I'm getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I've spent the last week reviewing several countries' ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I've come to a couple of conclusions.

1) They sure killed a ton of trees

2) With one noticeable exception, governmental entrepreneurship policies and initiatives appear to be less than optimal, with capital deployed inefficiently (read "They would have done better throwing the money in the street.") Why? Because they haven't defined the basics:

What's a startup? Who's an entrepreneur? How do the ecosystems differ for each one? What's the role of public versus private funding?

Stuck in your career? Still looking for that dream job, dream company, or dream career? Haven’t found your passion yet … or it hasn’t found you? Then you absolutely need to check out the One Thing Leads to Another career strategy.

It’s not some theoretical construct or research project; it’s how I managed my career in the real world, which I guess worked out pretty well. To be honest, I didn’t know I was doing anything special at the time, I was just doing what made sense to me.

Will it work for you or anyone else? Absolutely. It’s simply a set of empirical, common sense techniques for learning to follow the right pathways that will ultimately lead to job happiness and career success.

While small business hiring is slowing, it’s still happening. The method for getting new hires may be shifting, thanks to social media, but small business owners still want the same thing: qualified employees who will stick around. Here’s your guide to hiring for your business.

Who to Hire

What employers look for is changing, and rightfully so. With budget cuts and a shrinking pool of available jobs, employees need to be able to take on more and bring their own ideas to the table. That’s why you should, says Jennifer Prosek, hire an army of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial-minded employees tend to be more proactive and willing to take on more responsibility, which can help in a small business’ success. MSN

I go back to the basics because often—not always—our worst errors happen at the beginning, as in starting without a strategy, a system or support. Or we dive into marketing without fully understanding our client, without creating a way to capture their information, without an automated way to solve their problem and fulfill our promise. I’m sure you could come up with your own list of bad beginnings.

If we take the time to address the fundamentals, on the other hand, then we can establish something that lasts.

Summer is over. Time to get back to work.

At today’s roundtable, I synthesized some posts from our blog to give entrepreneurs, incubators, investors, and economic development agencies a flavor of what we've been doing this summer to make life easier for you.

In How Not To Sell Equity Too Cheap, Too Soon, entrepreneurs would find a discussion of what we recommend when it comes to selling incubation-stage equity. Also, PLEASE do not go banging on the doors of investors without first validating your business and knowing that your project is fundable. How to Become a Fundable Entrepreneur explains some of the issues we are seeing in the market. Please also read: The Myth About Seed Funding. Ninety-nine percent of the entrepreneurs seeking funding get rejected. We do NOT want you to be one of them.

Earlier this week Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures wrote a post about VCs over analysing market size and then passing on deals.  His point is that if a VC hasn’t got comfortable on market size within two meetings then they never will and the entrepreneur shouldn’t spend more time with them.  The post was titled You Can Never Size a Market in Excel.

There are a couple of important underlying points that I agree with, but I think there is an important subtlety which is ignored, and that is the difference between questioning the market size and questioning how big and valuable a company can get.

Nicholas Lovell just put up a post answering the question Should I seek a strategic investor? It is the latest in our series of 50 Questions you should ask before raising venture capital.

His advice is to be careful…

Amid rocky markets this month, IPOs failed at a pace reminiscent of the tech-bubble hangover.

Fifteen IPOs registered with the SEC were withdrawn this month, according to fresh U.S. figures from data provider Dealogic. That is the most spiked IPOs in any month since April 2001, when there were 20 withdrawn IPOs. (The figures exclude real-estate investment trusts and other less-than-plain-vanilla corporate offerings.)

Nanotechnology might not be immediately evident in a small, isolated village in India, but Steve Walsh says such a place offers an important example of what drives nanobiomedical innovation.

Residents there don’t have access to major testing labs, nor do they have the financial means for expensive care. But they can now take advantage of the latest in AIDS testing technology. They just need to blot a drop of blood on a piece of paper. Biotechnology combines with microfluidics to make a chemical indicator that looks like nothing more than a postage stamp-sized piece of paper. The result is a diagnostic test that is both accurate and cheap — two criteria necessary for making testing for AIDS and other diseases globally accessible.

You’re a healthcare startup owner, your company is gaining financial traction, and you’ve been promised a $24 million round of financing by a leading venture capital firm.

But guess what? Just when the golden apple is within reach, cruel fate– in the form of that venture capital firm– takes center stage. Your $24 million is yanked, because the firm backed out at the last moment.

SAN FRANCISCO — Michael Arrington, whose influential TechCrunch blog covers Silicon Valley, has started a venture capital fund to invest in start-ups, including some that he and his staff write about.

The $20 million CrunchFund is the latest example of Mr. Arrington’s casting aside one of traditional journalism’s cardinal rules — that reporters should avoid conflicts of interest by maintaining distance from the people, organizations and issues they cover — and raises questions about whether industry bloggers are journalists.

These handy-dandy equations give you a ballpark estimate of how much to spend on acquiring a new customer. But they don't tell you how to spend that money -- and that's where things get interesting. You know and I know that an MBA is a bullshit degree, but nonetheless, you can learn a few things in business school. You can also skip business school, and learn them via a very handy infographic. Take this one by Kiss Metrics, on the subject of calculating a customer's lifetime value.

The basic idea is to take an average check, figure out how often the customer will come back, and how long the customer will continue to be one. But these can be crunched in slightly different ways that yield quite different results, as you see at the bottom:

Textbooks are making the leap from paper to the Web and mobile apps. So, with school just around the corner, let’s take a look at some of the latest tools to help you get the most out of your education.

The companies in this round-up are using modern technology to help today’s students study more efficiently, with the added bonus of lightening their backpacks and keeping their wallets a bit heavier. Below are our top five digital education tools for the back to school season.

Kno: Digital textbooks The Kno textbook app, which is available on the iPad, Web and Facebook, has a catalog of over 100,000 books you can buy or rent, making it easy to find your syllabus’s requirements. Kno makes each textbook page look exactly the same as it would in the paper book. This makes it easy for students to find what specific section a professor is referencing. According to Kno co-founder and chief technology officer Babur Habib, Kno’s aim is to, “bring students in a comfortable fashion from their analogue, physical textbook experience to the digital world.”

Moncton, NB - Springboard Atlantic has received $8.5 million in funding to support its research commercialization activities in Atlantic Canada.

The not-for-profit organization was established seven years ago and provides resources to all 19 post-secondary institutions in the region to encourage transfer of knowledge to the private sector. It builds on the institutions' existing commercialization efforts by filling gaps in support services and other resources.

Everyone is talking about the need to stimulate the depressed economy through job creation, but no one has developed a workable plan that can be implemented quickly. Innovation America, in co-operation with some bright industry and workforce development experts, respectfully submits a potential INNOVATIVE partnership that engages industry, academia and government.

The following white paper describes the "American Innovation Corps" a plan to create 200,000 to 400,000 jobs for unemployed or underemployed recent college graduates, America's next generation of knowledge workers.

Next Monday, São Paulo will host Brazil’s first international Conference on Crowdsourcing, Communities and Co-Creation. This event is a reflection of the growing importance of co-creation in the country. It’s more than a fad; crowdsourcing may have found a perfect home in Brazil, where it deeply connects with the local culture. Initiatives have flourished over the last months, and go well beyond what you’d imagine.

Here are some of the many problems it can fix for you:

1. Raise funds for your project

Crowdfunding is perhaps the best known form of crowdsourcing. Thanks to the power of crowds, small contributions can add up and help finance all sorts of projects, from books to documentaries. Kickstarter popularized the concept in the US, and the same is happening in Brazil with websites such as Catarse.

The introductory section of KPMG’s Doing Business in Russia report focuses on Russia’s investment climate and sets the tone for those who wish to do business there. This section also provides insight for those not familiar with the country and its recent developments on the innovation and modernization front while offering tips to those who seek to live and work in the country.

An introduction the Russian economy today

Property Magazine International recently reported that Russia’s economy continued to recover in the first half of 2011. This falls in line with First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov’s expectation for the GDP growth to reach pre-crisis levels by 2012, as noted in KPMG’s report.

Every time I hear about a new startup that is in stealth mode, I wonder what problem they are hiding from whom. Of course they pretend that they are trying to avoid alerting competitors prior to launch, but too often it becomes an excuse to move slowly in a world that’s all about getting to market fast.

I believe stealth makes sense for large companies who can be sued for “pre-announcing” a new product to stall the market or kill a competitor. It also makes legal sense to never disclose the details of your patent application, before the product is ready to ship. But otherwise, startup companies should seek out publicity and the open sharing of information, from day one.

If you caught yesterday’s post, you know that your small business needs a website. If you missed it, well, maybe go give it a read now. Because it’s the truth. Your website is how your business will be able to build a presence, a brand and authority online. It’s also how you ensure that you’re getting in front of your target audience instead of hiding from them in a sea of obscurity.

Or at least it is if you design your site correctly.

While there’s a lot that can be said about how to design a business website, I thought I’d focus on some best practices for one of the most important pages on your site – your business home page.

THE motto of the Starfleet Academy, the nursery of future leaders and humanitarians in the fictional universe of Star Trek, was "Ex astris, scientia". Peter Diamandis, a billionaire who set up the X-Prize Foundation to spur innovators into tackling grand technological challenges, has turned the credo around. He wants to use knowledge to reach for the stars—both literally, by promoting private human spaceflight, a cause particularly dear to Mr Diamandis, and figuratively. Together with fellow techno-utopian Ray Kurzweil, he created what he calls “a Starfleet Academy for the world's biggest challenges”.