In an earlier post at Hire Education, I talked about how many students are turning to entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional internships and full-time positions, as on-campus recruiting decreases. Some readers were curious about what it takes to start a business and whether it’s a realistic option for them. Here are some issues to consider:

Determining Priorities: For many student entrepreneurs, finding a balance between work, school and life is the biggest challenge. After all, running a business and being a student simultaneously can often be the equivalent of trying to manage two full-time jobs. So it becomes very difficult to maintain a 4.0 GPA while working on a start-up. Students have to ask themselves what is most important to them and whether they are willing to risk a possibly lower GPA in hopes of achieving their entrepreneurial dreams and obtaining valuable real-world experience. For some this will be the right decision. For others, a focus on academics will be of greater importance.

Siamak Taghaddos, a 2003 Babson College graduate, might be considered the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur.

He and David Hauser, another Babson grad, formed Grasshopper Group seven years ago to offer phone and voice mail services to start-up companies. Today, the Needham company has more than 100,000 clients and has started Grasshopper Labs, a unit focused on developing other products and services to help entrepreneurs expand their businesses.

The ISCTE-IUL MIT Portugal Competition — launched by ISCTE-IUL in partnership with MIT School of Engineering, the Deshpande Center, and the MIT Sloan School of Management — aims to foster the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit in Portugal.

Open to anyone willing to register their company in Portugal, the high-visibility Venture Competition will help identify and reward global projects that are at an embryonic stage – projects with high-level technological content, or products or services that are able to demonstrate a highly innovative approach. Finalists from other national Portuguese competitions (e.g., CoHitec, Start, BES Inovação, EDP/Richard Branson, Audax) will be encouraged to participate.

Cycling’s long history with doping means that any dramatic victory is as likely to create suspicion as admiration. But the whispers surrounding Fabian Cancellara’s decisive wins in two of this spring’s most important races have a novel twist: they accuse him of using a tiny electric motor to help power his legs.

Although no one offered proof, and Cancellara dismissed the allegations as “stupid,” online speculation reached such a point that on Wednesday it crashed the Web servers of an Austrian company that makes an invisible motor system for bicycles. And the International Cycling Union, while carefully noting that it is not investigating any specific rider or team, is reviewing the need for a new bicycle inspection system to detect motorized cheating.

We receive a lot of emails from entrepreneur, either asking us for review of their product or general query on the industry. Given by the quality of some emails, I sometime pity VCs because of the possible email grind they end up going through!

Many entrepreneurs, especially first timers take email communication casually and in the process, hurt their own interest. Here are a few tips that will help them survive the email business.

1. Do not use Gmail/Yahoo for Official Purpose

If you are in a serious business, why not use your business id? If you want to be taken seriously, do yourself a favor by using your company domain id.

It hardly takes a few minutes to configure the same in Google apps.

Microfinance Focus, June 4, 2010: With a joint mission of fostering the growth of creative economy, The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship (IAE) and Gorilla Tango Financial have yesterday announced a strategic partnership to provide up to $10,000 of financing to qualified creative enterprise start-ups, small or medium businesses that have successfully completed The IAE’s 2-week business plan development workshop known as Creative Enterprise Boost Camp.

The IAE and Gorilla Tango Financial are uniquely positioned to help those in art, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, and publishing to realize their creative vision through educational training, mentorship and access to capital. The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship™ is a two-year program to teach artists how to earn a living. With a curriculum that combines experiential learning, mentorship and a personalized classroom environment that provides one-on-one time with the faculty of successful artist-entrepreneurs, artists are taught how to build their own arts based business while still in school.

“We have secured $100,000 as our startup/beta stage funding and we are looking to place this entire amount into various projects in 2010,” said, Dan Abbate, CEO of Gorilla Tango Financial and president of Gorilla Tango Theatre. “Our mission has always been to foster the growth of new and exciting productions in our theater in a sustainable and profitable manner. We are looking to expand that mission through Gorilla Tango Financial, which will supply advances, loans, investment and other types of venture capital to support small, medium and large entertainment projects in any media.”

Are we moving beyond the auto age? Writing in Esquire, Nate Silver provides hard statistical evidence that America’s once-overwhelming car-culture and driving habits have peaked. This article in Advertising Age (h/t: Patrick Adler) provides additional evidence that we may well be in the early stages of a reset in attitudes about driving and car ownership, especially among younger folks. Here are some key statistics from the article:

The state House of Representatives approved an $80 million expansion of the TNInvestco program today after months of questioning about the program that allocates tax credits to create a pool of venture capital. The vote was 79-13.

The expansion, which also included several revisions to the program, already cleared the Senate and awaits Gov. Phil Bredesen’s signature.

The program was established last year with $120 million in tax credits, which were distributed evenly to six venture capital firms. The investment firms sold the tax credits to insurance companies for $85 million and have begun making investments in Tennessee companies, including Nashville area firms such as Pathfinder Therapeutics, social media start-up GOBA LLC, New Day Pharmacy and onFocus Healthcare Inc.

BANGALORE: India has a long way to go in innovation as far as academic research is concerned but fared better in terms of business and industrial research, Infosys CEO S Gopalakrishnan said today.

"India has a long way to go partly because we need to increase the number of PhDs being produced in academic institutions. It will take some time", Gopalakrishan, also Chairman of CII Southern Region, told reporters announcing the two-day Sixth Innovation Summit beginning here from June 17.

"Industrial research is not that bad as many MNCs have their R and D centres here", he said. For some India was among their largest R and D centres outside North America, he said.

Cars are quickly becoming the new connected devices. Equipped with voice-command, streaming media centers, navigation displays and more, the newest line of vehicles out of major automakers are borrowing more from computers, the web and mobile technology than ever before. Now, riding this wave of rapid change, General Motors — a company still seemingly recovering from its bankruptcy — has launched its own venture capital arm.

Called General Motors Ventures, this new entity will be distributing $100 million to smaller companies developing groundbreaking automotive features, starting on July 1.

It’s meaningful that GM is the first of its brethren to make this move. Its Chevy Volt has gotten a lot of good press for being one of the most technologically advanced cars to hit the marker — beyond is unique electric powertrain. Just last month, it announced that it would be using the Android operating system to provide navigation tools in addition to its OnStar system. The news has prompted the media and analysts alike to dub it the first “Android car” — a cutting edge distinction.

Since February of last year when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law many of us who work in the entrepreneurial and innovation community have been wondering how we were missed.  As of today over $105 B has been paid out in grants, loans and government contracts, a figure that you can track daily at this site. In addition $163 B has been paid out for tax benefits and $128 B for entitlement programs. With this money over 682,226 people are reported to have moved into a stimulus generated or retained position.   Roads are being paved, bridges rebuilt, community centers restored and lots and lots of training dollars with the Department of Labor paying out over $61 B.

If you spend some time looking at the funding awarded by community, by state, by region you will see very little of the words entrepreneurship and innovation.  That is the use of “innovation” that means new companies and jobs rather then just not doing things the old way – which is the form used in almost every funding announcement  - because really nothing has worked in the past, or so people say (that will be a future discussion).

There is no doubt that these are tough economic times. Unemployment is high and credit is tight. Key indicates show that is the worse economy in a generation. Many technology transfer offices have seen potential business partners reduce their innovation portfolios and expenditures. This coupled with a reduction in funding sources, from grants and investors to university sources are blowing the technology transfer research commercialization efforts into the perfect storm.

There are difficulties and challenges, but these times also create opportunities. Here are seven tips to help your technology transfer office succeed in these tough economic times.

1. Maintain a list of problems that are relevant to the research and technologies in the pipeline.

Technology transfer offices typically get involved in research commercialization efforts late in the research and testing process. Get involved earlier in the process and start developing a list of problems of which the research can be applied.

This is really an early brainstorming exercise. Don’t just talk to the researchers. Get business input from those who are not involved with the research or the research teams. Independent ideas can be worth their weight in gold.

Raising millions of dollars from VCs is still the tech entrepreneurs’ dream. Entrepreneurs believe that a hoard of cash in the bank will give them the luxury of developing better products, marketing the heck out of them, and reaping the rewards with big sales and an eventual IPO. But more often than not, the money is a curse. When a company is running on a tight budget, it will usually perform far better than a company that is well capitalized. In my experience, having too much money always leads to bad habits.

First, the CEO will feel pressure from investors to upgrade the management team and bring in “grown up” supervision. This doesn’t always work out as planned. Seasoned managers want bigger salaries and larger chunks of equity. VCs usually expect a portfolio company to use a preferred headhunter to find the rockstar VP of sales. Naturally, the headhunter also wants an equity stake, on top of a finder’s fee in the neighborhood of six figures.

Columbus, Ohio – The Ohio Third Frontier Commission today approved more than $11 million in Pre-Seed Fund Initiative and Entrepreneurial Signature Program funds that will be awarded to six Ohio-based projects. The funding ensures that new start-up technology companies continue to have access to early-stage capital to develop new products and technologies and bring them to market. The awards are contingent upon State Controlling Board approval.

“This Ohio Third Frontier program funding advances the creation of new technology products and companies in Ohio,” said Governor Ted Strickland. “When we help our businesses turn innovative ideas into quality products, those businesses create good Ohio jobs that promote economic growth.”

“The companies receiving Ohio Third Frontier awards have a proven track record of success in assisting with early-stage capital,” said Eric Fingerhut, Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents and Chairman of the Ohio Third Frontier Commission. “These awards will allow their important work to continue, helping to create future job opportunities as well as revenue in the state.”

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When a forest fire burns down the bush woods, tall trees are left standing. This is the metaphor venture capitalists’ used in the Silicon Valley to explain why start-ups that were founded post-bubble, during the tech crash of 2001-2003 outperformed even the most established technology companies in the years that followed.

Google and Facebook both reached critical mass during technology downturns. Paypal and Skype both had sizable exits in a recession.

Silicon Valley’s vibrant ecosystem of intellectual property, venture capital and talent pool helped spawn these start-ups like no other region could. Good business plans found early-stage capital, albeit at modest valuations, while frivolous business plans died a slow, painful death. Brainy, engineering graduates joined unknown start-ups for stock options in lieu of staple career choices like banking and consulting. Some worked. Many failed. The net effect was extremely positive for the region and the entire United States.

When people ask for my advice on how to improve their innovation programs, one thing I usually suggest is to do away with their organization’s suggestion schemes and tear down the idea boxes. Why? Because it’s too tempting to substitute these methods in place of real innovation that adds customer and organizational value. And they can do more harm than good, in my opinion.

Here are 10 reasons suggestion schemes and idea boxes fail:

1. Wrong Motivation. In many cases, suggestion schemes are made for disgruntled employees who need a way to vent. The result is a very narrow set of ideas from only a small percentage of the population.
2. Lack of Training. Suggestion schemes assume that employees know how to generate innovative ideas on their own. In most companies, employees are not provided with the proper training (tools and methods) to understand how to generate valuable ideas.
3. Incremental Innovation. Without proper training, employees tend to only generate ideas related to their immediate sphere of influence, ad mostly related to process improvement. While these ideas shouldn’t be ignored, they won’t ever lead to breakthrough innovation.

Innovation is definitely in these days. The word is on the lips of every CEO, CFO, CIO, and anyone else with a three-letter acronym after their name.

As a result, many organizations are launching all kinds of "innovation initiatives" -- hoping to stir the creative soup.

This is commendable. But it is also, all too often, a disappointing experience.

Innovation initiatives sound good, but usually don't live up to expectations. The reasons are many. What follows are 56 of the most common -- organizational obstacles we've observed that get in the way of a company truly raising the bar for innovation.

At long last, there are signs that our region is beginning to recover from the long recession. Thanks to over two decades of economic diversification, the Pittsburgh Region lost fewer jobs than most major regions last year, and the early signs of recovery are very positive: in April, we had the largest monthly job growth of any major region in the country.

However, we can’t take a strong recovery for granted. The fact that other regions suffered so much more than we did means they’ll be competing aggressively to attract new jobs. Despite the many accolades our region has received, we have a number of significant competitive weaknesses compared to other communities, such as high state business taxes, crumbling infrastructure, and a proliferation of municipalities and civic agencies.

Indeed, fragmentation and lack of coordination among governments and civic agencies is one of the major impediments to solving our other problems. We have over 1,000 different governmental entities in the region – more units of government per person than any region in the country. We have at least a dozen separate organizations focused on technology businesses, nine tourist promotion agencies, five workforce investment boards, and dozens of other agencies working on infrastructure issues. All too often, instead of working together to compete with other regions, we’ve fought among ourselves over who will get the biggest slice of a stagnant economic pie.

Entrepreneurs through small businesses provide approximately 75% of the net new jobs added to the economy -U.S. Small Business Association (SBA)

According to SimplyHired.com "The average salary for entrepreneurship major jobs is $104,000. Average entrepreneurship major salaries can vary greatly due to company, location, industry, experience and benefits."