NYC-based Blueprint Health, a health-focused member of the TechStars Network, has just opened applications for its inaugural program starting on January 9th, 2012. This accelerator program is the only TechStars member to exclusively concentrate on healthcare.

The program plans to offer access to a large network of healthcare entrepreneurs, VCs and innovators. Its current mentors include those who have founded and helped lead companies like Amicas, Eliza, Everyday Health, Generation Health, Healthination, HelloHealth, Keas, Kryuus, Livestrong, MedCommons, Medivo, PatientsLikeMe, Phreesia, ShapeUp and ZocDoc.

If you are an entrepreneur involved in providing services to your clients, in most cases, I think your biggest goal should be to become a trusted business advisor.  What is a “trusted business advisor”?  It is an advisor who adds value consistently over a period of time.  In so doing, the advisor develops a relationship of trust and respect with the client and the client becomes more willing to rely on the advisor regarding important issues and decisions.  The advisor’s consistently high-level and high-value-added work gives the client peace of mind and allows them to focus on running their business, rather than constantly worrying about the performance of the advisor.  The advisor becomes like a member of their trusted internal team.

I have written elsewhere that sustainable success in business is based on trust.  There I discussed ten things you should keep in mind as you develop those trusting relationships.  Here I will expand on those in the context of the trusted business advisor concept.

Entrepreneurs contribute significantly to the region’s economy. According to a recent Cleveland State University report, 90 technology-based companies created and grown in Northeast Ohio generated approximately $155 million in economic benefits for the 21-county region in 2010. They also created and retained 546 direct jobs paying an average salary of $62,850 and more than 1,000 total jobs in the region.

The companies in the report were supported early in their development by JumpStart and our partners either through significant investment dollars and/or intensive technical assistance. While the businesses participating in the survey represent less than a quarter of JumpStart’s total client and portfolio companies, the fact that this relatively small pool of young companies has created such an impact confirms that the growth of entrepreneurial ventures is important to the economic growth of Northeast Ohio.

WASHINGTON—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas joined the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in Pittsburgh to announce “Entrepreneurs in Residence.”  This new innovative initiative will utilize industry expertise to strengthen USCIS policies and practices surrounding immigrant investors, entrepreneurs and workers with specialized skills, knowledge, or abilities. Mayorkas announced the initiative at the Jobs Council’s High Growth Entrepreneurship Listening and Action Session at AlphaLab in Pittsburgh before the Council’s quarterly meeting with President Obama.

“This initiative creates additional opportunities for USCIS to gain insights in areas critical to economic growth,” said Director Mayorkas. “The introduction of expert views from the private and public sector will help us to ensure that our policies and processes fully realize the immigration law’s potential to create and protect American jobs.”

In an opinion article published in the Washington Post, Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, decried the current relationship between universities and research centers, industry, and markets, stating “the university commercialization system is broken…If university research (were) a business, it would be bankrupt.”

There is danger in equating commercialization with technology transfer, in eliminating public good from the equation, and Wadhwa seems to agree, “it is not fair to judge the success of university research by the licensing revenue produced,” yet the basis of the article is the vast difference between investment and commercial returns.

Dexetra, a mobile start-up, impressed us all last night with their Siri clone, an Android app called Iris. The folks there were so thankful that their project hit the front page that they sent us a kind thank you as well as a picture of a cake that the founders gave the team in celebration of getting TechCruched (sic). It’s heartwarming to see people who worked hard get rewarded for their excellent work, especially when the reward is in the form of cake.

The founders would also like to thank you, the community:

The world’s largest city classification and ranking with 331 benchmark cities classified, and top 125 cities ranked in 2011, of which the top 100 are listed below. Based on 2thinknow analysis of cities in what our analysts term the ‘global innovation economy’. Annual since 2007.

Just because you are an entrepreneur, or work in a startup, you can’t ignore the rules of building and maintaining relationships. Many despise these experiences in corporate environments, and leave for a startup, only to find that they have to be able to navigate a similar minefield there of workplace and business relationships to be successful.

Jan Yager, Ph.D., an author and speaker on this and related subjects, outlines in her latest book “Productive Relationships: 57 Strategies for Building Stronger Business Connections.” From my experience and hers, here are ten top relationship strategies for people in startups:

Create a favorable first impression. You only get one chance for a first impression. Don’t miss an opportunity for face-to-face communication, where you can use body language that welcomes relating, estimated at over 50% of all communication. Limit the use of e-mail and texting for early interactions, where you miss the body language.

Enthusiastic entrepreneurs looking to raise funding must realise that a great business case alone is definitely not enough to guarantee a favorable outcome. Not preparing adequately for a presentation to an angel investor or a venture capital fund is a sure-fire way of guaranteeing failure.

The power of a strong, well polished pitch to funders cannot be underestimated and it warrants considerable time and effort to make sure that you hit the mark first off. Here are some tips on what funders might expect from entrepreneurs hoping to make a good impression.

Launching a startup requires a good idea and a whole lot of passion. But how do you execute on your idea when you can't leave your day job just yet?

It takes tons of self discipline and smart strategizing.

"Many investors will want to speak with former employers as a reference," says Chris Altchek, who kept his day job at Goldman Sachs before launching PolicyMic. "If you've let your side project get in the way of your full-time commitments, you may be hurting your chances more than you think."

Sunday's Globe column asked the question, "Is Boston spawning too many start-ups?"

That’s the question I’ve been wondering about lately, as I see so many people toiling at two-person companies. Maybe they’re relying on their own savings, or maybe they’ve raised a few hundred thousand dollars from angel investors. Some of them win admittance to programs that try to help young companies gain momentum, like TechStars Boston or MassChallenge.

For small business owners, creating a social media policy is an effective way to help your employees interact with customers, clarify your marketing messages and protect your credibility online. Let’s look at how to create a social media policy.

What Is a Social Media Policy?

Here’s one definition:

“A social media policy is a set of guidelines that describes how employees should interact with customers online.”

In general, most policies provide guidelines for:

• Corporate blogs
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Calgary has the most entrepreneurs per capita, Regina has the greatest business optimism and Saskatoon tops the list of entrepreneurial cities that have the most effective local and provincial government policy on business, according to the 2011 FP/Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) rankings of Canada’s Entrepreneurial Urban Centres.

That data puts Western Canadian cities in the top of the rankings for the second year running. However, this year smaller cities have also fared well, outranking the country’s major urban centres such as Toronto and Vancouver when it comes to optimism and policy. Financial Post asked some young entrepreneurs for their thoughts on the results and what they look for in a business community.

At long last: entrepreneurship support in Maine at a sustainable scale. The Blackstone Charitable Foundation announcement on Oct. 7 of a $3 million grant to Maine to support existing entrepreneurship programs has been a long time coming. But this support enables Maine to support its entrepreneurs at a level commensurate with our long-standing investment in research and development. And, since R&D without commercialization, without entrepreneurship, does not by itself create economic growth, Mainers who have been advocating the importance of entrepreneurship to the state’s growth are welcoming Blackstone with open arms.

A bit of history will help put this announcement in context. In the late 1990s, the Maine state legislature inaugurated several programs to promote economic growth in the state through investments in innovation. These included the Maine Technology Institute, a funding source for emerging technology-based companies, the Patent Program to assist inventors with intellectual property, the Maine Economic Improvement Fund and the Maine Biomedical Fund to support research and development, and the Applied Technology Development Centers to start seven technology incubators around the state.

The cotton gin. The Model T. The iPad. Three game-changing inventions conceived, developed, and sold in America first.

Over the past 50 years, the US has provided an ideal innovation ecosystem that has fostered significant advances in medical technology, among other fields.

US companies dominate the $350 billion global device industry for example, with 32 of the 46 medical technology companies with more than more than $1 billion dollars in annual revenue based in the US.

Innovation is all about creating “the new”, but if you hang around innovators long enough you begin to get the feeling that while lots of “new” things are being brought to market, innovators continue to use “old” approaches to do this! Recently, however, Arthur D. Little published a study on The New Face of Innovation designed to reassure us that new innovation approaches were indeed being developed as well!

After speaking with nearly 100 Chief Technology & Chief Innovation Officers, ADL has concluded that the new face of innovation has five principle new dimensions:

Ningbo is a port city on the eastern Chinese coast which has dedicated itself over the years to economic experiments; the city map includes an Economic and Technological Development Zone not far from a National Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone. After the Chinese outpouring of admiration for Steve Jobs, the Ningbo press heralded another local initiative: a program to cultivate “an army of Steve Jobs-style leaders.”

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

JobsOhio honcho Mark Kvamme thinks the decision by the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds    to move to Ohio will lift the state’s profile in the venture capital world.

The association said Monday it will move its offices from Philadelphia to Lorain in northeast Ohio and hold its annual conference in Cleveland next year. The nonprofit group uses the conference as a schmoozing ground for the sort of movers and shakers in the venture capital world that Kvamme, chief investment officer at JobsOhio, and his boss, Gov. John Kasich, have been trying to attract since taking office in January.

Through a crowd funding platform it is now possible to invest as an individual in Enviu in exchange for profit certificates for existing and new start-ups. Enviu is one of the first businesses in the world where small investors become shareholder of start-ups that have massive social, environmental and positive impact on the world.