Name: NewME Accelerator

Big Idea: NewME startup accelerator guides and mentors minorities and women — two groups underrepresented in the tech space — by working to lower industry’s barrier to entry.

Why It’s Working: NewME’s 12-week immersion programs nurture startup founders’ ideas, foster discussion, encourage co-working and offer mentorship from some of the industry’s most prominent leaders. Each program concludes with a “demo day,” during which NewME participants present their ideas and products to influential tech attendees.

"I freeze. I have no idea where to even start with this," the 29-year-old says.

Worthy has held at least six jobs since graduating from college in 2005. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a publication director at a non-profit press association — but she plans to leave that job to do freelance content marketing starting next month. Over the past few years, she has "just scraped together," which she attributes to an unstable income and sporadic spending habits.

There's been a flurry of recent coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids.  Apparently she's been doing this for years, but only recently "came out of the closet," as it were.

What's insane is that Sandberg felt the need to hide the fact, since there's a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity.  They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.

Tina Seelig teaches people how to get their creative juices flowing. She's done this for the past dozen years with students at Stanford and at companies around the world.

Now, in a new book, she compiles her lessons for the rest of us – using exercises from her classroom, studies from scholars, guidance from innovative colleagues and her own insights.

The book, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, does not provide a 10-step list of what to do to be creative – such as painting your office blue or moving the restroom to the center of your building. Seelig says those kinds of lists only lead to disappointment.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you want to be the next Mark Zuckerburg, Andrew Mason or Jack Dorsey. You’re not alone. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, over 550,000 new small businesses are created every year in America. Business schools (including Richard Ivey School of Business that I attend) are trying to capitalize on this trend by including entrepreneurship streams in their curriculum.

But this brings up the age-old debate: can entrepreneurship be taught or can it only be developed by doing? Some say no. In a recent Under30CEO post, Marc Brodeur pointed out that grad schools in general are “passive, intellectual and theoretical discipline.” But, in my opinion, the answer is both yes and no.

… is actually a new course being offered to MIT students this summer.

I just learned from Bill Aulet, the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, about a great new initiative getting started at the Institute this summer exclusively available to its students and 2012 grads. It’s called the Founder Skills Accelerator, and is intended to give very early-stage businesses a summer’s worth of support – money, space, peers, and mentors.

As its website explains:

Spend your summer at MIT iterating on a startup idea, and earn up to $20k for your team! The Founders’ Skills Accelerator pilot is designed as a hands-on summer active learning experience for MIT students (including 2012 graduates).

Source: "Personal Omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Molecular and Medical Phenotypes" Michael Snyder et al. Cell 148: 1293–1307

RESULTS: After sequencing his own genes, Stanford University geneticist Michael Snyder discovered that he had a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes. He and colleagues measured changes to 40,000 of his biological variables that could be associated with diabetes, such as gene and metabolite activity. After he developed the disease, the data they'd collected revealed the precise time of onset: his diabetes seems to have been triggered by a cold. They observed how the disease changed the variables they were monitoring. Treatment, including diet and exercise, returned the molecular markers that reflected diabetes to their normal state.

Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the economy. They’re innovators, experimenters, and risk takers, the driving force behind capitalism’s “perennial gale of creative destruction,” in economist Joseph Schumpeter’s evocative metaphor. In the American imagination, entrepreneurs are young and bold. Think Bill Gates of Microsoft and Michael Dell of Dell creating the personal computer revolution in the 1980s and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter building social media enterprises in the 2000s.

As Claire Leonardi takes over a revamped Connecticut Innovations, she’ll have an expanded economic development tool box to work with, probably the most comprehensive resource package the organization has ever had.

The October Jobs Bill passed by the state legislature allocated $125 million to Connecticut Innovations, which, in recent years, has funded its own operations with investment returns as state funding dried up.

But that is not the case anymore. Over the next five years, CI plans to invest $250 million.

“We are ramping up growth and doing more deals,” Leonardi said.

The latest Google shakeup, called the Penguin update, has some online small business owners scratching their heads. The purpose, experts say, is to punish over-optimization, but what does the change really mean in practice and what specifically does it mean for your business? Don’t panic! We’ve rounded up some of the best resources on the Web to help you understand things better.

Inside Penguin

From the horse’s mouth. Want to know what’s really behind the new changes at Google? Why not start with a post from Google’s Matt Cutts about what’s going on from the search engine’s perspective. Google Webmaster Central Blog

Whether you are trying to create a new product, solve problems more effectively, become the most successful company in your industry, or find creative ways to meet your customers' needs, innovation is likely one of your most critical objectives at work. But a factor often overlooked may get in the way of your expressing and implementing your excellent ideas: You are an introvert.

About 50% of U.S. residents are introverts, according to a study by psychologists Stephan Dilchert and Deniz Ones. What are the signs that you are one of them? Introverts have a tendency to be drained by social encounters and energized by solitary activities. They are generally inward looking and less concerned with the outside world. They enjoy reflecting on their own thoughts and feelings, and they often prefer to avoid social situations.

When it comes to generating innovative ideas, introverts and extroverts may be on par. Yet introverts' inward-looking nature can hold them back from having their creative ideas accepted since they may be disinclined to share them with others.

Former CNN head and noted biographer Walter Isaacson captured my attention from the moment he walked on the IBM Impact 2012 stage and announced his next book would be a history of the computer age.

Then, Isaacson launched into an explanation of what attributes great innovators shared throughout history -- Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs.

Though Isaacson's keynote at times seemed like an uncoordinated symphony, the words of wisdom and insight, and keen observations into the lives of his subjects, made his talk both compelling and inspirational.

Imagine: You've been a practicing lawyer for 20 years. You've been elected to Parliament. You've run the environment Ministry for a whole country. You've been a Cabinet member. You own a successful business, including the building from which it operates. You have an impeccable financial record.

Then imagine: You go to ask for a loan for a larger building to support your expanding energy and environmental consulting practice, and the bank clerk asks you to bring in your husband -- to sign the loan papers.

All too many startups are founded simply on the basis of a new and exciting technology invented by an industrious technologist. This is the origin of the “solution looking for a problem” and “if we build it, they will come” syndromes, which result in surprise and frustration waiting for funding, and waiting for customers that don’t materialize.

The right approach is to start by solving a problem causing real pain to a large number of customers willing to pay real money for a solution. Develop the solution with your technology, and develop a strategy to maximize your impact in the marketplace. I’ve talked about the solution part several times, so this article will focus on the value of a strategy.

There's a fundamental difference between an innovator and an inventor, writes digital entrepreneur Tom Grasty in a great column over at MediaShift Idea Lab.

Invention is the "creation of a product or introduction of a process for the first time." Thomas Edison was an inventor.

Innovation happens when someone "improves on or makes a significant contribution" to something that has already been invented. Steve Jobs was an innovator.

A friend of mine resigned his long-time bank management job this week to take early retirement. I learned about it on Facebook.

As I began reading his announcement, I fully expected it to be an animated recounting of all the new hobbies he planned to pursue and exotic trips he intended to take. But it quickly became clear that this was no ordinary farewell note. He was truly upset about ending his career prematurely and wanted everyone close to him to understand why.

Some of us are still waiting for higher education's Nicholas Carr moment—the point at which it becomes clear to everyone that technology doesn't matter. Carr's 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "Why IT Doesn't Matter," threw sand in the gears of the information-technology industry by pointing out the obvious: Building strategy around a competitive necessity is simply a bad idea.

In 2003, the very notion that information-technology investments—the revered centerpieces of ambitious plans to differentiate products and achieve lasting market advantage—could be bad investments contradicted everything that forward-looking corporate leaders thought true about the digital revolution. These were the same CEO's who had reshaped their industries around the strategic value of information. They led companies that aimed to gain unfair advantage over bricks-and-mortar competitors by automating their business models. Armies of consultants stood ready, as Carr wrote, to "provide fresh ideas on how to leverage their IT investments for differentiation and advantage."

I’ve had the privilege of mentoring lots of student entrepreneurs over the past years and based on this experience I’ve decided to lay-out the roadmap I believe every student entrepreneur ought to have in place in the interest of increasing the chances of seeing their venture succeed.

The map above (which I shall be improving upon over time) lays out the major high-level ingredients required to maximize success for a student entrepreneur. In this mini-series of posts I’m going to flesh-out each step in more detail.

Something feels wrong about putting the words “biotech” and “IPO” together in a headline. This market has been lifeless for so long that few investors even play the game anymore. Biotech entrepreneurs I talk to seem to feel a bit sheepish about saying they are considering an IPO, probably because they know most people will just roll their eyes.

But a strange thing has started to happen in 2012. A few biotech IPOs have been modestly successful. And even though biotech executives could be excused for missing the news that 2012 is shaping up to be the biggest IPO year since 2000, there are signs that biotech IPOs have a fighting chance.

During the first quarter of 2012, the drop in venture capital deal activity for European companies was slight compared to the sharp drop in the amount of capital invested over the same period last year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

Venture-backed companies based in Europe raised euro 762 million for 241 deals, a 41% decline in capital raised and a 7% decline in deals over the same period in 2011. The first quarter's deal figure of 241 matches the fourth quarter of last year as the weakest since VentureSource began tracking the region in 2000.