A new polymer material that can repeatedly heal itself at room temperature when exposed to ultraviolet light presents the tantalizing possibility of products that can repair themselves when damaged. Possibilities include self-healing medical implants, cars, or even airplane parts.

The polymer, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Kyushu University, heals when a crack in the material is pressed together and exposed to UV light. The same treatment can cause separate chunks of the material to fuse together to form one solid piece.

FORTUNE -- Feeling a little disillusioned lately? That's not a bad thing if you're an entrepreneur. There's nothing like humbling economic times to force chief executives to let go of the sacred-cow ideas and grandiose illusions they've been harboring and start building on reality. Some of the smartest business owners I know have fallen for these five myths. Ditch them. It will make your business that much stronger.

1. Gross margins will grow as you get bigger

Not so. My research shows that they typically dip. That was a tough lesson for Jennifer Olsen Welding, who owns a 70-employee Salt Lake City casting company. Her tale: Unlimited Designs won a municipal contract to create a precast building façade in 2009. The trouble was, the $5 million company had to lease extra equipment to do the job. Sales increased significantly, and gross margins declined by 3%. "We would have been better off having no revenue than the revenue that was coming in," she says.

You hear a lot about the importance of collaboration in the business environment, but what happens when an executive can’t just pop into a colleague’s office to hash through a big idea? And how do managers maintain interpersonal connections when their employees span different time zones and geographies?

As more organizations move towards satellite offices or a remote workforce model to reduce costs and acquire top-tier talent from other locations, it’s a problem that’s only going to grow.

I was having a chat with an entrepreneur who I really like and who I try to mentor from time-to-time. He has an interesting business and one that has a viable shot at being an innovative & profitable business.

One problem. He’s struggling to raise money. This is extra frustrating in an era in which all you read about is how frothy the VC / funding market is these days. People are raising in record times and with wacky valuations. It is not an uncommon story that this is happening but others are struggling.

As the economy gets better, holding on to your peak-performing employees is going to get harder and harder. You obviously can’t (or may not want to) hold on to all of your workers, but if one of your key players heads out the door, your small business could be in a tough spot.

So how do you keep top-notch employees? One way to learn is from the “talent masters.” The Talent Masters is the title of a recent book by Bill Conaty (formerly head of HR at General Electric) and Ram Charan, a business advisor, speaker and author who has coached some of the world’s most successful CEOs. The Economist recently took a look at some of the lessons from the book, which studied companies known to be “talent factories,” including GE and Procter & Gamble.

Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment is today releasing FDI Perspectives: Issues in International Investment. The 30 chapters in this volume, written by diverse experts on international investment, cover a wide range of issues in this field. Their purpose is to inform readers in a concise manner about some of the important issues and trends in the contemporary debate on FDI and to promote a wide-ranging discussion about the policy implications of major trends and events.

When a business brain like Michael E. Porter talks, people listen. He’s a Harvard Professor with 18 books published to his name and is believed to be the most cited author in business and economics (according to Wikipedia).

He also has some interesting views about capitalism.

In this interview by Harvard Business Review editor Adi Ignatius, Porter calls for the next evolution of capitalism to get going already.

Max Chafkin has a fantastic story in Inc magazine about how to structure an economy so as to encourage entrepreneurship, full employment, and general happiness and contentment, all while drastically reducing inequality. It’s easy, in fact: all you need to do is become Norway.

There’s loads of great stuff in this piece, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing. But a few things stand out.

Chafkin starts with the tale of Wiggo Dalmo, an industrial mechanic with a high-school education who chafed under his bosses, set up his own shop, and is now running a $44 million company with 150 employees. That’s the kind of story which should be common in the US but is in fact rare. But ask yourself: in the US, how much would such a person be paying in taxes? Dalmo paid $102,970 in personal taxes on his income and wealth last year, which is probably lower, not higher, than the CEO of a $44 million company would pay in taxes in the US.

Advanced internet technologies, energy management and the smart grid are coming together in an unlikely location: a mid-sized city in the South.

Chattanooga, Tenn.-based utility EPB hit two milestones in the last two weeks of 2010: it completed the final touches on one of the fastest internet pipelines in the world, and it activated the first automated switches on its electricity network. The combination constitutes the backbone for a DOE-funded smart grid network that’s expected to save the utility and area businesses tens of millions of dollars annually.

All creative professionals face creative blocks. Many times these blocks are caused by being overworked and burned out on creativity. Sometimes routine helps, but it can frequently hinder the brain juices. After all, variety is the spice of life.

As a creative professional there are definitely some related fields to your profession. Being a graphic designer with a degree, I could swear that college burned out my creativity. Then I discovered that I enjoyed photography as a hobby. I also like to sit at my drafting table and sketch. Both of these hobbies are related to the field of design, and both help me get creative.

The Venture Capital Trust Fund (VCTF) says it will create about 6,000 jobs if they are able to increase their total pool of funds to exceed $100million to support Small Medium Enterprises (SME’s).

The Trust Fund with a starting seed capital of $ 22.4million in 2006 was able to create an estimated 1,400 jobs in its participating communities and farmer-based organizations (FBO) with an over GHC45, 400 paid to communities as local council tax.

The Venture Capital Trust Fund was established by the Government of Ghana to provide capital to SMEs and to promote the Venture Capital industry in Ghana.

Thanks to Microsoft's Kinect, millions are casting aside their controllers and using their bodies to play games. Now the company that created the motion-tracking hardware for the Kinect wants to make waving your arms an accepted way to control everything from your TV to your desktop computer.

PrimeSense, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, makes a package that combines one or two conventional cameras, an infrared depth sensor, and specialized computer chips. Together they collect and interpret a person's movements in 3-D. The movements are calculated by projecting a grid of infrared light spots into a room, tracking how light bounces back, and correlating this with information from the stereo cameras. Certain motions can be translated into computer commands or, in the case of Kinect, used to control an on-screen avatar.

If anybody needs a feel-good moment in this winter of our discontent, it's Michael Bloomberg. When the embattled New York city mayor gave his State of the City address yesterday he hoped to take the spotlight off the issues that have recently bedeviled both city residents and City Hall: snow removal screw-ups, fraud in the payroll system, withering criticism over a new schools chancellor, and fury over neglect of the boroughs.

Another report on venture investing is being released today, this time showing a decline in fourth-quarter deal activity compared with the same quarter in 2009—albeit a slight uptick from the previous quarter—and a significant overall gain for the entire year.

Venture funding during the fourth quarter of 2010 amounted to $5 billion in 765 deals nationwide, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, based on data from Thomson Reuters. That represents a 6.8 percent drop in dollars invested and an 11 percent decline in deal count compared with the same quarter of 2009, when $5.4 billion went into 864 deals.

Venture capitalists invested $640 million in Washington state companies last year, an increase of 15 percent over 2009, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree Report. That's the good news. Now, the bad news. Investment levels are still way below the totals of 2006, 2007 and 2008 when an average of $1.1 billion was invested in the state annually.

Many people, especially those who have spent years struggling up the corporate ladder, dream of jumping ship and becoming an entrepreneur. But every job move is fraught with risk, and the move from employee to entrepreneur is on the high end of the risk curve. This is a big jump, especially in a down economy, so do your homework first on this one.

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review a while back, “Five Ways to Bungle a Job Change” there are at least five common missteps that professionals make when moving to a new job, and I will offer the comparable relevance for those of you contemplating leaving a company to initiate or join an entrepreneurial startup:

1. Not doing enough research. In moving to a new company, the questions to ask are expectations, financial stability, cultural fit, and role responsibilities. All of these apply directly to starting your own company. Test your “dream” startup plans on some experienced entrepreneurs to get a reality check before you leave your current job.

I’ve recently been engaged to help sell a very successful national franchise company and been able to observe firsthand many reasons why a franchise company grows to $10 million in sales through 600 nationwide locations. Last year I also worked on the other end of the spectrum, helping two business owners locate the necessary capital and expertise to begin the journey of becoming the next great franchise company.

These two experiences have helped deepen my understanding of the five Sacred Rules that distinguish great franchise opportunities. I offer them here, in case you are considering converting your business into a franchise company.

I saw the following explanation of why startups fail on Quora this morning:

Answer Summary

The top reasons are:
1. No one wants the product created.
2. Management teams lack flexibility to change direction when needed.
3. Resources (funding/time/labor) are managed poorly.
4. Inability or failure to obtain and/or maintain sufficient capital (for a variety of reasons), whether or not managed poorly.

One answer claims lack of luck is the main reason, leading to the conclusion success is random (as luck is random), leading to the conclusion the only way to succeed is to try a large enough number of times.
(Just flip a coin until you get "Heads").

The “Innovation for Associations” white paper proposes four barriers to innovation in associations: diffuse leadership, low tolerance for risk, unwillingness to commit resources and complex organizational structures. While these barriers certainly exist to varying degrees in most associations, they are not the real root causes of our community’s continuing struggle with innovation. Throughout my career working in and with associations, I have observed four other deep-seated obstacles that have rendered the phrase, “association innovation,” something of a contradiction in terms.

Our nation’s economic growth and competitiveness in 2011 will top the list of things to worry about among policymakers in Washington. The extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for another two years beginning January 1 means the debate over short-term economic stimulus is, hopefully, behind us. Now the fight over fiscal policy really begins. And the debate will focus on how to put our fiscal house in order, not whether we need to do so, which in turn means the term “investment” will be politically loaded—and hotly debated. After all, investment to some means future growth but to others is just federal pork to be cut or blocked.