A new partnership between the University of Michigan’s tech transfer office and the Michigan Venture Capital Association (MVCA) aims to increase the commercialization of university technology by granting members of the MVCA access to UM-based research and start-ups.

The Intelligent Community Forum announced the opening of nominations for its 2013 Intelligent Community of the Year award.  The New York-based think thank, which has named the world’s Intelligent Community of the Year since 1999, has posted a nomination form at www.intelligentcommunity.org/nominations. Nominations will close on September 21, 2012.

The awards program salutes the accomplishments of communities in developing inclusive prosperity on a foundation of information and communications technology. Communities large and small, urban and rural, in developing and industrialized nations are invited to apply.  Nominations on behalf of communities are accepted from local governments, institutions, for-profit companies, national government agencies, consular offices, as well as individuals.  

How many times has pressure worked in your favor? Or is it the calmer moments that serve you better? Creativity tends to show up when you make room for it.

A Little Pressure For Your Plans

It’s funny how deadlines tend to heat things up and you create and finish what you’ve been putting off for days or months.

Let me put it this way: if you have forever to complete a task, it will probably take you forever to get it done. But add a deadline that you respect to that and things will start moving. You could finish that book in a year or six months if you had to. If it’s the right kind of pressure, chances are you will rise to the occasion, and create all kinds of unique solutions along the way.

Entrepreneurs usually sprout ideas from what they know best—current occupations, lifetime hobbies, subjects they’ve unknowingly studied for so long before starting up. Most of the time, they know who their target audience is.  Which is why they feel so comfortable when taking such a big risk in order to serve them with something new.

If that target audience is located nowhere near your current headquarters, the leap into entrepreneurship may require relocation a brand new region. Whether just across town, to other side of the country or onto a different continent, launching or expanding into previously uncharted lands can be daunting.

Innovative American businesses and entrepreneurs may no longer have to send their ideas off to Washington D.C. and wait years for patent approval. The US Commerce Department has announced plans to open four regional patent offices in order to clear out the backlog of patent applications and to help spur innovation and growth among American businesses.

Some critics may not agree with the added expense of the satellite offices, but lawmakers from both sides of the aisle backed the idea of adding satellite offices last year because of the overwhelming amount of patent applications currently awaiting approval. With the new offices, the US Patent and Trademark Office hopes to work through the applications more quickly and get the nation’s innovative companies and individuals back on track. They also hope the extra offices will help businesses to protect their intellectual property and hopefully to create some jobs in the process.

Americans love fast food.

The top 15 fast food chains in the nation raked in a combined $115 billion in sales last year, and their 105,000 total stores blanket the landscape.

We asked food industry research firm Technomic to put together a list of the biggest fast food brands in America.

They're defined as LSRs — "limited service restaurants" — which include burger joints, sandwich shops, coffee cafés, pizza places and more.

There are tons of startups, but few are industry changers. Some entrepreneurs are working to change the way we travel, pay for things, listen to music, and share news. Here are eleven innovative startups that will change the way we do things forever -- or they'll go broke trying.

One of the great symbols of US spirit has always been its small businesses. It’s one of those myths that seems to carry everywhere  including to views of us in other countries.  There are two related memes that go along with this mythic American institution that are not borne out by statistics.  The first is that small businesses are the source of employment growth in the country.  This is not true. Most small businesses that do not fail stay small.  The majority of job growth comes from medium to large businesses.  Midsize business are far more important. (Data from the BLS.) The second meme is that either too much regulation or uncertainty created by the government is causing depressed job growth.  This is simply not true either.

The city has a lot of wealthy tech players with business experience looking to give back, plus a government that is making it easy for social entrepreneurs to flourish.

Nestled away in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle may be known more for software, coffee, and drizzly weather than for startups, but it’s aiming to become the center of entrepreneurship to solve social and environmental issues.

“Seattle is interesting; it’s the number one most charitable city in the nation--meaning that largest number of people who donate money--and it has lots of new tech companies alongside established ones like Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing,” says Lindsey Engh, who works at The Hub Seattle, which rents space to startups and forms connections with investors.

Crowdfunding has had success in high-tech, where people are eager to explore new models. MedStartr is bringing this concept to healthcare where it can be particularly challenging to get a startup off the ground. They have a twist on crowdfunding to address requirements of healthcare, an increasingly popular way to raise capital for startup technologies and interesting projects. MedStartr is like most crowdfunding sites that are non-equity. They have plans later to have an equity model once SEC rules are clarified. In the meantime.

MedStartr is attempting to hit the sweet spot that crowdfunding poster child, Pebble Technology hit. That is, customers get a great deal and early access to a product. Meanwhile, the startup gets non-dilutive funding and market validation to help it grow to the next stage.

This wasn’t exactly a secret anymore, but Microsoft just officially unveiled its Bing Fund, a new angel fund and incubator program sponsored by Bing and “backed by the experience, expertise, and resources of Microsoft.” The idea here, says Microsoft, is to “partner with like-minded entrepreneurs—great talent that is innovating online to solve big problems and create amazing new experiences.” The fund is looking for startups that focus on mobile and web experiences and which provide “both inspirational vision” and the “ability to execute.”

Microsoft also recommends that the startups that plan to apply for this program already have a working prototype and a broad plan for how to tackle the problem they are trying to solve and what the market for their products looks like.

Compared to previous generations, Millennials seem to have some very different habits that have taken both established companies and small businesses by surprise. One of these is that Generation Y doesn't seem to enjoy purchasing things.

The Atlantic's article "Why Don't Young Americans Buy Cars?" mused recently about Millennials' tendency to not care about owning a vehicle. The subtitle: "Is this a generational shift, or just a lousy economy at work?"

What are the elements of a start-up community?  What can you do to startup a start-up community in your city, or help it do more—faster?

Venture investor Brad Feld (Foundry Group, Boulder, Colorado, co-founder of Tech Stars, blogger Feld Thoughts) writes about these subjects in his other blog StartUp Communities with his new book titled ‘Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City,’ to be published in the fall of 2012.  You can read his first draft, outline here.

If you don’t know Brad, he was and remains the protagonist and instigator that transformed Boulder from a sleepy Rocky Mountain hippie town into one of the most vibrant entrepreneurial tech start-up communities in the United States.  It is his individual contributions to this success that makes Brad’s advice sought by investors, government policy makers and entrepreneurs from around the world.

If you ever thought pitching a VC was hard, maybe you should try giving your talk to a pack of grandmothers who aren’t afraid to ask tough questions.

Among the most popular events happening today at Montreal’s International Startup Festival is the “Grandmothers” pitch tent, where seven grandmas quiz startup founders on their businesses. Whether they asked “Are you actually making money?” or “What is cloud computing?”, watching the grandmas in action proved a fun exercise to see if founders could talk to folks without any tech expertise.

A recent trend in the tech-startup scene is to join an incubator or startup accelerator.  These incubators promise to mentor, guide, and position early stage startups for success, and in return, they receive 4% – 7% equity in the company.

But a recent article on RWW tells the story of how the majority of incubator graduates go nowhere.

If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur, is it worth it to join an incubator that is NOT Y Combinator or Tech Stars?

I recently met a graduate from a startup incubator located in New York.  The girl I met (Karen) is smart, motivated, and ready to do what it takes to get her startup off the ground.  Unfortunately, I learned that the incubator she joined gave her very poor advice and offered no connections to raise an Angel or Series-A round of capital after graduating.

Since my background includes software development, I often get the question about when to build a solution in-house, versus outsourcing it to a local company, near-shore service, or off-shore organization in China, India, or Eastern Europe. In the USA, “near-shore” is a euphemism for connected countries, like Mexico and Canada.

There is no simple answer to that question for all cases, but there certainly are some key considerations which will help you select the optimal solution for your case. In fact, the considerations are not unique to software development – they apply almost as well to any product or service you have:

With the possibility of broad budget cuts to discretionary programs, including scientific research, looming from Congressional sequestration early next year, research officers from public and private universities are thinking a lot about the future.

At a roundtable convened by the Science Coalition, an organization of universities dedicated to preserving federal funding for basic research, and the Association of American Universities, the officers discussed the future of pure and applied research -- and where the money will come from to pursue both.

Whenever I try to conjure up what innovation looks like, the same slideshow of images clicks across my mind: that photo of Einstein with his tongue sticking out, Edison with his light bulb, Steve Jobs onstage in his black turtleneck, introducing the latest iThing. Unoriginal and overdone, to be sure. And not all that accurate.

Because it’s not just about that romantic “ah ha!” moment in front of a chalkboard or a cocktail napkin, it’s about the nitty-gritty work that comes after the idea:  getting it accepted and implemented. Who are these faces? And, most importantly, as I’m sure you’re all asking yourselves: where do I fit in?

Every day is a battle for productivity when you’re a small business owner or consultant. And, if we’re being honest, productivity can be especially hard to hold on to during these warm summer months when BBQs and beach daydreams wreak havoc on our day.

If you’ve ever sat back and wondered what happened between 9-5, a new survey from the creators of OfficeTime may interest you. Here, the time tracking site polled respondents to answer the question “where does our time go” and identified some of the biggest culprits to workplace productivity.

For many of us that have been in and out of sales, tried sales short term or are truly dedicated career sales professionals, we have all had our share of the good, the bad and the ugly  ”sales manager.”

It got me thinking about what it really takes today to lead a team of salespeople through harder times, more difficult selling environments and the new marketing tools we all must use now.