A revolution is stirring in America. Across the nation cities and metropolitan areas, and the networks of pragmatic leaders who govern them, are taking on the big issues that Washington won’t, or can’t, solve.  They are reshaping our economy and fixing our broken political system.

The Metropolitan Revolution is a national movement, and the book describes how it is taking root in New York City, where efforts are under way to diversify the city’s vast economy; in Portland, Oregon, which is selling the  “sustainability” solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world; in Northeast Ohio, where groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes; in Houston, where a modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder; in Miami, where innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations; in Denver and Los Angeles, where leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises; and in Boston and Detroit, where innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century.  

Like bunnies, humans need rest: especially after spending the morning sandwiched between meetings, spreadsheets, gossip, and starving for an actual sandwich. By the time we reach 2:55 p.m, we're fall-out-of-our-chair exhausted.

This leads to frightful consequences: the more tired a person is, the worse decisions they will make. If you've ever felt too tired to brush your teeth, you'll know what we mean.

A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 200 hours a year. For a grand total over an entire career of--are you sitting down?--9,000 hours of meetings. That's a solid year and 10 days of your precious time.

There are few tried and true strategies for running productive meetings: Be prepared, have a leader, an agenda, a fixed time to start and stop, a conclusion and plan to follow up. But if we have to sit around in a windowless conference room for 9,000 hours, can’t we come up with something more . . . engaging?

Construction is underway on a $10 million addition to the Bioscience and Technology Business Center at the University of Kansas.

The Lawrence Journal-World ( http://bit.ly/1797hDV) reports the 30,000-square-foot expansion will more than double the space in the existing building, which opened in 2010 and already is full.

The addition will accommodate nine to 15 more business tenants in addition to the nine already there.

Are you struggling with your business? Is your business taking too much of your time? Are you becoming perplexed because you’re giving so much time and energy to your business, only for you not to get the same in returns?

I know how difficult this can be, especially if you’re a serial entrepreneur, who is just starting out even though you have the necessary experience your business requires.

Often times when a business starts newly they often don’t anticipate most of the unpredictable challenges they’re most likely going to experience.

Make the Pitch

“Draw up a list of all the professional organizations in your industry, and make note of when and where their annual conferences occur. If it makes sense for you, draw up a proposal for a panel or other type of presentation that would provide value to conference attendees. Once you get a recording or two up on your site, you can start getting paid for your appearances.”

Often, it’s doing the things that scare us that can make the biggest differences in our lives. Unfortunately, these very same things are also the tasks that we procrastinate on the most. We put off doing them and cover up our fears with excuses like, “I don’t have the time to do that right now” or “I’m not ready yet” or my personal favorite, “I’ll have to get this other thing done first before I can do that.”

And while lack of experience and time constrains do play a role in SOME situations, for the most part the excuses above are just a façade that covers up the REAL reason why we put off doing important tasks: We’re scared.

At the height of the financial crisis, it was unclear how diminished 401(k)s and general economic uncertainty would impact retirement trends for baby boomer professors. But new data suggest that professors are either significantly – or indefinitely – putting off retirement, and not just for financial reasons. Experts say the trend is forcing institutions to rethink traditional faculty models. Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all, according to a new Fidelity Investments study of higher education faculty. While 69 percent of those surveyed cited financial concerns, an even higher percentage of professors said love of their careers factored into their decision.

Ben & Jerry’s is at it again with another neat crowdsourcing initiative.  In a project dubbed “City Churned” the ice cream maker is turning to city locals for flavor ideas that best represent their town.

Five cities have been chosen to kick off the project – Washington DC, New York, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco – and each one has its own microsite for votes.

In part, the flavors will be decided by a simple tallying of votes, but they’ll also be decided on what citizens do.

For example, Ben & Jerry’s filmed joggers in Washington DC, and those that went in one direction counted as a vote for marshmallow, while joggers going in the other direction were a vote for peppermint.

A recent trip to Italy meant my first visit to Florence, home of my youngest daughter’s favorite pizza and my oldest daughter’s new leather purse.   For me it was the discovery of something much different, I think Florence is where innovation was born – and perhaps an inspiration for your business to get unstuck.

The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, currently known as the Duomo, was completed in 1436 after 140 years of construction.  The cathedral’s most prominent feature is a dome some 375 feet high and 144 feet across built of brick, marble and sandstone, the impressive achievement weighs 37,000 tons.  All much more impressive when you consider that the marble was quarried 106 kilometers away – and had to be delivered by horse and wagon, one stone at a time.  Filippo Brunelleschi was the chosen architect (actually a goldsmith) and oversaw the majority of the construction until his death.

A brand is more than a logo. But a company’s mark is its calling card, a shorthand for all that other stuff--the quality of the product, the level of service, the history of the company--for its composite brand. To understand the cultural power and currency of a popular logo, all you have to do is survey a set of preschoolers, who, while unable to order off a menu, can handily identify McDonald’s golden arches, as well as the emblems of Disney and Nike, to name but a few.

The European Union and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today (10 June) pledged to pool resources for research into HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, malaria and other poverty-related diseases.  

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European commissioner for research and innovation, signed the agreement in Paris with Bill Gates, the co-founder of the poverty charity.

The two will partner to develop treatments for poverty-related diseases, which affect more than one billion people  worldwide, particularly in developing countries.

The University Economic Development Association (UEDA) is currently seeking nominations for its annual Awards of Excellence program, which recognizes leading edge university-based economic development initiatives from across the country. The Awards of Excellence Program recognizes higher education institutions and their partners who are transforming their campuses into engines of economic prosperity through creative initiatives in five categories: 

1. Community Connected Campus: initiatives that promote the physical development of quality connected campuses and their surrounding communities;
2. Research and Analysis: initiatives that enhance the capacity of colleges and universities to provide new forms of research and tools for community, economic and workforce development practitioners;
3. Leadership and Collaboration: initiatives that support the development of collaborative economic development strategies and the leaders required to implement them;
4. Innovation and Entrepreneurship: initiatives designed to support startups, high-growth companies and clusters within a region; and
5. Talent Development: initiatives that promote the development of 21st-century skills.

The cheetah crouches in the undergrowth. When a young antelope strays a little too far from the herd, the cheetah explodes out of the bush — and, with a burst of speed unrivalled in the natural world, brings down its next meal.

Or so we have assumed. But the first study to collect data on the animal’s movements in the wild reveals that, contrary to popular opinion, a cheetah’s sheer speed is not its only weapon when it comes to hunting. Its success as a predator also hinges on its lightning reflexes and its ability to accelerate faster than a Ferrari.

Earth's human population is expected to coast upward to 9.6 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100, up from 7.2 billion people alive today, a United Nations agency has projected.

The U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs yesterday released revised numbers for the coming century, raising median estimates for population growth in 2050 and 2100. The agency's prior best guess had humanity at 9.3 billion in 2050 and 10.1 billion in 2100.

In what may be an industry first (in finance) venture firm InCube Ventures has unveiled a crowdfunding site of its own dubbed VentureHealth.

The new platform will differentiate itself from “rewards-based” crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, or sites that help consumer technology startups raise seed money, like AngelList, Microventures or Crowdfunder, by focusing on health startups exclusively.

Attracting investor funding is only the beginning of the start-up adventure, not the endgame.

"Those guys are successful, they've raised half a million from investors," one start-up commentator recently told me about a business.

Is raising money the benchmark of business success? Surely getting investors on board is part of the journey, not the destination.

Having some investors coming on board means others share the founders' belief their idea is a viable business and it's a great ego boost for those working hard to bring the product to market.

The implementation of the America Invents Act has been the catalyst for increasing media discussion about the role of patents in the US business innovation cycle. Patents clearly play a large role for big companies in many life science and high tech industries, but what role do they play for research based startups and how important are they to those companies?

University based startups typically have the benefit of patent applications filed by the university. The university staffs often has access to sophisticated professionals and seek the broadest protection possible so the patent applications and issued patents may be stronger than a typical startup formed by an inexperienced entrepreneur.

The suspicion that industrial involvement in science is only geared towards profit threatens to derail European policymaking and new ethical standards could help solve the issue, the EU’s chief scientific advisor has said. Professor Anne Glover, the chief scientific advisor to Commission President José Manuel Barroso, said she had become “extremely uncomfortable” witnessing the lack of trust in some quarters at the role of industry in science.

Using data from Crowdsourcing.org and other sources, oBizMedia put together the following infographic to introduce the topic of crowdfunding and weigh some of its advantages and disadvantages.

It points out that venture capitalists are “more stable than crowdfunding resources” — but not every business or project is a good fit for venture capital, of course. Check out the infographic below to see why crowdfunding might be a better solution for your business.