A successful business partnership has many similarities with a successful marriage. In some ways it is even more challenging to build such a partnership.

The first question you should ask yourself is, “Do you really need a partner?” If you can create a viable business without a partner you are probably well advised to take that route. It may be that a partner is essential to complement your talents, to sell to customers, to help handle the work load or to bring needed financing. In that case, you and that partner should consider together whether it will work for you both by going through the following checklist.

The Government today strongly pitched for increased private sector investment in research and development (R&D) efforts in the country and creating a “correct” ecosystem that promotes innovation.

The Science and Technology Minister, S Jaipal Reddy said while investment of private sector in R&D in developed countries is 60-80 per cent, it is only about 30 per cent in India.

“The Government leads the expenditure in research innovation in the country. We need the private sector to take the lead in innovation enterprise. One expects the private sector to play a bigger role in the years to come,” he said.

Take a look at these videos of the explosive upward growth of cities like New York, LA, Chicago, and more. 

When 20th-century French psychoanalyst and urban philosopher Michel de Certeau gazed down at Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, he was overcome by the city’s curves, its crests, its collisions of history. “To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong?” he asked, presumably stroking his chin. “Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.”

When David Cornejo Chinguel, founder and chairman of Juan Mejia Baca, decided to start a new system of schools in Chiclayo, Peru, he knew he wanted them to be different. David had traveled outside of Peru before to Europe and other South American countries. He wanted to bring the best ideas from these places back with him and implement the good bits all in one place:

What we are helping form here in our schools is a new generation of children that are tech savvy and part of the digital age. This is the product of globalization.

Visionary companies do not only try to see into the future – they create the future. The history of innovation is scattered with examples of misjudgments regarding the dynamics of new technology. Less than two years before Polaroid’s bankruptcy, Morgan Stanley made the following statement: “We are upgrading Polaroid to Outperform from Neutral based on the company’s new product performance…

Most startup mentors tell me that the single biggest problem they have to deal with in small companies is the lack of open, honest, and effective communication, both from the top down and from the bottom up. Some entrepreneurs forget that talking is not communicating. Fortunately these skills can be learned, and the barriers to communication can be overcome one by one.

Founders have to communicate their ideas and products to investors, business partners, and the rest of the team. Then, hopefully, come customers, distribution channels, and going public or merging with an attractive buy-out candidate. Communication is not just talking, but also listening, writing, body language, and “actions speak louder than words.”

Diane Fennig’s recent post about the importance of creating a digital signature prompted me to consider the ways in which our LinkedIn connections influence the way people perceive us. Do people with 500+ connections seem somehow more impressive than those with far fewer, or do we suspect that people with several hundred connections are indiscriminate when it comes to creating their networks? According to LinkedIn, it is best not to accept invitations from people we don’t know, but I regularly receive invitations from people I have never met before, and I’m betting they believe bigger is better when it comes to crafting on their online personas.

Facebook increasingly plays copycat to Twitter and other Silicon Valley upstarts when it comes to innovation, but with over 1.1 billion active users, Facebook can afford to be a fast follower. Indeed, the right strategy may well be to simply copy or acquire others' innovations as they become popular. After all, as much as people may wring their hands about Instagram or Snapchat beating Facebook to this or that feature, the hardest feature of all to copy is a massive, built-in audience. 

Many people seem to feel that if the market can't offer them a brilliant job, there's not much point looking.

But you don't need a perfect job. Every job is a compromise between what you want to get out of life and what an employer wants to get out of you. Keeping this reality in mind will help you challenge perfection-focused thinking and increase your options.

Daniel Isenberg, author of Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid, shatters the stereotypes about who the typical entrepreneur really is. 

Even as the White House has backed off on a few of its deadlines for administering the Affordable Care Act, the Obama Administration is staying the course on its efforts to transition paper files to electronic health records in doctor's offices.

President Barack Obama met with several chief executives of health-care technology companies, government leaders and nonprofit public-service organizations on Monday for a conversation on how technology, big data and innovation can be used to bring down the costs and improve the quality of health care in the U.S., according to a statement from the White House.

The recommended seven to eight hours of sleep can be hard to get. But here’s a good excuse to make sure you catch those extra zzz's: a study shows that healthy adults who don’t get enough sleep gained significantly more weight than did their well-rested counterparts. 

The research features 225 non-obese subjects in a controlled lab setting. Some were on a restricted sleep schedule, in bed only between the hours of 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. Others had from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. to lounge in bed.

Lieutenant Governor Shan Tsutsui signed into law today two measures aimed at supporting the development of Hawaii’s innovation economy and growing our State’s research industry. House Bill 858, relating to the HI Growth Initiative, appropriates $6,000,000 to the Hawaii Strategic Development Corporation to implement the HI Growth Initiative.  The initiative is an investment program to develop and promote the creation of competitive high-growth companies in Hawaii.

As New Jersey looks for new ways to attract and retain high-paying jobs in a climate where seemingly every state competes for the same or similar companies, legislators and pro-business forces are heavily promoting collaboration between academia and industry as a way to attract investment and cut the time it takes to get a product or process out of the lab.

Increasingly, the state is offering tax credits and other incentives to encourage businesses to locate near universities. The result is an "innovation zone," where institutions of higher education lend research, facilities, and talent to neighboring companies, with the goal of reducing time to market -- and time to profit.

U.S. venture capital firms raised $2.9 billion from 44 funds during the second quarter of 2013, a decrease of 33 percent compared to the level of dollar commitments raised during the first quarter of 2013, but equal to the number of funds, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The dollar commitments raised during the second quarter of 2013 is a 54 percent decline from the levels raised during the comparable period in 2012 and marks the lowest quarter for venture capital fundraising, by dollars, since the third quarter of 2011. The top five venture capital funds accounted for 55 percent of total fundraising during the second quarter of 2013.

I'll never forget the first time a famous entrepreneur put his hand on my shoulder, looked me right in the eye, and said, "Steve, you don't want to miss out on this opportunity. You'll see; it'll be great. Once you get equity, you never look back." He couldn't have been more wrong. The start-up he founded would eventually crash and burn. By that time I was long gone and begging for my old job back. Luckily, I didn't get it. It wasn't long before I landed at another start-up and experienced my first IPO.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know a few yiddish words, whether you realize it or not. Contrary to what many believe, Yiddish isn’t “Jewish slang.” It’s actually a language that’s still spoken in some pars of the world. It is considered to be a “High German Language” of Ashkenazi Jewish origin and was brought to America by European immigrant families. While Yiddish isn’t as widely spoken as it was during the 18th and 19th century, many of us are still familiar with the language as a result of references in popular culture and in business.

It seems like just yesterday I was writing my first column about the 126th Legislature, and talking about Democratic priorities and goals for the session. We knew Mainers wanted us to work on developing Maine’s workforce and putting Mainers back to work. We knew Mainers wanted us to strengthen public education. We knew Mainers wanted us to lower the cost of both health care and energy. We knew Mainers wanted us to focus on our state’s future and find smart ways to invest in research and development, and our transportation infrastructure, including our roads and bridges.

CMS has proposed a policy change that would expand payments for telehealth services under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for 2014, Modern Physician reports. Details of the Proposal The proposed change would affect locations identified as rural "health professional shortage areas." Specifically, CMS plans to change the definition of "rural" to avoid disruptions in services if a location's geographic designation changes.

Unemployment rates in Spain are one of the highest in the developed world, hovering around 25% this year. Worse, for those under the age of 25 the joblessness rate is more than double (57%). On a recent visit to Barcelona, I met a Prince doing something about it.

His Royal Highness the Prince of Asturias and of Girona, Felipe de Borbón y de Grecia, might seem like an unlikely champion for startups. To my knowledge he is not an entrepreneur, not to mention the fact that he has the slight complication of being the heir apparent to the Spanish throne. But he might just be what the doctor ordered.