A new voyage into “chemical space” – occupied not by stars and planets but substances that could become useful in everyday life – has concluded that scientists have synthesized barely one tenth of 1 percent of the potential medicines that could be made. The report, in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, estimates that the actual number of these so-called “small molecules” could be 1 novemdecillion (that’s 1 with 60 zeroes), 1 million billion billion billion billion billion billion, which is more than some estimates of the number of stars in the universe.

The European Union is struggling towards a reform of its complex, costly patent system with unified application process (in most member-states), and steps towards a more efficient court system.

Following its conference on international IP reform May 7 in the US Congress, Science|Business is launching a study of the innovation impact of these changes to provide an overview of the reforms, and begin examining their meaning for industry and academia.

It's one of the hardest things in the world to do, probably because it runs so counter to our powerful and primal need to feel safe, loved, and successful.

For most of my life, I prided myself on relentless perseverance in the face of obstacles, and a refusal to give up on any goal or client I was pursuing. Letting go felt like failure or rejection, and both were nearly unbearable to me.

"Language learning is like learning how to cook or how to surf," says Voxy founder Paul Gollash. It’s not something that is best learned in a classroom.

He’s right. I learned more French on a short visit to Paris than I did during four semesters in high school. But you can't travel to a foreign country whenever you want to learn a new language. That’s why Gollash started Voxy, a suite of mobile and browser applications designed to teach English to Spanish and Portuguese speakers through experience, not static exercises. Since its launch in September 2010, Gollash says Voxy has amassed a million and a half users, including tens of thousands of paying premium customers.

There are lists of the best places to get a job, retire, ski, golf and fall in love, best places lists for almost everything. We think any best place worth traveling to should have one quality above others: culture.

To help create our list, we asked the geographic information systems company Esri to search its data bases for high concentrations of museums, historic sites, botanic gardens, resident orchestras, art galleries and other cultural assets common to big cities. But we focused on towns with populations less than 25,000, so travelers could experience what might be called enlightened good times in an unhurried, charming setting. We also tried to select towns ranging across the lower 48.

Wade Eyerly says the idea for Surf Air began as something of a joke.

Prior to leading the start-up, he served, among other things, as an economist to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff covering Europe and NATO, and as a press advance to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004. During that time, he traveled 27 days a month.

His brother Dave previously trained as a pilot at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, then went on to work for the Transportation Security Administration and as a manager of the Dallas Fort-Worth airport for Frontier Airlines.

The ISPIM 2012 conference offers the unique opportunity to engage in a “local open innovation” experience. During the ISPIM Seeks Solutions workshop, participants will collaborate in solving problems related to the practice of innovation management.

Discover the problems that have been selected at https://www.quebec-solutions.com/EventDetails.aspx?eid=2&espid=2.

Prepare yourself to help Adidas, the Research foundation Mutua Terrassa, the Carleton University, the Utrecht School of the Arts and TNO to address their innovation management challenges. 

Facebook’s recent IPO is one of the most celebrated in history.  Despite the travails of its stock price since then, its early investors are now thought of as visionaries, and received handsome returns at the IPO. The company’s first angel investor, Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in 2004, sold a third of his stake for $640 million.  Mark Pincus cashed out $38 million after a $40,000 investment. Yuri Milner invested in Facebook only three years ago, when it was worth $15 billion, and has more than tripled his investment.  Facebook’s first venture capital investor, Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million seven years ago, cashed out $1.9 billion and now holds a stake worth several billion more.

As angel and venture investors seek the next Facebook amid a proliferation of innovative startups, increasing valuations, and a stampede of investors to seed and early stage opportunities, I am delighted to invite you to an important new industry conference on the future of financing at a highly discounted rate for active, professional angel investors.

Rich Bendis and Dr. Mark Rohrbaugh will discuss a new Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program financed by BioHealth Innovation (BHI) which places a full-time, experienced, serial entrepreneur inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Technology Transfer. This EIR is designed to be an active partner with research institutions to source, fund, and grow high-potential, early-stage products through project-focused companies. The entrepreneurs in the program support the formation of new companies based upon innovative discoveries in the areas of drugs, vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical devices from the intramural research programs at the NIH and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as from universities and businesses. The EIR will find, evaluate, and support the development of new start-up companies based upon technology license agreements from technology transfer offices or equivalent units within the research institutions.

BHI, a new regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, announced on March 26, 2012 its selection of Todd Chappell as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) for BHI at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). Mr. Chappell, a venture capital-backed entrepreneurial leader and inventor with more than ten years of experience in molecular biology research, drug development and life sciences business strategy, will help support the development of new start-up companies based upon OTT technology license agreements. As the first EIR, Mr. Chappell – who will have dual responsibility to both BHI and NIH – will assist OTT in the evaluation of existing technologies, provide an entrepreneurial perspective to OTT in its evaluation of new licensing proposals from start-up companies, advise OTT on opportunities for new ventures based on NIH/Food & Drug Administration (FDA) technologies, assist with developmental strategies, and mentor scientists to help ensure their research becomes commercially valuable.

Remember just a decade ago when the term "inner city" basically meant "dead city," conjuring up images of destruction, dereliction and despair? Today, inner cities are "in" — innovative, hip hotbeds of convenient culture, commerce and connection. Scholars such as Richard Florida and Edward Glaeser, among others, are showing that although increasing problems accompany increasing density, urban access to the good things of life increases even faster. The centripetal force of today's cities is pulling the ambitious and educated back in, and increasing cities' innovative capacity, without sacrificing (at least some would argue) their inclusiveness.

Entrepreneurs, too, are moving downtown: London, Boston, Barcelona and Buenos Aires are balancing the suburban pull of Silicon Valley and Route 128. Venture capitalists are close behind. Smart mayors, such as Boston's Mayor Menino and New York's Mayor Bloomberg, are fostering holistic entrepreneurship ecosystems to strengthen and accelerate the trend. Nor do you have to be a mammoth metropolis to have an urban entrepreneurship policy: led by Mayor Jorge Rojas, this month a dozen public and private institutions in the city of Manizales, known throughout Colombia for its concentration of universities and safe environment, in partnership with the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project, launched a four-year initiative to dramatically increase the concentration of high growth entrepreneurship in the city.

I hear some form of the following question frequently from founders that are starting to have early success:

“How do we hire a bunch of new people and grow the company quickly without losing the culture we’ve worked so hard to establish?”

I’ve been fascinated by different company cultures for as long as I can remember and I love asking entrepreneurs to describe the culture of their companies.  Over time I’ve come to realize that when you break down culture descriptions you’ll often find a mix of two components:  values and vibe.  Although each component can have a significant impact on the overall feel of a company, the way you establish and manage the two should be different.

Companies today are paranoid, afraid that even their friends will steal their business. Yet a creative collaboration with your biggest competitor may be the best opportunity for revenue and survival. But remember that “dancing with the wolves” can also get you eaten for lunch. You have to take the risk, but keep your wits about you.

Your goal is “coopetition” - to find a way to partner with your competitor in such a way that both parties can substantially benefit from the other's resources - without stealing customers or damaging anyone's credibility. It’s a great survival strategy for small companies or entrepreneurs, and a good expansion strategy for even the largest companies.

It is well known that intrinsic motivation–the kind that comes from working with a task because it’s interesting, involving and challenging–has the strongest relationship with individual creativity. Extrinsic motivation–especially based on monetary rewards–has a detrimental effect on creativity. But is this really true? In this article, we’ll explore how to reward creativity and realize that everything may not be as it seems.

Unraveling the relationships between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic rewards, and their link to creativity poses quite the challenge. But let’s first begin with what we do know.

26-year-old Nat Turner and his business partner, Zach Weinberg, sold ad tech company Invite Media to Google in 2010 for $81 million. This Friday, the pair are quitting Google to begin a new startup in health care. Turner just posted the news on his blog. In the post, he admits ad tech was never his true passion:

The certificate is the odd man out in the debate over college completion. But the rarely discussed and little-understood certificate is the fastest-growing form of college credential, and a key component of work force development and the “completion agenda.”

Those were among the findings of a new report, released today by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, that found that certificates make up 22 percent of all college awards, up from 6 percent in 1980.

This is one of the most commonly asked questions posted by entrepreneurs and owners of young businesses in the SBA Community. And, in most cases, the answer is “no.” However, some small businesses, particularly those engaged in “high-tech” innovation or scientific research and development, can benefit from government grants.

Here are some facts about government grants for small businesses, including who is eligible and how you can go about finding them:

Can I Get a Government Grant to Start a Business?

The words innovation and government may not be synonymous, but “the times, they are a-changin.”

Last month, the White House launched a Presidential Innovation Fellows program that will bring in 15 innovators from outside government to provide expertise on five technology projects.  

The announcement spurred two distinct reactions. The cynics, of course, rolled their eyes. The enthusiasts sent in their applications.

Within 24 hours of the announcement, more than 600 people applied to come to Washington for at least six months to work with federal employees on projects aimed at making government more effective and more accountable.

Someone recently asked what it felt like to run a startup. It’s an interesting question, because you constantly get peppered with advice on how to choose your partners, what sins to avoid committing, and what events to go to but never get told how you’ll feel.

It’s not an easy subject to tackle with any brevity — emotions are, after all, complex — but I’ve given it my best shot.

First off, it’s very tough to sleep most nights of the week. Weekends don’t mean anything to you anymore. Closing a round of financing is not a relief. It means more people are depending on you to turn their investment into 20 times what they gave you.

When Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning first teamed up in the late 1990s, they changed the way people share and discover music, with Napster. They're hoping to be similarly disruptive with their new startup, Airtime, which lets users conduct video chats with Facebook friends and like-minded strangers over the Web.

Parker and Fanning, who themselves met in an online chat room, unveiled the service Tuesday at a New York event that included celebrity guests and technical glitches, as several attempts at Airtime calls failed in front of the crowd. Airtime, which requires users to have a Facebook account and a computer with a webcam, has long been in the works, with little known about it previously beyond that it would be a social video company.

If you want to get your malicious software loaded on 1,000 U.S. computers, it will cost you about $100, or a dime each, on the black market. Getting your malware on 1,000 machines in Asian countries will cost you only $5.

These infected computers—collectively known as botnets—can be used to send spam, steal passwords or other private information, and hack into corporate computer systems. Researchers estimate that five million computers around the world were infected just in the first quarter of 2012.