Two weeks ago in the Sunday New York Times a piece called, "Maybe It's Time for Plan C" revealed the unexpected disenchantment of several new entrepreneurs. They lamented how the experience fell short of their initial expectations -- they worked longer hours, made less money, and felt more isolated.

Surprisingly, many found the job of business owner to be more stressful and less satisfying than the corporate positions they had so eagerly fled. The author of the piece, Alex Williams, keenly observed that if starting their own business was Plan B, then perhaps it was time for a Plan C.

Most seasoned advisors have developed a sixth sense about which new businesses will thrive and the ones that will crash and burn before the first product shipment. Finding ways to systematically spot winning – and losing – ideas at the very early stages can dramatically increase an incubator's success rate for backing viable businesses. At the same time, helping inventors learn repeatable commercialization skills can pay huge dividends down the road in fostering the development of a robust community of “commercial-ready” founders.

It takes courage to break up a company. CEOs and boards of directors often fear that investors will view asset divestitures as admissions of failed strategy—that having certain businesses under the same corporate umbrella never made sense. Many worry that shedding assets will cost a company the benefits of scale, cut into the advantages of analyst coverage, or even damage employee morale. Spin-offs in particular draw scrutiny because they shrink the size of the parent company but, unlike sales, don’t generate cash to reinvest.

Everyone knows about Silicon Valley. Or do we? The term is tossed about with élan, abused by public leaders, and touted by experts as a model, panacea, or Shangri-La of entrepreneurship. Headlines with catchy titles, such as "Africa's Silicon Valley to be Unveiled in Nairobi" and "Kazan (Tartarstan) to Set-Up Innovative Ecosystem Similar to Silicon Valley," are found in every major news source. The Next Silicon Valley, a website, has links to articles from 81 countries: Is it possible that "Silicon Valley-Style Entrepreneurship will help Ease the Greek Debt Crisis?" A "Siliconia" website teaches us that there are 79 siliconia, which are "appropriations of names beginning with 'Silicon' by areas outside Silicon Valley."

New Yorkers who follow technology trends know our state is losing jobs in life sciences. Many people in the industry believe it’s because New York is inhospitable to biotech. In the words of a recent academic report, “the state taxes too much, regulates too much [and] has fostered a generally risk averse atmosphere…” The exodus includes biotech startups as well as large pharmaceutical companies, according to the report, which was released in April by the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of New York State, Inc. (PPI). Some 3,000 biopharmaceutical manufacturing jobs were lost in New York in 2010 or are now on the block, according to the PPI. The multiplier effect is at least 10 support positions lost for each of these slots.

A social network that doctors can prescribe to their patients: that's the idea behind a new San Diego startup called Wellaho. The company creates software to manage and support patients after they leave the hospital by bringing together different parts of a patient's support system. Doctors, family, and friends could all be part of the network, which can be customized for individual patients. The system will begin clinical trials in three large San Diego hospitals next month, with a larger rollout planned for 2012.

Other patient-based networks, including PatientsLikeMe, HealthCentral, Inspire, CureTogether, and CaringBridge, are gaining popularity with the chronically ill. But this one is different, says Wellaho's founder, Naser Partovi. "It's prescribed by a doctor, and it involves clinicians as well as friends and family. It's much more controlled."

CNBC:

Unemployment is a national problem in the U.S., but you wouldn’t know that if you travel through North Dakota.

The state’s unemployment rate hovers around 3 percent, and “Help Wanted” signs litter the landscape of cities such as Williston in the same way “For Sale” signs populate the streets of Las Vegas.

Last week at SmallBizTrends I shared the statistic that 47 percent of small business owners still weren’t using social media because they didn’t feel it was important to their business. That post spurred a lot of strong comments, both on site here and on Facebook. Eventually the conversation went from whether SMBs should invest in social media to whether they even need a Website or an Internet presence at all.

I really wish we could stop having this conversation.

You probably know some businesses who are doing phenomenally well without a website. I do, too. But I often wonder how much better they could be doing if they took the time to invest in one. And when I say “website,” I don’t mean an electronic version of that brochure they’ve been handing out for the past 10 years. I mean a legitimate, well-thought-out site that is designed to inform, engage and convert their audience.

A popular approach for aspiring entrepreneurs these days seems to be to corner anyone who will listen, with a pitch on their current “million dollar idea.” The initial monologue usually ends with the question “How much money do you think this is worth?” In my humble opinion, ideas are a commodity, and are really not worth much, outside the context of a visionary leader and a plan.

Over the past couple of decades, experts have perfected the art of brainstorming and other idea-generation techniques. Executives and investors are now increasingly exposed to a wealth of ideas. The result is that ideas are no longer in short supply, and no longer a differentiator in competition.

An increase in take-up of cycling in the UK means this form of transport brought in just under £3 billion to the green economy last year and could save Britain £278 million in traffic congestion and pollution costs by 2015, according to a report by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

The 'British Cycling Economy: Gross Cycling Product Report’, published last week, for the first time quantifies the full benefits cycling is having on the UK economy, including manufacturing, retail sales and employment. It finds almost a quarter of Britons are now getting on their bikes, equating to £230 spent by every cyclist in the country contributing to a total value of £2.9 billion to the UK green economy

Top scientists from companies such as Google and Yahoo are gathered alongside leading academics at the 17th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in San Diego this week. They will present the latest techniques for wresting insights from the deluge of data produced nowadays, and for making sense of information that comes in a wider variety of forms than ever before.

Twenty years ago, the only people who cared about so-called "big data"—the only ones who had enormous data sets and the motivation to try to process them—were members of the scientific community, says Usama Fayyad, executive chair of ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and former chief data officer at Yahoo. Even then, the results of data mining were impressive. "We were able to solve significant scientific problems that were standing in the field for 30-plus years," Fayyad says.

Natan Linder, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab, asked a question most of us have never thought to ask: what if the lamp on your desktop could be transformed into a computer display?

Instead of screwing a lightbulb into a spring-armed desk lamp, Linder designed a device that combines a camera, digital projector, and wireless node. LuminAR (the AR stands for "augmented reality") works on the same 110 volts that would have powered the lightbulb. The result is one of the coolest demos I've seen in a long time: a personal projector that can turn any flat surface into a rough approximation of an iPad.

I’ve been part of many business turnarounds in my career. In all situations, I’ve noted the errors consistently made by sales management — all of which negatively impact team morale and sales – which I now refer to as the seven deadly sins.

1. Conflicts with Marketing

We’ve all heard of the traditional conflict between sales and marketing. The sales team says the product is priced too high or not what the customer wants, or that the marketing programs are ineffective. Marketing, in turn, says the sales force is not well trained, too small, ineffective, or a myriad of other complaints.

Today on MBA Mondays, I am going to walk you through some math that our team does when looking at a venture investment in a company that is starting to scale its business.

Let's assume we have a portfolio company. I will call it fit.sy. It is a marketplace for fitness experiences. We invested in it last year as it was getting ready to launch. A year later the business is scaling nicely and needs more expansion capital. The founders don't really want to go out and do a fundraising process. So they have asked the existing investors to make them an offer for an internal round. They believe they need $3mm of expansion capital to get them to cash flow breakeven.

An Irish surfing entrepreneur has developed the ultimate tool for modern surfers. Nick Ryan is looking for a seed capital that will allow him to market the "Irish-Swiss Army knife" for wave riders.

The Surf Buckle is a special a belt buckle that offers a hex key for adjusting fins, a sharp edge for wax removal, a comb to improve grip and a bottle opener.

It’s been some three-odd years since the Great Recession and the near total collapse of the global financial system.  U.S. unemployment rates remain at historically high levels while job growth has been nowhere near the pace typical of an economic recovery.  The abysmal U.S. labor market has economists saying that the political economy of the U.S., as well as the labor market, are out of sync with the times; fundamental, structural flaws are taking their toll.

The idea of building a “green economy”–one focuses on energy conservation and improving energy efficiency, along with developing renewable energy resources and “clean” technology– has been advocated as a business strategy as well as a framework for government job creation policies.  Going down this path, advocates say, can yield significant benefits when it comes to a number of critically important issues, not the least of which is revitalizing job growth in the U.S.

The assigned Honourable Mention recognises the product submitted by Fibersensing, the WindMETER system, which consists of an innovative solution for monitoring the blades of wind generators. Using fibre optics, this system makes it possible to assess the generator’s structural condition and dynamically control the angle of the turbine, thus reducing maintenance costs and increasing production capacity. WindMETER is especially suited to monitoring remote high powered generators, such as off-shore wind turbines.

Under the topic “Outsourcing Innovation - Collaborative Innovation Networks”, the event welcomed Peter Gloor as guest speaker. He is a Professor and Research Scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The President of the Portuguese Republic, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, led the closing session for the event.

Biotechnology is a key driver of innovation for many industries. From medicine and food to energy and agriculture, bio-based innovations are in great demand and they are providing new solutions to the challenges faced by industrial societies in the 21st century.

As the global need for sustainable solutions has increased, the German biotech sector has responded. A recent survey by Germany's federal biotechnology platform, biotechnologie.de, reported a turnover of 2.4 billion euros, record financing of 700 million euros, and an increase in the number of employees in the commercial biotech sector to around 32,500 in 2010. The total number of German biotechnology companies rose to 538. According to the survey, the majority of the biotech firms founded in 2010 focus on medical biotechnology, with half of the newcomers located in the Munich area. Based on the number of biotech companies by state, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Berlin-Brandenburg have been the traditional leaders, followed by North-Rhine Westphalia, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatine, and Saxony. To learn more about Germany's biotechnology landscape, visit www.biotechnologie.de. Follow us on Twitter @GCRI_NY for biotech news and innovations made in Germany, including the plant-based lupin ice cream and plastics made from peas.

In previous articles, I have occasionally mentioned “red flags” which every potential investor unconsciously listens for. Other writers, like Guy Kawasaki, have irreverently called some of these “entrepreneur lies,” but I prefer to think of them as innocent over-enthusiasm or over-confidence that can kill your deal.

At any rate, here is my summary of the top ten from my experience with hundreds of elevator pitches, business plans, and executive presentations:

“Our product is truly disruptive technology.” If your product really represents a paradigm shift, you probably haven’t figured out yet what problem it solves. At best we can count on it taking many years to catch on, just like other disruptive technologies before you. No investor wants to wait that long for his return, or fund the years of waiting.

It’s essential to provide strategic guidance to the innovation process, so in this chapter we take a look at six essential forces that are driving the changes that are occurring across much of today’s world.  While these may not be the most pressing issues for your company, chances are that some combination of them will have huge influence on your situation, on the strategic choices you make, and thus on your approach to innovation.

Driving force #1:  commoditization

In 1992 Wal-Mart passed Sears to become the world’s number one retailer.  How did Sears allow this to happen?  First, Sears suffered from the arrogant assumption that it was invulnerable, and then its leaders fundamentally misunderstood the key competitive dynamics in the market (which I refer to as the mindset problem), and allowed Wal-Mart to out-innovate them in three critical performance dimensions:  cost of goods, cost of distribution, and pricing.  In essence, Wal-Mart mastered one of the six critical forces that drive today’s economy, commoditization.