For most new high-tech products, the first customers are always “early adopters.” The conventional wisdom is that early adopters are the ideal target for new products, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, and secondly, their feedback may lead you directly away from your real target market of mainstream customers.

The term “early adopters” relates to the people who are eager to try almost any new technology products, and originates from Everett M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations book. Early adopters are usually no more than 10%-15% of the ultimate market potential, and marketing to them may be necessary, but not sufficient in marketing to the mainstream. Witness the market struggle for 3DTV acceptance over the past couple of years.

I have been dispensing a fair amount of startup advice of late, mostly picked up from hanging around some pretty hardcore venture capitalists (VCs). This time I thought we could look at a little something for the not-so-seasoned investors out there. So, if you’ve got some spare cash lying around, you might fancy yourself an investor. You’ve heard a few startups pitch and you’re pretty sure that they are going revolutionise mobile/social/the web as we know it. You have the money and they have the killer power point so it is a marriage made in startup heaven.

You may decide your business can't afford to hire too many full-time employees, and you'd like to use the services of an independent contractor. With an independent contractor, you don't have to withhold and pay the person's income, Social Security and Medicare taxes.

While independent contractors do translate to lower payroll costs, be advised that the Internal Revenue Service scrutinizes the use of contractors very carefully. The IRS wants to make sure that your workers are properly classified and paying the government the necessary income and payroll taxes that are due.

In Silicon Valley and the tech world, building a startup is almost seen as a rite of passage. Working at a startup is commonplace: not just acceptable but venerated. That culture has brought a lot of innovation and perhaps a few silly ideas to the world, but sometimes it’s worth it to step outside that bubble to see what can be learned from cultures in other entrepreneurial enclaves.

I had such an opportunity at the Toy Fair in New York last week during its Launchpad section. It featured roughly two dozen entrepreneurs who built a prototype toy and a website, and paid $1,900 for a 6-foot long table at the show. Several people showed off board games, figurines, including the above pictured Obos, and a variety of other items waited for a distributor or a buyer to discover them.

“Everybody knows” that the pace of daily life is speeding up, accelerated by the proliferation of mobile phones, tablets, WiFi and other communication technologies and by fallout from the 2007 economic crisis. As if anyone needed reminding of this trend, book titles echoing the faster-paced theme include The Overworked American and Busy Bodies in the early 1990s through to Faster, Fighting for Time, and Busier Than Ever.

However, despite this broad consensus, and its obvious health and quality-of-life implications, there seems little empirical survey evidence that daily life is truly speeding up. Some 15 years ago, in compiling our book Time for Life, my coauthor and I were only able to locate three short measures of subjective time pressure in the public: “stress” questions developed by the US National Institutes of Health (since discontinued); a “time crunch” scale of 10 yes-no questions (also abandoned); and two questions we had included in the initial time-use national survey conducted by the University of Michigan in 1965. These questions first asked respondents how often they felt “rushed,” and then how often they had time on their hands they didn’t know what to do with.

Whales are mammals, but they don’t look like the mammals living around us, as they have a triangular fluke for tail, no hind legs and no body hair.

And inside their mouths, whale teeth are unfamiliar too – being much simpler and ‘peg like’. A multidisciplinary team of researchers have now married together the fossil record and the embryonic development process to investigate how the whale got its teeth. Most mammals have four kinds of teeth, each shaped for specific tasks. In most mammals there are wedge-shaped incisors, a pointy canine, and premolars and molars with bumps and valleys that fit together like a mortar and pestle when you chew.

One of the most common questions people ask me is how I measure innovation when conducting my research. The question echoes an underlying concern about how innovation can be captured and adequately measured. In this article I delineate the most frequently used innovation indicators, their strengths, and their drawbacks.

ST. LOUIS (February 19, 2013) — BioGenerator – the non-profit venture development organization of BioSTL – recently closed on a Spark Fund investment in Tansna Therapeutics, Inc., to support further commercialization of the company’s epilepsy drugs and to relocate the company to St. Louis from Iowa. Tansna’s development has also been supported by Alan MacInnes, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) with the BioGenerator. The company will locate in the BioGenerator’s Accelerator Labs facility at CORTEX.

Tansna is a drug discovery and development company founded in 2010 to create and commercialize oral drugs to treat epilepsy. Nearly 1 in 26 people will develop epilepsy in their lifetime. A significant need for more effective and safer antiepileptic drugs remains – indeed, approximately 30% of epilepsy patients are refractory, or unresponsive, to currently available therapeutics. Tansna has discovered novel compounds that are highly effective in several animal models of epilepsy, including refractory epilepsy.

The top 20 technology venture capital firms of 2012 have been tabulated by PrivCo, a company that provides financial analysis of private companies. Based on the number of private tech company exits in 2012, Intel Capital ranked No. 1.

Next up were Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Battery Ventures, DFJ, Greylock Partners, Ignition, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Lerer Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Focus Ventures.

Virginia is among a handful of states that plan to start releasing data on the salaries of recent college graduates by school and by program, as well as information on how deep in debt grads are when they graduate, according to a report from WTOP. There's momentum on both sides of Capitol Hill to make this sort of info more accessible as grads enter the rocky job market.

So what are the best jobs for recent grads? Check out the top 10, according to results of a December 2012 CareerBuilder and EMSI study using EMSI's labor market database, which pulls from over 90 national and state employment resources.

Last Thursday (Feb 7th) I went to the Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference in San Francisco. The lineup of speakers and panelists was impressive and the discussions were incredibly honest, which is always a good thing.

After being in the entrepreneurial space for a few years, the topics discussed weren’t exactly new for me. The panel “How do you know you are ready to take the plunge?”, however, struck a chord with something I’ve been thinking quite a lot about lately: knowing whether or not you should take the plunge. The panelists included:

• Alexander Suh, Managing Director, California Technology Ventures 
• Andrew Busey (Wharton MBA 2005), Entrepreneur and Angel Investor 
• Mauria Finley, CEO and Founder, Citrus Lane 
• Sam Allen (Wharton MBA 2006), Co-founder and Exec Chairman, Scancafe 
• Moderator: Katie Knepley, Principal, SVB Capital Funds

After 14 years of helping Kendall Square become a national hot spot for technology companies, the Cambridge Innovation Center is looking to replicate its success in other cities.

The Kendall operation is in talks to open two new innovation centers, one in Baltimore and another in St. Louis, by the end of 2013. Since opening in 1999, the Innovation Center has helped launch more than 1,200 companies by providing low-cost shared office spaces, fast Internet service, stocked kitchens, and a communal environment where budding entrepreneurs can mix.

“We are really trying to create communities of people who are making an impact,” said Tim Rowe, chief executive of the Cambridge center. “We really should be doing that everywhere.”

For most people, the sea is a deep, dark mystery. That is changing, though, as scientists find innovative ways to track the movements of ocean-going creatures.

Stanford marine sciences professor and Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellow Barbara Block is using technology to enable live feeds of animal movements relayed by a series of “ocean WiFi hotspots.” This could help protect marine ecosystems by revolutionizing how we understand their function, population structure, fisheries management and species’ physiological and evolutionary constraints.

Henry Chesbrough published his revolutionary book on Open Innovation 10 years ago, in that time we have seen a variation of reactions from businesses as well as commentary from a wide range of experts. In this post I have drawn together my favourite posts on open innovation in the last 12 months.

Open innovation advises companies to make more use of external ideas and technologies in their own innovations, and allow unused internal ideas and technologies to be used by others for their innovations.  Your business model helps determine what to bring in, and what to take out – and this links directly to the two halves to the model: an “outside in” half, and an “inside out” half.

Technology is enabling us to get ever closer to the ideal of casual and seamless face-to-face communication over long distances. In fits and starts we’re pulling in more tools and options for communicating and getting us closer to a video-based ideal thanks to better devices and faster broadband connections.

Skype is reportedly testing video messaging options for mobile users today. The service would let people leave a video-based message for their friends. I can see a whole new variant on the “wish-you-were-here” picture messages I send that could involve panoramic views or the local soundscape (good for concerts and birdcalls, bad for when I’m in New York City).

Genome sequencing is becoming more affordable than ever before – several companies in the industry say the $1,000 personal genome is just around the corner. But, even if you can afford it, is mapping your genes worth it if you don’t have a specific medical condition to consider?

Despite the whole “knowledge is power” argument – it could help with early diagnosis and prevention or lead a doctor to better treatment options for an existing condition – sequencing skeptics raise valid concerns and questions when it comes to gene sequencing for healthy people. How precise is it? How well will consumers be able to interpret the results? Will it just lead to needless hand-wringing about conditions that people won’t be able to do to much to address or that won’t surface until much later in life?

Let’s first define what a dream is. For me, my dream is what I most desire to achieve. It is a goal I want to reach more than anything and I will do anything it takes to achieve this. The thing with dreams is that they often remain dreams and never become reality. The question is therefore, how badly do you want to live your dream? Is your dream really your DREAM? And if your dream is what gives you ultimate happiness, what good reason is there then to refuse yourself to be happy?

Thinking Big

When we’re young we allow ourselves to think big. We want to become firemen, play in the NBA or be movie stars and it all seems so possible. ‘Of course we will be able to reach this’, we think. As we grow older however, limiting beliefs start to kick in. Limiting beliefs are what keep most of us from reaching our goals. It starts when you enter puberty and you see another girl that you think is more beautiful, slimmer, or smarter. You see a classmate being taller and shooting the hoops easier. You want to go to Harvard and you think you do everything to be the best you can be, and yet there is that one other person having a slightly better GPA.

Being a CEO in and of itself is a really hard task.  Often times this title is misconstrued as being one that is particularly glamorous and esteem.  However, especially in a startup, the CEO serves as a decision maker forging together the strategy of the company with inputs from other founders, team members, and advisors while simultaneously trying to ensure that they are not persuaded by bad or irrelevant advice.

Even amidst these tasks there comes another aspect of leadership, which is something we try to marginalize but cannot be ignored, age. We often say that age is nothing but a number, but age is understood in the context of experience which is not something to be taken lightly when managing an entire company and your employees.  However, there are things that can be done to both ensure that you are acting as the best CEO you can be while not being dismissed for your age.

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.

While every entrepreneur starts with a dream of making a dent in the universe, most end up discovering that it is more about survival.

Skepticism looms large and the struggle is often tougher than expected. The challenge is to deal with the ups and downs.

The initial euphoria of a new company subsides and eventually one has to face the real world: a place full of skeptics. An entrepreneur must learn to cope with all these things and still remain focused at work.

Innovation as a business model or organizational ideal sometimes seems intent on following a path to incomprehensibility and irrelevance.  Practitioners, seekers-after, and proponents alike are caught up in a whirlwind of buzzwords, lists of critical-things-to-do, and claims for knowing the single most important next step to innovation.    Just about everyone has their own recipe, or strategy, or secret or unique set of tactics.  They are everywhere.

The cause of this confusion may be simple:  Innovation is not linear, but harvesting the value created by innovation is.   And when we try to cause innovation by linear thinking, we run into as much trouble as we would if we tried to harvest innovation value via the non-linear.  We are mixing up ways of thinking when we consider innovation as a linear process; in fact, we need two sets of rules to think about innovation and the harvesting of innovation, much as we need two sets of rules to consider quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.