Venture capital (VC) accounted for $3.6bn (£2.95bn) of investment in the UK tech sector last year – a 70 per cent increase on the previous year.

On a per capita basis, the country is now the second biggest destination for VC money in the world. But while it’s a valuable option, it’s not necessarily the simplest kind of funding to pursue: with the money comes a number of responsibilities, complications, and sacrifices.

Imagine the following scenario. You’re a division president of a Fortune 500 company and you’ve been tapped to run a crucial new initiative. The executive committee has targeted Southeast Asia as a new market for your company, and you’re tasked with reorienting the strategic focus of your division. You know this change will be controversial, as you’re going to have to redistribute parts of your division to make the strategic plan work. You’re also going to have to lay off a small part of your workforce, and you need to decide exactly how many people and in which areas. Although you know the discussion with your executive team will be heated and that not everyone will agree with your decisions, you’re excited about the task and know you can make it work.

In the largest proposed deal of the year, AT&T reached an agreement to buy Time Warner. Some observers are skeptical, comparing the acquisition to the spectacularly failed AOL–Time Warner merger of 2000. Others say the new company will be a “powerhouse.”

Will the outcome be different this time? AT&T’s stock is not massively overvalued, as AOL’s was. Broadband has made the experience of consuming content far better than it was with dial-up. And consumers are shifting away from TV and toward mobile devices. Combining the second-largest wireless carrier with the fourth-biggest entertainment company — one whose impressive assets include HBO and CNN — is likely to create an unassailable mobile-entertainment business.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”

The success of crowdfunding as a whole isn’t something that nonprofits can ignore. Nonprofits, in the constant state of needing more donations, can learn from the more lucrative crowdfunding trends.

In fact, nonprofits have already started applying crowdfunding techniques to their online fundraising channels.

One key to innovation is creativity—and organizations spend a great deal of time looking at how to promote and foster it both in and out of the office.

It’s no wonder. Fifty-eight percent of respondents to a study by Adobe and Forrester said firms that foster creativity had 10% year-over-year revenue growth in 2013. Just 20% of less creative companies performed similarly.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a report on technology transfers between federal laboratories and private sector entities in fiscal year 2014.

NIST said Thursday the “Federal Laboratory Technology Transfer, Fiscal Year 2014, Summary Report” shows federal laboratories established approximately 9,180 formal collaborative research agreements and 27,182 research and development-related relationships in FY 2014.

At the start of this year, President Obama called for an ambitious, $4 billion investment in computer science education for students from kindergarten through grade 12. The proposal gained the support of business leaders and 27 U.S. governors, but Congress predictably failed to act. In the meantime, countries like Canada, the U.K., Estonia, and Singapore are all adding programming skills to their school curricula.

Road trips usually start with a bold and outlandish idea, which is what makes them a distinctly American tradition. Our most recent one began with a meeting in Los Angeles. We live three thousand miles away in Maryland. Since I don’t particularly like to fly I off-handedly asked my husband last month if we could drive there, mostly in jest. Would a logical person drive 100 hours round-trip across America for a 45-minute meeting? Perhaps not, but with my decks as clear as they are going to get, I am on a journey to discover what my next move in life will be.

Julie Smith has $9,000 in her budget this year to update the stock of power tools, lawn equipment and other hardware in the nonprofit tool library she runs on the East Side.

After salaries, new tools and paying for warehouse space, the budget for Rebuilding Together Central Ohio doesn’t leave much room for marketing. That makes it harder to recruit new members and new donors, Smith said.

Most of us use products made in China every day and are aware of its growing economic power as a factory to the world. But China intends to become a developed nation by mid-century, and integral to this ambition is its intense focus on innovation. In a few decades, Chinese companies have evolved from imitators to imaginative and effective innovators. As part of my research with my colleague George Yip on this issue, we identified three key phases in China’s development:

This year’s State of the State finds the UK Government moving from an era of challenge around one objective – eliminating the budget deficit – into an era of multiple and complex challenges. The next five years will see additional demands on the public sector as it manages the UK’s departure from the EU, continues to drive major reforms and maintains business as usual.

The Council of European BioRegions seeks a energetic and self-motivated Network Manager, working as an independent contractor. The successful applicant will work part time to manage a lively network of approximately 35 member clusters across Europe plus many further connections on a global scale.

The successful applicant will work closely with the CEBR Board and be ideally situated in Brussels, although this is not essential.

Applications are invited for a deadline of November 18, with an approximate 2017 budget for personnel at €40,000. This document provides a description of tasks, skills for potential applicants and process for application.

Download the PDF for more information.

Xconomy New York —  New York biotech has historically lagged behind more established life sciences hubs like Boston and San Francisco, but collaborations between its research institutions have helped the city start to move forward. Another step in that direction was taken this morning, with the launch of what’s being called Bridge Medicines.

Bridge is a drug discovery company formed via a partnership between two local venture firms (Bay City Capital, Deerfield Management), three research centers (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medical College), and one pharmaceutical company (Takeda).

I was talking with my good friend Sheryl Sleeva last week and discussing that there will be a day in the not so distant future where your refrigerator will re-order food for you automatically. Out of Honest Tea and So Delicious dairy free ice cream? No worries, it arrives in less than three hours. At 4pm, your thermostat goes from 65 to 72 degrees. Your home, lightbulbs and all appliances will be getting ready to welcome you when you return from work.

Successful people solve problems.  Look at any great fortune, whether it be Carnegie, Ford or Gates and you find that the source of their vast accomplishment was a problem solved.  Even more prosaic executives spend most of their time solving one problem or another, with greater or lesser skill.

The contrast in outcomes can be attributed to the scale and difficulty of the problems they tackled.  All too often, we get so mired down in day-to-day challenges that the bigger issues fall by the wayside, being left for another day which never seems to come.  That, in the final analysis, is the difference between the mundane and the sublime.

The data-analytics revolution now under way has the potential to transform how companies organize, operate, manage talent, and create value. That’s starting to happen in a few companies—typically ones that are reaping major rewards from their data—but it’s far from the norm. There’s a simple reason: CEOs and other top executives, the only people who can drive the broader business changes needed to fully exploit advanced analytics, tend to avoid getting dragged into the esoteric “weeds.” On one level, this is understandable. The complexity of the methodologies, the increasing importance of machine learning, and the sheer scale of the data sets make it tempting for senior leaders to “leave it to the experts.”

The more business Uber, Airbnb, and other Silicon Valley companies do, the more government suffers from a loss of taxes. Uber, for instance, avoids licensing fees and withholding taxes for its “independent contractors.” Airbnb avoids hotel taxes, licensing fees, and other indirect taxation.

Willard Dix is one of the crankiest observers of the college admissions process I know; he’s also one of the smartest. He worked at Amherst, his alma mater, then advised college-bound students at a private secondary school in Chicago. He now blogs about higher education.

I asked him on the phone the other day about the dizzying proliferation of college rankings beyond those by U.S. News & World Report, each using its own methodology and emphasizing different metrics. If a tone of voice can approximate an eye roll, his did.

Florida is getting back way more than it is spending from the economic impact of investing in technology companies and that return is accelerating as the companies mature, according to an economics study.

The Washington Economics Group, based in Coral Gables, conducted the study of companies funded by the Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research, which has an office at the University of Florida Innovation Hub and another in Boca Raton.