SAN FRANCISCO — ON Monday the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in perhaps the most important intellectual property case in a decade: Alice v. CLS Bank. Narrowly speaking, the case is a patent dispute over computerized escrow accounts. But more broadly, it offers the court an opportunity to resolve two decades of economically harmful confusion over how the law grants patent protection to computer software.

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The Internet of things is forecast to achieve a $20 billiontotal available market by 2018.  But is that market size real? What are the tools that we can use to understand this and take effective action?

The Internet of things is inarguably here already for innovators and early adopters, and seems to be in a state similar to where mobile was seven years ago.

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IS it worth applying to a start-up 'accelerator' or 'incubator' fund? What are your chances of getting into one? Is the 'mentoring' offered in such places worth it or is it just a semi-social office with coffee, coding and a bit of pool thrown in?

Thanks to an impressive bit of research from AIB and Amarach, we now have a good idea of the scale and success rate of accelerator-hosted start-ups in Ireland.

Image: The Entrepreneurship Forum's Sean O’Sullivan and Minister Richard Bruton at Dogpatch Labs, which Eamon Leonard rates as one of the best accelerators around. Picture: Steve Humphreys 

A recent CareerBuilder survey suggests that 21% of workers plan to change jobs this year -– a 17% jump from last year, and the highest percentage since the recession.

For employers, this turnover rate can be a frightening thought, especially when you consider the potential impact that the loss of an employee can have on productivity and morale. In this competitive environment, many employers are likely wondering how to keep their brightest stars and how to bring promising fresh blood neatly into the fold.

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The province is moving into the venture capital business. $10-million will be going towards two funds over the next five years in an effort, the Minister says, to attract business to Newfoundland and Labrador. Venture capitals are high risk investments with on average just a 20 per cent success rate. The funds are being diverted from the former business attraction fund. Terry French says government needed a new way to get the money out the door. Under the old fund, only about half of the annual investment was ever spent.

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At a certain point, we become what we do. We want our jobs and lives to fit us as well as custom-tailored clothing. It seems more and more the secret to great success and happiness is finding purpose and working with meaning.

This is a step-by-step process. It requires knowing yourself and being honest about your goals. Here is a quick guide to creating a road map to success:

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Duncan Lou Who is a pup born with two deformed hind legs that had to be removed. While the boxer has a wheelchair to help him get around, he much prefers the au naturel look.

So his caregivers at Panda Paws Rescue in Vancouver, Wash., happily obliged, letting Duncan go wild at the beach, where he hobbled along on his front two legs.

 

Entrepreneurs are usually highly creative and innovative, but many innovative people are not entrepreneurs. Since it takes a team of people to build a great company, the challenge is to find that small percentage of innovative people, and then nurture the tendency, rather than stifle it.

A few years ago I read a book titled “The Rudolph Factor,” by Cyndi Laurin and Craig Morningstar, which is all about finding the bright lights that can drive innovation in your business. The story most specifically targets big companies, like Boeing, but the concepts are just as applicable to a startup with one or more employees.

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One of the hardest things for most entrepreneurs to know is how hard to push in situations where people tell you “no.” But then again most entrepreneurs fail. There is that rare breed that doesn’t accept “no” for an answer. It is impossible advice to give because there is such a fine line between being persistent and being annoying and it’s something you probably can’t teach. I often describe “chutzpah” as being able to skate right up to the line of acceptability without crossing over it.

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Entrepreneurship means setting sail on a whirlwind adventure without a boat and the hope that you’ll be able to build a ship along the way. It is the impossible, the improbable and magnificent all at the same time. Giving up everything of themselves, entrepreneurs will work to build their proverbial ships.

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You are invited to the Iowa SMART Economic Development Conference on Thursday, May 1, 2014.

The sponsors of Iowa's premiere economic development conference are delighted to invite you to join economic development professionals, business leaders, chamber of commerce executives, community leaders, elected officials and other board members who influence economic development and public policy issues across the state to the 2014 Iowa SMART Conference.

In his book The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin describes how he is able to compete, and win, against martial arts competitors much physically stronger than himself by putting his mind into the game. When I asked Waitzkin whether he thinks his mental game is a result of his high intelligence, he told me,

“I don’t think I have an extraordinary intelligence. Buffalo had cultivated his whole body his whole life, and he had that edge. I had cultivated my mind. My chance lay in making the mental game dominate a physical battle. At a high level of competition, success often hinges on who determines the field and tone of battle.

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"A lot of speakers try to fit 10 pounds of information into a five-pound bag," says Nadine Hanafi describing one of the main issues people have when creating content for a presentation.

The CEO and founder of We Are Visual started the Miami-based company less than a year ago, and already they are changing the way people present.

Hanafi's skills first drew attention at a TEDxMiami where cofounder and curator Matthew Greer praised her work: "Nadine turns PowerPoint from a design liability into a design asset." We Are Visual focuses on keynotes, pitch decks, and webinars. One of their key services is called, "Presentation Rescue," which helps a speaker revitalize a deck with a custom, story-based design.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

The cofounder of the open source microcontroller Arduino, Massimo Banzi, doesn’t mince words. “Italy is the kind of a country where if you are young, you don't exist,” he says. “It's a country run by old farts.” Banzi decided not to accept the status quo. Arduino was designed in Italy, by virtue of a foolish young Banzi on a quest for love. Today, Arduino is an enormously popular single-board microcontroller used to develop interactive objects

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I still remember when Steve Jobs was featured in business school case studies as an example of bad leadership style. At the time, Apple was a less-than-successful computer company, and Steve – ever the loner – had moved on to create Next, another less-than-successful one. When things go poorly for a nonconformist, how easy it is to call them the fool. But on those rare occasions when the loner gets it right – see Jobs a few years later when he returned to Apple – he does so in a big way. Nothing pays off so well as a nonconformist strategy that wins.

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Investments and policy to support innovation-focused agendas have flourished with the close of the 2014 legislative sessions in several states. Crowdfunding legislation, incentives for attracting talent, higher education affordability, punishing patent trolls, and encouraging greater accountability are some of the areas where lawmakers focused their efforts.

Think hybrids that go 60 miles on a gallon are efficient? Trains can go eight times as far with 2,000 pounds in their backseat. And they’re only getting smarter.

Trains are no longer the lumbering hunks of metal of the 20th century. Today’s locomotives are computers on wheels, and they’re beginning to take business from fuel-guzzling semi-trucks.

Image: http://www.forbes.com 

One way to stop the ever-growing pile of plastic water bottles in landfills? Make a bottle people can eat.

Inspired by techniques from molecular gastronomy, three London-based industrial design students created Ooho, a blob-like water container that they say is easy and cheap to make, strong, hygienic, biodegradable, and edible.

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Sharing isn’t always caring when it comes to social media. This is something we see every day through lengthy status rants on Facebook, detailed dirty laundry blog posts, and 24 hours of a sick day chronicled entirely on Instagram. For entrepreneurs running their own businesses, sharing via social outlets needs to be a somewhat more calculated process. Brands are backed with a unique voice and that voice will ultimately translate to how successful and recognizable they are in the long run. As such, these voices need to be savvy and smart, but also know how to toe the line between what constitutes as sharing versus oversharing in the kind of content they publish on their company blog.

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PwC and Russian Venture Company (RVC) present the 2013 Russian venture capital market reportMoneyTreeTM: Venture Capital Market Navigator. According to the report, in 2013, fast-growing companies, working in the Russian biotechnology, industrial, and IT sectors, received venture capital investments of USD 653.1 million from a total of 222 deals. The number of investor exits almost doubled, increasing from 12 to 21, while investors' proceeds from these exits grew more than fivefold, from USD 372 million to an unprecedented USD 2 billion.