The Kremlin wants to engineer its own Silicon Valley. In a plan revealed in February, the Russian high-tech haven will come complete with new-wave architecture and all the comforts of a resort, a place for Russian geniuses to get together and invent the biggest thing since, well, the Internet. That's the hope, anyway. President Dmitri Medvedev, who has cultivated the image of a tech-savvy liberal, is staking much of his economic vision on the plan's success. And Russia has a resource that other nations envy: a fervid hacker culture with a reputation for excellence or, at least, for daring.

Since the Soviet collapse, no major platforms have emerged in Russia for its computer experts to innovate. As a result many of them have emigrated, while many others have turned to hacking, a field where Russians seem to excel. In January, police arrested a 40-year-old computer whiz for hacking into a Moscow advertising mainframe and making a giant billboard display a clip of hardcore pornography over one of the city's main streets. To avoid detection, the man had routed his attack through a proxy in the region of Chechnya, a sophisticated trick. But for all his skills, the man was found to be unemployed. He told police he had done it "just to give people a laugh." The Russian government's idea now seems to be giving minds like his something more productive to do.

Haitians have received help from governments, the private sector and the philanthropic community around the world to deal with the awful devastation, but the long term goal of rebuilding a nation and constructing institutions from scratch will require sustained commitment to the country. I can’t think of a better group to enlist in this task than Haitian entrepreneurs. The needs of the businesses affected in this region are extraordinary, but so is their potential to become agents for restoration.

Part of the efforts of the international community should be devoted to help entrepreneurs survive this crisis and help other businesses emerge through opportunities related to the rebuilding of the country. Improvements in the health, number, and size of businesses will generate job opportunities and add vitality to the economy.

What can entrepreneurs do in the midst of a crisis of this nature and magnitude? You might be thinking that entrepreneurship has no place in a society where there are only minimal traces of an economy, but the New York Times recently reported on entrepreneurs engaging in business transactions out a desire to return to normalcy in Léogâne, a city near the epicenter of the earthquake (see “Near Quake’s Epicenter, a City Ready for Business”). Anything from huts to haircuts to personal care products to meals are being offered in this city for a price. Entrepreneurs can do even more. Think of the construction contractors and the many service providers that will be needed to put donations to good use.

Before a doctor diagnoses a specific disease, his patient must undergo a series of laboratory exams and assessments. He has to know the history of his patient and how lifestyle affected his present health problem. As results come in, that would be an indication of the time when a physician gives specific drugs and therapies for maintenance. This will eventually contribute to the level of optimum health for that individual. If all else fails, the process will be repeated again.

Similar to what the above mentioned situation has stated, an entrepreneurs responsibility would be pretty much the same. Its just that, he should see his customers as his patients and what they must have to survive a present predicament or a need. He must follow certain steps before doing anything irrational that could contribute to the downfall of his business. He should have certain characteristics innate in his personality for if he lacks one of these, hes most probably doomed to fail.

Entrepreneurship is collectively defined as exhibiting ones vision, taking action, and pursuing that vision as a goal to be achieved in life as service to reality. In the meaningless definition, its getting your butt out of that couch and doing something rather than fulfilling your lifes destiny of being a couch potato. Stated below are some of the distinct attitudes an entrepreneur should positively have:

THE print hanging behind the receptionist’s desk at Foundation Capital screams, “Our greatest thrill is to loan you money” — in chunky, capitalized red letters. That’s encouraging news for Michael Bauer, because he wants money and has put himself in a prime position to get it.

Mr. Bauer has set up shop on the second floor of Foundation Capital’s offices here to pursue his dream of creating an energy company from scratch. He pays no rent to operate out of the building, which is designed to evoke a Mediterranean villa. And he’s free to enjoy all the trappings of this venture capital firm, including its ample parking, woodsy surroundings and outdoor patio.

Mr. Bauer has won these cozy environs through a new role as an “entrepreneur in residence.” This coveted position, called an E.I.R. in Silicon Valley shorthand, is emblematic of the valley’s economy of ideas. Most E.I.R.’s receive a monthly stipend of up to $15,000 to sit and think for about six months. In return, the venture capital firm usually gets the first shot at financing the idea that emerges from this meditation.

“The E.I.R. takes out some of the risk because they are known quantities,” said Adam Grosser, a partner at Foundation Capital. “They have a track record of success and a proven ability to disrupt a market with their ideas.”

• January 25, 2010: Solicitation was issued for public release
• February 23, 2010: DoD will begin accepting proposals
• March 24, 2010: Deadline for receipt of proposals by 6:00 a.m. EST -- plan ahead and submit early.

February 16, 2010

Program Solicitation -- This file contains the proposal preparation instructions and requirements, program description, definitions, methods of selection and evaluation criteria, and contracting information. The Program Solicitation is available in the following formats:

• HTML format
  
• PDF format -- can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader (download it FREE)
• MS Word 95, 97, and 2000 format

  Important Note: In addition to following the DoD-wide instructions in the Program Solicitation, proposers must also follow the specific instructions of the DoD Component (Army and Navy) to which they are applying -- see Solicitation Topics below.

The University of Michigan’s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies held the finals for its annual all-student business plan competition, the Michigan Business Challenge, over the weekend. From 85 initial applications, a record number for the school, four advanced to the finals, and the winner was Ambiq Micro, which took $27,000 in cash grants.

Formerly known as Cubiq Microchip, the company was founded by Scott Hanson, a research fellow in the University of Michigan’s college of engineering; David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, professors from the department of electrical engineering and computer science; and David Landman and Philip O’Niel, two M.B.A. candidates.

Ambiq Micro plans to sell low-power microprocessors that could  substantially extend the battery life of a range of tiny wireless devices. The start-up’s technology could be used in smart credit cards, computers, sensors that control temperature or detect motion in smart homes and buildings, and a variety of medical and mobile devices.

Italian plastic surgeon Luca Poli, who benefited from the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs programme, said the three months he spent shadowing a businesswoman in Spain were key to the success of his new clinic in Milan. The EU scheme has been extended for a second year and could soon become a permanent fixture.

Poli is one of 1,800 business people registered in the exchange programme, which allows Europeans to shadow established entrepreneurs before launching their own ventures.

The €5 million pilot scheme has been extended for a second year and a European Commission official has revealed plans to put the initiative on a permanent footing. To date, 60 exchanges have been completed but this could climb to 500 by June 2010.

The mobility programme has been highly successful in Italy and Spain, which account for nearly half of all applications. The UK is by far the most requested destination, primarily for linguistic reasons, according to Eurochambres, the umbrella organisation for EU chambers of commerce, which coordinates the scheme.

The National Cancer Institute will soon house about 2,100 researchers and support staff on the Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center in Rockville, Md.

NCI, a part of the National Institutes of Health, will occupy a new facility, consisting of twin seven-story buildings totaling 575,000 square feet of space. They will be completed and occupied in about three years.

“The addition of NCI to our campus makes the Shady Grove area a national epicenter for cancer research,” university President Ronald J. Daniels said. “We are excited to be a partner in providing state-of-the-art space for this incredibly important scientific institution and thousands of its employees.”

The NCI facility, which will also include a parking structure wrapped by retail space, will join three existing buildings on the Montgomery County Campus. The campus, which opened in 1988, now serves about 4,000 students, primarily working professionals studying part-time for master’s degrees. Four Johns Hopkins divisions offer more than 50 degree and certificate programs on the campus, which also hosts research facilities and business tenants whose interests mesh with the university’s and county’s focus on the life sciences.

A newly published report from the non-profit organization Greater Ohio and the Brookings Institution, suggests that innovation is one of the key assets needed to restore Ohio to the prosperity level the state enjoyed for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. The “Restoring Prosperity” agenda calls for a new era of innovation and a re-energizing of Ohio’s entrepreneurial culture. Specifically the report recommends the state:

• Preserve Ohio Third Frontier funding.
• Find creative sources of funding for innovation-based economic development.
• Significantly expand the state’s advanced manufacturing network.
•  Create micro-investment funds.
  

Where do we grow from here? As a new era beckons, we must recognize the real opportunities.

As our economy shows signs of life, we will encounter both new and familiar challenges.

Like previous recoveries, this one will be unique and create new opportunities for growth and prosperity while old business models collapse with changing consumer demands. Unlike recent recoveries, however, there are transformational macro-economic forces at work that will redefine our economy and our quality of life.

The era of inexpensive energy and urban sprawl has passed as we now compete against rapidly growing economies for energy and other key resources. The convergence of the information age, efficient foreign capital markets and seamless transportation networks has created a level playing field, allowing entrepreneurs to build companies virtually anywhere on the planet. Closer to home, we face an unfamiliar challenge of slowing population growth. The fact is that our rate of historic population growth is neither sustainable nor desirable. With nearly 20 million people living in Florida, we have reached adulthood, and it’s time for us to assume our rightful role as a leader in determining our own economic destiny.

This recovery is the dawning of Central Florida’s next economic era.

Finding so-called informal investors for a debt or equity financing in a small company isn't easy. It helps to understand who they are

If you're an entrepreneur, at one time or another you have probably sought to answer the question: "Where can I get the capital I need?" For most people, the answer is from their own savings or the existing cash flow of their businesses. But for some, it means seeking money from others.

The many sources of external capital for entrepreneurs range from banks to trade creditors to credit cards to venture capitalists. Getting a loan from an outsider is more common than getting an equity investment. And some sources, such as credit-card companies, provide small amounts of money to lots of people while others, such as venture capitalists, provide larger amounts to a handful of businesses. But one source frequently mentioned in books and articles is "informal investors," a term that lumps together friends, family, and business angels.

How Many Informal Investors Are There?

If you're going to look for debt or equity capital from a particular source, it's probably a good idea to know how much money that source tends to provide. So how prevalent is informal investing?

Business schools need to focus on bootstrapping, not only raising money from VCs.

I know I am entering highly contentious territory. Academia generally looks down upon entrepreneurs even as they teach entrepreneurship in business schools and other university programs around the world.

Meanwhile, I have come to observe that most business school programs have an extensive emphasis on fundraising, especially from venture capitalists, and very little pragmatic understanding of what it really takes to get a venture off the ground. As a result, business schools launch students into the real world with completely unrealistic expectations, set up to fail.

Last week I launched a discussion on my blog asking my readers in academia to weigh in on teaching bootstrapping in business schools. It generated an active discussion from which I will synthesize a few points.

The Smithsonian National Zoo just got a Pacific Giant Octopus. (Weeeelll, sort of. It's a baby, and currently only about three pounds. But it'll be giant someday, promise.) The little critter doesn't have a name yet, but he (they think it's probably a he, maybe) does have a web cam. The camera is set up to capture the octopus at feeding times—11 and 3 Eastern, daily. Which is, coincidentally, right about the time I could use a good cephalopod fix in my day.

Even better, this announcement led me to discover that the National Zoo has a ton of different animal web cams. Seriously, they're set up like a bunch of teenage emo girls over there. Lions, naked mole rats (!!), single-celled organisms, sloth bears (?!): You can watch 'em all live.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is apparently greatly concerned about getting more federally funded research out of university research labs and into the market:

"the United States cannot afford to merely fund research and say a prayer that some entrepreneur will commercialize it down the road,"

So he's asking for advice on how to improve the commercialization of federally funded research. Here's a simple and practical idea that he almost certainly won't consider:

Get the Bayh-Dole Act repealed. Bayh-Dole, of course, was officially designed to do exactly what Locke is supposedly now looking to do. It specifically gave universities and other organizations the right to patent and control federally funded research, with the misguided belief that this would increase commercialization of federally funded research. The law was enacted thirty years ago, and we can now say, pretty conclusively, that it has failed and has only served to hold back commercialization efforts and to massively stifle federally funded research in a number of areas, through a series of (somewhat predictable, if you understand what monopoly rights do) unintended consequences.

TEMPE, Arizona—As a species of seeming feeble, naked apes, we humans are unlikely candidates for power in a natural world where dominant adaptations can boil down to speed, agility, jaws and claws. Why we rose to rule, while our hominin relatives died out, has long been a curiosity for scientists.

The study of our human nature encompasses a variety of fields ranging from anthropology, primatology, cognitive science and psychology to paleontology, archaeology, evolutionary biology and genetics.

Representatives of each of these disciplines gathered February 19-22 at a workshop, "Origins of Human Uniqueness and Behavioral Modernity," staged by Arizona State University's Origins Project to discuss recent advances in their respective fields.

Led by ASU professors anthropologist Kim Hill and paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean, co-organizers of the event, the panel of scientists agreed to adopt a working definition that human uniqueness is the "underlying capacity to produce complexity," and to think of behavioral modernity as "the expression" of those capacities.

We've noticed a common thread among many companies these days. When thinking about innovation - most seem to be heavily focused on providing incremental features and benefits as a cornerstone for their competitive advantage. What seems to elude many executive leaders is a lack of understanding that people do not buy products, they buy into meanings.

Maybe the reason for this is simply the physics of most organizations inhibits radical innovation and the competitive advantage that results. What matters the most to people is not the function of a product, but their emotional, psychological and cultural connection to what a product means to them. The key to sustained competitive advantage for companies is to innovate around meanings rather than function and performance. Radical Innovation does not happen when you bring people an incremental improvement of what they already know. Rather, radical innovation (and market leadership for that matter) is the result of 'proposing' an unexpected meaning. This meaning, unsolicited by user needs, once discovered, turns out to be the very thing people were waiting for!

There are countless examples of companies who have mastered this. Of course, Apple is an easy one. And there are other compelling examples. Back in the early 80's, Seiko and Casio were driving technological innovation in quartz watches, believing people wanted technical precision. However, a Swiss watchmaker realized people cared more about self-expression than technical precision. Swatch was born and proved to be a radical innovation of meaning that created radical market success. While Seiko and Casio were closely observing user needs and existing meanings, Swatch created new ones.

Researchers at X-Ray Optical Systems Inc. in East Greenbush have developed an analyzer that can instantly measure the amount of lead and other toxic metals in body fluids -- a big improvement over current blood tests that can be expensive and time consuming.

But even with a demonstration product in his hands, CEO David Gibson says his company doesn't "have the cash to take it from that to the marketplace." Instead, "we're sitting there in the valley of death," Gibson said, referring to the time span between product development and commercialization -- where sometimes even the most promising ideas go to die.

Legislation before Congress seeks to bridge that gap for a select group of entrepreneurs, such as Gibson, who have recently used federal dollars to develop new technologies. The measure, sponsored by Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam, would create a new grant program for companies whose federal research and development dollars are drying up -- just as they begin focusing on pushing new products to market.

Nothing like putting your heart and soul into innovation, and then getting this:

Harsh Reality of Innovation - Apple and Google
Man, tough audience. But very much in keeping with some the best advice on innovation. Which is, you can't have innovation without some failure along the way. It's inevitable.

That advice is both true, and glib. Innovation consultant Jeffrey Phillips catches the right spirit when he says:

"Another thing about 'failure' is that we try to kid ourselves that failure is a 'good thing' a learning opportunity. Well, not in most cultures.

This is the reality of innovation. It's tough. The more disruptive an innovation, the tougher it gets. And we're in the middle of seeing how it plays right now with Apple iPad and Google Buzz.

Don’t miss out on these great upcoming events, especially the Small Business Summit on March 16th – which features an appearance by Anita Campbell, Founder of Small Business Trends. (Note that several events in this week’s list have upcoming early bird deadlines.)

This list of events, conferences and webinars for growing small businesses and entrepreneurs is brought to you twice a month as a community service by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com

Product development is a wild animal. It's unimaginably powerful, but you have to make sure it knows who's in charge – at every moment. Oh, and it might bite your head off anyway.

This is true whether we're talking about software, media, or tangible commercial products. And the most common complaint I've heard from leaders is that development is out of control. Here are some telltale messages from the development team:

"We'll be done in 2-3 weeks"
Translation: We're working on things as they come up

"We need a little more money"
Translation: We're working on things as they come up

"We've found a few last things that need to be fixed"
Translation: We're working on things as they come up