Another once-great company with a market-dominating product may be in danger of becoming extinct. This time it's Research in Motion, the Waterloo, Ontario-based maker the BlackBerry line of mobile devices. Yesterday RIM announced a $518 million quarterly loss, the elimination of 5,000 jobs and the delay for the release of the BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

These are all blows to a company that created the pioneer phone of the mobile industry.

But the turbulence isn’t the result of some recent and sudden market shift. RIM's slide can be traced to a number of missteps made by its managers over several years. Here's a look at four of those ill-fated decisions and the lessons that entrepreneurs can learn from them:

One of the foundational principles in organizations is the notion of the hierarchy. Efficient organizations need an efficient chain of command. Well-managed organizations require the supervision of trained managers running their departments and reporting upward to more senior decision makers. While there is raging debate about how deep or wide the structure of an organization should be, few would argue that the hierarchy should be scrapped all together. For all their efficiencies, hierarchies turn out to be remarkably inefficient when organizations are trying to leverage creative ideas and increase their innovation.

For ages, the most important asset an entrepreneur could have is a spouse with health insurance. That's about to change as more corporate employees feel free to go freelance. You think there's a war for talent now? If Obamacare works--now that the Supreme Court has found the Affordable Care Act constitutional--Corporate America is going to face turnover unlike any it's ever seen before. Be honest: How many working parents do you know who would ditch their corporate jobs if they thought they could buy decent health insurance for their families in the individual marketplace? What if they didn't have to worry that their kid seems to have asthma and might not be insurable, or that the kidney stone their spouse dealt with six years ago will make it impossible to buy a family policy?

We set out with a few simple questions: how are business startups going from the idea phase to real action and implementation? How does place -- the physical location of this conversion of ideas into action -- have an impact on entrepreneurship? And where can we track this relatively new phenomena as it happens?

For this special report we picked Detroit, Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids and asked our writers to dig into these questions.

In Detroit, social entrepreurship is spreading like wildfire, but nowhere is it more visible than at downtown's M@dison building, a property developed by Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball franchise and, perhaps most important to this story, a principal in Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that funds start-up and early-stage technology companies in the city.

After going without food for 18 hours, most of us would rather reach for French fries or chicken fingers than green beans or carrots, according to a new study from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab.

The study, published June 25 in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, found that 75 percent of participants placed on an 18-hour fast started their next meal with a starch or a protein rather than a vegetable, compared with 44 percent of non-fasting participants.

And most of the calories consumed during that meal came from whichever food they ate first — participants consumed about 47 percent more calories from the first food they ate compared with other foods.

The healthcare industry has been growing faster than any other industry in the American economy — even during the Great Recession.

But where are the jobs? And what level of education do they require?

A new detailed study on the healthcare industry in all 50 states conducted by the Center on Education and the Workforce by Georgetown University shows that between 2010 and 2020, the states that will have the largest number of healthcare job openings are California, Texas, New York, Florida and Ohio. Here is the breakdown:

ENTREPRENEUR – What the hell does it really mean and what right do you have to call yourself one… and how is the blatant promotion of ‘go-it-aloneship’ affecting the SA digital industry?

Entrepreneur. It’s a word we see and hear bandied about everywhere at the moment, everyone is one, or is being told they should be one. If you do a quick search on Twitter as to the number of people who include the title of ‘entrepreneur’ in their profile, it’s a wonder how the global economy is in such a precarious position given how many of these ‘entrepreneurs’ are broadcasting their self-proclaimed brilliant existence.

If your startup is great enough to get a term sheet from angel investors or a venture capitalist, the next step for the investor is to complete the dreaded due diligence process. This is the last step of the process, where surprises in the evaluation of the management team, documentation, and personnel problems can derail the investment.

Some startups do nothing to prepare for the due diligence process, assuming the people and business plan documents will speak for themselves. Others stage elaborate “training” sessions, to “assure” that everyone tells the same story. The right answer is somewhere in between.

If you’re like most small business owners, you’ve invested a sizable chunk of your company’s time and money into recruiting, onboarding, and training employees.  Naturally, you do not want to lose good people — because then your investment is wasted.  On top of that your business may be plunged into a mini-crisis by losing a great performer who is difficult to replace.

But the question on the minds of small business owners like me is, what exactly does it take to attract and retain good employees today?  And can small employers compete with large employers able to offer bigger financial packages?

More than 76 percent of the patents awarded to the nation’s top 10 research universities last year had a foreign-born scientist listed as an inventor.

That’s according to the Partnership for a New American Economy, which analyzed 1,500 patents awarded in 2011 to the top 10 patent-producing universities in the U.S. The organization, which is composed of mayors and business leaders, contends this finding demonstrates the need to reform our immigration policies to allow more of these foreign-born inventors to remain in the United States.

Before Hacker News, and the wealth of Paul Graham essays that came with it, there was, for me, ignorance.

Of course, I'd heard about the "dotcom boom", and, being a geek, I stayed relatively on the bleeding edge of tools and web-based startups. Hell, I even knew about Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. But the landscape of "learning about startups" was largely made up of the typical books you find in your average library, about "how to deal with your company finances", "10 steps to marketing success" and other dispiriting works, along with more inspiring but largely useless biographies of successful businessmen.

So, when I stumbled upon this treasure trove of startup lore, it shaped my view of entrepreneurship for years to come. Thank you, Paul, for putting so much valuable insight online.

Why do skateboarders grind on railings? Was it part of an evolution of the sport, from backyard pools to urban landscapes? Sure. Was it a ridiculous idea from a skateboarder who preferred to risk life and limb, sliding down a rail rather than face certain death taking the stairs on a skateboard, again? Probably.

Now, recent Royal College of Art graduate Po-Chih Lai has designed a skateboard that can cruise down stairs without a second thought. Called the Stair Rover, it’s the semi of skateboards, an 8-wheeled beast that’s quite literally “rocking” an aluminum Y-frame to transform stairs into a passive-propelling landscape.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has looked at a lot of different ways to get the most bang for every buck it puts into global health. Now its new global health leader, Trevor Mundel, says he hopes to do that by making more equity investments in biotech companies.

Mundel, a former Novartis executive, said this week in an interview with the Financial Times that the foundation plans to take equity stakes in as many as a dozen biotech companies, which will likely get a few million dollars each.

China needs policies to support venture capital investment to transform its growth model, a senior official with the nation's securities regulator said Thursday.

Xie Geng, director of the market supervision department at the China Securities Regulatory Commission, told a financial forum that the nation's reliance on investment as a key driver of growth is unsustainable over the long term.

"China needs to transform its growth model," Mr. Xie said.

Much has been made of and discussed about the JOBS act that was signed into law back in April 2012, and the impact it will have in vitalizing the funding of start-up businesses by allowing regular Americans to directly buy equity or debt in companies that they believe in. Already the passage of the law and the pending regulations that will be released by the Security and Exchange Commission in the coming months have led to a flood of new crowdfunding sites emerging onto the scene.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) released a report on the significant economic impact of university and nonprofit institution patent licensing on the U.S. economy between 1996 and 2012. According to The Economic Contribution of University/Nonprofit Inventions in the United States: 1996-2010, the economic impact data related to patent licensing from university and nonprofit institutions indicated:

• The impact on U.S. gross industry output is as much as $836 billion; 
• The impact on U.S. gross domestic product is as much as $388 billion; 
• University and nonprofit licensing supported as many as 3 million jobs; 
• and, In 2010 alone, academic and nonprofit research institutions spun out approximately 651 new companies.

Starting a company can be a long, hard slog, with many opportunites to quit along the way. But as Mobile Posse founder Jon Jackson discovered, sometimes persistence pays off.

Jackson last week raised a $5 million Series C round to continue his company’s new strategy of using idle mobile phone screens to deliver ads and information to users.

The Ohio Board of Regents today issued a comprehensive report on commercialization efforts, making recommendations to improve the technology transfer pipeline to turn research innovation into the next great products and services in the market. The Condition of Higher Education in Ohio: Advancing Ohio’s Innovation Economy, report was crafted with participation of hundreds of business and higher education leaders, university and community college presidents, Ohio’s top researchers, finance and venture capital representatives, key industry CEOs, student intern researchers and others. It proposes a statewide commercialization ecosystem to create jobs, promote economic growth, and increase wealth in Ohio.

Crowdfunding won’t work for small businesses unless the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission    limits the burdens imposed on companies that use this new method of raising capital. That’s what crowdfunding experts told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during a hearing on the JOBS Act, the new law that aims to make it easier for small businesses to raise capital. Once the SEC issues regulations governing crowdfunding, small businesses will be able to use Internet intermediaries to raise up to $1 million in small investments from lots of people.

The American economy appears to be growing too slowly to pull the job market out of a slump, according to data that suggests June will be another weak month for hiring.

Applications for unemployment benefits in the latest week stayed above a level generally considered too high to lower the unemployment rate. And the annual growth rate for the January-to-March quarter was unchanged at a tepid 1.9 percent.

The two government reports released Thursday added to the picture of an economy that is faltering for the third consecutive year after a promising start. Job growth has tumbled, consumers were less confident and Europe’s financial crisis damped demand for American exports.