On the coasts, venture capital is sexy. Like the beautiful woman you’re too apprehensive to approach, investors are the forbidden fruit, presented to a plethora of startup visionaries and wannabes. No different than the mysterious vixen, VCs have secrets – they all play into investment strategy and factor into projecting fund success. I’ll let the cat out of the bag and share one of these with you: venture capital’s dirty little secret rests in its location. Startups located anywhere but the coasts are those considered sexiest by investors.

To be fair, I am a tad biased on the subject. Detroit Venture Partners (full disclosure: I’m DVP’s CEO and Managing Partner) is headquartered smack dab in the middle of the Rust Belt, and Detroit (our home city) is the region’s poster child, both for a crumbling manufacturing infrastructure and a core development of entrepreneurial endeavors. That being said, we have a reason to be biased – our experience investing in (and for) the city of Detroit has been nothing short of monumental.

Entrepreneurs rarely set out to create jobs.

"That's a side effect of creating a company," says Eric Dobson, founder of TrakLok, the shipping container company often cited as a recent high-tech startup success story in East Tennessee.

TrakLok has raised more than $4 million in venture capital within the last four years, and was one of the first companies to receive money through the state-backed TNInvestco program. The company in 2010 merged with Telesensors, a Knoxville developer of wireless sensors.

Based on my experience as a mentor and an entrepreneur, if you fail on your first startup, you are about average. That’s not bad, but who wants to be average? Every young entrepreneur knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Statistics show that the failure rate for new startups within the first 5 years is as high as 50 percent. How can you improve your odds?

Of course, a real entrepreneur always takes a failure as a milestone on the road to success. They count on learning from their mistakes, and use the experience to move to the next idea. But why not learn as well from the mistakes of others, without suffering their cost, time, and pain? In that context, I offer you my list of ten top startup failure causes, seen over and over again:

I’m screwed. I’ve had a vasectomy.”

With that pithy note, a minor outpouring of insight and feedback began to flow into my email inbox and onto posts at the various LinkedIn group sites after I released my most recent essay in this “Epistemology of Innovation” series, “Of feral cats and pet cats.” Since the notes and posts revealed both the additional nuanced insight and the great sense of humor of the readership of these essays, I thought it appropriate to share portions of some of them with the entire group. My hope and expectation is that you will benefit from seeing what others have to say. So, here it goes!

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Staying active is usually a good thing. But the motivation to move goes to unwelcome extremes for people with restless legs syndrome. The condition can cause throbbing, pulling or creeping sensations in the legs along with a powerful need to move around for relief. The feelings can range from uncomfortable to agonizing.

“People with this condition feel they just absolutely have to move their legs. Their legs feel uncomfortable or even painful unless they move them,” says Dr. Richard P. Allen, an expert on restless legs syndrome at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. “When it’s extreme, patients with this condition can be sitting—in a meeting, in a conversation, watching TV—and they have to keep moving their legs, which could be very disturbing to themselves and to other people.”

In a search for “tech genius” outside Silicon Valley, Entrepreneur.com has identified Kansas City as one of the “9 Cities You Wouldn’t Think Are Hubs for Tech Startups.”

Kansas City is on a list of other “far-flung” locales, including Hoboken, N.J.; Omaha; Boulder, Colo.; and Northwest Arkansas. See the full rundown.

“These (nine) places may not leap out as startup hotbeds, but they’re making a name for themselves with investors and innovators alike,” Entrepreneur.com’s John Patrick Pullen wrote in a Thursday blog. “And tech entrepreneurs are flocking to these places to get their startups off the ground.”

Things change. The business owner knows that better than any one.  Change can alter the impact of your company. And if it’s not the kind of change that you’re looking for, it can kill your bottom line.  We change everyday.

Our favorite items may not be our favorites any more. When we change our mind, we alter our spending to match our new taste. It’s the same for your clients, they can change their minds and their spending habits.

Corey Capasso is 25 and he's already founded four startups. His first startup idea came to him in class one day at the University of Wisconsin. He watched fellow students chew on their pen caps, and he figured the experience would be more enjoyable if the pen caps were flavored. It turned out flavored plastic didn't exist. Dentists had been trying to create it for years, but to make plastic you have to heat it, and the high temperatures cooked out any added flavoring.

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch.

Recently I wrote a post arguing to make the definition of a Startup more inclusive than that to which Silicon Valley, fueled by Venture Capital return profiles, would sometimes like to attach to the word.

Today I’d like to talk about what startup communities outside of Silicon Valley look like, how they emerge and what makes them take hold.

The drug company GlaxoSmithKline employs 12,687 people in its research and development division to search for and test new drugs. Despite that huge staff, around half of the company's $6.3 billion R&D budget goes to people who don't work for Glaxo at all.

The money instead flows to companies like Epizyme, a small biotechnology firm that, since last year, has received $24 million from Glaxo to support research on a novel type of cancer drug. That's money the biotech firm needs to survive, and if its efforts yield a drug, that would be a success for Glaxo, too.

”What are the best strategies to stimulate Science Based Regional Innovation?” This was the main question raised at the 9th Annual Conference of The Technopolicy Network.

The conference, held in the innovative cities of Leuven and Genk from 17-19 September, was attended by numerous stakeholders in the field of regional innovation and collaboration. From across the globe interested parties participated to expand their network, learn from one another and share their experiences. Prof. de Rosa, who came all the way from Brazil, stated that he has visited every conference since the founding of The Technopolicy Network. ‘Each time I pick up one or two new ideas and implement these in my own organisation’.

Multiple healthcare systems around the world are struggling with offering high quality, accessible, affordable health care services to their citizens. Given the global recession, decreasing tax revenues, aging populations and the demand for expensive, advanced technologies, public and private payers and providers are looking for answers. One solution is to jumpstart and accelerate local biomedical and health innovation and entrepreneurship and thus create, in addition to new drugs and devices, new models and paradigms for non-face to face care using digital health technologies, care delivery, business process innovation and systems. Unfortunately, while many doctors have great ideas, are content and domain experts and are on the front lines perceiving market needs, few have the mindset or  entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, abilities, networks or experience to get an idea to market.

Over the last two weeks, my colleague Alexis Madrigal has been touring nascent start-up scenes across the Midwest, reporting on entrepreneurs in places like Cleveland and Detroit who are both building companies and, hopefully, urban revivals. 

The more ambitious people like that we have around the country, the better off we'll be. But where are America's scrappy tech start-ups really finding success today? When measured in venture capital dollar, mostly in just a few, select places. 

In the Bootstrapping Business Series, Mashable talked to a ton of entrepreneurs about how they got started, what tools they live by and what they wished they had known at the beginning. The result is a deep pool of tips and tricks for aspiring business owners who are looking to raise money, start a tech startup or build their brand.

From selecting the best employees to putting together an awesome workspace, the little decisions are the ones that add up and will make you successful in the long run. Take a look at a roundup of 10 of these solid primers below. Have tips of your own? Tell us in the comments.

Whether you’re serving clients or leading an organization to launch a new product, cause, or creative project on the web – you’ll find these crowdfunding tips useful.

What is Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is a collaborative effort of individuals to pool resources, usually via the web, to support entrepreneurial, cause or creative projects initiated by other people, businesses, and community groups.

What’s the Next Big Thing?

If by that you mean a venture capital-backed startup and you listen to the annual rankings compiled by the Wall Street Journal, it is Genband, a supplier of voice-over-internet-protocol technology for the telecommunications industry.

Where’s the Next Big Thing?

Silicon Valley, right? Wrong. Genband is actually far away from the Bay Area. Headed by Chief Executive Charlie Vogt, Genband calls Frisco, Texas, home.

When Sherrie Walter lost her ear to cancer two years ago, she told herself she'd never be one of those survivors attaching a prosthetic ear every day.

"The concept of having to tape something to my skin every day didn't feel like that was who I was," the 42-year-old mother of two told ABC News. "I could just see my kids running around with it, yelling, 'I have mommy's ear!'"

Being a successful entrepreneur is not about flying with great ideas. If you don't have the financial ballast to anchor them, your dream venture will probably remain on the drawing board. Here's the good news: Bank financing to small and medium enterprises is on the upswing. And, according to the Reserve Bank of India, the credit flow to SMEs from scheduled commercial banks more than doubled between March 2008 and March 2011, from Rs 2.14 lakh crore to Rs 4.79 lakh crore. Better still, banks have been asked to add 20 per cent to this number every year.

Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to attract investors today? The team is the same. The company's market is the same.

The only difference might be the start of another recession like the last one, resulting in lower liquidity and investors with no money, and that makes all the difference. Herein lies a key principle of decision making - “Any decision is better than no decision.”

As an entrepreneur, your job is to be one step ahead of the market, always ready with the next big idea. Whether you want to design a new product or disrupt a market, you need to be able to come up with creative solutions for problems of everyday life. Creativity often eludes us because we're accustomed to certain norms. "We're highly socialized and have fixed assumptions about what the world looks like," says Barry Staw, an organizational behaviorist at University of California, Berkeley. "You have to try to envision another world."