Many great breakthroughs have come in dreams.

Rene Descartes got the concept for the Scientific Method in a dream. Elias Howe came up with the final design for the lock stitch sewing machine in a dream. August Kekule arrived at the formulation of the Benzene molecule in a dream.

In the dream state, the subconscious mind arrives at solutions that the conscious mind is unlikely to discover during the daily grind -- no matter much it obsesses, gathers data, or blames the "organization."

I was recently asked by an entrepreneur what my advice would be on how to handle a contract negotiation between his company and a large, Wall Street financial services firm.  He was a bit concerned by the rather one sided terms being proposed by in the initial draft of the contract.  He was also getting annoyed that every time he tried to push back, he inevitably found himself arguing with their lawyers instead of the principals themselves.  And for the past week, they had stopped returning his emails and phone calls altogether.  Needless to say, the entrepreneur was concerned that his push back had soured the deal.

I told him to take a deep breath and relax, while I acquainted him with the realities of a Wall Street Negotiation.

Some individuals feel that in order to become an entrepreneur, the proper course of study to choose in graduate school is a master of business administration (MBA). This credential can give students the skills and knowledge they need to become entrepreneurs, especially with many programs now offering concentrations in entrepreneurship. For example, the University of Louisville and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offer similar concentrations within their MBA degree tracks, according to their websites.

The Small Business Administration today presented the White House with suggestions on how to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship, gathered from eight roundtables it held around the country as part of the Startup America initiative.

About 1,000 entrepreneurs and investors participated in these roundtables. The SBA forwarded around 200 distinct ideas, including ways to reduce regulatory burdens, to the appropriate federal agencies. An interagency committee will work with President Barack Obama’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council to develop a short list of high-impact proposals.

Ever since Tim Ferriss wrote The Four Hour Workweek, the small business owner market has been aware of outsourcing and its benefits.  Find a virtual assistant or contractor of just about any flavor and your work life will be easier.

That’s the promise. The reality is a little different. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right person (as in regular employment), and it often takes more management than you expect, especially when the person is working from a remote location.  However, I have used several of these services as a business owner and can attest to their value.

From renewable energy sources to the latest in entertainment technology, Utah’s universities have a plethora of interesting research spinning out of their laboratories. The potential for profit has attracted entrepreneurs who are interested in turning that technology into marketable products. Here are nine notable companies in various stages, from those developing product prototypes to those with a firm market presence, all based on technology from Utah’s research institutions: the University of Utah, Brigham Young University and Utah State University.

San Diego’s life sciences and biomedical communities showed their support today for California Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax plan, which he has offered as a way to promote statewide job growth by closing a “toxic tax loophole” and offering other incentives for companies to add jobs.

“The majority of Biocom’s members are smaller companies within Southern California, and those companies will realize benefits from each of the three components of the package,” Biocom CEO Joe Panetta (and a San Diego Xconomist) told the governor during a news conference today at Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: GPRO), the San Diego-based medical diagnostics company.

State and local governments may be winners under the jobs plan President Obama is set to announce before a joint session of Congress on Thursday (September 7), according to media reports.

The plan, which is now reported to come with a price tag of $300 billion, will focus significantly on tax cuts, an extension of government benefits for the unemployed, and economic development initiatives — including, as Stateline reported last week, a version of a popular Georgia program that places job seekers into training positions with employers who are hiring. But the plan also is expected to include direct aid to state and local governments, which have contributed to the nation's 9.1-percent unemployment rate by laying off thousands of public workers of their own.

Government incentives big attraction

Quebec has become a preferred destination for some of the hottest videogame makers to set up shop, thanks to government incentives coming their way, reports Reuters in this piece.

Companies ranging from Electronic Arts to Ubisoft have been drawn to the province as a result of a refundable tax credit that subsidizes 37.5 per cent of a videogame company's payroll. And that's not all: There are more credits for companies that make French versions of their games, the piece reports.

That's had a big impact: citing economic development agency Invest Quebec, Reuters reports that 86 companies and 8,236 jobs have moved to Quebec as a result of the program, on which Quebec spent $100-million last year, up from $83-million in 2009.

Tablets and e-readers and connected electric meters … oh my! As device makers embed broadband into more and more gadgets, and consumer demand for ubiquitous broadband skyrockets, operators are realizing they aren’t in Kansas anymore, and traditional financial metrics and ways of running their businesses won’t cut it. The solution to an influx of devices and accelerated demand unfortunately isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but will require an operator to take several steps, including working more closely with device makers and application companies.

The next hot venture capital hotshot? Justin Bieber. Say whaaaat? Bieber’s been a mogul for some time, with a licensed perfume business to accompany his record career. Now, he’s apparently funding a web startup. What kind of startup? Good question.

Business Insider reports, “All we can tell you is that the Bieber-backed startup will be a good-natured Zynga, and it has other high-profile celebrity backers on board.” A “good-natured Zynga?” What does that mean? We asked the reporter for more details, who could only tell us, “Wish I could elaborate.”

With the rising tide of WikiLeaks-style attacks and increasingly sophisticated hackers, it’s more important than ever to be especially diligent in protecting your company’s sensitive information. If your intellectual property (IP) gets into the wrong hands or you suffer a data breach, not only does it put your credibility and competitive edge at risk, it can also jeopardize your company’s financial viability.

Even more concerning, according to the 2011 Verizon data breach report, cybercriminals are now targeting companies with 1 to 100 employees. To make matters worse, these criminals are more interested in sensitive company data than financial/credit information. This trend is putting IP in more danger than ever before.

Being smart is the most expensive thing we do. Not in terms of money, but in a currency that is vital to all living things: energy.  One study found that newborn humans spend close to 90 percent of their calories on building and running their brains. (Even as adults, our brains consume as much as a quarter of our energy.) If, during childhood, when the brain is being built, some unexpected energy cost comes along, the brain will suffer. Infectious disease is a factor that may rob large amounts of energy away from a developing brain. This was our hypothesis, anyway, when my colleagues, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill, and I published a paper on the global diversity of human intelligence.

Over 80% of the respondents to the online survey run by Innovation America voted positively that the proposed American Innovation Corps Jobs program should receive serious consideration by the Obama Administration. There were over 450 unique viewers of the proposed plan and 110 of you voted for or against the plan as illustrated (1):

For humans to thrive, we often need to come up with unexpected solutions to tricky problems. Yet people are often skeptical and dismissive of creative ideas...and the reason for that is found deep inside our minds.

Anyone who considers him or herself a misunderstood genius - and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that includes roughly 98% of those reading this - knows the experience of having a brilliant idea rejected. The narrow-minded audience is incapable of grasping the visionary concept being put forward, greeting the proposal with dismissive shrugs and petty objections when they should be showering praise and adulation. Creativity is almost universally considered a positive trait in theory, but in practice it seems to make people distinctly uncomfortable.

Many people struggle to remember scores of passwords for different websites. They often have to reset an account or dig through years of e-mail to find stored log-in information. A common trick is to use the same password for lots of accounts, but this can be a security risk, potentially allowing many accounts to be hijacked at once.

Even as identity becomes increasingly important online, it is becoming more fragmented, with users signing up for ever more websites and services. Account Chooser, a new service launched by the OpenID Foundation, an organization that includes the major websites Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo, is the latest effort to solve this problem. Instead of having to create yet another account, Account Chooser lets users choose one account—their Gmail or Facebook log-in, for example—and then use it to log in to many other sites. The technology was developed by Eric Sachs, a Google project manager and OpenID Foundation board member. Google is backing the project by hosting the code.

In a landmark government effort to drive American health care into the information age, the February 2009 stimulus bill earmarked about $30 billion in incentives for doctors and hospitals who install electronic medical records—paying up to $63,750 to individual physicians and millions to hospitals.

Now comes the tough part: implementing "EMRs" and proving they really can reduce medical errors or get doctors to keep better track of chronically ill people. As National Coordinator for Health IT, Farzad Mostashari oversees federal efforts to promote adoption of EMRs and to prod reluctant hospitals to share patient data.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago, they devised a unique way to keep their young nation on the cutting edge of scientific progress. They agreed "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." In other words, people producing new ideas were assured that they would benefit from them, through a patent system that was created soon after.

More often than not, Westerners dismiss the idea of Chinese innovation as a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the Chinese practice of “copying and improving” can blur the lines between innovation and piracy. In response to these accusations from the West, the Chinese assert – albeit tongue-in-cheek – that students must first learn to copy the master’s work before they are able to develop their own style. After all, if you are not very good at something, you’ve got to start somewhere.

The rapid increase in China’s competitiveness in the high-speed rail, ship-building and even aviation and automotive industries caught some Western observers by surprise. Less than a decade ago, for example, China’s rail system was woefully inadequate. Today it boasts more kilometers of high-speed rail lines than Europe, as well as the world’s fastest trains (350 km/hour) in regular commercial service.