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Employees shouldn’t be surfing the Web when they’re in the office, right? It’s just common sense. Some recent studies are turning that bit of management wisdom on its head. Turns out that the most productive workers are the ones who get to read the news and make Amazon purchases from their desk.

Recently, PC World reported on a study out of the University of Singapore, which found that giving office workers the ability to Web surf at work allowed them to “restore resources that are drained as a result of work.”

WASHINGTON, DC -- Today, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, President Obama signed the America Invents Act, historic patent reform legislation that will help American entrepreneurs and businesses bring their inventions to market sooner, creating new businesses and new jobs. In addition, the President announced additional steps that will help convert the ideas from America’s universities and research labs into new products, expanding our economy and creating 21st century jobs.

“I am pleased to sign the America Invents Act.  This much-needed reform will speed up the patent process so that innovators and entrepreneurs can turn a new invention into a business as quickly as possible,” said President Obama. “I’m also announcing even more steps today that will help bring these inventions to market faster and create jobs. Here in America, our creativity has always set us apart, and in order to continue to grow our economy, we need to encourage that spirit wherever we find it.”

Amidst an increasingly connected world, globalization is the order of the day. The concept poses both great benefits and significant challenges to entrepreneurs. However, while the benefits are many (including more efficient communication and greater potential for collaboration), today’s digital age can put increased pressure on young businesses to expand globally — and to do so quickly.

There is something to allowing your business to grow organically and not to push expansion too rapidly. On the other hand, it’s important to consider the realities of today’s business environment. If you’re a startup entrepreneur, you risk facing a competitive disadvantage if you wait too long to expand your operations.

The first step in the process of expansion is identifying which markets are of the most strategic significance to your business. Once you’ve targeted a market, however, things can quickly become convoluted and overwhelming.

Scientists examined a mass of EU-funded research on the impacts of climate change on Europe's marine environment and identified the gaps and priorities for future work.

"Change has been clearly visible and is much more rapid than we thought was possible," said Carlo Heip, chair of the CLAMER project and lead author of the report.

Over the past 25 years, sea-water temperatures have increased as Arctic sea ice has melted. The combination of rising sea levels and increased winds has contributed to the erosion of 15% of European coasts, the report said.

As noted in a previous entry (‘Visualizing the globalization of higher education and research’), we’ve been keen to both develop and promote high quality visualizations associated with the globalization of higher education and research. On this note, the wonderful Floating Sheep collective recently informed me about some new graphics that will be published in:

Graham, M., Hale, S. A., and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World's Knowledge, London, Convoco! Edition.

While the rest of us were at leisure, it’s been a busy time in European biotech, with a string of new company formations, funding rounds and licensing deals announced over the past five to six weeks.

These have ranged from big ticket partnerships like that between the Austrian antibody engineering specialist F-Star and pharma company Merck Serono which boasted a headline value of €492 million, to small financings such as the €2.5 million follow-on round announced by Pharnext, a French start-up that is applying systems biology to find new uses for marketed drugs.

The F-Star deal, under which it will work to discover novel antibodies against inflammatory diseases targets supplied by Merck Serono, highlights how pharma’s R&D productivity problems and the ongoing restructuring of research operations continue to dominate partnering activity in the sector. Antibodies are now established as a valuable class of drugs and pharma companies are anxious to bolster their pipelines with novel formats that are emerging from research-based companies like F-Star.

Researchers, authors and funding bodies are challenging the traditional journal publishing model, with open access becoming the preferred route to publishing and accessing research results, according to a paper published today in the journal ecancermedicalscience.

The paper, “An Open Access future? Report from the eurocancercoms project” analyses the results of a survey carried out as part of the Framework Programme 7-funded Eurocancercoms project, looking at researchers’ attitudes towards open access publishing. Open access business models to challenge the traditional subscription models are also examined.

The survey, by the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR), found that 59 per cent of researchers say their work is often hindered by a lack of free access to research findings.

Change is about the only thing constant in the world of startups. Despite their own focus on changing the world, they often forget that they too have to change rapidly and often as the market evolves. Too many find that out too late, and are left chasing a rabbit that is long gone.

The solution is to establish and maintain a culture and processes that don’t view change as a discrete event to be spotted and managed, but as an ongoing opportunity to improve competitiveness. Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe, in an HBR article last year on change readiness for large companies, define it as “the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance.”

I read a blog post (via Hacker News) this morning that suggested three slides is enough.

I've written that six slides is what got it done for us.

And the best presenations I've seen lately used no slides, but started with a live demo of a working web app and went from there.

(Reuters) - Last winter, President Barack Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and a small posse of White House officials made a big show as they swept through Northeast Ohio to kick off their Startup America initiative that promised to help seed new ventures and create jobs. Eight months later, Ray Leach is still waiting.

"Everything is moving too slowly," said Leach, chief executive of Cleveland-based JumpStart, a regional accelerator focused on business development. "We need to make progress."

Many retiree’s today are not happy with that status. They may be of age, but they are not ready to stop. That is why so many people are escaping retirement and starting a business.

Mature entrepreneurs differ from their younger counterparts in several critical ways. For one, they are usually in a much better financial position than younger entrepreneurs. Their bigger financial cushion—retirement packages, nest eggs, or home ownership—affords them flexibility in the initial stages of a start-up, where funding is often critical. Because they can often rely on other sources for current income, they are in a better position to take entrepreneurial risks.

Washington Post:

Most prospective college students submit several applications. Allen Gannett fired off just one, to George Washington University, then threw up his hands and crossed his fingers.

Looking back, what frustrated me was there were so many schools I could have gotten into … but I was so overwhelmed,” said Gannett, now a senior at GW. “That’s solely based on the fact that information gathering is so hard for college search.”

Q: Apple recently surpassed Google as the most valuable brand in the world. How do you think the rivalry will play out in the future?

It's an exciting time to be in the technology space. I believe that the technological revolution we're in the midst of now will be remembered as one of the greatest in the history of mankind, if you consider both the pace of innovation and the effect it's having on people's lives. But in terms of our competitors, as I've always said -- I'm more worried about the two guys in the garage coming up with the next Google than our big competitors today! In the meantime, we'll stay focused on our users and fostering the kind of innovation that can change the world.

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For a while, I was optimistic that 2011 would be a good year for venture capital-backed IPOs, and it wasn’t just wishful thinking. There were 72 VC-backed IPOs last year—six times as many as in 2009. The year ended with a bang and 2011 got off to a good start. In the first half of 2011, there were 36 IPOs, right on target for at least a replay of 2010.

Lately, however, I have parked my optimism at the side of the road.

Our high jobless rate has not budged, housing remains in the tank, and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe now threatens the United States. In addition, the U.S. government’s debt load grows more out of control every day. And, of course, we have stalemate over fiscal policy in Washington.

Do you need to raise funds to get your idea off the ground?

You’ve got a brilliant business idea, but your bank lacks your vision. (Or perhaps you lack the collateral.)

Maybe you reached out to friends and family, but you know they lost their shirts when your brother-in-law’s salmon-flavored energy drink flopped. Is this the death of your nascent business?

Not. So. Fast.

There’s a new player in the startup accelerator block. New Jersey-based Ecelerator (http://www.ecelerator.com) announces the launch of a startup accelerator for emerging enterprise (business-to-business) focused software entrepreneurs. Based on startup accelerators such as Y Combinator and TechStars, Ecelerator offers promising teams of early-stage entrepreneurs a three-month residency program during which they will hone their business skills, gain concrete guidance from experts in the field, and make valuable connections with investors to secure financial backing -- all key elements in bringing a an innovative business to full fruition.

Ecelerator invites early-stage entrepreneurs from around the nation to apply for the Spring 2012 session in New Jersey.

An upcoming tour of the province will introduce New Brunswick's wealthy to the benefits of angel investing, a sometimes risky financial move that can provide handsome returns.

First Angel Network, a Halifax-based organization that shares research information and pools investment capital, is touring New Brunswick in late October and early November with members of the New Brunswick Innovation Fund to raise awareness about angel investing and to teach interested people how to make a well-informed angel investment.

"We want to come up and talk about angel investing and teach people how to do it the right way," said Ross Finlay, co-founder of First Angel Network. "If they're going to do it and they make a mistake, it's with their own money."

[Updated 5:15 pm PT with fresh quotes from Richard Sudek, see below] Regional angel investing groups in Southern California, Northern California, and New York say they’re banding together in an effort to lengthen the financial runway for early-stage startups before their founders are forced to turn to venture capital firms.

Tech Coast Angels, based in Irvine, CA, said in an announcement today that it’s joining with Band of Angels in Menlo Park, CA, and Golden Seeds in New York City to form a new alliance called the Angel Syndication Network. The idea is to lower the barriers to funding, so that companies that have already won early stage investments from one regional angel group can get pre-screened introductions to other groups in the network without having to restart the due-diligence process.