Small businesses who want to conduct and commercialize health-related research will connect with national experts and programs Oct. 28-30 in Sioux Falls, S.D. Close to 500 are expected to attend the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) 15th annual Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Conference held at the Sioux Falls Convention Center.

NIH awards more than $700 million annually to small businesses to perform research and development through its innovation and technology transfer programs. “South Dakota and the surrounding states have growing medical industries,” says Matthew Portnoy, NIH SBIR/STTR Program Coordinator.  “We look forward to sharing how NIH can partner with small businesses to bring new products and technologies to market.”

The advent of the digital age has made it simpler than ever to not only further brand awareness but to also establish your brand in the public eye. But too many businesses proceed from the belief that “if you build it, they will come” – based on the misconception that existing is all that it takes to succeed in Africa’s bourgeoning economic environments. In the past, when innovative startups were few and far between, this may have been the case, but in today’s accelerated African growth environment, being is not enough.

Crowdfunding is still a rather new concept to many businesses. The concept is to raise a little bit of money from a large crowd to fund your next project. On most platforms when the financial goal isn’t met, the company will lose the money raised. It’s important to know how crowdfunding works before diving in so that you can crowdfund successfully.

Check out these four misconceptions about crowdfunding.

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Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, but there is no market for ideas. I’m often approached by people with a “million dollar idea,” but I haven’t seen anyone pay that for one yet.

Equally often, I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven’t figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on eloquently for 20 pages about how great this product and technology is, but never gets around to defining the problem (investors call this the “solution looking for a problem” syndrome).

Matt Blumberg’s new book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is about to come out. If you are a CEO and haven’t preordered it, I recommend you go get it right now.

I had a chat with a CEO I work with who has had a challenging year scaling up his company. He – and the company – have made a lot of progress after hitting a low point this spring. After the call, he sent me the following note he has pasted on his desk.

Last Wednesday, 20 excited teens gathered on the 28th floor of the Bloomberg Tower in Manhattan. They were graduating from a six-week summer program that turned them into programmers. It was demo night, where they would show off an impressive collection of early stage projects, from action games to online cookbooks.

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Vortices in the South Atlantic are mathematically equivalent to black holes, say physicists, an idea that could lead to new ways of understanding how currents transport oil and garbage across oceans

Black holes are regions of spacetime in which gravity is strong enough to prevent anything escaping, even light. These strange objects were first discovered in the early 20th century as mathematical solutions to the equations of general relativity. (It was not until much later that astronomers began to gather observational evidence of their existence.)

Are you capturing the value of your innovation? It is a question that I ask innovators over and over. Chances are they do not at all or at least not fully. In my experience in innovation management, I have seen great levels of sophistication and process orientation in the new product/service development process. Everything is in place: the deliverables are being worked on; multi-functional teams are in place; priorities are being managed; and the process works like clockwork. All is good in innovation land!

This is a brilliant 3 minute video, where Richard St. John shares 8 secrets of success… they’re good!

When I first watched this video it really made me realise that success is not just for a special few – anyone can be successful, if they apply these things!

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Despite a slate of new products that promise a new generation of human-computer interaction, no company has yet been able to resolutely slay the decades-old desktop mouse. Now a company called Ractiv thinks their new device, dubbed Haptix--which turns any surface into a 3-D multi-touch one--can eliminate the standard desktop’s tappy-navigation tool for good.

Earlier forays into this area have gotten mixed reviews. When Leap Motion, the most hyped of these next-generation interaction products, launched their motion gesture controller in July, the reviews were nearly unanimous: It’s a lot of work for developers to integrate into their apps, and equally demanding for users, their arms hovering outstretched above their keyboards, to control.

Jared Polis, former tech entrepreneur, Techstars co-founder, longtime figure in Colorado’s tech scene, and now Boulder’s representative in Congress, is the seventh wealthiest lawmaker in Washington, according to rankings released today by the Hill, a print and online publication that covers politics and government.

The Democratic Congressman’s personal wealth is an estimated $60.2 million, according to the report. Polis’s fortune is the result of two online retail sites he helped launch before beginning his political career about a decade ago. He was elected to Congress in 2008.

This week's innovation pick is a shower head that reminds you you're taking too long. The Uji shower head gradually turns from green to red as users linger in the shower.

"It encourages (people) to take shorter and more energy efficient showers," said one of the co-inventors, Brett Andler. "By letting people become aware of how long they're in the shower, we've actually been able to cut shower time by 12 percent."

You've selected your classes and shopped for your dorm room. You've bought some new clothes and packed your favorite things. The new semester is around the corner and you're as ready as you'll ever be.

Unless, that is, you want to get a tiny bit ahead. We know you're excited, and probably more than a little nervous, so take some time to listen to these TED talks to get some inspiration before you even have a syllabus to crack. You'll learn some important lessons that may just stick with you throughout college and beyond.

Through years of steady investment and research, high performance computing in Europe has started paying returns to many parts of the economy - aerospace, pharmaceuticals, energy, automotive, the environment and climate research. But the best could be yet to come, as computing powers worldwide jump upwards and HPC becomes an essential tool for competitiveness across the European economy. In short, supercomputers will be for all, no longer a few.

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This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.

Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word "eneeavor" should be "endeavor." This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; "Serbia" for example was indeed spelled "Servia" back then.

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Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, or in this case 1,400 pictures are worth a few words. Here is the collage of images uploaded by people across the planet for NASA’s Cassini ‘Wave at Saturn’ event on July 19th 2013, while Cassini snapped Earth in turn, as a teeny, tiny dot of light seen from the outer solar system

In early human tests, SetPoint Medical has found that an electronic implant helped reduce the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis in six of eight patients. The company, which is based in Valencia, California, is one of many groups exploring the potential of electronic implants to treat diseases by delivering pulses to nerves that regulate organ or body functions.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put forth what he calls a "rough plan" to bring the internet to the next 5 billion people (there are currently 2.7 billion people online, or roughly a third of the world's population).

The announcement has a slightly hyperloopy feel to it, as it's a little bit unclear on how the plan would be executed. But it's a blueprint that's extremely important to Facebook, since one obvious limitation to its growth is simply the number of people who are on the internet.

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Even with an exceptional idea, budding entrepreneurs can struggle to move past the brainstorming stages. They face challenges in execution like building a cohesive team, coming up with a business plan and even understanding how to present their product or service.

This week mentors on "WSJ Startup of the Year," a documentary on wsj.com, offered some words of inspiration for all entrepreneurs. Here's what some science and technology innovators had to say.

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Today MIT Technology Review reveals its list of 35 top young innovators (http://www.technologyreview.com/innovators-under-35/). For more than a decade, the global media company has recognized a list of exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world.

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