World and local issues that deserve the attention of innovative and organized human effort abound. Hunger, housing, climate change, nuclear proliferation, war and conflicts, health management, disappearing species, urban development, access to information, or the widening of access to education, and many more concerns deserve the attention of community-relevant organizations.

GSK has submitted an application for the world’s first malaria vaccine to the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The vaccine candidate, RTS,S, is produced in yeast cells and targets the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite, most common in sub-Saharan Africa. It uses GSK’s proprietary AS01 adjuvant system, containing QS-21 Stimulon adjuvant licensed from Antigenics, a subsidiary of Agenus, as well as monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) and liposomes.

In case you haven't heard about the vast amounts of money raised online for Pebble, Oculus Rift or potato salad, Internet crowdfunding is kind of a big deal.

Both the Internet and the JOBS Act, a law passed slightly more than two years ago that eased certain security regulations to facilitate funding of small businesses, have made crowdfunding significantly easier and more accessible.

Image: http://www.benzinga.com 

Michigan’s venture capital is expanding. According to a recent report issued by the Michigan Venture Capital Association, capital under management, the number of venture capital firms, the number of professional investors and the number of deals in Michigan are all trending upward, and have shown significant increases in the past five years.

Image: The Michigan Economic Development Corporation headquarters in Lansing. (AP files) (AL GOLDIS) 

The three big venture capital investment hubs all took part in the industry’s blockbuster second-quarter, but Massachusetts lagged a bit behind California and New York. The amount of venture capital invested in California for the first half of 2014 increased 91% year over year, far outpacing the overall U.S. increase of 60%, according to data from industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource. New York’s year-over-year increase was 70%, also outpacing the national average.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

What happens when you put three business professors in a rental car and send them out to talk to owners and managers of small- and medium-sized businesses? Would they discover their MBA frameworks to be a bunch of academic mumbo-jumbo with no real applicability?

For the past several years, professors Mike Mazzeo (Kellogg), Paul Oyer (Stanford) and I (Utah) have been touring the back roads of America, knocking on doors, and asking business people how they do it.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The result? A skyrocketing number of new businesses.

Entrepreneurs and venture capital go hand in hand.

There’s no where that that is truer than in Michigan, where over the past five years, venture capitalism has increased by 84 percent in the state compared to a 13 percent drop nationwide, according to a report from Cassie Jones, the executive director of Michigan Venture Capital Association. Not only is Michigan ahead of the rest of the country, it also defeated its neighbors with more venture-backed deals in 2013 than Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Linda Hill, Harvard Business School professor, and Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, senior adviser at Egon Zehnder, on the talent strategies that set up a company for long-term success. Linda is the coauthor of Collective Genius, and Claudio is the author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who. Both authors will be speaking at the World Business Forum, October 7–8, 2014.

Unless you’ve just woken up from an extraordinarily long coma (in which case, there’s so much we have to tell you), you’re probably well aware of the massive impact mobile technology has had on the world. You just have to look around you, or reach into your pocket and compare the astounding technology in your smartphone to what was inside the brick-sized devices we were all carrying around less than 20 years ago.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

If you’ve ever seen A Christmas Story, you know that new toys are sometimes more trouble than they’re worth. Remember how little Ralphie begs for (and eventually receives) a BB gun? Then, just as the adults warned him, he ends up shooting himself in the eye. While most business owners aren’t pining for a BB gun, there are plenty of new tech toys they crave. Some of these tools are great for startups, but they won’t necessarily solve all your problems. The road to early adoption can be a rocky one, but there are a few toys that are worth the investment.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Technology firms in the US are set to continue getting the vast majority of the world's venture capital funding, a report has found.

The Silicon Valley Bank study, titled Innovation Economy Outlook 2014 and based on interviews with 1,200 executives working in high growth businesses worldwide, explains why US companies receive more than half the world's venture capital funding.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Chicago — Brian Wm. Niles didn’t cuss, but still a few people winced.

At the ACT’s annual Enrollment Planners Conference here on Thursday, Mr. Niles, founder of Target X, recommended five “dirty words” colleges should use regularly. (Squeamish romantics fond of quaint words like “learning,” be warned.)

Image: Eric Hoover is a senior writer who covers admissions, student affairs, and the issues affecting adult students. 

After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age. Mobile technologies, sensors, genome sequencing, and advances in analytic software now make it possible to capture vast amounts of information about our individual makeup and the environment around us. The sum of this information could transform medicine, turning a field aimed at treating the average patient into one that’s customized to each person while shifting more control and responsibility from doctors to patients.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Most experienced community bank commercial lenders have accumulated many similar types of experiences. We’ve all got our personal galleries of borrowers with character and borrowers who were characters.

None of these experiences are typically found in textbooks. In fact I’ve seen very few textbooks that deal exclusively with the subject of lending per se. Yet these experiences are of the “stuff” that makes a lending career in a community bank so interesting.

Irwin Kula is an eighth-generation rabbi known for his fearless attitude about change — a rare quality among religious leaders who tend to adhere closely to tradition.

Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL) in New York and the author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, has dedicated himself to opening up the wisdom of his 3,500-year-old faith to be in conversation with the world.

Image: http://itssaulconnected.com 

Most small businesses are trying to forget the recent recession, and get back to “business as usual.” They don’t realize that business as usual is gone forever. With social media and smart phone conversations, real product information spreads at astounding speeds. Entrepreneurs that are not listening, not engaging, and not changing will be left behind even in the best of times.

Conventional wisdom holds that there is a tradeoff between an expansive welfare state and the dynamism of a country’s economy. Bigger government gets in the way of entrepreneurship, the thinking goes, thereby holding back innovation and job creation.

There is data that seems to bear this out; research has found a negative correlation between a country’s level of government spending and its rate of new business creation. But a new paper from a researcher at The World Bank adds some much-needed nuance to the conversation, making the point that not all government spending is equal.

The results of the 2014 GEDIndex are in. The US tops the rankings with a score of 82.5, five points above second ranked Australia.  Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland round out the top five, and Taiwan and Singapore rank 6th and 10th—the only non-western nations in the top 10.

The overall composition of the top ten has changed little from last year, (Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, and Western European countries in the innovation-driven stage of development are in the front ranks). However, there are several noteworthy results in this year’s Index.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

I always find it fascinating to look back and trace an imaginary line connecting a series of dots that represent specific events in time. These dots can be used to visualize the path we have gone through as a society, or highlight the business direction we are headed in as we move forward. Looking back at a few of the dots that represent the evolution to tech entrepreneurship in Quebec reveals a fascinating trajectory.

Image: http://montrealtechwatch.com 

Entrepreneurship is an engine of economic growth, driving change and innovation around the world.

CAREER ADVANTAGE

The study of entrepreneurship provides students with far more than the tools necessary to start a business; it spurs students' development as leaders and innovators in whatever field they choose. The Donald H. Jones Center teaches students to think like entrepreneurs, solve problems and create solutions.

Image: http://tepper.cmu.edu