I’ve written and talked about the cultural differences between entrepreneurs and career researchers. Lately I’ve discovered a new one:

Scientists:     Are afraid of making bad decisions. As a result, they are slow to make difficult decisions.

Entrepreneurs:     Optimize around fast, not perfect, decision making with constant iteration.

Loyal readers know that I work with professors and career scientists and help them commercialize their work, often through the formation of a startup company. The professor’s role is as a founder of the startup, usually with an experienced entrepreneur or business person as a co-founder. Professor-founders should ensure there is a good alignment of incentives between themselves and the business people running the company and cede the business decisions to the business people. When professors insert themselves into operational decisions, they often find themselves completely out of their element.

Years back, chemists had great difficulty putting a pleasant-tasting coating on aspirin tablets. Dipping tablets led to uneven and lumpy coats. They were stumped until they reversed their thinking. Instead of looking for ways to put something on the aspirin, they looked for ways to take something off the aspirin. This reversal led to one of the newer techniques for coating pills. The pills are immersed in a liquid which is passed onto a spinning disk. The centrifugal force on the fluid and the pills causes the two to separate, leaving a nice, even coating around the pill.

You can provoke new ideas by considering the opposite of any subject or action. When bioengineers were looking for ways to improve the tomato, they identified the gene in tomatoes that ripens tomatoes. They thought that if the gene hastens ripening maybe they could use the gene to slow down the process by reversing it. They copied the gene, put it in backwards and now the gene slows down ripening, making vine ripened tomatoes possible in winter.

Canada is the once-upon-a-time country, start of countless stories of invention and aspiration.

How else to explain this nation’s ability to punch so far above its weight on the world stage since confederation.

Think of the innovation Canada has delivered in that short time, the creativity that helps define a prosperous, energetic and forward looking people.

Simple things like the humble zipper. It was a Canadian innovation, patented in 1917 by one Gideon Sundback.

It's becoming a common story. A project listed on Kickstarter, the Internet crowdfunding website, ends up wildly exceeding its financial goals. Suddenly, someone is in business.

That's what happened to inventor Jay Silver, creator of MaKey MaKey, an "invention kit" consisting of a processor board and alligator clips that turns objects with high electrical resistance—bananas, Play-Doh, human flesh—into computer controllers. Silver listed the project on Kickstarter this year hoping to raise $25,000. He ended up with $568,106.

Since then, it's been a race to negotiate with Chinese manufacturers, customs agents, and wholesalers to produce and ship what will be the first product of Silver's newly incorporated company, JoyLabz. "I was going to start this company in a few years, but my crowdfunding success accelerated the timing," says Silver, who is 33.

Management has changed over the last couple of decades. The old 80’s style of management and motivating people by fear has evolved and today’s management is a much more supportive, encouraging, inclusive and altogether more effective form of directing and developing people.

That said, although this is a softer approach, it is no less rigorous as it encourages people to take responsibility for themselves and become accountable for their actions. In a way, managers have a tougher job now than they did in the past. A more subtle approach requires a more refined skills set and many “old style” managers are finding it difficult to adapt.

I’m sure we have all seen entrepreneurs with high levels of passion and confidence touting an idea that seems to make very little sense to us. Of course, we never see ourselves in this mode, yet we need to recognize that all humans see reality differently through a built-in set of “cognitive biases,” based on their own unique background of experiences, training, and mental state.

These biases are good, in that they allow us to quickly filter and make decisions in the constant barrage of information we face each day, but bad because they often lead to errors in reasoning and emotional choices. The worst case is called the “passion trap,” where a pattern of beliefs, choices, and behaviors feel good and become self-reinforcing, but lead to disaster.

Johns Hopkins scientists report what is believed to be the first evidence that complex, reversible behavioral patterns in bees – and presumably other animals – are linked to reversible chemical tags on genes.

The scientists say what is most significant about the new study, described online September 16 in Nature Neuroscience, is that for the first time DNA methylation "tagging" has been linked to something at the behavioral level of a whole organism. On top of that, they say, the behavior in question, and its corresponding molecular changes, are reversible, which has important implications for human health.

My favorite part of great heist movies is the part where they put the team together. The minds behind the heist know they have the chance to get the big score, but they know they can’t do it alone. So they spend their time planning for the perfect combination of skills and attitudes they need for their heist. Then they go off to find those perfect people.

In many ways, picking a team to start a business is a lot like picking a team to pull off the perfect heist. In a lot of ways, starting a business can prove even riskier than a heist – which makes finding the perfect team even more valuable.

Startup accelerators are popping up around the world at a rapid pace.

Jed Christansen’s Seed-DB site links to over 120 but there are many more not listed there that service a wide range of geographies and industries.

While opinions vary as to whether or not there are too many, or too few (funny how nobody’s arguing there is just the right amount) little is spoken about the process behind the formation of the vast majority.

There's something brewing in Los Angeles. Suddenly, Hollywood has becoming a startup hotbed. Incubators and accelerators are popping up everywhere. Venture capitalists are becoming frequent fliers at LAX. Celebrities are stamping their names on new companies. And TV industry executives are quitting their jobs to become entrepreneurs. In many ways, Los Angeles looks like New York City did three years ago. One early-stage investor, Gary Vaynerchuk, thinks LA will eventually trump both New York and San Francisco as the ultimate location for startups.

Everyone in the tech industry knows this simple fact: the pace of change is accelerating. Legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said that this is having an interesting affect on the industry. Khosla, who is 57, was speaking on Thursday at the prestigious Churchill Club event series. He explained that the older a person gets, the longer it takes to adjust to change. People over 45, he says, are noticeably slower in adopting new tech than, say, teenagers.

Capital Regions Venture Partners, a new venture capital fund providing initial capital to startup emerging technology and digital media companies, will be officially unveiled Friday at the Kress Gallery downtown during a noon luncheon.

The fund has already raised $1 million from a group of investors but plans to collect an additional $4 million, said Trey Godfrey, Springboard Baton Rouge president. The money will help new businesses kick-start their first products, allowing them to generate even more money.

Entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capital funds have always lived in a symbiotic ecosystem, where each depended on the other for success.

Relative power in the ecosystem changes over time: The bubble in the 1990s benefited entrepreneurs and VCs disproportionately, as winners were often determined by the size of their funding round. The tech implosion of 2000 gave the power back to the VCs, who too often used a heavy hand in trying to “save” companies through the down times. But starting around 2006, the power moved back to the angels. The rise of Web-based businesses drove this move, as companies could now be started with less capital. Entrepreneurs didn’t need VC-scale money to start their companies, and angels could see a company get to market without too much cash.

If your office is a meat locker in the summer and a sauna in the winter, your employees' productivity and collaboration suffers--probably more than you think.

Some years back, the Campbell Soup Company stumbled upon a marketing insight worthy of Don Draper.

If you want to predict when people will buy soup, the reasoning goes, you have to look beyond the product. It’s not about the depth of the soup’s flavor, the color of its packaging or even its price. In fact, it’s hardly about Campbell’s at all.

Two years ago, most everybody in biotech had heard of Twitter but most people were looking for reasons to ignore it. A year ago, people in the industry began realizing that even though they’re busy, it’s not a fad, and maybe they see what the fuss was about.

Now we’re just beginning to see what this real-time platform for news and commentary can do for healthcare innovation. And what comes next will do the industry a lot of good.

It’s hard to get reliable numbers on the usage of Twitter, but one estimate I’ve seen says the 140-character microblog service is on track to reach 250 million active users by the end of 2012. Many of the earliest adopters of this six-year-old service were in the tech industry (no surprise), but there’s now a firestorm of more than 400 million tweets a day about presidential politics, Middle East revolutions, music, sports, high-tech gadgets, and all kinds of culture high and low. A small percentage of Twitter’s overall traffic comes from discussion of drugs, devices, diagnostics, or healthcare in general, but it’s all there and growing fast, too. Again, this growth is hard to measure, but earlier this year, Brian Reid of the PR firm WCG (@brianreid) posted a map that showed the growth and expanding reach of Twitter usage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.

There are misconceptions about how important branding it is to success, how much work it takes, and the best ways to approach it. But every company, from a fresh-faced tech-startup to Apple, knows good branding can make a product or service.

Branding is how you present your company — your name, imagery, reputation — to the world through logos, ads, marketing materials, websites, apps, and social media. Left-brained business types may see it as simple graphic design, like choosing a logo color, or as a mysterious art. But experts know successful branding is hard and the best results are based on research, facts, and a well thought-out road-map.

Teleworking (also known as telecommuting) has taken flight as a global trend. During July of 2002, European Union collectively decided on a shared framework agreement on telework, which regulates issues such as employment and working conditions, health and safety, training, and the collective rights of teleworkers. Following suit, the American the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 served as a rallying call for federal agencies to encourage “work-at-home” employees. In the same year officials in China, eager to reduce gross national carbon emissions, chose the province of Hubei to undergo the country’s first telecommuting pilot program  

In the United States, telecommuting is   on the clear increase.  Data from the American Community Survey estimate that the working at home population grew 61% between 2005 and 2009. The biggest increases in teleworking population compared to workforce was in Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA while the metro with the highest growth in teleworking was San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA.

Another Fashion Week just wrapped up in New York City, but the real future of fashion was not necessarily happening on runways shimmering under the flash bulbs at Lincoln Center.  In all business ecosystems, power and hierarchy tend to suppress the most interesting innovations.  And so it is in the fashion business, too.  When a nod or a grimace from the editor of Vogue is enough to make or break a new designer, you know the ecosystem is not functioning all that efficiently for everyone.

Thus, I am fascinated by how an emerging company—Nolcha Fashion Week—has become a hot incubator of new fashion design talent.  Think of it as the “other” fashion week.  It’s the equivalent of being off-Broadway (or even off-off-Broadway), a place where the cool, unexpected stuff is allowed to sprout and grow, away from the traditional gatekeepers.

Recruiting is one of the most important jobs an entrepreneur has in the early stages of setting up his or her company for success. After all, people are the most valuable resource at any company, and when you bring in a co-founder, you’re starting a new relationship that requires nurturing and mutual support. It’s very important to approach this task with enthusiasm and transparency.

Bootstrapping a startup is an excellent way to validate your assumptions about the company you plan to start. Researching and learning about the market you’re addressing without spending a lot of money helps pinpoint where your product is going to have the most impact and gives you a better understanding of what you will need to make it a success. At a certain point, you’ll know if it’s the right time to knock on investors’ doors or go at it with no investment. Regardless, you should have an understanding of what you need for success.

The awards program salutes the accomplishments of communities in developing inclusive prosperity on a foundation of information and communications technology. Communities large and small, urban and rural, in developing and industrialized nations are invited to apply for an international award that does not use population as a factor.