Having an uncertain income is one of the things that people find frightening about going into business for themselves. Unlike a salary earned from working for someone else, future business profits are hard to predict. And people like to be able to forecast what they will earn in coming years.

While the the unpredictability of business income is something that makes people everywhere apprehensive about business ownership, how big this fear is varies a great deal across countries. A random survey of the population of 36 countries undertaken in 2009 indicated that only 19 percent of the population in South Korea but 59 percent in Lithuania saw an uncertain income as one of the two scariest aspects of starting a company (see below).

MBA Mondays is back after a week off. Today we are going to talk about burn rate, or cash burn rate to be more specific.

Your burn rate is the speed at which your cash balance is going down. If you had $1mm in cash on January 1st, and now it is October 1st and you have $250,000 left, your burn rate is $750,000/9, or $83,333/month. Just to be perfectly clear the $750,000 in this calculation is the amount of cash that has gone out the door ($1mm minus $250,000 is $750,000). And the 9 is the number of months that have transpired (January through September is nine months).

Last week, Erick wrote about the dramatic increase in startups and early-stage businesses we’ve been seeing over the last few years, likening the phenomenon to the Cambrian Explosion. In these fertile times for startups, naturally, there’s plenty of funding to be had: In the last year, according to CrunchBase, there were more than 1,100 seed/angel funding rounds, up from 855 in 2008.

There are fewer barriers to startup creation now than ever before, and as businesses pop up left and right, so have the incubators and accelerators that provide these companies with the early fuel they need to build their products. Y Combinator, one of the more well-known startup incubators in the world, is now receiving over one application every minute, for example, and recently expanded the size of its classes to keep pace with demand.

In previous months, we've covered here in ReadWriteWeb a new and emerging concept called crowdfunding - a way for entrepreneurs, especially apps developers, to obtain just enough funding to get off the ground, by way of a handful of collected funding sources contributing no more than $1,000 each. It's a superb alternative for businesses as small as one person to build an app and place it in the cloud.

The problem is, it's not officially legal. Not that there's any enforcement against the practice at the moment; in fact, last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved by a vote of 407 - 17 language that amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, in order to exempt crowdsourced funds from having to clear legal hurdles from every state from which a member contributes funding.

Robert Kaplan and David Norton popularized the Balanced Scorecard twenty years ago. Its simple, visual framework helps organizations depict linked sets of goals that define strategy. Today, with new mindsets, practices, and technologies, people have more opportunities to engage in helping their organizations envision the future. The scorecard, however, can at times seem like an Easter Island statue, offering mute, impenetrable witness to firm performance. In this article Doug Collins explores opportunities for people to bring alive the scorecard by applying the practice of collaborative innovation.

Every year hundreds of millions of pounds are spent on consumer and market research. All those involved in NPD will know how a myriad of research projects is deemed fundamental. Yet, managers across the globe may be wasting a good portion of their research budget. Learn more on how to leverage research results and create new opportunities in this article by Bryan Urbick, Chairman of Consumer Knowledge Centre.

The U.S. is currently home to a suite of national laboratories that conduct cutting-edge research. Throughout the country, this network of 17 labs (overseen by the Department of Energy) focuses on a wide array of basic science and engineering questions. The results of this research have spurred innovation and technology development for more than seven decades. And, through the technology transfer process, the discoveries unearthed within these institutions – from low-e window coatings to hybrid solar lighting – have the chance to leave the research world and make significant impacts in the marketplace.

The ACA voiced support for pending legislation in the House and Senate to make it easier for entrepreneurs to raise early stage capital. They put their position in a good context with angel financing which is the ACA’s focus as the national association of angel capital groups.  The ACA also mentioned the need for coordinated legislation with crowdfunding for angel capital (re: S. 256). See the ACA’s public statement below:

Public Statement on Crowdfunding Legislation

December 5, 2011

The Angel Capital Association (ACA) wishes to provide our support for the concept of crowdfunding, currently addressed in H.R.2930 and S.1791. ACA is the North American trade association of angel groups and private investors that invest in high growth, early‐stage ventures. ACA membership includes more than 160 angel groups and 20 affiliate organizations across North America. ACA member angel groups represent more than 7,000 accredited investors. Our focus is on professional development for accredited investors active in supporting some of the nation’s highest growth startups.

There's a lot of debate about the future of labor in America: Will manufacturing ever come back? Will automation be a job destroyer? Will we all be freelancers working from home, shifting from gig to gig every 6 months?

It's all interesting to think about, but if you want to place one solid bet on the future of jobs in America, this chart would be a pretty simple place to start. Regardless of where the economic cycle is, health care jobs just keep going up in a straight line.

There are countless inventions throughout the year, but only a few have the capacity to change the world.

From a sassy digital personal assistant to a mirror of the future, here are our picks for the most impressive breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine.

You won’t learn about it in business school, hear about it from Wall Street, or see it in Palo Alto. But if you spend time in Bushwick, Brooklyn, or on Rivington Street in Manhattan, you just might detect the outlines of an emerging “indie” capitalism. This new form of capitalism is not just about conventional startups and technology and venture capitalists. If you add up all the trends under way today, I believe we are beginning to see the start of something original, and perhaps wonderful. It may prove to be the economic and social antidote to the failed financial capitalism and crony capitalism that no longer delivers economic value in terms of jobs, income, and taxes to the people of this country.

The investment landscape continues to go through a prolonged roller coaster ride this year, and we’ve seen the IPO window open and narrow on almost a weekly basis. Despite the mercurial ride, investors infused $7.9B in 790 firms in Q3, setting the investing pace on the best trajectory we’ve seen in the last decade.

Many entrepreneurs are also facing an uphill climb because while VCs are still investing in startups, they are doing so with far more caution and discretion. On the bright side, the micro and early-stage VC market continues to attract new money and announce new funds, providing entrepreneurs with an attractive avenue for capital.

Over the last decade, more than 3 million Americans have lost their jobs as factory workers. It is a safe bet that most have little in common with Suzanne Berger. She has spent four decades as a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has 50 scholarly tomes and treatises to her credit, several written in French. She stands about 5 feet tall.

She does not, in other words, fit the stereotype of a burly worker on an assembly line. But Berger and other academics like her may represent the new face of American manufacturing.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Lee Redden, 26, a Ph.D. student in engineering at Stanford, recently decided to shelve his education and help found a start-up company. His skills lie in a couple of red-hot niches of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning. Yet he is not applying his talents to Internet search, online commerce or intelligence surveillance.

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times TRAINING Blue River Technology, a start-up company, is teaching its robot to tell crops from weeds. Mr. Redden’s ambitions are further afield — in farm fields, actually. His company, Blue River Technology, is developing a robotic weed killer for organic farms, which shun chemical pesticides. The new venture, he said, is “a great way to bring this technology to agriculture.”

He might have been content simply to teach thousands of university students in Uganda how to use computers, assemble them into networks, manage them and write basic software programs. In a poor African country with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations and rising Internet use, that alone would have been an enormous achievement.

But Venansius Baryamureeba had bigger ideas. In 2005, when he returned home with a doctorate from the University of Bergen in Norway, he was just one of a handful of computer scientists in Uganda. And his timing was right. The largely agricultural economy had been growing by about 7 percent annually, propelling an enormous expansion of the upper middle class and the urban elite’s aspirations for advanced training in science and engineering.

Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers — room-size behemoths — were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.

For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”

Everyone knows that innovation means coming up with the next great idea in your industry, right? Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that. Test your ability to separate innovation fact from fiction by answering the following questions true or false:

• Innovation is the act of coming up with new and creative ideas.
• Innovation is a random process.
• Innovation is the exclusive realm of a few naturally talented people.
• The biggest obstacle to innovation is a lack of organizational resources and know-how.
• The most important type of innovation involves bringing new products and services to market.

To what extent are you responsible for innovation in your company? The reality is that unless they're in research or product development, most people in organizations don't think of themselves as innovators. In fact, many managers discourage their people from inventing new ways of doing things — pushing them instead to follow procedures and stay within established guidelines.

I was reminded of this distinction between "official innovators" and "everyone else" when I met with a group of high potential managers in a consumer products company. While everyone agreed that innovation should be accelerated in the firm, many felt powerless to act on it. "After all," they said, "new products need to come out of the labs."

Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome, yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell. How does this gigantic genome—which would stretch 2 meters if you unwound it from its 5-micron-wide coil in the nucleus—actually go about its work?

To get to the bottom of this central question, he parlayed his mathematics major into applied math and health sciences and technology Ph.D. work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, where he is currently a Harvard Fellow. Today in the journal Science, he explains the fruit of this work: a technique for mapping the genome that has already shed light on the human genome in all its 3-D glory. The essay won this year’s GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.

Ever heard someone say “Their head is stuck in the sand”?Such expressions refer to people who are oblivious to the obvious because they can’t see outside of their own limited perspectives.  Just like having one’s head stuck in the sand.

With the ongoing deluge of all things social anyone with any kind of experience all of a sudden are experts in the minds of those with no experience. People tend to listen to the most popular and as such consider popular as meaning something significant. It doesn’t and never will unless one’s popularity is used to do something meaningful.