Can venture capital still work for funding new businesses in the biosciences? Or, as moderator Gregory C. Simon, CEO of Poliwogg.com, challenged a recent Partnering for Cures panel, how long does the venture capital (VC) industry have in the biosciences before it’s a dinosaur?

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Elevator pitch need some work? Need a few extra days to put the finishing touches on your team video?

Great news: applications will now be accepted until Monday, November 18th!

Final deadline: 11:59pm on Monday, November 18th Application: here!

At business school they taught me that diversity in the workplace is a good thing. I can still remember the intensity on my lecturer’s face when he explained how bringing people together from different walks of life would foster a creative environment, and bring us untold riches.

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CONVERGENCE: An International Gathering of People in the ‘Know-Flow’ In late October, 122 faculty, students and consultants from 44 countries convened for the 10th International Conference of Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management, and Organizational Learning—ICICKM 2013—at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

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When I started my career, being nice was synonymous with being a doormat. But I’ve learned that being nice can be powerful, game-changing even. Success is not a zero-sum game and generosity can be a direct route to success for you and those around you.

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What do Airbnb, Etsy, OpenTable, Uber, and Kickstarter have in common? Well, to begin with, each of them are relatively young. Each of them also followed  the heavyweights Amazon and Ebay, and each of them share something else in common:

In its infancy, science was sponsored by rich benefactors who favoured areas of their own liking. Today, despite being more equitably financed by public intervention, science seems to evolve in parallel to, rather than in sync with, society. In the future, should citizens have a direct say in priority setting for science and technology developments to rebalance the supply and the demand?

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If there’s one thing you could argue is more important than your startup’s brand it’s your personal brand as a founder and entrepreneur. This is the brand that will transcend whatever companies you start or work for, and will be with you until the end of your career. Establishing your personal brand is hard work though, because it doesn’t start tomorrow, it started yesterday, and it’s an ongoing process.

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With all the headlines about Twitter's successful IPO, you may have wondered just how early-stage startup companies get funded and whether it's something the average investor can get in on or even consider.

Today, new options other than traditional angel and venture capital outfits have become available including online venture capital and equity crowdfunding. But what is the difference between these and why should you care? The fact is that you may now, or very soon, be able to invest in some of these startups online.

Bizdom is upping the amount of seed capital it can give to startups by six figures. The downtown Detroit-based startup accelerator is offering the opportunity for a convertible note worth up to $100,000 to startups that have gone through its accelerator class.

"We feel if we can make a large commitment to these startups that increases the chances of growing them," says Maria LaLonde, recruiting & development leader for Bizdom.

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We're in the midst of a Big Data Gold Rush, with VCs throwing cash at anyone and everyone with a Big Data idea. But as Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher posits, the Big Data financial opportunity has three phases, with Big Data users, not vendors, standing to make the most money in Big Data's third and final phase.

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If a destination’s desirability is measured by the number of maps that claim to lead you to it, innovation is the corporate world’s Taj Mahal. Among the manuals on sale is an Innovator’s Guide, a Cookbook, a Toolkit, a Path, a Way, a Handbook and a Manifesto. My addition to the genre would be The Innovator’s Contradictions. Insights gleaned from last week’s FT Innovate conference suggest that, for almost every rule of innovation, there is an innovator who has made a breakthrough – and a fortune – flouting it. Here are seven examples.

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IBM has built a computational creativity machine that creates entirely new and useful stuff from its knowledge of existing stuff. And the secret sauce in all this? Big data, say the computer scientists behind it.

Can computers be creative? That’s a question likely to generate controversial answers. It also raises and some important issues too, like how to define creativity.

In the 1930s, Hedwig von Restorff, a German psychologist, made an important, though not very counterintuitive, discovery: things that somehow stand out are remembered more easily than typical things. Suppose we read the following list to a group and then asked them to recall it:

apple, truck, necklace, tomato, glass, dog, rock, umbrella, butter, spoon, Lady Gaga, pillow, pencil, chocolate, desk, banana, bug, soup, milk, tie

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We are in the midst of a revolution in gender roles, both at work and at home. And when it comes to having children, the outlook is very different for those embarking on adulthood’s journey now than it was for the men and women who graduated a generation ago.

I recently published research from the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, comparing Wharton’s Classes of 1992 and 2012. One of the more surprising findings is that the rate of Wharton graduates who plan to have children has dropped by about half over the past 20 years.

Bedaya Startup Academy is one of the few entrepreneurship training program existing outside the academic sphere in Egypt, providing hands-on training that fits entrepreneurs’ fast-paced lifestyles. It is also the first formal agreement to be signed between the Ministry of Investment and a civil association for the benefit of the entrepreneurship community.

When Cameron Crake of Raven and Lilly discovered that she, not the company’s founder, would be pitching at Incubation Station’s Demo Day, she was nervous. To begin with, she’s the background person, not the public face of the company. Also, she was the program’s youngest member and desperately didn’t want her youth to be what the audience remembered.

“I said ‘like’ a lot,” she recalls. “I also would get high pitched at the end of sentences…I had a tendency to cock my hip. A lot of women do that. It’s how we carry our weight. I had to practice standing with my feet planted, looking confident and unshakeable.” She also had to practice her pitch as if she were speaking to a kindergarten class, to overcome the monotone she’d adopted to sound more mature.

For a young man, Matt Van Horn has had a long career in startups. He worked at Digg, back during its first iterations. Then he helped create ride-sharing startup Zimride, which is now called Lyft. For many years, he worked at social network Path. Now he's quit his job and plans to start a new company.

You know who this terrifies?

The automatic federal budget cuts, known as sequestration, that took effect in March have forced universities to lay off research-related personnel, delay projects and admit fewer graduate students, according to a new survey released Monday. Eighty-one percent of responding institutions said that sequestration was directly affecting their research activities. More than half of universities said that the decrease in new federal grant opportunities -- and the shrinking value of some existing grants -- had prompted them to reduce research-related positions, and nearly a quarter of institutions said they had already laid off research employees.

It's important to stand out with an impressive resume, but who, or what, should you be trying to impress?

Most big companies use applicant tracking system (ATS) software to sift through online resume submissions. It's mainly used as an initial screening tool to analyze titles, dates and descriptions from resumes to evaluate a candidate's depth of experience (or rather, to see whether it's fit for human eyes).