Despite the potential pitfalls, thousands of companies continue to incorporate design thinking into their business process, often with outstanding results. In an era when almost every product or service on the market is at least satisfactory and efficiencies have largely been optimized, innovation is still the most effective way for a company to differentiate its offering.

For the company that wants to begin pursuing this path, a new perspective is essential, whether it takes the form of a newly created internal innovation group, a shake-up of the executive team, or the engagement of a consultancy. In each of these cases, matching expectations with reality is crucial. In the case of the consultancy--my area of expertise--there’s also the relationship to consider.

While sitting in a group of young entrepreneurs at a panel discussion in Mountain View last month, I was struck by how many of them felt like they needed investor money simply to validate the existence of their companies. Having recently closed a $4.4 million venture round, I was there to speak about my fundraising experience as an entrepreneur, founding ReadyForZero, an online software program that helps people manage their challenging financial situations. The panel discussion--an exclusive event hosted by Y Combinator--was meant to introduce newly accepted YC companies to alumni who have successfully raised outside investment dollars for their companies and candidly discuss and demystify the process. Just one year prior, my cofounder and I had attended this very same panel discussion as a new YC team and listened to war stories from alumni and other inspiring entrepreneurs. I had come back to return the favor, admittedly, feeling only slightly more prepared than I was the first time.

As I listened to their questions, though, I noticed a lot of them started with something like: “This other company, that is doing something completely different than us, raised $X million last week...so we need to raise at least that much to succeed.” As a startup, it's common to compare yourself to other startups; in this case it was the only way they were measuring their company’s success.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Diann Daniel for an article she recently posted about healthcare IT careers. It’s worth checking out if you’re looking to enter the health IT field.

Here was my advice during the interview:

• Hiring managers are making a mistake if they aren’t looking outside of healthcare for filling IT roles. The only roles that can not be filled by outsiders are in clinical engineering and application-specific specialists. For all other infrastructure and integration work you can hire pretty much any qualified IT personnel and they will be able to help you. If you have a choice, then certainly go for the health / medical experience but these days we don’t always have the choice.

AngelSoft, a New York company that makes software for investors, is creating an online marketplace to introduce potential backers to entrepreneurs, betting on an uptick in financial matchmaking from the service.

Founded in 2004 by New York angel investor David Rose, 54, AngelSoft is launching the site for early investment in startups and changing its name to Gust today. The service, which is available to AngelSoft’s 150 venture-capital funds and 35,000 angel investors, adds features for entrepreneurs to post their progress confidentially as well as to manage investor relations.

Selling a business is not like selling a car. It is an ongoing process that can take a few years to complete. Not only must the owner find the right buyer, they must find a buyer at the right price, and someone who is willing to meet his terms. DO you want to remain with the company once the sale is complete? You must find a buyer who will meet your needs.

When Teresa Walsh, Bonnie Kelly, and Jerry Kelly decided to sell Silpada Designs to Avon, they discovered just how long this process could take. Although the company was sold last year, the process really began a few years before, reports USA Today.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama proposed the American Jobs Act to create new jobs for millions of Americans. A key component of the proposal is to reduce regulation for startups, especially in crowdfunding.

Currently, websites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter offer the opportunity for people to contribute small amounts of money to new ventures. Under the President’s proposal, startups could offer equity to small scale investors, which might fuel a new wave of crowdfunding startups. Larger startups would have reduced regulatory costs for going public, with “mini” public offerings. Companies participating could raise up to $50 million, rather than the current limit of $5 million.

I remember my first video game console vividly.

I was in grade three. After a stellar report card, my parents took me straight from school to Zellers, where I received a brand new, Japanese-made Sega Genesis – a 16-bit gaming system with a blazing 8mhz processor (today’s smartphones are a mere 1000mhz).  It was my entry to computer-generated ecstasy and I’ll never forget it.

IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Tech Coast Angels (TCA), the nation's largest angel investment network, today announced the formation of the Angel Syndication Network (ASN), an affiliation of angel investment groups across the U.S. that have banded together to provide entrepreneurs with more and larger financing rounds before leaving the angel system.

According to Richard Sudek, chairman of the TCA Syndication Committee, "ASN is a dynamic new opportunity for entrepreneurs. Previously, start-up companies might go to a single angel group to receive their initial financing, but when they required additional funds, they had to go through the same due diligence at other angel networks. Or they had to try to make the leap to venture capital, sometimes before they were ready. Now, these companies can start up with any of our ASN partners and have access to the funds and support of the other groups when they need it. They can take any on-ramp and access the same freeway."

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is investing billions of dollars to promote economic development in rural areas by bringing broadband service and small-business financing to regions with chronic poverty and high unemployment.

But critics say the administration has little to show for its efforts, which highlight the difficulties of creating jobs in remote areas. They say the money has gone to areas where it is not needed, to promote broadband where it already exists and for industrial parks designed to attract business and jobs that may never materialize.

In its State of the Population report in 2007, the United Nations Population Fund made this ringing declaration:  “In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas.”

The agency’s voice was one of many trumpeting an epoch-making event.  For the last several years, newspaper and magazine articles, television shows and scholarly papers have explored the premise that  because most of the world now lives in urban rather than in rural areas things are going to be, or at least should be, different.  Often the conclusion is that cities may finally get the attention they deserve from policy makers and governments.  This optimism dovetails nicely with a sizeable literature of urban advocacy chronicling the rejuvenation of central cities and extolling the supposed virtues of high-density city living, even predicting the withering away of the suburbs.

President Obama threw down the gauntlet to Congress today, releasing his plan for the American Jobs Act, a $447 billion legislative proposal to jumpstart the economy that creates a number incentives for employers to start—and keep—hiring. The plan includes a payroll tax holiday for small business that hire new employees as well as for those who raise salaries. Other incentives include cutting payroll taxes on the first $5 million in payroll and extending “100% expensing” that allows firms to take an immediate deduction on investments in new plants and equipment.

Another interesting idea put forward in the AJA is the “Bridge to Work” program—modeled off a similar program in Georgia that offers unemployment benefits to those who take unpaid positions with companies designed to give them an opportunity to re-enter the workforce and build new skills. The program would provide a boost in productivity to companies that had been forced to down-size, while helping the under- and unemployed to acquire critical skills for newer industries.

Over time I have become increasingly confused as to the meaning of “youth entrepreneurship.” Here in the United States, invariably, the Small Business Administration adheres to the same definition as youth entrepreneurship advocates such as DECA and NFTE who serve high school age Americans and even younger. However, the World Bank and other multinational development organizations appear to be referring to anyone under the age of 40. Further still, private sector global entrepreneurship charities such as the respected Prince’s Youth Business International (YBI)—Prince Charles’s charity—narrow it to between 18 and 25. While the myth of entrepreneurs as “modern day Mozarts” in garages (to borrow Carl Schramm’s phrase) is slowly being dispelled, it seems our human instinct to avoid conversations about age is alive and well!

The reason this matters now is because governments and non-governmental organizations around the globe appear to be ramping up investment in “youth enterprise.”

I've found myself thinking a lot about the research being conducted by the Startup Genome Project these days. The data is an absolute goldmine and provides quantitative benchmarks for issues I've thought about for years. One of the findings from their first report was:

"Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money." This certainly maps to my experience as a founder and also working with other entrepreneurs. However, in most cases it's a little more complex than that, as I find a number of goals typically intertwine to get people to jump in and start a business.

Auren Hoffman is the CEO of Rapleaf, a personal-data aggregator that has been the subject of a remarkable amount of controversy but is wildly useful as a data provider to must-see apps like Rapportive and Gist.

While Hoffman's company may know a lot about you as a web user and person, he knows a lot of people himself the old-fashioned way, in real life. Introduced before keynoting at Austin, Texas's Capital Factory Demo Day as "the most-connected person in Silicon Valley," Hoffman gave a really interesting talk about how he handles hiring at his company. I live blogged his talk on Google Plus and offer my notes below.

Last week's post on valuation brought a couple questions about EBITDA. The first of which is how do you pronounce that acronym? The answer to that question is e-bit-dah. The second of which is what does it mean? The answer to that is Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization.

The way I like to think about EBITDA is the pre-tax cash earning power of the business. It is not much different than the notion of Operating Income which is revenue minus cost of goods sold and operating expenses. But it takes out the two big non-cash items in an income statement, depreciation and amortization.

PHILADELPHIA, September 13, 2011 – Acting U.S. Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank, Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Karen Mills, Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter and Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Co-Chairman of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE), celebrated new federal support for innovative entrepreneurs, small businesses, research and commercialization innovation at a meeting of NACIE. Administrator Mills acknowledged two Pennsylvania winners, out of twenty across the country, of the SBA’s new, competitive Intermediary Lending Pilot (ILP) Program. Philadelphia was the only city in the nation with two organizations receiving funds through the ILP.

The award provides $1 million each to Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern PA and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) to invest in regional startups and to grow small businesses. This funding will provide a new source of financing to drive economic growth and job creation.

Diabetes affects more than one in 10 Americans, with the numbers projected to keep climbing. The chronic disease can mean frequent needle jabs to test blood sugar levels—and costly treatments. And there is still no cure in sight.

But recently, researchers have found that a number of lifestyle factors up the odds of getting type 2 diabetes. These factors include obesity, a poor diet, lack of physical activity, cigarettes and too much alcohol.

It’s hard enough to get someone to look twice at your resume and now, more and more, you need not only the right resume, but the right personality.

That’s right, personality testing isn’t just for online dating sites anymore.  MarketWatch reports that 56 percent of companies do some form of personality testing before hiring people.  Am I a fan?  How about a  resounding maybe.

Turnover is actually really expensive.  Not only do you have to pay for a recruiter’s time to find someone, all the interviewer’s time to interview and consider, and your current employees are overworked covering, or the work doesn’t get done (which means whatever income was generated by the job is lost), and then when you hire someone and bring him on board there is a learning period.  For some jobs it’s a few weeks, but for a lot of jobs it takes a lot longer to get someone up to speed.

SARASOTA - Scientists cannot stop climate change to save the world's coral reefs, but they might be able to make reefs more resilient to it.

Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota is at the forefront of research aimed at figuring out what makes some corals better at fending off disease when temperatures rise. The answer appears related to bacteria. Further research could lead to new ways to help reefs survive warming seas and other environmental stressors.

Mote recently received a $180,000 grant from the Michigan-based Dart Foundation to continue two years of research on coral health, extending a project that started eight years ago.

Adrian Fortino counts himself lucky he didn't have to scrounge for money from family and friends to launch Shepherd Intelligent Systems LLC in Ann Arbor. And so far he hasn't had to deal with the third traditional "F" source of funds for a startup company: fools.

On the contrary, Fortino speaks highly of the advice he has received from the principals of Huron River Ventures -- who, with a syndicate of other investors, closed on an agreement with his company three weeks ago to provide $1.25 million in exchange for an equity stake.

The commitment "means the world to us," said Fortino, 34, who with partner Jahan Khanna co-founded a business that allows cellphone users to time their arrival at bus stations to meet the bus.