The cross-country road trip is a quintessential American experience. Whether you are on the run from the law, battling conformity in a psychedelic school bus, or in search of love, powerful things can happen on the open road. Six months ago, a group of four guys embarked on an epic journey to awaken the entrepreneurial spirit from coast to coast.

This experiment is called IdeaMensch and it is “a road trip for people with ideas.” Packed into a Honda Element, the team visited 48 states and held events at every stop along the way. They held these events anywhere that was available, including startup co-working spaces, wineries, and even an old mill. In each location, a handful of local entrepreneurs would speak on how they brought their ideas to life.

The past three decades saw companies in developed economies make huge strides improving the productivity and organizational performance of an array of jobs. Aided by advances in technology and digital communications, companies automated, reengineered, and outsourced numerous tasks that had once required full-time, on-site employees. The trend, which began on production floors, moved next to offices, where a range of transaction-based jobs that could be standardized or scripted were automated, shifted to workers in low-wage countries, or both.

Through all such changes, a broad swath of employment remained largely untouched: work requiring extensive human interactions. Among these positions are the jobs held by knowledge workers—the doctors, engineers, lawyers, managers, sales representatives, teachers, and other skilled professionals who together serve as the engine of the knowledge economy. Research from McKinsey and others has shown that such interaction workers are vital to the competitive success of companies and countries alike.1 Interaction work is the fastest-growing category of employment in developed countries, where it already accounts for a large proportion of jobs (Exhibit 1).2 Because technology has tended to complement, not replace, labor in interaction work, until recently many of these jobs had essentially been performed in the same ways for decades.

Startups are usually so focused on selling more of their branded product or service to their own customer base (organic growth) that they don’t consider the more indirect methods (non-organic growth) of increasing revenue and market share. Non-organic growth would include OEM relationships, finding strategic partners, “coopetition,” as well as acquisitions.

This initial focus is usually driven by limited financial and people resources, as well as the bandwidth of the executive team. Yet a creative and skilled team will often find that non-organic growth techniques can better leverage these limited resources.

These “labels” often blend into one another: those who are self-employed consider themselves business owners, business owners consider themselves entrepreneurs, freelancers consider themselves self-employed. For those who enjoy making a living from something they have built, they may label themselves all of the above.

However, for some of us freelancers, we may see ourselves as self-employed and as business owners, but stop short of calling ourselves entrepreneurs. My best guess as to why this is is probably because the word “entrepreneur” often brings up adjectives that they don’t necessarily see in themselves: multiple business owner, innovative, creative in the business sense, unique product and service offerings, taking on great risks. Why do freelancers tend not to call themselves entrepreneurs? And how can we move from freelancers to entrepreneurs?

Booz & Company’s annual global study of R&D spending reveals that successful innovators bring clarity to the early stage of innovation. It’s when companies generate ideas and decide which ones to develop.

Just 43 percent of participants said they were highly effective in generating new ideas. And only 36 percent felt the same way about converting ideas to development projects. Altogether, only a quarter of all companies indicated they were highly effective at the front end of innovation. Which is a shocking conclusion.

Startup Maryland is proud to announce that CoFounders Lab (Rockville, Md.) has claimed the top spot in its Pitch Across Maryland competition. The company was named the winner in the video pitch competition at the Maryland Entrepreneur Expo on November 13, by a panel of distinguished judges. The judges also named Woofound (Baltimore, Md.) as the runner-up.

As the winner and runner-up, CoFounders Lab and Woofound will receive free entry and bypass the first round of judging in the InvestMaryland Challenge, a national seed and early-stage business competition hosted by the State of Maryland. All Pitch Across Maryland participants are encouraged to apply.

At 2025 Washington Ave., on a wide South Philly street lined with stone and pipe dealers, crews have spent the last two months laying concrete footings, installing heating, cooling, and ventilating equipment, soundproofing, wiring, winching, piping, and preparing to install computer-controlled plasma cutters, lathes, grinders, robotic painters, 3D printers, and other cutting-edge machines, for an inventors' dream workshop. Its owners hope it will revive Philadelphia manufacturing for digital times. They're building the second NextFab - five times larger, at 21,000 square feet, than Penn and Cornell grad Evan Malone's original four-year-old machine-and-design center at the University City Science Center in West Philadelphia. This new NextFab will open next month, if Peco Energy gets the 3,000-volt switchgear hooked up in time and the big machines all arrive on schedule through the trailer-high doors and docks.

Three years ago, South Carolina lured Continental Tire’sheadquarters for the Americas — and more than 300 jobs — from Charlotte to Fort Mill.

Then last year, the German tire maker chose Sumter over a site in Brunswick County, N.C., for a $500 million plant that’s expected to employ 1,600 people over a decade.

South Carolina sealed the Continental deals with the help of tax breaks and a big cash grant.

Harrisburg – To position Pennsylvania as a national leader for technology development, Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration announced today the awarding of new investments to support business, community and university-based innovation.

“The governor is committed to providing our start-up companies and entrepreneurs with the resources they need to grow here and stay here,” Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary C. Alan Walker said.  “The support we are providing will help to build the relationship between students, businesses and universities to create jobs for graduates right here at home.”

If you’re running a lean startup, “launch and learn” is undoubtedly a familiar mantra. But launching a new feature can take weeks or even months, and for a scrappy startup that’s a potentially make-or-break issue. Our design studio works with dozens of startups each year to help teams define their products and features. Through the process of doing this over and over again, we’ve collected a time-tested toolkit of methods for learning that are cheap, fast, and perfect for startups to find those crucial mistakes earlier and then adapt their plans more nimbly. The result is almost always that they ship better products and do so even faster.

Do you consider yourself a creative thinker with great ideas? Are you a person with a non-technical background? Are you looking for someone technical who can make your brilliant idea come true?

Then this post is for you.

Maybe it’s because of my own non-technical background, maybe it’s because there are just not enough technical people here in Amsterdam, but whatever it is, I get constantly asked by non-technical founders where they can find technical talent.

For all the hype around small businesses raising money by selling equity stakes to individuals online, no one knows what this type of crowdfunding will actually look like. Since Congress relaxed securities laws this spring to make it easier for entrepreneurs to fund their businesses, a slew of new middlemen are trying to position themselves to benefit. The law, called the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (pdf), called for a new way for private companies to raise up to $1 million online from retail investors. It also eased other regulations for businesses trying to raise capital, including rolling back the ban on “general solicitation,” or publicly seeking investment in private companies.

Arizona's first-of-its-kind statewide technology transfer startup program, AZ Furnace Accelerator, is pleased to announce it has selected the first 10 startups that will participate in the business accelerator program. As part of the competitive process, a panel of judges selected the 10 winners from a group of 22 finalists and more than 50 applicants.

The AZ Furnace Accelerator is a groundbreaking initiative that encourages entrepreneurs from across the country to find and commercialize innovations developed within the state's universities and research institutions. These 10 winning companies utilized innovations from Arizona State University, Dignity Health Arizona, Northern Arizona University and University of Arizona. They represent a wide array of technologies and innovative solutions — from biomarkers for disease diagnosis to new methods for massive data storage to repurposing discarded tires for new concrete and construction materials:

Attometrics will use a novel technology capable of rapidly detecting protein, metabolite and DNA analytes with unprecedented sensitivity. Attometrics will sell an automated, multiplexed detection system that can handle high sample throughput to detect and identify groups of biomarkers for cancer and infectious diseases.

Drop a few pounds and it will lead to a good night's sleep, new Johns Hopkins research has found. As the body loses fat, particularly belly fat, people are able to sleep better, Hopkins doctors found when following 77 people over six months.

The improvement in sleep quality was experienced by those who lost weight through diet as well as those who combined a healthy diet with exercise.

Study participants had Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes and were all overweight or obese. They were randomly assigned to one of two groups; one focused on diet, the other exercise and diet. Both groups lost about 15 pounds on average and 15 percent of belly fat.

If you are in the business of anything, you know you need resources – whether it is human or natural capital. When Mitt Romney, a successful businessman famously made a joke about climate change at the 2012 GOP’s national convention during the 2012 presidential elections, he assumed that resources are unlimited and climate change does not affect people who are trying to find jobs. He probably did not see this infographic.

Denmark comes top in the European Commission’s Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2012. The ranking “Innovation leader” is mainly due to the strong performance of the Copenhagen Region, which offers a highly educated work force, innovative SMEs, and strong public-private collaboration in R&D.

The European Commission’s report Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2012 (RIS) provides a comparative assessment of innovation performance across regions of the European Union, Croatia, Norway and Switzerland. Denmark is placed in the best performing group “Innovation leader”. The Copenhagen Region and Region Midtjylland get the main credit for the top ranking.

Here's a new, old idea for America: Let's identify, recruit, develop, and make a welcoming home for all the entrepreneurs in the world. We've done it before, and we can do it again. But to do it again, it will require all of us to go back to entrepreneurship school.

Gallup Chairman and CEO, Jim Clifton, has sent leaders worldwide back to their drawing boards on job creation with his book The Coming Jobs War. What Gallup has learned, and what Jim has convincingly argued, is that new job creation is almost entirely in the hands of small and medium-sized businesses. In other words, it's all about startups and shoot-ups. And those come from entrepreneurs.

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.

The first question most people seem to ask when contemplating a new startup is where they will get investor money. That’s certainly a valid question, but all the money in the world won’t make your business a success if you hate what you are doing, and you don’t have a plan to use it. I suggest that there are several other questions even more important than the money one.

The best way to assure the success of your startup is to do something you love, as opposed to something that will make you a lot of money. Of course, all these things and many more are critical, so it’s important that you keep your priorities straight. Here are the right questions to ask yourself, in the right order, before asking others about money:

Bank loans and venture capital aren’t the only ways to get a new business up and running. Countless entrepreneurs have started successful businesses without borrowing a dime. Known as bootstrapping or starting a business without outside capital, small business owners who’ve gone this route have had to rely on their resourcefulness, drive and creativity instead of cash to build successful enterprises.

“Being undercapitalized was a great thing for Barefoot,” says Michael Houlihan, co-founder of Barefoot Cellars and co-author of the upcoming book The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built a Bestselling Wine. “It forced us to think creatively and to be resourceful every step of the way.”