This was a question recently posed on the website Gamification.org. The interesting and hugely important thing about the folks at Gamification.org is that they are trying to bridge the reality chasm between entertainment games and economic games.  This, I believe they are rapidly learning, is yet another game.

So, sure, I’ll play…

The questioner asks that the respondents keep in mind the things that matter when raising money.  These are called the initial conditions:

• Traction
• Team
• Technology
• Validation

Want to make sure you never come up with a great idea? Here are twenty suggestions to help you kill your creativity.

Always think the way you've always thought. When confronted with a problem, fixate on what you were taught about how past thinkers solved it. Then analytically select the most promising logical past approach and apply it to the problem, excluding all other possibilities.

Be focused. The key to logical, linear thinking is knowing what to exclude from your mental space. Exclude everything that is dissimilar, unrelated or is in some other domain from your subject. If you want to improve the can opener, only study existing can openers and how they are made. Then work on improving what exists.

As a serial entrepreneur and professor in Silicon Valley, I am frequently asked what it takes to create an ecosystem of start-up innovation. Usually, the question is phrased like this: "What does it take to create a Silicon Valley in our backyard?"

I give everybody the same answer: "Invite a bunch of entrepreneurs into a room. Then leave."

One of the most important, and underrated, aspects of entrepreneurship clusters is location. Entrepreneurs don't need "teaching" so much as space. A place to gather, share ideas, experiment, fail, and settle on an innovation.

From my experience, there are five elements to every success "ecosystem" of entrepreneurship.

1) A culture of collaboration: To lean over to a group engaged in conversation at a table next to yours at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, and ask, "Do you know anything about [programming platform] Ruby-on-Rails?" is tantamount to saying, "Oh hi." We ask people we meet about technology, about trends, and what they're up to, and what new project their friends just started. There is an informal air of collaboration in Silicon Valley. It's network-building friendships. It's informal mentorships. And it's everywhere.

MEET the British Bill Gates. He studied computer science at Cambridge—dropping out to start his career in nearby “Silicon Fen”. Then he launched his own start-up, based at “Silicon Roundabout”, a new hub of tech firms in east London. Bolstered by finance from the City, he resisted the lure of a foreign takeover, ultimately listing on the London Stock Exchange.

It is a plausible biography—given the necessary addition of animal spirits—but an imaginary one. Britain has no digital equivalent of the 18th-century industrial innovators who turned technology into commercial leadership. Its more recent prowess in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology has not been emulated in the digital sphere. David Cameron’s government should ponder this failure and address the reasons for it. Luck is one of them, but so are national and European regulations and a tepid climate for entrepreneurs.

The quick expansion of social and mobile technologies is creating a widely distributed workforce. To better suit employees who come into offices more sporadically, some companies and design firms are testing radically new—and more efficient—configurations for physical offices, and betting that improved technology will make the experiment more successful than similar ones in the 1990s.

A project at the headquarters of Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, for example, overthrows decades-old conventions about office space. Called Connected Workplace, it replaces individual cubicles with open clusters of wheeled desks that belong to groups, not individuals; personal belongings are largely confined to lockers.

Albert Wegner (Union Square Ventures) has today’s VC Post of the day titled If You Need To Raise Money, Get Your Financing Done ASAP. In it, Albert expresses his belief that given the current macro economic environment, companies should focus on getting their money raised quickly – as in right now. He’s conveying global / macro pessimism that many people are talking about. While there are obvious timing disconnects between the long term value of a startup (often much more than five years), there is often a sentiment shift in the funding environment – all the way through the funding supply chain – when the economy goes south.

The next decade will bring remarkable changes in the way office work is done. Perhaps nowhere will change be more profound than in countries such as India, where improved network access and smart technologies could make it possible for certain tasks to be divided among people working outside major city centers, including in rural areas.

Xerox is one of many companies researching this trend and developing the technologies that will pave the way. CTO Sophie Vandebroek described some of the efforts of the company's two-year-old Xerox Research Center in India with Technology Review's chief correspondent, David Talbot.

Recent trends in economic indicators R such as unemployment rates and job growth clearly favor Nebraska. However, these trends may differ from the state’s performance in core mehasures of economic strength such as entrepreneurship, net migration and capital formation. Given this, the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Bureau of Business Research seeks to track these core economic measures in Nebraska and in all U.S. states.

The state entrepreneurship index is one effort to traEck these core trends. Specifically, the index is used to track entrepreneurship in Nebraska and compare with the other forty-nine states.

The index was developed by Eric C. Thompson and William B. Walstad in Entrepreneurship in Nebraska: Conditions, Attitudes, and Actions (GBallup Press, 2008). In this report, we use the same methodology to calculate a 2010 index and compare it to the 2008 index.

Download the PDF

Venture capitalists from around the world say the current level of IPO activity is too low to support the health of the venture capital industry in their respective countries, a new report has revealed.

According to the 2011 Global Venture Capital Survey sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association, venture capitalists in the US, China, Brazil, India and France found it most important to have an active IPO market in their home countries, followed closely by the UK, Canada, and Germany.

While start-ups in Silicon Valley, Boston and New York receive the bulk of venture capital, and the most media attention, the money is actually spread around the country further than you might think.

Using data from Dow Jones VentureSource and software from Tableau, we dumped onto a U.S. map the nearly 1,500 venture-capital funding deals — worth more than $14 billion — that took place in the first six months of the year.

Check out the map on the “Interactive Graphics” tab of this post (or click the picture). You’ll see that start-ups in 40 states were recipients of venture capital — even Hawaii.

As the United States continues to fight its way out of the Great Recession, more attention has been directed to the question of why is has taken so long for workers to find re-employment. In economist parlance, this is primarily a question of “structural unemployment.” This describes the type of unemployment that results from a mismatch of worker skills and the skills demanded by employers.

As of April 2011, there were 13.2 million unemployed workers and 2.9 million unfilled job openings. In other words, April’s bulky 8.7% unemployment rate could have been lowered one percentage point (to 7.7%) if just half of the advertised job vacancies were filled by unemployed workers. Obviously, it is not realistic for every position to be filled immediately—it takes time for employers to find the right workers, and vice versa. But the odd pairing of high unemployment and high job vacancies illustrates a structural employment issue, which may have worsened in recent years.

Economists forecast that Friday's unemployment report will show the nation's unemployment rate has not changed at 9.2 percent, with an expected figure of 90,000 jobs added last month. Congress has done little to address unemployment, infuriating voters around the nation. But, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University has an idea about lowering unemployment. The institute has teamed up with the city of New York to found an incubator that provides a physical space and money to help new businesses take off.

The Takeaway's host, John Hockenberry spent a day visiting young entrepreneurs at the Varick Street Incubator, and he speaks with Polytech president Jerry Hultin about the venture.

IT'S REALLY JUST A MATTER OF TIME. Using iPads as in-store touch-screen displays makes too much sense for consumer and retailers alike.

They're more interactive than traditional digital signage and much easier to use than PC-based kiosks.  They're also less expensive than either option and you can instantly update an entire fleet of iPads from any web-enabled computer.

If only there was a place to turn, a person to talk with who understood the whole process; someone ready with answers to the questions you haven't even thought of yet.

Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield cited evidence that digital technology is having an impact on our brains:

• A recent paper, Microstructure abnormalities in adolescents with internet addiction disorder, in the journal PLoS (free access).
• Increase in people with autistic spectrum disorders.
• The rise in the appeal of Twitter.

When we don’t eat, hunger-inducing neurons in the brain’s hypothalamus start eating bits of themselves (autophagy), sending a hunger signal to prompt eating, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found in experiments with mice.

They said the new findings suggest that treatments aimed at blocking autophagy may prove useful as hunger-fighting weapons in the war against obesity.

It is clear by now that Android is winning the overall mobile market share battle in the U.S. among smart phones. But how does the battle break down by state? Mobile ad network Jumptap put out a report this morning (embedded below) with a map showing which states have more Android activity versus iOS activity across its network that reaches 83 million mobile users.

According to Jumptap, Southern and Western states like Florida, Texas, California, and Oregon over-index for Android. Whereas the Midwest and New England states are dominated by Apple devices. Strangely, New York state is neither. It is one of the few remaining Blackberry strongholds. (I’m sorry, that’s just embarrassing, and I live in New York).

China has been a Godsend to Detroit. Even as Ford Motor, General Motors, and Chrysler have stumbled in recent years, the country has provided a nice boost to sales of American cars equipped with traditional internal combustible engines.

But when it comes to electric vehicles…well, China has its own plans.

The country is spending billions of dollars to develop home-grown battery and motor technology, hybrids, and full plug-in cars, trucks, and buses. And to protect its nascent industry, the Chinese central government has recently issued draft guidelines that limit foreign investment in certain electric vehicle components and require overseas firms to disclose intellectual property secrets to Chinese companies.

Is now the time to leave your job? With unemployment hovering just above 9 percent, the obvious answer would seem to be, “No way.”

Millions of people are turning their backs on the obvious answer, leaving their jobs in record numbers, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures quoted in a recent story from Bloomberg News. In May, almost two million Americans quit their jobs voluntarily, up 35 percent from January 2010.

The Bloomberg story points out that generally, job-hopping is a sign of an improving economy. I would love for that to be true, but I think it’s only part of the story.

Being a good entrepreneur means being able to effectively convince an investor that you have a great idea, persuade partners that your approach is right, and convince potential customers that the solution is right for them. If all your ideas are intuitively obvious to everyone, you probably aren’t thinking outside the box, or don’t really have the next big thing.

The process and tactics involved in winning over others with your views have has been studied extensively by Howard Gardner, and documented in “Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds.” It turns out that the same principles apply to changing your own mind (learning new things), as well as others.

The first company to emerge from Peter Thiel's great "stop going to college and create a business" program is being led by a 20-year-old who doesn't quite fit the dropout description Thiel was going for. In fact, despite his age, Andrew Hsu has three degrees from the University of Washington and was working on his PhD in neuroscience when he left to develop the idea for his company.

That business, a social-gaming company called Airy Labs, emerged from stealth mode today with a $1.5 million investment from Thiel, Google Ventures, and Foundation Capital. The company makes social games geared at teaching kids math, reading, and science skills.