Local entrepreneurs selected to take part in the new Healthbox accelerator program in Nashville will receive a $50,000 boost to give them legs while going through the program. Healthbox, which already has programs in Chicago, Boston and London, establishes a microfund for each program that strategic partners act as investors in, which is where that $50,000 for program companies comes from. In Nashville, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee is the anchor partner, and Healthbox Director Jenna Rose, who will oversee the Nashville program, said more partners will be announced. Depending on what stage companies are at when they enter the Healthbox program, they may get that money right out of the gate or over the course of the four-month program, explained Rose.

Blueprint Health, a New York-based accelerator for health tech startups, this week introduced its latest class. But these aren’t necessarily your wet-behind-the-ears, pre-revenue upstarts. The program said that half of the startups in its fourth class (which represents 2.5 percent of the applicant pool) are entering with paying customers, compared with two revenue-generating companies in its last class.

Blueprint Health co-founder Mathew Farkash said they weren’t deliberately looking for more mature startups, but it seems that the program is progressively accepting more advanced startups. It shows that in digital health, accelerator programs – and the mentorship and connections they provide – are seen as valuable even to companies that have already started gaining some traction.

For big enterprise services companies, the hot new trend is having a cloud-hosted platform for third-party applications. These platforms give app developers the resources they need to build, launch, promote, and integrate their apps with other businesses. This not only creates a bundle of exceptional business tools but it also creates a hotbed of savvy entrepreneurs with working solutions looking for partners.

Two of the largest cloud-hosted platforms are Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and the Google Marketplace. These two platforms-as-a-service are prime examples of environments that provide developers the cloud space and necessary tools to build and release their apps rapidly. In turn customers—whether other entrepreneurs, or small or large businesses—can integrate these apps into their own operations simply through the cloud with no downloads required.

It’s the dream of any tech-person: come up with an idea or concept that you can build up and sell off for millions. Consider something as banal as Draw Something which only a few weeks after its release was sold to Zynga for US$180-million. Everyone wants the “big score”. Technology and app development in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya have pushed hard towards finding thing that will make venture capitalists and sponsors sit up and notice. Startups seem to be all about the quick get-in and get-out; lacking very little substance.

Making the decision to become an entrepreneur is a major commitment, with huge implications for skills and lifestyle. Yet there is no standardized testing or certification required or available anywhere to help you decide if you are a good fit for entrepreneurship, or entrepreneurship is right for you. An MBA or other academic credentials just don’t do it.

Therefore, the least you can do is take advantage of some of the self-assessment tools and guides around, like “The Entrepreneur Equation,” by Carol Roth, which highlights personal characteristics and skills required. Some day, I expect there will be a more formal certification required, like lawyers and accountants have to pass, to hang out their shingle.

In this article from the Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker and his progressive understanding of business is highlighted. In the 60’s and 70’s, Drucker began to recognize the signs that there was a shift in business beginning to emerge.  During this time two innovations developed, the microprocessor and economic liberalism. This created great opportunities but also a drastic change in the business was made.

It is my experience that open innovation is going to affect all industries, but some more than others, and some sooner than others.

Overall, I see four external factors that matter here:

1) cycle time for products/services development, 2) money and 3) IPR needed for getting new products/services to market and 4) the level of conservatism in the industry.

It's important to foster a culture of entrepreneurship within your business. For me, in-house entrepreneurship means we continue taking calculated risks in order to keep delivering cool new products for creative professionals. Here are some ways we accomplish this.

1. Hire disrupters.

When hiring, we try to identify people who are disruptive, but not reckless. I ask questions like, “If you were going to start a business right now to make $1 on the Web, what would you do?” We want people who will think creatively and change our business in a productive way.

Right Intention: The intention behind any deed is the ‘will’ to perform the action, with an energy that controls our actions. Prince Siddhartha had everything in his life, but he felt that all the worldly pleasures around him were impermanent and he took the step of renunciation. Similarly when you have so many lesser risk options to survive in the world, why to choose entrepreneurial journey? Question yourself and seek an answer. Whether you are launching a new product/ service; take time, think and decide. Until then don’t take a step forward.

The familiar strangers we see every day on the bus and in the supermarket form an important hidden network at the heart of society, according to the first city-wide study of these passive links.

We’ve all experienced the sense of being familiar with somebody without knowing their name or even having spoken to them. These so-called “familiar strangers” are the people we see every day on the bus on the way to work, in the sandwich shop at lunchtime, or in the local restaurant or supermarket in the evening.

Undergraduates who had gazed at their 40-year-old selves in virtual "mirrors" were 74% less likely to cheat for extra cash on a subsequent trivia test, says a team led by Jean-Louis van Gelder of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement and Hal E. Hershfield of NYU. This and another experiment suggest that one reason people make self-defeating choices such as engaging in unethical behavior is that their ability to imagine their future selves is limited. They're less inclined to indulge in illegal acts if they can see vivid images of themselves such as the computer simulations presented by the researchers. See Hershfield's "Defend Your Research" interview in the June 2013 HBR.

How do you become truly influential? We've found that the most highly respected leaders avoid techniques to gain short-term compliance; they also steer clear of a self-centered "How can I get people to do what I want?" mindset. Instead, they take a different approach altogether.

We interviewed over 100 high-impact influencers from a wide range of industries and organizations for our recent book. To achieve real influence, they tend to follow four steps that turn typical persuasion strategies upside down. These steps are action guidelines all of us can use to get things done with people in ways that not only yield great results, but also strengthen relationships and enhance credibility.

Even a brief interaction can change the way people think about themselves, their leaders, and the future. Each of those many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone's day. Each is a chance to transform an ordinary moment into a touchpoint.

What is a touchpoint? A touchpoint is an interaction with one other person, a couple of people, or a group that can last a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, or a couple of days. Those Touchpoints can be planned or spontaneous, casual or carefully choreographed.

From Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" to Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," the ocean has long been a subject of deep wonder and mystery.

For most of human history, this vast watery abode — which covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface — remained unexplored. But in recent decades, technology has begun to give humans a glimpse of the deep sea landscape. Submersibles can carry people to the deepest depths of the seafloor; and autonomous vehicles can now map a geography never seen by human eyes.

While the media may saturate the startup world talking about which startups raised the most venture capital over the weekend, the vast majority of successful startup founders are busy building their businesses, not trying to raise capital.

We call these entrepreneurs “Bootstrappers”.  According to Wikipedia, Bootstrapping refers to a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.  In other words, Bootstrappers build successful businesses without raising venture capital or outside funding.

A few months ago Fred Perrotta wrote a great article about finding wifi abroad. Having now spent the past year traveling and finding “offices” on the road myself, I thought I would add to this list with a few other places I’ve found helpful for getting online.

Hotel Lobbies

If you’re not already staying in a hotel, hotel lobbies are a great place to get connected. More and more hotels offer free wifi these days and you can find out exactly which ones do by using a hotel comparison website and selecting only to view those with wifi. From there it’s a case of looking at which ones have friendly lobbies – places you would feel comfortable working in. I tend to look out for places with business conferencing services as they’re more likely to be used to non-guests using the hotel’s facilities and of course be used to giving the wifi password out to them.

As a young, up-and-coming business tycoon, you might find yourself travelling on the road a lot, meeting potential clients, tending to customers, or maybe you work from a home office and spend most of your days hidden behind a computer desk.

Whichever of these sounds most like you, it can be pretty difficult forming a solid routine when your schedule is either constantly in flux or you’re pinned to your laptop all day.

STANFORD'S STARTUP GARAGE GIVES STUDENTS A CHANCE TO IDENTIFY A CUSTOMER PAIN POINT, DESIGN A SOLUTION, AND DEVELOP A BUSINESS THAT SUPPORTS ITS CREATION AND LAUNCH. SOUND FAMILIAR?

Like so many important lessons, Stefanos Zenios learned the difference between innovation and invention in the classroom. But that wasn’t the Stanford professor’s original goal.

Ten years ago, Zenios got interested in experiential learning for multi-disciplinary teams. The result was a course in which groups of medical school student were tasked with inventing something--usually some sort of device--to fill a medical need. But they couldn’t stop there.

Among all the great things being positive can do for you, new research from Johns Hopkins University says people with a sunny disposition are less likely to have heart problems.

Smile. It’s good for you. 

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University say people with a general sense of well being, including feeling cheerful, optimistic, and energetic about life, are less likely to suffer a heart attack.  

Many entrepreneurs think of philanthropy as something to consider way off in the future when their businesses are mature and profitable. There is a better approach. Philanthropy works best when it is included in a company's business plan from the very start — when it is part of a company's actual DNA, growing and prospering over the years as the company itself grows and prospers.

Each month, more than 500,000 people create new businesses in the United States. Some founders dream that their ventures will become high-tech giants like Google or Facebook, while others pursue more modest goals. At the very least, they all hope to make a living. At the very best, they hope to strike it rich.