When entrepreneurs first start their businesses, they are usually involved in everything: running operations, keeping the books, and making sales calls. But as a company grows, one of the smartest things an owner can do is to fire herself from role after role. Letting go of anything critical to business outcomes is a challenge, but successful entrepreneurs have all learned to replace themselves – and serial entrepreneurs even develop it as a skill.

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Today I am headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a government-convened gathering of entrepreneurs and their supporters focused on advancing entrepreneurship in Muslim-majority countries. Although U.S. President Barack Obama had to cancel at the last minute due to the federal government shutdown, Secretary of State John Kerry is representing the U.S. Government and it promises to be no less of an important week for policy wonks, entrepreneurs and program leads keen on knowledge creation.

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Chris Howell was dead set on working in local government. He had been a graduate student in business school and decided that wasn’t what he wanted his career to be about. So he began doing just about everything conceivable to prepare for a change in direction. He earned a master’s degree in public administration. Through volunteering and internships, he worked with a dozen municipalities—from a small town’s fire department to a regional chamber of commerce. Howell then hit the job market in late 2008.

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The annual TechSparks 2013 conference and showcase of Indian startups revealed not just the Top 30 product startups of India, but a wealth of insights and advice from investors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, academics, authors, techies and designers.

I used to dread going to parties. I stood around struggling with small talk, waiting for an opening to debate about big ideas. That changed 13 years ago, the day I read The Tipping Point.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas, and I felt right at home. He made social science cool in watercooler chatter, spawning an entire genre of books that blend stories and studies to explain how the world works. He carried me through a decade of dinner parties with Blink and Outliers. With last week’s release of David and Goliath, I’ll be set for a while.

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Braintree. GrubHub. Bump Technologies.

You’ve seen these names in headlines in recent months, likely with two or three-digit sale or acquisition prices next to them. But they have something else in common too.

The founders of these tens-of-million-dollar companies all dreampt up their businesses as MBA students at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. And more specifically, they participated in the college’s New Venture Challenge before they launched.

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During the third quarter, 56 venture capital firms across the United States raised a combined $4.1 billion in funds to be invested in young companies, according to a report released Monday by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. It was the strongest quarter in terms of the number of firms in a year, although dollars were down 29 percent and 58 percent of the total raised was attributed to five venture capital firms.

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New Clients All Around

“I work regularly at coworking spaces. I routinely land new clients through a quick chat, especially since in a coworking space, I can immediately show the person sitting next to me exactly what I’m working on.”

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The bottom line of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute report on innovation in the medtech industry can be summed up as follows: “The value of a device is no longer solely in the product itself.”

While clinical efficacy is a must, the true value in medtech today is a company’s ability to provide information, services, and other assistance to customers to solve additional problems such as improving diagnostics, increasing operating room efficiency, reducing length of hospital stays, monitoring patients remotely, and keeping people out of the hospital.

"Do what you love and the money will follow."

Perhaps no one better exemplifies this adage than multibillionaire Richard Branson, who has earned his fortune simply by pursuing his personal interests. His has seamlessly transitioned from journalist to record executive to space-travel pioneer--all begun out of his natural curiosity and passion, coupled with a well-honed instinct for turning anything into a business.

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In the course of writing The Talent Mandate, I spoke with a prominent business school professor who told me that no corporate function lags behind today so dramatically as talent. He sees improvements and innovations in every area except in the vital matter of managing people. That’s astonishing--and it’s also lunacy at a time when people costs tend to be upward of 50 percent of a company's expenses. What could be more vital than talent to the bottom line? And yet the people in our employ continue to be neglected, taking a backseat to the various other matters that occupy our workdays.

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The HIMSS Innovation Center opens today in Cleveland, a city, known around the world for the Cleveland Clinic and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and one that prides itself on being a city of firsts.

HIMSS leaders who describe their 50,000-plus member organization of health IT professionals as "cause-based," make no bones about their intent to shake things up in healthcare – more than a little bit.

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There seems to be speculation that Cisco, Sap or Google might want to purchase BlackBerry and bid against the Fairfax acquisition proposal, according to Reuters report.

In my opinion, it’s unlikely any one of these companies would be seriously considering acquiring BlackBerry in its entirety (or at least keeping it intact once it did acquire). I don’t think the probability of any of these companies acquiring BlackBerry is high, but here is my breakdown on what each company would gain and/or lose from such an acquisition. Remember, BlackBerry is essentially in three businesses; Devices, Enterprise Services (BES), and Social Services (BBM).

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An IBM researcher says she can make a good educated guess about your personality just from looking at 200 of your Twitter messages.

That may seem obvious, as people typically express their personalities through the 140-character messaging service. But Michelle Zhou, a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., can do this personality analysis in a disciplined and automated fashion using the science of data analytics. Companies that pay attention to this research could save hundreds of millions of dollars — and stop annoying people.

David Friedberg was driving home from his job at Google, stuck in traffic in the pouring rain. On the side of the road, he noticed a bike rental shop for tourists, shuttered early due to the weather. The next day, he saw the same thing, and the next — for a week. “It got to the point where I’m sure the guy who owned the place wasn’t even showing up — no one wants to ride bikes in the rain. And I thought to myself, that’s a pretty crappy business.”

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Have you ever glared at an ad on Facebook and wondered where they put the “Dislike” button? I’d imagine this is a pretty universal experience for social media users, but thus far Facebook hasn’t stepped up to address this void. Perhaps they’d rather not hear about our distaste, but many companies who use the Like button and similar sentiment measuring tools would like more comprehensive feedback. Companies that rely on relatively small levels of feedback to gauge their performance can’t get the information that they need from a few likes. Do they have a segment of customers who enjoy what they offer but aren’t inclined to hit “Like”? Or more importantly, do they have dissatisfied customers with no easy way to express their distaste?

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They say that people join companies but leave managers.

If it seems like a lot of your people are walking out the door, you might want to study your behavior for some clues, and what you can do about it. In most cases, “I don’t consider bad bosses bad people,” says Dr. Noelle Nelson, author of the new book, Got a Bad Boss? “These are traits we all have, but bad bosses accentuate them or rely on them,” she says.

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What you're working on is really important.

No, not the task on your to-do list--the actual surface that you're physically working on. Your desk.

As people are getting more mindful of their workdays, they're getting more mindful of their work spaces. Citing the dangers of Sedentary Death Syndrome, some won't stand for anything less than a standing desk: Hemingway stood in oversize loafers as he typed his stories, while HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes tells us that standing desks abound in his company's office.

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By Debra M. Amidon (ENTOVATION International Ltd.)

From Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, there is hardly a country (and/or region) which has not crafted a National Innovation Strategy to invigorate their innovation and entrepreneurial capability. Since all nations are mobilizing to position their unique history and technology prowess, savvy leaders have launched trans-border initiatives to leap-frog competitors on this new level playing field. Fundamental is an understanding of the innovation ecosystem—how it functions and prospers. The interaction and influence of the Baltics Dynamics as a 'Zone of Innovation' is one prime example, and will be contrasted with Boston, Massachusetts, which ranks as the #1 Innovation Region in the world—ahead of Finland, Sweden, Singapore, Denmark, Japan, and South Korea.

Read the full PDF article here.

View the presentation here.

Name: Cotap

One-Liner Pitch: Cotap aims to be like WhatsApp for the workplace.

Why It's Taking Off: The app makes it simple for employees to quickly message anyone in their company and create group chats.

If Jim Patterson has his way, managers across the country may one day encourage their employees to text more inside and outside the office.

Patterson is the co-founder of Cotap, a mobile messaging app that launched for iPhone earlier this week with the promise of making texting more useful for the workplace. The app lets employees communicate through one-to-one and group messages in much the same way as consumer-facing apps like WhatsApp and MessageMe.

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