Social networks can breathe new life into old brands by enabling companies to build collaborative relationships with consumers like never before. But what’s a corporate giant to do when no one wants to follow it on Twitter or be its friend on Facebook?

Many firms struggle to answer that question. Yet turning even mundane products like toothpaste or tampons into talking points doesn’t have to be difficult. The trick, a few innovators have found, is to let consumers lead the conversation. Rather than strip a brand of its valuable identity, relinquishing control of messaging to the masses can have a rejuvenating effect.

The museum that houses one of the most iconic medicine-themed paintings of all time, "The Gross Clinic" by Thomas Eakins, is opening a new exhibition of posters called Health for Sale.

The collection includes works depicting the "social plague" of syphilis, the benefits of aspirin, and the dangers of marijuana -- the "Weed with Roots in Hell."

The posters in the exhibit were collected by William H. Helfand, a chemical engineer who worked for more than 30 years as an executive in pharmaceutical giant Merck's international operations division. His job with Merck took him to Paris, where he collected numerous medical posters.

Even as Eric Schmidt steps down as chief executive at Google on Monday, he can leave with the satisfaction that his employee approval rating is at an all-time high. There’s an art to quitting when you’re on top.

Schmidt has an approval rating of 96 percent, up 3 percentage points from a year ago, according to employee approval surveys by Glassdoor.com. Schmidt barely edged out Steve Jobs, whose rating fell 3 points to 95 percent. Glassdoor.com says that its latest survey of employee approval at the top 12 large technology companies yields some insights that aren’t normally measured with the daily ebb and flow of a company’s stock price.

But the top bosses at Yahoo and Microsoft aren’t so lucky, as might be predicted by the companies’ recent performance. Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, saw her employee approval rating drop the farthest among the tech giants, with her approval rating coming in at 50 percent, 27 percentage points below a year ago. Still, Bartz’s approval rating is still higher than the 34 percent that Jerry Yang had as CEO of Yahoo at the time he stepped down.

DowJones Venture Source has released its quarterly data on venture-backed exists and its appears that M&A activity has dropped in Q1 2011 despite the momentum that venture-backed exits gained throughout 2010.

In the first quarter of 2011, 104 U.S.-based venture-backed companies achieved liquidity, netting $9.8 billion, according to VentureSource. That represents a 21% decrease in exits and a 17% increase in capital raised from the first quarter of 2010 when 131 exits raised $8.4 billion.

So why is M&A activity down? Jessica Canning, director of global research for Dow Jones VentureSource says that despite the fact that companies have plenty of cash on hand, acquirers may feel that rising valuations are making acquisitions more risky.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 144,000 fewer chief executives were employed in the United States in 2010 than in 2007. More broadly, half a million fewer people were employed in management occupations in 2010 than in 2007. While some former executives have taken lower-paying jobs, a great many are still out of work.

If you are one of the unemployed, the pain is real, not only financially but also in a sense that you are not contributing to your own potential. But I see former business managers as potential entrepreneurs. Granted, not every former executive has the ability, the desire or the luck to start a successful business. But if you try and succeed you cannot only regain meaningful employment, but you can also help restart the great American jobs engine.

When Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder Ben Horowitz took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo Wednesday in San Francisco, he was expected to tell audience members which technologies they should invest in and which ones they should build.

Horowitz and co-founder Marc Andreessen have been investing since last year from a $650 million fund, so the audience would have loved to hear Horowitz’s opinions. But he didn’t like that idea.

Instead, in just 10 minutes, he gave a history of the great technology shifts that have occurred in the computer industry over the past 50 years and what they mean.

Information overload is the bane of the web worker, and a primary source of that overload is our email inboxes. While I’ve previously mentioned a few strategies for dealing with email overload, I think it’s a good time for a post with comprehensive rundown of my tips for managing email.

1. Unsubscribe. Be brutally honest with yourself about which information you really have time to read, and get rid of subscriptions to anything you rarely, or never, read.

2. Turn off or filter the bacn. Bacn refers to email like messages from retailers and social network notifications. It’s not exactly spam, because you’ve signed up to receive it, but not necessarily useful either. While notifications from various services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can sometimes be useful, you should think about whether you actually read them and how much time it can take to delete these emails. Anything you can live without seeing is a candidate for unsubscribing or automatically filtering and dumping into a folder where it can be reviewed periodically. If you use Gmail, you can use its Smart Labels feature to automatically filter out bacn emails.

1. Venture capitalists are human. They like to invest in people they know…or in people their friends know. Thus, if you have no relationship with them, you are a mere business plan from a stranger. Work your network! You can get an audience with a referral, but it's really a long shot to go in cold.

2. Expect rejection. Most people I know had to speak with a dozen VCs before they got any traction -- and many had to do more than that. You are not going to fit with everyone. So, if you have a biotech start-up, find out who the people are who like your space.

3. Net it out. A long, boring Powerpoint presentation doesn't get anyone excited these days. That goes for VCs, too. The best presentations start with a slide that says, "Here are the eight things that I want you to walk away with." Everything else is "appendix."

Washington, DC (MMD Newswire) April 1, 2011 -- The U.S. Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration (EDA) today announced its FY 2011 University Center Economic Development Program competition to promote bottom-up regional strategies that help foster business expansion and job creation in EDA's Chicago and Philadelphia regions. Applicant submissions should seek to create and nurture regional economic ecosystems through applied research and development, technology commercialization, and targeted activities that cultivate entrepreneurship.

"Investing in regional innovation clusters represent a proven, cost-effective strategy for fostering sustainable growth and University Centers are important partners in this approach to advance the innovation economy and increase competitiveness," said U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development John Fernandez. "This year's competition seeks to expand the capacity of the centers to help build ecosystems where the private sector can flourish and create the connective tissue that will bind together vibrant regional economies."

Today, BMW announced the planned creation of a tech incubator in New York City to seed innovations in mobile and location-based services. The announcement follows the automaker's establishment in February of a venture capital company, BMW i Ventures, with an investment fund of as much as $100 million, and serves as yet another indication that BMW is turning its eye toward the mobile startup scene.

Oh, and they'll still make cars, too.

But while such a strategy has obvious benefits in an industry increasingly looking to merge vehicles with high-end tech (BMW's iPhone integration, Ford SYNC, Hyundai's iPad owner's manual), the automaker is clear that it's not expecting to invest only in technology applicable to automobiles.

Ontario Centres of Excellence's (OCE's) Centre for Commercialization of Research (CCR) recently hosted a gathering of some of the world's brightest minds from academia, government and industry in a bid to better capitalize on the commercialization potential of publicly funded research and enhance the state of innovation in Canada and around the world.

The inaugural meeting of The International Commercialization Alliance was held March 30th and 31st in Ottawa, bringing together experts from 18 countries. The group examined exemplary practices in the commercialization of research outcomes internationally and focused on continuous global collaborations among its members by signing a formal declaration of intent.

Some weeks, it’s easy to feel foolish because it seems impossible to predict what are popular topics for blog posts. That’s when I start nosing around more to discover apparently popular topics on other blogs. In the interests of sharing, here’s a completely unscientific study of what seems to work for other bloggers in creating highly popular topics:

* Admit you’re failing or incapable of performing a task
* Use a lot of curse words
* Put a number in the blog post’s title
* Express outrage for the sake of expressing outrage
* Be outrageous for the sake of being outrageous
* Say something ridiculously contrary to what everyone knows and understands

First came StartUp America, then StartUp Britain. Now even communist-run Cuba is turning to entrepreneurs to help kick start its economy.

This week, Cuban government officials approved several measures aimed at helping the many start-ups that were launched after reforms last year eased restrictions on privately owned businesses, Reuters reports.

We looked on in a mixture of wonder and envy this week as the UK Government launched StartUp Britain, a scheme aimed at propelling wannabe Richard Bransons into business.

Every new business in the UK will be able to claim a support package worth £1,500 (about $2,300) to help them get up and running. There will be a raft of other technical and educational help for start-ups.

The program comes hot on the heels of Startup America, a major private/public partnership kicked off by US president Barack Obama in February. More than $US2 billion will be pumped into boosting entrepreneurship in the country.

You’ll eventually need start-up funds, an office space, and a business license to become an entrepreneur. But before you take the plunge, make sure you also have these five intangibles that are absolutely crucial to CEO success.

1. Confidence

When Morgan First started her first company, a Boston city guide and planner, she felt isolated at CEO networking events. She was not only the lone female, but also a 21-year-old redhead in a room of middle-aged, grey-haired men. She was naturally intimidated but, after the first few events, she realized that “when I walked in that room and I was confident, everyone in realized, ‘she’s different, I want to talk to her.’ And it was really just the difference of the energy I carried.”

There’s a growing number of startup accelerators around the world, from Y Combinator in Silicon Valley to TechStars in Boulder and SeedCamp based out of London- All helping entrepreneurs to accelerate their ideas from conception to commercial business in a shorter time frame than normal.

Most take a huge chunk of equity in return for a small amount of early stage seed funding, but SSE Labs, the new accelerator programe based out of AOL’s offices on Page Mill Road, Palo Alto works differently; SSE labs is built in compliance with Stanford Student Enterprise to help nurture the existing world class entrepreneurial nature of Standford students.

Iowa needs to take steps to grow its bioscience industry, an area that added high-paying jobs even during the recession, a new report shows.

Iowa added about 625 jobs, a 4.5 percent increase from 2007 to 2008, the first year of the U.S. recession, a report from the Battelle Memorial Institute showed. Nationally, bioscience jobs grew 1.4 percent in the same time.

"It's exciting ... that even through this recession we've seen growth in bioscience, and we've been growing significantly ahead of the nation," said Gov. Terry Branstad. He released the report Thursday with Innovate Iowa, a group of business and academic leaders.

It’s sad when the startup is “successful,” but the founder still feels totally unsatisfied. I see it happening all the time. The business is a winner, but the family or other relationships are broken by the stress. Or the entrepreneur started down this path to be their own boss and change the world, but find they are now answering to many more people, with nothing really changed.

I was just reading a new book, called “The Plan,” by John McKee and Helen Latimer, which focuses on the difference between being “successful” and being “satisfied” in your personal and professional lives. They start by asserting that many people feel more or less successful, but far fewer, even the successful ones, feel satisfied.

How many of you actually know what you want to be when you grow up? I know people in their 40s and 50s who are still trying to figure that out.

Come to think of it, the whole idea of somehow magically discovering what you’re meant to do with your life is more or less a roll of the dice.

That’s the way it was for me, that’s for sure. From high-tech engineering to sales to marketing to executive management and finally, after more years than I care to count, to this. I’ve found myself.