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/

Colony collapse disorder first appeared in 2006. But while the North American honeybee population has dropped precipitously recently (one beekeeper tells Fast Company that his 2010 honey crop was the smallest in 35 years of beekeeping), honeybee populations had been declining for decades due to insecticide-resistant mites and viruses. Instead of trying new insecticides, researchers are trying a different approach: breeding stronger bees.

Viruses and mites have, according to the U.N., killed 85% of bees in the Middle East, 10% to 30% of bees in Europe, and nearly a third of American bees each year. This is a big deal--over 70 of the 100 crops that provide 90% of the world's food are pollinated by bees (that's $83 billion worth of crops).

In an iconic moment of 1960s cinema, a young Dustin Hoffman is given one-word career advice by an officious party guest: “Plastics.” While the word was supposed to represent the horrors of the suburban lifestyle, it was still damn good career advice.

Plastics did indeed become a boom industry in the late 60s and 70s, and if the hero of “The Graduate” had followed that advice, by this time he might be an overpaid CEO married to his third trophy wife.

If that movie were made today, the good career advice would be a different word entirely: “Healthcare.”

There is simply no industry in the United States that has a better record of success.  Not in saving lives or keeping people healthy!  When it comes to results of that kind, the U.S. healthcare system is among the worst in the industrial world.  No!  Where the U.S. healthcare industry is successful is where it count: the bottom line!

This week, I’ve had several meetings with venture funds, incubators, corporate accelerators and other significant players in the startup eco-system. One theme seems to come up over and again, especially from geographies outside Silicon Valley: lack of a reliable pipeline of deals. On July 1, 2006, commenting on the Indian startup scenario, I had written a blog post called Too Much Money, Too Few Deals . Today, the Indian scenario has improved greatly, but still the issue of lack of a mature deal flow remains. The same applies to Malaysia, where our partner, the MAD Incubator, is in search of 10 good deals to put through the 1M/1M program. And it also applies to many different parts of the United States where startup activity is still a relatively small portion of economic development.

In many of these cases, the funds or the accelerators want to put in $100,000 to $500,000 in select ventures but are having a hard time finding mature entrepreneurs to support.

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn't pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money).

The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. It provides private funds for untested and unproven technology and entrepreneurs. While most of these investments fail, the returns for the ones that win are so great they make up for the failures. The cultural tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a financial structure which balanced risk, return and obscene returns, allowed this system flourish in technology clusters in United States, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Blogging yesterday, Ian Smith, chairman of Young Enterprise , wrote: "What I see in the new government’s approach is an alarming lack of focus on the skills, attitudes and behaviours that young people actually need, and understand they need, to be successful in their working lives. Skills like teamwork, presentation, reliability, honesty, integrity, and punctuality, which employers like me look for when taking on new recruits."

Smith says he fears the Department of Education is ignoring the "enormous amount of evidence that young people can also learn by doing" – giving them the opportunity to run their own real businesses while they are still at school and college.

Smith also takes a swipe at senior managers who “blame the attitude of British workers for their own failures.”

Thirty-two-year-old Roman Beranek studied Interaction Design at Zurich’s University of the Arts before founding Projektil, a dynamic visual arts collective in which design, technology and communication effortlessly coalesce into something both mind-bending and beautiful. Whether they’re draping Eindhoven’s Saint Catherine’s Cathedral in a psychedelic kaleidoscope of colors, or turning Beesenstedt Castle in Germany into a live, 3D concert with mobile interaction, Projektil is responsible for some of the world’s most innovative projection mapping events and has helped to define a uniquely twenty-first-century digital art form.

What does innovation mean to you? Innovation is the freedom of creativity. It’s about understanding the actual possibilities of what you’re able to do.

MADISON—As Governor Scott Walker continues to highlight the need for venture capital legislation, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Paul Jadin announced today that Tim Cooley has been named Director of Capital Development for the state’s lead economic development organization.

“Access to venture capital for an early-stage business is critical for Wisconsin companies to grow and create jobs in our state,” Governor Walker said. “The WEDC is well-positioned to lead a discussion with a broad spectrum of lawmakers, industry leaders and start-up companies who already agree that the need is urgent.”

HARRISBURG, Pa., July 28, 2011 -- /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New state investments in Pennsylvania's technology sector will help bring innovative products to the marketplace and strengthen Pennsylvania's energy industry, Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary C. Alan Walker announced today.

The $30.6 million investment was approved today by the Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority (BFTDA) to support the four regionally based Ben Franklin Technology Partners. A portion of these funds, $16.6 million, will focus on development of alternate energy start-ups and new product innovations. The Technology Authority is designed to help Pennsylvania entrepreneurs build globally competitive technology companies.

Many high-end cars today come equipped with brake assist systems, which help a driver use the brakes correctly depending on particular conditions in an emergency. But what if the car could apply the brakes before the driver even moved?

This is what German researchers have successfully simulated, as reported in the Journal of Neural Engineering. With electrodes attached to the scalps and right legs of drivers in a driving simulator, they used both electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) respectively to detect the intent to brake. These electrical signals were seen 130 milliseconds before drivers actually hit the brakes—enough time to reduce the braking distance by about 12 feet.

U.S. manufacturing is in trouble. Technological innovation, particularly in new process technologies, can play a key role in spurring a revival, but that won't happen without a coherent and well-funded national manufacturing technology strategy.

First, some background. From January 2000 to January 2010, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs fell by 6.17 million, or 34 percent. It would be one thing if this job loss were due solely to superior productivity. But output declined as well. From 2000 to 2009, 15 of the 19 U.S. manufacturing sectors shrank in terms of real value added (gross output minus the cost of inputs), and overall manufacturing output declined by 10 percent during a period when U.S. GDP grew 15 percent. Had manufacturing output maintained its share of GDP, we'd have two million more manufacturing jobs and eight million more jobs overall.

There has been a lot of dialog about whether all the hype around all things social represents a bubble similar to the dot com bubble in the beginning of 2000.

The dialog is likely to continue and heat up as companies such as Linkedin go public with the share price and P/E ratios defying historical market logic.  Others like Facebook and Zynga will follow form and subsequent share prices and P/E ratios will set new records.

Here's something to keep in mind as you follow this evening's congressional debate over the debt ceiling.

According to the latest daily statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion at the end of the day yesterday.

Apple's last earnings report (PDF here) showed that the company had $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs foolishly believe that all they need to do is sign up for a Twitter account, blog about special offers, and hand out a flashy looking brochure, whereupon leads will come pouring in. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

These are unfortunate social media fantasies and free marketing delusions. The mere existence of a market for your product or service does not guarantee anyone will listen to or care about your brand. People are bombarded with thousands of messages every day, which makes it difficult for business owners to garner attention and convert that attention into income.

I tell entrepreneurs that Google was an “exception” to all the investment and startup rules, but I’ve always wondered what it takes to be an exception. Since every business is built by unique individuals, I’m totally convinced that exceptional people are the key to an exceptional company.

To check out the Google founders, and because I still see so many business plans that are modeled after Google (more search engines, and more billion dollar growth models), I had to take a look at the definitive book about them, called “Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain,” by Richard L. Brandt. It didn’t disappoint me.

Are you using press releases as part of your marketing and PR strategy?

Press releases are great SEO builders. When you distribute one using a press release distribution service like PRWeb (there are other services, but I have a long-time love affair with PRWeb and they know it), it sends your release to dozens of news and niche websites. On each of those pages where your press release lives, there’s a link back to your website. Google thinks your website must be pretty awesome to have so many links from other sites, so it ranks your site higher in search engine results.

If innovative CEOs want their companies to attract the next brightest minds, they should save the cash bonuses and give their younger workers a strong mentor instead.

According to the 14th Annual Global CEO Survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 98% of Millennials believe working with a mentor is a necessary component in development. In fact, they ranked training and development three times higher than cash bonuses as their first choice in benefits.

With social media and technology playing such a influential role in the Millennials' daily lives, the way they judge a successful organization and hierarchy will differ from their parents.