In 1996 Alan Greenspan uttered the words “irrational exuberance“ to describe the speculative fervor of the 1990’s economy. Assets in the dot.com days were over priced and value was driven by talk rather then demonstrated performance. We learned some lessons and forgot others from that time.

I am deeply concerned that state and local governments are being flooded by irrational exuberance of a different industry, the Shale play. Let me be clear, I think that having a U.S. sourced energy supply can prove to be a great catalyst for supporting our pursuit of energy independence. The concerns however come from the lack of honest planning and conversation about how the economic opportunity of Shale fits into any coordinated economic and business growth strategy for the state.

A couple of weeks ago, the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a council of entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, university and economic development leaders that provides policy recommendations to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce, released a report with eight specific recommendations for improving access to capital for high growth companies.

Young high potential companies need funds to create and fill jobs. And it's the nation's fastest growing young companies that create a disproportionate number of our nation's jobs. In fact, the top-performing 1 percent of young firms generate roughly 40 percent of new jobs. If the Obama administration and Congress agreed to these recommendations, it would create lots of jobs across the U.S.

Opening day share surges, multibillion-dollar valuations, and continued investor appetite have shown just how robust social media can potentially be on the public markets. And a report on venture capital (VC) funding for these firms only serves to fan the flames.

Venture capital funding for social media companies more than tripled to $2.23 billion in second quarter 2011 compared to the same quarter a year earlier, according to Wedbush Securities. Among the largest winners were group buying firms, including LivingSocial ($410 million), 55tuan ($200 million), and Coupons.com ($200 million). The second quarter fundraising fell below the $3.17 billion raised during the previous three months, although that period was marked by Facebook and Groupon each raising an eye-popping $1.5 billion and $950 million, respectively.

Warning — Trite Statement to Follow: The leadership at a startup makes or breaks the success of the company.

Yes, you’ve heard it a million times. There are multiple reasons for this, and that topic alone calls for a whole different article. But right now let’s focus on one particular skill-set of a leader that has been a positive indicator of success time and time again for energy and cleantech venture-backed companies: a successful energy investment requires a Commercialization Executive.

Many venture capitalists will tell you that this is not so, and there are examples where a technical founder is the right CEO to lead the company from startup through the early growth phase, through a public offering and beyond. There are even studies showing that founder-led companies tend to outperform professionally led firms three years after an IPO. However, these studies usually look at high-tech companies creating new products for new markets. Having worked with and sat on the board of many energy and materials companies for years, we have observed that this sector necessitates this particular commercialization skillset.

A small-business incubator set to open Tuesday in Detroit hopes to fill the gap created by widespread auto-sector job losses with local film and video production companies, design firms and other creative-sector employers.

The Creative Ventures Acceleration Program offers local entrepreneurs access to resources, services, strategic counseling, development support and other services that seek to “increase the density of creative-sector businesses in the downtown area,” according to the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, a business accelerator that developed the program.

Backed by $500,000 in funding by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and the U.S. Small Business Administration, among other groups, the program features a 12-month curriculum for “ventures-in-residence” to better identify development goals and best practices.

San Francisco is home to an inventors dream. While many inventors are known for working out of their garage, TechShop allows them to leave the garage or basement and work on their creations in a workshop dedicated to inventing, reports ABC 7. For as little as $99 per month, their members have access to thousands of dollars worth of machines and tools that can assist them in their inventing adventures.

“I will never bet against the American spirit and we are not done with manufacturing in the United States,” said Mark Hatch.

Hatch runs the expanding company that is betting on the American entrepreneurial spirit. We’re long past the days of your grandfather’s assembly line, he says. Where before, big companies held the keys to industrial success, tech shop is about empowerment.

A new Detroit News article stresses the importance of crowdfunding, and Skoll Awardee Kiva is mentioned.

An excerpt: “Like other microlending efforts, crowdfunding is a way for like-minded people to support small businesses, artists and community events by giving money through the Internet with sites such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and Kiva….’I recommend crowdfunding to everybody, I really do,” said Jack Miner, entrepreneurial coach at TechTown, the Wayne State University Research and Technology Park. ‘It’s probably the most important thing that’s happened to startup investing — maybe ever.’”

A new report* sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department (DOC)—the results of the first independent study of its kind in almost 10 years—describes both barriers and effective strategies for the transfer of technology developed in federal laboratories to industry for commercialization.

The study found that the distinctive missions of federal laboratories, management strategies and resources, statutory requirements and incentives for researchers were key factors determining an agency's particular approach to commercialization of federal laboratory results.

On July 26, the Hawaii Strategic Development Corporation (HSDC) will hold an information meeting on Oahu, to inform the public about its new venture capital fund and to seek input on implementation.

In May, the Governor announced the allocation of $13 million by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBC) to invest in Hawaii businesses through the HSDC’s venture capital Fund of Funds Investment program.

“The program provides a powerful incentive for new private lending to small businesses, which will help spur additional job creation and economic growth throughout Hawai’i,” said U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, in a written statement released earlier from the governor’s office.

Remember cellphones in the early 1990s? They were either installed in a car or you had to carry a bulky bag around with you—that is, if you could get decent signal. Few then thought they would become the ubiquitous devices they are today.

Cellphones were a “disruptive innovation.”  That’s the process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors. The term was coined by Clay Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Christensen has written plenty of books about the phenomenon. And later this month he is coming out with a book co-written with Henry J. Eyring about how it might impact higher education (The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education From the Inside Out).

I’m sure we have all seen entrepreneurs with high levels of passion and confidence touting an idea that seems to make very little sense to us. Of course, we never see ourselves in this mode, yet we need to recognize that all humans see reality differently through a built-in set of “cognitive biases,” based on their own unique background of experiences, training, and mental state.

These biases are good, in that they allow us to quickly filter and make decisions in the constant barrage of information we face each day, but bad because they often lead to errors in reasoning and emotional choices. The worst case is called the “passion trap,” where a pattern of beliefs, choices, and behaviors feel good and become self-reinforcing, but lead to disaster.

We've talked about times where you should say no, but it's just as important to learn to hear others say no to you in the right light. Chase Jarvis explains that hearing "no" doesn't have to be a blow to your self-esteem or your ego. Instead, let it be a driving force to push you forward.

It's easier said than done, but Jarvis says that "no" is a powerful motivator if you know how to handle it. You can use it to force yourself into changing the plan or angle you have for your work, or just as a way to whittle out the people who don't understand your vision. He also reminds us that the things worth doing aren't always easy: the more you hear no, the better you'll get in the long run.

Seed capital is hard to find in St. Louis; everybody says so. In fact, if you had $10 for every time you've heard that lament, you'd probably have enough money to start a business.

That's exactly the thinking behind Fund St. Louis, a new website that lets local entrepreneurs raise money in dribs and drabs from people who like their business plans, or who simply believe in the cause of creating an entrepreneurial culture here.

Founder Brian Cross, who's also a managing partner at downtown marketing firm Elasticity, says he's well aware that St. Louis has other funding sources, such as the Arch Angel Network, the BioGenerator and the Startup St. Louis Accelerator. Those, however, concentrate on technology startups and can invest in only a small number of companies.

The stereotype of a Gen Y employee is usually that of someone difficult to deal with, overly-demanding and the bane of a manager’s life.

Yet, according to new research by Leadership Management Australasia (LMA), Gen-Y is looked upon favourably by most workplace leaders and employees across generations.

And who is the real threat to workplace stability? Baby Boomers.

According to LMA’s Generations L.E.A.D. (Leadership, Employment and Direction) Survey, Gen-Y is building a reputation among Australian employers as an emerging driver of cross-generational harmony.  Gen-Y calls for more formal structures to connect different generations in the workplace.

Surgeons in Sweden have successfully transplanted a fully synthetic, tissue-engineered organ—a trachea—into a man with late-stage tracheal cancer. The synthetic trachea was created entirely in the lab, using a scaffold built out of a porous polymer, and tissue grown from the patient's own stem cells inside a bioreactor designed to protect the organ and promote cell growth.

The surgery was performed last month by Paolo Macchiarini at Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, Stockholm. The patient has now made a full recovery, and will be discharged from the hospital today.

MBA Mondays are back after a one week hiatus. Today we are going to talk about convertible debt. Convertible debt can also be called convertible loans or convertible notes. For the purposes of this post, these three terms will be interchangeable.

Convertible debt is when a company borrows money from an investor or a group of investors and the intention of both the investors and the company is to convert the debt to equity at some later date. Typically the way the debt will be converted into equity is specified at the time the loan is made. Sometimes there is compensation in the form of a discount or a warrant. Other times there is not. Sometimes there is a cap on the valuation at which the debt will convert. Other times there is not.

Internet companies are notoriously difficult to value, as investors learned in the dot-com crash 11 years ago. But since the "Web 2.0" companies fueling this year's Internet IPOs rely upon having a reliable group of engaged users, they do offer at least one telling metric: the amount of money each user is worth. That's why venture capitalists evaluating such businesses in their early stages often examine how much revenue a company is generating per user.

Bijan Sabet, a venture capitalist at Spark Capital, which has invested in several Internet companies, including Twitter, FourSquare, and Tumblr, says his firm often considers $2 of annual revenue per user to be an important target threshold for startups. By that measure, several of today's new Web companies show genuine promise, as the chart below indicates.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers.

The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

The Detroit Creative Corridor Center has chosen 17 early- and second-stage companies to participate in a pilot program that will help them flourish in fields such as architecture, film production and graphic design, the center said Monday.

The Creative Ventures Acceleration Program will assist businesses that have grown past the startup phase and want to fill a demand in Detroit's creative economy. The companies were selected based on their potential to fill a demand for a large market, commitment to grow and ability to use the program's resources, said Matthew Clayson, director of the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, a partnership between the College for Creative Studies and Business Leaders for Michigan.

This is the first development program sponsored by the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, a business accelerator to develop Detroit's sector for mass-produced creative arts, from advertising to industrial design to music production.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Gov. John Kasich on Monday formally introduced his JobsOhio board, a new group charged with creating jobs and nurturing a business-friendly climate in the state.

Kasich is privatizing the state's economic development efforts by turning over job creation and company recruitment and retention to the nine-member board, while dismantling the Ohio Department of Development that once carried out those duties.

JobsOhio is a critical building block in the Republican governor's overall agenda for stimulating the state's limping economy by focusing on jobs, along with tax breaks and credits that may make Ohio's business climate more attractive.