HONG KONG — The United States is too reliant on China for minerals crucial to new clean energy technologies, making the American economy vulnerable to shortages of materials needed for a range of green products — from compact fluorescent light bulbs to electric cars to giant wind turbines.

So warns a detailed report to be released on Wednesday morning by the United States Energy Department. The report, which predicts that it could take 15 years to break American dependence on Chinese supplies, calls for the nation to increase research and expand diplomatic contacts to find alternative sources, and to develop ways to recycle the minerals or replace them with other materials.

At least 96 percent of the most crucial types of the so-called rare earth minerals are now produced in China, and Beijing has wielded various export controls to limit the minerals’ supply to other countries while favoring its own manufacturers that use them.

Need extra cash to move your business forward? Maybe you want to hire new people, buy a building, expand your inventory, or take your business to the next level, whatever that may be. Word on the street is that banks have money to lend.

Here are five questions you should consider before you begin the funding process: 

1. How much is my business worth, today? 

This is crucial for banks and investors. Is your company/business worth enough to cover the investment? Hiring new workers is a key motivation in today’s high market of unemployment. Even with an investment or a loan, hiring new workers means having a sustainable business model that is going to last more than another year or two. Those new workers want some long-term security, as do your investors.

I was recently speaking with some founders about their fund raising process. They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm. I personally had three separate data points from entrepreneurs who took money from the firm that said “never again.”

I really try to stay out of the middle of these things so I softly said to the team, “maybe you should contact these companies and see how their experience went?” From there I figure they can both figure out what to discuss – or not. One bad comment doesn’t always scare me as there’s often two sides to every situation. But three from different, independent sources? Pattern, me thinks.

If you are new to the startup space and angel investing, you probably don’t realize that some groups of angel investors charge entrepreneurs a fee to pitch to their groups. This practice has caused a rousing debate among key players, with some calling it a scam, and others defending it as necessary to cover expenses.

Jason Calacanis, a well-known entrepreneur and angel investor, opened the debate about a year ago in a strongly-worded article on his blog which attacked the practice on ethical grounds, and called out popular angel groups charging fees ranging from several hundred dollars to $5,000 or more. He calls these a scam, and “angel group” payola.

Others, including noted angel David S. Rose, head of the New York Angels and Angelsoft, have spoken out in defense of the practice, at least for smaller amounts, commenting that, aside from covering expenses, it also provides a degree of “filtering”.

Infections resulting from joint-replacement surgeries are costly and potentially deadly. Now researchers at MIT are developing coatings for medical implants that can be loaded with multiple drugs, including antibiotics that are released over time. The process involves layering antibiotic films, which are released over the short term, onto a permanently antibacterial polymer designed to prevent infection over the long term.

About one percent of knee and hip replacement surgeries result in infection; the number rises to three to five percent for second surgeries. "It's a low rate, but if you are the one out of one hundred who gets an infection, the complications are catastrophic," says Lloyd Miller, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles. All the infected tissue and hardware must be surgically removed and replaced with an antibiotic block; the patient cannot walk for six to eight weeks while being treated with intravenous antibiotics to eliminate all traces of infection; and then a revision surgery is done. Complications due to infection are also enormously expensive. A joint replacement costs about $30,000 in the United States, but dealing with infections can raise the tab to nearly $150,000.

Becoming your own boss has sort of gained a global appeal. These days many people start up their own businesses for virtually any reason. Somehow it doesn’t seem to count anymore what led people to go into business, going into business has suddenly become the new mantra of the 21st century. Obviously, there are several factors owing to this global trend some of which are; the emergence of the Internet, the unreliability of job security, the God-like attention given to successful entrepreneurs, the rise of the knowledge worker and so on. In the end, it’s not the number of businesses that are being started that matters, but the number of businesses that thrive.

Therefore, in this article I will be x-raying some of the ways how NOT to start a business so that in the end, you can have the right mindset needed to start a business. I welcome you to join me in this exciting journey and as you go through this unusual article I want you to constantly bear this in mind, failure in business is usually as a result of how you start. It is the beginning of a thing that often predicts the end. As always, I encourage you to share this unusual information with as many entrepreneurs as possible and don’t forget to share your thoughts and opinion in the comment box below. There’s no way you’re going to read this, without having one or two things to say; trust me, it’s just too unusual for you to keep quiet.

Entrepreneurship is now a pretty big deal. Business schools all over the world have courses in this area and some even make it their major focus of teaching and research. Governments are also interested in entrepreneurs and routinely ask themselves how they can develop a more entrepreneurial national culture. Many years ago, an economist called Schumpeter recognized that risk taking and trying new technologies and business ideas was essential for economic growth. However, the current fascination with entrepreneurs would have even surprised Schumpeter.

I mainly spend my time working on innovation and strategy but over the years I’ve seen the rise of the entrepreneurship field and kept notes on some ideas that I have found interesting. One of these is the issue of nature versus nurture. In other words, is there an inherent psychological bias that makes an entrepreneur or is it something that can be learned and developed? This question matters because if entrepreneurship is largely psychological then government and business school efforts to increase the number of new ventures through training might have limited effects.

Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.

You would give yourself a few seconds to imagine tasting and chewing one truffle. (If there’s a picture on the box, you could focus on it.) Then you would imagine eating another, and then another and another...until at last you could open the box of real chocolates without making a total pig of yourself. And then you could start on fantasies of other vices you wanted to eliminate.

So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.

"Thank goodness for muscle memory," I told my wife early last Tuesday morning. She looked at me quizzically (this is not all that unusual). I went on to explain how muscle memory was going to be my saving grace that day.

You see, late last Sunday night, we returned from a family trip to the United States and England. Dealing with the jet lag that comes from 13 time zone changes is tough enough for adults. But it's hard to explain to a 2-year-old who is up at 2 a.m. that she really ought to be asleep when her body is telling her otherwise.

So Monday night had been a rough night, involving late night game playing, cereal eating, and iTouch watching. And Tuesday featured two different talks with large organizations in Singapore. To make matters worse, somewhere along the way I picked up a cold.

Organizations use a variety of tools to motivate employees to participate in their innovation efforts.

The most common form of motivation involves compensation via a points system. When you contribute an idea, solution, comment or vote, you get points – much like American Express Membership Rewards points – that can be used to buy a variety of items: company T-shirts, mugs, and other “exciting” things. For some reason this reminds me of the arcade games like skeeball where you would win tickets that could be exchanged for wonderful items like fake vampire fangs or rubber spiders.

LANSING – Ann Arbor SPARK President and CEO Michael Finney will take on that role for the entire state, named today by Gov.-elect Rick Snyder to run the daily operations of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. In a joint press conference with Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Snyder also announced that Doug Rothwell, who ran the agency in the Engler administration, would chair the MEDC's 20-member executive committee.

All current 20 members, Granholm appointees serving staggered terms that would have run into the Snyder administration, resigned last week per the agreement of transition officials in both the Granholm and Snyder camps. As part of that collaboration, Granholm appointed 10 members to the committee, including several reappointments and Snyder appointed 10.

MONTPELIER — State and local officials on Thursday formally announced e-Corp English’s plans to grow in Middlebury and confirmed details of a state aid package that helped woo the English-language training company to Addison County’s shire town.

The company’s plans, first reported by the Addison Independent, call for an initial work force of 35 workers to locate next year in a vacant 6,700-square-foot space at 1197 Exchange St. Deborah Schwarz, founder and president of e-Corp English, hopes to expand that work force to more than 100 within the next three years.

Gov.-elect Peter Shumlin, Middlebury selectboard Chairman John Tenny and Gov. James Douglas — a Middlebury Republican — announced e-Corp’s impending arrival with Schwarz at a press conference in Montpelier on Thursday.

Toronto-based leadership coach Robin Sharma says that even if we aren't artists, we all have the ability to be creative - including leaders. "Who sold us on the lie that only artists and poets and musicians are creative?" he writes in his e-newsletter. To help tap your creativity, he invites you to consider the eight faces of creativity, drawn from the most creative people he has observed:

Connect, the San Diego non-profit group dedicated to supporting technology innovation and entrepreneurism, named the winners of its “Most Innovative New Product” awards at a luncheon ceremony Friday. This year, San Diego’s innovation community nominated more than 100 new products—a record number of nominees—which prompted Connect CEO Duane Roth to note in a statement that “the true measure of an innovation economy is the volume of research that translates into successful products.”

The group also named TurboTax as the recipient of this year’s Otterson Award, which Connect describes as the highlight of its ceremony. The award, created in memory of Connect’s founding executive director, Bill Otterson, recognizes technologies or products developed in San Diego that have demonstrated a “significant positive impact on quality of life.” San Diego’s ChipSoft developed TurboTax during the early 1980s and Mountain View, CA-based Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) acquired ChipSoft in 1993. Since its launch in 1984, TurboTax has grown to become the nation’s best-selling tax preparation software.

One of the most important attributes of a patent is its term or duration of enforceability. In 1995, the US patent system began calculating patent term based on the priority filing date of an application rather than a patent's issue date. Under the prior rule, a patent would remain in force for 17 years from the date of issue. Under the “new” system, the term is 20–years from the priority filing date. The three extra years were intended to account for a typical prosecution delay of three years. In addition, Congress added a patent-term-adjustment (PTA) provision to lengthen the patent term in instances where the USPTO unduly delayed in issuing a patent.

Study: For this study, I wanted to consider how the change has actually impacted patent term. To do this, I created a database of 50,000 recently issued patents and calculated the term under both the old and new system. For the calculation under the new system, I added 20–years to the earliest priority date (excluding provisional and original foreign filing dates) and then added any patent-term-adjustment. To calculate the term under the old system, I added 17–years to the issue date unless the patent had a family member (e.g., continuation application) with an earlier issue date. In that case, I added 17–years to the issue date of the family member based on an assumption that a terminal disclaimer would have been filed in the case. Because of some potential data discrepancies, I excluded the extreme 1% of results and also patents on applications filed proir to the 1995 change-over.

After a series of recent European tech conferences, Silicon Valley continues to dominate. Tech venture capital on this side of the Atlantic still remains relatively small, due to bureaucracy, language problems.

It was hard to ignore the dominance of Silicon Valley at this year's LeWeb tech conference last week in Paris - nearly all the speakers and featured guests were from California's famed tech hub.

While European innovation is picking up speed, it is starting from a long way behind the American startup scene - participants at the conference blamed over-cautious investors and misguided government spending.

I highly recommend mapping your organization or community genome. Understanding the basic genetic code or wiring of any organization is key to understanding what drives the behavior of both internal and external stakeholders. Intimate knowledge of the genome’s chromosomal makeup is a prerequisite for alignment and making meaningful progress. It explains why employees, customers, and collaborators are attracted to an organization or why they aren’t. Passion for an organization, community, or movement is coded at the genetic level. If you want to transform an organization or a system, forget process reengineering and think genetic reengineering. If you want to launch a movement make your genome transparent and accessible to anyone with a similar genetic make-up.

I offer up the BIF genome as an example and with the hope you will improve it. The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is catalyzing a movement to transform the next decade. This is no time to think small! Together with a growing community of passionate innovators we are re-imagining the future of education, health care, energy, and entrepreneurship. We have identified and mapped 11 chromosomes that comprise the genome of the BIF innovation community and transformation movement. Do they resonate with you? Do you share a similar genetic make-up? If yes, do we have a movement for you!

Gina del Monte wasn't planning to go to college in Philadelphia - until she visited St. Joseph's University.

Growing up in Wildwood, she had her sights set on schools in Washington when a friend at St. Joe's took her on a tour of the campus.

"I looked around and said, 'This is it,' " she said. "I just fell in love with the area."

Now a graduate, del Monte lives in Manayunk, working as an account analyst at the Graham Co. in Center City.

Del Monte is part of what Campus Philly says is a growing trend of students choosing to stay in Philadelphia.

Have you ever read about a start-up and were so intrigued that you wanted to invest in it? And then learned that unless you knew someone involved in the company it was nearly impossible? A new online investment service called MicroVentures might just get you in the door.

The Austin-based company matches companies seeking money with investors looking to invest anywhere from $250 to $5,000 or more. Microventures helps investors learn about companies they may never have heard of, and helps them invest smaller sums, which is virtually unheard of with traditional investing. There is no fee or obligation to invest.