One of the major trends we have seen in business in 2011 is how enterprises are coping with the movement of employees to bring their own mobile devices to work. There are a plethora of problems associated with the bring-your-own-device culture, from security to application and device management to employee reimbursements. This is an ongoing topic that is not going to go away any time soon.

Research firm Forrester has come out with a roadmap of how to "build an operations stairway to a mobile future." The firm outlines seven key aspects that will help IT departments prioritize efforts in the mobile enterprise, from workforce segmentation to how to handle multi-platform development. Check out Forrester's results below.

For decades computer scientists have strived to build machines that can calculate faster than the human brain and store more information. The contraptions have won. The world’s most powerful supercomputer, the K from Fujitsu, computes four times faster and holds 10 times as much data. And of course, many more bits are coursing through the Internet at any moment. Yet the Internet’s servers worldwide would fill a small city, and the K sucks up enough electricity to power 10,000 homes. The incredibly efficient brain consumes less juice than a dim lightbulb and fits nicely inside our head. Biology does a lot with a little: the human genome, which grows our body and directs us through years of complex life, requires less data than a laptop operating system. Even a cat’s brain smokes the newest iPad—1,000 times more data storage and a million times quicker to act on it.

No doubt times are tough for first-time entrepreneurs trying to raise seed capital, especially in this region with few funding bodies.

Add to that the current downturn and you are compelled to take what you can get and extract maximum mileage out of every dirham. In reality, it is difficult for a small first-time entrepreneur to go beyond the "friends and family" round of funding. True entrepreneurs maximise the tight funds with resourcefulness and innovation until they can approach banks and venture funds with a trackrecord.

Some of the biggest companies we see today started from garages and kitchen tables on shoestring budgets. They got through their initial days by using practices known as "bootstrapping".

Chicago Business believes that entrepreneurs fall short when hiring employees. So, what should you do?

1. Have a clear job description. Robert Half recommends not recycling old ones since chances are the role has changed since the description was written. Take a fresh look at business needs and the skills that should be added to the team this time.

The arc of discovery is moving abroad. While markets crashed in the United States and Europe, creditor countries like China focused deeply on investing in growing their crop of trained scientists and engineers, attracting research and development firms, and becoming the new hotbed of life sciences innovation. According to Tomasz Mroczkowski, Kogod international business professor, the life sciences industrial complex — the amalgam of pharma, biotech, health care, and computational sciences firms that will dominate the twenty-first century business landscape — is shifting to nations like China, India, and South Korea.

Mroczkowski sees this is as a good thing.

Making your agency or organization into a center for innovation requires nothing less than a cultural transformation. You must change your agency from a cloistered, bureaucratic environment to an open and free-flowing organization committed to finding the best innovations.

There are several kinds of “permeability” necessary in an organization that truly wants to innovate. Your agency must be open to insights, suggestions, and feedback from both inside and outside the organization. You must be open to collaboration across organizations in your field. And you must be open to the possibilities created by new technologies. Together, these types of openness can lead to a more nimble and flexible organization that allows new innovations to emerge and take root.

As hyped as it is, genetic sequencing remains out of reach for most people. With a cost of at least $4,000 to sequence a single genome, there's just no way that the technology can currently be used in a clinical setting. There's nothing like a cash prize to speed up research, however, which is why the Archon Genomics X Prize is offering $10 million to the first team that can quickly, accurately, and cheaply sequence 100 genomes.

One other requirement: Those 100 genomes have to come from people who have lived to be 100. While that won't necessarily explain why these centenarians lived longer than others, it could be a start. "The notion of looking at people who have already lived to 100, they obviously have something working for them," says Craig Venter, the originator of the prize and the first person to sequence the human genome. "In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate."

Here at FastCompany we often write about futurist predictions of life in 20, 30, even 100 years down the line. But the National Association of Home Builders is offering up a vision of how we'll live in just four years--and it's a little different than what you might expect.

The NAHB sent out a survey last year that asked members--designers, architects, manufacturers, and more-- what they think homes will look like in 2015. Some of the results aren't that surprising. The survey reveals that the average single-family home is likely to drop to 2,150 square feet from 2,400 square feet today, probably as a result of tough economic times and rising energy prices.

If Northern Ireland can be transformed into the UK’s leading knowledge economy it would result in an extra 25,500 direct jobs across 6,000 new technology businesses and an additional 24,000 indirect jobs in the economy, generating an extra £3bn of Gross Value Added (GVA), according to a new report.

This scale of change would have a profound effect on the NI economy, turning it into one of the UK’s strongest, according to the  Northern Ireland Knowledge Economy Index – Baseline Report published today by NISP CONNECT in partnership with Northern Bank.

Even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend most people to get a flu shot, a new review of studies finds that it may actually not be 100 percent effective at guarding against the flu -- in fact, the effectiveness may only be 59 percent for people ages 18 to 65.

The review, published in the journal The Lancet, examined the efficacy of the most commonly used flu shot in the United States, the trivalent inactivated vaccine (TIV). The shot makes up 90 percent of all flu shots given in the U.S., WebMD reported.

An innovation that revolutionizes your life is the dream of every entrepreneur. But that dream may die hard if you don’t have the right expectations. What sort of expectations should you have? Well, you can start with these eleven: 1. Innovation demands the right business model

Obviously the very first thing you need to do for your company is figure out how you are going to make money. Advertising or direct monetization through licensing or subscription are the typical business models.

Trying to create a culture of innovation is a daunting task for even the most committed organization.

Cultures take decades to form. Changing them is not an overnight phenomenon, no matter how many outside consultants you've gotten on the case. You might as well try to end world hunger or wipe out Aids overnight. It's gonna take a while.

But if you and your colleagues are game, culture change is possible. The question, of course, is where to begin?

Starting is always the hardest part. And, in the absence of clarity about where to start, procrastination creeps in -- and nothing changes.

OK. Enough preamble. Here are five ways to get started. Pick one or all five -- and don't forget to enjoy the process.

At times, intellectual property can almost seem like science fiction. Yet there is nothing fictional about buying, selling, and trading ideas with no physical product whatsoever to substantiate them. Crazier still, the ones who own these ideas—but don’t act on them—are still able to sue those who actually do turn their ideas into marketable goods.

Welcome to the bizarre world of patents.

In recent decades, the historically defensive nature of these documents has unfortunately taken an aggressive, anti-competitive turn. Worse yet, a lack of serious attention to patent policy has only contributed their increasingly problematic use.

Social entrepreneurs create ventures that further societal goals — these enterprising innovators are increasingly guided by foundations eager to help achieve social change.

While social good has existed in the offline world for quite a while, through the likes of food drives and charitable causes, for example, online social good has only begun to take off.

We’ve pinpointed five foundations that are supporting digital social entrepreneurship.

One year ago, serial entrepreneur Scott Gerber, a prolific columnist on youth entrepreneurship and author of Never Get a Real Job, established The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to promote entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment. Like an Ivy League University for the real world, YEC provides its invite only member list–300 of the nation’s best and brightest entrepreneurs– with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth.

YEC has partnered with the Young Invincibles, along with a coalition of many top colleges and organizations in the US, to support a new legislative effort entitled the Youth Entrepreneurship Act, which would offer young people more access to micro-loans, increased grants for entrepreneurship education programs and enact a student loan forgiveness program for young entrepreneurs who build businesses and create jobs.

Venture capital is a fickle, prickly industry.

Like any investor, too many venture funders follow the herd, and place the bulk of their bets on the next “hot market.”

When the expected profits in that market don’t materialize, or materialize and then dry up, venture capitalists snap their checkbooks shut, grab their Armani briefcases, and head for the door.

ADVERTISEMENT In other words, venture capitalists are prone to boom-and-bust markets, too.

So, you not only come up with a great medical device or drug that will improve or save lives, you spend years getting your product through clinical trials. And, finally, it’s approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Now, your product is ready to launch.

But one major issue highlighted at a panel discussion at Biotech 2011 was the multitude of things that can go wrong when medical device and drug companies launch a product. Here are just a few of them. The lifespan of a drug or device can be decided in the first few months of its launch, several panelists noted.

I had been planning to talk in today’s column about the shortcomings of the Google Chromebook, which are numerous. But I’m in too good of a mood this week to play the critic, partly because of a terrific Silicon Valley event that I attended Tuesday night called Get Bigger! With Vinod Khosla. So instead, I’m going to tell you about the event itself, which featured the legendary Sun Microsystems co-founder and venture investor on stage with the CEOs of six early-stage startups.

Microsoft hosted the event at its Mountain View campus, and Joyce Park of 106 Miles, an increasingly active and important group of engineer-entrepreneurs based in and around Silicon Valley, was the organizer. Park—who is the co-founder with Adam Rifkin of stealth startup PandaWhale, but is perhaps better known for being the first person ever fired for blogging—came up with an unusual and refreshing format for the session. In six 15-minute bursts, Khosla alternately quizzed and advised the CEOs about their business strategies. In the process, he provided a wonderful glimpse of how his own mind works when it comes to evaluating investment opportunities and mentoring startup founders.

(Einhdoven, the Netherlands & New York City, USA – 21 October, 2011) - The Intelligent Community Forum (www.intelligentcommunity.org) announced today its highly anticipated list of the Smart21 Intelligent Communities of 2012.  The announcement was made by ICF Co-founder Louis Zacharilla at an event hosted by 2011 Intelligent Community of the Year Eindhoven in The Netherlands.

Each year ICF defines a theme that guides the nominations for the Intelligent Community of the Year.  The 2012 theme is Intelligent Communities – Platforms for Innovation.  Innovation is one of ICF’s five permanent Indicators, which are used to judge communities seeking award status.  However the special theme focuses on how Intelligent Communities create uniquely powerful innovation ecosystems on a foundation of information and communications technology.

The surge of trading activity in the stock of private companies such as Facebook and Groupon could soon run up against its natural limitation: It’s not entirely clear what happens after those boldface names advance to the big leagues.

SecondMarket These are the companies showing the most demand on SecondMarket’s platform. The field of dealers offering these off-exchange services to accredited investors has become crowded of late, thanks in part to the social-media glamour names. But critics say the pipeline of companies beyond these highflying names is rather thin, putting the sustainability of these private markets into question.