This week I’ve polled a variety of people with experience in crowdfunding to identify the secrets for success for social entrepreneurs.  I’ve talked to people who’ve tried to raise money using crowdfunding and have raised absolutely nothing.  Others have been blown away by the generosity of their friends, neighbors and social network, raising more than they hoped or expected.

The following insights may help you to join the ranks of those who are blown away by the generosity of crowdfunders:

I would like to call your attention to our second annual "Innovators who changed the course of telecom" series.

With the consumer's continual reliance on gaming consoles and wireless devices as well as the ongoing expectation that high speed Internet will be always available in our homes and at our businesses, it's not hard to forget the many innovators who laid the foundations that make these applications a reality.

Scientists and engineers dream about big advances that could change the world, and then they try to create them. On the following pages, Scientific American reveals 10 innovations that could be game changers: an artificial alternative to DNA, oil that cleans water, pacemakers powered by our blood, and more. These are not pie-in-the-sky notions but practical breakthroughs that have been proved or prototyped and are poised to scale up greatly. Each has the potential to make what may now seem impossible possible. —The Editors

Mavericks, cutting-edge innovators, risk-taking gamblers, in it for the money: These are some of the stereotypes of entrepreneurs that a new study puts the kibbosh to, at least among the British entrepreneurial set.

The study of nearly 1,000 British entrepreneurs by think tank Demos found that just a quarter said they enjoy taking risks to get ahead, and more than half – 55 per cent – take risks only if they see significant rewards. As well, a fifth would avoid risks altogether, even if they’d lead to great reward.

The overwork, lack of sustainable systems and processes, and work/life imbalance describe many professionals I see, not just entrepreneurs. When I read The Entrepreneur’s Trap, it made me reflect on my practices as a business owner but I saw a pressing need for the same principles to be adopted by professionals:

Boundaries are the key …For example, deciding what your NON-working hours will be. As entrepreneurs it’s not always easy to stick to a regular 9 to 5 schedule – there are some things that we just can’t plan for! But what we can do is decide when we will NOT work – be it evenings, weekends, before 9am, etc. If you don’t carve out (and commit to) specific NON-working hours then you will find yourself in the common trap of working 24/7 because you have allowed yourself the space to do so….We have all had those moments where something seemed impossible but we still got it done in time right? Likewise when you commit to NON-working hours many entrepreneurs find they are still able to get the same amount of work done even though they are taking more time off. – Tina Forsyth

You would think if there were a group of U.S. companies that collectively employ 700,000 workers and achieved 30 percent job growth and 48 percent revenue growth between 2009 and 2011, investors, economists and policymakers would want to know who they are.

We do.

The 636 companies that are finalists of the Ernst & Young U.S. Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2012 Awards are those companies.

Spread across the U.S. in industries as diverse as technology, manufacturing, consumer products and energy, these high-growth entrepreneurial companies are defying gravity. Not only have they collectively added more than 150,000 jobs in this challenging two-year period but, also, their annual rates of job growth have almost doubled -- from 9.7 percent in 2010 to 18.9 percent in 2011.

SARASOTA (November 13, 2012) Eleven Sarasota County area businesses have qualified to participate in the 2013 GrowFL Economic Gardening class coordinated locally by the Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County (EDC). Now in its third year, GrowFL fosters growth among “second-stage” businesses that have grown beyond the startup or first stage of business development.  

“As a partner in the GrowFL program, the EDC offers qualified area businesses a robust and, for first-time participants, cost-free program of custom strategic research, peer interaction and mentoring that has already paid off for Sarasota County businesses,” said Mark Huey, EDC president and chief executive officer. “With funding from the State of Florida and assistance from the statewide program based at the Florida Economic Gardening Institute at the University of Central Florida, GrowFL is a powerful tool for assisting entrepreneurial businesses with strong potential for job creation.”

Can you name the biggest impediment to innovation? One of our Fishbowl “Captains” – John Erickson– hit the nail on the head in a team discussion this week.

The culprit is fear.

A recent survey by the Robert Half Group agrees. What makes employees afraid?

 Fear of making a mistake tops the list, and was cited by 30% of employees Fear of getting fired is another. In fact fear of getting fired or appearing less dedicated or vital if they dare to take a vacation is rampant in the slow economy. The survey shows employees left an average of 11 vacation days—70%–of their vacations–untaken in 2011.

This week, Popular Science announced the winner of their annual Innovation of the Year award. In years past, they’ve named the Atari gaming system and also the iPhone as winners, but their Editor-in-Chief made a special point for Google Now, marking it as the first time that the thin line between humans and their devices was crossed with such pleasant ease. Google Now “innocently” collects our data, tracks our movements, and then offers suggestions for things before we even think about it.  The below video is Pop Sci’s Editor-in-Chief sharing his thoughts on Google’s latest achievement.

It seems like everyone has an Internet startup these days. The cost of entry is so low – you can create a web site for almost nothing - and you are on your way to riches with ecommerce, your latest invention, or personal services. But the low cost also means that your competition will also be there in force. Mashable claims there are 150,000 new web sites created per day.

In addition, every business has operating costs, like customer acquisition, fulfillment, inventory, and customer service. Without a sustainable strategy, these challenges lead to the terrifying statistic that nine out of ten online businesses will fail, and lead to the current ratio of Internet failures to millionaires being thousands to one.

Median household income in the United States declined for the second straight year, according to datareleased by the U.S. Census Bureau last month. The national median income was $50,502 in 2011, more than 8% below the 2007 pre-recession peak. The country’s largest cities followed the same pattern, with income falling in some cases by more than 10%. Even in the country’s wealthiest metropolitan areas median household income fell in many cases.

“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.”

In the aftermath of President Obama's historic reelection, the big discussion in Washington D.C. has already shifted to the elephant in the room: the looming battle in congress that will be fought on the precipice of a fiscal cliff.

On the other side of America, however, deep within Oregon's growing Silicon Forest, is a quiet convergence of national and local policymakers, small business owners, corporate CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, educators and community leaders all seeking local solutions to the economic challenges of job growth and wealth creation without waiting on an act of Congress.

This week the nonprofit TED is celebrating 1 billion video views with a series of playlists put together by celebrities like Bill Gates and Ben Affleck.

The organization’s entire offering of videos contains some fascinating talks on science, medicine and running a business. Below are just four of the ones we would put on our “most inspiring” list for life science inventors and entrepreneurs. Comment or tweet your top TED talks to @medcitynews.com.

TechCrunch has a profile of Galvanize, a new kind of business incubator/accelerator aimed at fostering new firms in the Denver area:

Galvanize offers cool workspace within a restored, national historic site (in the Rocky Mountain Bank Note Building) that is equipped with Knoll workstations, redundant high-speed fiber Internet, conference rooms, phone booths, etc., as well as the capital early-stage companies need to get their projects off the ground. To do this, Galvanize has been partnering with local and national firms, with its first strategic partner being Silicon Valley Bank.

Mayor Vincent C. Gray unveiled a plan Wednesday that he said would create 100,000 jobs and generate $1 billion in revenue for the District over five years through initiatives that include developing McMillan Reservoir into a medical hub and attracting more foreign investors and tourists.

The ambitious plan was created through a partnership with the business schools at George Washington, Georgetown, Howard and American universities, which had a combined 16 MBA students working on the project with the schools’ deans.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Nov 14, 2012) - Crowdfunding -- the social web strategies that entrepreneurial individuals and companies use to attract large pools of small investors -- is driving innovation in areas ranging from high-tech to entertainment. Now, the mainstream venture capital industry is taking notice. A new Program for Innovation in Entrepreneurial and Social Finance, launched today at the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will help to explain this new phenomenon and identify best practices in micro-, mobile- and early-stage entrepreneurial finance.

S. Shankar Sastry, dean of engineering at Berkeley, announced the initiative during the annual UC Berkeley Global Technology Leaders conference on campus held Nov. 13, 2012.

John Grindley is the executive director of CoHabitat Foundation, whose Cohab workspace has become something of a hub for tech startups in the unlikely location of Shreveport, Louisiana. We caught up with Grindley to ask why you should consider bringing your startup to the bayou.

FAST COMPANY: Where’s Shreveport exactly?

JOHN GRINDLEY: As Louisiana is a boot, it’s at the top of the state, where you put your foot in, at the top left. We’re in what’s called the Ark-La-Tex, where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas meet. You couldn’t be further from New Orleans and still be in the same state. We’re about five hours from New Orleans, but three hours from Dallas and Little Rock. People ask, are you in a hurricane zone? No, we couldn’t be further. During Katrina we got a nasty rainstorm, but that’s about it.

Startup companies, particularly those that receive venture capital, are major engines of growth and innovation in America. Research from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has shown that much of the job growth in America in recent years has come from startups. That is why a recent Department of Labor proposal that would force startup companies to choose between revealing private commercial information and hiring skilled workers is troubling.

The Department of Labor has proposed dramatically expanding the information requested when employers seek to hire skilled foreign nationals on H-1B visas. A recent National Foundation for American Policy report concluded, “Simply because they choose to hire one or more foreign nationals, privately-held companies would be compelled to release such financial information as their annual revenues and salary structure, information often closely guarded by entrepreneurs and small businesses.”

"It's done," said European Commissioner Viviane Reding today. "The Commission has adopted my proposal for a European law so that women represent 40% of company board members by 2020."

Reding has often repeated, "I don't like quotas, but I like what they do." A controversial measure, hotly contested by a number of European countries and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic, the new law will come up against deeply entrenched assumptions about gender roles and divided opinions about the best way to increase the uncontested penury of women at the top of business organizations.