Any entrepreneur with a vision can postulate a new business, but it takes a collaboration of many people to make it a success. Today the complexity of forces required for success include multi-disciplinary skills, competencies, and experiences in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Entrepreneurs who embrace the “lone wolf” approach usually live to regret it.

I just finished a new book, “The Collaboration Imperative,” by Ron Ricci and Carl Wiese, which makes the case very well for why collaboration matters in every business, as well as startups. Every entrepreneur should heed the following lessons on collaboration derived from the authors work on the culture, process and technology of collaboration in hundreds of companies:

Consensus is the enemy of collaboration. Collaboration leaves everyone with a feeling of “win-win,” while consensus is “win-lose” or even “lose-lose.” Collaboration opens more possibilities, while consensus narrows them to a compromise.

If you have kids, you've probably gotten used to handing them your phone so they can play games or watch videos. So what about handing them your phone so they can insert it into a Nerf-like ball and toss it around?

That's the idea behind a new product from Physical Apps in Hollis, New Hampshire. The TheO Ball is a foam sphere with a pocket in its center that keeps the phone safe while allowing players to see its screen. Some of the initial games will be bowling, hot potato, and a question-and-answer game called Interrogo, but the company also plans a software development kit that will enable others to create games for TheO. The ball will sell for $24.95, and include several free apps. Additional apps will be sold through the Android and iTunes online marketplaces.

Good news for all of the New York City-based startups out there: A new bill under discussion in the New York State Assembly would give angel investors a sizable tax credit for investing in your company.

The Angel Investor Tax Credit, proposed by Democratic Assemblymember Micah Kellner, would give a 25% tax credit to investors who put between $25,000 and $1 million of their money behind a New York City-based startup. 60% of the startup’s employees must be based in the city for the company’s investors to qualify for the credit.

Hiring, especially in Silicon Valley, can be one of the toughest challenges of running a startup, as there’s so much competition — especially for engineers. When trying to run a lean startup, the prospect of spending 20% or more of a hire’s salary on recruiter fees is not exactly appealing. But recruiters aren’t your only option for hiring. There are lots of ways to hustle your hiring on the cheap — here are five tips.

It’s good practice to come up with a structured recruitment process, which you can evolve over time and bypass only for exceptional candidates. Having every candidate go through the same process means that you will have a level playing field on which to evaluate them; we’ve often found that when we’ve skipped our interview process for a candidate, there are glaring issues down the line that we hadn’t picked up on. Here’s a good step-by-step outline.

On Wednesday, New York-based Center for an Urban Future, a policy think tank, released a report surveying the city’s digital startup scene, and its conclusion was rather dramatic: New York has surpassed Boston in tech leadership, the center says. “In 2006, I wouldn’t have put New York anywhere on the map (of leading tech hubs),” says entrepreneurship trend tracker Vivek Wadwha in the report. “Now it is literally number two. If there is any second to Silicon Valley, it’s now New York, not Boston.”

Certainly the researchers contributing to the report have some compelling data to back up the notion that NYC is now the number-two tech hub in the United States. In the five years ending in 2011, 486 companies were founded and received angel or venture capital, according to the report, which pulls together data from several sources, including PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The number of VC deals grew 32 percent in that five-year period in New York, while venture funding was down in every other major tech hub.

Fact: Thanks to the new crowdfunding legislation, it will soon be easier for any entrepreneur trying to build Instagram for Cats to raise $10 million than it is for an experienced investor to raise a fund to invest in the next 25 new businesses as well as support their growth with strategic advice, help with hiring, PR, business development, and connections to future capital.

In fact, thanks to increased scrutiny of investment funds in a post-Madoff world, this imbalance will probably get bigger and bigger.  The laws are written seemingly with the view that it's worse to lose your money from fraud than it is from your run of the mill poorly exacuted bad idea.  You know, because sometimes startups just simply don't make it (shrug) but you gotta watch out for those financial hucksters who are looking to take your money and run off to kick it in Fiji.  Trust me, if you lose all your money on your brother-in-law's Arizona tanning salon, it's not going to hurt any less than if you lose it in his seed fund.  (Hmm... tanning salon/seed fund combo...  Jersey Shore Ventures anyone?)

In the recent HBR article "The Crowdfunding Road to Hell," Daniel Isenberg argues persuasively that crowdfunding — specifically equity crowdfunding — cannot work.

As an entrepreneur, angel investor, VC, philanthropist, and CEO with 40 years' experience, I cannot agree.

From my experience investing in emerging start-ups (I'm invested in 60 right now) and launching my share of both failures (4) and highly successful (3) companies, I can attest that Mr. Isenberg is perfectly correct in his assertion that it's dangerous to expect crowdfunding of equities to work the same way crowdfunded donations do. Furthermore, I understand all too keenly the complexities of determining a fair valuation for companies that are too early in their development to fit existing measurement standards and can't meet the criteria for standard bank or SBA funding. I also agree that due diligence is an imperative — and is often overlooked by crowdfunders as impractical or overly complex. And finally, I concur that a crowd mentality can frequently encourage those who invest to be stupid.

If you haven’t had a failure, you aren’t pushing the limits. If you are really an entrepreneur, you are a risk taker and less cautious by nature, so failures should be expected. Wear you startup failure as a badge of courage. Don’t go after failure, but embrace it when it does happen and grow from it.

People who are afraid of failing should not become entrepreneurs. They can't overcome the psychological fears of making a mistake, and are afraid of losing money. They are better off keeping their day job. Successful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, tap into the positive power of failure. Here are three examples:

Not long ago, serial entrepreneur and founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council Scott Gerber offered his prescription to Fix Young America. In short, Gerber believes entrepreneurship can cure a lot of what’s wrong with the American economy.

Yesterday on Salon.com, those ideas came under attack as an Occupy imposter - instead of representing American’s youth, the post contended, they’re shills for “the most noxious aspects of the bipartisan status quo.” Gerber can defend himself, but in criticizing him, the authors seem to be condemning entrepreneurship. And that needs defending.

How can you beat the odds if you want to join the boomerpreneur boom and start your own company after 50? MONEY put that question to small-business experts and dozens of fiftysomething entrepreneurs for their best advice.

This is the third of three articles on how to become a boomerpreneur. This one will help you understand the real costs of starting up a business and how to finance with caution. You can also see if you've got what it takes to own your own business and how to put time on your side, and to see what lifestyle changes starting your own business will call for.

Map of Life, a new interactive website the draws on a diverse source of datasets to map species across the globe, went online yesterday (May 10), reported Nature. The visualization tool combines expert range maps, presence/absence checklists, point-occurrence records, and other digitized species data to form a searchable map. The current version focuses on fish and land-dwelling vertebrates, with plant and some invertebrates species slated to arrive later in the year.

Resumes are dead. Interviews are largely ineffectual. Linked-In is good. Portfolios are useful.

But projects are the real future of hiring, especially knowledge working hiring. No matter how wonderful your references or how well you do on those too-clever-by-half Microsoft/Google brainteasers, serious firms will increasingly ask serious candidates to do serious work in order to get a serious job offer.

Call them "projeclications" or "applijects." World-class talent will engage in bespoke real-world projects testing their abilities to deliver real value on their own and with others. Forget the "What's Your Greatest Weakness?" interrogatory genre; the real question will be how well candidates can rise to the "appliject" challenge and help redesign a social media campaign, document a tricky bit of software, edit a Keynote presentation, produce a webinar or peer review a CAD layout for a contract Chinese manufacturer.

High school program takes kids out of the classroom and into business. By David Conrads

Hunter Browning is a high school senior, but don’t look for him in the halls of Blue Valley High in Stilwell. He spends his days at the school district’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS). There, he tinkers with a fuel cell he invented, which can pull the hydrogen out of water efficiently enough to run a car.

Browning holds seven provisional patents and has formed two companies around his invention, and is focused now on fabricating a clean presentation model to show to potential investors.

“There’s been quite a bit of interest,” Hunter said. “It’s pretty cool to be doing this at age 18.”

The Public Policy Institute (PPI), the research arm of The Business Council of New York State, today released an in-depth study on the challenges in attracting and retaining private-sector jobs and companies in New York's lucrative bioscience sector.

Based on interviews with 30 industry experts as well as existing research, Cultivating the Next Generation of Discoveries and Development in New York Bioscience explores the opportunities and barriers facing companies in various stages of development and offers three public policy recommendations to foster public-private partnerships and make New York more competitive with other states:

• Create a Governor's Council to spearhead development and marketing of the state's bioscience industry.

• Establish a Small Business Innovation Research matching grant program for bioscience companies as well as a dedicated Biosciences Commercialization Fund.

Americans spend, on average, only about two hours each week participating in sports and fitness activities, according to researchers at Penn State and the University of Maryland who examined U.S. government data from the American Time Use Study.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults aged 18 to 64 get about four hours of physical activity each week by exercising moderately for 2.5 hours per week and engaging in a vigorous activity, such as running and muscle strengthening, for an hour and fifteen minutes per week.

“The United States is the fattest country in the world,” said Geoffrey Godbey, professor emeritus of recreation, park and tourism management, Penn State. “The amount of exercise Americans get has become a major concern.”

Universities are reasonably conservative places and virtually no institutions have moved away from the three-year undergraduate degree, or the one-year master's programme. The exceptions, such as the four-year classics programme at Oxford, are mainly historical anomalies rather than recent innovations.

Almost all universities are geared around either full-time undergraduates, or part-time students who will take the full-time programme over a longer time period. Tuition methods are usually based around lectures and classes, with the exceptions often more conservative still – Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, use tutorials rather than classes, but this again is an old established tradition.

Creativity is crucial to economic expansion, the development of society, and personal growth. Yet only 1 in 4 people actually feel they are living up to their creative potential. A look at what's behind this "creativity gap."

According to a developed-country study by Adobe, the vast majority of people around the world know creativity is crucial to economic expansion, the development of society, and their personal growth. Yet only 1 in 4 actually feel they are living up to their creative potential. What's the cause of this "creativity gap"? Let's explore the key findings.

Creativity is important: Eighty percent of the people survey believe creativity is key to economic growth and 64% believe it is valuable to society. And 75% feel that being creative enables them to make a difference in their own lives, while another two-third believe it helps them make a difference in the lives of others. In a world in which innovation drives the economy and in which more people than ever have the opportunity to be creative, this is not surprising. And it's good news. But here's the rub.

When 1986 College graduate Ted Schlein was an undergraduate, his father’s position on the board of Apple Inc. meant that he was one of very few Penn students to have a personal computer in his room. When he found all his friends using it to design their resumes, the intrepid economics major started a resume business, charging $35 for 10 copies and allowing unlimited changes.

That enterprise — which ended up netting Schlein a few thousand dollars — was one of many on an entrepreneurial path that eventually led him to his position as a managing partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested in companies like Google, AOL and Twitter.

It seems true that what we think about defines what we are capable of.

I often hear that athletes, musicians, orators, and many others must see themselves accomplishing their goals in order to perform at their best.

What is it that government employees think about, and how does that thinking shape their capabilities?

In my observations, government employees can’t help but think a lot about short cycles, many of which seem to be distractions from organizational performance: political processing, short executive tenures, acquisition processes, and “solution” hype cycles. The mix of short cycles seems to discourage fresh thinking.