If your startup is looking for an angel investor, does it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up? In reality, hitting large numbers of angels in multiple locations with a generic pitch is one of the least productive approaches.

Here are five key things you need to know to quickly find the right angel for your startup:

1.  Angels invest in people, more often than they invest in ideas. That means they need to know you, or someone they trust who does know you (warm introduction). For maximum credibility, start networking for potential investors to build relationships a few months before you start asking for money.

Businesses always ask for examples of either your work in social media or others. When they ask for examples it tells you they haven’t been paying attention to the market nor do they have any familiarity with the market. Yet they always want something to point to or examples of what you have done as a reference to credibility.

When you respond they have no reference point to put other examples or your own experience into context with their needs. Instead most businesses want to know who you’ve helped create a success with social media and what did those people do so they can copy it.

This week IM caught up with Debra Amidon to ask her views on the evolution of innovation management as a profession. Debrah first wrote about intellectual capital in 1987 and became a practitioner as ‘global innovation strategist’ long before it was in vogue. As founder of ENTOVATION International Ltd, she has managed a global network of innovation experts across 67 countries for over 2 decades. She provides us with some perspective and counsel for the future.

What is innovation management to you?

Our profession has evolved beyond a focus on the flow of technology or finances. Knowledge, in the form of ’intellectual capital’, is now the strategic resource to be leveraged at all economic levels. Indeed, the flow of knowledge must be visualized and incentivized from the point of origin to the point of optimal need or opportunity; and the process now operates more as innovation value-system ecology than the traditional, linear value-chain.

All of us have been enabled to use social media as the means to build relationship capital that enhances the value of a our individual and our collective economy.

Each of our benefits can be significantly enhanced if the “system” of social media is continuously improved. Improvement will only come if we all learn and use appropriate and relevant knowledge to improve the value social media affords us.

The word directions means several things including: guidance or supervision of action or conduct : an explicit instruction : the line or course on which something is moving or is aimed to move or along which something is pointing or facing : a channel or direct course of thought or action : the art and technique of directing a group of people to accomplish an aim.

The marketplace is filled with thousands and thousands of individuals, organizations, products and services all claiming to help other people and organizations with directions on how to use social media. The problem is that not all directions will take you to the place you want to go.

Everyone wants to be smart. The opposite of smart is dum. No one wants to be known as dum. Yet smart and dum are transparent because of social media. What you say and do can be labeled as either smart or dum and at the click of a mouse millions will know what millions of other think about what you said or did.

The irony of social media is its transparency and each word and action is logged into the world wide library which stores everything, everyone and all things said and done. This world wide library is search-able by anyone, everyone and everybody is creating an index of content that can be found forever.

Facebook, Google, Apple: all companies that were started by hackers of one kind or another, grew fast, and changed the world. It's a model that still motivates computer scientists and engineers who bet everything on their own tech startups. But the next company to join that list of successes may be founded by a designer, not a hacker, if the backers of a new Silicon Valley investment fund are right. The Designer Fund will focus on companies led by Web and product designers rather than solely engineers, in hopes of creating more tech startups that specialize in compelling user experiences.

The fund is being put together by 500 Startups, a company that acts as an incubator for early-stage tech companies, trading seed funding and mentoring for a stake in a venture.

No simple checklist could ever fully define what we mean by good design, but when we look at examples of it, we see that some essential elements tend to show up consistently.

By exploring these elements individually—and by thinking about design as not just a noun (the design) but also a verb (to design)—we can approach the abstract question of "What is design?" in a productive way. Drawing on what design is actually like in the real world helps us talk about what it could, and should, become.

Here are 10 essential elements or aspects of good design that transcend context, industry, and geography.

I believe that a good domain name is an important success factor in building and launching consumer web services. It's not in my top ten but it could be. It's certainly something we think about a lot when making investments and working with companies post investment.

A number of our portfolio companies have acquired their domain names in connection with or shortly after our investment. Del.icio.us purchased Delicious.com with some of the proceeds of our investment. Foursquare purchased Foursquare.com with some of the proceeds of our investment (they launched with playfoursquare.com). We've advised and assisted a number of our portfolio companies in this effort.

Some of the least stressful jobs in America are those where people work closely with others.

CareerCast.com rated the stress level of 200 jobs based on work environment, income, outlook, travel, deadlines, competitiveness and work in the public eye.

Many of the jobs are in high demand, have normal eight hour work days, and allow employees to work from remote locations.

Want to think like Steve Jobs?

Erik Calonius, author of Ten Steps Ahead, says all you need to do to is find "flow."

The phrase "flow" was coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; it refers to a state of mind that's like daydreaming in the present-tense.

"It's when the thinker, exhausted, has stopped concentrating on the problem at hand, and the brain slips into that single-mind immersion," Calonius writes on Fortune.

Canaan Partners, a venture capital firm that has backed companies like DoubleClick and Match.com, put together a 28-slide presentation for entrepreneurs.

It tells them how to craft the perfect pitch, from what to wear to what to say.

The presentation is from three years ago, but the advice is timeless.

Starting your own company is one of the hardest things you can do in business -- so it's invaluable to get advice from other people who have done it, too.

Fortunately, the blogosphere is packed with entrepreneurs, investors, and business gurus dying to share their knowledge.

Unfortunately, it can be a real pain trying to figure out which ones are worth your time.

Well, now the work is done for you: we sorted through others' suggestions, official lists of recommended bloggers, and our own personal favorites to pick out the 20 best blogs for entrepreneurs.

It's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com, the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you? Well, if you want to spruce up your documents, blog posts, and presentations, there are some free tools online that can help.

Many Eyes

This IBM Research tool gives you two choices: an option to browse through existing sets of data, or use your own. The public database includes everything from population density across the U.S. to Internet browsers by popularity. If you have your own data on hand, you can upload it to Many Eyes and craft your own visualization. The best part of this tool is that you have many different options insofar as the final product, from creating a world map to a network diagram.

IPOs traditionally have been the pinnacle of success for companies, but Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket argues that’s no longer true. The IPO market, he tells students in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture at Stanford University, is dying a painful death. Silbert cites several reasons for this, ranging from Sarbanes-Oxley to the shift to online brokerages, which cut into the research budgets of brokers, who shifted their focus to large cap companies and began paying less attention to smaller ones.

Invertebrate larvae at hot, biologically active deep sea vents can be swept up and transported hundreds of kilometers by surface-generated currents caused by the weather, according to research published this week in Science.

Hydrothermal vents on the sea floor
Copyright Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The discovery provides one solution to the long-standing question of how materials -- including heat, chemicals and living organisms -- present at hydrothermal vents are transported throughout the ocean.

"What's neat about this paper is the idea that right next door to a mid ocean ridge system is a source of energetic eddies that can slowly flush things out into the ocean and populate other areas," said Richard Thomson of the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Canada, who was not involved in the research. "That's new and innovative."

Science careers are a booming sector of the US economy. This is also the case around the globe, and the situation won't be changing any time soon. We live in a high tech world, and much of our progress has been made possible by the millions of people working in science careers. It wasn't that long ago that the phrase "science career" brought to mind an image of a stodgy, middle aged man spending most of his day peering into a miscrope in a dull laboratory somewhere. Those days are long gone, however. These days, science careers are, if not quite "glamorous", a whole lot more exciting than they used to be. It's scientists who make the breakthroughs that help America keep its competitive edge. It's scientists who devise the increasingly complex (and miraculous) blood tests which help police solve murders. These are just a few examples of the way in which nearly our entire world revolves around hard working people in science careers. In recognition of these facts, science careers now pay far more than they did just a few years ago. So if you're looking for a career in science, you've made a smart career decision.

Gordon S. Jones has been named the director of the Harvard innovation lab, an initiative set to launch later this year that aims to foster team-based and entrepreneurial activities, Harvard University said today.

Part of the lab's mandate is to also provide a forum, both physically and virtually, for interactions among students, faculty, alumni, and the surrounding community, Harvard said in a press release.

Along with the Harvard Business School, the lab will occupy space at 125 Western Ave. in Allston, a building that formerly housed the WGBH-TV offices and studios. The lab will "complement Mayor Thomas M. Menino's Innovation agenda and help revitalize Western Avenue," the release added.

While working in technology transfer and in the Brooklyn-based incubator at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Bruce Niswander says he saw a disconnect between the “high supply of talented, energetic students,” and hiring struggles at startup companies.

“One of biggest challenges for a small business is identifying talent that’s affordable and available,” says Niswander, who now runs the NYU-Poly Varick Street Incubator in SoHo.

It used to be that finding angel investors mostly involved figuring out who you personally knew who had money -- maybe a rich uncle or former boss -- and asking them to invest in your business. If you were lucky, maybe you scared up two or three different individuals who could back your idea.

In recent years, though, it's gotten easier to find angel investors outside your own network of connections. That's because angels increasingly travel in groups. The Angel Capital Education Foundation reports angel groups now number 340, up 13 percent in the past year.

The rise of angel groups is making life easier both for angel investors and for entrepreneurs trying to find them. Here's why: