It’s less than two months before his company’s initial product launch, and CEO Ric Fulop is excitedly showing off rows of stripped-down 3-D printers, several bulky microwave furnaces, and assorted small metal objects on a table for display. Behind a closed door, a team of industrial designers sit around a shared work desk, each facing a large screen. The wall behind them is papered with various possible looks for the startup’s ambitious products: 3-D printers that can fabricate metal parts cheaply and quickly enough to make the technology practical for widespread use in product design and manufacturing.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com  - GRANT CORNETT

Happy Independence Day from Rich Bendis and the Innovation America Team!

Here was my Father’s Day weekend: up at 2:30 Friday morning so I could make a flight at 5. Off to Artifact Technology board duties on Whidbey Island, floating in Puget Sound. Redeye back four days later. So much for a relaxing weekend.

But wait! Whidbey Island. A place of enchantment covered in beautiful forests and parklands and edged by colorful rocky cliffs and beach. Filled with interesting tiny towns and creative people.

A perfect place for a Clarity Break!

On a spring afternoon, Albert, a high school senior, sits in a waiting area with his parents at a dim sum restaurant in New York. It's an unusually slow Saturday--the wait is only two and a half hours, much less than a week ago, when the restaurant stopped taking the names of hopeful diners by just 1 p.m. "My colleague in Hong Kong told me how popular it was, so we decided to check it out," says his father.

 Image: Courtesy of Tim Ho Wan Group - Tim Ho Wan's chef founders Mak Kwai Pui and Leung Fai Keung.

According to new studies, it turns out that the vast majority of entrepreneurs have a glaring financial blind spot. A survey of business owners by BMO Wealth Management found that only a fraction of entrepreneurs are prepared for retirement. In fact, three-quarters of the survey respondents (aged 18-64) had less than $100,000 set aside for retirement.

Since I was a kid, I wanted to own a business. But, my professional life didn’t start with entrepreneurship. I went to college and worked as a systems programmer for a big, multinational company. While there (and feeling like a cog in the corporate wheel), I started my first company in a spare bedroom of my house. A year later, I quit my job to be a full-time business owner.

Back in May, Scott Henderson, orbital launch site director of Blue Origin, spoke to about 100 community leaders at a luncheon at the Florida Institute of Technology.

The event was hosted by the statewide law firm GrayRobinson’s Melbourne office.

At the luncheon, Henderson pointed out Blue Origin’s presence in Brevard County wasn’t a given. If not for the support of the Space Coast community – i.e. financial incentives – he could just as easily be addressing leaders in some other state.

Image: http://www.floridatoday.com 

If you're a college student, there's a good chance summer has become synonymous with one thing: internships.

Land one in the tech industry and you're likely headed to San Francisco. While dozens of the largest tech companies,— like Facebook, Google, HP, and Cisco — are headquartered on the outskirts of the city, in the heart of Silicon Valley, spending time in San Francisco is a must.

My first advice for new entrepreneurs is to pick a domain that doesn’t have the sky-high up-front development costs, like online web sites and smart phone apps. Leave the world of new computer chips and new drugs to the big companies, and people with deep pockets. For the rest of us, the following suggestions will help you survive the valley of death:

Accumulate some resources before you start. It always reduces risk to plan your business first. That includes estimating the money required to get to the revenue stage, and saving money to cover costs before you jump off the cliff. Self-funding or bootstrapping is still the most common and safest approach for startups

Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's best known start-up accelerator, thinks it has found a new type of biotechnology start-up.

Life-sciences companies come with a high risk of failure—often, the science behind a proposed invention isn't entirely proven, and turns out not to work. Because of this risk, the traditional way to fund early-stage life sciences companies is for a landmark East Coast investor, such as Third Rock or Flagship, to take a huge equity stake in the business and replace the founder with a seasoned executive. In exchange, it pumps tens of millions of dollars into the company over many years. It often takes more than a decade to generate a return.

Take a look at any successful enterprise and you’ll find innovation at its core. That was just as true a hundred years ago when Henry Ford perfected the assembly line as it is today, when modern day giants like Elon Musk bring cutting edge technology to market. Innovation, as I’ve written before, is how people come up with novel solutions to important problems.

The tricky part is that every organization faces different types of challenges. Some, like Intel, focus on improving old technologies, while others, like MD Anderson Cancer Center, strive to make fundamental new discoveries. There are also those that innovate business models, marketing campaigns and many other things.

'Hitch Theaters' is a portable movie screen and projector stand that attaches to the back of your vehicle.

Image: http://mashable.com 

Mirage Eclipse has pedals and a handlebar for you to pedal across the water. The large fins move you forward. Generate speed or freely cruise at a relaxed paced. The handlebar and rudder comes off so the board fits right on top of your car. 

The pot of gold that may or may not be at the end of the venture capital rainbow can be tempting to entrepreneurs, but most business owners are better off pursuing homegrown capital.

Between the effort involved in accessing venture capital, the cost of it if you’re successful and some possible unintended consequences, most business owners would be wise to bootstrap instead of pursuing VC funding, according to Brian Hamilton, chairman and co-founder of Sageworks, a financial information company.

Image: Sageworks Chairman Brian Hamilton  - Sageworks

Entrepreneurship is no walk in the park. In fact, the amount of new businesses that fail exceed the number that succeed. That’s why it’s more important than ever to create a unique product or service that helps you stand out from the rest.

However, don’t be discouraged. If you believe in your business, passion will prevail. On average, 75 percent of small-business owners are confident in their company. And why shouldn’t they be? They’ve turned their passion into profit. Yet, keep in mind it’s important not to be overly confident. Instead, take things one step at a time. Typically, 20 percent of small businesses fail in their first year, 50 percent in their fifth year and 70 percent after a decade of being in business.

As the country moves toward full employment, at least as economists define it, the quality of jobs has replaced joblessness as the primary concern. With wages still stagnant, rising an anemic 2.5% in the year to May, the biggest challenge for most parts of the U.S. is not getting more people into the workforce but rather driving the creation of the types of jobs that can sustain a middle-class quality of life.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

MIDLOTHIAN, Va. — “Let’s make sure we’re clear on terms,” the instructor said, summoning the next presentation slide onto the big screen behind him. Obscurities such as “borrow excavation,” “grubbing” and “subbase” didn’t faze the 21 apprentices in the room. They were almost all young men, many sporting baseball caps and sunburned necks. They’d been working on construction sites for months.

When I started my podcast, Behind the Brilliance, I reached out to smart and successful venture capitalists who could offer advice on everything from pitching to scaling.

The wisdom came in spades as investors opened up about their own journeys and shared rarely discussed advice for founders. VCs are notoriously busy and hard to reach, so these in-depth conversations provide a wealth of information for founders who want to understand how VCs think about their most important decisions.

People are up in arms after the recent reporting by The Information that six women entrepreneurs were sexually harassed by the managing partner of a VC firm, and rightly so.

While the news is making headlines globally, the more substantive questions remain — what will happen when the buzz fizzles out? Do we go back to business as usual? Maybe we try to be a little more aware, or just a little less sexist? It’s time to take a hard look at how we are conducting business in venture and address the role of women in our industry.