As a people, we tend to group ourselves into tribes or communities that accept our foibles and issues and often reflect them. Perhaps no place is more representative of this fact than high school. Some of my favorite movies are about high school: Sixteen Candles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club and so on. The reason: everything falls into simple, neat categories (jocks, stoners, beauty queens, nerds, etc) and the real action takes place when someone tries to stray outside the natural groupings (a jock becomes a stoner, for instance) or when two groups intersect (a beauty queen dates a nerd, for example).

In business, there are tribes or communities as well. You have finance types, marketing types and sales types, for example. These tribes are social among themselves, share the same language and experiences, and look at the other tribes or communities with suspicion or disdain. We have the Six Sigma types, the manufacturing types, the legal team and so on. And for the most part, we work in small, homogeneous teams with little intermixing.

Six MEPs are urging the committee charged with drawing up the European Parliament’s position on the EU budget from 2014 – 2020 for a near-doubling of spending on research and innovation, from the €52.5 billion funding available under the current Framework Programme 7 (FP7) to €100 billion.

The demand comes in the form of a motion submitted within the EU Parliament’s Policy Challenges Committee (more usually referred to as the SURE committee). SURE was set up in July 2010 with a one year mandate to prepare the Parliament’s common position on how and where Europe should spend its money in the next five year budget cycle beginning in 2014.

Such a hefty budget request could meet a frosty reception in Europe’s current political climate – and indeed, in December several European leaders sent a letter to Commission President Barroso urging budgetary restraint. British Prime Minister David Cameron said at the time, “All around Europe, countries are tightening their belts to deal with their deficits. Europe cannot be immune from that. We want to see real budgetary restraint for 2014-20.” The letter was also signed by the German, French, Dutch and Finnish leaders.

I’m sure you have all been frustrated at least once at not being able to get the Internet domain name you want for your company. Who owns all of these names, and should you ever buy one for a premium? The simple answer is that if you want to be found and remembered on the Web, the perfect domain name can easily be worth several thousand dollars.

Snagging an unclaimed great one is almost impossible these days because domain "squatters" gobbled up a lot of the catchy real estate several years ago. Kevin Ham was the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of in 2007, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire of over 300,000 domain names.

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Last month, nine-year-old Maggie Huang of Florence, Alabama, started her very own business. And it wasn’t a lemonade stand or cookie table set up outside her house, but a Web start-up called SmartMaggie.com.

“It’s about business stuff and you can post problems on it,” she said. “(Visitors) can ask about a general business problem ? installing (Microsoft) Access questions and mathematics questions. Stuff like that.”

Much has changed in two years, when Forbes last published its list of top venture capitalists. Secondary markets surfaced. Founders dragged their feet to exit. Fresh competition emerged abroad and from a new flock of angel investors. Firms shrank and returns declined. These 100 investors buck those trends, create wealth and fund the new ideas that keep our economy vibrant.

As an entrepreneur who interacts with other entrepreneurs, we live in a world of concepts – and they are a dime a dozen. A concept is an idea or rationale that assumes a need in the marketplace for some product or service and usually follows a thought track based on “if” and “then.” “IF such a product or service were available at some price THEN people would buy it.”

Taking that concept and developing it into a business requires a major leap. In fact, as I often tell my students, the difference between a concept and a money-making commercial enterprise can be compared to the difference between an amoeba and a human being. The gap is that great.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Great companies start out as great ideas. But commercialization of even the best idea requires development. The ideal location is close to a strong, cooperative academic community that delivers a skilled labor pool, the latest technologies, research and development, and knowledge relevant to the business. It has networks of other experienced entrepreneurs and successful business people ready to share their expertise. It's an environment that encourages and stimulates the sharing and transfer of knowledge to the benefit of the entrepreneur.

Andreessen Horowitz announced Wednesday the formation of a $200-million investment fund, pushing the firm to a total of $1.2 billion in investments overseen.

A16zlogo The Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm will use the new fund to invest in "growth-stage" companies that are past an initial "seed round" funding level or a secondary "venture round" funding stage, John O'Farrell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post.

"These companies have a substantial need for capital -- they're hiring aggressively, expanding internationally, making acquisitions, investing in facilities, pouring money into marketing -- all to double down on their success and win the entire market," O'Farrell said of the types of companies the fund will target.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ray Leach, chief executive of the JumpStart economic development group, has been elected to a four-year term on the board of the National Venture Capital Association.

Leach is one of six new board members for the association, which represents more than 400 individuals and organizations and pushes for investments in innovation and entrepreneurship. The board includes many leaders of national and international venture capital firms, and Leach is the only current member who hails from and works in the Midwest.

The association announced changes to its board today, during an annual meeting in Boston.

When asked about his post-graduation plans in a college survey, future Half.com founder Josh Kopelman checked the box “unemployed.”

“Back in the ’90s, there was no box for ‘start your own business,’” the 1993 Wharton graduate said on Tuesday to an audience of about 50 in Huntsman Hall. At the talk, organized by the Wharton Undergraduate Private Equity/Venture Capital Association, Kopelman shared with the students his experience in entrepreneurship and venture capital. “He has both perspectives,” said Engineering freshman Hong Kim, who attended the event.

As a rising junior in 1991, Kopelman co-founded the internet service company Infonautics Corporation. He cherished the hands-on experience, but after graduation he planned to create a site called “Ebazon” — inspired by eBay and Amazon. He eventually launched the site as “Half.com.”

When we start looking at almost any plan to improving health care, chronic disease immediately becomes a huge factor. The most common chronic diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, are simultaneously a substantial cause of death and a substantial source of health care costs. Clearly, a drop in the incidence of these diseases could reduce the load on the health care system, reduce the drag health care costs have on our economy and, of course, result in healthier people.

Conveniently, it turns out that while these diseases are expensive and deadly, they are also largely preventable or controllable by daily activities like diet and exercise. Less conveniently, these lifestyle “choices” can be very difficult to change. (Current thinking is that around 80 percent of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60 percent of cancers are preventable, and more than 90 percent of obesity is preventable.)

500 Startups–Dave McClure’s seed fund, accelerator program, communal office and yes, he dares call it an “incubator”–today held its first open house to show off 22 young companies.

In attendance were many of the same angelic faces that showed up to Y Combinator’s Demo Day two weeks ago and AngelPad’s Demo Day last week.

500 Startups’ tone is more whimsical than the earnest hacker vibe of its peers; McClure, known as much for his swearing as his investing, encouraged attendees to heckle presenters, and presenters to roll with the hiccups in their presentation slides, and they did.

Fluoride toothpaste. Rocket fuel. The cancer drug Taxol. LCD displays. Seat belts. Gatorade. Penicillin.

What do all of these things have in common? They are certainly useful. Some of them save lives. But the one thing that connects them all is that they were developed through research at universities. Academic researchers are continually developing technologies, products and processes that improve our lives and stimulate the economy.

In 2010, researchers at Arizona State University submitted 187 invention disclosures, received 17 patents and launched four start-up companies. In addition, the university signed 63 agreements with private companies, allowing them to use and market ASU-generated technologies. Two of these recent agreements will help patients struggling with chronic health problems.

Dave McClure, whose hyperactive superangel fund 500 Startups is certainly living up to its name, is planning a new fund called The Designer Fund, VentureBeat reports.

McClure noted that plenty of great startups from Flickr to YouTube were started by designers and that design is crucial to a consumer startup's success, but that designers also face specific challenges to getting started.

The interesting thing about the fund, which will be led by 500 Startups designer Enrique Allen, is that it won't just invest in designers, but be funded by designers. The fund is looking for designers, presumably with startup success under their belt, to put in at least $50,000 each into the fund. Allen wants to recruit 50 investors into the fund, which will then invest in 50 startups.

Short answer: Because extinction doesn't happen in a vacuum. When one species dies out, it can have further reaching implications for the ecosystem that species lived in. Case in point: Coral reefs. You've probably heard a lot about coral reefs dying. But it's not always spelled out that these deaths are more than just a loss of biodiversity. During a panel on Tuesday, Peter Hildebrand—an atmospheric scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center—did a nice job of putting this issue into stark relief.

This week, Boing Boing was invited to visit NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first and only opportunity for media to enter the Pasadena, CA clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft have been built for launch in late 2011 from Florida.

Shipment from the clean room to Florida will begin next month. Curiosity rover recently completed tests under simulated space and Mars-surface environmental conditions in another building and is back in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for other tests. Spacecraft assembly and testing specialists showed Boing Boing the rover and the other spacecraft components, including the descent stage "sky crane."

Creativity and innovation are critical to any organization’s success. This statement is so obvious it almost doesn’t require commentary. Yet creativity is often elusive, for individuals and for organizations. While there are skills that you can learn and employ to become better at various parts of the creative process, there are some barriers that aren’t really about skill building at all.

These are emotional barriers, and while they might not be immediately seen, they are as real as anything you can see and touch. As a leader, you must understand these barriers for yourself and how pervasive many of them may be in your organization.

You can spend all you want on innovation, but you can't guarantee success. In fact, the most innovative companies are not necessarily the biggest spenders, according to Booz & Company's recent global innovation study. What matters instead? The ability to build the right innovation capabilities to connect with the overall business strategy and other critical capabilities.

In conducting our latest Global Innovation 1000 study, we surveyed more than 450 innovation executives (senior managers and R&D professionals) at more than 400 different companies around the globe. We asked them to identify the companies they thought were the most innovative.

Today, we listened to venture capitalist Mark Suster speak at DogPatch Labs. The room was packed with entrepreneurs, and Suster was very candid.

Among the notable advice he gave, one statement in particular stood out.

"There are two things that never, and can never, get written about [by VCs]," he says.

1. Just how screwed founders get.

2. How badly cofounder situations turn out.

About the first: "I ran into a founder last week," Suster says. "It's a company that at least 50% of this room has heard of. Now, he only owns 1% of his company.

"I told him it's time to cut the umbilical cord and move on. I think he fell for the VC narrative. And that outcome is so common I can’t tell you."