Q: Friends who run companies, as well as the occasional investor I have spoken to, keep asking me what my exit plan is. I do not have one. I am not looking to raise money at the moment and have no plans to sell my business so as far as I am concerned I do not need one. Am I setting myself up for a fall?

Alex Macpherson, head of ventures, Octopus Investments writes:

WHAT is it you really want from your business and what are your personal ambitions? And how might your ambitions alter? Those are the first questions any business owner should be able to answer whether they are planning a sale or not.

Investors gave thumbs up to the ability to improvise and thumbs down to an infomercial tone at a recent critique of entrepreneurial pitches in Philadelphia. A panel of investors evaluated presentations from four entrepreneurs and discussed what they look for in elevator and longer format pitches. The session was part of a seminar instructing entrepreneurs on how to succeed at the upcoming Angel Venture Fair 2012.

Four companies who will be participating in the fair won the opportunity to participate in the critique. Two gave eight-minute pitches and the other two had less than 2 minutes to sell their idea.

Look for new dealflow, new investor faces and new funds in Research Triangle Park throughout the year.

At the moment, the life science investing opportunities can look pretty dry. Intersouth Partners, a Durham, North Carolina venture capital firm, has about two deals left until its current fund runs out. The same probably goes for Durham-based Pappas Ventures.

ADVERTISEMENT But Intersouth and Pappas won’t be dry for long. Local members of the life science sector say both groups will start to raise new funds later this year (Intersouth said as much but wouldn’t confirm a timetable for the new fund; Pappas didn’t respond for comment).

Last year, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, it was impossible to escape the concept of the "Lean Startup"--especially the great ideas espoused by the preeminent thought leader on the topic, Eric Ries.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of entrepreneurs embraced these tenets and joined the "Lean Startup movement." In addition to curbing costs, an entrepreneur would begin by creating their first "minimal viable product" to test that initial business idea. If it failed? No big deal! The strategy of launching quietly held that few people would even know about the product in the first place--and thus wouldn’t have been the wiser to its initial failure. Eventually, the goal was to achieve product/market fit--another Riesian commandment that equates to plowing through "build-measure-learn" feedback loops until one discovers that special (and monetizable) moment when a product and its market interest collide.

Erick Njenga, a 21-year-old college senior wrapping up his business IT degree at Nairobi's Strathmore University, has a gap-toothed grin and a scraggly goatee. A mild-mannered son of auditors, he didn't say much as we tucked into a lunch of grilled steak, rice, and fruit juice at an outdoor café amid the din of the city's awful traffic. But his code had done the talking. Last year Njenga and three classmates developed a program that will let thousands of Kenyan health workers use mobile phones to report and track the spread of diseases in real time—and they'd done it for a tiny fraction of what the government had been on the verge of paying for such an application. Their success—and that of others in the nation's fast-growing startup scene—demonstrates the emergence of a tech-savvy generation able to address Kenya's public-health problems in ways that donors, nongovernmental organizations, and multinational companies alone cannot.

Back in 2000, when Larry Smarr left his job as head of a celebrated supercomputer center in Illinois to start a new institute at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine, he rarely paid attention to his bathroom scale. He regularly drank Coke, added sugar to his coffee, and enjoyed Big Mac Combo Meals with his kids at McDonald's. Exercise consisted of an occasional hike or a ride on a stationary bike. "In Illinois they said, 'We know what's going to happen when you go out to California. You're going to start eating organic food and get a blonde trainer and get a hot tub,' " recalls Smarr, who laughed off the predictions. "Of course, I did all three."

Smarr, who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in La Jolla, dropped from 205 to 184 pounds and is now a fit 63-year-old. But his transformation transcends his regular exercise program and carefully managed diet: he has become a poster man for the medical strategy of the future. Over the past decade, he has gathered as much data as he can about his body and then used that information to improve his health. And he has accomplished something that few people at the forefront of the "quantified self" movement have had the opportunity to do: he helped diagnose the emergence of a chronic disease in his body.

As a serial snack-food entrepreneur, Warren Wilson is no stranger to the challenges of running a business.

In the early days of his first enterprise, selling funnel cakes at fairs, there was the time when, tired of losing money on inclement days, he bought weather insurance — and proceeded to lose even more money than he had when it rained. In the 1990s, he and his wife and business partner, Sara, once had to mortgage their house and sell off investments to make their company’s payroll.

But it still came as a bit of a shock when the Wilsons made what they thought was a routine move to register the trademark of their hot product — a flat pretzel snack called Pretzel Crisps — and it was contested by none other than Frito-Lay, the 800-pound gorilla of the snack food market owned by PepsiCo.

The value of attending networking events is often hard to quantify, as it takes valuable time, but it is worth the effort especially if you are considering starting your own business; building an innovative product or trying to raise funding.

Funders invest in companies and founders they know

Although we receive many proposals through our website at the VC firm I’m part of, all of the deals that we have concluded (i.e. invested in) to date, have been sourced through our networks. An essential part of our business is the relationships that we’ve been building and nurturing with various suppliers and stakeholders in our industry over many years. We are not unique in this regard.

The 2010 SAVCA Venture Solutions VC Survey, found that 96% of deals that resulted in eventual transactions were sourced through own networks and referrals. This was common to all early stage investors including venture capitalists and Angels.

When CEOs like Jeff Bezos name their favorite books, they'll often cite authors like Jim Collins, who wrote the business school classic, Good To Great, or Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Porter, known as the father of modern corporate strategy.

These guys all made the "Top 50 Business Thinkers" list, put out annually by The Thinkers50 and facilitated by consultancy Crainer Dearlove.

There are a great many business books out there on everything from marketing and brand building to stories of the life and times of some great business person. For better or for worse, these books often shape the past, present and future generations of entrepreneurs.

We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, this question:

“What business book do you recommend for improving management leadership?”

A steadfast accountability is the best antidote to tempering volatility.  It’s really easy today to get off track, distracted, and behind. The demands of being an outstanding worker, a small business owner, or a top professional couldn’t be more demanding today.

No matter what stage of life or career one is in, we are perpetually juggling, multi-tasking and balancing to try to stay afloat, get ahead, stay ahead and find some time for ourselves.

I have found that a steadfast accountability to my professionalism, a continued commitment to embrace change, while still keeping a sense of humor, are tantamount to dealing with uncertainty and volatility. Things are getting better, but still uncertain and volatile.

Micro enterprises are a more important source of jobs in some countries than in others. Data from Entrepreneurship at a Glance, a publication of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), shows wide variation across nations in the share of employment in micro-businesses. While nearly 60 percent of Greeks work in businesses with one-to-nine employees, only 4.6 percent of Slovaks do.

Americans are less likely than people in many other countries to work in micro enterprises. As the figure below shows, only 11.1 percent of Americans worked for companies with fewer than ten employees in 2007 (the latest year for which the data are available).

When asked to define innovation, many people give an answer that separates the solution from the problem. In this article, InCube Labs founder Mir Imran, who holds more than 200 issued patents and has founded more than 20 life science companies, says  that “doing that assumes that you know what the problem is,” and that even includes sometimes launching multiple ventures in parallel. It is a mistake to separate the process of innovation from careful consideration of the problem, he explains.

Through his experience as an entrepreneur and investor, Imran has learned about innovation from the inside out. He offers the following definition:

“Innovation is the process of defining the problem and understanding the problem—not solving it,” Imran says. “The solution comes later. Understanding the problem is at the heart of it.”

The federal government has paid more than $3 billion to U.S. hospitals and doctors offices in the process of switching patient records from paper to computers.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius visited Kansas City Friday to report the progress of health care providers in adopting electronic health record technology.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it has paid out $3.12 billion in incentive payments to almost 2,000 hospitals and more than 41,000 physicians who have shown that they are using technology that federal and industry officials say can improve quality of care and lower costs.

You’ve heard it off and on throughout 2011 and 2012: Chinese investors and the Chinese government are starting to aggressively fund U.S.-based cleantech startups from electric vehicle companies to clean power developers. There’s been a half dozen of these deals in recent weeks and months, so I thought I’d put together this list to point out the 10 big ones I’ve noticed:

1). GreatPoint Energy and China Wanxiang Holdings: At one point GreatPoint Energy, a company that converts coal into cleaner-burning natural gas, had an investor list that was led by the who’s who of Silicon Valley’s greentech ambitions, including Kleiner Perkins, Advanced Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Khosla Ventures. But according to DowJones Venture Wire last week, GreatPoint Energy has now developed a $1.25 billion partnership with industrial parts supplier China Wanxiang Holdings, including a $420 million Series D equity investment.

Cities are the future, and innovations to make them better, smarter, and faster are happening every day. Take a beautiful tour of some of the most interesting urban projects and thinking going on today.

"There’s an enormous realization of the importance of cities. That is true for business, it’s true for government, it’s true for civil society." So says one of the speakers in Thinking Cities (made by Ericsson as part of their Networked Society series), which you can watch above. As Geoffrey West, a scientist who studies cities, notes in the film, cities are the cause of many of the world’s problems, but are also hubs of innovation that are going to drive the solutions.

We now face a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it. After decades of eroding middle-class security as those at the very top saw their incomes rise as never before and after a historic recession that plunged our economy into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover, it is time to construct an economy that is built to last. The President’s 2013 Budget is built around the idea that our country does best when everyone gets a fair shot, does their fair share, and plays by the same rules. We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending, and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building. That begins with putting the Nation on a path to living within our means – by cutting wasteful spending, asking all Americans to shoulder their fair share, and making tough choices on some things we cannot afford, while keeping the investments we need to grow the economy and create jobs. The Budget targets scarce federal resources to the areas critical to growing the economy and restoring middle-class security: education and skills for American workers, innovation and manufacturing, clean energy, and infrastructure. The Budget is a blueprint for how we can rebuild an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded.

Download the PDF

This rainy February weekend, CANARIE is in Vancouver at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. This is the 178th meeting of the organization, and the first time it’s been held in Canada for the past 30 years. It is a Big Deal: more than 5,000 attendees have gathered to share knowledge and learn what’s new in science.

Among the many illustrious speakers was Mike Lazaridis, former RIM co-CEO. It’s not every day that you are privy to the thoughts of one of Canada’s premier technology leaders, so the seats at the AAAS plenary lecture by Mike Lazaridis filled up fast.

Scientists have claimed they would serve the world's first testtube hamburger this October.

A team, led by Prof Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, says it has already grown artificial meat in the laboratory, and now aims to create a hamburger, identical to a real stuff, by generating strips of meat from stem cells.

The finished product is expected to cost nearly 220,000 pounds, 'The Daily Telegraph' reported.

Prof Post said his team has successfully replicated the process with cow cells and calf serum, bringing the first artificial burger a step closer.

“Entrepreneurialism is essentially a belief system: you must believe in something that is bigger than yourself”. A strong message for young entrepreneurs and the entire startup ecosystem. Mårten Mickos has been the CEO of MySQL AB, a relatively small European company that he guided to an exit worth one billion, when in 2008 the company was sold to Sun Microsystems. Not a surprise if the talk he gave for the Stanford University‘s Entrepreneurship Corner in Nov. 2011 was titled exactly in this way: Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself.

His lesson is strongly inspiring both for startups and big corporations.

You need to believe in something that is bigger than the business you are, attempting to address something that is bigger than everything. You must have a belief in something absolutely enormous that you can do for this planet. You must have a belief that there is something you can do that nobody else can do, and if you do it the world will be a better place. You must have it as part of your entrepreneurial soul.