SAN FRANCISCO: The Indian entrepreneur in America - a middle-aged man who runs an IT consulting outfit or a body shop. That person has not disappeared. But it's a stereotype that is now being challenged by a new clutch of entrepreneurs looking beyond the usual realms thatIndian entrepreneurs are identified with.

"A lot of traditionalSilicon Valley industries like semiconductors and networking have matured. Today's Indian entrepreneur is simply where the market is. And that obviously includes social, mobile and cloud," says Vish Mishra, a venture capitalist at ClearStone Ventures and global head of the world's largest entrepreneurial body, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).

While still in his 20s, Aayush Phumbhra started textbook rentalChegg - which in a few years made several acquisitions and is now rumoured to be filing an IPO in the near future. Just six years out of college, Kunal Sarkar created

In my last post, I cautioned about the dangers of learning about venture capital from watching a TV show. After all, would you learn about how to remove a gallbladder from watching ER, or how to behave if you're arrested from Law and Order? No, TV isn't reality (even reality TV) and Shark Tank is plenty entertaining, but hardly a roadmap for funding.

So how do you go about raising capital? Any proper "show me the money" checklist begins with one question: What kind of money are you raising? Money comes in three basic flavors, Friends and Family, Angel Money, and Venture Capital.

Last week, Burt Rutan announced his retirement from Scaled Composites while simultaneously unveiling a prototype of his latest design, the Model 367 BiPod flying car roadable plane. Rutan gave each of his aircraft designs a model number, and as you may have surmised by now, he's got a lot of designs, and most of them are spectacularly innovative.

The most extraordinary thing about Rutan's aircraft is how many of them were actually built and flown by the company he founded, Scaled Composites. And it's not like it's just the (relatively) ordinary ones that got off the ground either, since no less than five of his designs now reside in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

The legends of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other high-tech entrepreneurs have fed a stereotypical vision of innovation in America: Mix a brainy college dropout, a garage-incubated idea and a powerful venture capitalist, stir well, and you get the latest Silicon Valley powerhouse. That’s Hollywood’s version of technological innovation; unfortunately, it’s also the one that venture capitalists try to fund and government planners seek to replicate. But these individuals are not America’s typical entrepreneurs. To find them, first let’s dispense with some major misconceptions about where our best ideas comes from.

The National Business Incubator Association says there are about 1,200 business incubators operating in America.

The Athens, Ohio-based group also has some ideas on how healthcare entrepreneurs can latch on to a local incubators group – and make it work for them.

So how do you go about it?

David Monkman, the president of the National Business Incubation Association, has some specific tips on what entrepreneurs should look for before joining an incubator.

Monkman tells MSNBC in a recent interview that a business incubator has many advantages. “Business owners can get counseling and mentorship options and incubators give them access to financial support,” he says.

For a lot of businesses, or so I thought, summer means slower days and less work. Blame it on the kids being out of school or people taking more vacations. I know a lot of my mom blog and mompreneur work-at-home friends usually have slow summers, due to the kids being out of school (I’m glad my son is in year-round school and is out for just six weeks!)

But the statistics prove otherwise. Manta, an online community for promoting and connecting small business, polled more than 1,000 small business owners about their business during the summer months. I found the results a bit surprising.  A whopping 85 percent of the small businesses surveyed said they do not experience a slump in productivity due to increases in employee vacation time in the summer. And nearly three in four small businesses keep the same schedule through the year with no changes during the summer months.

David Tisch began investing in startups when he was a teenager. He took his bar mitzvah money, invested it in eBay's IPO, and saw a 15x return.

Since then he has started two companies.  He is currently the managing director of TechStars NYC, a 3-month startup mentorship and accelerator program. Tisch has also made 43 angel investments.

Jane and Dick worked together at Denver Health, the nation’s “most wired” hospital according to Hospitals & Health Networks Magazine. They have seen first-hand the impact technology can have in the medical field through exposure to a number of Denver Health IT initiatives. Through a series of conversations, Jane and Dick have come up with the idea to develop a social network tailored to the medical community. Through an online platform, doctors, nurses, and administrators would be able to assist each other with complicated diagnoses, collaborate on research studies, and find and fill job openings. After sharing the concept with a number of colleagues and receiving enthusiastic support for the idea, Jane and Dick built up the confidence to quit their day jobs and launch a business together.

Jane and Dick each brings a similar level of skill and capability to the business, making it easy for them to agree to a 50/50 equity split. While they could both go without salaries for a year, Dick had no extra money to invest in the business. However, Jane was in a position to invest some of her savings into the startup. How could they treat Jane’s cash investment in the business in a way that was fair to both of them?

Currently working on that next ‘great’ project? Inventors Digest has a few tips to help you get off on the right foot.

1.) Have your invention evaluated by a non-biased professional – even if your mom’s in the business, go to someone else.

2.) Read all you can about new-product development. Go to your local book store or library and dig through the Web … others have gone before you. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

• 

  We analysed a selection of the largest technology companies included in the S&P 500 index, a selection of large international technology companies that regularly report financial results and a selection of promising CleanTech companies.

• In order to present the information by calendar year or calendar quarter, the financial information for companies with non-calendar years or quarters was included in the nearest calendar year or quarter.

• We analysed technology companies that operate predominantly within the following sectors:

  • Communications
  • Consumer Electronics
  • EMS/Distributors
  • Semiconductors
  • Software & Internet
  • Systems and PC Hardware
  • CleanTech

Sometimes it is really hard to leave something that is comfortable that you like. But, making a choice for something even better, must be done. I am leaving the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce on August 26th. I have really enjoyed working at the Chamber. I like the people. I like the work. I have loved working directly with many of you.

However, I am a builder and the opportunity presented by Nebraska Global to become an instrumental part of doing something AWESOME and impactful for our community is a powerful draw for me. Thus, when they expressed their interest in me, it was hard not to listen. And in fact, the opportunity that they have presented to me – is right up my alley and is just the sort of opportunity at which I can excel. [I also plan to write for Silicon Prairie News during the transition and beyond so maybe I can share some insight into transitions and change also.]

Dear Colleagues,

The 2011 NASVF conference is just around the corner.  We are proud to partner with the National Association of Seed & Venture Funds to provide a special rate for our members to attend the 2011 NASVF Annual Conference in Arlington, TX, October 17-19, 2011. 

Register today and receive a $150 discount off the current registration rate. Use the discount code: nasvf150

To view the program with speakers and sessions, visit NASVF 2011 Conference Agenda .

We look forward to seeing you in Arlington.

Most entrepreneurs think that risk is just an “occupational hazard” that can be minimized or eliminated by a smart businessman. That way of thinking is simplistic and wrong. In reality, some risks are good and should be embraced for growth and a competitive edge, while others are bad and should be avoided completely.

Traditional risk management focuses only on bad risks, and seeks to contain losses. But if you want growth and sustainability, you need to create good risks, which means intentionally taking a risk to grow your business or gain competitive advantage.

More than ever, the capacity to innovate is a fundamental resource of organizations as well as the true wealth of a society. To contribute fully to the prosperity of an organization, region or country, the innovation process requires the implementation of knowledge dynamics between domains that are often treated in isolation.

This dynamic is based on a synergy between humans and intelligent machines. More broadly, ‘knowledge innovation’ is a combination of knowledge, imagination and experience, the ability to transcend the boundaries between domains, to make linkages and operate as interdependent parts.

Ecosystems of innovation include diverse facets. They bring out the concept of “e-co-innovation”, which – far from being a fad – brings a better understanding of the successful transition from idea to reality and ultimate value. Among some aspects of e-co-innovation: e- as economic, educative, environmental, electronic and ethics; co- as collaborative, co-design, common values, collective intelligence, knowledge and experience, convergence of intelligences – human and artificial; eco- as ecosystems – those of enterprise, regions and countries.

THE second annual Australian Innovation System report released by Innovation Minister Kim Carr yesterday is dry as a lizard's tongue at Longreach. Over 157 pages, it pulls statistics in from all over the world to position Australia on the global innovation league table. There are no specific policy prescriptions, no lofty conclusions, and the numbers often lag because of the complexity of the benchmarking process.

The picture it paints each year is destined, however, to become an increasingly important guide to innovation policy, particularly if the Australian dollar stays high, putting a premium on unique products.

There are already fascinating pointers in the data, and one of them is that Australia's innovation tends to be second-hand: companies are much more likely to take something that has already been developed and adapt it than invent something themselves. That in turn means we are still not getting significant ''first mover'' dividends from our rapidly expanding R&D budget.

One of the greatest joys of running a business online is the ability to measure results. Yet the very metrics that are supposed to help define the success or failure of your Web efforts are often poorly understood.

The most famous part of Google’s ranking algorithm, PageRank, has been confusing website owners for years. By itself it can’t do very much.  But it can be useful if you understand how it works and recognize its many limitations.

However, even Google suggests you’re better off not focusing on it too much. Here are five reasons why (below I’ll tell you what you should focus on instead):

Let's be clear from the beginning: America is at a precipice. Sitting still is not an option.

Our problems, while not hopeless, are urgent. And they require rediscovering something fundamental that we have lost: our shared sense of purpose.

Before 12 million of our soldiers began returning from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific in 1945, America passed the GI Bill to open the doors to college education and homeownership. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, America set its sights on sending a man to the moon - and marshaled its brains and resources to make it happen.

These were meaningful and long-reaching decisions inspired by national purpose, a public will to action and, yes, an awareness that our survival was at stake. They ushered in an extraordinary period of prosperity and innovation.

But that was then.

What does it take to be a great artist?

Richard Russo evokes this question near the end of his 2007 novel, Bridge of Sighs. In it, he chronicles Lou Lynch, Jr. (Lucy) and his friend Bobby Marconi, who grew up together in a small town in upstate New York. The two friends couldn’t be more different. In sixty years, Lucy has never left his hometown, but Bobby on the other hand, leaves as soon as he graduates high school, fleeing Thomaston never to return. He eventually becomes a world-famous artist and lives the rest of his life in Venice. After Bobby passes away, a reporter interviews Lucy to learn more about his friend’s childhood.

On Saturdays, the two friends took turns surfing in the back of Lou Sr.’s milk truck. The thrill came when the truck, turning unexpectedly, caused one or the other to lose his balance and crash into the side.  Unlike Lucy, who braced himself before turns, Bobby let go and even shut his eyes. In Lucy’s words, “Bobby wanted what was coming down the road to be a surprise, even if it meant he got hurt.”

Business incubators and business accelerators provide advice, guidance and various forms of support for businesses in the startup phase. The key difference between them is that business accelerators, as the name suggests, compress the timescale for starting up by operating as a type of boot camp. Business accelerators claim to help entrepreneurs hit the ground running; business incubators nurture the business in its startup phase, allowing it to develop at its own pace.

Incubators Business incubators provide new businesses with office space and shared facilities, such as telecommunications systems and Internet connections, in a dedicated building. According to The New York Times, there are around 1,200 incubation centers in the United States, as of 2011. Entrepreneurs can also access advice and guidance from professionals such as accountants, marketing consultants and business advisers who are associated with the incubation center and act as mentors. Entrepreneurs typically stay in an incubation center for three to five years, although there is no maximum period.

Our friends at Causevox published a very helpful free ebook called “7 Habits of Highly Effective Personal Fundraisers.”  Get it Here: http://ebook.causevox.com/7habits/.  We couldn’t have said it better.  A must download for anyone running a fund-raising campaign.

Here are some of our favorite online fund raising platforms:

• Spot.us http://spot.us/ hyper local community funded journalism
• Emphas.is http://emphas.is/ specifically for visual journalists doing image based projects anywhere
• Kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/
• IndieGoGo http://www.indiegogo.com/
• Chipin http://www.chipin.com/ this is a widget that can be installed on one’s own blog or website.
• Invested.in http://invested.in/