A large portion of your competitive advantage and your potential value to investors is the size of your intellectual property portfolio. When someone says Intellectual Property (IP), most entrepreneurs think only of patents. In reality, patents are only one of at least eight items that should be in your IP portfolio. You need all these before you start looking for funding.

Some of the other items may cost a lot less, and may be worth far more in the long run. Here are the key elements:

* Company name. The company name becomes your intellectual property at the moment you incorporate your startup as an LLC or a Corporation. Sole proprietorships need to trademark the name to protect it. Select it well – marketers will tell you that you will be selling your name, more than your products. Actual incorporation fees in many states are below $100, if you do it yourself. Don’t pick a company name until you are certain that you can get the comparable domain name, so Internet brokers won’t hold you hostage.

A group of 12 biology educators at US colleges and universities that teach mostly undergraduates argues in the May issue of BioScience for coordinating networks to expand the study and teaching of ecology conducted at these institutions. The group, which has launched a network dedicated to continental-scale observations, argues that better coordination of current research efforts will allow “transformative contributions” cost-effectively, while also providing valuable educational experiences for undergraduates.

Most ecological research in the United States is conducted at dedicated institutions or at research universities, where postgraduate students studying for advanced degrees and postdoctoral researchers do much of the work. Yet institutions dedicated to undergraduate education commonly employ ecologists as professors, and many of them now pursue local research projects. Though some of these have produced important results, the projects are typically poorly coordinated with other studies.

A whole new crop of eager college grads are about to hit the job market and they’re coming your way. If you’re one of the increasing numbers of small business owners who are hiring, you’ll want to make sure that you hire the crème de la crème, not just any smooth talker with a shiny new degree. I asked several entrepreneurs how they go about hiring new grads, and they shared these unusual techniques:

Interview them again, and again (and again). Razor Suleman, CEO and founder of I Love Rewards, uses a four-step process to interview candidates at his Toronto- based company, which creates employee recognition programs. “The first step in our hiring process is an open house, which attracts upwards of 400 candidates,” he says. “It lets prospects get a feel for the company and allows us to personally meet every candidate.” A select few are invited to come back for a group interview, half of which is spent asking questions and half “half about selling the company, because you’ll always have to fight for an A-play,” says Suleman. A handful moves on to a skills interview, where prospects are asked to perform job-related tasks; and last, the company does “Topgrading” which Suleman says “takes the applicant back to high school and evaluates their ability to self-reflect, as well as the value of all their previous experiences.” The process, says Suleman, “may seem timely and excessive, but it has proven to work well and gives us the opportunity to gauge both personality and skill level.”

Toronto is Canada’s high-tech hub

Toronto is known for lots of things. The longest street in the world. The tallest freestanding structure in the world (at least, such was our claim to fame until 2007). North America’s largest continuous underground pedestrian system.

Toronto is also gaining global steam as Canada’s leading high-tech hub: home to 30% of Canada’s ICT workforce and a thriving entrepreneurial environment where the number of ICT service firms has increased by 2,000 since 2002.

A recent report, Canada’s High-Tech Hub: Toronto, showcases highlights from Toronto’s high-tech scene, including an overview of the entire sector and details about our city’s research and innovation community, talent pool and investment environment.

In the American Express OPEN State of Women-Owned Business Report, there are some fascinating statistics that point to the strength women are bringing into start-ups and running and owning their own businesses. As a woman CEO of a technology company, I am thrilled to see statistics that show that women are starting businesses at 1.5 times the national average and, more importantly, women-owned firms are doing better than men-owned businesses have done over the past 14 years.

* As of 2011, it is estimated that there are over 8.1 million women-owned businesses in the United States, generating nearly $1 .3 trillion in revenue and employing nearly 7 .7 million people.

I gave a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of Entrepreneurship Week on the Democratization of Entrepreneurship. The first 11 minutes or so of the talk covers the post I wrote called “When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.”

In it I observed that the barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. In each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten.

My hypotheses is that we’ll look back to this decade as the beginning of our own revolution. We may remember this as the time when scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. As the time when we reinvented the American economy and our Gross Domestic Product began to take off and the U.S. and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before. It may be the dawn of a new era for a new American economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Younger workers – the so-called Millenials or those born after 1982 - with all of their creative talent and intellectual savvy, and all of their flightiness and senses of entitlement - offer unique challenges and opportunities for 21st Century managers seeking to build well-functioning teams that work and win together.

Here are five best practices:

#5. Understand that Entrepreneurship and Youth Go Hand-in-Hand. Most ambitious young people today don’t grow up dreaming about getting that “good state job” or to work for the same company for 30 years.

Rather, and following up on that overriding sense of “specialness” with which we now raise our children, young people want their star to shine. They want to come up with the new, great ideas, and to be acknowledged and rewarded for it.

SHANGHAI — For three decades, wealthy nations have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in China, helping drive one of the most remarkable economic booms in history.

Now, China is poised to return the investment favor. The question is whether the United States will be willing and able to fully participate, according to a new study to be released Thursday.

Flush with capital from its enormous trade surpluses and armed with the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, China has begun spreading its newfound riches to every corner of the world — whether copper mines in Africa, iron ore facilities in Australia or even a gas shale project in the heart of Texas.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of “Solid State,” Venture Atlanta’s monthly newsletter featuring intriguing Georgia technology start-ups, entrepreneurs and the ecosystem that supports them. Solid State serves as a complement to our blog Cache and will explore companies, issues and trends in a longer format.

Innovation in Russia’s heartland picked up momentum and funding recently with the launch of a new nanotechnology fund backed by Russian innovation giant Rusnano and German venture capital fund Nanostart in the Russian regional city of Perm. Rusnano, Nanostart and the governor of the Perm administrative district created the $73 million fund as an investment vehicle to provide seed capital to start-up nanotechnology companies in Perm and to increase the project base in the region for Rusnano co-investment at later stages. The fund, to be called the Kama First Fund, takes its name from the Kama River, which flows through the Perm region. As previously discussed on ModernRussia.com, Perm is the third largest city in Russia and is quickly becoming a hot spot for Russian innovation.

Today, in virtually every corner of the country, well-meaning bureaucrats will hand out money to people who shouldn’t have it. They claim they are offering a lifeline, but more often, it is a noose.

I’m talking about the network of community-lending programs and banks that hand out six-figure loans to new entrepreneurs who provide a business plan and pledge their house (and often that of a cosigner) in return for a start-up loan.

More often than not, those lenders end up saddling applicants with more debt than they need or can afford.

Capital is not the scarce resource that new entrepreneurs need.

The first of many tests of a true entrepreneur is the ability to make something out of virtually nothing. When Aaron and Michael Serruya decided they wanted to set up a frozen yogurt store, they calculated their start-up costs: They needed retail space in a tier-one shopping mall, signage, industrial refrigeration units and inventory, among other things. It all added up to more than $100,000.

Entrepreneurs can use peer-to-peer lending sites such as Prosper and LendingClub to obtain loans for their businesses without worrying about breaking securities laws. But they cannot take a similar approach to selling equity in their companies online. Selling interests in the financial returns of a business must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or meet the criteria for exemption from registration, according to rules established about eight decades ago. Even if the entrepreneurs seeking to raise money by soliciting others online don't care if the money they obtain is a gift, a loan, or an equity investment, those distinctions matter to the SEC.

Now the SEC is considering making regulatory changes that would allow entrepreneurs to raise modest amounts of equity through online crowdfunding, according to a recent letter from SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I applaud Schapiro because her changes to the Depression-era rules would make a lot of sense by giving capital-constrained entrepreneurs a further source of equity funding.

When you think of startup accelerators, Y Combinator certainly has the buzz and backing by some serious investors. But is it the best out there?

Tech Cocktail, Kauffman Foundation and the Kellogg School of Management aimed to answer that question by coming out with the 2011 USA Startup Accelerator Rankings. The study was led by Aziz Gilani from investment firm DFJ Mercury with participation from Professor Yael Hochberg and MBA Candidate Kelly Quann from Northwestern University.

The rankings were compiled through numerous interviews with VC’s, Angels, and program graduates. The accelerator programs were then ranked using a three tiered methodology. From the rankings, “It weighed 25 percent by qualified financing events (i.e. companies that got funded after completing the program), 50 percent by the success of the companies that came out of an accelerator and finally 25 percent on accelerator program characteristics (i.e. money startups receive, equity accelerator takes, with a bonus for the size of the alumni base). Each accelerator was put through this methodology and then the rankings were generated.”

Startup founders regularly fork over chunks of their companies in exchange for venture capital. But a new angel fund is hoping that they’ll do the same in exchange for engineering talent.

“Most of that money (from venture capitalists and angels) is used to build a product,” explains Haig Kayserian, the CEO of Kayweb Angels. “Once that product is built, you will probably have given away a lot of equity.”

Kayserian sees what he calls “angel developing” as a way for entrepreneurs to accomplish the same end — a product — without giving up control of their companies in the process.

Kayweb is named for its majority owner, the design and development firm Kayserian founded in Australia seven years ago. That company, which now has a client list of more than 200 companies and additional offices in the Philippines and New York, takes on the startup projects that Kayweb Angels selects. Like a traditional capital fund, Kayweb Angels also has a board of directors that provides its startups with connections, guidance and help securing further funding.

Quick, which Boston- and San Francisco-area venture firm has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the burgeoning—and controversial—market of intellectual property and patent protection over the past five years?

If you said Charles River Ventures, you are correct. In fact, CRV is the only big venture investor behind Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm known for its unique (and often criticized) approach to the business of invention. Charles River says that, together with its limited partners, it has poured some $300 million into the company since 2006.

That’s an astounding figure, and it shows that Charles River is betting on intellectual property in a huge way—perhaps more so than anything else in its portfolio. Besides Intellectual Ventures, the VC firm is also invested in RPX, a San Francisco-based defensive patent aggregation firm, which filed for an IPO in January and plans to go public today—more on that coming in a separate story. (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures are also investors in RPX, which was co-founded by two former employees of Intellectual Ventures.) Yet most venture firms still treat the field of intellectual property as a bit of a scourge—or, at best, a fringe area—even though it has great ramifications for VCs and their startups. So why did CRV decide to take the plunge?

We fall into comfort zones easily. We see something that works, or appears to be working, and we settle for that.

It’s understandable. After all, experimentation isn’t always fun. It can be hard work. It can backfire – results are never guaranteed.

Compare that to the safe and the tried, where we know something has been proven to be successful (relatively or otherwise), and you can see why comfort zones are easier to be part of.

The thing is, though, comfort zones make us lazy. They confine us, and inhibit continued learning. And once we stop learning, we stop living. Maybe not physically, but certainly mentally.

Once the learning disappears, so does the ask.

Are venture capitalists starting to chase deals? It appears that might be the case as more capital went into fewer deals in the first quarter.

Investments are up while deals are down, according to a report from Dow Jones VentureSource, which found that venture capitalists invested $9.8 billion into 967 deals for companies around the world during the first quarter of 2011, representing a 20% increase in investment but a 7% decline in the number of deals from the same period in 2010.

By comparison, in Q1 2010, companies around the world received $8.2 billion in venture capital across 1,038 deals.

Last week, BMW upset electric vehicle lovers everywhere when Jim O'Donnell, the company's North American chairman and CEO, said that EVs won't work at their current battery range for at least 90% of the population--and that the U.S. government should end the $7,500 EV tax credit. Does this mean these cars aren't going to be in every driveway in five years?

Actually, people are pretty excited about electric cars--as is BMW, which is making them. So now the company is rushing to do damage control lest we think that it is not behind its own entry into the market. Fast Company had the chance to talk to Tom Kowaleski, VP of Corporate Communications for BMW North America, to find out what the company really thinks about EVs--and other alternative vehicle technologies.

Silicon Valley is built on simple myths. One of the most pervasive is that all winning startups are founded straight out of school by 20 year olds from Stanford or Harvard. The reality is these are the exceptions, not the rule.

A student called me recently and said he had to meet - “I’m having a career crisis,” was how he described it. I invited him to make the drive down to my ranch.

As the story unfolded, it turned out that he just turned 30 and realized that he hadn’t founded a company yet. “Everyone now starts a company out of school. All my classmates who were interested in entrepreneurship have started their own companies. I’ve just been working my way up the ladder.”

BOSTON--Even with the excitement ARPA-E generates for its energy research, more people are questioning how to get those innovations out of labs and into the market at large scale.

The Advanced Research Program Agency-Energy was modeled on DARPA, which is considered a successful model of using the Department of Defense to fund new technology research. But the key difference in energy is that researchers don't have a ready customer in the DOD willing to buy or further enhance the fruits of government-funded work.

ARPA-E is seeking to improve its research programs to increase the chances that a breakthrough technology will actually be produced at scale, said Ilan Gur, a senior commercialization advisor at ARPA-E today here at the Lux Executive Summit. Specifically, ARPA-E program managers garner input from industrial companies to better ensure that grant programs address a market need.