There’s no mystical secret when it comes to being a successful business owner. There is certainly no definite set of rules to follow, either. However, you can learn a lot from entrepreneurs who have tried, failed, and finally succeeded before you.

We are all bound to make mistakes along the way, and there’s so much that we can gain from our mistakes. Some mistakes, though, are so deadly that they can cripple our business, so  obviously, we need to avoid them at all costs.

Below are some common mistakes that new entrepreneurs often make. See if any of them ring a bell, and do your best to correct your course as necessary to increase your chances of winning in the entrepreneurial game!

With the lack of a federal advanced energy policy, several states are seizing the opportunity to fill the void.  I was in Columbus last week to attend Ohio Governor John Kasich’s Energy and Economic Summit, which kicked off the development of a comprehensive energy strategy for the state. Personally, I found the opening remarks from Governor Kasich and from Joseph Stanislaw, author and the former president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, very motivating.

One thing in the Governor’s comments that really resonated with me was that Ohio could work on a comprehensive energy strategy, which could be a model for other industrial states.  What if states continue to take a leadership role, share best practices and then link together their energy strategies – could they make a significant economic impact on the advanced energy industry as well as help solve our country’s energy puzzle?

Are you ready to take your company to the next level? Is it time to go get some of that easy flowing venture capital cash?

Most of the time the answer is a simple “nope.”  A company must be the right type of company at the right stage of their development at the right time in the market to be VC fundable.

5 BUSINESS TRAITS THAT MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO GET FUNDED 1. Leverage-bility – The business has very little margin leverage due to high variable costs and/or high cost of goods (COGs), resulting in low gross margins that don’t ramp up with volume. VCs love leverage-able financials.  COGs that represent single digit percentage of the average selling price are very attractive.  Single digit gross margins aren’t.

I’m often asked the question about why there aren’t more women who are entrepreneurs. On my blog I’ve been hesitant to take the topic head on. Somehow it seems kind of strange for a man to answer this question that obviously comes from a man’s point of view.

But last week I noticed a blog post by a woman, Tara Tiger Brown, that asked the question, “Why Aren’t More Women Commenting on VC Blog Posts?” [it's short, you should read it] . In it she observes that only 3% of the comments on this blog are from women. I would love to see Tara follow up with blog posts on: why she believes this is the case & what we can do about it.

It’s time for more entrepreneurs to reset their focus, and shift their thinking to completely different ways of doing things. Everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with improved usability, one more wind-farm energy generator with a few more blades, or one more dating site with a new dimension of compatibility. Serious changes and great successes don’t come from linear thinking.

In searching for ways to get this message out, I came across a no excuse, no apology, new book by Brian Reich, called “Shift and Reset,” which makes some excellent points on ways to increase the range of change in a person’s thinking, or an organization’s results. Here are some key principles that he espouses and I support:

Contrary to belief, older people in South Africa and Brazil become happier as they age. New research suggests that, with the right policies in place, a developing country can significantly improve the wellbeing of its older citizens.

The average levels of wellbeing experienced by older people in South Africa and Brazil improved between 2002 and 2008, due to a combination of economic growth and enlightened social policies, according to a study from the New Dynamics of Ageing Programme, a unique collaboration between five UK Research Councils.

Patent application review is an integral part of the examination procedures undertaken by patent offices before a patent grant is given. Prior art search is a complex and time consuming part of this process. Crowdsourcing this critical stage is a valuable opportunity to render the traditional patent application review process more efficient by separating the stage of prior art search from the patent grant procedure.

This article briefly describes the crowdsourcing phenomenon and then details how it can aid patent review. The open source review pilot projects of the USPTO and JPO are presented in order to assess the potential of opening prior art search to a wider community of experts and practitioners. Public-private partnerships between patent offices and companies managing online review communities are proposed as an opportunity to leverage the benefits of open review while providing sufficient incentives and quality assurances to yield useful contributions.

People approach collaborative innovation from many places. Some seek a way for their group to solve problems more effectively. They define effective in many ways. Some want to engage their group more deeply. Their people do not contribute fully because they had little opportunity to create a shared vision for the organization. Still others wish to remain current. If collaborative innovation represents the state of the art, then they choose to embrace the practice. Doing so becomes an innovative act in its own right.

Each path leads its respective pilgrim to ask the following, critical questions: What does it mean to practice collaborative innovation? What opportunities does the practice offer in terms of a vocation? Where might I start my journey?

A number of issues are likely to play a crucial role in the ongoing antitrust investigation into Google, including the question of whether the company is using its dominant position in a way that damages the market (which as we’ve described before is a lot harder to answer than it might seem). In addition to that, one likely argument will be the one that Chris O’Brien at the San Jose Mercury News tried to float this past weekend: that Google’s position is now unassailable thanks to network effects and a number of other factors, and therefore. the company is unkillable. But is this really true?

Jan Rosenbaum creates bioscience matches made in heaven.

As an executive-in-residence with Cincinnati-based seed-stage investor CincyTech, Rosenbaum matches up physicians with medical-device engineers, therapeutics companies with molecular pharmacologists, and diagnostics makers with target markets.

Rosenbaum’s role is to look for opportunities to create companies – or commercialize research – out of health care and biotechnology work being done at local research institutions. For the last 12 months, that work has included three trips to Israel to form connections with its dynamic and prolific medical research and biotechnology industries.

If you’re in a certain industry, or looking to get into an industry, it is advisable to learn all you can about the industry.

Questions you might want to ask include who are the major, medium and up-and-coming players?  What are the industry trends?  How fast is the marketplace growing?  Who are the leaders?  Who are the opinion leaders?  What academic research is going on?  What patents are being registered?   There are a number of ways to do this:

1. Put industry keywords into Google and see which companies come up in the search, learn all you can about them by going onto their websites, read their About Us, News section and research/technical section

2. See which white papers and blogs come up in the search, look at industrial survey results – who are the opinion leaders?  Follow them on twitter, linkedin…

If you are an ambitious young person and you want to make it in the movies, country music, or advertising, you know where to go: Hollywood, Nashville, and New York. If you want to get in line to be the next Zuckerberg or Jobs, you head for the Valley.

Why do people come to Boston?

The most common answer you'd hear, I think, is to get an education.

And that's wonderful if you're employed by one of our city's great universities.

But not so great if you work outside of higher ed, or care about Massachusetts' economic health over the long haul.

The IPO market might be looking a little frosty, but the M&A market so far this year has been positive enough to warm VCs’ hearts.

The median selling price through September was nearly $71 million – four times the median amount invested prior to liquidity, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. That kind of multiple hasn’t been seen since 2000.

Because M&A is affected by the stock market, the pace is likely to fall in the fourth quarter, but the total raised is sure to exceed last year. VentureSource pegs the amount raised in the first nine months at $37.3 billion, only slightly behind the $39.42 billion for all of 2010, which was the best year since 2007. (VentureSource is owned by Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of this blog.)

China's economic success in the last three quarters is mainly due to cheap labor and export-oriented economies of scale. However, the leadership is quite aware of the unsustainability of this approach, and as wages are rising in the country, they are working to increase the value chain of domestic production.

Their foreign technology transfer strategies and highly incentivized, state-sponsored private sector research and development support have started to pay dividends. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Chinese domestic patent filings increased from 15,600 in 1999 to 122,000 in 2006. An average 35 percent annual increase is not a bad accomplishment. This rate is 6 percent in America, 5 percent in South Korea, 4 percent in Europe and 1 percent in Japan.

Although they are often said to eschew monetary rewards, and have a great eagerness for rewards outside the monetary pay scale, many Millennials find their financial reality daunting.

Many Millennials are operating under crushing debt: Most college students graduate with close to $20,000 in student loan debt. Graduate and professional students easily can incur $100,000 in loans that have to be repaid as of day one on the job. These knowledge economy workers have made a great investment in higher education, where costs have multiplied by triple digits at both private and public colleges in the last decade and a half. And they're still escalating.

For artists, entrepreneurs, and any other driven creators, exercise is a powerful tool in the quest to help transform the persistent uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that accompanies the quest to create from a source of suffering into something less toxic, then potentially even into fuel.

For more than thirty years, Haruki Murakami has dazzled the world with his beautifully crafted words, most often in the form of novels and short stories. But his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008) opens a rare window into his life and process, revealing an obsession with running and how it fuels his creative process.

Real innovation isn’t common in higher education, especially at the most prestigious schools.

They are presumed to have gotten where they are because they have the formula right. Their nearest competitors try to be more like them, not to find novel ways of outdoing them. In an academic world where nothing succeeds like success, innovation is rare because it is seen as risky, even foolhardy.

But change is coming to higher education.

For-profit universities, which have nothing to lose in the prestige game, are testing powerful new learning technologies and operating models.

They’ve made mistakes, and they’re paying the price in onerous new regulations. But those regulations will make them stronger, more focused on helping students to learn and graduate with valuable capabilities. The for-profits will not only have to deliver these outcomes, as the best traditional institutions do, they’ll have to document them.

While the investment decision is critical to portfolio performance, VCs spend more than 60% of their time on post-investment activities in order to grow investments for lucrative exits. These activities can be separated into monitoring (protecting the interests of the investor) and value-adding activities (strategic influence, mentorship and access to networks).

It should be noted that because of the many different VC management styles, VC involvement post-investment vary greatly — ranging from informal interaction to stringent control.

Building a Trust Relationship

Let’s face it. If an entrepreneur could do it on his own, he would. It is a major inconvenience having strangers involved in your business that you’ve been conceptualising for ages and nurtured to life. The due diligence exercise is a distant memory, negotiation tactics lead to both parties having to compromise and you’ve gone from sitting on opposite sides of the table to being part of the same team with a vested interest in mutual success. If things work out, the money invested will be of much less importance than the value-adding activities of the VC.

Maybe Starbucks can give entrepreneurs more than just a daily jolt of caffeine… perhaps the coffee company can help kick-start small business lending. While the government’s much touted Small Business Lending Fund is widely viewed as a dud, Starbucks has begun its own small business financing initiative by teaming up with Philadelphia-based nonprofit Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) and starting a program called Create Jobs for USA. The coffee giant will pool donations from its customers, employees and concerned citizens into a nationwide fund for community business lending.

Calling small businesses “the backbone of America,” Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said, “We’ve got to thaw the channels of credit so that community businesses can start hiring again. Create Jobs for USA empowers Americans to help other Americans create and sustain jobs.”