We are living in the age of globalization, and information technology has penetrated our society in every aspect. Multinational firms seem to operate relentlessly anytime, anywhere, and in every activity. They have research and development (R&D) centers with global reach, and collect knowledge and innovations from all over the world to create new technologies and products, or at least so they claim.

However, a closer investigation into how Toyota, Sony and Canon, three successful global players, conduct their R&D activities reveals that the overwhelming proportion of R&D takes place within each firm’s core region. Moreover, the scope of this core region is substantially smaller than national, or all of Japan, but rather matches with the metropolitan scale: the Toyota-Nagoya region for Toyota, and the southern Tokyo region for Sony and Canon.

Would-be entrepreneurs who are getting on in years are going to have a nationwide day of learning presented to them, should they want it. AARP and the U.S. Small Business Administration are sponsoring meetings and connections between senior startup minds and successful business owners.

Called the National Encore Entrepreneur Mentor Day – October 2 – entrepreneurs over 50 will be able to attend training events to gaining knowledge and counsel. According to the Small Business Administration, 63% of Americans plan to continue working after ‘retirement’ and running a small business may be an option.

One of the most interesting debates in the past decade is around the definition of an entrepreneur.

Some experts take a very narrow position by saying an entrepreneur is only someone whose business idea can scale to national reach, like the founders of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. Others cast a much wider net to include anyone who takes a business risk.

Here is my very broad definition: An entrepreneur attempts to create a new product, service or solution while accepting responsibility for the results.

About two months ago, a new employee arrived on the production line at Vanguard Plastics in Southington, Connecticut, a town that was once a hub of U.S. manufacturing but saw many of its factories disappear in the 1960s. The small manufacturer's new worker, Baxter, is six feet tall, 300 pounds, and a robot. For a hulking machine, Baxter is remarkably expressive. A pair of eyes on the screen that serves as a face stare down as the robot picks up plastic components, look concerned when it makes a mistake, and direct its glance at its next task when one is finished. It's cute. But the real point of these expressions is that they let workers nearby know instantly if Baxter is performing appropriately, and they provide clues to what it is about to do next. Even more amazing, when Baxter is done with one task, a fellow worker can simply show the robot how to start another. "Almost anyone, literally, can in very short order be shown how to program it," says Chris Budnick, president of Vanguard Plastics. "It's a matter of a couple of minutes."

Baxter is the first of a new generation of smarter, more adaptive industrial robots. Conventional industrial robots are expensive to program, incapable of handling even small deviations in their environment, and so dangerous that they have to be physically separated from human workers by cages. So even as robotics have become commonplace in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries, they remain impractical in many other types of manufacturing. Baxter, however, can be programmed more easily than a Tivo and can deftly respond to a toppled-over part or shifted table. And it is so safe that Baxter's developer, Rethink Robotics, which loaned Baxter to Vanguard Plastics, believes it can work seamlessly alongside its human coworkers.

It takes a great entrepreneur with a great vision to start a business, but it takes a collaboration of many people to make it a success. That’s where leadership comes in as a key ingredient, to drive the collaborative process to make the whole team better than the sum of the parts.

I remember a book from a while back by Amilya Antonetti, titled “The Recipe: A Fable for Leaders and Teams” which illustrates the key concepts with stories and specific guidance on how to develop your natural leadership style. It all starts with how to be the leader in your own life, but then extends to learning the following skills she outlines for building a great collaborative team:

If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, there can be a lot of confusing financial jargon to deal with — especially when you’re raising funding. If you don’t want to get screwed, some things are probably worth fighting over so that you don’t get screwed, but others probably won’t make a difference. Which is which? You can find plenty of viewpoints online, but now Y Combinator-backed startup SmartAsset has released a Startup Economics calculator, which shows you exactly how each financial decision can affect the money you make when you sell to Google (or, you know, whatever).

The calculator basically takes you through each event that can affect the division of a company’s equity. First you start with the founding — entering the total number of shares, each founder, and the equity that they receive. Then you enter employees and advisors and their equity. You can add multiple funding events and their details, and the eventual exit.

The University of Arizona has announced that Tech Launch Arizona will join the Arizona Furnace as a university research partner. The UA’s Office of Technology Transfer, under the Tech Launch Arizona umbrella, will present selected technologies and intellectual property for licensing to entrepreneurs, with the intent that these technologies will form the basis for new high-potential startups.

Arizona Furnace offers promising startup ventures a package worth more than $50,000 in cash and services. The package includes a $25,000 seed funding grant and six months of incubation space in the ASU SkySong facility, the UA’s BIO5 Oro Valley Accelerator, or the UA’s partner incubator, the Arizona Center for Innovation. Arizona Furnace is an intensive, six-month, mentor-led accelerator program, and includes several additional support services. Companies that are accepted into Arizona Furnace must be based in Arizona as a stimulant to regional economic development and job creation.

Entrepreneurs are America’s best resource for economic prosperity and growth. They have the ideas and the fire in the belly needed to create flourishing businesses that benefit entire communities.

These undaunted risk takers are the unquestionable source of wealth creation, new jobs and a strong nation. They provide the financial fuel to pay good wages and valuable benefits. They pay the majority of local, state and federal taxes. They contribute to their communities with donations to the needy, the arts, education and health care.

Who makes the better entrepreneur, young or old? It’s not too late to enter your opinion in the Entrepreneurs Channel live survey, posted here. In the past 5 days, no fewer than 96 entrepreneurs, in addition to voting, have sent the details of their stories to me. The youngest to respond is 16. The oldest: 85.

He's barely old enough to drive, but at 16, Alex Parker has founded his first successful company, Brand Strategix, www.brand-strategix.com.

I’ve only reviewed about a third of the emails I’ve gotten so far, so if you posted a message and I haven’t yet responded, be patient. I hope to get to you soon. Today I’d like to introduce Alex Parker, the 16 year old Founder and CEO of Brand Strategix, a national internet marketing and web development firm (young enough I actually felt the need to ask his permission to post his photograph here). He’s barely old enough to drive, but Alex founded his company this year, May 2012, and has a first year revenue goal of $200,000. To get past the stigma of being too young or too small a company to deliver, he secured a gold credibility rating on Dun and Bradstreet (not bad!) and managed through sheer will and chutzpah to garner press coverage in Virtual Strategy Magazine and Yahoo! News.

There’s a specific step every entrepreneur needs to take that isn’t talked about nearly enough.

The news likes to cover the “overnight” success stories like Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars or Angry Birds selling millions of copies, but they don’t share the key first step that the people who built these stories took.

So, what is this secret phase that almost every successful entrepreneur has gone through, but that no one cares to mention?

Keep reading and I’ll tell you.

The First Step Towards Entrepreneurship

You might think that all entrepreneurs are generally risky people. You picture them:

• In Vegas putting all their chips on red and letting the roulette wheel spin. 
• Speeding sports cars down the highway, dodging between traffic. 
• Constantly jumping off of things with parachutes attached to themselves.

I once got this in a message from a former employee:

When I worked for you, I thought I was Superman. I have occasionally reflected on why that was. Not sure I know all the answers, but the things I do know are that the environment was real, the energy was high, and the crap was low.

It was wonderful to get that message. Those first 10 words sum up for me, in a pretty profound way, what I believe being a good leader is about.

Corporate innovation programs can’t fulfill their potential without the right foundations in place. Many organizations are taking their programs across the enterprise. In this article we consider three key foundations and how they can be boosted to improve corporate innovation: the linkage between every day innovation and corporate targets, the levels of openness, trust and acceptance of diverse opinions.

The problem most startups have when they take their product or service to the big companies? “The big companies can’t figure out how to make it mundane enough to interoperate with all of the complexity they have,” answers Liz Tinkham, a global manager at Accenture. She says that a start-up may have the best piece of new technology ever, but if it doesn’t work easily with other technology, it’s just too hard to get larger companies to adopt the service or product.

The MIT Technology Review recently interviewed Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, about the future of his industry. The most striking part of the interview?

“I don’t think there’s too much money sitting around. I think there’s too much money in too few hands. So when six white guys in suits control two-and-a-half-billion dollars, that’s not a good thing. Instead of being allocated just to one firm, it would be better if that two-and-a-half-billion dollars was allocated to 25 firms at $100 million each. It would lead to more diversity or people trying more things: data sciences, urban sciences, transportation, energy, materials science, and many others.”

One of the highlights from the Forbes 400 Summit On Philanthropy was the panel ‘Impact Capital Is The New Asset Class,’ and not just because I was the moderator (entire video below). It was thanks to the intelligent panelists we brought on stage: venture capitalists Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and social venture investor Cheryl Dorsey of Echoing Green. They took turns underscoring how different (and similar) are the world’s of social venture and traditional venture capital.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been focusing on the effect of climate change on charismatic mega-fauna such as polar bears (adorable!) and dinosaurs (rawr!). This week though I wanted to draw attention to a smaller-fauna that is incredibly cool, totally charismatic and wildly vicious. It is the terrifying, the hypnotic, the fierce….sea anemone.

Now you’re probably thinking sea anemones? Really? I didn’t even think that was an animal.

To you, I say, go back to school, loser. No, but seriously, most people don’t realize that sea anemones are in fact animals (not plants) and they are crazy predators, stinging and engulfing whatever they can get their munchie little tentacles on. I for one am glad that I am of the larger-fauna variety, because there is no question that a sea anemone would gladly take down a novice snorkeler like myself if given half a chance.

In a former elevator factory in Cleveland's burgeoning Health-Tech Corridor, scientists for a company called Juventas Therapeutics pursue Cleveland-style entrepreneurship.

They're probing the impact of a drug that seems to rally the body's healing cells to tissue damaged by, say, a heart attack, and hoping for profound results.

While advancing regenerative medicine, the young company illustrates a promising local path into the innovation economy. Juventas spun out of the Cleveland Clinic, brandishing technology discovered in local labs. It opened its doors with a boost from JumpStart and has since attracted $32 million in private investment, in addition to some top talent.

Dyn has been a bootstrapped company and profitable from day one. We get a lot of questions on how we pulled this off, and while I would love to claim all the credit, there’s nothing really magical about our success. We started as an open-source, community-led project, found a need, and grew a company around it — fueled by a lot of hard work and many sleepless nights.

But when we incorporated in 2001, things weren’t pretty. We had never thought about funding, and since we were in college, we asked our customers to bankroll us. Actually, we said that the project would get shut down unless we were able to raise our $25,000 goal. When $40,000 came in, we knew we were on the hook.

However, the majority of business innovations today are quite the opposite. The companies that generate them thrive on collaboration, a free exchange of ideas and regular interactions with customers and other stakeholders. They innovate not necessarily to revolutionize their industry but to meet specific objectives and carve out a competitive edge.