When it comes to Halloween costumes, there are two types of people: Those who spend months planning their costume and those who throw something together at the last minute.

If you’re reading this, we bet you fall in the latter category.

Don’t feel bad. Sometimes the easiest — and most hastily made — costumes turn out to be the ones people remember most. They are creativity at its finest.

Unless you're a solo entrepreneur, you probably didn't build your business on your own. Nope, I'm not referring to President Barack Obama's incendiary remarks that recently ruffled some feathers in the small-business community. I'm talking about employees.

If you dream of building another Google or Patagonia one day, you'd do well to not only accept input from employees but actively seek it. Creativity doesn't just happen. If you're ready to really embrace the kind of culture where creativity and innovation may thrive, here's how to get started.

Every startup is keenly aware of how much money it has, and, more importantly, how much money it doesn’t have. As a result, for most startups, the goal is to score a big round of venture capital funding and then to finally get out of fundraising mode and into the business of growing the company.

But even if you get a round of funding, it rarely ends there.

More often than not, Series A becomes Series B; Series B becomes Series C; and so on, and while you’re out spending all day and all of your energy raising the next round of financing, it dawns on you: Your business isn’t about its mission anymore. Your business is now in the business of seeking funding. Some would even suggest that bootstrapping is overrated and that the #1 skill of an entrepreneur is raising capital, and I couldn’t disagree more.

If enthusiasm equates to success, Ireland’s start-up sector is bound to become Europe’s Silicon Valley.

In a country in which half the population is less than 30-years-old, Ireland seems to be teeming with start-up entrepreneurs or people with aspirations to become a startup entrepreneur.

The most obvious example of this phenomenon is the recent Web Summit conference in Dublin, which saw attendance nearly triple to 4,000 from last year.

Had a bad day? Extending your normal exercise routine by a few minutes may be the solution, according to Penn State researchers, who found that people’s satisfaction with life was higher on days when they exercised more than usual.

“We found that people’s satisfaction with life was directly impacted by their daily physical activity,” said Jaclyn Maher, graduate student in kinesiology. “The findings reinforce the idea that physical activity is a health behavior with important consequences for daily well-being and should be considered when developing national policies to enhance satisfaction with life.”

Simply asking "what job is the customer trying to get done?" can be a powerful way to enable innovation, because it forces you to go beyond superficial demographic markers that correlate with purchase and use to zero in on frustrations and desires that motivate purchase and use.

Seductive simplicity hides a rich, robust set of opportunity identification tools. Through our experience utilizing the "jobs-to-be-done" concept in a range of settings, my colleagues and I have developed five tips for would-be innovators: the five Cs of opportunity identification (modeled after marketing's famous four Ps — price, product, place, and promotion).

A growing number of ambitious entrepreneurs are looking to supercharge their startups' growth by working with a business accelerator or incubator program. These highly competitive programs can be valuable beyond the investment of their backers for their mentoring offered by experienced investors and entrepreneurs.

We spoke to startups at the Triangle Startup Factory, a three-month accelerator program in Durham, N.C. for an inside look at some of the top -- and most common -- tips accelerator graduates took with them after going through the “entrepreneurship bootcamp” intensive:

If a tree falls in a Maryland forest, does anyone know its value?

State Forester Steve Koehn threw back his head and laughed when asked that question. And then he jumped at the chance to shed some light on what he calls one of Maryland's best-kept secrets.

"Forest products are a $4 billion-a-year industry in Maryland," he said. "For comparison, seafood is a $950 million industry."

Koehn stood on a gentle slope in the middle of a towering stand of poplar trees, their golden leaves electrified by a bright fall sun. Eighteen months ago, loggers harvested that private plot in western Baltimore County, removing about half of the trees.

This is an interesting walk through the history of the smartphone from HTC's perspective. It points out key products, moments and announcements from the companies that pioneered the mobile computer. As the timeline enters the age of ubiquitous mobility, it brings in key stats about mobile usage in terms of data, time, and people. There are also some kind-of-funny jokes.

SplashData, a password management applications producer, has listed the 25 worst and scariest passwords used. According to the site, “password”, “123456″ and “12345678″ still top the list from last year as the most common passwords used on the internet, but new to the list is “Jesus”, “ninja”, “mustang” and believe it or not “password1.”

Users “of any of these passwords are most likely to be victims in future breaches,” the company says. Millions of password were posted online by hackers and helped put together the list. The list of 25 was released with Halloween as a peg.

In my last post, Why Innovation Through Acquisition Is Such A Darn Good Idea, I commented on the crucial importance of mergers and acquisitions in the business innovation ecosystem. From an entrepreneur’s-eye-view, M&A provides lucrative shareholder exits. Viewed through the lens of the public company, innovation-through-acquisition can be a legitimate strategy for entering exciting new technologies or markets by first allowing startups to do the de-risking.  And yet history shows that, in at least half of all cases, after the deal closes, acquisitions sour. (There are dozens of studies and papers, and estimates of how many M&A deals fail to meet financial expectations run from 50 percent to as high as 90 percent.)

“Why do we keep making the same mistakes?” laments the chief executive of a large global company about its low innovation success rate, a common complaint of leaders everywhere.

When companies do poorly at innovation, and most do, they tend to throw every idea out onto the market, hoping something will work. It becomes a game of quantity, not quality, and it usually backfires. According to Nielsen, in recent years new consumer packaged goods products actually have less sales than the products they replace.

Visiting AngelList HQ in San Francisco earlier this month, founder Naval Ravikant shared some interesting survey data that the site has been collecting -- but hasn't previously published.

Ravikant explains that the survey is being used to help his team at AngelList figure out what new features to build. The top needs that startups have, he says, are funding, engineers, and designers, "which is why we have specific products for each of those (angel.co/talent, for example.)"

Starting a company can sometimes be likened to a game of chance. Coming up with the right idea at the right time, when the market is neither saturated nor in financial free-fall, isn’t always under the business owner’s control, no matter how crack the team.

Ronen Gafni aims to enable entrepreneurs to surmount the vicissitudes of chance by turning the startup game into a real board game. FreshBiz is the result of eight years of development by Gafni, an entrepreneur who is taking his biggest gamble yet with a product that looks like the fabled Game of Life, but is far more practical.

FreshBiz players move through various business stages, from starting a new company to trading on the stock market. Dice throws and “business opportunity” cards help them advance toward the winner’s slot.

David Cohen didn’t found TechStars with the intention of being a social entrepreneur, but it’s hard to deny the social change his company has initiated by growing and mentoring countless startups in the United States. TechStars, one of the premier startup accelerators worldwide, leverages connections with VC firms and angel investors to provide members with seed funding and mentorship from some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Ryerson professor and DMZ mentor Sean Wise interviewed Cohen for The Naked Entrepreneur on his advice for budding entrepreneurs.

Learn from the best Cohen’s first few startup attempts taught him the value of having an experienced mentor. During the dot-com era of the mid to late 90’s, he founded his first company called Pinpoint, a mobile communication system used for ambulance dispatch systems. Within a couple years, the company valuation was upwards of $50 million. They started speaking with investors and soon got acquired. Five to six years later, the CEO of the acquiring company admitted they had “left half the money on the table,” and could have gotten twice the value of the offer they accepted. This may have been prevented if he had a mentor.

Sure, your company has a great work environment and an even better work-life balance. Your employees genuinely care about the work they do and they enjoy coming to the office. You host contests, hand out annual awards, and pat your employees on the back every chance you get. That’s all great. But do you have a competitive compensation plan?

As a recruiter, I’ve heard it all when companies try to explain why they don’t. Most involve some bits and pieces of the benefits listed in the paragraph above. And while those are great things to build into your corporate culture, they don’t excuse not having a competitive compensation plan. Quite honestly, you should have a great work environment and a work-life balance because you care about your employees and want them to enjoy coming to work. But you also need to take care of them monetarily – regardless of their level in the company.

Unless you've been in a coma for the past 20 years, I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "get out of the box." It's everywhere. Whole industries have sprung up around it, including mine.

No one can deny that getting out of the box is a good thing to do. Seems like a no-brainer, eh? Kind of like helping little old ladies cross the street. Or tearing down the Berlin Wall.

This just in! We're here for just a little while. No one gets out of here alive. Not even Donald Trump. So while you're here, remember to be kind and go beyond judgment, blame, and impatience -- especially when things start getting stressed out. Like on-the-job.

Here's my inspired rant on the subject, just published in The Huffington Post.

'Innovation' is currently a wildly popular, multi faceted word in business circles. Seeking out new ideas that can be quickly brought to market for profit is as old as commerce, and the realities of our borderless, globalized world requires constant vigilance to stay ahead of competitors (or to 'disrupt' them, to wheel out another overused cliche).

'When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?' by Justin Fox in Wired is an article I've returned to a lot this year and has a direct bearing on the current enterprise technology industry, which some would argue (including indirectly Cisco CEO John Chambers) at the top end is going the way of the Detroit car industry in the '70's.   

You've gotten feedback from your manager as well as word of rumblings within your team: You're seen as a micromanager who tends to get into the weeds — and stay there. You produce great results but senior management sees you as an operational manager and questions your ability to let go and operate at a strategic level. Wait a minute, you think. Who are they trying to kid? Delegation sounds great on paper, but you're responsible for some major projects, and management expects flawless execution. How can they have it both ways?

Managers prone to micromanagement fall prey to several misconceptions about delegating to staff. The first is the assumption that delegation has an on and off switch. That is, that they either delegate totally to all direct reports in all situations or not at all. They fail to assess each subordinate's ability to operate independently and don't put in place the "eyehooks" of implementation — the check-ins, milestones, and metrics — that promote predictable execution. And they forget that there are times when they need to get directly involved to get a major initiative back on course.