Entrepreneurs need to listen to constructive criticism, but ignore negative vibes and complainers at all costs. If you are a complainer, and you are thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, think again. The world of an entrepreneur is tough, unpredictable, and fraught with risk. Most importantly, the buck stops with you, so there is no room for excuses and negativity. Even listening often to negative team members and partners will reinforce negative thinking and behavior, and turn your normally positive perspective toxic. I’ve seen it too often in real life, and it was reinforced to me recently when I read a new book by Trevor Blake, “Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life.”

A new study published online in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice demonstrates the importance of presentation skills to the success of entrepreneurs seeking funding from potential investors.

The study, “Preparedness and Cognitive Legitimacy as Antecedents of New Venture Funding in Televised Business Pitches,” examined data from two television shows built around entrepreneurs in search of venture capital – “Shark Tank” and “Dragon’s Den” – and determined the key characteristics of successful pitches on the shows.

The new hot topic for entrepreneurs these days is crowd funding, which is anticipated to at least supplement, if not replace, the slow and mysterious process of current Angel and venture capital investors. The problem is that crowd funding means something different to everyone, and even I have been confused by the different ways the term gets used.

So I have set out here to outline and offer some practical advice on the many different models currently used with the term “crowd funding” and “crowd sourcing.” The newest model was passed into law recently via the JOBS Act, and won’t even be available until the end of this year or maybe mid-2013 in the USA, while waiting for the rules to be finalized:

When I started in the healthcare field more than 25 years ago, the only thing that a healthcare IT startup needed was a good idea — a new technology, maybe, or a new scientific pathway. “If you build it, they will come.”

But 25 years later, a lot has changed, and startups need more than just a good idea if they want to secure growth capital to expand their business.

So, when I talk to prospective Safeguard partner companies, one of the first questions I typically ask tells me everything I need to know: “Who’s your customer?”

Often individuals and organizations tend to get stuck in the mode of talking about innovation and/or trying to understand innovation. The only way to really know innovation is to do innovation, and learn from your mistakes along the way. In this article Harun Asad suggests preparing an Innovation Mission Statement as an initial, action-oriented way to get out of the rhetoric trap.

I heard a story this week that raised my blood pressure and left me fuming at another great injustice. Unfortunately there is very little I can do about it. Kicking the dog would not be PC (and after all, it’s not her fault); stamping my foot makes me feel like a child and waving my fist in the air while shouting at the universe… well, it didn’t do anything the last few times so that’s out too. So instead, I’m venting through my keyboard.

The story goes as follows. A friend of ours has an 8 year old daughter who attends a private school. This amazing little child has been running a mini-spa business in the after-care center. She offers the other children mini-facials, neck massages and nail treatments for which she charges R2 each. Now as I’m hearing this story I’m seriously chuffed. Firstly, if you read the biographies of some of the great businessmen(women) of our time, something they have in common is the fact that they were all running various small businesses at school, including paper routes, comic book sales, and tuck shops. Secondly, I have two daughters (one of whom is eight), and I have begun teaching them the basics of pocket money, business and earning some extra cash. In fact, I’ve been talking to them about starting a small business at school.

Memo to mayors, state premiers and even ministers for broadband, communications and the digital economy: technology is the economy.  

That is the view of urban economic development experts from New York City who have overseen the Big Apple's reinvention as a New Tech City to challenge Silicon Valley according to a report in theage.com.autheage.com.au.  

Punch drunk from the 2008 financial crisis that came close to gutting the city, the local government leveraged tech and digital sectors to rebuild and grow the local economy. As a result, in 2011 the city received USD$2.2 billion in venture capital funding, up 30 per cent from 2009.

New York’s vibrant neighborhood Tribeca is home to one of the city’s most dynamic incubators, NYU-Polytech Varick. Last week NYU-Polytech Varick hosted a Meetup event on New York’s biotech sector. A panel of speakers including Dr. Liam Ratcliffe of New Leaf Ventures, Michael Lamprecht of Cellanyx Diagnostics, Andrew Koopman of NYU’s New Venture Development Investment, and Alex Fair, the founder of Faircaremd.com and MedStartr, shared their take on what the opportunities and challenges for New York’s biotech sector are.  

New York State was ranked second as Biotech center by Business Facilities Magazine in 2005. Healthcare initiatives and funding, such as the NYC Economic Development Corporation’s (NYCEDC) BioAccelerate Program; New York’s Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR); and the Empire State Development’s (ESD) Excelsior Program, are all improvements recently designed to eliminate the “severely anemic” economic support of the biopharmaceutical industry in New York State. But other states, such as California, Texas, Kansas, and Massachusetts, are thriving biotech hubs as well.

You shouldn’t. Not the whole thing anyway.   We moved our first company from Copenhagen to Silicon Valley back in 1997 - lock, stock and barrel. At that time there were not so many choices. Staying in Denmark with no venture capital, a miniscule market, and 6000 miles away from the center of our industry was not a viable choice. 

  Nowadays (startups) don’t need to move your whole company - you can “split the difference”. You can have a technology team in Copenhagen, an engineering team in Kyiv, and a commercial and executive presence in Palo Alto. We just couldn’t do that back in 1997.  

An underutilized, but valuable resource, every startup should investigate is a formal or informal connection to your alma mater, or even any local university. These resources are definitely not limited to students, since every university seeks out and needs the real world exposure and experience of entrepreneurs who already are active in the real world marketplace.

Here is a short list of the areas where you should be able to find help, whether you are a student or an independent entrepreneur:

1) Exploring hot ideas. Universities are a rich source of new ideas from their students, their professors, and their own research, and they value entrepreneurs from the real world to decide which ones are viable in the marketplace. Start by contacting the university outreach liaison, or a professor in your area of interest or expertise.

Michael Schrage may have minted a cliché: “Who do you want your customers to become?”. The title of his new e-book, the query is a tool for understanding why some innovations--and the companies that make them--become a part of our lives, while others don’t.

Fast Company recently spoke with the MIT fellow about why innovation is an investment in the customer, why changing values is more important than adding value, and why the business world is getting customer centricity completely wrong.

Just like in college, graduates of incubators are sent off to go conquer the world… with the dream of a multi-million dollar exit and dollar signs in their eyes. We often hear of the successful entrepreneurs and start-ups, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram, the lucky (and deserving) 1%. But what about the remaining 99%? In life out of the incubator or accelerator bubble, why do most of these bright start-ups fail? What is the missing ingredient?

There is a reason why Y Combinator, TechStars, SeedCamp, Start-up Lab and others have gained traction for the pre-seed round. Incubators and accelerators have provided a tremendous boost to the start-up ecosystem, but the arena also requires another medium to step in for those accelerator graduates – one that helps them scale, go global, and gain critical traction to attract market interest and investment. They require help to clarify their business proposition, evaluate their value, and identify key partners. It’s a critical juncture in the United States, but perhaps even more so where the investment and market ecosystems require an understanding of the language of investors from multiple geographies worldwide.

A number of small and informal business incubators have opened in Detroit, offering inexpensive space and some services to companies that are trying to get going.

These are besides the larger, government or agency-sponsored incubators in the region such as Ann Arbor SPARK, TechTown in Detroit, and the Macomb Oakland University Incubator.

The lesser-known incubators that have opened in Detroit over the past couple of years include Ponyride on the city's near-west side, the Elevator Building in the east riverfront district, and the Green Garage in Midtown.

The geography of high-tech startups and venture capital appears to be changing, according to new data from the National Venture Capital Association reported yesterday in USA Today. The data charts the total number of high-tech startups, the number receiving venture capital investment and the dollar value of that investment for the ten largest high-tech regions in 2011.

If there are two characteristics that define me, they are my susceptibility to memes, and my fear of death. So when a meme arrives telling me my life is in danger, I pay attention.

Over the last few years, the media has come alive with reports to the effect that sitting kills you. You may have seen the stories--in the Times, in HuffPo, on NPR. The gist of the argument is that a life whiled away before a desk wreaks a havoc on your health so great that even regular exercise cannot undo it. If you sit too much, no amount of penance at the bench press will save you. What the summer of 1975 did for sharks, what the fall of 2001 did for anthrax, the last few years have been doing for that seemingly innocuous object: the chair.

Mark Zuckerberg reinvigorated an entire generation when he added nine zeroes to the end of his bank account before he was 30 years old. He made start-ups great again. He showed the world that youth is not a preventative factor of success and that work can actually be fun. This theme of wealth creation while doing something you love is why an increasingly large percentage of graduates are turning to start-ups over more traditional jobs. It might also be why people are quitting their consulting gigs and investment banking positions to pursue a career in start-up land. Just yesterday I ran into a recent Harvard Business School graduate who quit her consulting gig in order to follow her dream at a new start-up.

Unlike big, established corporations or what we might classify as a "steady job," start-ups present more inherent risk because there are more variables and questions for a prospect to consider. Things like: Does this start-up have the right team? Do they have money? What if I choose the wrong company? Nevertheless, this risk is often overlooked because start-up employee prospects realize that new ventures are more fun, are intellectually rewarding, and could have big paydays down the line.

We are without doubt one of the worlds most complicated machines. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, most of which contain a full copy of our own individual genome. Despite containing identical genetic information individual cells vary hugely in structure and function, for example, just think of the differences between skin and brain cells. This variation is achieved through the specialised way each cell reads it’s own copy of the genome, allowing cells to create only the components they require to function. One of the biggest challenges faced by biologists and medics today is bringing together our understanding of genes, gene processing, cellular and systems biology to gain a better understanding of how our bodies work, and what happens when things go wrong. Such research has lead us to appreciate just how individual we really are! It has highlighted how a combination of genes, environment and even our own compliment of bacteria can profoundly affect the way our cells function and ultimately our health. This ability to delve deeper into our inner workings has also spawned a new field of medicine known as personalised medicine.

Fulton County is coming apart. Over the past decade, four new cities have been carved out of the Georgia county, which is dominated by the county seat, Atlanta. As a result, Fulton County now provides a full set of services to fewer than 10 percent of its 920,000 residents. All but one of the new cities are in the northern part of the county, which is both more affluent and more white than Atlanta and the rest of the county. Northern Fulton residents have always felt that they receive less than their fair share of county services. Now that they depend on the county for so little, with their new cities providing most core services, they believe more than ever that their tax dollars are simply underwriting other county residents.

Not surprisingly, then, there’s constant fighting when it comes to matters such as divvying up tax revenues or choosing representatives to sit on the regional transit board. More than that, there’s a movement afoot among the northern communities to break off from the rest of Fulton County entirely, by reconstituting Milton County, the territory that went broke and was absorbed by Fulton back during the Great Depression. “There are certainly people working actively on splitting the county,” says Joe Lockwood, mayor of the city of Milton. “There’s a sense that the county’s so big -- it’s 70 miles long -- that it’s inefficient and an unfair share of resources are going from one part of the county to another.”

Every year, as an investor, I look at scores of business plans from eager entrepreneurs who seek funding for their emerging enterprises.  Most plans are not well written and I find only a few that are excellent.  I invite the founders with poorly conceived plans to improve their efforts and return when they are ready to present again.

At the end of a presentation, I take time to share with the entrepreneur what they need to do to develop an optimal business blue print.

More and more, entrepreneurs are not satisfied with creating a business that delivers a great product, generates a profit and creates value (read wealth), but instead want their enterprise to directly impact a social problem from poverty to global warming.

Some social entrepreneurs are running for-profit businesses with a clear and specific social mission integrated into the business model while others are launching traditional not-for-profit businesses.