I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. In these series of 5 posts, I thought I'd share what I learned in China. All the usual caveats apply. I was only in China for a week so this a cursory view. Thanks to Kai-Fu Lee of Innovation Works, David Lin of Microsoft Accelerator, Frank Hawke of the Stanford Center in Beijing, and my publisher China Machine Press.

Cleveland Clinic Innovations’ executive director, Chris Coburn, who has led the prolific technology commercialization arm of the Clinic since its formation in 2000, is heading to the life science capital of the U.S.

The Clinic confirmed this morning that Coburn will be departing June 1 to take a position at Partners Healthcare, an academic hospital system in Boston. The Clinic declined to say what he would be doing there, and a Partners Healthcare representative did not return a message this morning.

With the immigration debate in Washington heating up, Americans across the country recognize that we need smart and practical solutions to help reform our country’s broken immigration system.

Our immigration laws haven’t been significantly updated in almost 50 years, while other countries are implementing immigration programs to lure entrepreneurs, innovators, skilled workers, and other valuable potential employees.  Meanwhile, our system still works to support a Cold War economy in the 21st century. It’s an outdated and outmoded system that is as frustrating as it is ineffective.

On the first day of class in Management Strategies and Practices of Family-Controlled Companies, our lecturer, William Alexander, kicked-off the discussion by asking, “Why are family businesses so important to study?” A student astutely responded that approximately one-third of all companies in the S&P 500 index are family-controlled. Beyond the S&P, family businesses make up more than 90% of all companies worldwide, and many of them are actively outperforming their non-family-controlled competitors. Clearly, something is to be learned from these family businesses, some of which have been passed down from one generation to the next for hundreds of years! 

In the good old days, Hertz was the leader in auto rentals and Avis was a perennial number two. Its tag line was, “We try harder.” And that fits the way Boston‘s VC industry sees itself.

Silicon Valley start-ups raised three times more capital than second-ranked New England in 2012. But April 8, the NVCA reported that three Boston-based VC firms — Battery Ventures, Third Rock Ventures, and Spark Capital – raised 37% of the $4.1 billion in funds hauled in by America’s VCs in the first quarter of 2013.

New Enterprise Associates is betting on an accelerator concept to solve the de-risking riddle inherent to orphan drugs — that is, those targeting rare diseases — and identifying promising orphan drug candidates and bringing them to market. The Maryland venture giant, along with Pfizer Venture Investments and Alexandria Real Estate Equities, on Thursday morning announced a $16 million investment that will launch Cambridge, Mass.-based Cydan LLC, which will scour academia and industry for candidates "with well-understood biology and proof-of-concept data in in vivo models," and build companies and strategic partnerships around those candidates.

Confidence. It is an attribute we seek to have and look for in others, especially those in positions of leadership. Yet, time and time again, we meet executives who lack a confident presence. (We also encounter those who are overly confident — to the point that they are blinded by it — but that is a topic for another time). What many fail to realize is that confidence is dynamic and not a static emotion. Just like a physical muscle that needs exercise to grow stronger, a leader's confidence requires continuous attention.

Last Thursday, the Conference Board of Canada continued the steady drip of disappointing news about Canada’s research and innovation performance.

Ranked 13 of 16 industrialized countries for innovation and related metrics, Canada faces what can only be diagnosed as a crisis of complacency.

What else could it be? When it comes to revving up our innovation engines, we’ve got everything we need.

It’s become a tired refrain, voiced by tech businessmen and economic development and university officials alike: Charleston needs more investment capital to realize its potential.

Mount Pleasant medical diagnostics salesman Gavin McCulley has heard the talk and experienced the issue, as a young man trying to open an Irish pub in the area, then as part of a local angel investing duo.

Forget Myers-Briggs. A study out of BI Norwegian Business School has determined the signposts of a "creative" personality. Conducted by Professor Øyvind L. Martinsen, the study posed 200 questions to 481 people. The subjects fell into three categories. One group of "baseline" subjects such as lecturers or managers, and two groups of people who are generally considered to be creative, such as students of advertising and performing artists. Martinsen says he found meaningful differences between the creative and noncreative groups.

Workers are becoming increasingly distributed, mobile, and contractual in employment. These trends are leading to a rise in coworking space, which has been doubling annually. Coworking is a nontraditional shared office space that includes common amenities and shared desk space for entrepreneurs, freelance professionals, and remote workforces. The space is typically an alternative to working from home or a commercial office space and offers the benefit of a professional atmosphere, networking with others in the tech sector, programming, and community of workers. Coworking “incubators” are popping across in many urban centers and were originated by nomadic Internet entrepreneurs seeking an alternative to working in coffee shops or the isolation of home offices. The concept is based on a membership model that is more analogous to joining a gym or club than leasing an office.

The Internet went crazy when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to ban remote working at the company, a decision that drastically affected more than 500 employees. Debate raged over the merits of remote working. Many thought Mayer's move was uncalled for and archaic, and predicted it would end up backfiring, while other saw her move as a last-resort attempt to re-focus Yahoo after a decade of falling behind its competitors.

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Budding entrepreneurs may be glad to learn that Grand Junction's Business Incubator Center is one of the best in the world.

Competing with more than 4,000 Incubators worldwide, Grand Junction's center was awarded the Dinah Adkins Incubator of the Year in the general and special focus category by the National Business Incubator Association at its international conference in Boston earlier this week.

Do you remember the moment when crowdfunding became A Thing? Sites like Kickstarter have been around for a few years now, and the amount they've grown in that time is bananas, as this infographic from Statista shows. From 2010 to 2012, cash spent on crowdfunding tripled, from $900 million to about $2.7 billion. (If they included data back to 2009 here, it would've been a 529 percent increase between then and 2012.)

West Hartford entrepreneur Adam Alfin has been wearing a tie for more than 20 years.

“And I have always dreaded the tie-tying process and the tie-wearing experience,” he says.

Alfin, admittedly exaggerating a bit about his tie-wearing struggles, said he nonetheless wanted to make it easier for men to fold their shirt collars down over their ties without the tie sticking out the back or getting rumpled in the process.

U.S. small-business growth is being stunted by regulators’ delay in issuing rules to permit so- called crowdfunding and other means of raising capital, company owners and academics will tell lawmakers today. The House Small Business Committee is holding a hearing in Washington to examine Securities and Exchange Commission work to implement the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, signed into law last year with the goal of spurring job creation. The SEC has missed deadlines for rules including ones that would let hedge funds advertise for investors and allow startups to raise money over the Internet.

Job seekers like to believe that when they send a resume to an employer, someone on the receiving end reads the whole document and thinks…

“How can we best use this person in our organization?”

Wrong.

The reality is that your resume will most likely never be read in its entirety. And the real thought process when reading is…

Stanford students and alumni joined in a collective sigh upon reading a recent New Yorker blog post which essentially claimed that since the school's students routinely dominate in Silicon Valley, and very occasionally drop out with the financial backing of their professors, Stanford is no longer a university.

Ask any startup founder for advice, and he or she will probably tell you that it's important to celebrate the milestones large and small. Startup life is a rollercoaster, and if you get caught up in the madness, you might quickly burn out. The little things matter, and they keep you going — when your app launches, when you have a successful investor meeting, when you finally have a customer who isn't a relative, when you get acquired. These are little steps on the road to success, and it's important to take a deep breath, look back on how far you've come (even if it's not that far) and embrace a special moment with your team, perhaps over a cocktail or a team dinner.

I went to a great tech event called VatorSplash. It’s an event where tech entrepreneurs claw their way to center stage in hopes of getting their demo seen and receiving the coveted Vator award. The real benefit is they get in front of some impressive VCs that might love their idea enough to fund it to the next phase. The night I went, I was lucky enough to get to listen to the CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin speak. And as I write this, I’m using his great tool.

Libin walked us through his beliefs on entrepreneurship; specifically who should be an entrepreneur and where they should launch. As he chatted about the “who” part, I pulled four reasons why anyone thinking they want to start a business should NOT DO IT and related it to my day-to-day and boy, was he spot on. So here’s my take on his words. Don’t start a biz if…