I read quite a lot of papers about finance and investing, but I can’t remember the last time I came across a 52-page paper which I simply devoured, avidly, reading every word, and even following the footnotes. But such is the latest publication from the Kauffman Foundation, a truly wonderful report on the foundation’s own experiences in the world of venture-capital investing. This is required reading for all institutional investors with any kind of exposure to VC, and I sincerely hope that it succeeds, at least at the margin, in forcing those institutional investors to behave a bit more like investors, and a bit less like chumps being bullied into throwing millions of dollars into a series of opaque black boxes delivering decidedly subpar returns.

The Kauffman Foundation was created to encourage entrepreneurship; its endowment currently stands at some $1.83 billion. Of that, $249 million is invested in VC and growth equity funds; the foundation has been investing in VCs for 20 years now. As a rich, long-term institutional investor devoted to the cause of early-stage companies, the Kauffman Foundation is — or should be — pretty much the perfect LP as far as VC funds are concerned. And indeed, over the years, it has invested in 100 such funds, and therefore now has a spectacular real-world backward-looking dataset of VC returns from an LP perspective.

In most businesses, the prevailing assumption is that teams are the best way for leadership groups to go when solving a problem. Whenever possible, form a team. That's what most people believed a decade ago, when Doug Smith and I wrote our book The Wisdom of Teams and a related article in HBR.

But today, with the ever-increasing necessity of working across organizational and geographical boundaries, and the growing complexity of daily business, more leaders at all levels are finding that it's not always practical — or even best — to put together a team. Fortunately, we now have more options; in particular, consider the potential of focused networks, and sub-groups that can work more effectively in different modes than "real team." For example, even when I was engaged in my earlier writing on teams, I didn't really recognize that what looked like a team was in some cases actually a set of networks and sub-units.

While everyone in the in the world of sequencing has heard this cynical joke, as an industry, the joke is about to be on us. We have focused our time, energy and investment on the ability to sequence the genome in a day, and have largely ignored the computational power required to extract and analyze the genomic data in a timeframe that keeps it relevant. This disparity creates significant risk of delay to the pace of research and creates a scenario where the joke becomes “the genome in a day but with the year-long analysis.”

The vast majority of academic and core laboratories are not prepared for the massive wave of data that will be coming off of multiple new “Genome-in-a-Day” technology offerings. Most labs are already computationally resource constrained, struggling to just store volumes of data. The average analysis pipeline of basic alignment, consensus calling, variant detection and filtering process takes 14 days, even with a large cluster for most sequencing centers. For most, the exorbitant cost of building more computing infrastructure is not a realistic short term solution and ultimately will not shorten computation time.

Coming up with the right game plan offers the best chance at success.

by Thomas S. Hartwick and Fred Patterson

If innovation is the heart of a technology company, then the game plan is the brain. One cannot succeed without both.

Flaws in innovation are rare in the United States, but game plans are always flawed, and they are usually fatally flawed—which accounts for the high rate of failure for start-up companies.

A dictum originating in the Harvard MBA training program is that “a company that prepares and follows a good game plan has the best chance for success.” Rigorously following the game plan—while continuously searching for the flaws and applying corrective action—offers a small company this best chance to succeed.

A company’s game plan, as we define it, includes the pro forma business plan, the strategic plan, and the operating or action plan. Many companies follow “how-to”-book descriptions and develop a decent pro forma business plan and short-range operating plan. But the greatest flaws for a small company lie in the strategic vision and the important future decisions that flow from strategic assessments.

One of the original digital marketing execs, GM O’Connell made some predictions in 2002 about how the internet would impact people and brands. Here, he looks back and assesses his accuracy, and, along the way, reveals some timeless truths about marketing in the digital age.

What was the world like ten years ago? It was the year the Euro went into circulation, Mark Zuckerberg was a senior in high school, and J-Lo topped the list of the hottest Google searches. “You’ve got mail” was still heard on millions of computers across the country.

An assessment of coastal change over the past century has found 70 percent of beaches on the islands of Kaua’i, O’ahu, and Maui are undergoing long-term erosion, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of Hawai’i (UH) report released today.

Scientists from the USGS and the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH studied more than 150 miles of island coastline (essentially every beach) and found the average rate of coastal change – taking into account beaches that are both eroding and accreting – was 0.4 feet of erosion per year from the early 1900s to 2000s. Of those beaches eroding, the most extreme case was nearly 6 feet per year near Kualoa Point, East O’ahu.

CNet:

The next time you find yourself pounding your keyboard in frustration because the domain name you want is already taken, direct your ire toward Mike Mann.

Mann is one of the longest members of the clubby world of domain speculators, and he’s buying up names in force these days. And not all on the aftermarket, as some others do. But new names. Dot-com names that aren’t registered — even though. 100 million-plus already are — that he then turns around and sells for a few hundred bucks, sometimes far more.

It’s a long way from an entrepreneur’s “idea” to a working product with a real market and paying customers. A necessary intermediate step for proof of concept, credibility with potential investors, and communication with your team, is a working prototype. Building a prototype should be an early and high priority task for every startup.

A prototype doesn’t need to look great, or be built to scale, but it better accurately translate your vision into something real and tangible. For less tangible products, like software, it should simulate the look and feel of the final product on relevant base hardware. Here are some key objectives to keep in mind when designing your prototype to make it attractive to investors:

Last year, Peter Theil established the Thiel Fellowship, which gives college students under the age of 20 $100,000 and two years' time to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas.

One catch, though: Thiel Fellows are required to drop out of college for the two years of the fellowship.

Is Peter Thiel's notion that some young entrepreneurs would benefit more by skipping college and starting businesses instead?

When you hear “government” and “healthcare,” you probably think Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs directed at the general public.

Wil Yu

Wil Yu, director of innovations at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, by contrast, wants to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the private sector to solve big healthcare problems.

His tools? Data liberacion and app challenges that are designed to help entrepreneurs think up and build the next innovative solution for problems facing the industry.

The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen. It was launched in 2001 in a blizzard of publicity. Yet it has failed to gain significant market acceptance and is now something of a curiosity. In this article Paul Sloane takes a look at what lessons to be learned from the failure.

The product is very clever. It works well. The company, Segway Inc., had tremendous funding and resources. The level of press and TV exposure was astounding. So what went wrong? What lessons about the success or failure of innovations can we learn?

The Huffington Post marks its seven-year anniversary this week and its founder Arianna Huffington has a lot to celebrate.

HuffPo currently gets 1.2 billion pageviews a month and has accumulated 150 million comments since its launch. While in the beginning one of the challenges for HuffPo was sifting through and moderating the floods of comments, now about 90 percent of the comments are let through.

The publication is about to launch in a number of other countries, including Germany, Brazil and Japan, and start an online video channel to rival broadcast TV stations.

When it goes public, about 1,000 current and former Facebook employees will become millionaires.

Many of those millionaires are spending money on other startups, giving founders capital to get new ideas off the ground.

We scrolled through a bunch of the early Facebook employees and found where they've made angel investments. Zuckerberg has only personally invested in one startup. If he's invested in more, they haven't been named publicly.

It's a long-held assumption that human performance fits a normal (or Gaussian) distribution — a bell curve in which only a very small number of people are outliers.

Consequently human resource managers usually work from the idea that in most activities, although there are a few people that are very good and a few people that are very bad, most are about average.

A new study provides evidence that individual performance doesn't fit on a bell curve (with its stable average and limited variance), but follows a distribution in which the average is unstable, the variance is infinite and the prevalence of outliers is much higher.

With technological advancements in developing nations speeding the growth rate of high impact tech start-ups, many American venture capital firms are now looking further afield to expand their investment portfolios. But what is driving this trend?

1. Lack of local funding

There’s certainly no shortage of innovative ideas coming out of emerging market countries. Africa, China, Russia and many others are growing steadily, and are producing an ever-increasing number of tech success stories, many with an extensive global reach.

When it comes to mobile communications, there's still a lot of room for innovation at the bottom. In Bangalore, India, researchers from the University of Toronto and Microsoft are now imagining new business models for the world's poorest phone owners by adapting a little-known protocol that can receive pictures as bitmapped text messages. The technology could readily be used in the roughly 1.5 billion low-end Nokia and Samsung phones in circulation.

The researchers have shown how to use the technology to crowdsource the task of digitizing handwritten documents word by word, a type of work that anyone with an inexpensive phone could do for extra money. A handwritten word is displayed as the image—resembling retro graphics from 1980s Atari games—and the phone owner types in the word, contributing piecemeal to a larger job.

For a special issue, we invited readers to share an innovation that they have made in their daily lives. We posted selected entries on nytimes.com, along with feedback from Ben Kaufman and sketches by Oliver Jeffers. Browse the entries below, and click "recommend" for your favorites. A small selection of entries will be published in the June 3 issue of the magazine, along with commentary from our judges.

As Managing Director of T2 Venture Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm that helps build “innovation ecosystems” around the globe, Victor Hwang knows quite a lot about what it takes to create an environment where high-tech startups can grow and thrive.

In fact, it’s the subject of his new book - The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, with co-author Greg Horowitt. We asked Hwang to share some of those insights:

Q: What are the essential ingredients for an area hoping to become the next Silicon Valley?

Hwang: You need both the societal hardware and the human software. The hardware is the basic building blocks: talented people, professional organizations, market policies and good physical infrastructure. But lots of places have that hardware. The harder thing is the software, which is the cultural patterns of behavior. That software consists of diversity; motivations that are more than just “having a job”; trust between strangers; principles of fairness, collaboration and experimentation; and social feedback loops that penalize bad behavior and reward good behavior.

One of the prime reasons I founded the Public Forum Institute was a strong belief in the role ordinary citizens can play in addressing chronic stalemates on vital national policy issues. After moderating hundreds of congressionally-chaired health policy forums over the years, I conclude it will be other developments outside of top-down reform that drive improvements in health care. It seems inevitable that with so many people’s income dependent on our health care industry, even the most well-meaning politicians face a never-ending path of discourse in their efforts to improve health care without disrupting such a large chunk of the American economy. The revolution in consumer data may be just one of those new game changers.

Today, patients run little of the health care show. They are passive actors reacting to various hurdles from insurers, doctors, and hospitals. This is ironic given that one-third of health care patients choose what course of treatment to pursue. Today, doctors' preferences still prevail which, despite some recent slowing, is helping push U.S. health care spending to 17% of GDP with most nations being closer to 10% and Singapore only 4%. And what you and I spend on health care is about 2.5 percentage points higher than the general rate of inflation. Doctors should be equipped to explain more choices, and patients need to be better empowered to become the entrepreneurs of their own care.

Sen. Marco Rubio's proposal to allow undocumented immigrant youth to stay in the country legally has elicited interest among some immigration reform advocates. That's primarily because it has breathed life into a moribund effort.

Under Rubio's as-yet unwritten plan, men and women who came to the United States as children and are pursuing higher education would be able to live in the country legally. Unlike the original DREAM Act, which has failed repeatedly to pass the U.S. Congress, the legislation wouldn't provide a pathway to citizenship for this group. It would only create that venue for men and women joining the military.