North Dakota voters on Tuesday will decide the fate of a ballot initiative that would make the state the first in the country to end property taxes.

If any state is going to take such a dramatic step, North Dakota would seem to be a likely candidate. North Dakota is generally a conservative state, and fiscal conservatives generally support lower taxes. The state is also experiencing a surge in tax revenue unrivaled elsewhere. The property tax is often described as the least popular of the taxes that fund state and local government.

First LinkedIn’s passwords were was hacked, then eHarmony’s. Today we found out passwords from Last.fm’s may also have been stolen.

Odds are pretty good there are more compromised site that we just don’t know about yet. So guess what it’s a good time to do?

CHANGE ALL THE PASSWORDS!

We strongly recommend coming up with a new set of passwords for the key services you use. Of course, it’s impossible to go to every site you have ever set up an account on, but it would be worth your time to change passwords on any site that has important personal or financial information on you.

*This piece was originally published, in Italian, in the exceedingly innovative (and very Italian) website “Che Futuro.”

*As somebody who spends a lot of time in non-Anglophone countries, this is a situation that I see commonly. I rarely see it as well-described as this.

*I’d be flattered if people thought I wrote this thoughtful essay, but Mark Vanderbeeken wrote it. Mark’s a Belgian guy who lives in Italy, and you can tell that because his English is so superb. I emphasize that Mark wrote it, because eager startup guys with limited English-language skills are sure to link to this blog entry, firmly agreeing with everything Mark says (because it’s true). Since this is my blog, they’ll skip over all the biased English, including this very paragraph, and they will hastily conclude that I wrote it myself. That’s part of the “bias,” you see.

Based on my own experience and feedback from friends, every investor is approached by at least ten entrepreneurs with a “hot idea” for a new business, for every one who has a real “plan” for a new business. That’s why I often say that ideas are worth nothing, until they are put in the context of a business plan and real people committed to executing the plan.

In fact, you can find websites full of ideas, like these “Free Innovative Ideas,” by serial entrepreneur Kim E. Lumbard of CalTech. Or you can find books of free ideas, like “Ideas,” by Matt Schoenherr, providing 101 great ideas for increasing your visibility and profitability. Most investors will tell you that they rarely see a new idea that they haven’t heard before.

The Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium, an initiative of the regional government of the Comunidad de Madrid, through the madri+d Foundation in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), launches IDEA2 Madrid, a program designed to help the Madrid's emerging biomedical innovators and entrepreneurs refine their project ideas and connect with the expertise to help realize them. Its mission is to help turn new ideas into real products and successful business ventures, and to strengthen the community's innovation ecosystem. Experts from the United States and Europe meet these days during the Biomedical Innovation Conference "Building High Performance Innovation Ecosystems" to share their experiences in the establishment of high performance innovation ecosystems.

According to Karl Koster, executive director at the MIT Office of Corporate Relations, "it takes many different kinds of expertise to turn great ideas into real technologies and successful businesses. In a healthy innovation ecosystem, researchers, entrepreneurs, and end-users build on one another's ideas by identifying potential problems and solutions so there is an end-to-end dialog about how to make an impact. It also helps avoid the problem of engineering a solution that has meets no real-world need".

There are limited places left for the WIN Training of the World Incubator Network:

"Internationalize Your Incubator or Accelerator –Effective instruments for internationalization of your services and tenants."

The training takes place on Monday 2^nd and Tuesday 3^rd July 2012, at Biopark Genopole in Paris, France.
For high-tech start-ups, internationalization is the best way to make a growth-jump and turn into a ‘gazelle’ or global innovator. 

To facilitate this, incubators and accelerators can develop specific internationalization strategies and services that can make this growth-jump faster and more smoothly.

During the training, our experts will share their knowledge and provide you with insights on how to effectively organize your internationalization strategy.

Join us at Genopole and gain valuable insights on internationalization strategies and exiting networking opportunities.

The experts that will attend in Paris are:

• Klaus Plate: President of the Advisory Board of the World Incubator Network, Heidelberg, Germany
• Gabriel Mergui:  Managing Director of the International Department of Genopole, Paris, France
• Eric Lameignère:  Business Development Director of Genopole, Paris, France
• Dennis Lucquin:  Managing Partner and Chairman of Sofinnova Partners, Paris, France
• Ken Larkin: Business Development Manager of the London Bioscience Innovation Centre, London, United Kingdom
• Keith Segerson: Managing Director of the Mason Enterprise Center, Greater Washington, USA

For the complete program and registration please visit our website: www.worldincubator.net

Register now for the 2^nd World Incubator Network training and optimize the internationalization of your services and tenants !

We look forward to welcome you in Paris,

The WIN-Team

For cardiac patients, repair of defects often requires open-heart surgery and temporary paralysis of the organ. But a set of robotic tools developed by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital could eventually enable surgeons to operate on the heart through small incisions while the heart continues to beat. 

The use of small incisions and the insertion of robotic tools are increasingly common in many types of surgery. Such so-called minimally invasive surgery offers quicker recovery times than conventional surgery and reduced risk of infection, because the cuts in the body are much smaller. In the case of minimally invasive cardiac surgery, robotic tools have had to be delivered by catheters—smooth, flexible tubes that can carry, for example, an artery-opening stent. But because they are flexible, catheters can deliver only small amounts of force and can be difficult to position precisely.

Many people have pre-IPO stock, but don’t know they can sell it before their company goes public. Depending upon the restrictions in the stock agreement, employees can often sell their stock. Companies like SharesPost Financial Corporation are helping sellers sell their shares and access liquidity with confidence.

SharesPost Financial Corporation is a registered broker dealer that gives pre-IPO shareholders the access they need to sell their shares on the dynamic secondary market.

Founded in 2009, SharesPost is a market for today’s fastest-growing companies. SharesPost offers shareholders the largest network of investors to access liquidity.

When I was a kid growing up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I would sometimes ask my dad what he did for a living.  And each time he would reply the same.  “I’m an entrepreneur,” he would say proudly.  “Look it up.”  So I did.  The dictionary defined an entrepreneur as “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”  My dad was right – he was an entrepreneur.  And a lousy one at that.

He raised money from investors and for years worked out of his home (and this was before working from one’s home was acceptable) where he supervised a handful of misfit and quirky programmers who worked odd hours developing a bookkeeping application based on a patent he held in his name.  Until the money ran out.  And when that happened he took his unfinished product to market where he suffered painful project after painful project.  And (of course) he timed his product launch perfectly with Intuit’s latest iteration of QuickBooks, which was infinitely better, faster, more reliable and cheaper than his.

A report released today by Amgen Canada and Let's Talk Science reveals that creating a large pool of science-based talent is crucial to keeping Canada competitive and Canadians employed.

The report reveals that while Canadian students perform well in national and international tests, there is a huge drop-off in the uptake of science and math courses once they are no longer compulsory, usually after grade 10, and the proportion of students studying these courses in colleges and universities remains flat.

Given our needs as a nation - from filling employment shortages, being more innovative, and growing as a knowledge economy - more needs to be done to attract and retain students in science programs from high school right through to post-secondary if we are to fill the jobs of the future.

Sir Peter Gluckman, chief science adviser to the Prime Minister, argues that by 2022 New Zealand must be continuing to build a small advanced economy that bases its development on science-

based innovation.

We can generally agree on the New Zealand we want - a high standard 

of living for all, greater societal cohesion, and achievement of necessary 

economic growth without significant harm to our environment.

But in

 achieving these goals there must inevitably be trade-offs.

Sustaining 

40% more people on the planet, many demanding far better standards 

of living, will inevitably involve more energy consumption, more 

food production and more resource use.

MILWAUKEE – A company that has developed a mechanism to change how wheelchairs are propelled by their users won the grand prize in the 2012 Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest, organizers announced Wednesday.

RoWheels, led by Rimas Buinevicius and Jan Moen of Madison, worked with a NASA engineer to create a geared wheeling system that allows a wheelchair to be pulled forward by its user rather than the traditional pushing motion. The technology requires less effort by users while reducing strain on shoulders, joints and muscles.

“The primary reason we took this project on was the ability to build it in Wisconsin with manufacturing expertise we already have here,” said Buinevicius, who spent eight weeks in a wheelchair following an accident. Salim Nasser, a NASA space engineer, drew on 15 years of experience in a wheelchair to help design the mechanism.

The RoWheels was the first-place winner in the Advanced Manufacturing category of the contest. Other category winners were:

Karl Moore is an Internet entrepreneur and the author of five bestselling books. His newest book,The Secret Art of Self-Development is about how you need to think to be successful. Many people don't go for their personal or professional dreams because they're limited by the past, Moore says.

Over the past few months there have been several new strategies and reports published by states, regions and think tanks regarding the BioEconomy.  We are at the start of the next phase of economic development investments in the sector, which I think is BioEconomy 2.0. BioEconomy in this context refers to a variety of similar terms used by economic developers including life sciences and biosciences.

The first phase of activities began around 1999 when states such as Pennsylvania launched their life science initiatives utilizing a portfolio approach to investing in infrastructure, research and development, venture capital and regional innovation clusters. Their work inspired several states to launch similar efforts including Massachusetts, California, Texas and others to varying degrees.

In the push towards an innovation economy, universities are increasingly looked to as a driver of economic development activity. The focus on university – industry partnerships is at an all time high. For decades, however, a consistent criticism of academia is that it operates in silos, causing interactions with industry to be a challenging, if not frustrating experience.

According to the Association of University Technology Managers, universities filed over 12,000 patents and generated $2.4 billion in total licensing income in 2010. Simultaneous to this activity, universities generated $4.3 billion in industry sponsored research. While these figures are impressive, one might speculate whether the impact could have been significantly greater if the management of these two efforts were integrated.

MACKINAC ISLAND – The Michigan Economic Development Corporation at the Mackinac Policy Conference this week announced five new initiatives under the Pure Michigan Business Connect umbrella that will further help Michigan businesses grow and improve the state’s economy.

“These additions to Pure Michigan Business Connect significantly expand our economic gardening toolkit to grow our state’s economy,” said MEDC President and CEO Michael A. Finney. “Pure Michigan Business Connect provides new ways for companies to collaborate, create and take advantage of new growth opportunities.  This is an essential tool as we reinvent the way business is done here.”

The Kansas City Bioscience Authority (KBA) has launched a collaborative partnership of more than 90 contract research organizations (CROs) to help the region compete in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. BioResearch Central will help promote the Greater Kansas City region as a destination for pharmaceutical R&D at a time when drug companies are increasingly looking overseas for their contract research needs. The announcement follows the release of a KBA commissioned study that suggests pharmaceutical contract research is a $90-$105 billion industry in the U.S., much larger than previous estimates.

BioResearch Central will attempt to link the Kansas City region's CROs and related service providers to build a nationally-recognized research network, providing a wide spectrum of services for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The CROs involved in the network provide a wide spectrum of research services, including drug discovery, toxicology, bioanalysis, clinical trials, and regulatory and commercial support. These companies currently generate almost $1 billion in annual revenue and employ more than 9,000 people in the Greater Kansas City region. The new network will help accelerate and improve the product development process by finding the right providers for specific research. It will also facilitate knowledge transfer and connections between the partner organizations.

Henry Chesbrough is the key-speaker at the 14th B2B Marketing Conference on 5th june 2012 and on this occasion, the Social Economic Council of Flanders had an interview for the SERV-magazine of June 2012. In recognition of his contribution to the Flemish debate on open innovation, we publish here the English version.

Henry Chesbrough, worldwide known for his pioneering work on open innovation, published recently a new book titled Open Service Innovation. Key to innovation is 'think of your business as a service business' or 'make your product a service'.

Telephone switchboard operators are a thing of the past—the kind of job we only encounter in black-and-white movies. And just as technology and automation rendered those workers obsolete, in the modern age, it's also eradicating all sorts of other jobs; bank tellers, toll booth operators, and pharmacy clerks all may soon be a distant memory. We’re already starting to self-checkout at the grocery store, put in our own orders at McDonald's—and watch robots make our sushi.

At Foxconn, the world's leading electronics manufacturer that currently employs 1.2 million workers and 10,000 robots, humans are rapidly being replaced. Over the next three years, it plans to up the number of androids to 500,000.

St. Louis, MO, June 06, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Cultivation Capital will designate up to $500,000 for the most promising companies in each of the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 classes of Capital Innovators startup companies. This would be a follow-on investment to the $50,000 each company receives from Capital Innovators. Both firms working together expect this to boost graduating companies that are ready to take their products and services to a wider audience.

Graduates will receive full consideration for investment with a round of due diligence performed by Cultivation Capital on every company.