Why is it that most of the business plans I see are really product plans? I define a product plan as a detailed description of your product or service, with a bit of business thrown in at the end. A business plan is a detailed description of your business, with a bit of product description thrown in near the front.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely positive to have a product plan. A simple differentiation is that a product plan is designed for internal use, to get the product out. A business plan is an “outward facing” document for external investors, or for C-level executives within your own company.

The product plan tells your developers what to build, and the marketing team what to market. Because it addresses an internal audience, it can use technical jargon and assume the reader understands the technology. Here are the key components of a good product plan:

Here's an update on the SBIR/STTR/CPP extension, or lack thereof, and it's not pretty. You've got more work to do because SBIR authorization expires Tuesday at midnight May 31, 2011.

The SBIR extension bill we talked about in our last issue (S.990) was hijacked in the senate and it became the "PATRIOT Sunset Extension Act of 2011". It was passed by both bodies and signed into law by the President. It has nothing to do with SBIR! Because S.990 retained its original title "Small Business Additional Temporary Extension Act of 2011" many people following the legislation's progress on the "Thomas" legislative web site mistakenly believed SBIR was extended. As John McLaughlin would say, "WRONG!"

The Washington State Legislature has sent legislation to Governor Gregoire establishing “Innovate Washington,” a technology-based economic development agency formed from the merger of Washington Technology Center and Sirti (formerly the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute). The merger, which would take effect August 1, 2011, creates a single organization that assists innovative companies statewide with their technology commercialization needs.

Innovate Washington combines the nationally recognized business-assistance programs of WTC and Sirti, and adds a new industry cluster-based strategy, with an initial focus on coordinating Washington’s clean energy initiatives.

Why are so many people unpleasantly surprised when they feel unsatisfied or experience burn out? When viewed objectively, the cause is most often not a secret. We overextend. We overcommit. And we under-nourish our mind, body and spirit.

Sadly, it seems to be human nature to wait until something is not working in our lives before we change our priorities. This, however, is damage control behavior.

Balance, on the other hand, signifies the reverse; it’s a commitment to maintain physical, mental, and emotional harmony for sustained performance.  Easy? No. Worthwhile? Yes.

The cost of burn out is extremely high: decline in health, dwindling passion, lack of creativity, opportunity cost of time spent idling, etc.

Just about every entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley has a special take on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to a startup. But precious few of their assessments are based on cold, hard facts. For an industry that runs on data and analytics, there has been surprisingly little in-depth research in the tech sector about what actually makes startups successful.

Seed accelerator Blackbox, has released the Startup Genome Report on Saturday, a comprehensive map of the factors beyond luck, talent and money that make Silicon Valley startups successful and spur innovation. Through surveys and interviews with nearly 1000 startups, co-authors Bjoern Lasse Herrmann and Max Marmer have come up with a framework to assess startups and understand the drivers of entrepreneurial performance.

Dubbed the Startup Genome Project because of its stated mission to “crack the innovation code of Silicon Valley and share it with the rest of the world,” the project was supported by lean-startup guru Steve Blank, who also teaches classes in entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University.

Decision-making, by its very nature, involves risk-taking or gambling. This is true for any decision in life and is no less true for decisions taken by business managers who are constantly required to evaluate a wide range of alternatives. Good managers have learnt the art of calculating risk but they sometimes still need to make quick decisions based on their gut feelings or intuition.

I was a consultant once for a company which was in the process of an investment decision. There were two options, one for engaging in a fair gamble by making a one-time big investment; the other was for a few small investments to ensure some certain gain. As a consultant from academia, I supported the second school of conservative action. However, the boss of the company did not take my advice; he decided to take the risk in an effort to seize the opportunities. And he succeeded.

The world economy seems finally to be on the mend, with global economic growth forecast at 4.2 percent this year and 4.6 percent in 2012, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook.

But there are still many risks to recovery and handling these successfully will require far-reaching structural reforms in national economies, says the OECD’s Chief Economist, Pier Carlo Padoan.

“There is a recovery under way, and it is becoming stronger and more broad-based,” Padoan told INSEAD Knowledge in an interview at the OECD Forum in Paris.

When Zipcar launched in 2000, the American car rental company tried something different: it replaced the traditional daily car rental model with hourly rentals as an alternative for short-distance travel. It would go on to earn a much higher hourly rate than its competitors and the company's annual revenues are today approaching $200 million.

Also consider service provider LiveOps, a company in the business of managing customer service agents. Instead of employing and training a large workforce in low-cost locations such as India, the company built up a pool of loosely affiliated freelancers, allowing them to work remotely, paying the agents only for the time they served on the calls.

I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum.

I often get asked “what’s the role of a startup CEO?” Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch “CEO” and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn’t an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times people wonder what I do today as CEO of a 180 person company. In this post I’ll cover the pre-launch role, and in a follow-up, I’ll get into the role post-launch.

So what does the CEO, who at the beginning is really the general business person, do at a pre-launch startup?

Let’s go back to the beginning of Meebo, circa April, 2005.

Co-founders Sandy Jen, Elaine Wherry and I met every Wednesday night and all day every Sunday in an effort to get Meebo off the ground. We’d never meet in my apartment—it was always either at Sandy’s or Elaine’s. Why? Because they had the better computers and the faster internet connections. Frankly, that’s pretty emblematic of one’s role as the “business person” pre-launch. I’ve touched upon this topic before in a Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon (embedded below), but it is worth elaborating on.

In the first quarter of 2011 Indiana sowed more venture capital deals than Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin combined. The state turned in one of its five best quarters of all time on the backs of some big time investments into brands which are quickly becoming household names.

In what’s beginning to sound a lot like a broken record, the dominant sectors in Indiana are healthcare and technology. All told $69 million in deals were struck in Indiana in the first quarter including some high profile Internet names like Angie’s List and Cha Cha.

One sobering note is that only six other companies, for a total of 8, received part of that $69 million. Also, Angie’s List accounted for 75% of the total. Not exactly spreading the wealth around, but the state isn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

It has been interesting to see so much talk of venture capital recently. It seems the area is particularly fashionable although there are few economic reasons for this.

Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. This is a good thing, or the business world would be chaos, with everyone trying to do their own thing. So what about you? How do you know if you should be running your own company, or concentrating on that queue of work that someone else has built for you?

I’ve hit this before, but I still hear from too many unhappy entrepreneurs. Now is the time to put aside your fantasies, and take a hard look at who you really are, before you commit to the entrepreneurial lifestyle. If you recognize yourself in many of these quotes, you WILL NOT be happy in that lifestyle:

“I like my life structured with clear decisions.” Entrepreneurs do not function well in traditional organizations and do not like being in the conventional management hierarchy. Most believe they can do the job better than anyone else and will strive for maximum responsibility and accountability.

In his 2007 book, The Global Business Leader, former INSEAD Dean J. Frank Brown warns that most business leaders cling to power far too long, becoming a source of stagnation for the organisations they run. True to his conviction, Brown limited his tenure at INSEAD to five years when he signed on as dean in 2006 – and in February he handed over management of the international business school right on schedule to the incoming dean Dipak Jain.

“Five years is about the right time to move on from a top management position. It’s better for innovation,” says Brown, who takes up a new post as managing director at General Atlantic, the US global equity group in June. “The longer you hang on, the greater the tendency to surround yourself with people who say yes. It’s not good for organisations.”

In a country threatened with an obesity crisis, residents of Oklahoma City, Okla. should be particularly weary -- their metropolitan area is considered the least healthy place in America, according to a new survey from the America College of Sports Medicine.

The society ranked the 50 largest metropolitan areas in America on a 100-point scale to give a snapshot of community health, taking into account factors such as chronic disease conditions, health care access, community support, and income levels.

Of the 24 "most entrepeneur-friendly nations," Colombia has "the least well-developed culture of innovation and entrepreneurship", the BBC World Service concludeded Wednesday after a study among more than 24,000 citizens

Colombia scored 2.04 out of 4 when it comes to the country's entrepeneur-friendlyness against a global average of 2.49.

"Colombia has the least well-developed culture of innovation and entrepreneurship of all countries surveyed with an index of 2.04. Unlike Brazil, this is combined with a perception that it is both difficult to start one’s own business (67%) and pessimism regarding how innovation and creativity are valued in their country—only 30 per cent of Colombians think it is, the fourth lowest percentage among all countries surveyed and well below the global average of 55 per cent," says the World Service report.

Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to be seeing more and more parallel entrepreneurs these days. These are people who are working on multiple startups concurrently. On the surface, this seems like an extremely difficult and dangerous practice, but for the new generations which have been multi-tasking since birth, it may be just business as usual.

I’m not talking here about a bit of overlap between the winding down of one venture, while already gearing up for the next. I see entrepreneurs who have started two or more companies in the last few months, and continue to split their time between the efforts. Others tell me about people like Scott Rafer, former CEO of Feedster, who is now heavily involved in four other companies.

From the outside, looking in at innovative firms, it seems that the innovators must be fantastically insightful, smart and rapid responders. After all, innovation requires that someone or some team spot a great new opportunity, create a product or service to fill the gap, and arrive in the market with the solution before anyone else, yet not too early. What is it that good innovators know that you don’t?

Perhaps it’s easier to answer this question by examining what they’ve learned.

First, they’ve learned that interesting, valuable innovation comes from cues and signals on the adjacency of their markets or businesses. Good innovators combine ideas from the edges of their markets and industries, introducing new ideas and new concepts.

“The Greatest Generation” left us with more than victory in World War II and the passing of the Great Depression. They created an era of prosperity and the advent of a large middle class. Even more, they brought us an era founded on innovation driven by corporate research laboratories such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC and many others. And they built a nationwide infrastructure of national laboratories and the world’s greatest research universities, all working together to make America the leader of the World.

But as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, many question the American model and whether it is relevant and sufficiently adaptive to the new global competition and Friedman’s mantra of “the world is flat.” President Obama in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences on 27 April 2009 best captured the spirit and mood permeating the past decade. It is worth repeating his comments:

Lawmakers and business leaders concede they likely won’t land the full $19 million they’d sought for the Oregon Innovation Council program.

However, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has pledged to keep close tabs on the Joint Ways and Means subcommittee that’s crafting the program’s final proposal.

Oregon Inc. funds many of the state’s signature research programs, including the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute — known as ONAMI — and the Oregon Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center.

The session could mark the second consecutive time Oregon Inc.’s funding has been slashed. Lawmakers allotted the fund $16 million in state funding in the 2009-11 biennium, about 25 percent less than requested. The group received $28 million in the 2007-09 biennium.

One climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Another started college in third grade. Another opened a business at age 9. And yet another scored 5580 on the SATs (on a total of 5 tests, but still).

Now they're all getting two years of mentoring from a network of tech and entrepreneurial experts and $100,000 to start a business. The benefactor? PayPal founder, early Facebook investor, and Stanford's least favorite alumnus, Peter Thiel. Least favorite because Thiel has been making waves by arguing that college is an overhyped, overpriced bubble, and that the world needs better ways to recognize young talent. It's all been great fodder for debate, but little more.

Until today. Thiel just put a bit of his money where his active mouth is.