Any innovator hoping to turn a bright idea into a marketable product or successful company needs to know how to protect their intellectual property (IP). They may now find help from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which have joined forces to develop the Intellectual Property Awareness Assessment Tool. The tool is designed to help aspiring and actual entrepreneurs and business owners in the United States find out how much they know about this arcane yet crucial aspect of innovation and fill the gaps in their knowledge.

Mexican entrepreneur Cristian Castillo thinks avoiding investors is important.

Castillo, co-founder of instaDM, a messaging service for Instagram, doesn't consider himself a coder, but can hack his ideas into early-stage products.

He already has made a few apps that have gained traction.

For instance, instaDM lets people send direct messages to each other on Instagram and it has already been downloaded 150,000 times since it launched last week in the Apple App store.

With the Euro Zone in crisis and traditional career paths diminished, students are embracing entrepreneurship to create their own fate.

If you think finding a job as a young person in the U.S. is hard, imagine what it’s like in the Euro Zone, where unemployment is at 10.7%, the highest rate since the Euro was introduced in 1999. Now, many of the Europe’s young people are turning away from traditional careers in areas like banking, finance and consulting and opting to pursue entrepreneurship instead.

For some cardiac patients, recovery from a common heart procedure can be complicated by a single gene responsible for drug processing. The risk could be lowered with the first bedside genetic test of its kind. The test shows promise for quickly and easily identifying patients who need a different medication.

After a patient receives a heart stent—a small scaffold that props open an artery—his or her doctor will prescribe a blood thinner to prevent platelets from building up inside the device. However, for some 70 percent of patients with Asian ancestry and 30 percent of patients with African or European ancestry, a single genetic variant will prevent one of the most commonly prescribed blood thinners from working. Alternatives exist, but they are more expensive, so hospitals could use an easy way to identify who does and does not need the more expensive drug.

In Dr. Luis Proenza’s 12 years as President of the University of Akron, its revenue and research portfolio has more than doubled. Dr. Proenza has been involved in a range of national science and technology leadership positions since the 1970s.

This week, Dr. Proenza traveled to Cleveland to speak about recent changes in the U.S. patent system as a result of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. His remarks were part of the Ohio Aerospace Institute’s Protect Your Intellectual Property seminar.

People everywhere keep trying to ­duplicate the success of Silicon Valley as an incubator for innovation and wealth. Victor W. Hwang, a Los Altos Hills, Calif., venture capitalist, has been studying what makes the Valley succeed and so many of its imitators fail, and he’s convinced he has found the answer. Not only that, but he’s putting his ideas to the test, trying to foster new versions of the place around the world. How? It’s about how people work together.

“Instead of thinking of Silicon Valley as this exceptional place,” he says, “think of it as a result of the world’s biggest experiment—the opening of the American West. Take people running away from the rest of the world, strangers with diverse experience and talent, and what happens? What emerges is a body of culture and invisible rules, and a mechanism for trusting strangers.” We think of the Wild West as a lawless place, but it was the opposite, Hwang says. And the same goes for Silicon Valley. Both relied on people from vastly different backgrounds and places, driven by passion, coming together to build environments of unusual trust and mutual support.

Wall Street is examining whether it will benefit from a little-known section of a broad new law that President Obama is expected to sign on Thursday.

Provisions tucked into the so-called JOBS Act, or the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, will roll back some major securities regulations and parts of a landmark legal settlement struck almost a decade ago. That 2003 settlement built a Chinese wall between Wall Street research analysts and investment bankers, an effort to prevent analysts from improperly promoting stocks to help their firms drum up business from corporate clients.

Under the new legislation, some of those restrictions would be eased when it comes to smaller companies, so-called emerging growth companies.

Fossils discovered in northeastern China of a giant, previously unrecognized dinosaur show that it is the largest known feathered animal, living or extinct, scientists report.

Although several species of dinosaurs with feathers have already been uncovered in the rich fossil beds of Liaoning Province, the three largely complete 125-million-year-old specimens are by far the largest. The adult was at least 30 feet long and weighed a ton and a half, about 40 times the heft of Beipiaosaurus, the largest previously known feathered dinosaur. The two juveniles were a mere half ton each.

The new species was a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, the mighty predator that lived 60 million years later, at the end of the dinosaur era. The scaly T. rex apparently did not go in for feathers.

Science is a risky business, and when money is tight, the margin for error gets narrower for those who dare to build biotech companies. Part of what that means is the CEO, or the head of R&D, sometimes ends up being a visionary as well as the chief cook and bottle washer.

“When you’re building a team today, you need to have people with enough former company T-shirts to knit together a quilt in a nursing home,” quipped Bruce Montgomery, the founder and CEO of Seattle-based Cardeas Pharma.

Summary: The world's youngest CEO to have a company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange has launched online news site where he aims to provide news and tips on entrepreneurship, business strategy and financial related matters and more.

From making his first million at sixteen to being the youngest person ever to be listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, James Timothy White ( www.jamestimothywhite.com ) is one of the world's youngest successful entrepreneurs, businessmen and consultants. He has started several profitable businesses in various fields including lawn care, snow removal, construction, real estate development, advertising and marketing, business coaching, motivational speaking, investment banking, venture capital and more. In fact, he made his first million at the age of 16 with the landscaping company he sold in 2005 and at 25; he also became the world's youngest CEO to have a company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

In 22 years of working with venture capitalists, Steven M. Cohen, co-manager of Morgan Lewis's emerging business and technology practice, can only remember one time when a venture capitalist returned feedback to a presenter and ultimately invested. When the odds are that slim, "how do you get that first meeting and give yourself the best shot at getting a potential investor?" he asked.

Cohen moderated a panel titled, "VC Confessionals: Why We Funded, Why We Passed," during Wharton's recent 2012 Entrepreneurship Conference, whose theme was "Turning Painpoints into Opportunity". In explaining that tagline, the conference organizers noted that "pain has often been embedded in entrepreneurship. The pain of a personal frustration inspired a new venture. The pain, sweat and tears of an idea turned it into a viable business. The growing pains of the startup helped it morph from being in a league of its own, to one in which it became an industry leader. Pain has often revealed opportunity."

Russian investment firm Rusnano is seeking strategic partners to buy a 10% equity share in its $10 billion fund by the end of 2012, as it looks to wean itself from the support of the Russian government.

The decision comes at a pivotal time for the five-year-old nanotechnology-focused fund and the development of Russia’s tech and life sciences industries. Having committed north of $7.5 billion both by acting as an LP to venture firms and through direct venture bets on materials and life science companies like Bind Biosciences, the fledgling fund is now turning to the global audience to raise more cash.

When we think about innovation, we usually think about what impresses us. Like Steve Jobs standing on a podium showing off his latest triumph: Incredible! Revolutionary!  Mind Blowing!

However, the kind of innovation that changes paradigms is usually crappy. The stuff that doesn’t work all that well. The carpetbaggers who come into your industry utterly unprepared to service your existing clients. That’s where the danger often lies.

GRAND RAPIDS — Michigan needs to do less hunting and more gardening when it comes to economic development.

That was a key message delivered at a March 20 event in Grand Rapids that spotlighted a Michigan Economic Development Corp. pilot program aimed at helping grow second-stage companies in the state. The event also included an impromptu announcement by an MEDC official that the organization plans to significantly expand the program, even though the pilot is still underway.

It just might be, according to today's story in USA Today by Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg.

The story is built around a detailed analysis (supported by a terrific interactive map) of census data on population growth. The authors compared the data from 2006 with data from 2011.

Here's what population change looked like in 2006 across the U.S. (population growth is red, loss is blue):

SNR Denton is pleased to announce that John Fernandez has joined the Firm as a partner and Innovation Strategy Director, located in the Washington, DC, office. Prior to joining the Firm, he served as US Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development.

John will work closely with SNR Denton lawyers and professionals to identify and deploy innovative client service solutions that fully leverage SNR Denton's diverse legal expertise, business acumen and entrepreneurial spirit. He will coordinate how we execute these client services and also guide a series of initiatives such as advancing ancillary business concepts.

Kansas City, MO (PRWEB) April 05, 2012

The cofounder and managing partner of Think Big Partners, Herb Sih, earlier launched a new healthy-living blog called Startup Your Fitness, which encourages entrepreneurs to live a healthy lifestyle with diet and exercise.

Startup Your Fitness, which launched on April Fool's Day, will provide entrepreneurs with exercise tips, diet tricks and pieces of health advice that can fit into a busy lifestyle. The blog is written by Herb Sih, a serial entrepreneur who found himself caught up in the startup world and drifting further and further away from staying in shape.

It is time for immigration reform that will keep more top technical talent in the United States. Today, American colleges and universities are educating foreign nationals who come here to earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM fields). We educate them, and then U.S. immigration regulations force them to leave our country to return home, where they contribute to economic growth and the success of our competitors overseas. That has to change.

When allowed to remain in the U.S., foreign nationals with STEM degrees earned at American schools have gone on to become some of our most distinguished engineers and researchers. They add value to our economy and our companies. They generate new insights and contribute to innovations that change the way the industry addresses previously unsolved problems. Yet, U.S. employers face greater demand for STEM skills than the supply of STEM graduates. And the lack of immigration reform is constricting the pipeline of technical talent.

Startups are for the young and hungry. You’re thirty? You’re too old. If you haven’t made your first million by 25, you’ve missed your chance. If you’re not working 130 hours a week, you’ll never create the next Google.

One of the key myths of startups, especially in Silicon Valley, is that they are for the young. Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped out of Stanford in their 20s to start Google. Steve Jobs started Apple from his parents’ garage after he dropped out of college. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook at university and is now a multibillionaire at 27 years old.