We are currently living through a ridiculously interesting period in small business and entrepreneurship: The rise of entrepreneurial niche celebrity.

If the word “celebrity” makes you cringe or cry, let me clarify a bit. This isn’t about pouring champagne up in the club, bling bling, red carpets, PR people speaking for you and being a jackass. It also isn’t about being a household name in every household in the world with paparazzi chasing you around town.

It’s not uncommon for me to see a startup business plan “mission” to be the “premier brand” for their product, yet their marketing budget in the financials is trivial. This combination will almost certainly get your plan tossed by potential investors, who understand all too well the need and cost for marketing in today’s environment.

When questioned, founders usually mention word-of-mouth, viral marketing, and a top quality product. These founders need a reality check on what recognized brand names have spent to reach that threshold, and how long it is likely to take. Viral marketing costs real money these days, which usually means adding at least an extra zero to budget estimates.

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s precipitated an economic downturn of such magnitude and reach that many now refer to the period as the “Great Recession.” According to the International Monetary Fund, global economic output, which had grown at an annual rate of 3.2 percent from 1993 to 2007, actually shrank by 2 percent from 2008 to 2009. A precarious economic recovery is now underway.

Biotech and pharma companies will need to work together to create value
Governments around the world are trying to cut healthcare costs, and finding new drugs is getting harder. We've taken a closer look at what this means for the biotech industry in particular.

Biotech hasn't yet changed the face of drug development
The industry is now about 30 years old but it hasn’t completely fulfilled its promise. Drugs aren't being developed notably faster, cheaper, or with less risk. The Biotech business model relied on lots of seed money from financial investors, but this is getting harder to come by as the research base moves east and emerging economies fight for their share.

Boundaries between biotech and pharma are blurring
Biotech and Pharma are effectively becoming one industry - the biopharmaceutical industry - although there's a limit to how far Pharma can go down the Biotech route. Pharma can't copy Biotech's discovery and development methodology too closely and, even if it could, Biotech hasn't brought a golden era of productivity that would justify doing so. All biopharmaceutical companies - whether biotechnological or pharmaceutical in origin - will have to adopt a very different business model.

Social networks, to most, are about fun and games. To IBM, social networking has serious potential for the workplace.

The latest version of IBM's Lotus Connections 3.0, announced last month, is IBM's most earnest attempt yet to bring Facebook- and Twitter-style networking to large companies. Small firms can adopt other companies' tools, such as Yammer or Present.ly, to let employees tweet internally within the company, but Lotus Connections aims to serve companies with 10,000 or more employees.

A social network of this type lets workers in large, geographically spread out companies find one another—and one another's work—through serendipitous discovery, rather than through a deliberate search. "We had a customer with two teams, one in the U.S., and one in Australia," says Heidi Ambler, IBM's director of social software. "Neither knew that they were working on the same project, trying to solve the same problem." Ambler thinks a social networking tool like Lotus Connections could eliminate such redundancies.

Most of us have a long list of things we'd like to do—get more exercise, keep a cleaner house, spend money more responsibly, and deal with e-mail more effectively. But it's notoriously hard to change behavior when it comes to such tiresome chores. On the other hand, a compelling computer game can inspire you to stay up late at night trying to complete a tricky, and essentially pointless, task.

Several successful startup companies, including Foursquare and SCVNGR, have harnessed the principles at work in games—so-called "game dynamics"—to motivate people to perform particular location-based tasks. And there is growing interest in finding other ways to harness game dynamics.

However, one startup's experience shows that game dynamics can be an unpredictable, and sometimes blunt, tool. Baydin, which makes plugins for Outlook and Gmail, is testing an e-mail game designed to help people achieve "inbox zero"—the state in which the user has dealt with all of his or her messages.

Advice is given to us so often, it’s easy for it to fall on deaf ears. Some of this so-called advice is given from friends, other from family; perhaps a colleague or a mentor. How do you decide what sticks? The top 8 things I’ve learned from those around me can be summed up in close to 500 words. So what will you take with you?

1. Do what you love

We grow up wanting to be doctors, actors, sports players; yet many end up working in cubicles 8 hours a day. Does that mean settling? I don’t think so… it’s easy to get somewhere and stuck in a rut. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue what you love – work or hobby. Find a way to keep a piece of what you enjoy doing in your everyday life and you will find yourself significantly happier.

Former Google engineer and Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter has made angel investments in at least 45 companies, but he’s backed off from investing for now. He thinks angel investing has developed enough difficulties that he’s better off running a company than funding one.

Schachter doesn’t like the idea of start-ups taking money from “a pile of angels” instead of a venture capitalist who’s built a syndicate to fund a company. “No one is leading,” he says of the angels, “and so no one has responsibility when it’s time to raise money again.”

Last week the Center for American Progress and its Doing What Works project launched a new policy platform aimed at bolstering U.S. economic competitiveness by better coordinating federal efforts around trade, education, infrastructure, and innovation, among other areas. To accompany the new report, for seven days CAP will be hosting an online discussion on competitiveness, innovation, and economic issues with a diverse array of heavy-hitting industry, labor, and political leaders.

The report aptly notes “that amid short-term efforts to address the consequences of the Great Recession, too little attention was being paid to the equally important job of increasing America’s long-term competitiveness.” And it lays out a number of policy recommendations aimed at reforming federal agencies in order to bolster long-term economic planning. What the report does not explicitly state, but some of these online discussion participants broach, is the central role that innovation must play in sustaining this long-term competitiveness, and the need for public policy to recognize and internalize the benefits of innovation’s positive externalities.

The Obama administration’s enthusiasm for regional innovation clusters (or, RICs) as an organizing framework for sector-based economic growth and job creation is something that policy organizations (like Science Progress and the Brookings Institute) and regional columnists like me have followed closely over the past two years. In my articles I’ve described what clusters are and why they matter, what the administration is doing to catalyze clusters and in particular the unique role of Small Business Association Administrator Karen Mills in driving this approach. Given the new political realities of the mid-term election, I now offer some insight into cluster policy’s historic origins, and suggest that they may be a policy in which both parties can find common ground.

The Republican provenance of clusters in policy

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter is the most widely recognized advocate for this strategy for regional competitiveness. And one of the earliest organizations formed to advocate for competitiveness—including a full embrace of clusters—is the Council on Competitiveness, a nonprofit policy group formed in 1986 by the chairman of then President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, John A. Young; Porter was on the council’s board and still serves on its executive committee.  The council sponsors conferences, seminars, and other special events to help catalyze new ideas and solutions, and to circulate its findings in topics that speak to competitiveness in specific regions (e.g. Brazil) and in key sectors (e.g. energy).  The council’s Regional Initiatives reports serve to describe and prescribe cluster development process and strategies.

How you say something to an audience is more important, in some ways, than what you say.

That’s the unconventional thesis of Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, whose ideas about “power posing” to build self-confidence and authority during presentations is going viral with the business media. We’ve discussed her research here in Lack Confidence? Strike These Power Poses and Leadership is About Connecting, Not Dominating.

“A lot of the judgments being made of you are based not on the words that are coming out of your mouth, but on the disposition you are projecting,” Cuddy says.

Since these pieces had a lot of traction with BNET readers, I thought you’d be interested in this MSNBC interview with Cuddy. She talks about expansive poses (arms wide apart) you can strike over a two-minute period before a presentation that stimulate higher levels of testosterone, the dominance hormone, and lower levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with stress. And she discusses poses, such as crossing your arms (see our friend in photo above) that make us look smaller, weaker.

When you start out as an entrepreneur at an early age, you find that one of the things that stands in the way of your entrepreneur success isn’t the world, but it’s you. Yes, you. As a young entrepreneur, you often split your focus between two ideas:

* You’re too young to know better.
* You’re too young, and that makes you cutting edge.

For those who are the younger generation (however you define that), it can be easy to think that because you are younger, people don’t expect as much of you. You don’t have to be a professional because you’re young and people will simply write that off as being a part of who you are.

It’s that time of the year — it’s the 3rd annual Small Business Book Awards by SmallBizTrends.com, where we celebrate and honor the new business book releases for 2010.

This year the Awards are bigger and better than ever. Here is what’s new this year:

* There’s a special site specifically for you to vote on your favorite books through December 15, 2010.
* This year the voting is completely transparent. You can sort the book entries by number of votes, and see exactly where each book stands in the running at any moment.
* The books are searchable by 6 topics. That way, the site can be an ongoing resource for those looking for relevant reading.

Vern Burkhardt (VB): You say, “Innovate or die…” It’s that serious a matter for companies, large and small?

Robert F. Brands: Absolutely. Ask yourself, “Where are you on the product lifecycle extending from innovation to introduction, growth, maturity, and decline?” I invite you to attach to this interview the chart from my book which portrays this lifecycle.

No matter where you are on the product lifecycle with your most significant product or service, or your company as a whole, it is imperative to continuously think about the next new product or service to be offered. You need to identify them early so they can be developed, grow in sales and revenues, and be ready to replace your current lead products or services as they mature in the marketplace.

So the thing with the Internet is that there is so much information it is hard to know what websites to actually keep an eye on or what ones to subscribe to, to get that nugget of information or advice or business idea. We have talked about a number of sites here before including Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Siliconrepublic and Springwise.

Here is another extremely helpful website: Innovation America. This site is literally chock-full of information on a range of subjects, including innovation, economic development, venture news and more. It is produced by Richard A. Bendis, who is the Founder, President and CEO of Innovation America (IA), a global innovation intermediary focused on accelerating the growth of the entrepreneurial innovation economy Internationally and in America. Part of this is the first email I look at in the morning, innovationDAILY (ID) a Daily Electronic Newsletter, reporting on the Daily Pulse of Global Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Angel/Seed and Venture Capital and Innovation Based Economic Development.(IBED). ID has over 125,000 unique visitors in over 185 countries with readership growing all the time.

I would like to thank Ryan McConnell of the Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship in Ireland for the above endorsement....................Rich Bendis

I have just returned from a brief last minute visit to Algiers where I spoke at a conference focused on the Maghreb countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. The objectives of the Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference, a follow-on to President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship held in April 2010 in Washington, DC was to discuss strategies to promote job creation through entrepreneurship.

Hosted by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S.-Algeria Business Council, the conference brought together business talent and public officials from participating countries, including entrepreneurs of the North African Diaspora. The U.S. delegation to the conference was led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Business Affairs, Jose W. Fernandez, who was eager to continue the work to encourage entrepreneurship and create partnerships with the Muslim world.

A fascinating new report titled 'Creative Clusters and Innovation' has just been published by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), written by a team of researchers based at the Birmingham and Cardiff Business Schools.

At over 6% of the economy, and growing at twice the rate of other sectors, the UK's creative industries are proportionately the largest of any in the world. Creative firms also tend to be found in clusters, and by locating close to talent pools and clients, and by networking and sharing information, they can become more innovative and competitive.

Until the 'Creative Clusters and Innovation' project, no-one had examined systematically where these clusters are located in Britain, or the role that they play in local and regional processes of innovation.