With more than 150 educational technology startups being built in the New England area, there has only been one missing link: a centralized hub to harness all the talent. Today, however, one of the city’s newest nonprofits LearnLaunch has announced LearnLaunchX, an education technology and learning-focused accelerator.

The program will be announced at LearnLaunch’s inaugural two-day conference, “Across Boundaries: Innovation & The Future of Education,” which kicks off at 11 a.m. today.

“Social and economic realities demand that education be made more effective and accessible,” said Stephen Marcus, founder and CEO of Matchbox, in a press release. “As an entrepreneur, I understand firsthand the complexities of this market and applaud the formation of LearnLaunchX. I believe it will accelerate the growth and success of important solutions and outstanding ed tech companies.”

When faced with the question “Are you creative?” I have found that only the half of the audiences I speak to consider themselves creative. This is true even when you talk to people that are supposed to be creative in developing products or market plans. As innovation is partly depending on guts to dare, something that comes from self-confidence, I think it is time that we stretch our old opinion on what creativity is all about – here are 7 different ways to be creative. I am sure you can find yourself described at least in a couple of them.

As a former investment banker on Wall Street I know of the importance of a diverse portfolio. It’s simple. Unless you like to gamble, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That old cliché should also be applied to America’s energy strategy. As I have mentioned before, a diverse energy portfolio, one that combines traditional and advanced energy sources, is a prudent strategy to mitigate long-term risks in our energy needs and supply. Now, we have comprehensive numbers that show investing in advanced energy projects makes financial sense as well.

Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), a national organization representing the industry, recently released the first-ever analysis of the national and global advanced energy sector. Its findings are promising news for investors interested in the industry

Silicon Valley venture capital giant New Enterprise Associates, known as NEA, is likely to open a Boston area office within the next six months. That's according to General Partner David Mott, leader of the venture firm's health care investing and former CEO of drug maker Medimmune, which was bought by AstraZeneca plc (NYSE: AZN) in 2007. Mott is based in Washington D.C. but says he spends so much of his time in Boston, that it only makes sense to put out a shingle here. “Boston is winning the biopharma innovation race, versus other geographies,” Mott said in an interview. “When I come, I usually stay at the Mandarin, and I typically run into three or four other NEA partners in the elevator.”

Microbreweries and brewpubs may have exploded in popularity over the past decade or so, yet that’s in spite of the challenges brewers face when getting started, including heavy regulation, hefty overhead, and substantial risk. But in downtown Houston, the world’s first “brewery incubator” aims to grease the wheels for aspiring brewers, by offering community, a shared workspace with professional brewing equipment, and a tap room with a built-in customer base, so brewers can focus on what matters when they’re just starting off: making the best beer possible.

“We cultivate these nano-breweries through business workshops, networking events, co-marketing, investor pitches, and co-working until they are fully ready to launch their own brewery,” reads the Brewery Incubator’s Kickstarter. The project is actually an incubator within a more established incubator, Kitchen Inc., which provides food entrepreneurs with affordable commercial kitchen space and a café to sell their wares.

Arguably a painter’s most important tool is vision. Unfortunately, it is commonplace for vision to deteriorate with advancing age. This deterioration can lead to a decrease in colour and contrast discrimination, increased glare and a decreased field of view. These perceptual changes will all affect the way an artist perceives the world, an effect which can be observed through changes in their artistic style and composition. Take Monet for example. As he grew older, Monet developed severe cataracts in both eyes. By the age of 65 this disorder was already affecting his visual acuity and colour vision. He could no longer perceive a vivid colour pallete, instead seeing the world as desaturated and yellow. This change was reflected in his art. Monet painted a series of canvases depicting water lilies in the gardens of his home town Giverny. The changes in his visual perception can be seen in the two images below showing the same scene painted prior to and following development of cataracts.

Companies fail at business model innovation because they’re so busy pedalling the bicycle of current business models they leave no time or resource to design new ones.

Most companies focus innovation efforts on new products and on driving efficiencies into current models. These are important activities, but not sufficient in the 21st century when business models don’t last as long and face disruption. This means business model innovation is the new strategic imperative. In this post I outline the top 10 reasons why businesses fail to innovate.

CEOs don’t really want a new business model The most obvious reason companies fail at business model innovation is because CEOs don’t want to explore new business models. They are content with the current one and want everyone in the organisation focused on how to improve its performance. The clearest indication is when any discussion about emerging business models is viewed and treated solely as a competitive threat.

Over at the TechStars blog today, David Cohen introduced the new Managing Director for TechStars in New York, Eugene Chung.

Thirty-five great candidates were interviewed for this position; the only offer we extended was to Eugene. His background includes NY-area investments BuzzFeed and Bedrocket while he was at New Enterprise Associates. Prior to that, he worked  at Warbug Pincus and Morgan Stanley. We were looking for deep competence and culture fit with TechStars and we found it with Eugene.

Two more venture capital firms have been selected to receive money for investing in early-stage businesses through the state’s InvestMaryland program, the Baltimore Business Journal reported. New Atlantic Ventures in Reston will receive $8 million and Kinetic Ventures in Chevy Chase will receive $5 million through the program, which is run by the Maryland Venture Fund Authority. The $84 million InvestMaryland program will give two-thirds of its money to venture capital firms to invest in early-stage companies in Maryland and the Venture Fund Authority will invest the rest itself.

A New Jersey foundation that funds research coming out of the state’s medical school has agreed to replenish its investment arm with $5 million to pump into biotechnology startups at the pre-seed stage — one of the most difficult stages for companies to get funding.

The New Jersey Health Foundation’sFoundation Venture Capital Group in New Brunswick, New Jersey invests up to $500,000 in pre-seed stage companies spinning out of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. It is poised to close its 10th investment deal from the fund initially set up in 2006.

Money - most startup founders need it at some point. But when you're raising outside capital, cash can come at a very high price if you're not on the same page as your investors.

Where many startup founders go wrong in the fundraising process is focusing more on the offer than on who's making it. Thinking about the cash instead of who's investing it. So We asked 10 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to weigh in on what exactly they expect from their investors, and why.

I like to think of my resume as a living document; alive and well, living in the present. Unfortunately, not everyone shares my sentiment pertaining to their electronic career billboard, as evidenced by my recent interactions with clients. Surprisingly, there are hungry job seekers interested in employment that haven’t touched their resume in years! I can understand busy. I can even understand the fear and apprehension associated with attempting to adjust a resume when there is a feeling of: “I’m just not good at this”. Because these obstacles have prevented my clients and many others from updating their resume, there are resumes that now contain inaccurate, expired information which will suck the life out of any document. Please understand that a resume is used to judge the qualifications of the job seeker. What concerns me about my clients is that they’ve been a willing accomplice; contributing to the slow death of a document that should be living in the moment. Because resumes can open a door of opportunity, I’ve shared the following with clients to assist them in resuscitating their resumes:

You probably know happy couples who met online. For every happy couple, however, there are 10 horror stories of people showing up 15 years older (or 50 pounds heavier) than their profile picture.

E-recruiting, much like e-dating, has many success stories. The sad part about recruiting, though, is that we don’t get to date the winners very long. As recruiters, we give the best matches to the hiring manager… and then we start searching for “the one” all over again.

Here’s a more insight into the recruiting process (and a little advice on how to make it to the second date).

“Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil” is an intriguing credo worthy of consideration in some instances, but also typically an excuse to avoid confronting the obvious truth in situational encounters. Consider, for example, the case for the infallibility of university faculty members; namely, the notion that faculty are always right. How does that aphorism  work with respect to the commercialization of technology? The answer, of course, depends on whom you ask.

By all accounts, the process of transforming an idea or research discovery into a viable commercial product or service is a complex one populated with numerous evaluation procedures and decision branches. Not to be too harsh on faculty, but the experience of most technology transfer and commercialization professionals is that faculty members as a general rule are not prepared to undergo such a journey and in some cases willfully subvert the process to their own disadvantage. Why would anyone behave in such a manner and what is the nature of that behavior and their ignorance?

Yesterday I read a posting in Facebook that was extremely critical of a local entrepreneur CEO who had committed to spend four hours a week acting as a mentor for other entrepreneurs. The commentator was hard on the CEO, suggesting that a CEO who did something like this would not be backed by investors. As I read this post, I was dismayed for a few reasons. First, I like the CEO personally and think he is a solid guy. Second, I thought that the commentary was just wrong. As an investor, I thought that it was timely for me to weigh in on the big issue that lurked behind the commentary -- how committed should an entrepreneur be to his startup?

The place to begin is to acknowledge a few home truths. The first is that entrepreneurship, particularly, startup entrepreneurship is a 24/7 job. It is not something that should be done lightly or without passion. Successful entrepreneurs make their startup business their number one priority. This happens because of some of the key behavioral aspects of entrepreneurial behavior: passion for the entrepreneurial journey, optimism and a belief that an entrepreneur's own efforts can change the surrounding world in a material way. The net result of this is that successful entrepreneurs tend to give the appearance of monomania and single mindedness.

European Innovation Academy Winter Session which was located in the heart of Estonia - Tallinn, brought together 100 students from 30 different countries. The goal of the European Innovation Academy Winter was to design new business models during five days and to develop them to global level.

The main aim of European Innovation Academy is to unleash the entrepreneurial potential of young change makers by building their collective intelligence to co-create new ventures and stimulate innovation.

The first European Innovation Academy took place in the summer of 2012. The winner of the first Academy is now a wellknown start-up LifeinU who is heading to US, Silicon Valley, to take part of the training programm carried out by the world famous Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs.

In the new reality for life sciences companies - one where the product development formula of the past no longer applies, where extensive M&A activity is needed to fill pipelines and mitigate risk, and where an increasing amount of attention and opportunity lie in emerging markets - prudent measures and strategic solutions are critical to succeed. Yet with all this change and uncertainty comes an immeasurable amount of opportunity.

Beyond the costs to develop new drugs and treatments, facility and real estate costs are among the highest expenses for life sciences companies, and are therefore top of mind as the industry refocuses and reprioritizes. The industry is challenged by the conflicting need to right size in mature markets, where sales and demand are waning and where M&A activity oftentimes results in excess or duplicative facilities, while strategically growing in emerging clusters in order to capture market share and savings opportunities. More than ever, it is essential to achieve the ideal portfolio balance, with the proper size and type of facilities in the right locations. Given that the industry is contracting in mature markets, creatively positioning dispositions and knowing how and when to hit the market, can greatly impact the timeline, and thus expense, of divestiture. Additionally, knowing in which locations to maintain and expand operations has major bearing on the ability to capitalize on skilled labor force and fiscal resources, and thus, efficiently achieve new product breakthroughs.

Even when your startup is a one-man show and lots of fun, a “business” needs some discipline and controls to keep it from being defined as a hobby by investors, and assure some financial return. Like it or not, you are now entering the dreaded realm of specifying and documenting “formal business processes.” The right question is “What is the minimum that I need?”

The simple answer is that you need to implement one process at a time, starting with those things that are most critical to your business, until you feel a relief that things are starting to happen naturally and consistently, without the attendant stress and continual recovery mode. If you feel that the process itself is a burden, you have likely gone too far.

As the nation's economy continues its sluggish recovery, community colleges have emerged as important engines for entrepreneurial activity and job creation. An innovative new program, created and proven in a community college in northeastern Ohio, is hitting the road to help schools and the communities they serve to launch and grow technology-based startups.

Innovation Fund America (IFA), a 501(c)3 partnership between Lorain County Community College (LCCC) in Elyria, Ohio, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, has selected Long Beach (Calif.) Community College, Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan., and Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, N.C., as the first schools to pilot its program that invests in, mentors and motivates high-growth entrepreneurs.

That the country needs more science, technology, engineering, and math graduates is a common refrain, but there has been little consensus about how to achieve this goal, and recent announcements from two public universities showcase very different strategies.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced Thursday a plan to dedicate $1.5 billion to growing the science, technology, engineering, and math programs at the University of Connecticut. The money will be used to hire more faculty members, enroll more students, build new STEM facilities and dorms, and create new doctoral fellowships and a STEM honors program.

The proposal, called Next Generation Connecticut, spans UConn’s three campuses. If the program passes the state legislature, it would increase the number of engineering undergraduates enrolled by 70 percent and the number of STEM graduates by 47 percent. UConn currently enrolls 7,701 undergraduates and 1,973 graduate students in STEM fields. It would also fund the hiring of 259 new faculty members, 200 of whom would be in the STEM fields.