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.

More than half of the ideas and strategies that look good on paper get ‘lost in translation’ between the executive suite and the workforce. Why? INSEAD professors Michael Jarrett and Quy Huy have researched the subject for the past 15 years and have developed an easy-to-apply stress test for business strategies

“We know that over 60 percent of strategy execution fails and what the six-step stress test does is that it reveals the cold reality and problems in the business plan by showing the hidden elements of strategic execution as hidden traps in making the strategy work,” Jarrett told INSEAD Knowledge.

Like the reeds of an old Aesop fable, the companies that topped our 2011 Best Places to Work in Industry survey are bending—but not breaking—under the strain of continued economic adversity. With funding agencies still awarding grants only to the cream of the crop and 2009 stimulus funds expected to run dry as soon as next year, companies are working hard to find new funding sources that will allow them to survive despite the still-depressed economy.

Taking advantage of the growing personal-genomics boom, for example, DNA Genotek, the survey’s #8 company, expanded the market for its saliva-based DNA collection kit from population geneticists in the field to consumers in their homes by licensing its wares to genetic-testing companies. The recent uptick in the use of personalized genetic tests has boosted DNA Genotek’s income, which the company puts right back into basic research. “Personal genomics just became yet another market that we’re playing into,” says DNA Genotek product development manager Rafal Iwasiow.

Much has been made of the vaunted “back to the city” movement by “the young and restless,” young professionals, the creative class, empty nesters and others were voting with their feet in favor of cities over suburbs. Although there were bright spots, the Census 2010 results show that the trend was very overblown, affecting mostly downtown and near downtown areas, while outlying ones bled population. One culprit for this discrepancy seems to be that the intra-census estimates supplied by the Census Bureau were inflated – in some cases very inflated.

With anti-immigrant sentiment building across the nation, and clouds of nativism swirling around Washington, D.C., skilled immigrants are voting with their feet. They are returning home to countries like India and China. It’s not just the people we are denying visas to who are leaving; even U.S. permanent residents and naturalized citizens are going to where they think the grass is greener. As a result, India and China are experiencing an entrepreneurship boom. And they are learning to innovate just as Silicon Valley does.

Some call this a “brain drain” others say it is “brain circulation.” It is without doubt, good for these countries and it is good for the world. But this is America’s loss: innovation that would otherwise be happening here is going abroad. Without realizing it, we are exporting our prosperity and strengthening our competitors.

The Great Wall Club is an exclusive club made up of Chinese internet and technology CEOs. At its annual Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, China today, the club named the winners of its G-Start Up competition, in which some 20 seed and early-stage startups delivered 5 t0 6-minute pitches in the hopes of snagging a spot in an incubator program.

Up for grabs were four months of incubation and funding at Chinaccelerator in Liaoning, three months with Innovation Works’ Jump Start Program in Beijing, and three months with the Plug and Play Startup Acceleration Program in Silicon Valley. The competitors were a combination of global and local startups that Chinese venture capitalists were interested in talking to about their potential in the Chinese market. You can find a full list of participating startups at the competition web site.

THE economy is recovering, yet American confidence remains mired at levels more commonly seen in recessions. For that blame unemployment, petrol prices and a deeper, nagging feeling that America is in decline. A Gallup poll in February asked Americans to name the world’s leading economic power. By a significant margin, they said China.

Barack Obama has exploited this anxiety. America, he has said, faces a new “Sputnik moment” and must “compete for the jobs and industries of our time” by spending more on research, education and infrastructure. But the notion that America is on the verge of being vanquished by cleverer, more innovative competitors is flawed. First, competitiveness is a woolly concept that wrongly supposes countries, like football teams, win only when another team loses. But one country’s economic growth does not subtract from another’s. Second, America’s ability to innovate and raise productivity remains reasonably healthy. The problem is that the benefits of that innovation and productivity have become so narrowly concentrated that workers’ median wages have stagnated.

Business relationships are a lot like personal relationships: You’ll get a lot more done if the other party likes you. There is, of course, no way to train to be likeable, but entrepreneur and author Guy Kawaski notes that a person’s ‘likability’ is a key ingredient in business deals, in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture given at Stanford University. Kawaskai talks about ways to be more enchanting – including his mathematical formula for the perfect handshake.

Most of us were taught that creativity comes from the thoughts and emotions of the mind. However, the greatest singers, dancers, painters, writers and filmmakers recognize that the most original, and even transformative, ideas actually come from the core of our being, which is accessed through an "open-mind consciousness."

In ancient traditions, open-mind consciousness was considered to be a spiritual awakening, the great enlightenment that dissolves the darkness of confusion and fear and ushers in peace, happiness, clarity and contentment. Today the notion that there's one formulaic way to achieve this spiritual awakening and creative vibrancy has been blown apart. You don't have to run off to a monastery or practice meditation for 30 years before attaining a breakthrough. A few years ago, I had a client, Sarah, who'd completely given up on psychotherapy until a failed suicide attempt convinced her to try it one more time. I urged her to begin a mindfulness practice, and she agreed. After several months -- not years, but months -- she had an extremely powerful experience while meditating. As she described it, she felt a rush of light and energy infuse her body and experienced an ineffable sense of the presence of the divine, the cosmos and a collective consciousness. After this transcendent experience, Sarah, who'd been overweight to an unhealthy degree, lost several pounds, became more engaged in her work and closer to her friends, and was no longer suicidal. It was a major turning point for her.

All great companies start off with a pitch that captures people's imagination. Without it, entrepreneurs have a difficult time attracting talent, investors and, most importantly, customers.

That's why we at the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition have launched YouPitch, an elevator pitch contest that's based entirely on YouTube and open to students from across the world.

The contest is the latest evolution of MIT's student-run $100k competition, an annual program that provides aspiring entrepreneurs with the resources, network and learning opportunities needed to start successful ventures. Since its founding in 1989, over 150 companies have been launched out of the MIT $100k, raising $1.3 billion in venture capital and generating over $16 billion in market value. Notable alumni include Akamai, a leader in web application and performance management with annual revenues of $1+ billion, Harmonix, creators of "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero", as well as ZipCar, a leading car-sharing company.

Entrepreneurs, defined. Merriam-Webster defines an entrepreneur as "one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise;" however, Business Insider columnist James Altucher believes this definition is inadequate. Altucher, who has started, invested in, and advised dozens of businesses, has created his own definitive 100 rules for being an entrepreneur. Most of the rules on this comprehensive list address the initial challenges of launching a new business—but some rules also apply to those larger, more stable, companies as well. Which rules do you follow? What's missing from the list? Let us know below.

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a small clutch of colleagues have assiduously researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history, and vice versa. Their research has spawned not only a new branch of historical study but also a provocative theory that technology has sped human evolution in an unprecedented way during the past century.

Next month Cambridge University Press will publish the capstone of this inquiry, “The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700,” just a few weeks shy of Mr. Fogel’s 85th birthday. The book, which sums up the work of dozens of researchers on one of the most ambitious projects undertaken in economic history, is sure to renew debates over Mr. Fogel’s groundbreaking theories about what some regard as the most significant development in humanity’s long history.

THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

In 1961, the trade magazine Today’s Secretary predicted that, 50 years hence, the “secretary of the future” would start her workday at noon and take monthlong vacations thanks to the “electronic computer.” According to another optimistic assessment, secretaries (transported through office hallways “via trackless plastic bubble”) would be in ever-higher demand because of what was vaguely referred to as “business expansion.”

I know, I know, as a small business owner, you rock at everything you do: make sales, balance the books, prepare the coffee…well, maybe not so much. Tomorrow is Administrative Professionals Day, and in honor of that day, we want to make you feel good by telling you all the things an administrative assistant can do better than you.

flower delivery

1. Keeping Your Calendar Organized: Let’s face it: You’ve missed more than your fair share of meetings because you wrote them down on a bit of paper and then promptly lost it. Administrative professionals know all the latest, cool tech ways to keep you on schedule using your computer, phone and telepathy.

The OECD has highlighted once again the need for green tax reform to address significant vulnerabilities in our economy and protect New Zealand’s clean green brand, Green Party Co-Leader Dr Russel Norman said today.

Dr Norman was responding to the latest OECD Country Report on New Zealand released today which found that tax changes were essential to remove tax distortions that favour property investment and tax changes to ensure the more efficient use of resources like water.

If you attach a handful of brooms to a rotating drum and then drag that behind the car, will the streets get cleaned?

The mayor of New York does not usually take time from his schedule to mingle with academic deans from Finland. But there was Michael R. Bloomberg at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently, trying to sell the foreign visitors on his next big idea: a top-flight applied sciences school for the city.

As he seeks to revive his flagging third term, Mr. Bloomberg has taken a strong personal interest in the project, embarking on a campaign-style effort to lobby university leaders and business executives.

Such a school, envisioned as one of the largest development projects in the city’s history, could transform the local economy and help burnish his image as a financial steward.

The leaders of Tallinn's Tehnopol, an industrial park housing 150 companies and a university, aim to generate two to three internationally active entrepreneurial companies from their "business incubator" in coming years, according to management member Pirko Konsa.

The 2009 documentary Transcendent Man: The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil is currently screening both online and in select venues, and provoking exactly the wide range of responses one would expect from a film about a futurist who has claimed, among other things, that man would soon learn how to extend his life “indefinitely.” The New York Times recently compared his theories with 2nd and 3rd century gnosticism, and since this film was made by an avowed believer in Kurzweil’s philosophy and theories, it’s no surprise that Scientific American faults the movie for its reverence, and Variety wishes “It were not so transparently on (Kurzweil's side).”