Entrepreneurship is usually a risky road — one wrong turn, and you could land in a ditch.

It helps if there are angels to fund the entrepreneurial journey and mentors to help navigate. But time is usually a big constraint both for the start up as well as the experienced CEO mentor — this is where e-mentoring over a virtual platform comes in.

Since last December, the Indian Angel Network has been offering online mentoring support to innovators.

Everybody wants a rock star programmer in their team, but very few actually need them. There is a huge difference between need vs. want, though many startups are in a constant cribbing mode for not being able to find rock star programmers.

To give you certain perspective, I have worked with quite a few rock star programmers in my career and here are my observations vis-à-vis rock star programmers.

In his excellent new book, Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible, Daniel Burrus makes a point of discussing the opportunity for entrepreneurial ventures aimed at Baby Boomers. There were 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Burrus says 80 percent of the nation's wealth is controlled by people over the age of 50. So what are entrepreneurs doing about it? Forward-looking ones are taking the "hard trend" of demographic certainty to innovate. Some ideas that are already on the market, or should be:

* Personal elevators retrofitted onto the outside of homes
Video games that place you at Woodstock, the 1968 Democratic Convention or the Chicago 7 trial and let you interact with friends

Draper Laboratory and MIT have developed a satellite the size of a loaf of bread that will undertake one of the biggest tasks in astronomy: finding Earthlike planets beyond our solar system—or exoplanets—that could support life. It is scheduled to launch in 2012.

The "nanosatellite," called ExoPlanetSat, packs powerful, high-performance optics and new control and stabilization technology in a small package.

While there have been many small satellites, these are typically used to perform simple communication or observation missions. "We are doing something that has not been done before," says Séamus Tuohy, director of space systems at Draper.

Lately its been so busy that I've had to move into "task triage" mode where it's no longer an issue of IF something is going to be left undone. Rather it's WHAT is going to be left undone. I first learned this lesson as a product manager, which is one of those jobs where it's absolutely impossible to do everything that needs to be done. Most product managers learn a couple of lessons quickly:

* How to say "no"
* How to prioritize the critical from the "nice-to-haves"
* That sometimes good enough is the best you can manage

The deteriorating number of tenured positions in higher education is a common source of concern for faculty, but few college presidents seem perturbed by the trend.

Less than a quarter of college leaders who responded to a Pew Research Center survey, done in association with The Chronicle, said they would prefer full-time, tenured professors to make up most of the faculty at their institutions. Instead, 69 percent said they would prefer that a majority of faculty work under long-term or annual contracts.

Leaders of private four-year institutions were less enamored of tenure than were their public peers. Forty percent of leaders of four-year private colleges who responded to the survey, conducted this spring, expressed a preference for faculty with long-term contracts, while 30 percent favored tenure.

Bill Gates just wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe singing the praises of MIT.

As he points out, MIT isn't just a great engineering school, it's also a great entrepreneurial school, in the broad sense of the term. It's not just that MIT graduates disproportionately go on to start companies, it's that MIT itself keeps innovating, with initiatives like the OpenCourseWare, putting thousands of courses online for free.

Larry Page once said that Google should have one million engineers, and he's made clear that he wants to return Google to its engineering roots. He's hiring 6,000 people this year to help.

But Google will never be a great consumer company until it takes a lesson from the book of Jobs and hires a bunch more liberal arts majors.

Engineers are great at solving problems.

But they're not always so great at figuring out which problems to solve.

A quick flip through the recent covers of Fast Company magazine is a simple indicator of how innovation is top of mind for cutting-edge businesses. In fact, one of the feature articles, The United States of Innovation by Jeff Chu and Margaret Downing, highlights creative and effective businesses from every city, with Houston as the City of the Year—I take pleasure in it being in the South—but back to business.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, to innovate is “to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products.” Stated at its core, the Latin root for innovate means “to renew.”

A “vast abyss” exists in what we know about management education programs around the world, and “cross-border collaborative projects may yet prove to be the most underutilized mechanism with the greatest potential,” according to a recent report on the globalization of management education.

But the Global Business School Network, which since 2003 has linked colleges in the developed West to those in developing nations, with the goal of strengthening business education worldwide, is trying to realize that potential.

all it climbing to the top of the bracket. Call it the Final Four. Call it May Madness. But whatever you call it, call it impressive.

Johns Hopkins students in the engineering school’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID) have amassed an impressive win record during this nationwide season of design and business plan competitions.

Most recently, a CBID team won first place, and $10,000, in the “Be the Change: Save a Life” maternal health challenge, sponsored by ABC News and the Duke Global Health Institute.

Their product: A simple, yet elegant, diagnostic test in the form of a magic-marker pen that screens pregnant women and children for life threatening conditions such as gestational diabetes. The cost: a half cent. The payoff: A possible life saved.

Being a leader means energizing and motivating your team of direct reports to perform at a higher level. Again, there is no shortage of literature and advice on this issue, yet more managers get it wrong than right. There is no doubt that a motivated and energized workforce translates directly into a better bottom line. Furthermore, most managers want to keep their people motivated. The problem is that in the clamor of all the advice on how best to motivate their people, managers don't even know where to begin. Sometimes I think we are so poor at motivating people because there is so much information on how to do it. Most of it is too complex. Another factor is that today's managers generally tend to be player-coaches, meaning that they have individual production responsibilities in addition to their managerial roles. Who has the time for all the "people issues"? If only there were a simple way of thinking about it. If only there were some tangible things managers could do without investing a ton of time. There are. Here's a one-minute course on energizing and motivating others:

1. However hard you try, you cannot motivate another human being. Humans are premotivated by their individual purpose and values.

2. Don't ask yourself what you can do to motivate them; try to find out how they are already motivated.

There were so many great reactions to a previous post on 10 ways to be creative like a kid. I’ve had emails, tweets, in-person conversations, and even a business newspaper interview about the ideas for adults to be more creative by doing what kids do. When you get that kind of response, what else do you do, but come up with 10 more ways to be creative like a kid!

* Don’t do things in the suggested order. Do them in whatever order you want to do them.
* Don’t eat your food; play with your food! Sculpt your food into a monster.
* Run down the hall to a meeting when you’re late.
* Talk to the person next to you throughout a meeting. Or pass notes. Or both.

Do you remember seeing the first buds on the trees in the spring? Interns can be buds of promise for your business if you follow a few basic concepts:

L - Link the intern’s projects to business goals

E - Ethically plan for and manage your intern

A - Authentically mentor and coach your intern

F - Use feedback as a teaching and development tool

Not all internships are successful, but by using L.E.A.F. principles, your business can benefit from the reciprocal learning experience offered by internships.

Georges Haour: The knowledge and technology available in universities and public laboratories must be much better “leveraged” by firms, in order to create new activities and jobs. It is a gold mine, but the so-called “technology transfer” process does not “mine” it well. Universities are a privileged actor in the distributed innovation system, which I described in Resolving the Innovation Paradox and which calls for firms to effectively federate many external inputs, with an entrepreneurial perspective.

IM: Why is the issue of firm-university partnerships particularly acute now?

GH: The world is facing a host of crises: water, food, commodities in general, but also healthcare: we need myriads of effective innovations to provide good quality healthcare at acceptable cost to a population, which is fast ageing and living longer in OECD countries.

DOES inventiveness run in families? Is there a gene that awakens the entrepreneurial urge? A look at the Smith family offers at least anecdotal evidence that the answer is yes.

Nick and Billy Smith, California-born brothers, grew up admiring the derring-do of their father’s father, a mechanical engineer and sometime race-car driver named H. W. Smith Jr. — or Bill to his friends.

“He was all about having a good time — still is,” says Nick, 22. That’s why, in 2006 on a visit to their grandfather’s ski cabin in Vail, Colo., the brothers were drawn to its dusty attic. They were certain they would find something fun to do there. “We were looking for schnapps or fireworks, one of the two,” Nick says.

Connecticut regulators struck down plans to install the state’s first wind power farm that would produce 3.2 megawatts of power after a group of residents complained that the turbines would bring down property values.

This is a familiar argument for wind power companies — many residents complain that the large wind turbines can be an eyesore and will bring down property taxes. The Connecticut residents complained the noise from the turbines and the flickering sunlight as a result of the turbines blocking out light would end up damaging property values. Connecticut is the latest addition to a group of states that have summarily killed proposed wind power projects due to “not-in-my-backyard” complaints.

No, you don't have to tell me, because I know what you're about to say: your new product is brilliant. It's a game-changer. Problem is, you need a killer logo. Well, today, designers, inventors, and investors are facing a dilemma similar to the one that writers and artists have struggled with for decades: there's nothing left. Or here's another problem: if you do manage to create a jaw-droppingly clever or memorable image, rather than engendering widespread consumer recall of your brand, your Easter-blue palette risks looking uneasily similar to the Tiffany box, and your little black bull is a transparent rip-off of the one that dangles from the neck of Sangre de Toro red wine.

As far as the logo is concerned, to paraphrase Bill Maher, it's time for New Rules. Today, what counts far more than a puma, a monkey, or a snarling aardvark is the cross-sensory experience your brand offers. I'm talking not only the emotion, beliefs, and desires your brand evokes, but its feel, touch, sound, smell and personality, of which the logo is just one small part. Whether it's a soda can, a car, a doll, a fragrance, a smartphone, or laptop, your brand needs to be smashable, e.g., instantly identifiable via its shape, design, copy, contours, and even navigation. Aside from adolescents, who are always on the lookout for the coolest logos to set them apart from, or help them gain traction with, their peers, today for most consumers the logo comes in near-to-last place to other considerations.

Last week I wrote about Computer Village, where many of the gadget-hounds in Lagos go to get their gadgety fix. But what about new technology being developed in the country? The city’s tech entrepreneur scene is small, but several people are working on changing that.

Oo Nwoye– or @oothenigerian as he’s known on Twitter– is one of the more enthusiastic champions of this nascent scene. (That’s him on the left.) I met him two years ago in London, where he cornered me at an event and made a case for me going to Nigeria, so he was one of the first people I contacted when I finally did.

The economic development border war between Kansas City and the state of Kansas is promoting the kind of competition that could be mutually destructive. Yet everyone feels forced to play the game, even if it’s not rational.

Mayor Sly James this week entered the fray, pledging that Kansas City would fight back against efforts to poach its businesses. That was a shot at Kansas, which rewards some companies for moving a few miles over the state line.

Kansas City officials hope that Missouri soon will offer its own incentive program to reward companies that are threatening to move a few miles to Kansas.