Call it the copycat syndrome or marketing burnout wherein a company has a success with one product at which point every company in the space copies the effort leaving a market dotted with me-too products with little differentiation other than price. Eventually through this process value is suctioned out of the product or service, demand wanes, and consumers move on. It is almost impossible to satisfy consumer desire for the cheapest or most innovative product/technology/service/oh-heck-anything, particularly because in the end the equilibrium price may well be zero and innovation may be defined as simply announcing that something is innovative.

Sometimes, particularly with software or the internet (which move much faster than PV technology development), ennui with the copycat syndrome drives innovators to ask new questions and these questions lead to new directions and products – for example, something will replace apps and disrupt not only software but the tablets, cell phones and computers that are now set up as app delivery devices.

Successful entrepreneurs know the importance of surrounding themselves with a great team, not just the form of their paid employees, but on their company’s board of directors and in less formal mentorships surrounding their businesses. Being able to pick up the phone and ask for advice from a trusted mentor is invaluable in making key decisions in any business.

What kinds of mentors should you have? Every entrepreneur should have a bevy of mentors and advisors to lean on when issues arise. These three will be key to the success of your business.

It's Entrepreneurship Week on Bdaily. Below, Nick Hungerford, CEO of online personal investment manager Nutmeg (www.nutmeg.com), details the identifiable traits of an entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur is someone who thinks about risk in terms of ‘risk is not doing something’ rather than ‘risk is doing something’ An entrepreneur has to be prepared to make sacrifices with his or her time, not have people tell him how great he is or thank him.

Operating as lean startup has its advantanges. Instead of planning too much, you can build a prototype, test it out and make changes as you go. But in order to deal with the challenges of growing, you're going to still need a business plan. Here are three reasons why:

• It helps you figure out how much money you need.
• It helps you keep your mission in focus.
• It helps you size up the competition.

Putting a price tag on a young startup is a peculiar practice. While valuation models exist, many agree that it’s more of an art than a science, especially in the absence of revenue — if you’ve ever wondered how Instagram reached a billion dollar valuation without literally ever having made a cent, you’re not alone.

When a company is producing a profit or revenue, valuations can be based on thumb-suck math like five to ten times annual profit, or three to four times revenue. Great, but what if you were a VC in the early days of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram?

Think back to your younger days when you took an entrepreneurship course or small business class in college. You probably learned about corporate legal structures, how to create a marketing schedule, assembling a team of advisors, and of course, the all important pro forma. All this was packaged neatly in the form of a business plan that was graded on whether you had the appropriate elements included. At no point was there any reality check on the viability of the business model and there certainly wasn’t any primary customer research done as part of the process. And where has that approach gotten us? Not far enough. Way too many startups fail unnecessarily because of an allegiance to the almighty business plan instead of learning from customers by talking to them during the search phase of their new venture startup. Well, we decided to take a different approach to how entrepreneurship is taught at Central College. Or more accurately, how entrepreneurship should be experienced in an educational institution. And the results were astonishing.

The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced today 43 awardstotaling $3 million for the FY2013Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF). The awards were made to 27 unique organizations from academia, the research community and industry across Virginia for the purpose of funding targeted areas of research with commercial promise aligned with the Commonwealth Research and Technology (R&T) Strategic Roadmap.

CRCF funding is available to public and private institutions of higher education, private sector businesses, research institute, federal labs and political subdivisions. Governor McDonnell and the General Assembly appropriated $4.8 million to the Fund each for FY2013 and FY2014. Five programs were eligible for award during the most recent solicitation: Commercialization, Facilities Enhancement Loan, Matching Funds, SBIR Matching Funds and STTR Matching Funds. Awarded projectsrepresent the areas of advanced manufacturing, aerospace, communications, cyber security, energy, environment, information technology, life sciences, modeling and simulation and transportation.

The contraction of the PC market continues faster than ever, eaten by the rapid growth of the tablet market, which is expected to outsell laptop and notebook devices for the first time this year and all PCs by 2015. But portable PCs may still be the saving grace for PC sales in the years ahead.

If there is anything new about the news coming out from IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker, it's the increase of the rate of the PC's decline. IDC had initially predicted a decline of "1.3% in 2013 followed by a gradual increase in volume." Now the analyst firm is predicting a sharper decline of 7.8% in 2013 and 1.2% down in 2014.

It used to be that if you were young and ambitious, you headed to Wall Street. These days, those folks are running in the opposite direction.

In the wake of the financial crisis, loads of young financiers are leaving Wall Street--to strike out as entrepreneurs. Some are seeking more meaningful work; others want to take a risk while young and unencumbered. They are certainly well prepared. Like start-ups, banks are demanding and fiercely competitive. And like entrepreneurs, bankers must be skilled at market research, financial analysis, and working in teams.

It’s no secret that venture capital has struggled since the dot-com implosion. The latest dispatch from the industry’s U.S. trade group, however, says there might be some promising signs of better performance.

In a new report wrapping up the 2012 performance for VCs, the National Venture Capital Association says the broad industry finally returned to the black last year—“the first post-bubble year in which venture funds collectively distributed more cash to limited partners than they brought in,” association president Mark Heesen said in a statement.

The word "cliche" comes from back in the printing press days: Its pronunciation mimics the sound of a printer's mold striking molten metal, dating back to the 19th century.

While cliches have a natural ridiculousness to them--catch yourself if you find yourself rolling your eyes the next time someone talks to you about "going the extra mile"--a cliche also works as a heuristic, a quick guidepost that, if used sparingly, can clue you into what the hell is going on and help you navigate the future.

Breaking up really is hard to do. But it can lead to breakthroughs, too.

Consider the case of Baked by Melissa president and CPO, Melissa Ben-Ishay. After failing a final exam in her senior year of high school, Ben-Ishay learned a valuable lesson. The test happened after her boyfriend had broken up with her, and the distress damaged her performance on the exam. That's when Ben-Ishay's teacher pulled her aside. He told her that because she was letting her emotions get the better of her, Ben-Ishay's work was suffering.

The thought of starting your own small business can be a little scary, if not downright intimidating.  Still, there are many great reasons for you to give it a go. It is “easier” than it ever has been to start and run a business. Whether you are bootstrapping your business or you have venture capital, it is now arguably riskier to depend on your job. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that what we thought was secure isn’t really secure and what we thought was right is left.

QUESTION: WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK FOR IN A POTENTIAL STARTUP PARTNER?

Question by: Ashley

THE DATING GAME

“When searching for a potential startup founder, you must search based on how you would if you were looking for a long-term relationship. You need to look for someone that can share the long-term vision of the company. Founding and running a business is like being married and having a child — you’ve got to remember that its for better, for worse, for richer, for poor and in sickness and in health.”

Today, Insight Venture Partners announced the closing of Insight Venture Partners VIII, a $2.57 billion private equity fund. Like its predecessor funds, Insight Venture Partners will invest Fund VIII in global software, e-Commerce, internet and data-services businesses. The firm will deploy capital in growth stage and more mature companies, as minority or control transactions.  The new fund will continue to execute on Insight's strategy of helping portfolio companies achieve their long-term operational and financial goals.   

By: Joe Donoghue, President and CEO at Leardon Solutions

Many famous entrepreneurs sat on their new product ideas for some time before prototyping that invention and taking it to market. Those same entrepreneurs often say their biggest regret is that they didn’t do it sooner citing lack of resources and information.

In today’s rapidly developing and evolving information super highway, an entrepreneur has nearly light speed access to just about any fact or figure. An argument can be made either way that the sheer abundance of data is helpful or harmful to ones cause. Efficient entrepreneurs find ways to focus on the information they need and block out the rest. So what type of questions does an entrepreneur need to ask when exploring a new product idea further? Are there questions that should be answered to help avoid data overload and sitting on an idea opposed to making it happen? The answer is yes. Here are four questions entrepreneurs should answer when getting started.

Who is my market? Before developing a product, it’s extremely important to do your homework. This means conducting an analysis to truly understand who it is that you’re trying to target. Identifying a market entails looking at every aspect of your expected customer such as the average age, marital status, average annual income, geographic location, purchasing habits, behaviors and more. Take the time to not only determine your customer profile, but to evaluate the competitors in the space you’re looking to enter and your market potential. Consumer products typically have many online forums from dedicated loyalists that share information that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars from professional research firms. It would be in your best interest to examine those. Other ways of researching market demand for particular types of products is to review sites such as eBay and Amazon to see what products list for new and used and gather valuable feedback on what people do and don't like about a product.

Somehow, equal pay for women is still an issue; legislation is being passed as I write this to ease the gender pay gap. But the problem isn’t equal. For the 49.3% of U.S. workers that are women, certain cities and metro areas are far more likely than others to yield a fair work environment.

Financial information company NerdWallet has rounded up a list of the best small, medium, and large U.S. cities for women in the workforce, based on the population growth rate, whether women earn high overall salaries, and whether they earn as much as men. "We used population growth to weed out (shrinking) cities like Detroit. That isn’t specific to women, but workers in general," explains Divya Raghavan, a NerdWallet analyst.

Henry Markram has ambitious goal: fully map and simulate the human brain inside a supercomputer. Now he has funding - $1.3 billion - sized to match his ambitious plan.

In 2009, Markram announced during a Ted Talk that he "would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade" and "dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and create a self-aware artificial intelligence." How? He would build a complete model of the human brain - all 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections - and simulate it on a supercomputer.

Several dozen professors in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have signed a letter to their dean asking for formal oversight of the massive open online courses offered by Harvard through edX, a MOOC provider co-founded by the university.

While “some faculty are tremendously excited about HarvardX,” the professors wrote, referring to the university’s brand within the edX platform, “other are deeply concerned about the program’s cost and consequences.”

The job description “data scientist” didn’t exist five years ago. No one advertised for an expert in data science, and you couldn’t go to school to specialize in the field. Today, companies are fighting to recruit these specialists, courses on how to become one are popping up at many universities, and the Harvard Business Review even proclaimed that data scientist is the “sexiest” job of the 21st century.

Data scientists take huge amounts of data and attempt to pull useful information out. The job combines statistics and programming to identify sometimes subtle factors that can have a big impact on a company’s bottom line, from whether a person will click on a certain type of ad to whether a new chemical will be toxic in the human body.