Tony Longo and Dan Adams weren’t having an easy time raising money for their Boston mobile startup, CO Everywhere. Longo estimates that he attended about 200 meetings with local venture capital firms. None said yes.

Many didn’t say no, either. They simply didn’t return phone calls or e-mails. “You’d have a good meeting and maybe a second meeting with more of the partners at the firm, but then things would just go dead,” says Longo. “It’s really discouraging.”

Image: DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFF 

Corporate venture capital (CVC) funds are on the rise. Consider the growing number of big companies creating funds to find promising startups: Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Novartis Venture Funds, Samsung Ventures, AOL Ventures, Dell Ventures, Dow Venture Capital, Microsoft Ventures, and Citi Ventures. And that's just a short list.

Going with a CVC fund, especially if your startup is in a similar category to the company behind the fund, offers benefits that go beyond money--it's a strategic move that can promote your long-term growth and innovation. 

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No sooner had I announced my retirement did e-mails and phone calls start flooding in from competitors who wanted to meet. Some were curious why I had retired, while the majority of them were basically trying to see if I would be a good fit to work with them. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the carrots that used to be delicious are not as orange anymore. Still, getting offered big bucks to work in a new environment, with a growing product is an exciting proposition!

Image: http://www.financialsamurai.com 

An item we missed while on break is yet another report claiming that California is not business friendly. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council ranked California 50th in an extensive index measuring state policy measures on small business. The report noted it ranked “the 50 states according to 47 different policy measures, including a wide array of tax, regulatory and government spending measurements.”

Another year of challenges and extraordinary milestones for most…   The innovation agenda has exploded – in many respects due to much of your own talent and efforts. Fruits of your labors are forthcoming…and in unexpected ways.  

Such an innovation whirlwind we have helped create. Almost every organization – and in every corner of the globe - is talking of the Knowledge Economy.

Image: http://www.entovation.com 

Our Network continues to grow in substance and scope...  

In the meantime, take the opportunity to welcome 14 new E100 from 9 countries added to our Global Knowledge Leadership Map – now representing 200+ from 70 countries! Take a look at their capabilities and aspirations to see how they dovetail with your own.

Image: http://www.entovation.com

Prepare to relive the greatest time in cinematic history — 1984.

Don't laugh. There's no other way to describe a year that produced both Gremlins and Ghostbusters. And, not one, but two Tom Hanks movies.

We gathered up some of our favorite flicks from the year George Orwell warned us all about. Take a look and let us know in the comments if your favorite made the cut.

Dubai started off 2014 with quite a bang: The city's New Year's Eve fireworks display broke the Guinness World Record for largest pyrotechnics show on New Year's Eve.

During the six-minute show, more than 500,000 fireworks exploded, spanning 62 miles of Dubai's seafront and ending with a grandiose "artificial sunset." The entire spectacle was controlled by a network of 100 computers, took 10 months to plan and cost a cool $6 million.

Image: http://mashable.com 

From Seattle's well-known corporate behemoths—Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Costco—to its less-obvious innovators, like Nirvana and Dale Chihuly, a new permanent exhibition funded by Jeff Bezos explores the idea that innovation is a key part of the city's identity. The Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle's Museum of History and Industry features 5,000 square feet of exhibits which tell a story of science, design, and technology through a sense of place.

Image: http://gizmodo.com 

There’s no more tedious subject on the internet than an endless discussion of which companies are or are not innovative. If you doubt it, pick a random Tech.pinions comment thread; if the thread is of any length the subject is sure to come up.

The main reason these arguments are so fruitless is that people are not bothering to define their terms, so they end up arguing more about what innovation is than who does it. So to end the year by rushing in where angels fear to tread, I want to take a look at the most innovative companies of the personal computer era, going back to around 1980.

As your business kicks off a new year, there are likely several big things you’d like to accomplish over the next 12 months.

Maybe you hope to increase sales, attract bigger, better customers, or turn your attention to renewals. Whatever your goals might be, the bigger question is will you focusing on them really move the needle? In other words, are they actually attainable and relevant to your company’s long-term strategy, or are they unrealistic at best, distractions at worst, and more likely to derail your progress in the short-term?

Image Courtesy of Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One of the major shifts taking place is the growing adoption by consumers of subscriptions for goods and services instead of buying them outright. According to an October 2013 Economist study of 293 business executives commissioned by billing/subscription management platform provider Zuora, 80% of respondents believe that their customers are changing how they obtain access to goods and services.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com 

The senior leaders of a diversified global industrial company recently got a major shock when they took a more fine-grained look at corporate performance. Rather than viewing the company through the usual lens of the top-line growth, economic profit, and return on invested capital (ROIC) of its four divisions, the members of the top team broke things down much further—into 150 business segments. Two-thirds of those segments were falling so short of their economic-profit targets that they alone would have made the company overall miss its targets by 40 percent. The rest, however, were outperforming by enough to skew the averages for the company and each division, giving the appearance of only a 7 percent shortfall. Recognizing the performance disparities helped the company identify a more significant set of opportunities to reallocate resources and stimulate value creation than anything that had been on the table previously.

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Individual industries have their own alphabet soup of trade groups -- but we need one association, speaking with one voice, to drive US innovation policy. Innovation-based industries such as IT, aerospace, digital content, and life sciences are the engines of US economic prosperity, increasing productivity, improving competitiveness, and creating good jobs. The federal government needs to do everything it can to ensure that US policies maximize growth of those industries, but Washington is failing on that front.

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WHO DOESN’T WANT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET MORE DONE? OR GET THINGS DONE MORE EFFICIENTLY? WE ASKED SOME OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE WE KNOW HOW YOU CAN TACKLE THE NEW YEAR’S WORK.

Last year I used a kitchen timer to force myself to focus; I blocked the Internet and email so I couldn’t get distracted; I set an auto-response on my email; I wrote a lot of to-do lists. I even started getting up earlier.

Image Courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Traditionally, leaders spent 20 or more years rising through the ranks before they made it to the corner office. But we’re seeing a rise in CEOs in their 20s and 30s, who either founded their own company or rose quickly through the ranks of an established organization.

Discussions on the topic of 20- and 30- something CEOs usually focus on the creativity of youth, versus experience gained through decades on the job. But these attributes aren’t mutually exclusive.

Image Courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The research and development spending in the United States dropped from $131 billion to $119 billion, when adjusted for inflation, from 2007-2012, while Japan increased spending by $9 billion and China increased by $6.4 billion. Overall, Asia’s share of spending grew from 18 percent to 24 percent. Europe held steady at 29 percent.

Prior analyses have suggested the United States’ share of global expenditures were once as high as 80 percent.

Image: http://scienceblog.com 

As 2013 comes to a close, EurActiv looks back at the stories that had the biggest impact and were mostly widely shared on social media.

From the debate about a British exit of the European Union to budget negotiations, banking union but also toilet flushing standards, GMOs and shale gas, here are the stories which most fired up your imagination, below.

Job hunting is stressful. If you're working and job-hunting, you're anxious to make your move. If you're not working, you're under pressure to get a new job fast. As a job-seeker it's easy to forget that you're making as big a decision as your next employer is.

If a manager hires you and doesn't like your brand of jazz, he can cut you loose and find someone new. That will cost money and time, but those are costs of doing business. If you take a job working for the wrong person, it can damage your resume and destroy your mojo. If you've ever worked for someone you didn't mesh with, you know exactly what I mean.

Image: http://www.linkedin.com 

The New Year provides an opportunity to start with a fresh, clean slate. However, more than nine out of 10 Americans (92%) will not to keep their resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, or find romance. It can be the same with the goals small business owners set for themselves to grow revenues or become more profitable. The number one reason why New Year’s resolutions fail isn’t feasibility or a lack of motivation.

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