Even in tough economic times, small businesses need to find new ideas, develop original products, and engineer fresh market approaches. These are the pillars of good business, and each is made from a mixture of creativity and expertise. While it may seem counterintuitive, it's possible to implement strategies that drive not only employee engagement, but also innovation and, ultimately, sales without enormous investment in systems or people.

What can your company do to remain fresh, vibrant and alive without breaking the bank? Here are five ways:

Did you ever have that nightmare- You know, the one where you’re getting ready to take your final exam, and you suddenly realize you haven’t been to class all semester? I still have that same dream, 25 years after graduating from Boston College! For me, I’m getting ready to take my Psychology final, knowing I’ve blown off most of the classes for the entire term. I’m totally screwed. Fortunately, I wake up and remember that I passed Psych by the skin of my teeth!

That recurring dream is simply my way of saying I still don’t know squat about Psychology, but I have definitely figured out a few things in the last few years of being a solo entrepreneur. As my penance for missing so many Psych classes, I’m happy to share my recent realizations, Freudian or otherwise:

It is all about the money.

You may tell yourself and others that it is more than that. That it is about helping/saving/serving humanity, which it most certainly can be about. At the end of the day however, it is about the greenbacks.

Here is the surprising thing, that is a good thing!

Acumen Fund is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. We seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services – like health, water, housing and energy – through innovative, market-oriented approaches.

As long as there have been successful Internet entrepreneurs, there have been attempts to nail down what makes them successful. Whether it's a fellow entrepreneur looking for an edge or an interested layperson who is simply curious to know more, no shortage of people are dying to know how the Internet's business visionaries reached the top. These business success stories aren't the result of a secret formula; rather, each entrepreneur possesses a number of characteristics unique to their pursuits. Here's a rundown of 12 of these traits, the entrepreneurs who have them and the companies they helped create.

Canaan Partners hosted a roundtable discussion with over 30 angel investors. This note summarizes the key discussion items.
Individuals & Groups

The participants included members from angel groups (Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels, each of which have made 18 investments till date) as well as individual angel investors. Many participants also reported that they invest both individually and through these groups. Members of the groups pointed out to several advantages of organizing themselves, including:

* Ensuring adequate capital availability through syndication
* Sharing the effort involved in making investments as well as managing them
* Availability of wider domain knowledge within the investing group

As the 2010 Winter Olympics draw near, a lot of experts -- including political pundits, sports commentators, high-school debating teams and one particularly opinionated chimp who writes a blog from the Calgary zoo -- are questioning some of our assumptions about the upcoming games in Vancouver.

Me, too.

Some people wonder if all that money could be better spent on other things, like housing the homeless, feeding the poor or building portable jetpacks.

Looking for venture capital? Or looking for great insights to grow your business?

Well, we've scoured a year's worth of great blog posts from hundreds of venture capitalists and industry experts, and are pleased to present you with our 50 favorite posts of 2009.

Some great information is included in these posts, and savvy entrepreneurs and investors will heed this advice.

And we'd love to hear your comments...what posts did we miss?

Enjoy!

1 There’s more to mathematics than grades and exams and methods. As an undergraduate, there is a heavy emphasis on grade averages, and on exams which often emphasize memorisation of techniques and theory than on actual conceptual understanding, or on either intellectual or intuitive thought. However, as you transition to graduate school you will see that there is a higher level of learning (and more importantly, doing) mathematics, which requires more of your intellectual faculties than merely the ability to memorise and study, or to copy an existing argument or worked example. This often necessitates that one discards (or at least revises) many undergraduate study habits; there is a much greater need for self-motivated study and experimentation to advance your own understanding, than to simply focus on artificial benchmarks such as examinations. Also, whereas at the undergraduate level and below one is mostly taught highly developed and polished theories of mathematics, which were mostly worked out decades or even centuries ago, at the graduate level you will begin to see the cutting-edge, "live" stuff - and it may be significantly different (and more fun) to what you are used to as an undergraduate!

[Plenty more on the original article. -Ed.]

Fourteen projects have been proposed for 1 billion baht in funding as part of the country's creative economy development programme.

The projects, including a plan to turn the popular Chatuchak market in Bangkok into Creative Chatuchak, are scheduled to be completed by Sept 30, 2010, said Deputy Commerce Minister Alongkorn Ponlaboot.

Of the planned projects, 10 are under the Commerce Ministry. Two will be operated jointly with the Education Ministry, one with the Finance Ministry and another one with the Culture Ministry.

All the time, people wonder “Why is Silicon Valley so awesome?” Now, obviously there’s the smart people, the great restaurants, the great night life (nola’s in palo alto?), the great shopping (Santana Row!), and the great abundance of Fry’s. And high housing costs ensuring people work their hardest.

But… there’s more! There’s the innovation. There’s the risk taking. There’s the riches. It’s what keeps attracting people from around to this humble valley (that just happens to be the best in the world). Learn more about the edge here, so you can understand why we’ll never lose it, why others can only dream of having it, and why this will ensure house prices continue to soar.

Why is it that only a few cities and regions around the world have become successful innovation hubs, even though many have tried? For the last few years I have been intrigued by this question.

Silicon Valley and the Boston-Cambridge area are among the most prominent such innovation hubs in the world. Their leading positions as technology-based innovation centers have been near impossible to replicate. Others have tried to become the Next Silicon Valley. A few of these efforts have achieved modest success, but most have fallen short of their goals.

Why is it so difficult? The reasons are varied. The prominence of Silicon Valley and the Boston-Cambridge area is closely related to the great engineering universities in their midst – Stanford and UC Berkeley, and MIT, respectively. It clearly takes quite a long time to build such world class universities.

BEIJING, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) -- China revised its 2008 gross domestic product (GDP) to 4.52 trillion U.S. dollars at the average exchange rate of 2008, narrowing the gap with Japan, the world's second largest economy with a GDP of 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars for the same year.

The revision resulted from China's second economic census which raised the country's 2008 economic growth rate to 9.6 percent from9 percent.

Given an estimate of more than 8 percent growth rate for China in 2009, accompanied by Japan's shrinking economy amid the global economic downturn, the country, currently the world's third largest economy, was poised to overtake Japan as the second largest.

I like this story from the 15 October 2009 issue of the journal Nature, about how a pair of blogs allowed dozens of contributors to collaboratively solve a theorem that no single mathematician had been able to solve: the Density Hales-Jewitt Theorem (DHJ for short). The mathematician who created the blog was Timothy Gowers, a Professor at the University of Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, the highest honor a mathematician can receive. Even someone of Gowers’ high caliber was not able to solve the theorem. So he decided to try an experiment: He posted on his blog an invitation, to join a collaborative process of working on the theorem. He called it “The Polymath Project.”

Markets move based on new innovation. Market leaders know this and constantly look for ways to create and bring innovation to market.

Are You Thinking About Innovation?

Accenture writes: To further understand how companies are addressing innovation in this economic climate, Accenture conducted an online survey of more than 630 executives in May, 2009 in the United States and United Kingdom. Respondents represented a broad cross-section of industries – including automotive, banking, capital markets, consumer goods and services, electronics and high tech, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and medical products, and retail.

There are many problems a small business owner or entrepreneur faces while at the start up phase of a business. Most of the time it is revolves around not having enough resources to meet the needs of the growing company or just to stay above water. Apart from getting funds through bank loans, your personal savings and venture or angel capital, there is an often overlooked resource that could be a windfall for the business if it becomes successful. This source of money and publicity is business contests. They are usually organized by bigger companies, universities or whoever, where small businesses and entrepreneurs are encouraged to submit a business plan to be considered in the contest to win cash of free service.

If you are like most people you will not even bother about it, maybe saying that you have never won anything before so there is no need in trying or write it off as one of those get rich quick scams. However, most of them are authentic, but it would be good idea to do a quick search online to learn more about the contest or the company offering it. There are a few strategies you can use to give your business a fighting chance in the competition and they include:-

• Read The Instructions
• Mail It In
• Be Well Prepared
• The Harder You Work The Luckier You Get

We vividly remember the day, May 26, 2007, when we (RouteGuru) launched our key product, landmark-based driving directions. All major digital media blogs in India went abuzz with the appreciation for the innovation as well as speculations about scaling it.

Last week, Google introduced landmark-based driving directions, a global first for Google Maps. The news about this launch found a place in Google’s worldwide blog as well. And once again, all major digital media blogs, this time globally, are abuzz with the news.

I know we haven’t officially finished all the winter holidays yet, but they’re quickly on their way out. Sorry. That means it’s time to get your site ready for the New Year. Below is a checklist of some of the things you should be looking at as we ring the New Years bell and head into 2010. You don’t want to start 2010 off already looking out of style, do you? Your competitors won’t be.

Remove the holiday images: I know, they’re cute and make you feel festive, but by Monday these should be gone. Keeping up your Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever logos makes it looks like your site is still on vacation and that customers should go elsewhere for timely service. That’s not the message you want to send. It’s time for Santa to go back into hibernation.

A new E23 million expansion of the AIB Seed Capital Fund designed to help Ireland's entrepreneurs has been launched by the Government.

The E23m expansion will bring the total fund size to E53 million and will target investments in start up and early stage businesses with a particular focus on technology, financial services, clean and green sectors, and also businesses in the medical devices sectors. AIB and Enterprise Ireland are joint partners in the new E23m fund expansion, contributing E15m and E8m respectively.

The Fund is managed on behalf of AIB and Enterprise Ireland by Dublin Business Innovation Centre (DBIC) and Enterprise Equity which collectively have over 40 years experience in helping small businesses to develop and providing equity capital. It is administered from NovaUCD located on campus within University College Dublin.

This Christmas season we find many families struggling financially and the burden to make things "merry and bright" is palpable in all parts of our nation. Buying gifts this year is a low priority for many who are faced with the current economic challenges. Yes, these are lean financial times, but I believe there is no better time to encourage a child to become entrepreneurial than during the holidays.

As the creator of a company dedicated to supporting entrepreneurism for kids, I'm a proponent of promoting an early education in true capitalism. This rough economic time can be a teaching moment and the lessons learned in the process can be some of the most valuable, intangible gifts we can provide to our children that will benefit them throughout life. With American families spending 52% less on Christmas gifts due to financial issues, this season is a prime opportunity for our kids to step up and earn some money for themselves—becoming less dependent on the home budget and gratified in contributing to the family in ways they never knew they could.