Want to know what industries are heating up? Industry analyst IBISWorld just released its picks for the 5 hottest startup industries for the next five years. The company analyzed revenues, growth trends and profitability levels of more than 700 industries to determine which ones are best poised to grow.

Even if you are already in business, knowing which industries are in growth mode can give you ideas for new products, services or partnerships that could help your business expand. Here are IBISWorld’s picks:

• Testing and Educational Support: High school graduates are going on to college, college students are clinging to their college years instead of facing the tough job market, and laid-off employees are heading back to school. All this bodes well for testing and education businesses. IBISWorld reports that the industry grew at an average annual rate of 6.2 percent to $15.4 billion over the five years up to 2011, and that level of growth is projected to continue over the next five years, with revenue increasing an average of 5.5 percent per year to reach $19.1 billion in 2016. Trade and technical schools, business coaching and employment recruiting are all related industries with similarly positive outlooks.

There are many good reasons to start your own business from the independence it can bring to your lifestyle to the noble role you can play in helping to grow the economy, create jobs and opportunity and improve the world through a great product or service. In fact, the hardest part about becoming an entrepreneur is figuring out where to start. Whether you have some knowledge already or are going on a vague notion that this option may be for you, we hope this roundup will be a place to start. Good luck on your journey!

Self-development

Celebrating Independence Day with entrepreneurship. As July 4 approaches, serial entrepreneur Amy Lindgren suggests one way to declare independence in your own life may be to start your own business. Whether your ultimate goal is improved control over finances or over your own life and the way you live it, starting either a full-time or side business may be a possible answer. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Hopefully the recent posts in this series have given you an idea of how VC evaluate companies, markets, teams and so on.  My next three are going to deal with how to best get that in writing with the aim of getting productive meetings with investors.

I use the term ‘productive’ very deliberately as I’m a big believer that ‘raising money’ is actually better described as ‘selling equity’ and hence should be treated like a sales process where qualifying prospects out quickly is key to being efficient.  The purpose, then, of putting something in writing in front of the VC is to make sure that they have thought about your business enough to be genuinely interested before you give up your valuable time to meet with them (and take up theirs).  Meetings where it becomes quickly apparent that there is no fit between the startup and what the investor wants are no fun at all and the approach I describe here works better for both entrepreneur and VC.

Wanted: executives interested in the relationship between organization, culture, and innovation. We are seeking your insights for Booz & Company's annual Global Innovation 1000 study. Please click here to participate in our 15-minute survey. Everyone who takes the survey will receive a free one-year subscription to the digital edition of strategy+business and a copy of this year's Global Innovation 1000 study before its release to the public.
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Although high blood pressure can be monitored, and treated effectively, with a number of drugs, a quarter of the people with the condition don't even know they have it, according to the American Heart Association. Of those who know they have high blood pressure, only two-thirds get treatment, and fewer than half have it under control.

Now a new wireless monitor from Hewlett-Packard and a Singapore company called Healthstats aims to make it much easier for patients and doctors to monitor blood pressure. The device, which has the size and look of a wristwatch, can monitor pressure continuously—which provides a much more accurate picture than infrequent readings in the doctor's office. Until now, the only way to do such continuous monitoring has been with a cumbersome inflatable cuff for the arm or wrist.

Crowdsourcing was one of the most debated trends of 2009. The term crowdsourcing was first coined by Jeff Howe in June 2006.  Today there are over 100 web sites on crowdsourcing.[1]

Being a distributed problem-solving and production model, crowdsourcing consists of a number of models namely crowdfunding, crowdcreation, crowdvoting and crowd wisdom.[2]

Rob Van Rooyen, executive strategic planning director at McCann, discussed crowdsourcing as a marketing idea and how it has evolved into new ideas such as crowdfunding. “Through collaborative efforts people are raising funds, usually via the internet, to support efforts they have initiated,” he explained.

In February, an agreement that Nuru penned with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch gave the bank an option to buy several million carbon credits over a 10-year period, which they can then resell on the market. What it gave Nuru was a future - and a bright one. “This deal will provide us with the capital to scale up in five countries in East Africa: Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi,” Hajee explains.

“The potential exists for tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in East Africa who could sell hundreds of thousands of light cubes. The result: we are certainly expecting to be profitable within three years, and not five.” Nuru Energy is also looking to scale up in India, having tweaked the business model for this market, and is also talking to potential partners in other African countries, notably Ghana and Nigeria.

In The Granularity of Growth,1 we used insights from a proprietary database of large companies to argue that executives need to pursue growth in multiple ways. We disaggregated growth into three drivers: portfolio momentum, or the market growth of the segments in a company’s portfolio; M&A; and market share gains. The exercise showed us that companies outperforming their peers on two or three of these drivers grow faster and achieve better returns than those that outperform on just one. Now, three years later, we can reiterate our advice with more assurance because it’s clear that these multi-faceted growers have withstood the test of the financial crisis and the economic downturn—and continued to outperform.

That’s the first of three findings we share in this research update, which reflects the growth of our database from some 400 companies in 2007 to more than 700 today, as well as the addition of a significant set of smaller companies with annual revenues of less than $3 billion. The second finding is that companies from emerging markets are outgrowing competitors from developed ones at a startling pace. The third is that the smallest companies in our database, with revenues of less than $1 billion, are growing by increasing their market share to a much greater extent than larger companies are. For the latter, the role of share gain is marginal or even negative.

As entrepreneurs we tend to beat ourselves up over the tiniest mistakes – but sometimes we make big ones. I’ve been part of four ventures over 20 years, but some of the biggest I’ve made came when I launched Sandbox Entertainment. We had millions of customers – but little revenue. I was the founder – but ultimately, I was fired. We had roughly 100 employees – but no team.

The good thing about mistakes is you can learn from them. Here’s what I did wrong.

Mistake #1: Not prioritizing the company culture – At Sandbox, I was so focused on things like fundraising and acquiring customers that culture wasn’t on my priority list

Based on both quantitative and qualitative global research conducted by  Oxford Economics and sponsored by PwC, AT&T, Cisco, Citi, and SAP, this white paper identifies and delves into the six seismic shifts that are transforming the global playing field and outlines how they will affect companies in all industries. These shifts are:

• The coming of age of the global digital economy
• Industries undergoing digital transformation
• The digital divide reversing -- moving from
• West to East The emerging-market customer taking centre stage
• Business shifting  into hyperdrive -- the pace of change
• Firms reorganising to fully embrace the digital economy

What should CEOs be doing to ensure their firms remain competitive in this disruptive environment? A set of imperatives and recommended actions are offered in the report.

IN THE INTERSECTING WORLDS of celebrities and public causes, two opposing clichés are locked in competition for custody of our imagination: the celebrity as superhero and the celebrity as screwup. Both images are rooted in our notion that famous people are, in some profound way, not normal -- and which version we prefer at any given moment can depend on who's making the headlines. When we read, for instance, about George Clooney striving to bring democracy and health to Sudan, or Sean Penn appearing to carry on his shoulders all the troubles of Haiti as well as the rigors of overseeing a massive NGO, we can believe that exceptional people who have the power to attract exceptional attention can, under the right circumstances, do exceptional things. And when we look at Michael J. Fox's work for Parkinson's disease research, it isn't hard to construct a feel-good story of one man turning personal adversity into the kind of selfless dedication to a cause that, when combined with a high profile, really does make a difference.

The New York Angels is a group of 61 individual investors who have invested more than $40 million in more than 70 startups ever since the group launched in 1997. The organization’s vice chairman is Brian Cohen, who himself has a long history of entrepreneurship—the lessons from which he tries to pass along to the new class of young companies.

Cohen was the founding publisher of Computer Systems News and InformationWeek, both published by CMP Publications. In 1983, he founded Technology Solutions Inc., New York’s first marketing and PR agency focused entirely on science and technology. He sold the company to The McCann Erickson World Group (owned by Interpublic Group) in 1997.

I wrote in an earlier post in this series that friends and family is the most common form of startup financing. If you are talking explicitly equity investments, then that is probably true. But the most common way that startup businesses get money to get going is they sell something to someone. In this context, someone means customers.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product. An early customer will give you credibility with other customers. And an early customer may spend more with your company down the road.

As the G8 last month pledged $10 billion to aid the Arab Spring to support the building of economic and political institutions, the May 24th NASDAQ debut of Russia’s $10 billion Yandex was but one of many green shoots of an equally significant Entrepreneurial Spring blossoming out from Chile to China, and Israel to India. Led by two brilliant entrepreneurs who knew how to take native search engine technology and implant it in the emerging Russian marketplace, for over a decade, Yandex, a Moscow-based Internet venture, had been growing inside of its language-walled garden. Finally, after a planned 2008 IPO was foiled by the economic crisis, this ambitious venture burst onto a global stage with the largest NASDAQ Internet offering in recent history.

Like its Middle East counterpart, the Entrepreneurial Spring is a grass roots movement, and, although fertilised by innovations originating in the United States, it is fundamentally global and only loosely connected to America. China’s RenRen, Estonia’s Skype, Japan’s Rakuten, and Bangladesh’s GrameenPhone represent ripe fruits of the last decade’s entrepreneurial investments in environments outside the US.

I recently spoke at the Founder Showcase at the request of Adeo Ressi. I asked what the audience most needed to hear and he said, “They need an unbiased view of the fund raising environment because there is too much misinformation and everything seems to be changing fast.”

This was an audience of mostly first-time entrepreneurs. They have seen one side of a market where many of us have seen the ebb and flow multiple times. Still, market amnesia by ordinarily rational actors always surprises me.

I spoke about a lot of things during the keynote. If you are interested the Vimeo is here. I spoke about whom to raise capital from (funding options), how much I thought they should consider raising (18-24 months), how fast they should spend it (lean until product/market fit, then fat when they’re ready to scale), how fast they should raise it (now, now, now) and at what valuation (at a fair price that I call “the top end of normal“).

One of the forceful presenters at a recent event of SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network), Chennai, was Tathagat Varma, Senior Director-Business Operations, Yahoo! Software Development India, Bangalore (http://bit.ly/F4TYahooTV). Speaking on innovation, Tathagat emphasised that today's customers expect top-quality innovative solutions in lesser time and fewer dollars than ever before, and that competing on ‘cost arbitrage' or ‘part quality' is necessary but not enough.

“As the premier digital media company, Yahoo! places a strong emphasis on innovation,” he noted, during a brief interaction with Business Line. “Being in the consumer Internet space, innovation directly relates to our ability to adapt to a fast-changing market environment.” Our conversation continued over the email, on the theme ‘Creating an innovation ecosystem in the IT industry.'

Excerpts from the interview:

Why do we need an ecosystem to foster a culture of innovation in the IT industry?

Since plenty of people in Sillicon Valley are now liquid off IPOs or secondary market sales, real estate prices there are taking off, Bloomberg reports.

In Palo Alto prices are up 20% since last year and in Cupertino the median house price is above a million dollars. People are putting in bids 20% above the asking price.

Champagne, everybody!

Influence is the ability to have an effect on the character of someone or something.  At it’s Latin roots the word (influere) means into+flow or inflow.   How we function in business is influenced by others.  There are key ideas that flow into our thinking and affect our bottom line. We are not islands.  We are heavily influenced by one another, what we read, what we learn and what we have experienced.

Since Small Business Trends and SmallBizTechnology intend to celebrate the small business influencers in our lives, it really has me thinking about the core values and ideas that shape the way we see and handle business.

Giving lectures at other universities and inviting people to lecture at my own–I do a little of the former and a lot of the latter. Those experiences have permitted me to acquaint myself  with scores of truly intelligent and thoughtful hosts and speakers.

And, on rare occasions, it is has familiarized me with some neon-light blinking morons.

But imbeciles, admittedly, are far more fictionally compelling than those who display rectitude and wit. For that reason I share with you now some reflections based on a few of the headcases I have met on the podium. I close with suggestions of a more constructive nature.

If my intervention spares just one chairperson from losing her marbles when she learns that a guest lecturer somehow charged his lap dance at the local gentlemen’s club to her departmental credit card, well, then I think my work here is done.

There has been a great deal of discussion around the idea of entrepreneurship in higher education. At the University of Texas, we have the usual business school programs, but we also have a unique program in “Intellectual Entrepreneurship”:

The mission of IE is to educate "citizen-scholars" -- individuals who creatively utilize their intellectual capital as a lever for social good. IE is not a program, nor a compartmentalized academic unit or institute; it is an intellectual platform and educational philosophy for instigating learning across disciplinary boundaries and generating collaborations between the academy and society.

Programs like this are designed to help students think outside of the box through interactions with mentors in the university and the community, but the discussions out there around the future of academe aren’t necessarily addressing the role that entrepreneurship can play for professors. For many years faculty members have been told (at least in my discipline of political science) that interdisciplinary programs are the answer. So those of us who were entrepreneurial went out and started new interdisciplinary programs in the area studies (e.g., I helped start a center for European studies), ethnic and racial studies programs, and interdisciplinary majors (like our international relations major); and there has certainly been an increase in programs like nanotech that are clearly interdisciplinary on the science and engineering side.