Readers of a certain age will recall the contribution made by Fred Flintstone, the caveman in the '60s cartoon series, to a cleaner environment. The Flintstone family rode down the street in a car powered not by fossil fuels - fossils were then in their infancy - but by Fred's feet.

Or think back to The Little Rascals and their transportation innovation; a car powered by a dog chasing a rabbit on a treadmill.

Those cars were comical because they were impractical, but they were green by comparison to Detroit's tail-finned products.

Last week, we reported on the “coming renaissance of electrical contracting,” an upward trend of electricians transitioning into energy contractors to keep up with demand for green construction. A fast growing segment of this green construction market is building retrofits, or energy efficient renovations. Numerous reports forecast retrofitting to become a multi-billion dollar market over the next three to four years:

* McGraw Hill estimates it will become a $10 to $15 billion market by 2014;
* Pike Research puts it at $6.6 billion annually; and,
* SBI Energy predicts green renovations will make up 13% of the total renovation market by 2015.

A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. Even if you don’t have “direct” sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale” including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development.  So I hope these posts will be useful to all and not just those who need road warriors.

If you’re interested in recruiting sales people, I wrote on the topic of startup sales people: who to hire & when – understanding the roles of Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars.

Evangelical sales – Understanding startup sales people and process.

We can learn a lot about innovation by observing the social behavior of honeybees. Who hasn’t been riveted by devastating stories of colony collapse? This is serious stuff. From a honeybee’s perspective watching 35% of your fellow Apis mellifera get wiped out is no joke. From a human perspective, think of it this way, one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat is dependent on honeybee pollination. Bees are responsible for about $15 billion in U.S. agricultural crop value. Colony collapse really matters. It’s worth paying attention to bees.

The term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of honeybee disappearances in 2006. It’s an eerie phenomenon where one day worker bees swarm together in great numbers and the next they are gone, poof they just disappear, leaving behind an empty hive. It’s not as if they leave to join another colony. They leave to die alone and dispersed which is strange given the social nature of honeybees. Scientists have been working feverishly to determine the etiology of colony collapse disorder.

Corrected, see below] “Mounting tensions” would be the journalistic cliche to describe recent relations between traditional Silicon Valley venture capital firms and the growing class of “super angel” investors—groups like Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Mike Maple’s Floodgate Fund, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, and Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC.

The relationship between these super angels and VCs matters a lot, because it could have an impact on investment for the next generation of small, Internet-based ventures. Thanks to innovations like cloud computing, many of these Internet companies don’t really need the multi-million-dollar rounds traditionally dispensed by venture firms. So, when the super angels aren’t sniping at each other about how to work with entrepreneurs (witness the blizzard of leaked e-mails prompted by TechCrunch’s “AngelGate” kerfuffle), the VCs are circling warily and arguing that big venture firms make better business partners than super angels, thanks to their larger networks and operational experience.

MADISON - University Research Park, (URP) established in 1984, located three miles west of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, employs 3,400 people. The URP contributes more than $825 million to Wisconsin's economy each year, according to a study: The Economic Contribution of the University Research Park released yesterday. The study also found that the park supports nearly 9,300 jobs statewide, and generates $43 million in state and local tax revenue each year.

 “This new study demonstrates the return that's being paid on the creation of University Research Park as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's efforts to transfer university-discovered technology to the private sector, where it can be refined and commercialized,” according to Mark D. Bugher, director of University Research Park. 

"The results of the URP economic impact study reinforces the priority we've put on technology transfer and fostering the growth of companies born on this campus as a result,” Bugher said.

Investors associated with dotcom startups are turning their attention to clean technology – but can they revolutionise the sector?

As the heartland of global innovation over the past 40 years, Silicon Valley has plenty of reasons to be optimistic about green technology – not least the rising amount of money being pumped into the sector by the region's biggest investors.

California's venture capitalists are increasingly adding green technology companies to their investment portfolios. In fact, a recent Ernst & Young report suggests such groups helped push investments in the sector to $1.5bn (£960m) during the second quarter of this year – back to pre-recession levels.

Forbes magazine recently published its annual list of the 400 wealthiest people in America.  The entire list offers business lessons for all entrepreneurs, but the top 20 names offer a special set of insights. These are the richest of the ultrarich, and how they made their money provides a playbook for moneymaking.

Here are four key takeaways from this year’s list:

Choose entrepreneurship as your career

Owning a business is the single best way to become rich in America. Study the top 20, and you will see that all 20 people became wealthy through their ownership of a business. There are no rock stars, bank CEOs, real estate agents, movie moguls, writers, baseball players, stockbrokers, doctors or filmmakers in the top 20.

Getting ahead in your career isn’t just about memorizing the company manual and mastering your daily tasks. You also need to learn your office’s informal networks, the personality clashes and synergies among your co-workers and the helpful unofficial ‘work hacks’ that make you a more efficient employee. How do you learn these things if they’re not in the papers you’re handed as a new hire? Through mentors, of course. To make the mentoring as painless as possible for office newbies, blog Tough Guide to Work recently offered a post on three common mentoring pitfalls and how to avoid them:

• Searching for ‘the one’. Obi Wan. Mr Miyagi. Dumbledore. Watching movies and reading fiction gives us the deep impression that we should be seeking some Gandalf-like figure in our professional lives. Instead we end up having coffee with an exhausted executive who it turns out has a couple of good ideas and a bunch of neuroses. We expect one person to embody everything we want to become, advise on all areas of our work and life and then it turns out instead we’ve been paired with a human being instead. How unfair. Instead of seeking one perfect mentor, I strongly advocate getting a “Board of Advisors”. Seek out a selection of mentors who can offer guidance on a specific topic. Want great advice on work-life balance, career goals, navigating politics, professional growth, building a network, influencing senior management? It’s unlikely that you will find one genius that gives you everything.

Investment research firm CB Insights has released its report on the third quarter of 2010. And the report is very much a mixed bag: overall funding dollars are down, but the number of deals is up. And seed funding in particular, according the report, is strong.

VC funding dipped to $5.4 billion in the third quarter of this year, a five quarter low. But deal activity recorded its second highest tally in 8 quarters. Absence of mega deals, according to the report, hurt the funding total. The report finds that California, Massachusetts, and New York saw a decreased number of deals and the amount of funding (from 70% of funding dollars in the second quarter to 63% in the third quarter), while Washington state saw an increase.

Today,  Business web sites are often responsible for originating a major share of their companies turnover. This trend can only continue, with more and more organizations depending on the internet for a significant proportion of their sales enquiries and revenue. Business websites are more than equal to the challenges of this fast-changing environment, where the internet plays a vital part of the marketing, order-taking and customer support strategy.

If you’re preparing for a career in the business world, you’re undoubtedly devoting a lot of time and effort to your schoolwork, internships and networking. But keeping up with business news is equally important, and these websites can help you apply what you learn in class to real-world situations, from the stock market, to international business, to starting up your own company to social media marketing. As and entrepreneur or maybe future entrepreneur you should read the same magazines as the CEOs.  In this article I have collected 20 of the best websites providing fresh and relevant business news for entrepreneurs.

Canada's private and public sectors need to move quickly to foster innovation, a coalition of leaders from business, academia and supporting organizations said on Wednesday.

The Coalition for Action on Innovation in Canada, which is chaired by John Manley, president and CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and Paul Lucas, president and CEO of GlaxoSmithKline Inc., says says it has 10 key recommendations that would boost productivity, create jobs and raise income levels for Canadian workers.

The coalition's 10-page report says Canada's private sector lags other countries when it comes to private sector investment. Canada, it concludes, needs more private sector research and development and more companies that qualify as "global champions."

As if venture capital firms needed reminding, they’re raising precious fewer dollars these days.

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thompson Reuters brought that fact home with a report out Monday showing in the June-July-August quarter 45 venture funds raised just under $3 billion.

The economy has taken its toll on venture capital industry, which peaked at raising $35.4 billion in 2007 and has been dropping since. Last year the industry raised $16.4 billion for 151 funds, and through three quarters of 2010 has raised $9.1 billion from 124 funds.

We look to the future – but we do so from a centre of learning, this University, whose roots reach back over 600 years. From their earliest beginnings, our universities have consistently pushed forward the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. So, as we muster all our forces to put Europe back on track after the worst economic crisis the Union has known, it is no surprise that universities are at the centre of our efforts.

We are here in Pécs for another reason too – to celebrate the place of culture in the Union, and especially to mark 25 years of European Capitals of Culture – one of the European Union's best known initiatives.

If you are an entrepreneur these days, or trying to grow an existing business, everyone is telling you that you need to use social media. There are many ‘experts’ out there telling you how to do it, or even offering their services. But very few are talking about how to measure your results, and the right metrics for optimizing your marketing environment.

Jim Sterne, who has written six books on Internet advertising, marketing, and customer service, tackled this complex world of social media metrics in his recent book titled "Social Media Metrics." He has one of the first books on this subject, and he breaks the process down into nine steps, as follows:

1. Get focused and identify goals. Social media is the realm of public opinion and customer conversations. If you don’t have a clear idea of why you are there, anything you measure will be useless. He suggests you begin with the “big three” business objectives of higher revenue, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

The past few months have brought a new series of reports dissecting the job creation phenomenon by new firms, timely at a time when so much of the economic discussion lately in the U.S. has focused on strategies to recover the roughly 8 million jobs lost during this past recession. We already knew that research has firmly established that new firms—those no more than five years old—over the past three decades have been responsible for virtually all of the net new jobs created in the U.S. economy (see 2009 reports “Jobs Created from Business Startups in the United States,” and “Where Will The Jobs Come From?”). As the nation debates this leading up to the mid-term elections in the United States, let’s further examine U.S. job growth and its relationship to startup companies.

In March, a new study by the Kauffman Foundation’s Dane Stangler, “High-Growth Firms and the Future of the American Economy,” zoomed in on new firms that scale using data from the Census Bureau. The study demonstrated that not only are new firms generally important to the vitality of the economy and job growth, but new firms that grow in revenues and jobs are especially important. More precisely, the top 1 percent of all companies generate 40 percent of new jobs, and the vast majority of these firms are no more than five years old. If we further zoom in on the most rapidly growing young firms (those between ages 3-5 years), they represent less than 1 percent of all companies in the economy, but account for 10 percent of new jobs created each year.

Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, can pat themselves on the back on Earth Day next year, even if they choose not to pull out the shovels and saplings. Without digging a single hole into the ground, they have added the equivalent of 90 fourteen foot-tall trees when they unveiled the largest living wall in North America on October 9th. The 4,072 sq. ft. vegetative surface is the heavy-weight champion in the living wall world, taking the title from the PNC Bank building in Pittsburgh, whose planted surfaces are 70% smaller than Longwood Gardens’.

Green facades have become a growing trend for urbanites looking to connect with nature; potted plants are just not enough anymore. Like any growing trend, this one opens the door for many adventurous and creative steps ranging from the artistic to the mammoth to the just plain weird.

The student worker in our department office had messed up the committee report so that Page One was tucked between Pages Three and Five, and the last page was missing. A colleague of mine called this problem to her attention. “My bad!” she said cheerfully as she walked away.

A pause hung in the air. “Whatever happened to ‘I’m sorry’?” muttered the committee head, and we proceeded without the faulty report.

The phrase my bad, exported to the U.S. about a decade ago from Australia, has become a curse. Initially, it seemed a lighthearted way of claiming responsibility: not mea culpa, with its Catholic overtones of sinning and eventual forgiveness, but a slangy alternative. Turning bad into a noun was cute, if at first a bit grating, and it could apply to so many situations.

Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) have decided that June 2009 marked the end of the Great Recession, putting us over a year into the economic recovery in the United States.

Regardless of what the NBER economists say, few small business owners think the economy is very good right now.

But what do the numbers say? How does the small business economy compare to what it was like before the recession?