I am not a successful entrepreneur. I do not know the secret to life. I know that I love what I do but struggle with feeling content and balanced.

I'd ask other entrepreneurs about their advice and they would say within seconds you need to unplug or take a vacation, but applying that is difficult for me--I don't want to figure out the right way to take a break, I want to figure out how to appreciate the present moment.

I'm not an aspiring buddhist or a zen master either. I want to win, I want to be the best, I want to make some people feel stupid for not believing in us, and I love being at the front of the eternal fight that is a startup. But the counterbalance of the fight was difficult to find.

Brian Pollok is the University of Virginia's newest advocate for commercializing research discoveries that emerge on Grounds.

It’s a role he’ll hold formally as UVa’s first entrepreneur-in-residence. In that capacity, he’ll work with UVa Innovation and the university’s Licensing and Ventures Group, where he will offer guidance, perspective and a voice on how researchers can amplify their discoveries.

A solar-powered airplane is poised to complete an historic cross-country flight across the United States this weekend, after taking off on the last leg of its journey this morning (July 6) from Washington, D.C.

The plane, called Solar Impulse, departed Washington Dulles International Airport at 4:46 a.m. EDT today, and is expected to reach New York City early Sunday (July 7), at 2 a.m. EDT, after approximately 21 hours in the air. The aircraft is scheduled to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Jeff Weiner is a busy dude.

As the CEO of LinkedIn, he has a constant pull of to-dos, and as leaders often do, he has days of meeting after meeting after meeting. Realizing he had little time to think, he opted for what first felt like an "indulgence": he started scheduling nothing.

Writing on his LinkedIn page (naturally), Weiner explains that his scheduling nothing are his "buffers," that is, 30- to 90-minute blocks of time without meetings. And rather than a kind of indulgence, Weiner realized the free spaces were "absolutely necessary" for him to do his job--as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would agree.

Creating a new medical device is not an inexpensive exercise. There are development costs, clinical trial expenses, and the lengthy process of getting a piece of new equipment approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Those hurdles are a leading reason why most medical innovations come out of universities or established research firms.

With "smart immigration" still in the headlines, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is offering a free ebook to help more people understand the issues related to immigrant entrepreneurs and how current policies affect this important economic force in America.

In his pivotal book, The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, Vivek Wadhwa, Director of Research, Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization and Exec in Residence, Pratt, School of Engineering, Duke University, Vice President of Academics and Innovation, Singularity University, and Front End of Innovation 2013 Keynote, draws on fifty years of research and his Kauffman Foundation report, "America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs - Then and Now," to show that growth in immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States has peaked, is stagnating, and is on the verge of decline.

Dear Friends,

A recent survey of business executives by consulting firm A.T. Kearney shows that, for the first time since 2001, the United States has knocked China out of first place as the favored place for foreign direct investment. This finding is extremely good news, but it doesn’t mean we can rest in our efforts to build a supportive environment for business growth and job creation. Communities everywhere must position themselves to compete in the new economy. Those best able to align and leverage their assets with the needs of investors will attract and expand investment. And the Economic Development Administration can help. In EDA’s latest annual report, highlighted in this issue of Innovate@EDA, you will find examples from every state about how EDA has joined with local communities to catalyze their investment plans to grow their economies. We also have some insightful thoughts from Mark Muro, senior fellow and director of policy at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, on regional development and the revitalization of American manufacturing. Lastly, we highlight some important findings on the state of entrepreneurship that were published recently by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Thank you for your interest in our work at the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

Where are the world’s most innovative nations? Look to Europe.

In a new index from the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell University, and the French business school INSEAD, seven European countries rank as the world’s most innovative nations.

The Global Innovation Index looked at 142 economies and determined their innovation level from 84 indicators such as the quality of top universities, availability to microfinance, and venture capital deals.

“The problem is that extraordinary performance comes only from correct non-consensus forecasts, but non-consensus forecasts are hard to make, hard to make correctly and hard to act on.”  Howard Marks.    Humans are terrible forecasters for many reasons explained by behavioral economics, not the least of which is that we often see false patterns and ascribe false meaning to them.   Having great pattern recognition skill is critical in venture capital and one pattern that you see is that really great entrepreneurs often break some rule(s) that you thought were unbreakable.  History only rhymes and never repeats precisely.

Duck Dynasty, a reality show on A&E, might seem like an odd place to acquire tips to hire a great startup team. The reality program focuses on the backwater Robertson clan as they juggle a multi-million dollar duck-call-making business with their own natural inclination to just spend all day hunting.

Last season, the finale of Duck Dynasty drew 9.6 million viewers, putting it on the charts as the third most-watched show on television — even the broadcast networks. More impressively, in viewers ages 18 to 49, the little reality show could beat out Fox’s American Idol.

With the growing popularity of open innovation, crowdsourcing and web based suggestion schemes where the best ideas are decided by popular votes, many of us tend to forget a very simply truism: creative people do not follow the crowd.

At minimum, they do their own thing. At best, they lead the crowd. Highly creative people tend to be non-conformists who do their own things irrespective of the crowd. Some purposely go against popular trends in order to demonstrate their uniqueness and creativity. Others, often those who are most creative, often seem blithely unaware of the crowd, so focused are they on doing their own things.

The Innovation Economy peaked with the last financial crisis. In the emerging epoch—the Talent Economy—the competition among companies like Google and Facebook for the same pool of ideas makers will reshape our cities.

Jobs follow talent. Investment follows talent. Workers own the means of production. The Creative Class rules the world. Richard Florida’s utopian geography seduces the upwardly mobile. But don’t expect to freelance your way to prosperity. Most of us still slave to the old economic paradigm. But over the last decade, this old economic paradigm has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Getting what you want in your career and in life isn't as difficult as it may seem. I mean it.

I've been very fortunate, both professionally and personally, and along the way learned seven key ways to help make it happen. In essence, I work to put others first, and to be more likeable, to end up with what I want in everything I do. I'll be writing about this in far more detail in my third booknext year.

Due to the many changes that will result from the SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Act, NIH has set up a new website to keep the small business research community informed.

Applicants and grantees interested in the SBIR program can visit the website as well as the SBIR listserv and Twitter feed for news as the implementation plan rolls out.

UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called “buzz.”

The research has a broad range of implications, the study authors say, and could lead to more effective public health campaigns, more persuasive advertisements and better ways for teachers to communicate with students.

Scientists in Japan have created an early liver like those in fetuses from human stem cells. According to the research published in the journal Nature, the "buds" didn't grow into regular livers, but they do show serious steps toward creating new organs for transplants, Bloomberg reported.

As investments in life science companies have dipped over the past few years, some investors have scaled back investments or walked away from the sector all together. But based on a tally by investment research firm PitchBook in its 2013 Venture Capital Healthcare Report, several firms have made 10 or more investments in pharmaceutical, medical device or health IT companies in the last year and a half.

Here is PitchBook’s list of the most active life science Vcs between January 2012 and May 2013.

Over the past few months I’ve watched several powerful and successful VCs and entrepreneurs damage their reputations by having their words not match up with their actions. I think this is especially true in the context of a long term relationship.

This is a deeply held value of mine and of my partners at Foundry Group. I occasionally screw up and when I do I own it, apologize, and learn from it. But it stuns and amazes me when others assert strong style / values / culture and then consistently have their actions not line up with their words.

Raising capital keeps many startup founders busy. They approach angel investors, seek VC funds, attend conferences (hoping to randomly meet financiers), and endlessly polish their investment decks, business plans, and executive summaries.

To novice entrepreneurs, this feels logical. “With no capital, how can I progress? Money can surely help develop the product and shorten the time to market, right? Besides, everybody says that raising capital is part of the startup foundation process …”

In the biggest domain name sale so far this year, MakerBot VP of Marketing Chuck Pettis sold Brand.com to Reputation Changer, which has now changed its name — and its brand — to Brand.com.

The sale was leaked earlier, but the exact pricing details had not been released until today.

A half million dollars sounds like a lot for a domain name, but it’s nothing compared to the $16 million purchase of Insure.com in the heady dot-com bubble days of 2009, or the $14 million price tag on Sex.com. And it’s low compared to what Pettis wanted for the domain — TheDomains.com says that the original sales listing on Website Brokerage requested only seven-figure bids: