I talk with a lot of people who want to start a business “someday.” And as a result, I often think about the factors that determine which “someday” entrepreneurs will actually become business owners, and which will continue to say “I wish” for years to come.

Surprisingly, the ability to take the plunge has a lot less to do with people’s personalities, and a lot more to do with how accessible and familiar the experience of entrepreneurship is to them. Those who can picture themselves running a business often do. And those who continue to think of entrepreneurship as a big, scary thing that other people (perhaps more gregarious, sales-oriented, or risk-tolerant people) do tend to never move forward.

New strategies or approaches are needed to improve the effectiveness of university commercialization efforts, as are new yardsticks for success. To many universities, the only measure of success has been the dollar value of research discoveries that have been patented or licensed. This White Paper argues that universities need to take a broader view and see themselves as an essential part of an innovation ecosystem. Such systems are like a series of overlapping communities with university researchers, students, and infrastructure at the core. Successfully nurturing such an ecosystem is likely to be more important to the long-term health of a research university than the success of any individual discovery.

We all know the world has changed.  Technology has brought more information into the palm of your hand today than could fill a room 30 years ago.  Marketing has certainly changed.  There are exponentially more media options and delivery channels than even 20 years ago.

However, one thing that hasn’t really changed is human nature, and that’s where I see young marketers making the same mistakes over and over.

Back in the day, which means about 1990 in case you’re wondering, direct marketing consisted of direct mail catalogs and letters, telemarketing, direct response TV (infomercials), and that’s about it.  Since then, we have seen the rise of email marketing, highly targeted online marketing, mobile marketing, and much more.

Every company is hungry for innovation. At LinkedIn, we’ve cooked up something we call the “Innovator Challenge,” which has been tremendously successful at bringing out new and disruptive ideas from every employee at the company. It’s a one-day event that mixes competition and recognition as a way to bring creative ideas to life. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• One day of work
• Every employee at your company
• A couple hours with your executive staff
• A few prizes and incentives

The same market forces that made computers cheaper and faster are influencing the cost of gene mapping. The team at Complete Genomics is using expertise from computer networking experience to build machines that can do genetic sequencing more quickly and more affordably. Complete Genomics is in the race to push the cost of sequencing an entire human genome below $1,000.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that another effect of overuse of antibiotics is the higher levels of death from Clostridium difficile infections (CDI). The CDC says that more than 14,000 deaths every year are linked to C. difficile-associated diarrhea and that the best way to lower these numbers is better use of antibiotics.

It isn’t really fair to say health IT startup Explorys has changed its plan since it started. That’s because when the company started, it didn’t have a plan.

That might not be so rare in the tech world that founders Steve McHale (CEO) and Charlie Lougheed (president and CTO) hail from, but it’s a little less common in healthcare.

“A lot of people thought we were crazy to start without a business plan,” Lougheed said, but it was all part of a discovery process.

In its latest quarterly analysis, Lux Research Inc. offers a look at 10 companies "developing emerging technologies that are poised to impact global megatrends like sustainable energy and infrastructure, sustainable health and wellness, and materials revolutions."

Lux, a Boston-based emerging-technology research firm, profiled 262 companies across 12 emerging-technology domains in fourth-quarter 2011, as part of its ongoing intelligence services. These 10 are the pick of the litter.

Note: Each firm gets a "Lux Take" that ranges from "strong caution" to "strong positive," to provide a bottom-line assessment of its prospect, with a "wait-and-see" rating for companies that still face too much uncertainty for a definitive call.

Disruptive innovators ask the right questions, observe the world like anthropologists, network for novel ideas, and experiment to make things work. (For a more detailed look at these skills, see The Innovator's DNA).

Applying the skills disruptive innovators use to your job search can help you unearth more, and better, opportunities. Here's how:

Step 1. Start asking the right questions (and stop asking the wrong ones).

California has always been a magnet for entrepreneurs, innovators and investors. Our economy has been defined by a simple but powerful mindset – we innovate because we imagine, we grow because we innovate.

This fundamental mentality has drawn innovators and entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe to California seeking success. New business startups from 1992 to 2000 were the backbone of California’s economy, creating 770,000 more jobs from startups than it lost to business closures.

However, since 2000, the strength of small business and entrepreneurial startups has dissipated, and California’s job fortune has reversed – California lost 262,000 more jobs to business closures than it gained from startups.

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the first five.

It Feels Like 20 Years Ago Today It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. To share what we learned, we blogged each of those class sessions, (all the slides can be found here.)  Since then we’ve taught an additional 50 Lean LaunchPad teams: 21 teams for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps, 11 teams for a joint Berkeley/Columbia MBA class, another 9 for a Berkeley MBA/Engineering class, and now 9 more teams in this Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class class.

Apple just revealed the "new iPad."

It's not the iPad 3, and it's not the iPad HD, it's just the "new iPad."

What's in the new iPad?

A retina display. A quad-core A5X GPU chip. A better camera, and a few other upgrades.

It’s tough to say for sure with the crazy weather many of us are experiencing, but one thing is certain: Even it doesn’t feel like spring has arrived where you are, it does feel like spring is in the air. You can feel the sense of possibility and excitement that the new season brings, and you’re itching for it to arrive. And that feeling extends to your business.

Venture capital is investment to get new companies up and running. Most of the money comes from high net-worth individuals, or venture capital funds that make their money by investing in a basket of early-stage companies.

The first piece of VC funding usually comes from 'angel' investors, seed-capital funds or Enterprise Ireland. The investors get a shareholding in the company and usually provide some management support. The money usually keeps the company going for six to 12 months.

The next stage is 'Series A' and 'Series B', where companies look for multi-million investments. The money is often put in by syndicates of investors, who will end up taking part in

Ottawa companies looking to get their foot in the federal government's door can now submit proposals in the third round of the Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program.

The $40-million pilot project launched by Public Works is aimed at accelerating the time it takes to bring new products to market, and helps small businesses gain access to government clients.

After the second call for proposals, CICP had identified 37 pre-qualified companies that are being matched with applicable governmental agencies.

Hot, new Washington D.C. tech accelerator known as The Fort is debuting its inaugural class of startups today. The organization grew out the efforts from early stage VC firm Fortify Ventures LLC, also known as Fortify.vc (that’s its URL, too), which had previously invested in nearly dozen D.C.-area tech companies.

Over the past 9 months, The Fort’s co-founders, Jonathon Perrelli and Carla Valdes, have been busy trying to spark innovation in the nation’s capital. They set up the fund, invested in group of startups, created the accelerator, hosted a pitch competition called “Distilled Intelligence” which handed out $25K to winners, and selected a dozen more startups for The Fort’s first program.

The starting point for considering this question is the European Patent Convention, which states, amongst other things, that an invention must be capable of use within an industrial setting in order to attract patent protection. The European Biotech Directive goes further and states that "an element isolated from the human body or otherwise produced is not excluded from patentability". This is subject to the details of its industrial application being disclosed in the patent application

In 2008, the High Court ruled that the industrial application of the protein Neutrokine-alpha was not defined in enough detail to merit the award of a patent in favour of Human Genome Sciences. It stated that it would not be of much use beyond a research project. Pharmaceutical company had Eli Lilly opposed the grant.

Researchers turned entrepreneurs are providing an increasingly significant channel for spin-off formation and technology transfer, making it ever-more crucial that universities create a supportive environment for young researchers with entrepreneurial aspirations.

There are several ways in which institutions can go about engendering such an environment, according to contributors to the session, Spinning out – Tech Transfer Strategies, at the Science|Business European Entrepreneurship Summit.

For Karen Maex, Vice-Rector Science, Engineering and Technology at KU Leuven, one way to encourage and help young researchers to transfer their technology - and to promote entrepreneurial thinking - is for them to mix with the right people. At KU Leuven, she explained, “We pay a lot of attention to making sure that our students at masters’ level and at PhD level come into contact with entrepreneurship and everything that is related to that.”

In the quest to create jobs, some states are getting creative: Nevada may hold contests to encourage entrepreneurs. Ohio is giving control of its liquor profits to a group of business leaders. And Washington and Alabama are "selling" income they don't even have yet.

More than four years after the start of the Great Recession, state lawmakers have few options left to stimulate economic activity. With little room for new spending or tax cuts, several have turned to more imaginative, sometimes quirky, proposals to encourage job growth.

Massachusetts continued to occupy the top ranks of key innovation economy indicators such as attracting funding and research and development dollars, and it reversed a two-year decline in technology licensing in the 2011 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy released today.

The report, published annually by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) since 1997, is the commonwealth’s instrument for assessing the performance of its innovation ecosystem and key industry sectors within it. The index highlights key trends and helps inform decision-making among Massachusetts’ policy makers, industry practitioners, and academic leaders.