Combine a challenging job market with youthful creative spirit and you get a crop of recent college graduates contemplating the entrepreneurial life.

Some experimented with self-employment while in college. According to the Youth Entrepreneurship Study by the Young Entrepreneur Council and Buzz Marketing Group of more than 1,000 college students and recent grads, more than a third of them (36%) were side-preneurs -- they started businesses while getting their degrees, and about 1 in 5 (21%) started businesses after college because they couldn't find a job.

Many, however, go into it essentially relying on instinct. According to the study, 73% of those surveyed did not take classes in entrepreneurship, and 70% of those who did called their classes "inadequate."

In San Francisco, being an Entrepreneur puts you at the top of the food chain and failing is worn like a badge of honor, so most people can’t wait to jump into a pool full of startup Kool-Aid. Even the non-swimmers.

The problem is they think it’s all about working at coffee shops, raising a lot of money and speaking at conferences. If they get funded, they act like they’ve made a sound career decision, one that led to a promotion. Trouble is, it isn’t true. Most entrepreneurs are like artists: passionate and starving

I’m not sure when being an entrepreneur turned into a career but it’s a dangerous way to look at it. It’s like waking up one day deciding to become an artist. You don’t decide to become an artist, it comes from a passion to create.

WASHINGTON, June 13, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leaders from nearly three dozen top universities and national laboratories say that America must make radical changes in its manufacturing policy to maintain its innovation leadership, in a report released today by the Council on Competitiveness. Ignite 2.0: Voices of American University Presidents and National Lab Directors on Manufacturing Competitiveness calls for a stronger partnership between research and manufacturing - especially manufacturing at scale, improved vocational and STEM education and a commitment to supporting higher education and science.

The report's findings were unveiled by the Council's leadership at the Detroit Economic Club, and reflect the views of America's premier research university presidents, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dr. Susan Hockfield. Directors of five national laboratories were also surveyed for the report.

George Haines is a 36-year-old former gym teacher at St. Philip and James school in Long Island. A few years ago, Haines started a technology course to teach PreK-8th grade students all about entrepreneurship.

"Being a gym teacher isn't really that different now than it was in 1980. But technology changes so fast. It's even different between now and April," says Haines.

The technology class isn't an elective. All students take it, but the curriculum is different for each age group. Younger children are taught computer basics and play games, many of which have been created by startups.

So many of my company’s clients want to brand themselves–to be known in a sea of competitors as the best. And while this is certainly possible, it takes deep pockets and lots of time — something most small businesses don’t have.

And so I say that branding is a luxury.

What I mean by this is that there are many other things that will bring in sales more quickly than branding. I define branding as anything done to make your company stand out in a sea of non-differentiated brands, and that includes everything from your logo to sponsoring events locally and nationally.

Climate change, energy, health and SMEs will form the centre of European Commission proposals for research funding within the new Common Strategic Framework (CSF), which will be renamed today (10 June) at a 700-strong stakeholder event.

The CSF will follow on from the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) after it expires in 2013, but the new funding pool will be the subject of heated debate as the Commission mulls over a White Paper to be released later this year.

The White Paper will outline how the research budget should be allocated under the new programme, which will roll together several existing structural and cohesion funding mechanisms under a common umbrella.

University associations, national research institutions, government officials and business leaders will all mingle at the conference, during which in the Commission will unveil the new name of the programme after holding an open competition to settle the matter earlier in the year.

Australian private equity and venture capital continued to generate attractive returns over one-, three- and five-year periods as of the year ended December 31, 2010, when compared with the S&P/ASX 300 Index.

Performance for the same periods was mixed when compared with the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries Index, which performed stronger over the one-year period, according to the Cambridge Associates LLC Australia Private Equity and Venture Capital Index.

"Despite its relative underperformance during the fourth quarter of 2010, the Index performed favourably over the medium- to longer-term, when compared against the domestic public market and domestic bond market indices," said Eugene Snyman, Managing Director at Cambridge Associates' office in Sydney, Australia.

Although he lives in a world where he is shunned by pop song lyricists, grandmothers, big-box shoppers, house cats, classic rock radio programmers, and all left-brain-thinking people, Doubt continues to throw dynamite at history and use his outlaw thinking to move us all forward. Some love him. Others hate him. But nobody ignores him.

In the following excerpts from Doubt: Unconventional Wisdom From The World's Greatest Shit Disturber by Paul Lavoie, the cofounder and chair of ad agency TAXI, we learn why that all too common emotion can lead to uncommon results.

I have been described as a “serial entrepreneur,” which makes it all sound easy and full of success. But what I have found is that, whether it is my first or seventh endeavor, starting a new enterprise is exhausting, ego shattering and (at times) infuriating.

But it’s also one of the greatest thrills in my life.

After more than 25 years, I have learned quite a few lessons. Here are my most valuable five:

Just do it – Nike may have trademarked the slogan, but the sentiment is universally applicable. So much is never accomplished simply because the idea generators are overcome with the paralysis of inertia.

According to a new report from Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely. The report says that many clients are approaching the firm for insight on creating best practices for remote, mobile workplaces assuming these changes are part of the remote future when in reality the change is already well underway.

Previously, we looked at some of Forrester's research indicating that as much as 18% of the workforce used their personal smartphones for work, whether they were allowed to or not. That research showed only 29% of workers polled did work outside the office.

Innovation is high on the list of CEOs’ agendas in virtually all industries. But what are the common misconceptions about it and how do successful innovators create the processes, structures and practices to move the handful of viable ideas all the way to implementation?

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Your earning potential pretty much tops out at age 40. This is because your skills become increasingly valuable until you amass fifteen years’ experience, at which point you’ve hit a peak. According to statisticians at PayScale.com, in all fields except law, people are not paid more money for experience beyond fifteen years.

This means that to remain relevant and continue to increase your value, you are going to have to learn skills outside of your field. Here are five skills you should pick up as your earning power is due to drop.

With more women than men in the U.S. earning PhDs in the biological sciences and estimates that around 15 percent of the U.S. GNP over the next two decades will be comprised of life science activities, it is no surprise that women's entrepreneurship has attracted so much attention recently in both the developed and developing countries. And in many other countries, women's entrepreneurship is even more important as a separate track for cultural reasons.

This attention to women's participation in entrepreneurial activities, and in high-growth ventures in particular, is not just a reaction to a future trend. Current data show, for example, that America's female scientists are not commercializing their technologies. In fact, male academic scientists in the life sciences secure patents at more than twice the rate of their female colleagues. Other data suggest that women-owned firms in the U.S. are smaller and less growth-oriented than men-owned firms. In the UK, only a quarter of all entrepreneurs are female, and women represent just 7% of all science, engineering and technology entrepreneurs.

So the thing with the Internet is that there is so much information it is hard to know what websites to actually keep an eye on or what ones to subscribe to, to get that nugget of information or advice or business idea. We have talked about a number of sites here before including Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Siliconrepublic and Springwise.

Here is another extremely helpful website: Innovation America. This site is literally chock-full of information on a range of subjects, including innovation, economic development, venture news and more. It is produced by Richard A. Bendis, who is the Founder, President and CEO of Innovation America (IA), a global innovation intermediary focused on accelerating the growth of the entrepreneurial innovation economy Internationally and in America. Part of this is the first email I look at in the morning, innovationDAILY (ID) a Daily Electronic Newsletter, reporting on the Daily Pulse of Global Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Angel/Seed and Venture Capital and Innovation Based Economic Development.(IBED). ID has over 700,000 unique visitors in over 185 countries with readership growing all the time.

If you look at how Apple fares on the public markets today, compared to other tech powerhouses, you’ll notice that the Cupertino computer giant is currently valued at roughly $301 billion, which is close to the sum of the market cap of three of its closest rivals: Microsoft (~$200.3 billion), Hewlett-Packard (~$72.8 billion) and Dell (~$29.3 billion).

Market cap is of course just one metric – and arguably not even the best one – to make comparisons between companies. It is, nevertheless, a most excellent trend barometer and a simple way to compare valuations.

To be frank, I’m not sure this is the first time Apple’s equity value has come this close to the combined value of Microsoft, HP and Dell, but it’s most definitely the first time I’ve noticed. And while we’re at it …

WWDC. The annual Apple event where no real hints about what products they plan to release are floated in the public domain in advance. No private head nods are given to small startup companies to help them prepare. We’re in a market where 800-pound gorillas throw their weight around and the rest of the market races to react and survive.

Any company who develops products reliant on iOS spends weeks crapping their pants before WWDC. No vacation schedules allowed for weeks before or weeks after. The announcements come out in one day and then even if you survive the annual release announcements you often still have to scramble to make sure your product is ready to work on time.

Twice a year (in June and in December), Vincenzo Cosenza creates a “world map of social networks”, showing the dominant social networks by country, based on traffic data gathered from Alexa and Google Trends for Websites.

In June 2009, Facebook was already quite big, and at the end of that year its accelerating growth became even more apparent. By December 2010, the map colored bluer than ever.

The trend shows no signs of stopping this year. How long until it turns all blue?

Don’t BS me. Everyone wants to sell their startup. We all pay lip service to building a billion dollar Groupon but in general that’s a lie. Even Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million within ten seconds of starting their company. And Yahoo said, “No”.

As soon as I start a company, I want to sell it. I’ve sold four companies and I’m invested in another dozen that have been through various stages of the selling process. It’s not pleasant, it’s ugly, and everyone paints a pretty face so they look good on the first date. But later on in the dating process you realize who beats their children and who doesn’t. It’s important to keep track of the following nine things throughout the process so you don’t end up being beaten too or even worse—broke and out of business.

Recently I went through a Valley ritual: pitching a story to TechCrunch (not this one). We liked our chances: we were announcing funding, contracts, and growing metrics. It was our first TechCrunch pitch.

Like most press pitches, it went into the ether. We understood; journalists are swamped and cutting through the noise is hard. Yet I noticed that day out of TechCrunch’s forty stories, only two were about early-stage startups. The rest were on large or high-profile companies like Google, Twitter, and Foursquare.

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