The three largest parties to gain power in last night's Finnish parliamentary elections have dramatically different political agendas. Fortunately for entrepreneurs, employment and entrepreneurship is one of the areas with the fewest differences overall. However, there are differences and depending on how the new government will be formed - these might have significant effects on entrepreneurs and their incentives as well. Below are some of the key areas of change these three parties are trying to achieve (from an entrepreneurial point of view).

National Coalition Party
National Coalition Party (NCP) is the largest of the new parliament with 44 seats from 200. They were also part of the government and their chairman, Jyrki Katainen, is the former Minister of Finance. Compared to the Social Demoratic Party and True Finns, NCP is by far the most entrepreneurial.

In her recently published book, “TheNewRural.Com,” Whitefish resident Diane Smith writes that, “in our challenging 21st century economy, the experts appear to agree that entrepreneurship is more important than ever.”

So what does that mean for rural America? Smith believes it means good things, since, in her view, rural America’s landscape is filled with entrepreneurs. She’s one of them.

After a successful career in technology in Washington D.C., Smith moved with her family to Whitefish in 2002, seeking “elbow room” and all of those other treasures of Montana life. But her business days were far from finished.

The entrepreneur: A ball of kinetic energy. Wired to perform. Demanding of himself or herself Egotistical. Driven. And a powerhouse of results.

Usually a company is lucky to have one at the helm. Some companies, founded by equally aggressive co-founders – Google and Microsoft come to mind – have two locomotives at the front of the train. Private-equity companies are so desperate to install entrepreneurs at the head of their investments that they spend tens of thousands of dollars on rigorous personality tests to evaluate the entrepreneurial qualities of candidates they’re considering to lead their portfolio companies.

Two years after floating its “four pillar” plan to revive the liquidity prospects of the U.S. venture capital industry, the National Venture Capital Association is renewing its efforts to get Washington to tackle some of the things that it thinks are keeping its companies out of the public markets.

The group’s new chairman, Paul Maeder, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners, would like to see Sarbanes-Oxley rules dialed back for small companies and steps taken to make it profitable again for analysts to cover them post-IPO.

We talked to him recently about the state of the capital markets. Here is the edited interview.

After years of little growth, command and control management, and cost-cutting, the cultures of many organizations need rejuvenating and tweaking in order to thrive in today’s difficult and increasingly competitive business environment.

But, changing culture is difficult. As Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, wrote:

The hardest part of a business transformation is changing the culture – the mindset and instincts of the people in the company.

So, what are the keys to drive cultural change?

1. Clearly Define the Culture: Define the new culture clearly, fully explaining the attributes of the culture and the acceptable behavior in the new culture.

During my six years as an accidental bureaucrat, after spending twenty-five years in the private sector, my friends often wondered how I could do it. They routinely asked versions of the question: doesn’t government move too slowly for you? My standard reply was that, yes, the public sector moves slowly - but then, big companies don’t move so quickly either. And come to think of it, I teased my friends in higher education, colleges and universities move more slowly than either business or government! The point is, all institutions move slowly.

What surprised me wasn’t how slowly the different institutions moved, but the different language, behavior, secret handshakes, and views of each other I found across sectors. Xenophobia runs rampant within public, private, non-profit, and for-profit silos. Each silo has created its own world completely foreign to inhabitants from other sectors. Visiting emissaries are always viewed with skepticism. (”I’m from the government and I’m here to help …”)

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The University City Science Center announced today that its QED Proof-of-Concept Funding Program has been awarded a $1.0 million grant by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA).

The EDA, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, promotes competitiveness and prepares the nation’s regions for growth and success in the worldwide economy.

The Science Center’s QED Program is the nation’s first multi-institutional proof-of-concept program for life science technologies. A total of 19 academic, healthcare and research institutions located throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware currently participate in the program.

We read a long Steve Jobs interview with Playboy from 1985.

As with most long interviews with Jobs its filled with fantastic nuggets about his life, Apple, and the future of computing.

We pulled out our 15 favorite quotes and anecdotes.

Google alumni are spreading across the tech industry and beyond, bringing along with them the lessons they've learned inside the search giant.

We decided to reach out to a few ex-Googlers to find out what they learned while working for tech's most powerful company.

The hope is that other people will be able to pick up a few tips on how to run their business.

Google, for it's reputation as a carefree, "Googly" place, is still a big business and operates as such.

Business-related fields account for slightly over 20 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the United States, the most popular field of study. But the quality of that education is facing growing scrutiny and criticism, as detailed in an article by David Glenn in the Education Life section of The Times as part of a joint project with The Chronicle of Higher Education. A recent study found that undergraduate business majors study less than other students, and lag behind in assessments of critical thinking and writing skills -- scoring lower than students in education and communications, and well behind liberal arts majors.

Proposals to introduce standardisation systems across Europe – covering services that could range from tattooists to tourism – have met with hostility from business and caution from consumer groups.

Introducing a standardisation system for services is one of 12 so-called "key actions" that the European Commission has committed to achieving before the end of next year as part of its Single Market Act re-launch.

Standardisation of goods is well established at EU level, and individual member states already use some standardisation in the services sector. The Commission believes that such standards should be developed at European level to facilitate cross-border services.\

The Gotham Gal and I have been fortunate to accumulate signficant capital over the past fifteen years. And the vast majority of it is invested in startups. We get distributions from a sale of one company and within months that capital (after taxes) is invested in more startups (including non profit startups). This has caused a few liquidity issues over the years. The Gotham Gal is always saying that we'll set aside a bunch of cash next time and then we go and do the same thing. I guess we can't help ourselves. Investing in startups is more appealing to us than leaving cash in the bank or putting capital into the bond market or the stock market.

When I think about the history of silicon valley and startup ecosystems in general, this is the pattern I see. Entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs take the profits from one deal and turn around an invest in more deals. They recycle capital back into the startup economy. If you look at silicon valley right now, particularly in the early stage/angel/angel list market, this is what is going on. Early employees of Google, Facebook, and a bunch of other succcessful tech companies have taken a considerable part of their paydays and become angels. And it makes sense. They work in the startup economy. They understand the technology, the market, and the gestalt of startup life. They are allocating capital to the startup ecosystem.

Green products are everywhere, from water bottles that use less plastic to energy-efficient buildings to jackets made from recycled materials. But one sector that green principles have yet to infiltrate is health care; manufacturers of medical products are focused on safety rather than sustainability. Serge Roux, an industrial designer with the technology design firm Cambridge Consultants, says that those two goals need not be mutually exclusive.

Roux has created a syringe, called the Syreen ("syringe" plus "green"), that maintains the safety features of traditional syringes but might also help reduce waste. "I started the project purely with ecodesign as motivation," he says, "but as we went along, we found it added a lot of other benefits."

There's some debate about who was the first to broadcast a sporting event over the airwaves and into people's homes.

It's as if as many entities as possible want to claim that they were the ones who brought you a Jack Dempsey fight before someone else who also broadcast a Jack Dempsey fight.

(Or maybe it was Professor F.W. Springer who had a crude set up rigged to transmit University of Minnesota football games to a very small audience as early as 1912.)

My last two blogs on university education prompted a torrent of comments. The first, 'Does University Business Education Still Pay', looked at the poor research standings of many Australian business schools. The second, 'Not Failing Students is Failing Business', considered the problems with soft marking.

What's your experience of group work at uni? Add your comment below

I’m still getting emails and one of the more interesting comments is that there is too much group work in master’s and undergraduate business courses. This is an important issue for entrepreneurs considering university education. Group skills are vital in all business forms, and successful start-up entrepreneurs are usually adept at leveraging scarce resources of others through their ability to work in groups.

Distributed wireless sensors are increasingly being used to monitor all sorts of things—from water quality in a river to the oven in your kitchen. A startup in the U.K. called Pachube wants to kick-start a revolution in new apps and services by providing ways for anyone to share and access all this sensor data.

The 11-person firm, started in 2007, has developed sensor gateway that collects data feeds in many different formats and converts them into commonly used standards in real time. Pachube (pronounced "patchbay") processes six million points of data per day, and recently built its own cloud-based storage platform to handle a growing amount of data.

You know that swift glide-y feeling you get when you walk on an escalator. You’re moving faster than you normally would with the same effort. That’s the feeling we all want when we work. Instead, it often feels more like running in an exercise wheel. We spend lots of energy and break a sweat; we are working hard. However, when we exit the wheel at the end of the day, we find ourselves in the same place we started.

Many productivity tools help us manage what’s on our plate. I’ve looked through my books and have found a few techniques that – instead of simply moving things around on your plate – will help you reduce your serving size. These are… Create Focus, Purge Time Wasters, and Unplug Things.

Many small businesses are still struggling to raise capital in the wake of the Great Recession, despite a flurry of government and private initiatives.

President Obama launched Startup America to encourage entrepreneurship, stressing that small businesses traditionally have been the engine of job creation, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke regularly talks up his concern for small businesses and keep tabs on small business funding.

Now there's an effort to exempt startup businesses from the complex U.S. securities registration and filing requirements when they acquire relatively small amounts of loans and equity.

Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out:

1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books—a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying.