The Fakerpreneur, a fake entrepreneur, is the evil doppelganger destroying entrepreneurship as we know it. You may be one and you definitely know several. Here's how you know someone is a Fakerpreneur:

Canada’s economy is in the doldrums. While debates continue to swirl as to whether we are in a “true” technical recession, there is no uncertainty about the fact that the economy is lumbering along at half-speed.

Many analysts—usually planners—have been regularly offering a wealth of exhortations concerning how uneconomical it is to purchase, operate and maintain a private car. Is this a valid assertion of a household economic burden? And what is the likelihood that the advice will ultimately prove useful? Household economic decision-making varies greatly, depending principally upon income levels, personal circumstances, and preferences. A single mother with children, or a part-time worker, will make transport choices for radically different reasons than a management executive. With their priorities already set, each of these individuals has little use for generic advice; it is either unhelpful or irrelevant to them.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Look at a list of rags-to-riches billionaires, from Oprah to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, from immigrant investor George Soros to Jay-Z, and you'll see a common thread. They all, by definition, made it. Hence, their classic American stories are self-fulfilling tales that allow them to package stories about their hustle and hard-won riches as an example to others.

Gloved and gowned trainees carefully practiced filling vials of a clear liquid derived from human blood under the focused eyes of instructors and the unblinking lenses of a media horde.

The workers, new hires for the $1 billion Baxalta pharmaceutical plant that will begin testing operations near Social Circle next year, were showcased as part of the grand opening Thursday of the Georgia BioScience Training Center.

Image: J. SCOTT TRUBEY/STAFF

When making large-scale organizational changes, the design of a transformation’s initiatives is not a matter of guesswork. Rather, the results from a new McKinsey Global Survey on the topic1 suggest that companies that design their initiatives to support desired shifts in mind-sets and behaviors see the most successful transformations.2

Everybody’s for “innovation” these days.

Innovation is as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July, the iconic garage inventor who makes some great discovery and turns it into a commercial success, or the Washington Monument honoring George Washington, the Father of Our Country.

But Congress is exhibiting schizophrenic legislative impulses toward innovation.  One day, lawmakers overwhelmingly pass the pro-innovation 21st Century Cures Act.  Another day, Congress bears down on weakening the very vehicle that incentivizes American innovation, U.S. patents.

While Boston’s Seaport Innovation District has garnered praise and attention, the efforts in Holyoke to revitalize vacant mill and factory sections of the city with new businesses and spur economic growth has been steadily and successfully moving forward for more than half a decade.

Image: http://baystatebanner.com

One-thousand six-hundred fifty-four.

I'm not teaching this semester, but if I were, that is the one number that I would want everyone to remember.

It is the reported number of “fine artists" sustained by the booming visual art industry in New York City (as of two years ago), according to Creative New York, a 2015 report on the health of Gotham's “Creative Economy."

Image: https://news.artnet.com

It is interesting to note that amongst the top 10 start ups worldwide, 2 are in the e-commerce business (Airbnb and Flipkart) and seven (Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Flipkart, Didi Kuaidi, Pinterest and Dropbox) are part of the digital industry. 

Image: http://www.vccircle.com

The ability to attract the attention and support of a venture capital firm is a badge of honor for most entrepreneurs. The allure of an influx of capital and prestige that goes along with it can be quite  strong, and it often puts entrepreneurs in the position of trying to convince potential VC partners of their viability and merit. But can that actually be a mistake?

It’s easy to make fun of bad startup ideas – Airbnb for toilets? – but it’s not so easy to pick the good ones ahead of time. Just ask venture capitalists, the vast majority of whom lose money. The difficulty of separating good ideas from bad is part of why angel investors end up investing based largely on the founding team.

Anyone who has worked inside a large organization can rattle off a lengthy list of the things that regularly kill promising ideas: conflict with existing businesses, naysayers, management turmoil, insufficient resources.

Israel has been branded the “startup nation.” For good reason: A tiny country of only 8 million people — 0.1% of the world’s population — has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any country in the world save the United States and China. Frequently cited as one of the world’s most vibrant innovation hubs, Israel boasts more startups per capita than any other country in the world.

State economic development leaders exchanged ideas on incentive program impact and evaluation practices at the Workshop on Incentive Return on Investment in Washington, DC. Topics included evaluation design and objectives, ROI analysis, expanding the menu of metrics, and tools and techniques for communicating evaluation results.

The U.S. national energy labs, funded by taxpayers to the tune of $12 billion a year, produce too many dead ends and too few transformative clean technologies, some critics say. And they tend to ignore the local entrepreneurs who would love to collaborate.

Now a wave of new thinking seems to be afoot at the Department of Energy, which oversees the labs. A few pilot programs are nudging the labs to get their clean-technology ideas to market by working with regional tech firms.

Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, situated in the hills above the San Francisco Bay Area, is among the national labs trying new ways to collaborate with their regional economies. Photo courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley.

In April 2015, EDA issued a Federal Register Notice heralding some proposed improvements to our forms as part of overall enhancements we’re making to the grant application process. Very soon, those changes will become institutionalized. Here are a few key things you need to know to be ready when the FY2016 Public Works and Economic Adjustment Assistance Programs Federal Funding Opportunity hits the streets.

SAN DIEGO -- Google and city officials announced Thursday that they're going to explore bringing an ultra high-speed broadband network to San Diego.

The Silicon Valley-based high-tech giant will conduct a study of factors that affect construction of its Google Fiber networks, such as local topography, housing density and the condition of existing infrastructure.

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 10, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On September 11, 2015, at 10 a.m. the University f Maryland's (UMD) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), in the A. James Clark School of Engineering, will celebrate the opening of the Texas Instruments Discovery Lab, where first-year engineering students are being exposed to basic electrical and computer engineering concepts in a revolutionary, hands-on way. This lab opening at UMD is part of a company-level commitment by Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) to ensure young engineering students are engineering- and industry-ready by inspiring them at the inception of their academic careers.

I got the following question from a friend yesterday.

“I’ve had a few conversations recently about how individual seed investors are getting kind of tapped out – for a variety of reasons, but in general it’s not that easy to find people who are still actively investing. I don’t recall your having blogged about this – are you seeing it too? Lots of talk about Series A crunch but maybe there is a seed crunch too?”