Most biotech entrepreneurs I’ve met have a dream that ends one of two ways. They will either take their company public, or sell their startup to a giant drugmaker. Those are the paths to making money, making venture investors happy, and getting the resources needed to take a new drug all the way to the market.

Jim Posada looked at those two roads and essentially said to himself: Find another way.

“A lot of people in venture capital think they’ll fund a company and it will get bought. It’s surprising. It’s becoming more and more obvious it’s an antiquated view,” Posada says. He added: “We don’t think there’s a large probability of going public or being acquired. Our exit will be a licensing transaction. The probability of that happening is quite high.”

State officials are touting an economic development "road map" that they believe will spur significant job growth in Missouri over the next five years.

The plan relied on input from more than 600 business leaders, labor groups, economic development officials and education leaders, according to David Kerr, director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development.

"We didn't want this to be state government's plan," Kerr said last week, during a meeting with the News-Leader's Editorial Board. "This was developed by business leaders from across the state."

I don’t have an MBA. I used to fear that this would put me at a disadvantage in starting my own company, but now I’m convinced that it may be the other way around. In some recent surveys, as many as two-thirds of entrepreneurs felt that their entrepreneurial spirit was more ingrained than learned, so a specific education level is at least irrelevant.

For business professionals who aspire to an executive position in a large company, most people agree that an MBA is always positive. It will get you a higher starting salary, and a valuable edge in your credentials at every promotion opportunity.

Comcast Interactive Capital, the venture capital arm of the media giant, has partnered with Philadelphia based venture fund and startup accelerator Dreamit Ventures to provide seed funding, training, mentoring and other benefits to minority-led startups through DreamIt’s accelerator program.

The new $350,000 fund will give five minority-led startups for its Fall Philadelphia 2011 program a extra infusion of capital on top of the funding DreamIt provides for its class of startups. For Comcast Interactive Capital, this is the first investment initiative from the $20 million fund that was created as part of the acquisition of NBC Universal. The $20 million fund will be used to invest in other minority led startups and initiatives (outside of DreamIt), mainly in the technology sector.

Want to convince with your gift of gab? Sales people are hip to the tricks, stating everything as a question and doing more listening than yapping. But a recent study found more subtle ways to persuade.

Scientists had 100 interviewers make calls attempting to convince responders to take a survey. They then analyzed recordings for the interviewers’ speed, pitch and fluency. What emerged were specifics that succeeded in convincing people to take the survey.

Talkers at this speed, “a nice comfy pace,” were much more successful than “a languid pace” and these talkers “boy, I’m really hopped up.” So there's a “just right” speed and it’s about three-and-a-half words per second.

Have a great idea for innovation but don’t know how to take it to market? Well, Nokia’s Invent with Nokia initiative may help you take those grand conquer the world plans and put it into action, which would turn the smartphone giant into a tech incubator. Nokia says that you’ll get paid for your ideas, gain fame and fortune, and hopefully you’ll also be able to change the world in the process.

The Cocoon (Cooperative Sensor Communications) project, based on the vision of “smart” cities in which all devices within municipal areas are intelligently linked to one another, is being implemented by researchers at TU Darmstadt and the University of Kassel in Germany.

The backbone of a “smart” city is a communications network consisting of sen­sors that receive streams of data, or signals, analyze them, and trans­mit them onward.

Entrepreneurs are busy developing some of the technologies that will lead the way. As their small companies work to improve the future of humanity, they will need the support of clean tech incubators well versed in the intricacies of sustainable business development.
Business Incubation was first introduced in 1959 by Joseph Mancuso upon taking management of a warehouse in New York.

Ironically, one of the early participants in his shared business space was a poultry company and this is where the name business incubator stems from. Start-up incubators provide work space, prototyping facilities, subject specialists, contact with investors, legal services, definition of target markets, and overall, a nurturing environment for business growth. Companies that participate in start-up incubators are significantly more likely to be profitable in the long run than those who go it alone. Incubator graduates have an 80% chance of being profitable in two years and still in business in five years.

“It was the best of times and the worst of times”, Charles Dickens was writing about the French Revolution, but he could just as well be writing about the business climate today.

The dark clouds of high unemployment, tight credit and soaring deficits does have a silver lining, especially if you are an entrepreneur or a wannabe entrepreneur.  In the search for the next blockbuster, companies have begun, at an ever increasing rate, turning to open innovation as part of their business development strategy. The latest to join is Glaxo Smith Kline. Their Consumer Products Division has rolled out a new open innovation portal. To spread awareness of this they are using social media, one outlet is a rich media site devoted to accelerating commercialization http://www.urweb.tv . GSK created a short two minute promo and click through banners to take interested parties to their new portal.

Aaron Sorkin’s wonderful script for The Social Network opens with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, telling his girlfriend that there are more people with genius-level IQs in China than the entire population of the US.

The claim is ludicrous, of course; if true, it would mean that every fourth person in China was a genius. But in deploying it as his opening line, Sorkin demonstrates his characteristic talent for jabbing a finger on to the raw nerves of American society.

A newly appointed Minister of Youth asked me two weeks ago, what child and youth policies foster entrepreneurship later in life? Although not statistically valid, of the two dozen cases of entrepreneurs around the world that I have published a large number of them remembered early childhood experiences that strongly impacted their entrepreneurial drive. Here is what I wrote:

1. Directly impact children, and get the parents as a bonus. It is fantastic to devote a portion of your policies for children to planting the seeds of the entrepreneurial spirit in children. That is a great and inexpensive long term investment, but there can be a surprising short term payback: by "infecting" kids with entrepreneurship, the parents may get excited about entrepreneurship for themselves, too.

I just finished reading Wired’s in-depth piece on Y Combinator, the 6-year-old Silicon Valley incubator which in the words of author Steven Levy offers an “unmatchable entrée into the otherwise closed world of high-stakes Internet entrepreneurship.” It’s a great piece, partly because it describes how Paul Graham is shaking up the venture capital landscape through his hands-on approach with startups.

For example, Levy describes in great detail the moment at which Graham introduces the plan by angel investors Yuri Milner and Ron Conway to invest in all of the Y Combinator companies.

Each weekend, Mashable handpicks a few startups that we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

As a follow-up to our post on 13 alternative ways to consume the news, we decided to highlight three more applications that focus on enhancing the news-reading experience, each with its own appeal.

Web denizens with an old-fashioned bent toward reading news via RSS feeds like Google Reader might appreciate the simplicity and style of WebReader, a desktop client for Mac, PC and Linux. More avant-garde iPad news readers may enjoy Percolater’s visual approach to articles. And, news junkies hanging on the latest update related to their favorite celebrities and interests should give SkyGrid a look.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, “One of these days, I’m going to start my own company,” I’d be rich. If this day ever comes for all these people, we will be overrun by startups. Yet I don’t lose any sleep over either of these possibilities.

Most people procrastinate from time to time, but I suspect that the challenge here is somewhat deeper than that. So I did my own informal survey of business books, to gather the key reasons why most people never start the journey. If you recognize yourself in any of these categories, you may be more of a “wanna be” than a real entrepreneur:

1. You are a dreamer, not a do-er. Most people in this category actually prefer to think of themselves as “idea people,” rather than implementers. In reality, the dreaming part and the idea are the easy parts, and the hard part is building a workable plan and making it successful. A strong vision is required, but that’s different from the dream.

Talk to a Technology Transfer Executive at any University and they will tell you the licensing money is in Biotechnology, more simply put, in medicine. Innovation in the Biotechnology marketplace is a very different proposition than it is for materials, devices, energy, software or any other area of invention and innovation. The sums of money spent on research are huge, in 2007 that figure for the US was estimated at $122 billion.

Not only are large sums invested in research, but the time to market is long, ten years to get a drug from the laboratory to market is consider an achievement. But the pay off for all this time and money can be enormous, Emory University and Northwestern received tens of millions of dollars from biotechnology patents in last few years. Healthcare is one industry where consumers do not have much of a choice when it comes to purchasing a product. Suffering, pain or death are not an option. A successful drug passed by the FDA and other overseas agencies is the closest thing to the right to print money.

Top scientist Sir Paul Callaghan says New Zealand is a poor nation because we work at low-wage activities.

"We have the capacity to be prosperous, but we choose not to be," the New Zealander of the Year said in a speech to the Labour Party congress yesterday.

Thursday's budget has been criticised for its lack of a coherent plan for economic growth, when Callaghan said New Zealanders were looking for a vision "about where we can go as a country".

There was a disparity between rich and poor compared with other developed countries, productivity was near the bottom of the OECD despite Kiwis working longer than those in other developed countries, and we were failing to capitalise on a school system that performed highly in international comparisons.

Texas State University System regents on Friday approved design plans for a $7 million facility to house the school's technology accelerator for startup businesses.

The approval of the 20,000-square-foot Center for Research Commercialization facility comes as the school has been adding engineering degree programs over the past few years.

The new facility will provide startups and young businesses with access to Texas State faculty, as well as laboratory and office space.

The facility "has been a goal of the university's for some time," said Bill Nance, vice president for finance and support services.

"We think it really is a nice partnership toward economic development and research in San Marcos, so we're very excited about it," he said.

One of the biggest myths I still see in the community of new entrepreneurs is the assumption that “All I need is a good idea, and some investor will give me the big money I need to build the business.” In reality, investors fund good business plans, not big dreams. It’s all in the execution.

A related myth is that it takes a lot of money to start a business. Investment requests of $500K and $1M seem to be the most popular. In reality, most business today can be built and reach breakeven for much less than these amounts, maybe $10K-$50K, with the exception of some medical related ones, and high technology content solutions.

The iPad success has been initially questioned by some. They're not that loud anymore now that Apple is breaking record sales every quarter, that a whole bunch of competitors are releasing their own tablets and that people are forming lines every early morning in front of Apple Stores to get the new iPad 2. I won't blame them though: I've initially been septic about tablets, having been an early adopter of the first touchscreen laptops myself (windows tablet anyone?). A few months before the iPad came out I looked at the opportunity like many "power" users: why would I need a simpler machine that would do less than a Mac? Of course, the geek in me got the better of the rational guy and I rushed on the iPad when it came out. I wasn't too sure what to expect but now I know : the iPad does less than a Mac and that's better to a lot of people. Including me, surprisingly.

AOL co-founder Steve Case was reminded of the ups and downs of entrepreneurship this morning as he was being introduced at this morning’s National Small Business Week conference in Washington, D.C.

“How many of you had an AOL account?” asked Karen Mills, head of the Small Business Administration.

Mills, former manager of a private equity firm, raised her hand. But few members of the audience would have raised their hands if Mills had used the present tense. In 1992, AOL was the first Internet company to go public. At its peak, nearly half of all Internet users in the U.S. had AOL accounts. But AOL’s glory faded after it merged with Time Warner in 2001.

Case, however, didn’t just return to his native Hawaii and sit on the beach counting his billions. He got involved in other entrepreneurial efforts through his Revolution investment firm, helping new ventures like Zipcar and Living Social grow.