunding involves raising relatively small amounts of money, in small increments, from friends, friends-of-friends, and an extended network of people, typically using an Internet-based platform to spread the word and collect the money.

Last Sunday, Diane Stafford’s column in the Kansas City Star discussed the role of “Synergists,” as described by Lee McKeown, within teams. Synergists bring together team members with varied perspectives, pull the talents together collaboratively, and make things happen within business teams. Lee McKeown noted that from his experience, there are few natural synergists. Most people need to grow into the collaborative skills synergists employ.

Since we’re in the midst of March Madness, Diane Stafford’s column about synergists made me think about basketball point guards. As with synergists, basketball point guards play vital roles in pulling basketball teams together and making things happen, especially during March Madness basketball games.

Steven Burrill, the CEO of life science venture capital company Burrill & Co., spoke at a recent conference about some of the challenges facing the growth of personalized medicine in the United States and opportunities that could help in its development. Among the things that would change with the growth of personalized medicine is a shift in physicians roles from being determinants to critical advisers.

Burrill was speaking at a conference this week at a biotechnology industry event in Princeton, New Jersey hosted by BioNJ. Personalized medicine, also referred to as genomic medicine, is an approach to medicine in which individuals’ genome profiles are mapped out and assessed so that physicians can tailor the most effective treatment to the patient.

Everyone has heard of the monster returns to some venture funds from high-flyng social media and technology companies: Facebook’s potential 800x for Accel, Google’s 350x for KPCB and Sequoia, Zynga’s 100x+ for Union Square, Foundry, and Avalon.  These single big tech wins returned (or will return) multiples of their entire funds.

The sad reality is that these types of “halo deal” wins just don’t happen in Life Science venture capital investing.  We have great success stories in the 5x-15x range, like Amira, Avila, Enobia, Plexxikon – but 100x+ returns aren’t in the genetics of our ecosystem.  The venture model in LS is about higher consistency and lower rates of failure, as discussed previously in this blog.

University of Maryland Ventures, a new joint effort between the University of Maryland’s two biggest campuses, will soon create groups to help standardize the schools’ product licensing and technology transfer initiatives.

The program calls for the two schools — the University of Maryland, Baltimore and University of Maryland, College Park — to create teams of individuals to help both schools increase the commercialization of their research programs. The teams will focus on developing and refining ideas for boosting intellectual property, patent submission, tech transfer and community outreach efforts for university researchers.

Entrepreneurship accelerator Bizdom is on the hunt for the next generation of businesses. Bizdom is accepting applications for its April 2012 accelerator session, a three month program that mentors and funds aspiring entrepreneurs to launch and grow successful tech-based start-ups in Detroit and Cleveland.

"Bizdom is looking for passionate, dedicated individuals to be successful entrepreneurs," said Bizdom CEO Ross Sanders. "The ideal candidate has an idea or early stage start-up that is web or tech-based, scalable, and can get to beta, prototype or first customer within three months."

Mining personal data to discover what people care about has become big business for companies such as Facebook and Google. Now a project from Microsoft Research is trying to bring that kind of data mining back home to help people explore their own piles of personal digital data.

Software called Lifebrowser processes photos, e-mails, Web browsing history, calendar events, and other documents stored on a person's computer and identifies landmark events. Its timeline interface can explore, search, and discover those landmarks as a kind of memory aid.

Highlight founder Paul Davison first thought of the idea of Highlight during a stint as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

The idea of an EIR dates back to the 90s.

But what does an "entrepreneur in residence" actually do? How did this idea start?

Here's what you need to know.

Q. What is an EIR?

A. It's an informal and usually temporary position at a VC firm. EIRs are not full partners and they aren't usually looking for investments for the firm to make.

Women don't hold positions of leadership because they're just not being bold enough.

According to Victoria Medvec, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and director of its Center for Executive Women, it's really as simple as that.

We recently caught up with Dr. Medvec, and here's what she had to say about women and power:

No one can make it alone. The most successful leaders are where they are today because they took advice from people they trusted.

We've compiled some of the best tips that executives have shared throughout the years, including lessons from tech icons like Bill Gates, empire-builders like Richard Branson and legendary investment gurus like Warren Buffett.