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It seems that everybody wants an easy solution. They want best practices and case studies they can copy. They don’t want to do the hard work of learning for themselves. They want a cookie-cutter solution.

Well there aren’t any.

Case studies abound in business and many sell for a significant amount. Other than for general education, they’re rather useless. Each organization’s situation is not only different, it’s changing. Case studies and best practices in business are like the arbitrary subjects in our schools. They’re easy to package but don’t transfer well into real life.

Half of all Israeli venture capital funds did not invest in Israel in 2010, a 42% increase over the number of non-investing VC funds in 2009, a report by the Israel Venture Capital Association released this week reveals.

Of the 75 new investments in Israel over the course of 2010, 69% were by Israeli VC funds, led by Evergreen Venture Partners, which made six new investments, and Battery Ventures and Pontifax Fund, which each made five new investments. Gemini Israel Funds, Genesis Partners, Cedar Fund, and Carmel Ventures made four new investments each, while Pitango Venture Capital made three new investments in 2010.

Steve Chiotakis: We've been hearing a lot lately about drug violence in Mexico. But that's not stopping a lot of wealthy people from investing there.

Marketplace's Jeff Tyler now and why venture capital is taking off south of the border.

Jeff Tyler: Historically, entrepreneurs in Mexico have had a hard time raising venture capital for start-ups. American Paul Ahlstrom saw $1 trillion economy and a big opportunity.

Video DownloadHelper, a Firefox plugin that lets you download Flash videos to your hard drive from sites like YouTube, has had success most startups dream of: 85 million downloads so far, and yet they've stayed under the radar.

Video DownloadHelper is made by 4 year old company ACLAP, and it's a one-man band. French software developer Michel Gutierrez made DownloadHelper. He thinks it's the most downloaded French software in the world.

The app has been one of the top 2 most downloaded for the past 3 years, and gets one download per second.

How to make a billion in biotech: It’s much more difficult than the software industry, but the key to biotech billions for entrepreneurs and investors seems to be taking one or only a very few highly concentrated positions in companies that they developed over years of effort. So reports Forbes Magazine, noting that only three of its 400 wealthiest Americans made most of their money by spearheading the development and marketing of a new drug.

Going hostile: Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Canada’s largest drugmaker, has made a $5.7 billion hostile takeover bid of Cephalon, a Pennsylvania-based maker of pain and sleep drugs.

What’s next for cleantech? Sunil Paul, founding director of Spring Ventures, thinks it will be the “CleanWeb,” or technologies that leverage the capabilities of the Internet, social media and mobile technologies to address resource constraints. He’ll explain this idea in a morning talk at Green:Net 2011.

Paul, who made his first cleantech investment back in 2002 and was an early investor in Nanosolar and Solazyme (which just filed its S1), will discuss the next-generation of opportunities that he thinks the CleanWeb will unveil.

When you're running a growing business, it’s tempting to overlook the matter of keeping receipts and other financial documents. But staying on top of your record keeping is essential for filing tax returns and being able to prove they’re accurate in the event of a tax audit.

What’s more, well-organized records can help you track the progress of your business and prepare accurate financial statements.

What constitutes a record? The short answer is, if you think it’s one, it probably is. Cash register tapes, bank deposit slips, receipt books and credit card slips all record important information. A 1099 miscellaneous-income form is the kind of document you’ll want to keep, as are your invoices.

Banks pouring money into technology funds, wealthy clients and institutions clamoring to get pieces of start-ups, expectations of stock market debuts building — as Wall Street’s machinery kicks into second gear, some investors with memories of the Internet bust a decade earlier are wondering whether this sudden burst of activity spells danger for the industry once again.

With all this exuberance, valuations are soaring. Investments in Facebook and Zynga have more than quintupled the implied worth of each company in the last two years. The social shopping site Groupon is said to be considering an initial public offering that would value the company at $25 billion. Less than a year ago, the company was valued at $1.4 billion.

Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, Proctor and Gamble and others derive more than half of their revenues from international activities. We have heard that there are significant tax advantages in doing business offshore. All this sounds very enticing and many budding entrepreneurs can’t wait to fly to Paris or Shanghai to tap into the international markets. However, the startup CEO must evaluate a number of potential pitfalls, before jumping on the international bandwagon.

1. International requires patience. Relationships have to be built one-by-one in each country. Business contacts enjoy playing tour guide, having a meal together and getting to know you. So, do take time to get to know your partner and their country and its customs. Under no circumstances should you put your partner under pressure to sign a contract before your departure date. The partner should feel that you have all the time in the world to build and cement the relationship.

If you're a budding entrepreneur, you know you need an elevator pitch. But what about a taxi pitch?

Last August, Alex Moore and Aye Moah were visiting Silicon Valley to try and get funding for their startup Baydin.

The three-person company was only a few months old, and had already shipped a product called Boomerang, which lets email users set a reminder to respond to a message later in case they can't decide what to do with it when they read it -- perfect for those emails that fall somewhere between urgent business and obvious spam, like long catch-up messages from old friends.

But Baydin wasn't having any luck getting funding in Boston, and had planned a week long trip to the Valley in between two friends' weddings in the Bay Area and San Diego.

In a recent study, blur Group surveyed more than 1000 national and international entrepreneurs about the top business people that inspire them the most. Almost 10% of those surveyed were women. But when it came time to cast a ballot for the top entrepreneurs, women didn’t even receive 3% of the vote.

Richard Branson, British entrepreneur and Chairman of the Virgin Group, received 27.5% and topped the list for his creative ideas and ongoing innovation of new products.  And I agree, he is inspiring. But what about the ladies?  Is it an issue of out of sight, out of mind?

We all have one: some big, horrible, awful-sounding task that we’d prefer to put off to next month. Or never. Unfortunately, procrastination doesn’t really mean pushing something to the future, because if you’re worried about it, a postponed task has a sneaky way of consuming a lot of mindshare in the present. Here are a few ways to finally get moving:

1. Do a “home inspection” on the problem. I’m in the middle of buying a house. Part of the process is finding a disinterested yet expert third party to spell out exactly what’s wrong with the property and how to fix it. I think this is a concept that should be used more broadly. Survey several other parties (a spouse, close friends, your mentor) to tell you what they’d do with your particular project. You may discover that the Biggest Editing Job Ever just requires moving a few paragraphs around.

Is the government searching for America’s Next Top Model? No, but the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is searching for America’s Next Top Energy Innovator. Today, the DOE announced the energy innovator challenge, which is part of the Startup America Initiative. This isn’t a head-to-head competition where one entrepreneur will be left standing at the end. Instead, the DOE is making it easier and less costly for energy startups to take advantage of certain DOE patents.

"America's entrepreneurs and innovators are the best in the world," said Secretary Chu. "Today, we're challenging them to create new businesses based on discoveries made by our world-leading national laboratories. Because we've cut the upfront fees and reduced the paperwork, we'll make it easier for start-up companies to succeed and create the new jobs our economy needs. Our goal is simple: unleash America's innovation machine and win the global race for the clean energy jobs of the future." Source: DOE

San Diego’s innovation economy continues to move mostly sideways, with venture capital investments plunging and employment improving slightly among high technology and life sciences startups, according to a report today from Connect, the nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship. The mixed signals also showed San Diego’s merger and acquisition activity soared and federal grants to researchers strengthened during the last quarter of 2010.

A .pdf file for the full report can be downloaded here. My breakdown of the highlights and leading indicators for San Diego’s innovation economy follows:

—Eighty-four high tech and life sciences startups were formed in the region during the fourth quarter of 2010, a 13 percent increase from the same quarter of 2009, when 74 new companies were started. For the year, the report counted 277 new startup companies, which was a 13 percent decline from the 319 startups founded in 2009.

NEW YORK CITY—Who brewed—and then enjoyed—the first beer? The civilization responsible for the widely beloved beverage must have been a very old one, but we don't yet know who first brewed up a batch of beer, Christine Hastorf explained in a March 10 lecture at New York University on the archaeology of beer.

Hastorf, a University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist, noted that documented evidence of beer-making stretches back several thousands of years, but "unfortunately we don't get a really deep story" beyond that. Looking at very early fire sites and settlements, Hastorf noted, "we can't say they were making beer or not."

Just like that fake Color.xxx slide deck, this probably fake VC pitch video has been making the rounds across Silicon Valley lately, portraying the saga of a probably fake Rachel Sequoia (heh) and her probably fake startup “Share The Air.”

As I just finished doing an Ignite talk, the whole “bullshit for five minutes” thing really hit home with me, but especially the part where the actress playing Sequoia asks an audience presumably filled with VCs for 500K to support her location-based air service, which includes an ancillary app where you can use Google Maps to check into places where you’ve breathed. Yes, breathed.

Top leadership turnover and shake-ups have been all over the news lately, affecting everyone from AMD to Google to Apple to HP. The turbulence in the big business world underscores the need for companies of all sizes to look at their strategy and planning for leadership roles – and beyond.

A small staff doesn’t get you off the hook. In fact, it only magnifies the immediate impact of unexpected changes in your team – and the need for thoughtful planning.

There are many differences between a company with 10 employees and one with 10,000, but making sure you always have the right people in the right roles is crucial no matter what your size.

  Many people operate from an unwritten rule stating that a gargantuan, time-consuming task is a reliable indicator of both importance and future reward. But this logic could not be more flawed – and it’s a very costly misconception.

Spending a year on a painting does not guarantee it will be worth more than another completed in a few hours. Working on a business plan for 5 years does does not guarantee more success than one written in 2 weeks.

This seems quite obvious but we still often fall victim of the childhood axiom that states large sacrifices lead to large rewards. But apart from the alternative world of conventional education, we are not rewarded for “more effort.”

When Nicolas Shea completed his graduate program in entrepreneurship at Stanford University in 2009, he watched a stream of brilliant foreign students like him reluctantly say goodbye to Palo Alto, Calif., because of restrictive American immigration policies, taking their ideas with them.

Six months later, he launched StartUp Chile, a government program in his home country that hopes to become a major importer of just that kind of talent by offering $40,000, no-strings-attached grants to anyone who moves to Santiago to launch a company.