“When I was a young entrepreneur, board meetings were by far the worst days of my life,” says Jeff Bonforte, the veteran company-builder who just sold his latest, Xobni, to Yahoo. “Board meetings are the height of insecurity for a CEO. Basically it’s a group of people who can both judge you and fire you based on that judgment.” 

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What’s the best idea for reducing the impacts of ocean acidification on the environment and society? After all, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to go up and up and up, which suggests that the pH of seawater will continue to fall and fall and fall. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has weighed in with its opinion: genetics for coral.

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Imagine that rather than going to Walmart, you could get that new cellphone case by hitting a button on your 3D printer. Or that earthquake victims in underdeveloped countries could build themselves new homes out of mud. Or that your car was so light that it could get twice the gas mileage on half the engine.

So, you want to ditch the corporate life and go work for a startup. Cool, but do you really understand what that would mean?

Steve Blank, one of the fathers of the Lean Startup revolution, defines a startup as “an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” What does that mean? Well, that the company either doesn’t have a working product, it has a working product that no one will buy, or it has a product that sells but can’t figure out how to market and sell the product profitably.

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Twitter data reveals the cities that set trends and those that follow. And the difference may be in the way air passengers carry information across the country, by-passing the Internet, say network scientists.

One of the defining properties of social networks is the ease with which information can spread across them. This flow leads to information avalanches in which videos or photographs or other content becomes viral across entire countries, continents and even the globe.

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Last week was a blur of global entrepreneurial activity with the Lester Center welcoming over 28 startup  teams from 20 countries to the Bay Area to pitch their ideas to some of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capitalists, hear inspiring speakers, and have the chance to take home some of $100,000 in prize money. These teams participated in the 9th Annual Intel Global Challenge (IGC) at UC Berkeley, supported by the Intel Foundation and Intel Corporation.

The global life sciences industry has experienced a series of significant challenges recently, but is expected to see growth going forward and continue to be an important factor in the global economy. Despite projections that over the next four to five years the global market is expected to grow at 3.5 percent annually, it appears that companies are making fewer investments in new facilities and operations since the number of projects and investment dollars have both declined annually since 2009.(1, 2) However, interest in exploring deployment strategies has significantly increased recently — perhaps signaling a new wave of innovation and investment.

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Over a third of public support for R&D is delivered via tax incentives, with multinationals, rather than domestic SMEs benefitting the most. It’s time to give small companies an equal chance, says the OECD

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Renewal fees could make or break the unitary patent. And companies are worried a single patent court could prompt a deluge of patent infringement suits by “patent trolls.” But top EU officials insist the new system will actually help European inventors – while keeping trolls at bay.

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The new-look Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs) to be launched next January will be more accessible, more ambitious and more transparent. “This is not business as usual,” R&D Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn told MEPs on the Industry, Research and Energy Committee as she outlined exactly how the initiatives have been reformed and how they will operate under the €70 billion Horizon 2020 programme. 

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Venture capitalists continue to find solid opportunities, despite big regulatory changes that could eventually alter the way startup companies raise money. In the third quarter, VCs pumped $8.1 billion into 806 deals, an uptick in dollars invested compared to the previous quarter and the same period last year. The number of deals, however, declined slightly, according to a report being released today by Dow Jones.

“There’s no question that there are two Americas,” Steve Case, AOL founder turned VC and entrepreneurship advocate, told me in an interview last week. “There’s the America where entrepreneurship is celebrated and supported. Places like Silicon Valley and Boston. And there’s the rest of the country where the culture tends to be kind of risk averse.”

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It’s 1958, and Patricia Bays Haroski, a State Farm Insurance Company employee, wants people to formally recognize their boss on October 16th. Her goal? Improve the relationship between bosses and their direct reports. That date? She apparently picked it because it was her father’s birthday, and she thought he was a good boss.

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If your first instinct is to say yes to every opportunity that comes up, you may need to reconsider. Advertising exec Curt Hanke explains why saying no could be the best thing for your business.

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A bill reforming Wisconsin securities law and allowing in-state equity crowdfunding unanimously passed the state Senate on Tuesday. The bill now heads to Gov. Scott Walker’s desk. It passed the Assembly Oct. 8. The bill, dubbed the CASE (crowdfunding and securities exemptions) for Jobs Act, changes Wisconsin’s securities registration exemptions, moving the state’s Great Depression-era securities law into the 21st century, supporters said.

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LANSING — Proposed legislation would allow Michigan businesses to use crowdfunding websites to seek investments in exchange for company shares.

Bill sponsor Rep. Nancy Jenkins, R-Clayton, said her proposal would boost the state economy by giving small business owners and entrepreneurs options for raising capital. While the measure has support from several business groups, some lawmakers and state regulators expressed concerns that it doesn't do enough to protect investors.

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This image was recently emailed to one of the senior-most technology executives at LinkedIn. In case you can’t read it, the text says:

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”

At our ‘Sex up your start up’ Q&A at Virgin HQ as part of Social Media Week, we had some great questions from some entrepreneurs on screwing business as usual. This one from Sabina Lucia from Greener Upon Thames got a good debate going: ‘How can an environmental start-up increase followers of their social media accounts?’

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There comes a point in every startup's growth when the founding team has to shift from MVP mode to growth mode quickly. A chief marketing officer (CMO) can make a big difference in terms of customer acquisition and strategic marketing.

But how do you know it's finally time to bring in C-level marketing talent? And is it necessary to hire a CMO, or can a founder assume that role?

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Start-up founders who have worked countless hours and taken minimal pay to launch their companies understandably look forward to the big payday that comes with an IPO or a sale. So do venture capital or angel investors who risked millions to back a fledging enterprise that could very well go under.

But a study by experts from Wharton and INSEAD shows that IPOs and acquisitions actually dampen a start-up’s innovative spirit — which is often the very reason why it is appealing to investors or a new corporate owner in the first place. Instead of driving start-ups to step up their level of innovation, public scrutiny turns out to have the opposite effect, according to the recent paper, “Entrepreneurial Exits and Innovation,” by Wharton management professor David Hsu and Vikas A. Aggarwal, a professor of entrepreneurship and family enterprise at INSEAD. The study is slated for publication in the journal Management Science.

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