Women entrepreneurs are starting small businesses at approximately twice the national average for all startups. Despite some inaccurate stereotypes, the evidence is that they are in every industry, from small consulting firms to medical high technology. As a result, there have also been many new resources and mentors popping up specifically aimed at women.

In most cases, the lifestyle questions asked and the answers given are essentially the same for all entrepreneurs, whether they be men or women. But according to a recent book by Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams, “The Big Enough Company,” based on years of helping women entrepreneurs, the road to success for women does involve its own unique set of demons.

(NECN) – MassChallenge is the largest-ever startup accelerator, and on this week’s episode of “CEO Corner,” Peter Howe got to sit down with the man behind the magic.

“Our mission is to find the very best entrepreneurs around the world, get them here to Boston and … our mission is to help accelerate the growth of these startups,” said MassChallenge founder and president Akhil Nigam.

While many organizations focus on addressing problems, the most successful focus on raising the bar.  One of the ways they do this is by creating a culture where innovation thrives. When this organizational strength is magnified, it can become a source of competitive advantage.

One of my clients asked me to help identify the best practices of leaders who were the most innovative in his organization. In many interviews and meetings, there was very little discussion about brainstorming, generating ideas, prototyping, and the like—the kind of things most of us think about when we consider institutionalizing innovation. Instead, I heard what many of us would call excellent practices for leadership. My one-sentence conclusion: Excellence in leading innovation has far less to do with the leader having innovative ideas; it has everything to do with how that leader creates a culture where innovation and creativity thrives in every corner. Okay, maybe I cheated by having a sentence with a semi-colon but you get the gist in short form.

I recently read a great piece by Paul Graham that talked about getting startup ideas. In the well thought out essay about entrepreneurship and the various ways startup ideas have come to some the world’s biggest innovators, Graham finds a central concept at their core: problem solving. Graham is one of the founders of the widely popular YCombinator, a startup incubator that has funded more than 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit in the last seven years. As an investor Graham knows a thing or two about startups and good ideas. He reckons that startup ideas shouldn’t just be ideas for the sake of ideas.

It’s an interesting visual showing how an extended slinky hovers in midair when dropped. The dramatic demonstration is followed by the scientific explanation. What’s cool about the video is that the researcher shows the raw model on the computer and talks about the experiment, but it’s the intro that grabs your attention. The demo is intriguing and compels you into wanted to learn more. It’s Matrix stuff!

Along with the video there is also a link to the pre-print of the paper providing everyone with open access to the scholarly material. It’s a great way to promote a paper.

The video has over one million views and over nine hundred comments. Granted most of the comments are silly, but the video was effective in getting people thinking and talking about science. They learned something, perhaps unexpectedly.

Businesses that receive economic development money from Montgomery County soon might have to share some of their profit with the county government.

A bill being introduced in the Montgomery County Council would give the county up to 25 percent ownership in companies that receive economic development funds. That means if a company is successful, the county can profit off it.

Steve Silverman, director of the county Department of Economic Development, said the county currently gives forgivable loans to companies that promise to create a certain number of jobs and occupy a certain amount of space in a certain time period. He said it makes sense for the county to consider having a stake in companies it invests in.

Two analysts from BTIG Research went to Kansas City to see what Google's new cable-company killer, Google Fiber, is like. What's it like? It's awesome. The Time Warner Cable system in Kansas City appears to be freaking out about the rollout of Google Fiber, and for obvious reasons. Google Fiber puts the Time Warner Cable offering to shame. The analysts, Rich Greenfield and Walter Piecyk, have written a detailed report about how Google Fiber works and what the TV and Internet experience is like. The report is available at BTIG's site (registration required).

As I read this post in the WSJ about the changing nature of VC funding of consumer web companies, I thought that we may be looking at the symptoms and not the disease. As the WSJ notes, VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 (vs the first nine months of 2011). And the big falloff is not in seed rounds, which are still getting done, but in follow-on rounds, which are not. So what has changed in the past couple years? A lot, actually.

Don’t charge the hill until you are “ready.” This probably seems obvious to military types, but I see entrepreneurs violating this rule all the time. They approach key potential investors way too early, trying to talk their way up the hill, with no supporting business plan, and before they have a support team around them. Needless to say, they usually get shot down, and get no second chance.

The first rule is to separate your advisors from your investors. Perhaps a close personal friend can be both (the earliest stage and first tier investors should be “friends and family”). But for Angel investors and venture capital investors, just remember that investors are not on your team (yet). You only get once chance to make a great first impression.

DETROIT — As Hostess Brands, the makers of Twinkie and other snack foods, headed to bankruptcy court last week to begin liquidation plans, a group of southeast Michigan entrepreneurs are proposing to put the powerto the people to save this 82-year-old iconic company, and perhaps, some of those 18,000 jobs.

Watch out Wall Street, here comes crowdfunding.

Entrepreneur Steve Schaefer partnered with the Royal Oak technology studio Brilliant Chemistry earlier this year to create eRaise, a crowdfunding platform. Now, eRaise’s DoughforHostess.com campaign will sound the battle cry for generations of Twinkie lovers to help the cream-filled sponge cake live on.

Now that you have background knowledge of the patent system (at least within the U.S.), we can analyze probably the most difficult question: “Should you pursue patents for your company or invention?” Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy or direct way to answer this question. Each business is unique and requires an individual analysis. This article discusses some frequently asked questions and presents an analysis framework that may be useful for you to explore the applicability of patents for your business/invention.

Given the significant costs of obtaining a patent, should you spend any of your limited capital on them?

It depends. A patent will not directly make your company’s product or service more successful, but it can have a positive financial impact on the business. The best way to analyze your situation is to look at what a patent could do for your company and how it would fit into your company strategy. This self-analysis should include product, finance, and market/competition elements.

The law. It is just about the last thing you want to talk about when you are getting your startup off the ground. It probably ranks up there with whose turn it is to take out the garbage.

Trust me, I’m a lawyer who advised startups for a living, and even I had a hard time keeping focused on legal concerns with my own startup.

But remembering a few simple legal protections can save a lot of headache later on.

There are some good posts out there covering legal pitfalls for a startup on the business level, but this post is intended for individual startup founders.

Mental activities like reading and writing can preserve structural integrity in the brains of older people, according to a new study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

While previous research has shown an association between late-life cognitive activity and better mental acuity, the new study from Konstantinos Arfanakis, Ph.D., and colleagues from Rush University Medical Center and Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago studied what effect late-life cognitive activity might have on the brain’s white matter, which is composed of nerve fibers, or axons, that transmit information throughout the brain.

“Reading the newspaper, writing letters, visiting a library, attending a play or playing games, such as chess or checkers, are all simple activities that can contribute to a healthier brain,” Dr. Arfanakis said.

These 12 books have shaped not only the way we work this year, but how we think and the conversations we're having. Authored by luminaries like Nate Silver, Clay Christensen, and Susan Cain, these delightful-to-read tomes offer insight into the power of vulnerability, habit, social media, and more.

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain In Quiet, author Susan Cain argues that introverts are a reservoir of untapped talent--and that progressive managers can create environments in which they thrive.

“Any time people come together in a meeting, we’re not necessarily getting the best ideas," she tells Fast Company, "we’re just getting the ideas of the best talkers.”

Quick: Can you name three exciting biotech companies that got started, in your city, in 2012?

I can’t, as a resident of Seattle. Chances are, no matter where you live in the U.S., and no matter how plugged-in you are into the industry, you can’t either.

This wasn’t supposed to be a trick question. When I crafted this story idea last week, I thought it might be hard for people outside of top-tier hubs like Boston and San Francisco to fill in the blanks. But when I circulated the question last week to 12 people who are extremely well-connected in five major U.S. biotech startup clusters, I got very little back in the way of substantive answers. The incomplete responses say everything you need to know about the barren landscape for biotech startups in 2012.

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” These are the words that kicked off a blog post this month by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and among the best known funders and advisers to entrepreneurs.

Reading the piece, I was struck by how similar the genesis of a startup, as he describes it, was to my experience starting EasyBib.com.

EasyBib started as Paul would describe “organically.” My friend and I thought there was a better way to create a bibliography for research papers, so as fun project, we built a tool for ourselves to automate the process. Bibliographies were certainly a random thing to build a business around, but we recognized an immediate pain point that students alike would feel. Additionally, as Graham characterizes of many startups, we didn’t build EasyBib from the get-go to be a startup with a clear business plan. Years later, EasyBib would grow to 40 million yearly users, and we found ourselves thinking of various strategies and opportunities to build a legitimate business from what once was a simple hack.

The goal of the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command (USAMRMC) is to translate research into new products to advance the care of the Nation’s war fighters. TATRC is deeply aware that it must encourage that next breakthrough to enhance military health, while making effective use of the federal funds that it stewards.

To determine what it should fund, TATRC must decide whether a new technology solves an important problem and who would purchase it. While all TATRC project proposals are expected to provide detail on commercial potential, the reality is that many researchers do not have the knowledge or resources to assess this effectively and develop a commercialization strategy on their own.

Download the PDF: TATRC’s Technology Transfer/Commercialization Program could be a model for speeding viable medical innovations to the warfighter

Venture investors still have a healthy appetite for early-stage consumer Internet companies, but those startups are having a harder time raising follow-on financing.

Overall the amount invested in consumer information services was off 42% in the first nine months as the difficulties of newly public Internet companies such as Facebook and Zynga cast doubt on the business models and valuations of social media companies.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images New data from Dow Jones VentureSource provides a more nuanced picture of a venture industry that’s still very interested in consumer Internet startups but more cautious with its checkbook. The data looks at companies financed since 2007 and includes such luminaries as Twitter, LivingSocial, Tumblr and Foursquare. Most, however, are lesser-known companies that have raised far less money.

The European Service Innovation Centre ESIC will provide an analysis of service innovation policies of the six selected pilot regions by conducting a series of stress tests in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of such policies. The aim of these tests is to identify potential barriers and and scope for enhanced policy action. The tests will be followed by structured policy dialogues that will inform a policy briefing for each region.

As the holiday shopping season kicks off, consumers are flocking online to gobble up all the hottest products. Which products are they searching for? The researchers over at Experian have crunched the numbers for us. It looks like the winners so far are Uggs, Apple and Amazon: