As investors grow more choosy about putting money into venture capital, funds that invest in biotechnology and the life sciences have hit particularly tough sledding.

Irish business funding for research and university technology transfer offices (TTOs) fails to give Irish start-up companies the support they need when they need it. Instead, TTOs tend to take large chunks of company equity in exchange for funding, exactly when the companies are most vulnerable, or drown them in bureaucracy, according to UCD School of Business lecturer and researcher Dr Rory O’Shea.

Mitt Romney’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination may be costing his private- equity backers a lot more than they bargained for.

The travails of Research In Motion, the Ontario-based maker of the BlackBerry mobile messaging device, follow a pattern sadly familiar to technology-company watchers and admirers of classical tragedy. Brave innovation and superb execution create a new market, which the upstart dominates. But ultimately the very scale of the new champion’s success drags it down.

High-tech migrants to Silicon Valley, in their 20s and fresh out of college, drawn by a surge in start-ups and investment money that in the last year and a half have created more jobs than companies can fill, and are eager to help shape the technology that infuses their lives.

Indiana is likely days away from becoming the first Rust Belt state -- and the first state in a decade -- to adopt the controversial "right to work" law.

Assisted by technological innovation and years of subsidies, the cost of wind and solar power has fallen sharply — so much so that the two industries say that they can sometimes deliver cleaner electricity at prices competitive with power made from fossil fuels. At the same time, wind and solar companies are telling Congress that they cannot be truly competitive and keep creating jobs without a few more years of government support.

Mitt Romney’s opponents have spent weeks slamming the private-equity industry where he made his fortune, saying it profits from dismantling companies and laying off workers. The industry’s trade group has pushed back. Private-equity firms are good for the country, it argues, because they make the economy run more efficiently and turn around ailing companies, creating jobs.

Cincinnati manufacturers are revving up efforts to attract the region’s youngest workers to high-tech factory jobs of the future: Increasingly, they’re offering high-school kids job-shadowing opportunities, scholarships and apprenticeships where students split time between work and school.

The Rexas Permanent School Fund may hire in-house money managers to oversee its $25 billion in assets because returns are being “eaten alive” by hedge-fund fees, according to Chief Investment Officer Holland Timmins. Returns were less than 1 percent for the 44 months through November on assets managed by the five companies that bundle multiple hedge funds into single investment vehicles,

House budget-writers are proposing to give Gov. Rick Scott more flexibility to dole out tax dollars to companies that promise to create jobs -- but less than half the $230 million he wanted to award.

K Street defenders of tax perks for the wealthy weren’t looking for a poster child, but they’re stuck with one: Mitt Romney. The release of his tax returns Tuesday put a private equity baron’s face on some of the issues lobbyists have worked on behind closed doors for years: the 15 percent capital gains tax, taxes on carried interest, and write offs.

"The Blueprint Mississippi report, which was released on Jan. 5, shows we are already headed in the right direction," Alveno Castilla says. "We have seen tremendous growth of new technology companies in the state thanks to the creation of the Angel Fund at Mississippi Technology Alliance

The “disruption” of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard’s Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players.

St. Louis may finally be ready to shake its reputation as a tough place to start a business. Working mostly independently of one another, groups of St. Louisans have organized at least a half-dozen efforts to provide capital and advice to startup businesses, all of which seem to be bearing fruit at the same time.

It’s that outlook time of year, and Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), was in San Diego earlier this week, talking about the 2012 outlook for venture capital. Heesen began his presentation by saying, “Be prepared for a roller coaster ride here, because that’s where we’ve been for the past year—and that’s where we’re going.”

Kickstarter is a “crowd-funding” site. It’s a place for creative people to get enough start-up money to get their projects off the ground. The categories include music, film, art, design, food, publishing and technology. The projects seeking support might be recording a CD, putting on a play, producing a short film or developing a cool new tech product.