A decade ago, Maryland's chief competition in the bioscience industry came from the coasts: New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts on the East and California on the West.

Since then, a crop of emerging biotech clusters has started to make its mark, hailing from the Midwest and farther south into Texas and Florida.

As these new competitors seek their place in the market, Maryland's state officials and business executives hope to maintain and expand its biotech presence through a strategy of organic growth.

Harvard University has teamed up with an organization called the New Enterprise Associates to create an initiative that hopes to keep great innovators in college before they run out and make millions. This, of course, is exactly what happened with Mark Zuckerberg and fellow software architect Bill Gates. The problem is all the good schools are in New England but all the dough is out on the West Coast. But no more, perhaps.

The new initiative is called the Experiment Fund, and it will award amounts of $250,000 to $500,000 to as many as six start-ups in the brainy Massachusetts area that houses Hardvard and MIT, among many others. While anyone is eligible it was Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean Cherry Murray who co-founded the project.

In doing research for another story, we stumbled into this presentation for people thinking about doing a startup from super angel Dave McClure.

He lays out all the reasons doing a startup is awful. Entrepreneurs should read this, see it as a challenge, and realize they can handle these minor annoyances.

It's so overwhelmingly negative that it becomes positive. It's the sort of thing people should read every few months.

Remember a term sheet agreement is not a deal until the check clears. Entrepreneurs sometimes assume an initial agreement with an Angel is a commitment, so they start spending before any money is received. But due diligence and paperwork take time, and can change everything.

It’s true that Angel investors typically do not present entrepreneurs with overly complicated deal structures, especially when compared to venture capitalists. However, there is no set pattern of terms an entrepreneur might be able to anticipate from either. Your best strategy is to bring your own term sheet to the negotiation as a starting point.

When a company is at its earliest seed stage, the terms tend to be the least complex. As the company grows and the second or third group of investors comes in, the terms of each subsequent financing grow in size, scope, and the number of lawyers’ fingerprints on them.

IN the hunt for innovation, that elusive path to economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz as an inspirational metaphor.

That’s the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments — who is also a jazz pianist — was to deliver in a performance and talk on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Mr. Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and improvised creativity on the other.

For some Malaysians, coming up with new ideas and inventions is not a problem. It's getting them to market that's the problem.

WHAT are the odds of Malaysia having or producing its own Steve Jobs?

“Two in a billion,” according to Nazrin Hassan, CEO of the Cradle Fund, an agency under the Finance Ministry that offers funding to entrepreneurs, researchers or innovators to either develop their ideas into prototypes/proof-of-concepts or to attain commercialisation.

The average Wisconsin citizen probably believes state government is paralyzed by partisanship.

Recall elections, perpetual campaign fundraising and party-line votes on major proposals, such as last week's Assembly vote on the mining bill, offer little reason for Joe and Jane Badger to think otherwise.

There is one economic issue with the potential for bipartisan action in the Capitol: The idea of creating a state-leveraged growth capital fund.

A mix of Republicans and Democrats in both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature have been involved in pushing for legislation that could create a "fund of funds" to spur more angel and venture capital investment in the state's early stage companies. Many lawmakers in both parties understand that this type of growth - clean, innovative and capable of producing high-wage jobs - is an essential fit for Wisconsin.

Erik Michielsen was always impressed by his colleagues and associates at boutique research firm ABI Research. Though they weren't as glitzy and renowned as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, these everyday professionals still had wisdom to share and a story to tell.

So the marketing expert branched out on his own, intent on sharing the experience and expertise of his most inspiring peers and former workers in a video series. Documented and chronicled through a years-long process during which Michielsen met with subjects, interviewed them as they grew and then spliced the videos into short segments on specific topics. The end product was his website, Capture Your Flag, which features a free online video library.

It is well known that most people would rather receive information in beautifully wrapped packages that help them ‘contain’ the message in a simpler way by connecting the info with a tool that allows them to access it when needed.  Such is the value of  a reliable acronym, reference or letter bundle that offers a welcome bridge over what might otherwise feel like a sea of unweildy or unpackaged information.

Maybe we were taught to do this in primary school or maybe the method is really useful to retain data more easily. The fact is that acronyms and letter bundles came to stay in the teaching/learning process, and we have many of them rolling in our minds since long ago.

How true is this?  In response to an article on how to promote your business without being pushy, David Morgan threw the statement, “If your product or service is really good, it should sell itself” out there. So is it true?

If your product or service is really good, will it sell itself? And if so, when?

We want passive income, passive work and pay checks that come like clockwork—I know I do. But how passive can we be in the sales process?

Okay, you’ve learned how to “incubate.” But how do you “accelerate”? Once considered a daring innovation, the business incubator is no longer a new idea. Almost every city has an incubator of some sort, usually a low-priced, co-location space for startup companies with some business support services. Now cities and economic development agencies are focused on “accelerators,” a kind of incubator on steroids that provides access to a wider range of startup services, including networking with peers and investors, and connecting businesses to university technology transfer offices and the like. The idea is not just to get businesses going, but also to speed their growth. Some accelerators are private, some are public, and some are attached to universities or other nonprofit entities.

“One cannot be creative without learning what others know, but then one cannot be creative without becoming dissatisfied with that knowledge and rejecting it for a better way.”  (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996)

In looking at domains where creativity is needed, one that is often overlooked is in human services and community health. Within human services, these are often Government and non-profit organizations supporting people with developmental disabilities, mental health conditions and other marginalized populations.

Background of the need for creativity in human services

Over the years, some leaders in the disability services sector have realized that one of the reasons for low quality services is due to professionals adhering to old ways of providing service.  Often, these are services where systems and institutions become the focus rather than the people served, (Pitonyak, 2002).  To get our minds unstuck from old assumptions, some questioning and fresh thinking is required. As Michael Kendrick, a world leader in disability services has said, "The culture of innovation is one in which there needs to be a great deal of questioning of status quo assumptions or other apparent givens. It is through the ability to look at practices with new eyes that the much vaunted paradigm shifts become possible." (Kendrick, 2007a)

Often, when I tell someone that our company, Ginzametrics, has received funding from both Y Combinator and 500 Startups, they are surprised.

This is partly because both funds run an accelerator program that lasts three months and ends with a demo day. At Y Combinator, that's how all of the companies they fund participate in the portfolio. At 500 Startups, however, they do both accelerator investments and traditional investments in companies they want to have in their portfolio. So we went through the Y Combinator program in the Summer of 2010 and have received funding from 500 Startups but did not participate in the 500 Startups accelerator program. To my knowledge, there are a dozen or so other Y Combinator startups that have also received investment from 500 Startups, none of whom participated in the accelerator.

So, our initial experience with 500 Startups is different than those startups that have gone through their accelerator program and I can't comment on that directly (although I will provide some arms-length commentary below). I can, however, comment directly to how 500 Startups works for companies in their portfolio as a whole. I'll explain the funding process for both groups and then talk about some interesting cultural and organizational differences.

With the rise of numerous accelerator programs in Europe one cannot help but wonder whether jumping through the application process hoops, sweating through the mentoring sessions and flirting with investors at demo days are all worth a founders’ time.

When I attended the recent Startup Sauna demo day in Helsinki in December 2011, I met teams not only from Finland but also from Russia, Poland and the Baltic Rim. I was amazed how young many of the participating entrepreneurs were. So when the performance stats from Startup Sauna hit my mailbox I was curious to learn what actually happens to all those startups after they complete the seven-weeks-long coaching program in the startup co-working space Aalto Venture Garage.

In a previous post we looked at which states have been most competitive in terms of job creation since the recession.

In this post we teamed up with our friends at Tableau Software to produce the following interactive graphic, which details individual industries that are driving states to be more (or less) competitive. The graphic breaks down the performance of the 20 major sectors in every state in the contiguous US (plus Hawaii and Alaska) in terms of expected and actual job change from 2007-2011.

President Obama's State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: "Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there."

It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years?

The falling cost of LED lighting, batteries, and solar panels, together with innovative business plans, are allowing millions of households in Africa and elsewhere to switch from crude kerosene lamps to cleaner and safer electric lighting. For many, this offers a means to charge their mobile phones, which are becoming ubiquitous in Africa, instead of having to rent a charger.

Technology advances are opening up a huge new market for solar power: the approximately 1.3 billion people around the world who don't have access to grid electricity. Even though they are typically very poor, these people have to pay far more for lighting than people in rich countries because they use inefficient kerosene lamps. While in most parts of the world solar power typically costs far more than electricity from conventional power plants—especially when including battery costs—for some people, solar power makes economic sense because it costs half as much as lighting with kerosene.

So, you want to start a company? That’s a very exciting decision. But first, you must cover all your bases.

For instance, generate a clear and simple idea, then determine what industry or market you plan to target, what type of corporate organization you’ll implement and where your business will be located.

Each is an important decision, but the main consideration when starting a company is how to manage risk. Risk is the heart of entrepreneurship — defined as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” Risk is the sole determinant whether you will succeed or fail.

Backplane is the kind of place we think all the Facebook employees will flock to once it files its IPO. The

Lady Gaga-funded startup just came out of its super secretive mode with the launch of its beta site Little Monsters.

Still in beta, the site allows Lady Gaga to interact more intimately with her fans -- and allows her fans to all talk to each other too.

Backplane hopes to give celebrities the chance to interact more intimately with fans then they could on Facebook or Twitter. The sites are also supposed to help fans create and share content.