There is a long-running dispute over who constitute ‘real’ entrepreneurs. It is important we understand their importance.

At the University of Miami a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an entrepreneurship class with roughly 40 students.

Most of them were juniors and seniors, joined by a small number of law students.

The course had so far covered the theoretical literature on entrepreneurship, but on this particular day all the students wanted to talk about was their own futures.

Studying entrepreneurship in the midst of a severe recession and stumbling recovery, and in the months leading up to graduation, has made these students acutely aware that their own economic futures may not be entirely secure. Make no mistake: jobs are front and center in students’ minds. Both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve expect the unemployment rate to remain at relatively high levels for the next few years, falling from the present 9.7 percent to around 8 percent by the end of 2012.

Organizations within the nonprofit sector are, for the most part, in a constant state of struggle. Between trying to keep funding coming in and keeping all the constituents happy, it can be easy to lose sight of what they are trying to get done. Some of this is just the inherent nature of nonprofits, but much can be remedied by taking a different approach to how nonprofits are run, and therefore perceived. Applying entrepreneurship skills and perspectives to nonprofit organizations will open the doors for a better public reputation and a better opportunity to make a real difference.

Nonprofits, by their very nature, are difficult to manage. Because they are legally owned by the public and exist for the benefit of the public, they are run by a group of usually unpaid individuals. The board is made up of people with a variety of motives for being there -- some have a passion for the cause, some enjoy the role of leadership, some are just trying to beef up their resumes. Between the board and the people who contribute their time and money to work in the organization, there is a sense that everyone has to agree before any move can be made.

I'm Paul Maidment. This is Notes On The News. Tom Falk, chief executive of Kimberly Clark, the health care and consumer goods company that has big plans in China, told us a story of meeting a mayor in China who was pitching his city as a place for Kimberly Clark to invest, one of the selling points being that the city produced 200,000 new graduates a year.

Across China, universities are minting new graduates at record rates, half of them majoring in science or engineering. This has doubled the number of people working in science and technology over the past two decades and tripled the number working in R&D. China is also pouring money into R&D to the point where it is now the third-biggest spender, behind the U.S. and Japan.

By Dr. Janice Presser

Let's say you're a VC or an Angel, and you need to figure out which of many companies will survive, succeed, and become a profit-making 'star'. So, you follow a generally accepted set of guidelines.  You evaluate the market, examine barriers to entry, rank the competition, and predict the outlook for product sales.  You place a value on IP and examine cost projections for everything from the technology infrastructure to the coffee vendor.  You often know the 'ballpark', and if you don't, you know someone who does, so you can easily make adjustments and allowances to refine the company's projections.  

But there is one thing you can't do - or at least, you haven't been able to do 'til now - and that is to predict how well management will perform as a team.

What's Human Infrastructure?
For the past 100 years, business has viewed people as individual units of productivity and/or cost, a bias that is reflected in the terms 'Personnel,' Human Resources,' and 'Human Capital'.  In a business plan, this bias shows up as "plug in two for R&D, one for Finance, five for Operations", etc.  But has it occurred to you that this concept is way out of date?  We live in a world where one person, sitting on a beach in the Bahamas with a laptop and a wireless connection, can execute work that - just 20 years ago - might have required the coordinated efforts of fifty people.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to join an extraordinary group of women entrepreneurs mostly from Saudi Arabia for a lunch at the home of the Honorable Esther Coopersmith.  All were both proud of their higher education in Saudi Arabia and had started companies in a wide range of businesses from construction to IT.  I should not have been surprised.  Starting a business in Saudi Arabia is relatively easy. Its “ease of starting a business” rank is 13 out of 183 economies, according the World Bank’s Doing Business 2010 data. This is not surprising. Saudi Arabia is widely recognized as a leader in promoting and enabling entrepreneurship and innovation.

Entrepreneurship enjoys high level support in this country. Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the advisor to the King of Saudi Arabia, chairs the Saudi Arabian National Entrepreneurship Center (NEC), an institution created to empower the young to be successful entrepreneurs by creating the needed supportive environment through specialized education, training, knowledge, mentoring, and finance.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia is home to the one of the most influential Middle Eastern educational institutions, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The university is an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the Kingdom, across the region and around the globe. KAUST recruited top education leaders from around the world to ensure high-impact education, and engages in academic relationships and research collaborations with various global academic institutions.

Maybe you’ve seen a PowerPoint presentation that looks something like this [visual: heinous PPT template]. Maybe you were the author of a PowerPoint like that. This is a little unfair—usually people will throw in some clip art to jazz it up a little [visual: ridiculous smiley-face clip art]. How do you avoid the dreaded bullet-drenched PPT? Here are 3 tips.

1. Be simple. I know, you’ve heard it before. But it’s worth hearing again. There’s a trial lawyer who holds a focus group with the jury after every major case. His one overriding conclusion: If you make 10 arguments to the jury, no matter how good each argument is, by the time they get back to the jury room, they’ll remember nothing. If you say 10 things, you say nothing. Well, your colleagues are your jury. I know it hurts to cut but if your main points are going to shine through, you’ve got to be ruthless.

2. Show something. To be clear, that’s not the same thing as using clip art. You don’t need to decorate, you need to communicate. What you show doesn’t even need to be on the screen. I got an email from the president of a power tools company who was on the way to a sales meeting. He’d prepped a long presentation about how great his tools were. At the last minute, he decided to toss it out and instead, he put two drills on the table in front of the customer—his and his competitor’s. He disassembled both of them side-by-side to show the durability of his drills. The customer loved it. The best presentations are like this—they bring a little reality into the room.

By now you've probably heard of Australopithecus sediba, the 1.95-million-year-old human species that made news on April 8. In a nutshell, researchers have found two beautifully preserved partial skeletons that they say represent a previously unknown member of the human family--one that may have given rise to our genus, Homo. You can read my story on the find here.

There's a lot to talk about with this discovery, so I thought I'd supplement the story with some tidbits from the cutting room floor and material that came in after my deadline.

First, some tidbits:

• Lead investigator Lee Berger's nine-year-old son Matthew spotted the first A. sediba fossil--a collar bone that turned out to be from a juvenile individual around Matthew's age. Matthew was originally listed as a co-author on the Science paper describing the fossils, but the reviewers of the paper rejected that idea, according to a news story that accompanied the technical reports in the journal.

The valley of death refers to the severe financial risks that startups face as they struggle to grow from small teams to viable ventures. The dip of the valley refers to the debt -- i.e., the negative balance sheets -- that companies experience as they invest money now in hopes of making it back upon success (the accompanying figure provides a general description).

Nowhere is this valley of death more evident than in clean technology, where startups face a difficult combination of challenges. On the one hand, there is the challenge of teams seeking $50k to $5M or more in funding to begin translating their advanced science into industrial processes (moving thin-film solar or fuels from algae out of the lab and into commercial production) and, on the other hand, there's the challenge of funded startups trying to raise investments for the industrial-sized plants and equipment needed to utilize those emerging processes.

The goal is true innovation – breakthrough new products, services and solutions – that create tomorrow’s growth engines. But most companies are stuck in traditional development: line extensions, modifications and improvements, which won’t generate the desired sales and profits. InnovationManagement asked Dr Robert Cooper about the importance of innovation.

Everybody is talking about innovation and how important it is. Do you agree – is it really that important, and why is that?

– Most companies have ambitious growth goals. The trouble is there are only so many sources of growth. Four of these – market growth, market share increases, new markets, and acquisitions – are proving difficult or expensive. Markets in many countries and industries are flat and increasingly commoditized; gains in market shares are expensive; and acquisitions often don’t work. New markets – India and China, for example – pose special problems. Even traditional product development – for most companies, this means line extensions, improvements and product modifications – seems depleted, and only serves to maintain market share.

Most technology-based economic development (TBED) practitioners want to know the same thing: What approaches to TBED are being taken in other states and regions, and how are they succeeding?
 
While it may seem like a simple question with an easily attainable answer, distinguishing those initiatives with proven impact and a high degree of excellence is a complicated process. SSTI’s Excellence in TBED Awards program was created to help answer these questions and share best practices among policymakers and practitioners working toward the common goal of improving the nation’s competitiveness.
 
SSTI is now accepting applications for the 2010 Excellence in TBED Awards. Winners of this award are provided a national platform to showcase their achievement. Awards are presented in the following six categories:

• Expanding the Research Capacity
• Commercializing Research
• Building Entrepreneurial Capacity
• Increasing Access to Capital
• Enhancing the Science & Technology Workforce
• Improving Competitiveness of Existing Industries

The deadline to apply is June 1. More information is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Awards.

Harvard Business School’s Josh Lerner, an expert on entrepreneurial finance, has largely good things to say about recent steps out of Washing D.C. to strengthen small business growth.

But the Obama administration has gone wrong on some key policy directions, Lerner says, steps that could seriously undermine the best of intentions.

For example, the administration is focused on the idea of loosening up bank credit to fund expansion. Yes, that would help many small businesses, but not the ones that create jobs — the object of this exercise. Lerner points out that very young companies — say less than 5 years old — are the biggest job creators. A 25-year-old small business is more likely cutting than hiring. Actions to help venture capitalists and angel investors, who are also hampered these days, would better serve start-ups.

For information contact David Hochman,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 518-689-0553

More than two dozen clean-energy companies receiving commercialization support from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NSYERDA) will present their results and status at a day-long Program Review produced for NYSERDA by the Business Incubator Association of NYS (BIA/NYS), on Thursday, June 10th, at the Brooklyn campus of NYU-Poly.

Companies presenting at the Program Review will span sectors including solar photovoltaic, wind, biomass, geothermal, energy conversion and storage, smart-grid and transportation. All participants have received support from NYSERDA’s Clean Energy Business Growth and Development Program, or its Manufacturing Incentive Program, or from one of six clean-energy business incubators supported statewide by NYSERDA.

A visitor to Eastern Europe after the fall of communism would have been awestruck by the massive posters touting Winston cigarettes as “the taste of freedom” that often plastered locations where posters of Chairman Stalin and his ilk has once fluttered. It looked as if Christo had wrapped the Iron Curtain in a project sponsored by R.J. Reynolds.

If there were a taste to energy freedom, it would be salt for sure. Our ancestral mother, the ocean, forms an almost unfathomable medium of mystery — astronaut Scott Carpenter once noted that we know more about the heavens than the sea — but for biofuels, there is every urgent reason to look carefully to salt-friendly projects that can utilize brackish water, or marshes, or the abundant three-dimensional world of the oceans.

Virtually all biofuels projects, at massive scale, run into problems of land and freshwater. A million gallons of this, or even a billion gallons of that, are generally achievable without material changes in land or water usage. Sandia tells us that 90 billion gallons of fuel in the US is feasible from biomass on a sustainable basis.

Although most of my blogs have focused on advice to technology entrepreneurs, I take the chance in this blog to reflect on the role of government in stimulating innovation. I was recently invited to participate in an on-line debate on government’s role in innovation on the Economist.com. The proposition was “This house believes that innovation works best when government does least”

I voted in favor of the motion, for three simple reasons. First, I believe governments are terrible decision makers in the innovation forum; they do not understand it and have access to limited expert help. As a result, much of their activities has, at best, limited impact, at worst damaging effect on the free-market decision-making process. Second, government involvement in innovation is usually slow, motivated by political imperatives and distorts market forces. As a result, it can damage as much as it can help. This is particularly the case when you explore the gestation period of innovation policies, which are longer than the life of government. Finally, by encouraging innovators to respond to government programs and fulfill government requirements, we divert their attention from identifying customers, and expanding internationally. Even with the best intentions, in the words of John Wanamaker

Marla is the consummate creative entrepreneur. She’s a bright creative thinker who follows through and gets things done. Everybody loves her for a reason – she treats everyone she works with, big and small, as a valued collaborator and potential ally. And her creativity is not limited to the artistic sphere – her entrepreneurial vision allows her to conjure new opportunities out of thin air, and she has the business savvy to make her dreams a reality.

Her success – like yours – depends on her ability to master three critical skill-sets:

• Creativity – generating new ideas, evaluating them effectively, taking action to turn them into new products and services.
• Collaboration – connecting and working with partners, clients, and other significant players in your network, which will probably be scattered across the globe and contain more ‘virtual’ relationships than face-to-face ones.
• Entrepreneurship – identifying opportunities in the marketplace and using business skills to turn ideas into products into profits.

Venture capitalists and angel investors can be very useful external sources of capital for established businesses, but the value they bring to new ventures and start-ups is questionable at best. Entrepreneurs should aim to finance their ventures by means other than venture capitalists, private equity and angel investors unless a large fortune is needed to finance business start-up activities or they choose to work with investors specifically focused on very early-stage start-ups. Here are eight strategies in which many entrepreneurs might choose to finance their ventures:

Business Credit Cards
Many successful businesses, such as Under Armour, were financed through credit cards in the very early stages of their venture. While credit cards are not necessarily the most ideal source of financing as they do have their drawbacks, if used correctly they can be a very effective source of financing.

How to use a business credit card correctly:
- Effectively manage cash flow by not having to pay for purchases until the end of the billing cycle. 
- Use to pay for start-up fixed and upfront costs so you can make your first sale 
- Plan ahead on how you will pay off the balance, then create a backup plan

Washington State faces an unprecedented economic crisis and significant revenue shortfalls. Economic recovery and job creation are the top priority. The Commission’s first round recommendations released in February, 2009, focused on augmenting three interdependent components of the innovation ecosystem: talent, investment and infrastructure. Taken together these form the pillars of a new, comprehensive and integrated strategy for economic development. The 2010 legislative priorities adopted by the Commission advance the implementation of this cohesive strategy for the Washington Innovation Economy.

• Commitment to an innovation based economic development strategy;
• Aligning state agencies with the economic development strategy;
• Strengthening local leadership and innovation ecosystems from the bottom‐up;
• Investments in programs that yield a high return (and similarly reducing investments with low or no
• return);
• Well designed and timely outcome metrics;
• Constant adaption to global trends, technologies and market conditions.

The Commission’s first round recommendations released in February, 2009, focused on augmenting three interdependent components of the ecosystem which innovation needs to thrive: talent, investment and infrastructure. Taken together these form the pillars of the comprehensive and integrated approach the Commission has adopted. Below are the 2010 legislative priorities supported by the Commission.

Download the PDF

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

As the economy skids along, and secure, rewarding employment remains out of reach for many, a few young women are creating their own dream jobs, working for themselves.

Erin Estell, 27, took that path when her sales job at Sealmaster Inc., a Northbrook-based fabric-protection company owned by a family friend, evaporated last year in the downturn.

Rather than encouraging her to find another job, Ms. Estell says, her husband pointed her in a different direction. "He said, 'Why don't you start selling your jewelry?' "

Whether you’ve just started your business or been in business for a while, “Smart Business Stupid Business” is a book you’ll want to have. This isn’t one of those books you read for entertainment – it’s a book you’ll want to have on your reference shelf because it answers many (if not all) the financial and administrative questions you might have around starting and running a smart business.

What’s the Difference Between a Smart Business and a Stupid Business?

According to authors Diane Kennedy and Megan Hughes, a smart business is one that can survive a downturn. That’s a rather simple answer, but it’s honest and a lot deeper than it looks. A growing economy might funnel a lot of money into your business, but it can also hide a lot of flaws. A smart business is one that is built on a solid foundation of being clear about the decisions that you make about the structure of your business, the purpose of your business and the systems in your business.