When you’re neck deep in starting a new business, you may not take the time to properly protect your inventions. As a result, you could see your intellectual property stolen or you could be sued for inadvertently stealing the intellectual property of others. Here are five easy tips on how to quickly develop an intellectual property strategy, specifically with respect to patents.

1) Give each team member an information disclosure form

The first key step to getting a patent is identifying ideas that are potentially novel and inventive. Discovering and understanding your employees’ inventions as early as possible will enable your patent lawyer to draft earlier applications with more accurate and comprehensive disclosures, which means stronger patents. Circulating an information disclosure form to your team will help your startup learn about technology being created internally.

We delved into the World Bank’s Economy Rankings for 2012, released earlier this year and found that despite African countries not featuring in the top 20 overall for ease of doing business, they still offer aspects that could make them attractive to startups. We also identified some aspects of economies in Africa that make it really hard for entrepreneurs to prosper. First, let’s take a look at the countries in the region that have aspects that are likely to attract startups. Be sure to have a look at the full detailed report for complete rankings and methodology.

In our fifth annual survey, 103 colleges were recognized. Learn more about the 12 recognition categories in which each was evaluated. Colleges marked with a are on the Honor Roll.

Graduate and post-doctoral students are critical participants in university commercialization efforts, according to a study released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “University Technology Transfer through Entrepreneurship: Faculty and Students in Spinoffs” examines students’ roles in university startups and compares the functions and responsibilities of faculty, entrepreneurs and students in successfully moving university innovations to market.

The authors, Wai Fong Boh (Nanyang Technological University), Uzi De-Haan (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology), and Robert Strom (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) analyze four to eight cases of technology commercialization attempts by faculty and students at each of eight

Young entrepreneurs may get more attention, but www.startup50plus.com  founder Joyce Schwarz says that boomers are starting more businesses than any age group,  The Kaufman Foundation reports that Baby boomers age 45-66 are starting 1000 businesses every month.

World's First Accelerator for Seasoned Execs

That's why Schwarz who is also known as a bestselling author of SUCCESSFUL RECAREERING When Just Another Job Is Not Enough published by Career Press and featured in The Wall Street Journal, on PBS, NPR, NBC News knows it's the right time for the world's first business accelerator where one founder is over age 50 and we all cash in on $11 Trillion in retirement funds.  Schwarz reports that industry pundits are terming Startup50plus a Ycombinator (referring to the successful Gen Y accelerator in Silicon Valley) for Seasoned execs.

Every industry needs its anchors, the companies that everyone looks up to as models of success. Think Apple, GE, Boeing. Biotech is no different, as it has been defined by trailblazers like Genentech, Genzyme, and more.

But if you look around, biotech is clearly losing its anchors. And this worrisome trend isn’t just happening in one or two places—it is playing out in most every regional cluster where the industry has grown up in the past 30 years.

I write a lot about venture capital but not enough about venture capitalists. So I called John Backus, 53, who is a managing partner at New Atlantic Ventures in Reston.

Backus’s firm has invested $225 million in 35 companies, and he sits on the board of five of them. He’s chatty, the sort who likes to quote Warren Buffett.

I met him at his Northern Virginia home about a year ago when he hosted a party for a bunch of area entrepreneurs.

When you’re neck deep in starting a new business, you may not take the time to properly protect your inventions. As a result, you could see your intellectual property stolen or you could be sued for inadvertently stealing the intellectual property of others. Here are five easy tips on how to quickly develop an intellectual property strategy, specifically with respect to patents.

1) Give each team member an information disclosure form

The first key step to getting a patent is identifying ideas that are potentially novel and inventive. Discovering and understanding your employees’ inventions as early as possible will enable your patent lawyer to draft earlier applications with more accurate and comprehensive disclosures, which means stronger patents. Circulating an information disclosure form to your team will help your startup learn about technology being created internally.

With EMSI’s new data categories, we can now more closely parse data on the major classes of workers in the labor market. This is a significant shift in how we present employment data, and one of the valuable applications is being able to track and analyze self-employed workers — those whose primary job, their chief source of income, is working on their own.

In this piece, we’ll use EMSI’s self-employment data to dig into a segment of the workforce that has previously been hard (or impossible) to get at for local researchers and planners. But first, it’s important to distinguish between EMSI’s two proprietors datasets and why we’re only focusing here on the self-employed, the third of our four class of workers.

Entrepreneurship has an attractive set of freedoms: create any kind of business, set your own hours and manifest an ever changing job description, one free of geographical bounds. Thanks to the Internet, you can choose to start up anywhere in the world that you want to.

But just like selecting a home for your family or a school district for your kids, there are a few important factors to consider when picking a place to start a business. Note: these things should still be top of mind if you’re entertaining the idea of location independence altogether!

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, announced today the appointment to its Board of Directors of two Baltimore-based business leaders: M&T Bank Corporation Senior Vice President/Regional President Baltimore Scott E. Dagenais and Ernst & Young's Baltimore Office Managing Partner Jay S. Ridder.

"As the first Central Maryland intermediary created to connect Baltimore's strengths in university and hospital biohealth research with the bioscience industry and federal lab assets in Montgomery County, it is important for the BHI Board to have leadership and representation from both parts of our region," said Scott Carmer, BioHealth Innovation, Inc. Chairman of the Board and MedImmune Executive Vice President of Commercial Operations. "I am pleased to welcome Scott and Jay to the BHI Board.  They will both bring valued expertise from the Baltimore community and also provide depth in commercial banking and accounting experience."

Is the era of the ivy-walled college coming to an end? How much will technology reshape what we think of as the college experience? See what the experts had to say. 

Higher education is rapidly changing--you don’t have to even be paying much attention to see that. Universities have started streaming lectures en masse, schools like Harvard and MIT are teaming up to create content tailored for the web, startups like UniversityNow are creating reasonably priced online universities, and startups like Udacity offer online-only classes from renowned professors. None of this existed 10 years ago, and the field isn’t done changing yet. A new report from Pew Internet looks at what higher education will look like in 2020, based on survey responses from over 1,000 "Internet experts, researchers, observers and users."

People tend to think they have to choose between being employed and being an entrepreneur. But there is a way to do both--but first you have to find your "muse." A muse, in Tim Ferriss' context, is a low-maintenance business that generates significant income. In this video, Tim Ferriss details how entrepreneurs can engineer their own muse to make more money while working less.

That crazy landing idea worked, capturing the attention of the world, and inspiring a new generation of young space enthusiasts. Now, it’s onward to two years of learning how Mars formed and whether life once existed there.

In NASA’s most daring and complex extra-planetary landing, Curiosity touched down on Mars’ Gale Crater last night at 1:32 am (ET).

The harrowing seven minutes that brought Curiosity from an atmospheric entry of 13,000 mph to a soft standstill involved a seemingly impossible feat of engineering involving computerized guided flight, parachute deployment and slowing the craft doing supersonic speeds, retrorocket descent, and, in the final 65 feet, a sky-crane lowering of Curiosity to the ground.

As we continue our summer recess here at PDE, we wanted to bring your attention to a new global policy survey that is being conducted by the Monitor Group and the Kauffman Foundation to assess the state of entrepreneurship around the world. Available in nine different languages, the survey is focused on capturing the perceptions of entrepreneurs regarding their country's entrepreneurial environment and whether it enables or inhibits success in their enterprises. 

If you are an entrepreneur, please follow one of the links below and complete the online survey, which should take no more than 20 minutes. 

• English
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Chinese
• Arabic
• Russian
• Korean
• Greek

We would also ask that, as appropriate, you help us identify and pass along this survey to other entrepreneurs in your country. All respondent names and organizational affiliations will be kept confidential. Responses will only be allowed until August 31st.

Survey responses will be released during Global Entrepreneurship Week in a report that reflects the most important public policies necessary to encourage startups to launch and scale. If you care to receive a copy of the report when it is published, please send a request via email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.with your name, country and email address included.

Lockheed Martin Corporation LMT -0.45% today announced a worldwide innovation contest with cash awards totaling $50,000.

The "Innovate the Future" contest creates a global forum for interested participants to share their ideas on how innovation can enable a more secure future for the planet. Participants are invited to submit their thoughts on a range of topics facing the world community, including the need for sustainable energy, cyber security, and healthcare.

The rainforest was at the heart of Silicon Valley last month.

Greg Horowitt and Victor Hwang, authors of a new book, The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, assembled a mixed group of entrepreneurs, policymakers, nonprofit management, venture capitalists, and impact investors to discuss the successes and the failures of the “Impact Economy,” an economy that prizes inclusivity and focuses on social impact along with financial returns.

Recently, the bipartisan Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act became law, transforming how entrepreneurs can raise the money to grow their business. The JOBS Act expands the pool of potential investors, makes investing in small businesses more attractive and lowers the regulatory burden for more mature business of “going public.” Savvy entrepreneurs should be aware of what the new legislation entails when forming a comprehensive strategy for raising capital and growth.

“The JOBS Act is a game changer for entrepreneurs and ‘Main Street’ businesses,” explains Rob Kaplan, a partner at the law firm Kaplan Voekler Cunningham & Frank (KVCF). “Those who are unaware or don’t fully understand the implications may miss out on opportunities that are now becoming available.”

I’ve been in Pittsburgh long enough – 30 years this month, in fact – to remember when a term like “Pittsburgh Entrepreneur” was thought to be something of an oxymoron. It was a reflection of how strongly our region had become attached to the industrial, corporate economy that Pittsburgh exemplified for a century. There was a sense we’d become great managers but we’d lost some of our capacity to create. And there was concern that we’d never be able to recapture the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that had built Pittsburgh in the first place, when a bunch of young entrepreneurs with names like Heinz, Hunt and Westinghouse were reinventing the way the world worked, and Andrew Carnegie was combing the world for innovative technologies like the Bessemer Convertor to revolutionize the steel industry.

Worn out and resigned to its dwindling status, Japan Inc. is said to be quietly shuffling off the world stage. But don't tell that to Kenji Hasegawa, who is ready to conquer the global auto market with his nifty innovation, a bolt that doesn't need a nut. Or Chiaki Hayashi, who makes millions teaching big-name companies to be creative again.

As different as they seem - Hasegawa runs auto-parts supplier Lock'n Bolt Corp. and Hayashi is a rare woman to help found a Tokyo startup - both highlight the potential of innovation and entrepreneurship in a nation that is often typecast as facing an unrelenting decline.