Jeff Hubrig Jr. is Manager of Business Development at Innovasan, a Knoxville-based start-up with a tagline that says it all:” clean and safe water everywhere.” It’s a family-owned company, founded by the younger Hubrig’s parents and based on intellectual property co-invented by Jeff Sr. and Joe Dooley. Innovasan has 14 issued patents and 15 pending. We first profiled the company in this late 2014 article and have posted updates periodically since then. Innovasan is also a participant in this year’s “The TENN” master accelerator sponsored by Launch Tennessee.

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who think the most creatively, not only in their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth from startup to maturity. But even the best of them can easily slip into some bad decision habits that limit or hurt their business, due to natural human tendencies and the pressures of business challenges.

It’s one thing to play the arcade game Whac-A-Mole by swinging around an oversized mallet; it’s far easier to whack those moles virtually, controlling the mallet with just your gaze.

That’s what I was doing on a recent rainy morning in the Milpitas, California, office of a startup called Eyefluence while wearing an Oculus virtual-reality headset. Eyefluence is building eye-tracking technology that it believes will be good enough to let you do anything in virtual reality, from hitting subterranean mammals to navigating different menus and apps, all by simply looking around.

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Many estimate that between 25% and 30% of all startups fail within their first year. The reasons why they are unique to each company, though there are 18 very common causes that we all should avoid.

In 2007, founder of the successful Y Combinator incubator in the US, Paul Graham, jotted down a list of notorious things startups tend to do that end up leading to their awful defeat. Now, the folks at Funders and Founders have illustrated this beautiful infographic for all of us to remember.

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In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly.

Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should.

While it may very well be true that innovation as we often see it deployed is nothing more than a passing fancy, it is still possible to turn it into something real:  a living, breathing, human-centered way of thinking and being that will lead organizations into innovative states.

I went kayaking on the Snake River in Idaho a few years ago, accompanying a group on a raft, and the put‑in was immediately upstream of a large and long Class IV rapids, which was a bit off-putting right up front. I was given the option of riding that first set of rapids in the raft, my kayak strapped to the back.

tTalk to any entrepreneur or business leader and they’ll often admit that their company is their "baby." They brought it to life, spent time raising it, and are emotionally invested in its growth. Entrepreneurs who are also parents to real babies say that many of the skills they use at home have enhanced their workplace.

Some of the best kept secrets to getting amazing experience, advisors and funders can be found all over the country. Yes, even in the South. Now Feetz, a 3D printed shoe company, has harnessed the resources of some amazing people and has decided to call Tennessee home.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur is as much of a mental game, as it is one of finesse and expertise.

You can be the most intelligent, talented, and respected person within your industry, but if you don't believe in yourself and continue to be brutally honest as you move through the extremely difficult stages of growing a business, your failure is all but inevitable.

Is it possible to be born an entrepreneur? The concept of following a particular career or lifestyle, predetermined at birth, is a controversial one, so I’ll just say this -- I began my entrepreneurial journey at a very young age, and I feel that I am meant to follow the path I’m on.

I love everything that being an entrepreneur stands for.

The challenge of moving people and things around the world’s dense, growing major cities is bad and getting worse. Ninety percent of the world’s population growth in this century will be in “megacities,” and cities will soon account for 80 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Much of that will come from idling cars stuck in miles-long traffic jams.

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A sweeping economic development bill totaling nearly $1 billion over five years proposed by the Baker administration will keep Massachusetts at the forefront of innovation while spreading the wealth across the state, officials said.

“As good as things are, we want to make them better,” Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Jay Ash said yesterday. “We want to spread them across the state, we want to especially make sure all of our businesses and all of our residents are able to achieve their greatest possible success.”

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OLYMPIA, Wash. — A bill to exempt crowdfunding efforts from the state sales tax and business-and-occupation tax is working its way through the Washington House. The House Finance Committee held a hearing Friday on the bill by Rep. Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn.

Right now, Washington does not have any specific laws addressing crowdfunding. The Washington Department of Revenue has interpreted existing business laws to require that fundraisers must report their total income after the fund-raising period is over. And fundraisers must collect sales tax on a service, item or software that is provided as a reward for a donation.

There has been much debate in developing countries on intellectual property rights (IPR) in terms of protection of innovation and technology diffusion. Developing countries have huge technology disadvantage in today’s globalised economy. These countries acquire technologies from foreign markets as they lack resources to develop and innovate in the domestic market. Moreover, weak IPR protection in the developing economies forces entrepreneurs to import new technologies from advanced or developed countries. All this shifts benefit to foreign entities which gain a monopoly in the developing countries by implementing strong intellectual property rights.

This morning, President Obama and the White House made an awesome announcement of a new initiative called Computer Science for All. The goal is to empower a generation of American students with the computer science skills they need to thrive in a digital economy.

NCWIT (where I’m the chair of the board) is deeply involved in this. Rather than try to recreate Lucy Sanders (the CEO of NCWIT’s) message to the extended NCWIT community, I’m just republishing it below.

Some authors talk about successful innovation being the sum of idea plus execution, others talk about the importance of insight and its role in driving the creation of ideas that will be meaningful to customers, and even fewer about the role of inspiration in uncovering potential insight. But innovation is all about value and each of the definitions, frameworks, and models out there only tell part of the story of successful innovation.

I’ve been talking for a while now in my speeches how crucial value is to innovation. It is no consequence as a result that value sits at the center of my definition of innovation:

When we launched SparkLabs Global Ventures two years ago, we faced a lot of uncertainty and risk as a new seed-stage fund. How would the chemistry work out between the six partners? How would entrepreneurs respond to our vision and team? How would investors respond to our thesis as a global seed-stage fund?

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When Wilbur and Orville Wright managed to build and fly an airplane, you might imagine that the world was immediately dazzled by their amazing achievement.

You’d be wrong.

As David McCullough chronicles in his excellent book The Wright Brothers, many of the “most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight,” without success. The endeavor was fraught with hazards that included “humiliating failure, injury, and, of course, death, (but also)… the inevitable prospect of being mocked as a crank, a crackpot, and in many cases with good reason.”

About a decade ago, I was fresh out of business school and had a certain way of looking at things. We’d been taught that businesses operated a certain way. The rules were standard and straightforward: you got a job, stayed with that company, and worked slowly and steadily to make your way up the ladder. Occasionally you left for a better opportunity.