The European Commission has launched the latest edition of its Women Innovators Prize to reward female entrepreneurs who have come up with new innovations and brought them to market. A €175,000 prize fund will be divided amongst the three eventual winners.

According to the Commission, the goal of the contest is to raise awareness of the need for more female entrepreneurs and to inspire other women to take the leap into self-employment. The three winners will avail of a first prize worth €100,000, a second prize of €50,000 and a third prize to the value of €25,000.

There was a time not long ago, when most business owners considered it a hostile world. They were at odds with their competitors, with labor and with their community. They felt at the mercy of the economy, the environment and the government. In short, it was “us” against a pretty big “them.”

But there has been a shift in the landscape. Today collaboration is becoming the norm. To survive and thrive as business owners, we must work in harmony with our community, with our labor force and for the benefit of the environment. They, in turn, have to work with us. We must each be cognizant of and communicate about our needs and our limitations. We must seek solutions together that benefit all parties.

Baby boomers are easing into retirement, but some may find their golden years are haunted by student loan debt that could follow them until they die.

It's not their children's debt, however -- it's their own. Many boomers returned to graduate school during the recession to bolster their skills, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Student loan debt is actually growing fastest among people over 60, the report notes. More than 2 million Americans over 60 owe student loan debt, with the average balance standing at about $19,500, up from just under $11,000 in 2005, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

A new class of industrial robot is appearing. These robots are smart, affordable, and safe enough to work alongside humans, and they can do many tasks that human workers perform today (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing”). But does that necessarily mean there will be fewer jobs left for humans to do?

At a robotics industry event organized by business blog Xconomy in Menlo Park last week, people working on better industrial robots claimed their technology will actually boost the U.S. economy and create more jobs, even if some jobs do disappear forever.

New York City nonprofit Venture for America, which provides entrepreneurship training for recent college graduates, is adding Baltimore to its roster of cities this year.   Venture was founded in 2011 to encourage entrepreneurship through practical experience. It officially launched last year in five cities: Detroit, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Las Vegas and Providence, Rhode Island. This year, Baltimore and Cleveland are on board.

Looking at scenes of the Boston sidewalk a few hours after Monday’s bombing — torn clothing, bloodstains, shards of glass — I found my mind going back to a similar sidewalk in Tel Aviv in September 2003. A Hamas suicide bomber had blown himself up at a bus stop outside the Tsrifin army base, and by coincidence I was nearby and got there to witness the immediate aftermath. As I wrote then, parts of the bomber were still on the street, including his hairy leg. His shoe had been blown off, but his brown sock was still daintily on his foot. Israeli rescue workers calmly carried away the dead on stretchers, with an odd mix of horror and routine. But what I remember most was something the police spokesman said to me: “We will have this whole area cleaned up in two hours. By morning, the bus stop will be repaired. You will never know this happened.”

When I asked Mbwana Alliy last month why he founded the Savannah Fund in Nairobi, he had a simple answer—it is East Africa’s technology hub. As part of PDE’s look at Africa I began last week, we focus today on Kenya.

Beyond Alliy, Kenya is also home to rock stars like Erik Hersman who co-founded the groundbreaking mapping website Ushahidi as well as iHub, Nairobi's thriving technology center. It also has a growing number of academic institutions joining the country’s entrepreneurship scene like the Strathmore iLab in Nairobi. It is also the home of DEMO Africa and the core meetings of the LIONS@frica partners.

The adventure of running your own business is just as challenging as it is exciting. From time to time, many entrepreneurs might wish they had some kind of a super power to help them make instant (and correct) decisions, constantly generate fresh ideas to stay ahead of the competitors, deal with multitasking, and more. Well, we can’t promise you a spare neutron laser, but there are a few real lessons you can learn from the super heroes to gain new powers on the business battlefield.

In early 2012, I made the case to Co.Design’s readers that venture capital firms should incorporate a more comprehensive awareness of brand and design into their investment decisions. It seems that my assertion was not so far-flung. In the months since, some of the more forward-thinking firms in the venture-capital world have demonstrated a growing awareness of the impact of design. Google Ventures expanded its internal studio to support design initiatives for its startups. The venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers launched the Design Council and Fellows Program to connect startups with talented students who will in turn be mentored by top design talent. Phin Barnes and the team at First Round Capital & IDEO began hosting "Design + Start-ups," a running series of events where speakers address design philosophy, technique, entrepreneurship, and more.

What's hot with angel investors?

U.S. angel investment trends are shifting. The mobile sector is getting ever more attention and the health-care sector is losing dollars, according to the second annual Halo Report, released today from the advocacy organization Angel Resource Institute, entrepreneur-focused Silicon Valley Bank, and the National Science Foundation‐backed data research firm CB Insights. Data from 783 deals totaling $1.1 billion invested was collected both by survey and research of public data by the New York City-based CB Insights. Also, there is an increasing proliferation of angels in the Northwest and Southwest U.S., the report notes.

The U.S. market for remote patient monitoring, valued at $104.5 million in 2012, is forecasted to reach $296.5 million by 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 16 percent, according to a new report from GBI Research.

Chronic diseases represent an overwhelming burden for healthcare systems in developed countries, due to increasingly elderly populations, and a clear need exists for remote patient monitoring to help lift the load off stretched healthcare resources, according to the report Remote Patient Monitoring Market to 2019 – Potential to Reduce Healthcare Cost Burden and Improve Quality of Care to Drive Future Growth.

With nearly half a billion dollars raised in venture capital funding for health information technology, the first three months of 2013 represented a "record quarter," according to Mercom Capital Group.

Some $493 million was raised industry-wide, according to Mercom's 2013 Healthcare IT Funding and M&A Report, in twice as many deals as the previous quarter (104, up from 51). There were nearly four times as many early stage deals – 42, up from 14 – compared to the fourth quarter of 2012.

Electronics manufacturing giant PCH International is expanding its accelerator to launch more hardware startups, VentureWire has learned.

Since starting the program in 2011, PCH Chief Executive Liam Casey says he’s seen interest accelerate “significantly.” The accelerator has fielded more than 200 applications during the past 12 months  from founders looking to exchange equity in their startups in exchange for PCH designing the product, sourcing materials and handling other tasks to bring the product from concept to consumer.

A cup of beetroot juice a day may help reduce your blood pressure, according to a small study in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension.

People with high blood pressure who drank about 8 ounces of beetroot juice experienced a decrease in blood pressure of about 10 mm Hg. But the preliminary findings don’t yet suggest that supplementing your diet with beetroot juice benefits your health, researchers said.

Angel investors are unphased by bubble hype as 2012 valuations remain unchanged versus 2011. Median deal size down slightly from 2011, but trending up in Q4. Mobile doubles its share of investment dollars, while Healthcare slips to #2 behind Internet. California loses share. April 16, 2013

AOL Co-Founder Steve Case has a great perspective on the country's vast and varied startup universe. Now Chairman of Startup America and CEO of Revolution, a venture capital fund based in Washington, D.C., Case wrote a February blog post for the Wall Street Journal describing what he's dubbed the "rise of the rest."

"I'm convinced that we're beginning to see a regional 'rise of the rest' as cities like Washington D.C., Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, Raleigh, Cleveland, Detroit and many others experience unprecedented growth in startups," wrote Case.

Kansas City, MO, Santa Clara, CA, New York City, April 16, 2013 - The Angel Resource Institute (ARI), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and CB Insights released the 2012 Halo Report today, a national survey of angel group investment activity, as the Angel Capital Association gears up for its biggest event of the year in San Francisco this week.

The report shows angel investing for the year was stable with prior years. Pre money valuations for early-stage companies remained steady at $2.5M and round sizes were relatively consistent. The sectors and geographies getting funding are shifting, however, most notably with mobile and telecom companies gaining share of angel investment deals and dollars, while healthcare companies are losing share of angel investments. Companies in the Northwest and the Southwest US are gaining ground on the number of deals and total investments they receive over companies in California and New England.

Two Baltimore companies took top honors in the state's first InvestMaryland Challenge as some 260 startups from 26 states, including Maryland, threw their hats in the ring. The contest was part of the state's InvestMaryland initiative and is a first for the state. GrayBug, which is developing drug delivery technology, and RedOwl Analytics, a software company, were the winners of the startup business competition's life science and information technology categories. An LED lighting company in Cecil County, i-Lighting, won the contest's category for general industry.

After the idea, it’s all about execution. In fact, it’s not clear that even the idea is all that important. Most investors tell me that an A entrepreneur with a B idea is much more fundable than a B entrepreneur with an A idea. It’s great to be a visionary, inventor, thinker, or a dreamer, but none of these matter in the business world if you are not also a do-er.

According to Professor Sean Wise, who claims to have worked with more than 15,000 entrepreneurs (including many with the popular TV shows Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den), no matter how great the idea and the opportunity, in the end it is only the execution that creates change and generates wealth.