February’s jobs numbers provide even more evidence of the need for fresh ideas to get America out of its economic rut. While non-farm payroll employment increased, the number of unemployed people and the overall unemployment rate of 8.9 percent barely budged.

It’s been at least six months since the last holdouts realized that the Obama administration’s “stimulus package” of nearly $1 trillion failed in its principle task of restoring real economic growth and returning Americans to work. Yet what has changed? Very little, as we continued to pursue old solutions to new problems.

Genevieve Thiers' business, Sittercity.com is a network that connects parents with over one million caregivers online.

Caregivers are available in many divisions including child care, pet care, senior care, home care and tutoring.

Genevieve shares her experiences.

The Challenge: Sittercity launched in the middle of the dot com crash, and it was next to impossible to get funding.

New startups are popping up daily. With so much competition, older companies are struggling to stay relevant.

Bill Taylor, the cofounder of Fast Company and author of Practically Radical, studied businesses that are successfully reinventing themselves in today's uncertain economy.

"Long-established organizations are really being rocked to their core," he says. And if they don't adapt, they'll die.

There’s an old joke about how to make a small fortune in angel investing: start with a large fortune and invest it in angel rounds.

I guess you could say the same thing about how to fail at an entrepreneurial venture: start a new company and then do everything that could be reasonably expected of you. And that’s how you fail.

The world is not set up to make your venture successful, and in fact almost everything conspires against you and your new company.

With a nod to Garage Venture's Guy Kawasaki and his Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists, I offer my Top 12 Lies Angels Tell. When I showed a draft to my angel friend Malcolm, he turned to me and said, "wow, this is really cynical!" So let me acknowledge that first.

1. “That was a good presentation!”

I have to say something positive, but you’re not getting me to write a cheque. The fact is, most funding pitches are terrible; they’re more product pitches with an appeal for money tacked on at the end. Passion, yes; every entrepreneur has heard by now they must show great enthusiasm for their endeavor, but show me how I can get my money back someday, too. Who will acquire you? Are you going to raise venture capital that will keep me in the deal for six, seven, eight, nine years? Or are you aware of the new trend towards early exits? Show me how I can get my money back in three to five years and even I’ll be saying, “That was a good presentation!”

The Charlotte, North Carolina, entrepreneur wants to do something about that. His company announced on Wednesday a $25 million initiative dedicated to bringing individuals' innovations to the marketplace.

Inventors can submit their ideas to the Edison Nation Innovation Fund (www.edisonnation.com) for $25. No other money is required from them to develop the ideas, and they will share the royalties if the product succeeds.

"We're really greasing the rails. We're making it easier for those great ideas to finally get in the hands of companies," said Foreman, CEO and co-founder of Edison Nation, a search service that matches retailers' product requests with inventions.

There are many opportunities for those who are alert enough to recognize emerging trends, perceptive enough to realize their importance, and clever enough to take advantage of them. These minitrends are emerging trends that will become significantly important within 2-5 years, but are not yet generally recognized.

Unlike megatrends, Minitrends are of a scope and importance to offer attractive opportunities to individual entrepreneurs, decision-makers in small and mid-size businesses, innovative thinkers in large companies, and adventuresome investors. In my book, MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs & Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, I categorize the nine Minitrends below to those most applicable to different-sized groups. (In the book, I also discuss the background, current trends, and business opportunities of each of these Minitrends in more depth.)

As Rhode Island's economy shows signs of revival, entrepreneurs need more than just bravery and innovation to get their ventures off the ground — they need capital, and they need it now.

The state houses several entities — venture capital, business development, and government-funded — intended to provide developing businesses and startup companies with the loans they need to get their ventures up and running. Choosing the right one is essential to establishing and growing a new or underfunded business — but the choice may not be as simple as it once was.

Technology Seed Capital Fund; Provides for creation of Technology Seed Capital Fund by Institute for Commercialization of Public Research; provides for creation of fund management committee by board of directors of institute; forbids members of committee from investing in company for specified period after investment in company is approved; specifies responsibilities of institute & fund management committee with respect to fund; specifies requirements for investment management plan proposal from interested applicants for investment manager position, etc.

Most CEOs have a bias toward action, says Daniel Patrick Forrester, author of Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization. "This instinct may not always serve their organizations well. Many leaders say they want results, yet what they're actually saying is that they want speed. But without time for reflection, they just get to a faulty destination that much faster.

“We’re entrepreneurs; we’re in a business for ourselves,” Brooke Taylor said in a recent New York Times article describing those who work in the world’s oldest profession.

Like many academics and policy makers, Ms. Taylor defines entrepreneurs as people who run their own businesses. By this definition some entrepreneurial efforts would be undesirable to many of us. This, in turn, raises the question: should we encourage all types of entrepreneurship?

If you listen to most policy makers, members of the media and academics, the answer is “yes.” To many in society, entrepreneurship is a magic bullet that creates jobs, generates wealth, promotes innovation, and otherwise benefits all of us.

Google has a reputation as an innovative company, but in fact it owes a lot of its success to acquisitions.

Google basically bought AdSense, the paid search platform that made it a financial powerhouse, from Applied Semantics in 2003.

In addition, three of the four non-search businesses that Google has identified as its future -- YouTube, Android, and display advertising -- were acquired and run more or less independently today. The fourth -- enterprise apps -- was helped greatly by the acquisition of Postini.

My sister Michelle has quite the entrepreneurial resume. About 10 years ago, she took her academic knowledge of language acquisition and tied it to her (then burgeoning) knowledge of parenting to create a novel way for people to teach hearing infants and toddlers to communicate via sign language.

It turns out that infants and toddlers want to communicate and can, cognitively, but their weak throat muscles frustrate their efforts.

We've written several times here at ReadWriteStart about the benefits - for students and for startups - of offering internship opportunities. Almost 70% of college students say they plan to pursue an internship while in school, a smart move considering that recent figures show that 90% of direct-from-college jobs will go to students who've had internship experience.

Just as students have expressed an interest in pursuing internships, many startups are also keen to identify potential interns, and there are several companies, including YouTern and InternMatch that work to place students with startups and not just with large, established companies. Internships are a great way to identify (and recruit) young talent.

However matching students and startups can be difficult if students don't live near thriving entrepreneurial centers. So is it possible then to pursue a virtual internship?

While entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, I take particular interest in what the most populous countries are doing to comb their citizens for entrepreneurs. Italy is the sixth most populous country in Europe, and the twenty-third most populous in the world. It also has the world's seventh-largest nominal GDP. Unfortunately, it also has the sixth highest government budget and a large public deficit, such that the economic confidence crisis in the Euro zone that sparked in Greece put a spotlight on Italy´s economy, which faces similar insolvency risk. With Italy´s public debt around 120 percent of GDP and growing, policy options are increasingly constrained. Fortunately, spurring entrepreneurship is not necessarily expensive (although it does take political commitment) and is a proven source of economic energy.

For mastering search. The internet search company Yandex is already three times more popular than Google in its home market (Russia) and this year, it made its move onto Google's international turf with the launch of an English-language search engine. One of Yandex's key advantages has always been the complexity of the Russian language, whose Lego-set of prefixes, roots and suffixes has forced it to be a step ahead in the nuance of its algorithms. That pushed the Firefox browser to drop Google in 2009 as its default search engine in Russia, succeeding it with Yandex.

The Startup Visa Act is proposed United States legislation that would allow foreign entrepreneurs to get a visa and move to the US.

Making it easier for immigrants to start businesses in the US would be a boon for America, as it competes in a networked global economy which is increasingly driven by talent and entrepreneurship. Many of the greatest entrepreneurial successes in America (and by extension, the world) were started by immigrants.

As a French entrepreneur who would like to move to the US some day, I opposed the original Startup Visa Act.

Google, which has been called the #1 company to work for, has a surprisingly difficult time holding on to employees.

So, amidst its many innovations, like building algorithms and cars that drive themselves, Google made time for an internal endeavor: Project Oxygen.

After scouring years of performance reviews, feedback surveys and more, Project Oxygen identified eight characteristics employees at the Googleplex admire most in bosses.

The shocker? Technical abilities, which is the defining trait of many Googlers, came in dead last.

When it comes to health and happiness, some states have it in spades, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Based on nationwide surveys conducted from January through December 2010, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measures respondents' overall satisfaction according to categories such as life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, and other areas.

Not surprisingly, happiness seemed to correlate with healthy lifestyles. The happiest states exercise frequently, eat produce regularly, and have low obesity rates.

You keep putting off sales calls to organize your desk or surf the Internet. Or, facing a deadline, you start writing, get nowhere and decide to take a “break.” Or, maybe you’ve completed every aspect of planning a project, except one small detail, and you keep putting it off–until it’s too late.

If any of these hypotheticals resonate, you’re not alone.

According to The Procrastination Equation: How To Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done, a new book by Piers Steel, Ph.d., procrastination is rampant, a mixture of human nature and deadlines that create irrational delay. Winner of the Killam Emerging Research Leader award, Steel teaches human resources and organizational dynamics at the Haskayne School of Business/University of Calgary. At least 95% of us procrastinate at least occasionally, Steel writes, citing research, and “about 15-20% of us do it consistently and problematically.”