During the course of my 25-year plus career in entrepreneurship, I’ve coached and interacted with several thousand entrepreneurs, ALL of whom had one or several emotional reasons that drove them to set out on their own.  Here I will discuss several emotional reasons people choose to become and remain an entrepreneur.  I will map those emotions and feelings to a structure with which you are probably already familiar:  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  We’ll start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up.  In case you need a refresher, here is the structure.

If the best indicator of a country’s growth is the number of new firms started every year, as Kauffman Foundation research indicates, how do we get more companies to start and grow? What’s the magic sauce?

That’s the subject of the latest animated video in the Kauffman Sketchbook series released today. In “Magic Sauce,” Kauffman President and CEO Carl Schramm points out that nearly 700,000 new businesses start every year, but the failure rate is high and many of them are not creating jobs. Schramm asks, “How do we make those firms more successful at the outset?”

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Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and partner at the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, is talking up a handful of companies he's invested in that make use of abundant materials—in some cases materials that get thrown away or burned up—to make valuable commodities and reduce carbon emissions and replace petroleum. He described the new companies today at the Emtech Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Solidia: The company, based on technology developed at Rutgers, is using carbon dioxide to make building materials that have the strength of concrete, but that rather than emitting one ton of carbon dioxide per ton of concrete, Joy says, it actually uses carbon dioxide as a building material.

The European Commission issued its first annual "competitiveness report" last week, assessing countries' economic performance under the newly agreed framework for budgetary surveillance, which foresees sanctions for countries with serious imbalances. Many states showed serious shortfalls, the report found.

The report, published on Friday (14 October), confirms the deep divide between North and West European countries on the one hand, and those on the South and East on the other hand.

Labour productivity and innovation are well above average in countries such as Ireland or Germany, while serious shortfalls were apparent in Bulgaria or Spain, the report shows.

Has the fundamental meaning of the word “student” changed? At a small conference in Madrid that attracted participants from countries ranging from Brazil to Russia, that was the most interesting question to emerge.

International conferences on higher education usually struggle to say something new, and the handful of journalists who cover them struggle even more to extract sense from the scattershot of sessions. But at the conference on Reinventing Higher Education, at IE University, which The Chronicle had a hand in organizing, the changing role of students popped out as a clear theme.

Steve Jobs, a biography by Walter Isaacson, will be released tomorrow.

Throughout the past week, multiple excerpts and surprising facts have been leaked.

We rounded up everything out there from the book, which is based on more than 40 interviews with Apple's remarkable founder.

Earlier this week, the season finale of Bloomberg's Techstars show aired.

Eight of the eleven startups from the incoming class reunited to talk about what has happened in the six months since Demo Day.

Some raised financing. Some changed ideas. Some died.

We caught up with all eleven startups and found out where they are now.

When I first started my business I never thought about selling internationally. It was overwhelming enough just selling my product in my own neighborhood. But now 90% of my business is international. The Internet has made international business more accessible for a small manufacturer. There are multiple ways to sell overseas with the click of a mouse. Being in the U.S. I always thought I’d manufacture my product in the U.S. But after trying it once and barely breaking even, I realized I would have to move my manufacturing to China, like most of the rest of the world. It took a few tries to find a good, honest factory, but I finally found the right one.

Running a small business requires a combination of both leadership and management skills. While leadership and management come easily for some business owners, many find that reading management books helps keeps them informed and current with today’s best management practices.

With thousands of books to choose from, it can be frustrating and overwhelming deciding on what to read. That’s why Small Business Trends has put together this list of top 10 best management books every small business owner should read

Developing countries should only establish world-class research universities once they have a good tertiary education system in place, says a World Bank report.

The report, 'Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class Research Universities' published earlier this month (6 October), examined the experience of 11 leading public and private research universities in nine countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

The top performers shared three key factors, it found. These were: high concentration of talented academics and students, abundant resources and strategic vision and leadership.

I CHALLENGE you to find a stump speech by a politician running for any office from dog catcher to president that doesn’t invoke the importance of small businesses.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a hat tip to American entrepreneurialism, evoking images like that of Steve Jobs planting a seed in his garage that grew into an amazing Apple orchard. Besides, don’t most people work for small businesses, and aren’t such businesses the engine of job growth?

ONE week from today, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date — the Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March — but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone.

The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding the second took another 120 or so years. Then, in the last 50 years, humanity more than doubled, surging from three billion in 1959 to four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987 and six billion in 1998. This rate of population increase has no historical precedent.

Start-up technology companies have some gripes about higher education. One is that universities routinely make it hard for the public to access basic data, like course catalogs and book prices at the campus bookstore. Another is that when trying to sell services to a college, like a Web service that allows faculty members and students to organize and share their research and online readings, companies can’t find the people who make the purchasing decisions.

Those complaints got a high-level airing Thursday at Educause, at a round-table discussion with Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. chief technology officer, who cautioned them that the gathering was not a pity party and “we are here to get things done.” Also listening was James H. Shelton III, the assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the Department of Education. University CIO’s were also in the circle, as well as officials from giant software companies, such as SunGard Higher Education, that provide the technology backbones for most universities.

We’ve heard warnings for a couple of years now that the chickens would come home to roost in the biotech venture capital scene. Quite a few VCs just haven’t delivered the returns to back up all their talk, and you can’t wait around forever for things to improve.

This drama is going to be long and painful, and it’s only just beginning. There were a lot of firms that raised their last funds before the financial crisis of 2008, and after putting much of the cash to work in startups, they are finding it much harder to raise new funds today. While some of what’s happening may be a necessary culling of the weaker members of the VC herd, this trend is going to make it tougher than ever for some worthy entrepreneurs to raise cash for new companies to develop drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics.

Large investors are placing their bets on early-stage venture capital funds to earn higher returns after investments in private equity (PE) funds failed to meet their expectations.

Returns expectation of investors from their investments in PE funds have dropped to as low as 15%-18% now from 22%-25%, according to three limited partners (LPs) Mint spoke with.

The LPs have so far invested their money in larger funds.

While most Venture Capital firms have their own unique styles and criteria, the investment fundamentals are fairly similar across the board. Here are ten tips to help your fundraising process along:

1. Be resourceful and find a way to get a warm introduction. Your first meeting is primarily about building credibility. LinkedIn is a great tool to find mutual contacts. In addition, use your local start-up community to find entrepreneurs who have successfully raised capital and see if they would be willing to help break the ice.

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) -- Israel's high-tech companies raised 53% more money from venture-capital investors in the third quarter than they did a year earlier, a trade group said Monday. The startups raised $522 million in Q3 from local and foreign investors against $341 million in the third quarter of 2010, the Israel Venture Capital Research Center and KPMG Somekh Chaikin Israel said in a statement. The latest figure fell 8.3% from the second quarter of 2011's $569 million. A total of 137 companies raised money in the third quarter, up 43% from 96 a year earlier, the IVC center said. Through the first three quarters of 2011, foreign VC investors have strengthened their presence in Israel while the contribution from local VCs has "markedly declined," said Kobi Simana, the research center's chief executive. The third-quarter funds raised went 22% each to software and to communications companies while Internet-related businesses got 18% and life sciences got 16%, the IVC said.

The persistent shakiness of global stock markets isn't just putting the hurt on your 401(k): It could be lowering the odds of the next Google (GOOG), Facebook or Apple (AAPL) seeing the light of day. Venture capital firms raised less money last quarter than at any point in the past eight years, according to the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Va. Wall Street's cool climate for initial public offerings of stock has made it tougher for venture firms to post the hefty returns they need to coax university endowments, pension funds and other so-called "limited partners" into ponying up for new investment funds.

The University’s revenue stream from inventions and developments took a big hit last year when one of its most lucrative funding sources came into the public domain.

In 2009, the revenues from licensing patent rights were about $30.5 million. The Association of University Technology Managers ranked it among the highest in the nation.

“In 2010, we’re looking at about $6.86 million,” said Derek Eberhart, senior licensing manager at the University’s Technology Commercialization Office.