Every aspiring entrepreneur seeks an answer to this million dollar question, but the answer lies within

India’s hospitals are notoriously overburdened. Many patients suffering from routine ailments and requiring routine treatments end up in them because local doctors are scarce, especially in rural areas, where two-thirds of the population resides. Much of this burden could be lifted by a better primary healthcare system. Dr. Santanu Chattopadhyay, the founder and CEO of Nationwide Primary Healthcare Services, an Indian company set up with a mission to provide every family in the country with a qualified family doctor, hopes to change that.

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UC San Diego is faring poorly in its first attempt at crowdfunding for research dollars, a stumble that may stem in part from bad timing and the confusing message about its goal of developing small sensors for measuring pollution and identifying diseases.

The university’s Distributed Health Labs set a goal of collecting $50,000 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo between Dec. 12 and Jan. 21. Through Tuesday afternoon, the campaign had received $4,605, less than 10 percent of the school’s target.

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Your company is finally up and running, but you’re ready to get out of the startup phase. Perhaps those 80-hour weeks aren’t so much fun anymore and you’d like to bring on some help, or maybe you’d just like your business to generate more revenue. Whatever your reason, you need to look before you leap. Before you consider growing your startup, you need to know that your business is ready.

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Si eres emprendedor y has creado un productor innovador con el cual crees que tendrás éxito, detente un momento y analiza: ¿tu producto realmente satisface una necesidad del consumidor? ¿estás seguro de que en el mercado no hay algo que ya esté satisfacinedo esa necesidad? Ésa es la recomendación de Richard Bendis, CEO de Innovation America, para evitar un fracaso.

Gov. Bob McDonnell announced Tuesday the launch of the Commonwealth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Measurement System (IEMS), a web-based portal that uses key metrics and outcomes to track the performance of Virginia’s innovation economy.

“This system, which is available to the public, provides a dashboard and strategic path to new opportunities in the innovation economy using key indicators that can assist lawmakers, industry leaders and other stakeholders determine the best public-private investment priorities and policies. This program is an excellent example of how we can utilize creative solutions to empower the emerging economy and help create the jobs of the future,” McDonnell said.

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Brooklyn Boulders Somerville is redefining the open office concept. Wouldn't the workday be more fun if it occurred on top of a 22-foot climbing wall?

Most people hate open offices. They're loud, people sneeze every minute, and there's barely any privacy. But what if your open office was a climbing gym and your coworkers constantly cheered in admiration at people scaling the walls in the background?

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Recognising that innovation requires market acceptance, Horizon 2020 will invest €462 million over the next seven years on a new programme, ‘Science with and for society’. Science|Business looks at the plan for the first two years

Science needs people – to join its ranks as future scientists, to ensure its objectives are properly aligned to needs, and to ensure its innovations find market acceptance. Yet the numbers pursuing careers in science and technology fail to meet demand, science is still perceived as a male domain, and a recent Eurobarometer survey found that 58 per cent of people feel they are not well-informed about the outputs of publicly-funded science.

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A decade after establishing its European R&D centre, joint research is flourishing and the building has run out of space. Now GE is embarking on a multi-million dollar investment that will double the capacity

The earth-moving equipment is moving in at GE’s European Research Centre in Garching, near Munich, in preparation for a massive expansion at the site. Already home to 200 researchers and a further 70 students and other staff, the centre is set to raise capacity to perhaps 450 scientists and researchers.

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The credential — the degree or certificate — has long been the quintessential value proposition of higher education.  Americans have embraced degrees with a fervor generally reserved for bologna or hot dogs.  Everyone should have them!  Many and often! And their perceived value elsewhere in the world — in Asia in particular — is if anything even higher.

From the evaluator’s standpoint, credentials provide signals that allow one to make quick assumptions about a candidate’s potential contribution to an organization and their ability to flourish on the job. To a prospective student (or parent), the value lies in assuming these signals will be accepted in employment markets and other times of social evaluation.  These signals have long been known to be imperfect, but they were often the only game in town. Thus, a degree from a top university has been seen to contain crucial information about a person’s skills, networks, and work habits.

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Americans are hungry for innovation. From the light bulb to the iPad, we embrace the technology oriented products that transform our lives in new and unexpected ways. If an entrepreneur can dream something, the culture of innovation in our country will help make it reality.

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Q. What is the state of the medical device industry?

A. Broadly speaking, we have seen growth slow in recent years, as the industry has grappled with both persistent utilization softness following the end of the most recent economic downturn as well as the increasingly real headwind of pricing pressure from customers. As such, we believe industry growth has slowed from the mid-high single-digit range prior to the recession to the low single-digit area today.

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Venture capital is changing as we know it. Even if you're new to the business, you've likely realized that the 40-year-old, once-cottage industry is becoming far more accessible and transparent. This is thanks to notable rising stars like Facebook and Google that have made multi-billionaires out of their young founders and investors. 

So what are some of the changes in the last decade? How have traditional firms reacted? In light of the groundswell of newly-seeded startups, what are these firms' seed, deal-flow strategy and has Series A investing gotten tougher?

Every organization wants to be innovative. However putting innovation into motion is much more difficult than most people realize. As a matter of fact, many organizations manage to kill innovation and creative thinking long before they get started. Let’s take a closer look at these six ways that organizations unintentionally stop innovation in its tracks.

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What if you invented a revolutionary product that replaced narcotics to alleviate pain, but you fumbled the public relations (PR) effort and your news got lost in the media echo chamber?  

Startups and entrepreneurs in almost every industry must confront questions like this when deciding to launch or continue a PR campaign.  However, a number of small businesses often don’t fully recognize that the world of PR has been turned on its ear.  Many of the old rules simply don’t apply anymore.  Journalists are leaving the venerable media brands for new social networking platforms and to build their personal brands.  Unfortunately, using PR to grab headlines or market share is no longer just a matter of “getting out a press release.”  It requires deft handling from a knowledgeable team.

For years I’ve rejected the false choice that entrepreneurs are forced to make when it comes to the subjects of political science and comparative economics.  First is the offer to buy in to the notion that there exists no natural connection between the underlying motivations and incentives which inspire entrepreneurs and their political and electoral choices.  Second is the assumption, courtesy of academia, that there is no unified way to approach the study of political science, economics and entrepreneurship – that the supposed best route is an introduction from ‘macro-economic’ and ‘micro-economic’ perspectives, with entrepreneurship a purely ‘micro,’ concern.

My entrepreneurial past appeared on New Year’s Eve like a ghost visiting Ebenezer Scrooge. There it was, as plain as the tuna tacos I was eating at a local hot spot, although perhaps tinted by rose-colored glasses (like the blood orange margarita I wished I had ordered, too).

The agency I run, Havas PR North America, had just won a new client: LehighSiliconValley. I’d gotten an email offering us a new challenge from this incredible program that runs each January, created to take Lehigh University’s best and brightest, those associated with its Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation, on a learning trip to what it considers the hub of entrepreneurship.

Image: Packard Lab at Lehigh University (Photo credit: Wikipedia) 

The Puget Sound metro area finished 2013 well positioned for growth in the coming year. That’s according to two reports released last month. With Friday’s vote securing the 777X for the region, Boeing machinists make the predictions a certainty.

The Milken Institute ranks metropolitan Seattle as the sixth best-performing city in 2013, up from No. 13 in 2012. And an analysis of the

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An increasing number of older Americans are saying no to retirement to start companies of their own, Bloomberg reported. The report said older Americans are establishing their own startups for various reasons, including finding that job opportunities have become limited after they turn 55, realizing that they don't have sufficient savings for a comfortable retirement or wanting to just work for themselves.

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2013 was a bumper year for small European companies with investors throwing record levels of capital at the region’s start-ups, data has shown.

Some €6.3 billion ($8.3 billion) was plunged into venture capital in the continent over the last 12 months, according to data monitor Preqin, marking a 37% increase on the €4.6 billion committed in 2012. The number of deals also rose by 8% to 1,352 from 1,250. This represented the highest number—and highest overall proportion—of global transactions since Peqin began recording data in 2007.

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You're at the doctor’s office for your annual check up. At the end of the physical, the doctor gives you a prescription to take to the pharmacist … and a smartwatch. The doctor tells you that it wants to monitor your heart rate and activity for the next several weeks to determine a baseline of your health and fitness. 

If the doctor is concerned with your heart, she might also give you a sensor that is injected into your bloodstream. She says that this sensor can alert you to a possible heart attack two weeks before it actually happens. 

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