As work becomes our lives, it becomes more and more important for us to be happy at work. But few of us are. A revolution in workplace happiness would make us healthier and more productive. How can we get there?

If two magnets are separated by too much distance, they won’t have any impact on each other. But, if something helps move them a bit closer, they will gravitate towards each other and connect. Technology can be used in a similar way. It can connect you to other people, skills, tools, and trigger new ways of thinking and working; it can create an "assisted serendipity." More than ever, products and companies help connect us to people and information. But does merely creating access have anything to do with making better lives and better economies?

I’m looking for funds for my business, but I’m not sure how many “rounds” of fundraising I’ll need to do. Should I get regular, small amounts of funding or one big chunk?

The question about capital raising rounds is a good one and critical to your growth strategy.

Also, sometimes what you want is different to what investors are seeking. Often companies will modify their original plans to complete a deal with the right investor.

If we look at the mining and life science sectors, they are very well drilled in funding rounds and the stages that they require to raise capital.

Some of these companies could potentially be raising capital for up to 10 years as they move closer and closer to revenue, achieving milestones along the way.

Do you have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur, founding your own startup and jet-setting across the country to meet with investors? If so, you better have a stack of cash for cabs, coffee and all those hotels you’ll be staying at as you schmooze with potential business partners and other key players in your industry.

Luckily for those who dream of entrepreneurship, an up-and-coming membership program called FoundersCard is providing these founders with some serious perks and discounts to help ease the pain associated with the costs of a startup. FoundersCard, started by Eric Kuhn in 2009, is the first membership community designed specifically for entrepreneurs and innovators

Today, our online identities are fragmented across an array of usernames, email addresses, screen names, social media accounts, passwords, and on and on. We struggle to remember our login info and passwords, so oftentimes we use a few simple passwords that are easy to remember, or find ourselves turning to hints or inboxes to remember our forgotten permutations. Of course, this can cause cracks in our security armor, especially when it comes to online transactions, leaving us vulnerable to online thieves and no-goodniks.

Enter: OneID, a San Jose-based startup launching in beta today that is aiming to play a role in the next-generation of digital identity with a service that eliminates the need for multiple usernames and passwords. With OneID, users can securely log in to websites (across platforms), paying online with one single digital identity.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have its physical campus in Boston, but its reach and impact are global.

In San Diego, for example, several leading entrepreneurs have earned degrees from MIT. These include the co-founders of Qualcomm — Irwin Mark Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi; Peter Farrell, founder of ResMed; Farrell’s son Michael, a senior executive at ResMed; and venture capitalist Kevin Kinsella. In addition, hundreds more work in key positions in our technology and life sciences companies and research institutes.

But that is still just the United States. MIT now offers its classes on a global basis to anyone and everyone in any country in the world for free. Welcome to MITOpenCourseWare.

You want the truth about fundraising? You can’t handle the truth! OK, maybe you can.

There are many truths and myths about fundraising. In his book “Making a Difference,” Howard Berman wrote that while the myths speak only of conventional wisdom of what can and cannot be done, the truths show you the path to success.

We live in a very complicated world, but the truths about fundraising are actually pretty basic. Berman describes them as the “Nine Basic Truths of Fundraising,” and they are all time-tested approaches that define successful fundraising.

A university is offering early stage companies from its academic community office space in an incubator as the institution doubles its technology transfer office staff.

Philadelphia-based Temple University has opened an office in the University City Science Center that serves as an incubator for many life science and technology companies. So far, it is negotiating with two startup companies for office space: a nanotechnology company, Pure Nano, and a cancer therapeutics business.

Stephen Nappi, director of technology transfer and commercialization operations, declined to say how many companies it’s seeking, but said it would be “a flexible office space” and “the university has a pipeline of potential companies that it would see as a good fit for the space.”

The Silicon Valley billionaire and higher-education critic who offered young entrepreneurs money to leave college is returning to Stanford University, his alma mater, to teach a course of his own.

Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder whose “20 Under 20” fellowship last year awarded a group of budding entrepreneurs $100,000 each to drop out and develop innovative companies, will teach a class called “Computer Science 183: Startup” at the elite university this spring, according to Reuters. Mr. Thiel submitted his course proposal last year, after approaching Stanford professor-turned-commercial-educator Sebastian Thrun about teaching at the university. The 250-student course is already oversubscribed, according to Reuters.

Developing and supporting the practice of collaborative innovation takes time and money. What do we assess to weigh its value? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins proposes focusing on strategic alignment of the program, relative advantage of the ideas, and engagement of the community members.

People measure the return on their practice of collaborative innovation for many reasons. They want to show the extent to which the practice supports the organization’s strategy. They want to speak to employee engagement and cultural transformation. They want to increase the resources the organization applies to the practice. They want to advance their careers.

Innovation governance can be thought of as a system of mechanisms to align goals, allocate resources and assign decision-making authority for innovation, across the company and with external parties. In this series of articles, professor Jean-Philippe Deschamps delves deeper into this topic; what is innovation governance, what different models are there and which ones seem to be the most effective?

How can companies effectively steer and manage a complex, cross-functional and multidisciplinary activity like innovation? Most companies are organized to manage business units, regional operations and functions. Many have gone further by allocating specific responsibilities and setting up dedicated mechanisms to manage cross-functional processes, for example new product development. But how can they stimulate, steer and sustain innovation, an ongoing transformational endeavor that is increasingly becoming a corporate imperative?

One of the biggest red flags I see in many Internet-related business plans today is advertising as the initial revenue stream, or a key part of it. If challenged, the founder usually cites the Facebook business model (free service to users, revenue from ads), but forgets that Facebook has had several hundred million in funding, and has been profitable only in the last couple of years.

The most challenging time is your first years, when your site is unknown, and your page-views are low. Until you get a million page-views per month, your revenue will be negligible, and advertisers won’t be interested in your site. Don’t count on that to fund your startup.

"Every business owner eventually hears the same advice. If you want your business to grow, you must learn to delegate."

The first mistake: being hesitant to delegate.

Cornwall says that some entrepreneurs feel that no one can do what they do as well as they can, mainly because employees don't seem to care as much as the entrepreneur does.

Further education (FE) colleges needs a “complete transformation” if they are to prepare young people for the world of work, according to Gazelle.

The group has published a report, entitled ‘Enterprising Futures: The changing landscape and new possibilities for further education’, to coincide with the launch of Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2012.

The report says colleges are failing to provide a dynamic and  ”experiential learning environment” needed by students to prepare for the future job market.

Transparency Life Sciences is a new company that seeks to use open innovation to promote greater efficiency and productivity and lower the cost the development of new pharmaceuticals, as well as produce more pharmaceuticals targeted towards unmet medical needs. Open innovation has successfully been used in the technology to develop computer software and the operating system Linux, so why not medicine?

According to the founder and CEO of Transparency Life Sciences, Tomasz Sablinksi, “The main goal is lowering the cost of clinical trials so that more drugs can be delivered to the patients who need them. TLS uses crowdsourcing to incorporate the voices of as many researchers and patients as possible in the protocol design process. Then when it comes to trial execution, the use of telemedicine pushes out as much data collection to a home setting as possible. Finally, full data transparency engages the crowd’s interest and benefits the entire clinical trials ecosystem by cutting redundancy. The intended result is a better-designed trial at a lower cost.” According to their website, Transparency Life Sciences intends to lower costs by as much as 60-80%.

I have had more than one request to write more about sustainability and its role in radical management and the emerging Creative Economy.

Sustainability is important. Obvious? Anyone with common sense would think so, but not necessarily economists. Some years ago, I spent an unfortunate amount of time in the World Bank listening to high-powered practitioners of the dismal science argue against the need to give explicit attention to sustainability. They would say that the use of profitability ratios like ROI and NPV obviate the need to think separately about sustainability. The argument was that all future environmental costs could in principle be incorporated in the various cost and benefit streams of these ratios. The problem here is that environmental and other costs are often not included in the financial calculations of private sector firms at all, Even if they are, the discount rate can reduce to insignificance even catastrophic events like the environmental destruction or loss of whole sectors of the economy. As Clayton Christensen has pointed out, the total reliance on these financial ratios for decision-making has led many a firm to disaster.

Ahh, the NCAA Tournament... to quote Jim Nantz (who has apparently started calling basketball games again) it’s a “tradition unlike any other.” I mean really, what tradition beats watching hoops from noon ‘til midnight, yelling at your TV for no particular reason, and randomly rooting for a school you hadn’t heard of until a week ago? Nothing I tell you, nothing.

Still, not everyone is as excited for the Big Dance as you and I are. Nope, while you and I already have weak knees and an irregular heartbeat just from thinking about the start of the tournament, some people are just now getting into college hoops, and only beginning to feel out the field of 68. While we're salivating at the start of the games on Thursday (ok, technically Tuesday), they need a reason to be excited. What's wrong with these people? I’m not totally sure.

A much larger fraction of entrepreneurs expects to create jobs than actually do. This difference means that policy makers need to take entrepreneurs’ job creation plans with a grain of salt.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a consortium of university researchers around the globe who track entrepreneurial activity, “defines high-growth entrepreneurs as those who expect to have 20 or more employees (other than the owners) within the next five years.” By that definition, 17 percent of Americans founding a company expect to have a “high growth company,” as the figure below shows:

Whether you’re an upcoming graduate who is beginning to fill out endless job applications or an experienced employee looking to make a professional change, you’ll soon discover that the interview stage of the hiring process is no longer what it used to be. Employers aren’t inviting you into their offices to simply sit down and assess your technical skills, but also your personality and the degree of your passion for the job position, company and industry you’re interviewing for. There is more to discover in these interviews and candidates are finding themselves subject to new, unique questions that often make or break their candidacy.

We all know that Google recently updated its terms, conditions and privacy policies. The company argued that the change would ensure that all Google services would be consolidated under one, simple to understand, universal set of conditions, rather than expecting users to navigate a multitude of separate policies for each of their services.

Few analysts have been convinced, with many citing that Google is more concerned with turning a profit than protecting user privacy; either way, Google has gone ahead with its changes and, as Memeburn columnist Rowan Puttergill recently wrote, “if Google feels that its applications will function better by being able to share data between themselves, then that’s really up to Google. After all, Google can argue that it is ultimately providing a platform”.

Starting a company is always challenging, but for founders of life science startups, the regulations and funding hurdles make it dauntingly complex, overwhelming, and seemingly insurmountable.   Life science innovators hold the promise of improving the world’s health and well-being. The Kauffman Life Science Ventures Summit presents the path for how to successfully bring those innovations to market.

June 22 – 23, 2012 QB3 1675 Owens Street San Francisco, CA 94143 This first-time conference will answer the critical questions that founders must address to start and grow viable life science companies. Industry experts and successful entrepreneurs will provide practical guidance on how to commercialize innovations in each of four sectors: medical device, therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health. If you have a new startup in this space or are ready to start one, this two-day event may be for you.