Kansas City, MO – The Regnier Institute for Entrepreneurship and  Innovation undergraduate entrepreneurship program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City has been named the 2014 National Model Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Program by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE).

The program and Institute are housed within the new Henry W. Bloch Executive Hall for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management.

Image: http://info.umkc.edu - Students brainstorm in the Regnier Institute’s Innovation Lab 

President Barack Obama intends to nominate Maria Contreras-Sweet, the founder of a Latino-owned community bank in Los Angeles and a former California cabinet secretary, to direct the Small Business Administration, according to a White House official.

Obama will announce Contreras-Sweet's selection at an event Wednesday, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the nomination by name ahead of the announcement.

Image: Maria Contreras-Sweet in 2011. Image via YouTube. 

Windows of entrepreneurial opportunity can open unexpectedly and briefly, typically under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Founder entrepreneurs must therefore be alert, tolerant of ambiguity and able to respond quickly when opportunity knocks. But does this mean that founders´ brains work differently, compared to other people, when detecting and choosing opportunities? Our research suggests that they do.

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New legislation introduced this month in the Senate could turn what was anticipated to be a sleepy start on Capitol Hill for entrepreneurship advocates into a fresh look at how Washington, DC, helps entrepreneurs and new firms.

Distracted by budget talks, I did not expect Congress to start talking yet about legislation important to entrepreneurs like the Startup Act 3.0. Yet here we are, only days into January, talking about the proposed reform of the U.S. Government’s institutional framework for entrepreneurship.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.org 

SAN FRANCISCO--First there was a blizzard of new drug deals. Now comes the forecast for sunnier financial weather ahead.

AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot arrived at JPMorgan with a message: The pharma giant ($AZN) has beefed up its late-stage pipeline and is now ready to prove it can start to grow again in the near future as it pushes through one of the industry's most radical R&D reorganizations. As of today, AstraZeneca counts 11 drugs in late stages of development--just about double what Soriot inherited when he was named CEO a year ago--with another 27 coming up behind it. And it's mapped out a combo strategy for immunotherapies designed to get the company in the race to gain approvals and start growing oncology revenue.

Image: http://www.fiercebiotech.com - AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot 

American innovation, badly damaged last year by federal budget tightening and the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, appears to be getting partial relief with the bipartisan budget deals struck last month and Monday night. The progress is praiseworthy, but it will not counteract the decades-long decline in federal funding for research and development that is so essential to our economic future and critical to accelerating treatments for today’s major health care challenges, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Image: http://www.politico.com 

From wearable technologies that track back posture, blood pressure and brain waves to connected cars and homes, the 152,000 attendees at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were treated to some of the most innovative wireless technologies global innovation has to offer. So dazzling and ubiquitous were the wireless innovations not just on display --but in use-- that the event easily could have been rebranded as the Consumer Mobile Show.

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FAR TOO MANY DESIGNERS ARE TOLD THEY NEED TO WORK FOR FREE TO BUILD THEIR RESUMES. HERE ARE 10 TIPS FOR GETTING PAID WHAT YOU DESERVE.

The overarching business problem designers will face early in their freelance careers is navigating the waters of how to get paid for things. There are so many potholes, nightmare scenarios, and snake-oil businesspeople vying to get free work that, when combined with the “you must first build your résumé while not getting paid” notion that is wrongfully being accepted as normal practice today, it can seem impossible to understand how to protect yourself. Here are 10 tips:

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com 

Forecasting the future is never easy. We were, of course, supposed to have flying cars by now--and yet here we all are, still stuck in traffic on the ground. But lack of personal aerial-transportation options aside, we are living in a world in which the pace of innovation and scientific discovery makes reality seem more and more like science fiction. In the next year, those lines will get even more blurred: Think electronic pills that beam your vitals to your doctor, a drone swooping from the sky to save lives in a disaster, or even a fundamental rethinking of how businesses relate to society. One thing that's certain: The world will look very different a year from now. We predict that these 12 ideas, currently being shaped in labs, skunk works, and boardrooms around the world, will be some of the most revolutionary, changing how we live, for the better, in 2014 and beyond. And if they fail to materialize in the next 12 months, just wait--they'll still happen before that flying car.

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In less than two years, Paul Arnold helped grow cloud service marketplace AppDirect from 20 to 120 employees while leading end user acquisition, marketing and business operations. The keys to this velocity of expansion: introducing organization and process

Early-stage startups tend to be particularly reluctant to adopt structure where there was once free-wheeling ideas, serendipitous connections, and spontaneity. This is why organization needs to be layered in carefully and thoughtfully to keep everything headed in the right direction. But according to Arnold, there are ways to do this at startup speed.

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Leah Eichhorn is thrilled to be back in her hometown of Dubuque. Like a lot of educated young people, Eichhorn packed up and left once she became an adult, lighting out for Phoenix back in 2000 because there was so little opportunity where she’d grown up. The Iowa town, which sits alongside the Mississippi River across from Illinois and Wisconsin, had lost most of its manufacturing and agricultural sector employment during the 1980s, leaving it at one point with the worst unemployment rate in the nation.

Image: IBM is housed in a former department store, one of four old stores in downtown Dubuque, Iowa, that now are filled with white-collar workers. (Photos by David Kidd) 

A funky-looking fish with an outsized snout has become the most primitive jawed vertebrate to have its genome sequenced. The DNA sequence of the elephant shark helps to explain why sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton and how humans and other vertebrates evolved acquired immunity.

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The approaching March deadline for individuals to enroll in a health insurance plan is a useful reminder that provisions of Obamacare will continue to roll out this year. The Affordable Care Act and related legislation are putting a huge demand on the health system, from accelerating the shift to electronic medical records to creating a need for more efficient communication tools between physician offices, patients and insurers. A handful of industry insiders offers a glimpse of the kind of targets that will shift into focus in 2014 and the groups that will be looking to buy them.

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Public speaking quickly can turn into a disaster, like the wreck that Transformers director Michael Bay got into at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But from what Business Insider reports, the most common problems we face with speaking are more of the annoy-your-audience, undermine-your-credibility variety.

"The way we speak dramatically affects how our bosses and colleagues perceive us," Alison Griswold reports, with the most common speaking potholes including your tone, pitch, and volume. So let's get to correcting them.

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THE NUMBER ONE DRIVER OF WHETHER A HABIT CHANGE IS A SUCCESS OR NOT IS HOW BIG THE INITIAL GOAL IS. EVERYONE, IF THEY'RE CONSISTENT, WILL EVENTUALLY ACHIEVE SOMETHING MASSIVE. BUT THE PEOPLE THAT END UP FAILING ARE THE PEOPLE TRYING TO ACHIEVE OVERNIGHT SUCCESS.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10287726@N02/8096939321 

One of the most difficult concepts that I have to discuss when advising aspiring startups is that a great idea can still be a lousy business.

A wannabe founder will describe a product or service that all of their friends swear is going to be a game changer, only to be confused (and occasionally indignant) when challenged with a series of questions that they hadn’t considered before. Often, they have spent months planning and building only to find out later that they have wasted their time on a product that no one wants, no one understands, or no one will ever hear of because there are 50 other companies doing the same thing.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

Research has shown us that more than 90% of top leadership performers have a high amount of emotional intelligence or EI. The higher up the ladder that leaders are, the more people they impact and their EI becomes increasingly important. The person at the top sets the atmosphere that permeates the organization, including the emotional temperature.

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To test the hypothesis that people who are more tolerant of risk are more likely to become entrepreneurs—and to perform more poorly in that role—Hans K. Hvide of the University of Bergen in Norway and Georgios A. Panos of the University of Stirling in the UK examined investment data for 400,000 people in Norway. They found that those who invested in stocks, which are riskier than government bonds or savings accounts, are 50% more likely to subsequently become majority owners in new firms. And firms started by these stock investors have 25% lower sales and 15% lower return on assets than firms founded by people who are less tolerant of risk, probably because individuals who are tolerant of risk are willing to accept lower expected entrepreneurial returns for a given level of risk, the researchers say.

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The recently-concluded Consumer Electronics Show was full of latest gadgets. Many of them were just proof of concept. Almost half of them would not come to the market. Many would hit the market but might take months, or even years, before you could buy them. But let's not worry about that. For now, take a look at 10 gadgets that we feel stood out in the crowded world of CES:

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Anyone would be inspired by the story of Nick Woodman, the CEO of GoPro, a $2.5B company that makes wearable HD video cameras.  The highlights:

In the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, Woodman blows $4M of VC money on a failed venture called funBugs.com, an ultimately ill-conceived loyalty, sweepstakes, and entertainment website.  In 2002, unsure of what to do with his life, he takes off to surf in Indonesia and Australia.  He wants to capture live-action shots from his surfboard.  The only cost-effective way to do this is by strapping a disposable camera to his wrist with rubber bands.  Not surprisingly, it doesn’t work well.

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