The first time I left my job to begin an entrepreneurial venture, I was ready. I had money and a business plan. What else did I need, I thought? I gave notice to my employer and to my surprise, fear set in immediately. I didn’t leave my job…that time. I realized that while I prepared externally, I didn’t prepare internally – emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually – for this life transition.

Almost nine years have passed since I left my job and began my venture as an entrepreneur. I’ve learned that entrepreneurship is a process – it is like building and then crossing a bridge. I’ve also learned that entrepreneurship takes place “within” an individual – it is not necessarily about leaving a job , but rather about living a life of fulfillment. Entrepreneurial thinking and living takes time, energy, tools, and action. Here are some ideas that have proven to be helpful to my clients in making the transition to entrepreneurial thinking and living.

Do Something Different Every Day

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Contemplating an NDA? Here’s what you need to know – Non-disclosure agreements can be among the most important paperwork you sign as a startup. Attorney Scott Walker runs down five things you’ll need to keep in mind if you’re about to insist on one – from either side of the deal.

The new face of venture capital: A road map for entrepreneurs – Even as VCs begin to slowly invest more, startups are running into more hurdles than ever. Serial entrepreneur Kevin Lawton gives his thoughts on trends among VC firms and what’s driving change in the industry today.

A long time ago, I had to make a really tough choice: invest in an MBA from New York University, or make do with my bachelors. I was newly married, had a child on the way, and didn’t have much in savings. The degree would set me back tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete—especially if I did it part time. And I couldn’t imagine doing anything but programming computers for a living. So why learn finance, marketing, and operations management, I wondered? Well, I decided to enroll because my understanding of the business world lacked depth, and I harbored a deep-rooted desire to get the best education possible. My wife and I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in North Bergen, NJ, and we made do with what we had.

For a couple of years after getting my degree, I wondered whether I had made the right choice. Even though I scored a great job at CS First Boston in its IT department, I was just writing code and designing systems. Yes, I started to enjoy reading BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal; but had the financial sacrifice and time away from my family been worth it? It didn’t seem to have been.

Washington, D.C - Today, the New Democrat Coalition unveiled a comprehensive agenda aimed at encouraging innovation and boosting small businesses. The New Democrats' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda, which has been endorsed by the full 69-member Coalition, builds upon the New Democrats' long standing commitment to policies that embrace technology and innovation to drive sustainable economic growth, competitive businesses and a strong workforce.

Employing over half of the American workforce and accounting for over 97% percent of our exporters, American small businesses and entrepreneurs are vital to rebuilding our economy and achieving long term economic growth. The New Democrats' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda, comprised of proposals authored by New Dem members and other New Dem priorities, seeks to grow our economy by providing much needed support to American small businesses, bolstering competitiveness in the global marketplace, and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.

"Key to rebuilding and growing our economy is supporting American small businesses so they can compete globally, get Americans back to work, and do what they do best - innovate," said Congressman Joseph Crowley (NY-7), New Dem Chair. "The New Dems Agenda for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is focused on finding ways to address the challenges small businesses are facing and renewing our commitment to American innovators and entrepreneurs."

AMID the $6 million homes perched on a beachfront cliff in this conservative Southern California enclave, the seven-year-old Honda Civic hybrid with the Obama bumper sticker is the giveaway.

It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.

Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.

Of all organizational processes, that of innovation would seem to be the least amenable to use of IT, since IT is usually applied to workflows that are orderly, repeatable and given to formal specification. However, as Steve Gordon and I have found out in studies from over 40 companies, IT has a significant role to play in helping innovators in their tasks and the firm to increase the returns from its innovation portfolio.

In order to accomplish innovation, R&D folks need to tap certain capabilities. They can do so by combining the resources at their disposal in ways that are not easily imitable. For example, every corporate R&D department has a history and archive of previous projects, technical know-how, market trends and success-failure stories. But how many can claim to have organized this potentially priceless store into a knowledge management system than is accessed and updated by innovators so that they can effectively utilize the firm’s memory for identifying promising projects or solving problems? We find that inspite of the plethora of knowledge management systems existing in many firms, innovators either do not use them or do not substantially benefit from them. The capability to manage knowledge then, is important to make it easy for innovators to execute their tasks. We find that IT, that is the technology itself and the IT department, can help companies develop a number of capabilities that are required for effectively accomplishing innovation tasks (Tarafdar and Gordon 2007, Gordon and Tarafdar 2010).

After four years of steady growth, the high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs in 2009, or 4 percent of its workforce, according to the Cyberstates report released today by TechAmerica.

Engineering and tech services jobs suffered the biggest blow, losing 59,000 jobs. Communications services shed 53,000 jobs. Software services lost 20,700 jobs.

Some states did manage to add tech jobs in 2008, however. California, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts and Virginia added the most. Virginia had the highest concentration of tech workers for the fourth straight year.

The water pressure is there, so you might as well use it.

That's the business plan of Zeropex, a Norwegian company that produces pico- or micro-hydro generators. The company has created a device that harvests the excess pressure from water running through municipal water plants to run a turbine and create electricity. Water agencies -- along with heavy-duty private sector water consumers like oil refineries and agribusiness -- have to pressurize water to purify it or move it. Currently, most municipal water agencies use pressure reduction valves to reduce the water pressure before sending it along.

"We're basically replacing pressure reduction valves with a turbine," said CEO Tor Ersdal during a presentation at Nordic Green II. The company's current turbine can generate up to 80 kilowatts of power. A second-generation turbine in pilot testing at the moment can generate up to 300 kilowatts. At 300 kilowatts, the payback on the machine is just under two years, he said. The electricity created by the turbine can be fed into the grid or consumed locally.

Well, the publisher of Goldsmith’s latest book wasted no time today in making sure reporters here in City Hall's Room 9 (on request!) had enough copies to keep them riveted for months to come. Title: “The Power of Social Innovation,” with the subtitle of “How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good."

Here’s a nerve-tingling description of what the book is all about, courtesy of a media consultant hired to promote a now-likely-to-be-suspended book tour by Goldsmith:

"This candid and engaging book offers concrete strategies for aspiring innovators and civic entrepreneurs across sectors—non-profit, civic, government, business and philanthropic— who believe that we can do better in solving our communities’ most pressing social problems. Rich with vivid examples of how results-based problem solving can be applied to areas like criminal justice, homelessness and education, the book demonstrates that when innovators effectively engage both government and the communities it serves, real results are possible.”

I love cooking, so I know a fair amount about Croc-wearing superstar chef Mario Batali. But here is something I didn’t know until reading an interview with him in Harvard Business Review.

He has the makings of a great CEO.

As the chief executive of 14 high profile restaurants in the United States and Spain, Batali has figured out that the stereotypical brilliant-but-belligerent chef is not an effective model for leadership in the modern food service industry.

Describing his organizational business model, it’s all about team. Creating the right team. Helping it overcome problems. Promoting from within.

“All of the executive chefs and most of the general managers and wine directors have worked with me directly. They know where I’m going. They know the shorthand we use in describing how things need to change. I go into most of the New York restaurants almost every day, and we talk about things as they’re evolving. My objective as a manager, of course, is to remove the obstacles that prohibit greatness of the people that I’ve hired. So I ask, what is the hardest thing about today? And I say, well, why don’t we get somebody else to do that, or let’s remove it, or let’s streamline it, let’s make it easier. Then they can enjoy that zenny tea service effect of working through something they know how to do.”

If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans underfoot at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans will critically wound small companies. The agency has long worked under tremendous pressure and a growing backlog that has been the subject of heavy criticism. As details emerge of what the Patent Office plans in terms of improved performance and mechanisms to achieve it, one thing is clear: Patent filing and maintenance rates may shoot so high as to make it economically difficult, if not impossible, for many small companies to adequately protect their innovations.

The result could be even greater control of technology markets by a handful of large corporations that have the resources to file extensively and lock out small companies.

Some people are superb at creating visual tools to illustrate complex subjects. John Maloney is one of those gifted people who can synthesize information into a picture which helps people understand the emerging, and existing, knowledge that rest within an organizations “network” of people and processes.  More importantly the illustration above provides a “ systemic view” of how and where social technology integrates into the capabilities infrastructure of an organization.

A “Platform of Knowledge” is representative of what every organization has but most cannot “see or actualize” the knowledge because they lack the understanding to recognize that knowledge is an asset.

Over a year after the Recovery Act of 2009 was signed into law, the U.S. Department of Energy says that $32.5 billion of the $36.7 billion it was authorized to spend is "spoken for," and nearly 5,000 projects have been funded. The department has selected all but 1 percent of the proposals that will receive grants and contracts. So far, however, only $3.5 billion has actually been spent, and the money has only directly created 22,841 jobs.

This week, the DOE's senior advisor for Recovery Act implementation, Matt Rogers, provided an update on the department's progress in identifying projects that will receive funding. While much of the Recovery Act focused on funding for near-term recession relief, including tax relief for individuals and support for local and state governments, the funding allocated to the DOE was mainly for projects with longer term payoffs, including building infrastructure such as wind farms and battery factories and conducting research.

New rules designed to improve the transparency of investment funds could make venture capital less attractive to small businesses by forcing them to publish commercially sensitive information, according to venture capitalists.

The EU has set up an SME finance forum to tackle the ongoing funding crisis facing small businesses but Uli Fricke, chair of the European Venture Capital Association (EVCA), says a clause in the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) will undermine efforts to support fast-growing firms.

Fricke said companies with 50 employees will have to meet additional disclosure criteria if they accept venture capital, forcing them to share details of research investments and business strategies.

I know I was complaining about this earlier this year but I have to say that April was really quiet, as far as small business research goes.

The good news is that there are some real gems among the few releases we had.

Entrepreneurial Geography

In light of the frequently repeated jobs-jobs-jobs mantra, a policy brief out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government answering the question “What Makes A City Entrepreneurial?” was both timely and intriguing.

On the surface, the answer to that question is fairly intuitive — although I’ll put it differently than the good researchers at Harvard did. The easier and cheaper it is to start and run a business, and the more room there is in the local or regional economy (less dominated by large companies that crowd out the smaller ones), the more independent small businesses there are.

In the book Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about Disruptive Technologies. He talks about various well established companies in various industries failed to adapt themselves to the disruptive technological changes and which led most of them to fail in longer run. These kind of changes keep happening all the time around us, and once we map it to disruptive technology, suddenly we see reason.

When I [Mayank Sharma] applied it’s principle to my previous company (SiRF), I suddenly could see why the company failed. SiRF had established market leadership in GPS chips being used my navigation devices and in other niche segments. Profit margin in these industries was close to 50% and the company thrived in this market. Market for GPS chips in mobile phone was quite small then, and the profit margin quite low (30%-40%) for SiRF to address this market. But the market for GPS chips did change drastically in favor of mobile phones, where the requirements were completely different (low profit margin, low power etc..) and SiRF could not hold on to its leadership position.

1: Cape Wind

The 420-megawatt Cape Wind project  is big, but the expectations for it are even bigger. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who just last week announced approval for the project amidst some stiff opposition, expects the Nantucket Sound wind farm to do no less than prove the viability of offshore wind in America. Much remains to be done before the first turbine blades start to spin – bank financing and power purchase agreements must be finalized and the project must be built on time and within budget. But Cape Wind has already done a lot. The project’s developers have endured nine years of attempts to regulate offshore sites that played like a bureaucratic version of “Who’s on first?” before finally arriving at guidelines that future developers can follow. More importantly, the Obama administration has decided that the need for renewable energy trumps environmental and cultural concerns that threaten to block large projects. It’s an imperfect solution, to be sure, but it does move green energy forward.

2: President Barak Obama

As skilled a politician as he is, President Barack Obama has benefited from a whole heap of luck in his career. His presidential campaign, you may recall, reached orbit only after the economy crashed with a Republican at the helm. So, perhaps on a cosmic level, it was time for Obama to meet some truly rotten fortune. And he did – when he proposed opening up large swaths of the Atlantic and Gulf to offshore drilling just three weeks before BP’s deep-water rig sank off the coast of Louisiana, releasing 5,000 barrels of oil per day directly into the ocean. What does this disaster mean for Obama’s “pan-energy” strategy? It really depends – if we have to wait for three months for a second well to be drilled, Obama will face intense pressure from his base to back down on offshore drilling. If BP can block the leak soon, offshore drilling could remain politically viable. As Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said this week, “The Challenger accident was heartbreaking, but we went back to space.”

When JumpStart was started, the leaders looked across the country for models to emulate, and Innovation Works in Pittsburgh was one of them. Innovation Works (IW) is five years older than JumpStart but served as the model for many of our operational choices. While we have some important differences (including funding sources and the specifics of our local geographies), we also have many of the same elements: business community, deal flow from multiple partners including universities and service providers, inspired and supported entrepreneurs, and a model which ties various amounts of funding with business assistance.

IW had its annual meeting last Thursday and John Dearborn and I were in attendance. WOW. If you ever needed proof that the model we are both pursuing can work to create incredible economic transformation, a thriving entrepreneurial economy, positive internal brand image, and jobs, take a look at Pittsburgh and the work of IW. As just one example alone, the annual meeting was at McKesson Automation. The company that was the predecessor to McKesson was brought to IW by its three founding entrepreneurs. With the initial funding and business assistance from IW, the company grew from three to 800 employees in the Pittsburgh area. It was sold to McKesson and continues to employ over 500 hundred people in the Pittsburgh area and thousands of people across the U.S., while those three entrepreneurs have gone on to start other companies that have created hundreds of jobs (or lead IW, in the case of Rich Lunak). And that’s just one example.

The 2010 Fortune 500 list just came out and I'm completely blown away by Wal-Mart's size. We all know that the retail giant is the largest company in the world. But it's by how much that gets me.

Wal-Mart clocked in at $408 billion in revenues in 2009. The second-ranked Exxon Mobil, brought in $285 billion. If the difference between the two -- $124 billion -- were a company, it would be ranked 7th on the list. Let me say that again: Wal-Mart is bigger than the next largest company by the equivalent of an AT&T.

Let's exclude the oil companies from the list for the moment, since their revenues depend heavily on the price of oil and swing wildly -- Exxon's revenues were over $400 billion last year. Looking at companies that make anything but oil, Wal-Mart is basically three to four times the size of the largest ones, including Ford, HP, Citigroup, GM, IBM, and so on.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED:

The full U.S. House of Representatives is likely to vote on reauthorization of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 as early as next Wednesday, May 13.  ASTRA believes that bipartisan support for this vital legislation is important and most timely, given the nation's economic woes.

The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 is a bill that lays the basis for sustained funding increases in our nation's often neglected science, engineering and technology resources for three key agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science, and the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).

ASTRA has supported efforts like the COMPETES Act for a decade.  Finally, the benefits of adequate federal R&D investments in our science and engineering ecosystems are being recognized across the political spectrum. 

Republicans, Democrats and Independents in Congress have all voted for legislation like COMPETES in the past.  That's because they realize that job creation, global competitiveness, innovation, STEM education, national security and other issues directly relate back to our country's federal R&D investments.

Now, more than ever, our R&D investments are needed to keep up with aggressive overseas competitors - whether they be governments or private entities determined to either widen their leads, or overcome the current position of U.S.-based industry, small businesses, academic institutions, and workers...

Please review our ASTRA's extensive materials on these topics. They provide fact-based reasons to support this widely-held and nonpartisan view. See: www.usinnovation.org and www.aboutastra.org 

For specific details about what the COMPETES bill would do for the nation's science, engineering and technology infrastructure and workforce, see http://www.usinnovation.org/files/UpdateAmerica%20COMPETESforCVD2010.pdf