Being an entrepreneur is hard. You quit your nice paying job with your awesome corner office to start something because your grandmother thought it was a good idea. Now you have a URL, a product and it actually might work. It’s time to become a company, get investors onboard with your idea and take it to market. These and many other issues must keep entrepreneurs up at night. I recently attended the Knife Capital and AngelHub run Find, Make, Grow and Realise at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. The programme, which was launched last year, aims to promote the development of early-stage, high growth entrepreneurial activity in South Africa.

On Tuesday, GE Healthcare announced plans to invest $2 billion over the next five years on the development of software for health systems and applications, Healthcare IT News reports.

To develop the software, the company will work with the GE Software Center of Excellence in San Ramon, Calif., in addition to several other research and development firms across the world (Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 6/12).

With cloud computing increasing its popularity, more and more enterprise IT and development teams are looking to run proof-of-concept projects. Very often though such projects do not deliver results as expected and project managers come back to the leadership teams with either: "We are not ready for the cloud!" or "It will be too expensive to move our applications to the cloud!" However the problem doesn't necessary lie in the cloud or the application portfolio. Most of the times it is in the way the project is scoped and managed.   

Jeff Harris was on a beach in The Outer Banks, N.C., with friends, kicking a soccer ball in the surf. Diving for the ball in shallow water, he hit his head on the sand with such force that he couldn't move. He kept trying to lift his head but it became so tiring that he just let it dangle in the surf. He eventually passed out.

A nurse sitting on the beach nearby administered CPR, even after she was told to give up because he had no pulse. She revived him, however, and he was airlifted to a nearby hospital where he learned he had fractured his sixth vertebra. Harris, 30, is now paralyzed from the neck down. "That nurse was just hanging out with her family and said she was taking pictures of me because she thought I looked hot, running around on the beach," Harris says. "She may actually have one of the last pictures of me as a walking person."

There may seem only two good reasons for hanging on in a job that has become as appealing as shoveling excrement in torrential rain: i) you need the money and ii) there are no other jobs on offer. However, if you’re feeling trapped in a job you dislike simply because it pays the bills and there don’t seem any real alternatives, then you can buoy yourself up with this thought: there are some excellent reasons to hang on in a job, and they have nothing to do with being trapped there. Regardless of unpleasantness. careers specialists said you should stick in a job when…

For many entrepreneurs “raising money” has replaced “building a sustainable business” as their goal.  That’s a big mistake. When you take money from investors their business model becomes yours. One of my ex students came out to the ranch to give me an update on his startup. When I asked, “What are you working on?” the first words out of his mouth was his fund raising progress.  Sigh… What I should have been hearing is the search for the business model, specifically the progress on product/market fit, but I hear the fund raising story first at least 90% of the time.  It never makes me happy.

There’s not much we like better at CFO than having finance chiefs tell us directly what they’ve found to work and not work, including anecdotes detailing how they approached problematic scenarios.

But are they the only credible sources of such information? Are they even the most objective sources? Based on what I heard at a recent forum for finance executives I attended, called “The Habits of Successful CFOs,” the answers are “no” and “maybe not.”

"I love the image of being a baby again," Zen Habits author Leo Babauta once wrote, "in my head, it conjures up not only sleeping peacefully (though in reality many babies don’t), but growing magically young again, care-free, without the worries that normally plague us and keep us up at night."

While difficult to change, Babauta notes that sleeping habits are indeed changeable--though have a many inputs. Which is why before you go unconscious, you have to be conscious of quite a few things.

Every organization is designed to get the results it gets. Poor performance comes from a poorly designed organization. Superior results emerge when strategies, business models, structure, processes, technologies, tools, and reward systems fire on all cylinders in symphonic unison.

Savvy leaders shape the culture of their company to drive innovation. They know that it’s culture--the values, norms, unconscious messages, and subtle behaviors of leaders and employees--that often limits performance. These invisible forces are responsible for the fact that 70% of all organizational change efforts fail. The trick? Design the interplay between the company’s explicit strategies with the ways people actually relate to one another and to the organization.

Stan Ovshinsky passed away this week. With over 400 patents to his name, he transformed and enabled the markets for solar panels, flat panel TVs, CDs, computer batteries, electric cars and so much more.

His incredible inventions provide us with another window into the great challenges of converting early stage research into profit.

On May 31, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reissued its Omnibus Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs in order to implement venture capital provisions of the SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Act of 2011.

We've all seen examples of unstoppable companies that suddenly hit the wall. Growth slows down, stock prices start to decline, shareholders get nervous, and the press starts to speculate that something is wrong. In some cases, like P&G and Starbucks, the board brings back a former CEO who can presumably return the firm to its previous glory. In other cases, like with Apple, GE, or Cisco, the board holds its breath and hopes that things will change.

American-Statesman Staff A crowd of 150 Austin dignitaries on Tuesday opened the Pike Powers Laboratory and Center for Commercialization in East Austin as the lab’s namesake predicted a brighter future for Austin and Central Texas. “We’re going to innovate, we’re going to create, we’re going to jazz this sucker up and keep right on going,” Powers told the crowd. “We’re going to disrupt, we’re going to converge, whatever it takes…to make new things happen.”

Texas might have the nation's best business climate, but it struggles to get it share of federal funding for innovation from small businesses.

Over 30 years, Texas is only seventh in attracting awards from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program or the Small Business Technology Transfer (SBTT) program.

Adjusted for population, Texas ranks only 34th, claiming less than 4 percent of federal dollars, as compared to California's 20 percent.

Interesting tweet awhile ago from John Koetsier, linking to his article in VentureBeat about how non-accredited investment crowdfunding has been taking place in British Columbia for some time.

John's tweet and article say that BC is the only place in North America where equity crowdfunding for non-accredited investors is currently legal.

Nowadays, business trips are a normal part of young executive’s life. Rushing to and from airports, running in and out of meetings and jumping from one time zone to another can certainly take its toll on even the strongest body!

With little time and the high stakes involved when you are on such trips, how can you manage to keep lean and fit? Here are seven simple strategies you can use:

1. Watch the food

I know that while traveling, it can be tempting to gorge on fast food, candy and other quick snacks. After all, a chocolate bar or a pack of cookies looks pretty savory when you’re starving, doesn’t it?

Them’s fightin’ words!

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is looking to lasso some East Coast business for his low-tax Lone Star State with a new $1 million ad campaign and trip next week to the Big Apple and Connecticut.

Perry has already begun airing ads on NY1 ahead of his June 16 visit.

“Texas is calling. Your opportunity awaits,” Perry says at the end of the spot, which is filled with testimonials from Texas workers.

The ad buy, paid for by a public-private organization controlled by the governor, features two 30-second spots which are also slated to run on ESPN, CNN and other cable channels in the tristate area for a week, according to a statement from Perry’s office.

The Technology Commercialization Tax Credit provides a 40% refundable tax credit for companies that invest in the commercialization of Louisiana technology and a 6% payroll rebate for the creation of new, direct jobs.

Five years ago, almost nobody knew what the heck an infographic was. (I sure didn’t, and I was a graphic design major in college at the time.)

Now that the infographic craze has saturated us with new visual knowledge (and marketing gimmicks), something interesting has happened: The creation of infographics has become democratized. No longer is the act of creating a visual data story confined to professional designers using professional tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Now anyone with a data set can build an infographic.