At times, we hold ourselves back from taking a considerable financial risk associated with launching a new idea that has been stayed in the corners of our head. Crowd-finding websites and web applications as well let the designers to execute what they want to do without any worry of the financial loss.

Crowd-funding websites are planned to pull the risk out of that creativity and innovation that holds many designers. If you’ve been restraining due to financial risk associated with your idea, these sites can help you finance your idea, business startup or music project.

Your startup is gone, it’s never coming back, and you are in mourning. An entrepreneur whose business fails grieves similarly to anyone who has lost a loved one. The pain of losing a business is not only about a significant loss of income, but can send an entire identity into turmoil.

Most entrepreneurs define themselves by their business projects. They calibrate self-worth by what they accomplish or do not accomplish. In other words, if a project fails, then they are failures. If a project takes off, then they are wonderful. It’s the universal entrepreneur reaction.

The person who paid $70,000 to tour Facebook might have been trying to get some insight into how the company works.

Hopefully, that person read the walls.

When visiting Facebook, it's impossible not to notice the motivational posters peppered throughout the building. They seem to be there to remind Facebook developers to keep thinking like a startup, even as the company grows.

In what can only be described as a triumph of bad policy and craven politics, Congress and the Obama administration have spent the year focused on budget cuts, as the economy has faltered and unemployment has worsened. Official unemployment is 9.1 percent, but it would be 16.1 percent, or 25.1 million people, if it included those who can only find part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for work. For the past two and a half years, there have been more than four unemployed workers for every job opening, a record high, by far. In a healthy market, the ratio would be about one to one.

By a large margin, Americans have told pollsters that job creation is more important than budget cuts. Yet Republican leaders are wedded to austerity and appear to think that high unemployment will hurt President Obama politically more than it will hurt them, so they will likely resist efforts to create jobs, no matter how great the need.

MASSACHUSETTS IS blessed to be home to the greatest concentration of world-class hospitals, universities, and biopharmaceutical companies in the world. But a stagnating economy and looming federal debts will fundamentally alter our innovation ecosystem. How the Bay State adapts to change will have important implications for our local economy, and for medical innovation in the United States and globally.

Right now, the Bay State innovation economy is an enormous strength for our region and has provided great benefits to the nation and the world. Hospitals such as Mass. General and the Brigham regularly lead the rankings for patient care and innovative research. Universities such as Harvard and MIT attract the best professors and students from around the world. Leading local biotech companies such as Biogen, Genzyme, and Vertex have discovered and brought to market life-saving drugs for hepatitis, cancer, and other diseases. Small biotech companies such as Momenta have brought innovative biosimilar drugs to market. Key academic discoveries of the last decade, such as RNA interference and the elucidation of key mechanisms governing aging and diseases of aging, have spawned innovative emerging biotechs such as Alnylam and Sirtris. All of this has attracted the world’s great pharmaceutical companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi. The vibrancy of our region’s academic and innovative environment is unmatched.

Point and counterpoint is an appealing construct when it comes to movie reviews, sports predictions, and even politics. But what does it mean when you have two conflicting conclusions about new directions in scholarship? That seems to be the case in recent discussions of the state of interdisciplinary research.

In her book Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (Stanford University Press, 2010), Myra H. Strober, professor emerita at Stanford, provides

Private equity firms can boost the value of their investment portfolio by applying a systematic innovation method along the entire investment value chain - before, during, and even after the investment.

Private equity firms are collections of investors and funds that put money into privately-held companies. Private equity investments provide working capital to a target company to nurture expansion, new product development, or restructuring of the company’s operations, management, or ownership. Private equity firms are betting on their ability to take control of the target, clean it up, make it more competitive, and then sell it for a higher price.  It is like "flipping" a home in the real estate market.

Do you have a favorite innovation video?

We asked you the global innovation community, to suggest videos for the Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011.

Many people did, and they had the chance to win some of the $3,650 worth of prizes up for grabs.

Here are the Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011 based on the submissions:

• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Innovation Acceleration
• Do Schools Kill Creativity?
• ABC Niteline – IDEO Shopping Cart
• Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy – First Followers

Risk and fear of the unknown are the biggest obstacles companies face when trying to convince other organizations to adopt new technology. Even if you have a compelling value proposition, unless there is convincing evidence that the product or service works as promised, companies won’t change.

One of my clients is a South American company called HiddenBed, the developer of a cleverly designed bed/desk combination. Think of a sophisticated Murphy bed with a desk that rises into place when the bed is raised (pictured, right, or, watch it in action). The secret is a patented hydraulic mechanism that is so smooth it enables a cup of coffee--along with your computer, pens, and whatever else is on your desktop--to remain in place as the bed and desk are raised and lowered.

FORTUNE -- Now it's China's turn to fling lots of cash at trying to come up with cures.

For more than a decade, the U.S. has lavished funding on efforts to transform a wealth of biological breakthroughs in the lab into actual therapies and profits. After spending nearly a trillion dollars in public and private investments since 2000, however, the biotech and pharma industries have produced an average of only about 21 new drugs a year in recent years -- only two-thirds of the output from 1996 to 2004. Drugs now take a dozen years to be tested and approved, and 90% of meds that reach human clinical trial fail.

This meager yield is causing investors to abscond and business models to be questioned, with only one in nine venture dollars in the U.S. last year going to biotech, down from a ratio of nearly one in six in 2009. Revenues are also down, with a handful of large biotechs like Amgen (AMGN) making the lion's share of money while the majority of biotechs struggle to raise funds, especially for early stage projects.

Venture capital is very different today than it was in the 1980′s when the industry experienced a wave of growth in response to changes in tax and pension laws. Back in the days when Apple Computer and Genentech were young start-ups, venture capitalists made smaller investments in earlier stage companies with less follow on funding than they do now.

Today it’s not surprising to hear that companies like Facebook or Groupon have raised over $350 million in a single venture capital round. But back in the early 1980s no companies were raising those amounts ($150 million back then in real dollar terms).

MUMBAI | BANGALORE: Mona Sandhu, a lecturer turned costume jewellery designer, set up a jewellery store in her home city of Karnal, Haryana, in 2006. The five-year-old store was doing well, selling about 70 pieces a week, but the limited pool of customers was stifling for the ambitious businesswoman.

On a whim, Sandhu set up a profile on Facebook at the end of last year with photographs of some of her products. To her surprise, she bagged an order the same day from a customer in California. Ten months on, Sandhu, whose social media page has been liked by 17000 visitors, is busy planning exhibitions in the US and UK.

(openPR) - Peter Thiel – founder of the New York-based hedge fund Clarium Capital, co-founder of PayPal, and an early investor in Facebook – has established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of high school and pursue an ambition of becoming world visionary entrepreneurs.

Harrisburg, PA, August 12, 2011 - Peter Thiel – founder of the New York-based hedge fund Clarium Capital, co-founder of PayPal, and an early investor in Facebook – has established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of high school and pursue an ambition of becoming world visionary entrepreneurs.

Raising capital is one of the most significant business challenges faced by entrepreneurs. The fundraising process for technology startups is typically a slow and painful one, especially for those raising a business from infancy. In many cases, fundraising efforts detract from the time that could or should be spent growing the business.  Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs fail to raise capital because of easily avoidable mistakes made when approaching and meeting with potential investors.

The three most common mistakes include:

Not ready for prime-time. Some entrepreneurs might have a great idea for a business, but then try to pitch investors before the concept is fully developed. Before attempting to gain investment capital, the entrepreneur should create a mockup and develop a model of the screen interfaces. They should then talk to potential customers to validate the concept and ensure that product solves a problem. Entrepreneurs also need to develop the right business model for their company. By choosing and adapting the appropriate model, they can forecast product consumption and have the capability to scale the business during the growth phase.

It was just a lunch. On the day after being elected in 2005, the two of us met over local Italian fare with the hope that our cities, too often divided, could come together and start acting like a single unified region. That simple lunch not only turned into a media frenzy covered by seemingly every news outlet around, but launched a partnership not seen in our region for over 30 years.

This beginning developed into a strong collaborative foundation that over the past five years, has, indeed, become the new normal—not only for our two cities, but for our regional partners as well. Together we have secured significant investments through public, private and philanthropic partners including Living Cities and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to strengthen economic opportunity along our transit corridors.

Because recent indicators reveal distinct signs of economic decline, we have formed a dynamic private/ public partnership that includes regional mayors, CEOs, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development and the Target Corporation, to shape an economic development initiative that will take us to a new level of regional prosperity.

Ours is a region that gave rise to 3M, Control Data, Medtronic, and dozens of other success stories. We are home to one of the finest public research universities in the world as well as a host of small colleges.

We know that there are good ideas ready to launch and companies ready to be born that will grow our economy. We propose to accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship and put the entire strength of this region squarely behind the most promising of those ventures. It is a business proposition, pure and simple. We know that as they grow, these companies will create new markets for local goods and services, provide meaningful employment, add vitality to our neighborhoods and expand our tax base, which will, in turn, give rise to more good ideas and the cycle begins again.

As mayors, this is the work we were elected to do. That we have the opportunity to work together at the heart of such a forward-thinking region is indeed a privilege.

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Monday morning, Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility for around $12.5 billion, or $40 per share. Google cites Motorola’s commitment to Android and its success based on that commitment as a motivation behind the purchase, but the company mentions another reason fueling the acquisition: patent attacks being levied at Android. Make no mistake; that’s the real reason this deal went down.

Just last week, it looked like Motorola was considering seeking royalties related to patents it holds that Android might violate, in an effort to strengthen its position relative to more successful Android hardware partners like Samsung and HTC. It seems likely that talks were underway at that point, so perhaps CEO Sanjay Jha was hinting at this development when he said that investors could soon expect to “see a meaningful difference in positions of many Android players. Both, in terms of avoidance of royalties, as well as potentially being able to collect royalties.”

Google is delving into the Android hardware business and plans to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The news is a shocking turn for the fast-growing Android ecosystem, which was built on Google’s operating system but didn’t include any actual hardware built by the company. Soon Google will have a hardware platform it controls and could offer the sort of integrated hardware-OS package that Apple is famous for. Google said it will run Motorola as a separate business, but the acquisition raises a lot of questions about how partners will react.

Larry Page, CEO of Google, said the move will supercharge the Android platform but doesn’t change Google’s commitment to keeping the operating system open. The acquisition, however, appears to be a bid to bulk up Android’s patent strength, which will benefit from Motorola’s deep portfolio of mobility patents. Apple, Google’s rival in the smartphone sector, is suing Motorola, but the deal does provide much more protection because it provides Google with more patents — a weak flank for the search giant.

WALTHAM, Mass.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--InnoCentive, Inc., the pioneer in open innovation and crowdsourcing, today announced a collaboration with Popular Science, a leading science and technology publication, to connect organizations that have important science, technology or engineering problems to the people and global communities who can best solve them. As part of this strategic alliance, InnoCentive and Popular Science have launched the Popular Science Open Innovation Pavilion, located on both InnoCentive.com and PopSci.com, in addition to a new $25,000 Challenge, which asks problem solvers from around the world to design an innovative science lesson plan for students in grades 6-8.

One of the key distinctions between an entrepreneur and an operating executive is an entrepreneur’s almost seamless agility in the face of changing circumstances versus an operating executive’s intense execution focus on a plan. World-class entrepreneurs learn how to combine both.

WTF?

Driving home over the mountains from a Coastal Commission hearing, I had time to ponder an email I received from a city official as the road wound through the Redwood trees. The Coastal Commission had found that a zoning change his city requested didn’t conform to the Coastal Act, and we denied it. I felt sorry for him because he had put together a project that depended upon the property owner, developer, unions, hotel operator, local neighbors, city council, weather, wind speed, phase of the moon and astrological sign all aligning just to get the project in front of us. It was like herding cats and pushing water uphill. Reading his email I was sympathetic realizing that if you substituted customers, channel, product development, hiring, board of directors, and fund raising, he was describing a typical day at a startup. I felt real kinship until I got to his last sentence:

“Now we’re screwed because we had no Plan B.”

On January 31st, 2011, the White House announced Startup America, a public/private initiative to rally efforts to accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship in the U.S. by expanding access to capital, creating a national network for entrepreneurship education, enhancing the commercialization of federally-funded innovations and getting rid of tax and paperwork barriers for startups. Given the importance of new firms to America’s economy and the national urgency to create jobs, I take a look this week at what Washington accomplished—leading up to the summer break—in response to the President’s call for action.

On the policy front, the Startup America Partnership set out to create the right policy environment for entrepreneurs to flourish, and 2011 has indeed seen a number of developments in Washington that seek to move America in this direction. First, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently updated its FAQs to clarify that entrepreneurs may qualify for a National Interest Waiver under the EB-2 immigrant visa category if they can demonstrate that their business endeavors will be in the interest of the U.S. The document also clarifies that an H-1B beneficiary who is the sole owner of the petitioning company may establish a valid employer-employee relationship for the purposes of qualifying for an H-1B nonimmigrant visa. In May, DHS also expanded the number of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates of U.S. universities who can extend their work training in the country from 12 to 29 months. These represent important steps in the right direction, but as I will allude to later, to expand access to the nation's pool of talented high skilled graduates in the science and technology fields, we need real "entrepreneurs’ visas" and green cards for those with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.