Since the U.S. unemployment rate in 2012 is expected to be slightly under 9%, finding great talent should be relatively easy. But it’s not. Many businesses work hard to hire the best employees but often fall short.

If you’re struggling to find great talent a lack of effort may not be the problem; making broad assumptions or accepting common stereotypes might be to blame.

Look past the stereotypes, past conventional wisdom, incorrect assumptions. When you know where to look, great employees are waiting for you.

See if stereotypical thinking in the following broad classifications has negatively impacted your approach to hiring great talent.

Where should we start? Single moms.

Swagbucks is an online rewards destination where users earn virtual currency redeemable for real-life rewards for performing the everyday actions they already take online - like searching the web, playing games, shopping, watching videos, etc. The Los Angeles-based company, which has 3.5 million registered users, does over $10 million in annual revenue and COO Scott Dudelson is predicting close to $20 million by the end of this year. Sound like a classic Internet startup? It’s not.

Dudelson started his company, Prodege, (Swagbucks is the brand) with three of his best friends five years ago and he did it the old fashioned way - by bootstrapping.

One of the toughest and yet most important questions you will be asked by savvy potential startup investors is “What is your sustainable competitive advantage?” Yet many entrepreneurs, maybe in their passion for their new product, gloss over this one, or even announce that they have no competition.

Think about each of the three words for the full meaning of the phrase. “Sustainable” means over the longer term – not just today. First to market, for example, is not sustainable. It may buy you a few months, but if you show traction, competitors with deep pockets will catch up and bypass you quickly, jeopardizing all your investments.

“Competitive” should be taken broadly to include alternative ways that people might solve the problem you are addressing. Don’t define your scope so narrowly that you would not consider airplanes to be competitive with your new train, or you will suffer their fate. The competition is transportation, not slow machines on tracks.

The Washington Post has compiled a list of quotes from fellow entrepreneurs on what you should do this summer. Is any of it on your list?

Dive in, head first. “Take the plunge. You’ve been sitting on an idea for a couple years, it’s time to act. Put together a business plan and start

getting feedback from people you respect.”

— Elana Fine, director of venture investments, Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship

FOR the next few weeks, I would like to focus on enterprise development as one of the opportunities for our communities whether at home or in the Diaspora.

With Zimbabwean unemployment levels hovering north of 70%, this option need to be clearly promoted as a career option because most of us have been brought up on just a job-focused mindset.

A few years ago, we were hosted by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology in the city of Shanghai with a population of more than 18 million. We visited the University of Pudong, Shanghai Business and Technology Incubator, the massive science part in the city and similarly related incubators. The purpose of the visit was to understand how China was using incubation as a means for enterprise development.

If you’re an entrepreneur with an idea for an Internet startup, there’s a growing collection of venture incubators around the country ready to help you launch it—Y Combinator, TechStars, and 500Startups are a few of the best known ones. There’s even a new incubator for health technology companies: Rock Health, which we covered here a couple of weeks ago. But until recently, innovators in the cleantech or green energy sectors didn’t have many places to turn for the early-stage capital, mentorship, and business connections that incubators provide.

That could start to change this fall with the opening of San Francisco-based Greenstart, which claims to be the first venture incubator focused exclusively on cleantech. Founded by three serial entrepreneurs from the world of online automotive media, the incubator is searching for eight to 10 companies to join its first three-month session, which will start September 12. The terms at Greenstart are similar to those at Internet incubators: $25,000 per team to cover living expenses during the session, in return for a 3 to 10 percent equity stake in each company. The goal, says Greenstart co-founder Mitch Lowe, is not necessarily to create 10 revenue-producing companies, but to make sure that each team exits the incubator with a well-defined product that’s been validated with real-world customers.

Although investment in Africa has traditionally focused on commodities rather than technologies, the explosion of mobile usage has opened up opportunities for small-business development.

Memeburn explores some of the continent’s incubators for entrepreneurs to consider before taking the next step. It’s worth remembering that the investor climate is often make or break when it comes to finding angel investors.

Nigeria

Enspire is more than an incubation programme as it aims to support the establishment of businesses that graduate from the initial stage of developing an idea.

Crowdsourcing and ancillary crowdfunding are revolutionizing life for The Little Guy – and possibly for Wall Street. In a recent press release, David Alan Grier, associate professor at George Washington University and crowdsourcing scholar, said: “…Crowdsourcing is a serious form of production… It marks the same kind of accomplishment that Henry Ford achieved in 1915, when he showed that an assembly line could build 250,000 cars in a year.”

Crowd-as-a-ResourceIs this for real? You bet! If the crowd-as-a-resource isn’t on your radar, you could be missing out. Know the basics:

Crowdsourcing refers to an unprecedented mass distribution of labor online, offering incredible cost efficiencies to small businesses. At the same time, it’s bringing full- and part-time job opportunity to skilled, yet underserved populations. For example, Liveops' thousands of call center operators work from home, and non-profit SamaSource brings internet-based employment to disadvantaged economic areas.

The Purdue Research Park network, which stretches from Merrillville to New Albany, has an annual economic impact on the state of $1.3 billion. An independent report also shows the combined assets of the four locations place the network among the top 20 private employers in Indiana. The report from Indianapolis-based Thomas P. Miller and Associates was commissioned as part of the Purdue Research Park's 50th anniversary. In a Studio(i) interview with Gerry Dick, Purdue Research Foundation Senior Vice President Joe Hornett says the average annual wage for jobs in the park network is impressive.

Startup Weekend, the create-a-company cram session that has spread worldwide in just a few years, is branching out in a big way. The Seattle-based nonprofit tells Xconomy it is creating a sister organization called the Startup Foundation, aimed at establishing a permanent hub for local entrepreneurial communities around the globe. The new project has backing from the Kauffman Foundation, and full-time staffers in seven cities who officially start work next month.

Startup Weekend CEO Marc Nager says the Startup Foundation is a natural outgrowth of the Startup Weekend phenomenon, which gives entrepreneurs 54 hours to organize themselves into teams and develop proto-companies that are ready to pitch investors for possible seed money. The nonprofit organization, headquartered in Seattle, has taken its events to nearly 200 cities in 65 countries since 2009, and is on pace to hold 200 Startup Weekends this year alone.

Here are some recommendations for Father's Day gifts. Since you've left it this late, you may as well just buy what we tell you to and stop worrying about it.

Cory's recommendations

Logitech Anywhere Mouse This is a thoughtfully designed, genuinely useful addition to my computing setup. The fit and finish really shine, from the business with the battery to the surgical and deeply satisfying click that is the mouse equivalent of the chunk of a Mercedes door. I'm actually finding myself pining for the mouse when I'm away from my desk on my laptop, and am thinking of getting another for home.

For all of its grand ambitions, China has had some problems implementing high-speed rail--severe safety issues, construction fraud, and lack of ridership are just some of the issue the country has had to deal with recently. But China will not turn back from its vision of high-speed rail. And the country cares so much that it wants it's neighbors to have fast trains, too. China is starting by extending tracks into northern Laos.

Laos is one of the poorest countries in Asia, and it currently only has two miles of rail lines. But the nation anticipates that a high-speed rail system built by the Chinese could increase tourism, gambling, and local construction jobs.

No word on when construction will begin on the Laos line, but this is just the beginning of China's plan for a trans-Asian railway system. Eventually, the country envisions a system that could zip riders from China to Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.

By most accounts, transportation infrastructure in the United States is in serious disrepair. As roads and bridges across the country continue to age and deteriorate, governments at all levels are struggling to pay for maintenance and upkeep -- not to mention investments in much-needed upgrades and new projects. Since the federal Highway Trust Fund was established in the late 1950s, total combined highway and transit spending as a share of gross domestic product has fallen by about 25 percent, according to the federal National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission. Without changes to current policy, the commission projects a federal highway and transit funding gap totaling nearly $2.3 trillion through 2035.

With Congress debating reauthorization of the transportation bill this summer, and with states and localities looking for their own solutions, here are six ideas for fixing the nation’s infrastructure system -- how to plan it, how to fund it and how to make it safer and more efficient than ever.

The current wave of IPOs that investors hope will extend from LinkedIn through Groupon and onto Facebook is making some venture capitalists very, very wealthy. But the bonkers bubble money isn’t exactly getting spread around. Bloomberg reports that the success of firms like Sequoia, Greylock, Accel, and Andreessen Horowitz, all of whom have equity in the most valuable start-ups, is driving a massive wedge between “the venture-capital industry’s haves and have-nots.”

LinkedIn’s IPO, for example, has already yielded $2 billion in paper profits for backers like Sequoia and Greylock. Groupon hasn’t gone public yet, but its top investors like Accel and New Enterprise could end up owning a $5 billion stake. These are accredited private investors we’re talking about, so it’s not as though the VC-equivalent of the top one percent is making paupers of their competitors. But it is creating vastly disproportionate access to deal flow and capital.

Kevin Mendelsohn has the entrepreneurial bug. He was one of the early employees at Athersys, a Cleveland-based biopharmaceutical company that grew from about 15 to more than 100 employees while he was there. Kevin helped the team raise venture capital, develop strategic partnerships with other biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and manage the company’s product portfolio.

Kevin MendelsohnAfter Athersys, Kevin used his experience and knowledge to help promising entrepreneurs accelerate the growth of their companies, serving as a JumpStart Venture Partner. Then Kevin transitioned from a nonprofit advisor to a full-fledged member of a startup team, joining the team at CardioInsight, a young company in which JumpStart has invested. Here’s what he had to say about his time at JumpStart and how CardioInsight, developer of a technology that non-invasively generates real time, 3-D images of the electrical activity of the heart, provided the right opportunity to succumb to the bug once again.

Recognizing the urgency to kick-start the economy through entrepreneurship, the Kauffman Foundation sponsored the latest issue of Democracy--a Journal of Ideas to examine how the government can promote firm formation and growth.

"From the Ground Up: Fostering Entrepreneurship" features essays by five esteemed experts who look at different aspects of the question from a progressive point of view: the growth of regional innovation clusters; the vital role that immigrants play in American entrepreneurship; the need to educate children to be entrepreneurs; the hurdles faced by minority entrepreneurs; and the political tensions within the progressive coalition that sometimes constrain the ability or willingness to embrace an entrepreneurship agenda.

Congress will soon consider whether to revise a 77-year-old rule that is encouraging Facebook Inc. and other companies with at least 500 shareholders to register for an initial public offering.

Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) today introduced a bill (read it below) that would amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, allowing private companies to have 1,000 shareholders instead of the current 500 before they’re required to publicly disclose their finances, often compelling them to go public.

Called the Private Company Flexibility and Growth Act, the bill would also exempt accredited investors and employees from the 1,000-shareholder limit. Fortune earlier reported news of the bill.

Today the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) announced it has approved tax incentives for two projects expected to generate $121.3 million in combined new investment, two brownfield redevelopment projects and one significant brownfield amendment. This activity is expected to create/retain a projected 803 direct jobs in communities across the state.

“We are employing our economic gardening strategy to help companies grow and enlarge their footprint in Michigan,” said Michael A. Finney, President and CEO of MEGA. “At the same time, these incentives will help transform blighted, contaminated or functionally obsolete properties into new centers of economic growth and activity.”

White men – usually in white coats in Western laboratories – is the image many people conjure up then they’re asked to think of “innovation”. From biotechnology to space exploration, from nanotech to electronics engineering, innovation is perceived by many to be more of a corporate exercise than anything else.

In many cases, they’re right. Much of the innovation around us is the result of years of investment in time, resources and big ideas from some of the largest and most successful companies out there.

But framing innovation in this light doesn’t give us the entire picture.

The story of innovation is not complete without an appreciation of "real world" innovation, much of which is grassroots-driven and much of which goes unnoticed. It’s this “real world” innovation that I’d like to discuss.

Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel, wants to pay college students to drop out. If typical venture capital odds apply, about 22 of the 24 people who took his $100,000 inducement to drop out and spend two years working in a start-up will fail to build a successful company. For their sake, let’s hope the schools will let them back in.

And based on research from the country’s top-ranked school of entrepreneurship, the world will be better off if those whippersnappers stay in school and get 10 years of experience before launching their start-ups.