The American dream is alive and well, at least to immigrants who are magnetized by it.

It is they who challenge the rest of us to foster a culture of inclusion, access, opportunity, and empowerment. Moreover, they are the ones with the starkest sense of how America differs from every other country in the world. Their very belief in that difference virtually guarantees the American dream come true.

As James Jasper noted in his book Restless Nation, immigrants “picked this country because of its promise. They dreamed the dream.” This has always been one of the underlying premises of this dream, which has simultaneously been a catalyst for renewal and transformation of our society over the centuries.

1. "I want to put a ding in the universe." - Steve Jobs

2. "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

3. "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

4. "If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." - Charles Kettering

5. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller

You sit down to write, and instead of falling into a productive creative flow, you sit there staring at a blank screen.

You watch the cursor blink on-off-on; your fingers are aching to type, poised over the keyboard — but no words are coming out.

No, Hell hasn’t frozen over.

You’re just in a writing slump. You’re in a place where you can’t write — or where you can write, but what’s coming out is, well, less than great.

A couple years ago, when Alex Fair was tossing around ideas on how to raise money for his new healthcare marketplace, FairCareMD, he knew that putting the startup on the uber-popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter would be out of the question. Kickstarter has collected $250 million for 24,000 projects since it was founded three years ago, but virtually none of that has gone to health-related companies. “I said, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity here,’” Fair says. “No one’s really doing health care crowdfunding.”

Enter MedStartr, Fair’s New York-based site that’s making its debut today. MedStartr allows entrepreneurs to find backers for healthcare technologies and services. The site, which Fair says ran a brief alpha test starting in April, is launching with six projects, including MedStartr itself. During that early project, which was designed to test the concept, Fair was surprised to find MedStartr was able to raise enough capital to run the company. “Of the 71 people we invited to view the alpha, six invested,” he says. It’s a sign, he believes, that “crowdfunding has hit the public consciousness.”

Qatar has retained its position as the Middle East's most innovative economy in the annual Global Innovation Index 2012 (GII).

The index ranked the future host of FIFA World Cup 2022 33rd globally, one place ahead of powerhouse China, the world’s largest emerging economy.

The gas-rich state fell seven places compared to last year but was still ahead of the UAE which was placed 37th, down three positions over 2011.

We see this as a cost reduction and access to quality care issue. Further, tackling this gap can be a platform for expansion of the U.S. economy, to advance health care technologies, and for creation of high paying skill rich employment opportunities. All, one would hope, are shared goals among rational thinkers regardless of political persuasion.

The challenge is here and now. What steps do you propose?

You can’t miss the massive Sico outdoor sign in Longueuil as you leave the Lafontaine Tunnel and speed toward Quebec City.

Therein lies a remarkable tale of Quebec entrepreneurship and an example of how globalization can deliver real benefits to a local company and its 1,000-strong workforce.

Quebec paintmaker Sico Inc., founded by entrepreneur Marcel Deslauriers in Quebec City in 1937 with one tiny factory, had vaulted toward Canadian market leadership by 2006, with toeholds in the U.S., Europe and Mexico, and several manufacturing plants.

In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

Or rather, his brain's performance is near perfect. The man has a machine strapped to his head, an array of electrodes called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is recording his brain activity as each image skips by. It then sends the brain-activity data wirelessly to a large computer. The computer has learned what the man's brain activity looks like when he sees one of the visual targets, and, based on that information, it quickly reshuffles the images. When the man sorts back through the hundreds of images—most without structures, but some with—almost all the ones with buildings in them pop to the front of the pack. His brain and the computer have done good work.

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination.

I was reading an article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”. Based on a small sample of household names from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, he is an optimist. Here is some data from Wikipedia:

Since the passing of the JOBS Act, much has been written about crowdfunding and how it will affect the investment landscape from this point forward. The question many are asking is: is crowdfunding a complement to venture activity, or will it put pressure on a VC industry that has been struggling to perform over the past decade?

I don’t think the answer is clear one way or the other but somewhere in between.

Pro: Crowdfunding may make it easier for start-ups that would otherwise not have access to funding to get off the ground. Crowdfunding will likely prove most useful for companies that can be successfully launched with less money than the dollar thresholds of most VCs. Some areas within the internet and mobile industries, for example, have a history of doing more with less, and may see crowdfunding as an attractive option. The availability and low cost of cloud computing has made it easier for an internet or mobile development-focused company to get off the ground as they no longer need to spend precious capital on hardware. For companies that will need more than the $1 million per year that can be legally raised through crowdfunding, however, traditional venture capital will remain the better option.

I've always been a bit of a stickler for language. Not quite so much as Humpty Dumpty, who says to Alice during her adventures in Wonderland (a place with disturbing similarities to the 9 to 5 worlds that some of us inhabit): "When I use a word... it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." For me, words are nuanced, and specific - not used as a device of control but for the purpose of communicating new ideas by connecting them to things that people already understand.

Having said that, please know that I'm not upset when people use 'cohesion' when they are talking about 'coherence'. It's only in the interest of clarity that I'm even mentioning it.

Cohesion is the state of sticking together. On a team, cohesion accurately describes the traditional sense of everyone doing the same thing at the same time. (No I will not say "hold hands and sing Kumbaya," but if you thought of that, you've got the idea.) That kind of cohesion worked best back when there was one boss and he (it was almost always 'he') made all the decisions, and large numbers of people were actually doing the same thing.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ quasi-public agency, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, has opened its 2012-2013 Accelerator Loan Program, the agency announced Monday.

MLSC launched the program in 2009 as a way to help startup businesses who need working capital or funding to pay for capital assets. A loan of up to $1 million per company is provided, an increase from the maximum amount of $750,000 offered in the past. The decision to increase the amount available was made during a June meeting of the board of directors, according to Angus McQuilken, vice president of communications at the MLSC. Companies still will only be able to borrow a dollar-for-dollar match, he said.

Some of the best engineering schools in the world serve as feeder programs for the best technology companies out there, like Facebook, Google, and Apple.

So, which school is most likely to land you the job you want?

Over the past few weeks, we've conducted a survey to find out the true ranking of the top 50 schools. The top school in the world, from our survey, is the California Institute of Technology.

There’s no better way to show companies how to create an engaging infographic than through outlined steps in the form of an infographic.

A new infographic by Infographic Labs — first published by Performancing.com — highlights the best practices of developing a creative way to get the word out about new data.

As the amount of information we consume on the Internet grows and attention spans decrease thanks to a bevvy of distractions from email to Facebook, market research firms and other companies are packaging new data in visual ways. In some cases, infographics even go viral.

Deciding to leave the workforce and go back to school for a MBA can be a daunting decision.

But is it really worth it?

We talked to the recruiters responsible for finding corporate America the perfect employees.

While most praised the value of a MBA, not everyone was sold.

However, most recruiters can agree that if you plan on studying for a MBA, make sure you do so at a top-tier school.

The nature of problems in innovative work is that they are often ill defined, novel to the individual who engaged them, and complex in that often several solutions exist to the same problem. In this post we will see how expertise is an important factor in innovative problem solving, and how leaders and organizations can cultivate R&D team expertise.

One of the strongest characteristics of creative people is that they spend considerable time and effort into developing their expertise. For instance, Heinzen, Mills and Cameron (1993) found that early intense curiosity about a subject was one of the strongest predictors for becoming a successful scientist. Other scholars have found that extensive practice and involvement in the work at hand predicts creative achievement (Sternberg, 1999). These findings are not very counterintuitive, since creativity in its most basic sense is the combination of two or more elements of information. The more knowledge a person has, the better the chances are for novel and useful ideas and solutions.

We believe that:

• One of the best ways of getting energized at work is to start something outside of it. (You will gain new skills and new perspectives which will naturally attach to you as go about doing your day job.) 
• You should be spending at least 1,000 hours preparing for a new career (Just in case that your industry goes the way of publishing, pay phones, photo finishing and the like and either disappears or radically changes to the point where there is no room for you.) 

To which some people commented, as Rich did, we are, in essence, idiots: "When people get excited about things outside of work they end showing up to work and going through motions just to get through a day. Everyone loses. The employee loses and the employer loses. People are not going to give all of themselves as they focus on their new outside interest." Rich makes an extremely valid point — one that we think is worth elaborating on.

Venture capital fundraising for early stage funds doubled in the first half of the year to $3 billion compared with the same period last year, according to a report by Dow Jones.

Among the firms that have raised funds were Felicis Ventures, a well-respected early stage investment group with a new $70 million fund targeting bioinformatics, and other sectors.

Healthcare IT companies are likely to benefit from the increase as healthcare facilities shift to electronic medical records.

When we think of places with high salaries, big metro areas like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco are usually the first to spring to mind. Or cities with the biggest concentrations of educated workers, such as Boston.

But wages are just one part of the equation — high prices in those East and West Coast cities mean the fat paychecks aren’t necessarily getting the locals ahead. When cost of living is factored in, most of the places that boast the highest effective pay turn out to be in the less celebrated and less expensive middle part of the country. My colleague Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group and I looked at the average annual wages in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan statistical areas and adjusted incomes by the cost of living. The results were surprising and revealing.

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