If you are raising kids, you have a unique advantage over your childless peers when it comes to creating a successful business. I’m pretty sure this claim will probably raise the hackles of some, but hear me out. There are lessons for all in drawing parallels between raising a kid and a company.

Let’s start with the assumption — and I think it’s a good one — that the end goal of starting a business should be to create something that can one day thrive without your personal involvement. That way, you’ll have all of your options open: run your business forever without the stress of dealing with the details, install a manager and become a shareholder, or — if the price is right — sell it.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, e-mail is the cause of — and solution to — all of life’s problems. That’s why we spend so much time talking about e-mail efficiency, inbox management, and better messaging strategies.

Indeed, just the other day Rick recapped The 99 Percent blog’s recommendations for e-mail etiquette for the super-busy.

Having reviewed the blog’s advice, though, it seems to me that it’s not really about etiquette so much as just advice for communicating more effectively and efficiently. If you apply these tips, your e-mail will be more lucid, which will result in fewer traded messages, faster responses, and less time in your inbox. It might look like etiquette, but it’s really quite self-serving.

Throughout the history of franchising, there have been some amazing rags-to-riches stories, many of which have entered the realm of modern business lore. When the Franchise Help staff and Matt Wilson decided to assemble a list of the 10 most famous franchise founders of all time, it quickly became clear that achieving any kind of consensus about this ranking would be nearly impossible given all the great candidates from which to choose.

In a bid to get people spending again, retailers distributed $332 billion in coupons last year, a 7 percent rise from 2009, according to NCH Marketing Services.

We identified the 10 cities where people are most addicted to coupons, based on data from Coupons.com.

This post has been ruminating with me for a while. It's not a sudden "a-ha" moment that made it form, but a collective group of "a-has!" over the past few months.

Consider this the uplifting post to counter last week's "The 11 Harsh Realities Of Entrepreneurship".

Maryland TEDCO
AND
The National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2)

Present

A Webinar Series on
"Demystifying Working with Federal Labs"
Featuring Federal Technology Transfer Professionals

Click Here to Register [or visit http://center.ncet2.org]
SERIES DESCRIPTION:
On April 7, 2010, Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House released its inaugural Open Government Plan highlighting transparency, participation, and collaboration.
"Demystifying Working with the Federal Labs" is a lecture series launched by the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Federal Laboratory Consortium in order to render the technology transfer process at federal agencies more transparent, and to encourage collaborations with the federal labs. This lecture series aims to provide a platform for Federal Laboratories to educate academia, industry, and technology transfer professionals on different technology transfer mechanisms used at the federal labs. While some of the lectures will be an introduction to common technology transfer mechanisms, such as CRADAs and licenses, other lectures will focus on more specialized agreements that may be unique to a particular agency, such as NASA's Space Act agreements.
It is our hope that the series will encourage a dialogue between the federal laboratories and other stakeholders in the area of technology innovation. We hope to reach small businesses, large businesses, academia, economic development organizations, and technology transfer professionals.
THIS MONTH:
INTERSECTION OF CRADAs AND LICENSING -
FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF NCI AND NIST
Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 1:00 to 2:30 pm ET

The second lecture in the series will focus on Collaborative Research and Development Agreements and their interplay with licensing. Two seasoned technology transfer professionals will discuss the rights of the CRADA collaborator in the IP developped under the research plan.

Presenters:

COST: Free, but registration required by clicking on the link above.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE?: This series is online. You need a computer with web access for the visual/audio. Q&A is conducted by a chat box to the speakers. Once registered to the webinar series you will receive a separate email with the webinar url 24 hours before the start of the webinar.

WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE IN THE WEBINAR?: These webinars are open to anyone interested in how federal labs, universities and industry can better work together to foster innovation. This includes university staff, faculty and students, local and state economic development professionals, corporate business development directors, academic liaisons, corporate, academic and federal laboratory researchers, technology transfer professionals, and service providers (e.g. lawyers, consultants).

There is an innovation emergency in Europe and a huge amount of work lies ahead if the EU is to close the innovation gap with competitors the US and Japan, writes Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, in an exclusive commentary for EurActiv.

Let’s say you’ve decided to provide something tremendously fantastic for your customers, even though it meant great expense and hardship. It would be incontrovertible — you’d refuse to compromise on that one thing, even if it seems impossible to work out how to do it profitably.

It’s easy to identify companies who became wildly successful with this technique. Of course this is survivor bias at it’s finest; these examples don’t prove this is a great strategy, they just illustrate that it can work:

Chuck Patterson had grown up skiing dangerous big-mountain terrain; he had also surfed plenty of large, thunderous waves.

But never, until recently, had he or anyone else donned skis and used them to surf the gargantuan swells at a notoriously treacherous spot called Jaws, off the Hawaiian island of Maui.

A new model for developing cures is winning battles in the war against disease in laboratories, clinics and research centers around the world. The hallmarks of this movement are collaboration and the sharing of intellectual property in a wide-open manner that cuts against the grain of traditional for-profit drug discovery.

The new initiatives take many forms. Some target conditions ranging from Alzheimer's to tuberculosis through alliances of foundations, nonprofits, universities, corporations and government agencies. Others make years of research available at the click of a mouse button to scientists around the world. Still others are carving out new financial and regulatory paths for bringing drugs to market at an accelerated pace.

Health care will dominate job creation in the next decade, and employment opportunities for college educated workers will grow nearly twice as fast as jobs for high school graduates, according to comprehensive projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"The fastest growing jobs are mostly in health care and consulting," said Michael Wolf, an economist with BLS, which originally produced this report in 2008. "The fastest declining sectors are in low-skill manufacturing with apparel, textiles and fabrics."

Washington likes to play guessing games with the economy, placing bets on certain industries by supplying them with luxurious tax giveaways or no-fault loans. But the jobs of the future are at the mercy of giant, global forces that are largely out of our control. To get a feel for the known unknowns, I spoke with Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, on the metaforces driving the next economy. He named four.

1.  Global Demand. In the 20th century, the United States was the world's top producer and consumer. But as China and India join the global middle class with a combined population eight times the size of the U.S. (and that's not to mention their fast-charging cousins, like Brazil and Indonesia), the new slogan for successful companies will be "Go East Young Man." Firms that can open overseas wallets will see the highest gains in productivity, wages and growth.

In most companies, there's a profound tension between the right-brainers (for lack of a better term) espousing design, design thinking and user-centered approaches to innovation and the left-brained, more spreadsheet-minded among us. Most C-suites are dominated by the latter, all of whom are big fans of nice neat processes and who pay good money to get them implemented rigorously. So often, the innovation process is treated as a simple, neat little machine. Put in a little cash and install the right process, and six months later, out pops your new game-changing innovation -- just like toast, right from the toaster. But that, of course, is wrong.

You just read another story on how quickly certain angels invest and you’re secretly admiring their ability to make decisions on the spot. Now you’re thinking: Due diligence is SO yesterday. Screw it and close more deals already!

Do what you want; you’re investing your own money, not ours. But first, check out our interview with Bill Payne, Angel of the Year in 2009. You might rethink your “strategy.”

It takes different leadership to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace. Leadership is the key, not technology. Most of our leadership practices come from a command and control military legacy that have been adopted by the business world for the past century. But hierarchies don’t help us manage in networks, whether they be social, value or organizational networks. Steve Denning explains:

Saying that hierarchies are needed is like arguing for smoking cigarettes. Hierarchies are a harmful habit that we need to break. We may be addicted to them, so that breaking the habit is hard, but the way forward is clear.

Crowdfunding’s growing up.

On one such site, 13,512 people recently raised nearly $1 million for a Chicago designer. And fan-funding sites are now bankrolling albums from established music acts, not just dodgy indie bands.

But just how much are these services making for members, and for themselves?

I’ve spent the last few weeks collecting data on the sector, by talking with all the main crowdfunding platforms…

My conclusion: an estimated $80 million has been pledged through these sites, by fewer than a million supporters. But not everyone gets funded, and returns for the sites themselves appear modest.

Well, that was fast.

Only three years after the iPhone launched, the smartphone market is already bigger than the PC market.

According to IDC, 101 million smartphones were sold in Q4, versus 92 million PCs.

Smartphone shipments, meanwhile, grew 87% year over year, while PCs only grew 3%.

May I call it the expertise business? As a provider, I made a good living with business planning consulting on my own for 11 years and as an employee of larger consulting companies for nine years. As a client, I’ve worked with some excellent attorneys, some good and not-so-good accountants, and good and not-so-good package designers, copywriters, graphic artists, and public relations consultants. And I’d like to suggest some tips for buyers of expertise, to help you get what you pay for.

1. Map the different species. Different experts have different standard behaviors. Some experts do the work for you, some tell you what to do, some help you do it. Some are obvious, like the accountant filling out the tax forms for you, the lawyers writing the legal documents, the designers designing, and the graphic artists drawing. But the lines get blurry. Accountants and lawyers, for example, don’t just do things, they also give advice and charge you for it. Coaches and consultants have some obvious differences. Know who does what.