On occasion, the Government Accountability Office breaks the mold by looking for things that work well and identifying why. A new report examines four cross-agency collaborative initiatives that overcame program overlap and the promising practices that led to their success.

GAO has reported for almost two decades on missed opportunities for collaboration between agencies that share accountability. In response to a new law requiring greater collaboration, GAO has been providing agencies more insights into what works. In 2005, for example, auditors identified practices that agencies used to “enhance and sustain collaboration,” and in 2012, it cataloged multiple interagency mechanisms across government.

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With more educational apps being developed everyday, smartphones and tablets are on their way to replacing those clunky textbooks in the classroom.

In the latest video of our Mobile Minute series, Market Developer Paul Sowada discusses the future of education and technology.

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As we look to grow the strength of our innovation economy here in Massachusetts, and build a broad-based economic recovery that fosters opportunity for everyone, it is critical that we give students the skills and knowledge to tackle the good jobs going unfilled today, and those we will create tomorrow. An essential part of this effort is expanding access to high-quality computer science education in our public schools.

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Making the decision to found your own business is a life-altering experience. Of course, it’s what comes after that breakthrough moment – how unique the idea, how quickly you move, how you continue to innovate – that ultimately separates the wheat from the chaff.  

And whether you’re in the culinary arts, book publishing or cloud technology, when you become an entrepreneur, work-life balance becomes a thing of the past. Your work must subsume your life if you want any shot of making it big.

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Two of the most significant pieces of legislation in decades, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, are poised to transform the entire spectrum of health care. The ACA regulates everything from health insurance requirements to tax collection. The JOBS Act regulates businesses that fund their ventures online. In tandem, these two bills have created a new world for health care innovators and investors. Ironically though, it is the innovators and investors who are joining forces to do what the ACA is unable to do: reduce costs and increase access. At the 7th Annual OneMedForum recently in San Francisco more than 400 one-on-one investor meetings were conducted between venture capitalists and startup health care companies, all in the name of disruptive innovation.

In a way, Sam Altman is back where he started. The Y Combinator graduate will take over from co-founder Paul Graham as the head of the prestigious Silicon Valley accelerator.

Altman's company Loopt, which provides location-based services for smartphones, started with a seed investment from Y Combinator in 2005, its first batch of startups. Altman was a freshman at Stanford. He took to the stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2008 with one of the first apps in the new unveiled Apple App Store (here's a video of a very fresh-faced Altman).

Image: Sam Altman, the new president of Y Combinator. twitter.com/sama 

In an attempt to make it easier for researchers to commercialize their work, officials at Cornell University’s New York City campus are reconsidering how they make money off intellectual property. Instead of going through a laborious revenue-sharing negotiation with researchers who believe they have a valuable idea, an institute at Cornell Tech is going to let a set of postdocs keep exclusive license to their IP and take a fixed dollar amount of equity if the researchers create a spinoff company.

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Is college worth it?

News articles raising that question, and reports meant to answer it, are piling up at a steady clip.

And the answer has real consequences for anyone advising a student about whether and where to go to college, and for policy makers wondering if the country has too many degree holders, or too few.

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Raleigh has been named one of eight "emerging tech hubs you should pay attention to" by the international money transfer service TransferWise – and it's the only U.S. city on the list. Affordable housing, short commutes and being a good place for young families are cited as reasons tech companies and university graduates are flocking to the Triangle.

Image: Charlie Surratt/SkySite Aerial Downtown Raleigh 

Whether you're just getting started in your first venture as a tech entrepreneur or you're in the thick of your fifth startup endeavor, you're going to make mistakes in the course of your leadership. No matter how awesome your idea is or how perfect your plans are, your mistakes are going to create new obstacles and force unanticipated changes in your game plan.

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As we continue to recover from a global recession and look to the future, it’s imperative that we build more entrepreneurial-driven academic institutions. Not only will this provide the foundation for much-needed innovation, it also will strengthen economies by providing jobs and fostering sustainable growth in enterprises.

Lessons can be learned from universities around the world about accelerating entrepreneurship. They can provide the model for how to create clusters of commercially successful startups around research-driven institutions. However, the success of that model largely depends on the role of the business school within that university setting.

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Almost 25 years after the Human Genome Project launched, and a little over a decade after it reached its goal of reading all three billion base pairs in human DNA, genome sequencing for the masses is finally arriving. It will no longer be just a research tool; reading all of your DNA (rather than looking at just certain genes) will soon be cheap enough to be used regularly for pinpointing medical problems and identifying treatments. This will be an enormous business, and one company dominates it: Illumina. The San Diego–based company sells everything from sequencing machines that identify each nucleotide in DNA to software and services that analyze the data. In the coming age of genomic medicine, Illumina is poised to be what Intel was to the PC era—the dominant supplier of the fundamental technology.

If your startup is looking for an Angel investor, it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of Angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up. Or does it? Actually numbers and locations are just the beginning. The challenge is to find the right Angel for you, and for your situation. Here are some basic principles:

Angels invest in people, more often than they invest in ideas. That means they need to know you, or someone they trust who does know you (warm introduction). For credibility, they need to know you BEFORE you are asking for money. Angel investors are people too. Investors expect you to understand their motivation, respect their time, and show your integrity in all actions. They probably won’t respond well to high pressure sales tactics, information overload, or bribes.

Over 2000 people completed two validated questionnaires: one measuring “dark side” personality traits and the other a measure of values and preferences that indicates the type of work that an individual would like to do and is best suited for. Dark side variables (and demographics) accounted for between 11% (science) and 46% (affiliation) variance in specific vocation related values. Factor analysis suggested three overall value/vocation factors (enterprising, traditional, and social) and three dark side variables (moving against, away from, and toward others). The three dark side factors predicted around a third of the variance in favoring enterprising and social occupations. Implications for vocational guidance and limitations of the study are considered.

While I'm not usually a fan of "leadership lessons you can learn from (insert pretty much anything here, including pets and inanimate objects)," this well-written piece from television writer James Poniewozik smartly frames an important decision made by new Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon: He introduced himself to his audience. And we're not talking "Hi, I'm Jimmy Fallon, and I'm looking forward to this." In fact, Fallon "deliberately walked the audience through who he was, who his supporting stars were and what kind of show he was going to do," writes Poniewozik. "He literally, at one point, pretty much explained how a late-night show works."

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“It is simple math,” the strategist said in a tone that sounded suspiciously similar to how I explain things to my six-year-old daughter. “Decreasing churn by a percent — a single percent! — creates tens of millions of dollars of value. A point of market share creates five times that amount. Our growth investments are years from providing that kind of return.”

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A headline that caught my eye this week was in the Huffington Post, ‘Why a War & Shrinking Economy Can’t Stop Syrian Innovation’, and having just returned from Libya, I can see the point of the article.  It suggests that war, terrorism or violence doesn’t stop the enthusiasm of youngsters to make things happen, sometimes despite government.

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Goal is to expand the reach of the Internet to emerging markets and create better mobile experiences

- Optimizing applications, networks, devices and services for next five billion Internet users

- Key to Internet.org goal of making Internet access available to all and supporting the vision for the Networked Society

Ericsson ERIC +0.48% and Facebook today announced the creation of a joint innovation lab supporting the Internet.org initiative. The Internet.org Innovation Lab, an Ericsson-Facebook collaboration, will provide an environment and expertise for optimizing applications, networks, devices and services for the next five billion Internet users.

Americans are proud of their innovative heritage, and rightly so. But innovation isn't equally distributed across the country -- it thrives in pockets of high-tech development and withers where state and local governments fail to provide adequate support. Everyone knows about California's Silicon Valley, but that area isn't the only part of America, or even of California, where innovation is a fact of life for residents and workers.

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With the economy finally gaining steam after four years of a stop-and-start recovery, the Kauffman Foundation kicked off its “America's New Entrepreneurial Growth Initiative” at the fifth annual State of Entrepreneurship Address. The main output will be a New Entrepreneurial Growth Agenda by early 2016.

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