Preparing for the worst.

• Position: Triangle

Here's the situation: A dirty bomb detonated dining a food festival at the State Fairgrounds. That's the scenario Rex Healthcare in Raleigh put its emergency department through April 26, less than two weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings. The drill, planned before the Patriots' Day attack, is required by regulators to prepare hospitals for unexpected disasters.

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Taking steps in the right direction

Bill Warner and his partners call their Cary-based nonprofit EntreDot Enterprises Inc. because it helps entrepreneurs connect the dots. "These are six logical steps of business maturity. People running businesses came to us because they didn't do previous steps like market research or competitive differentiation, or they don't have the right marketing and sales channel." Warner--a former IBM Corp. executive and managing partner of Paladin and Associates Inc., a consultancy in Wake Forest--entered the nonprofit world in 2008, when he and several other businessmen used a grant from Winston-Salem-based Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to mentor entrepreneurs in rural North Carolina. They took the model for that program and, using donations and their own money, debuted EntreDot's first incubator in Cary last February. It has opened four more in the Triangle and wants to expand to Charlotte. Besides cheap...