50 Fastest-Growing Women Owned Companies Share Key AttributesOn April 28, 2010 the Women Presidents Organization and American Express OPEN announced the winners of the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies in North America.

The top winner? Argent Associates Inc., a New Jersey supply chain company that provides warehousing, logistics and product life cycle management services. President and CEO Beatriz Manetta’s 12-year old company saw gross revenues grow more than twelvefold in two years, from over $9 million in 2007 to $115 million in 2009.

Second on the list was BrightStar, a home healthcare and medical staffing company in Illinois. Third was Artech Information Systems LLC in New Jersey.

WPO’s founder and president Marsha Firestone says the group launched its first ranking three years ago in order to combat the stereotype that women-owned companies are primarily mom-and-pop operations in “retail, cookie-making or crafts.” Most of the Top 50 are business-to-business companies, often in traditionally male-dominated fields.

First off, you do not need a PR firm. The retainer is usually not worth it, especially for a young, growing startup because your product is still drastically changing and because your conversion rates are probably very low.

As a startup that is looking to innovate in your industry, it usually does not make any sense for you to allow someone else to communicate your vision. PR firms do not always get it. Even with stellar communication skills, only you and your core team really understand the message and the vision.

If you are a first-timer at PR, start small so you do not burn any important bridges (but be aware that every bridge counts). Start pitching to small blogs and websites in your niche and occasionally take a shot at medium-sized blogs. Once you start feeling more comfortable with your email pitch, and are making decent traction with small blogs and websites, move onto pitching to medium-sized sites. Then, as you gain experience, and learn a bit more about tailoring your pitch to specific authors, you can move onto mass-media outlets that can really increase your exposure because of their tremendous reach.

Governor Donald L. Carcieri, House Speaker Gordon Fox, and President of the Senate M. Teresa Paiva Weed joined the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) and the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce to unveil an Executive Order and package of legislation aimed at making it easy to do business in Rhode Island.

The order cuts government red tape and removes barriers to the establishment and growth of small business.

The Executive Order and nine-bill legislative package are the result of many months of work between the Governor’s Office, the House Small Business Committee, the Senate’s Small Business Task Force, RIEDC, and the Governor’s Regulatory Review Task Force, and is a coordinated approach to meeting a unified goal: making it easy to do business in Rhode Island.

“Rhode Island’s small businesses are the backbone of the state’s economy. While we’ve made progress on our path toward economic recovery – beginning with the restructuring of the leadership of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and the passing of the IRBA legislation – it’s clear that we must do even more to support the state’s small companies and strengthen our workforce,” said Governor Donald L. Carcieri.

Dolphin species on four continents are in danger, warn various reports.

In Asia, the Taiwan Matsu's Fish Conservation Union says that only 60 to 90 Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis chinensis) remain off the Taiwanese coast, fewer than half that existed just four years ago. The Union says the species could become extinct in that region in 10 years. Industrial development and pollution near the estuary of Taiwan's longest river, the Jhuoshuei River, is blamed for the decline.

Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins exist throughout Asia, Africa and Australia, but this particular population is isolated. The species have a very low birth rate and take 10 to 12 years to reach sexual maturity.

On Tuesday, voters approved a four-year, $700 million bond to extend funding for the Ohio Third Frontier initiative through 2016. Established in 2002, the initiative offers programs for emerging and established high-tech companies, including grants for pre-seed funding, research initiatives, product development and commercialization.  Read more about the program ...

Startup culture is continually growing in the greater public interest, and with that growth comes a sort of celebrity for the founders of the more popular companies. Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams are now household names, and in many ways, these entrepreneurs are like rock stars in the startup world. In fact, the journey of an entrepreneur through the startup experience is a lot like that of a musician seeking stardom and millions of adoring fans, and artist Shane Snow has a perfect infographic to illustrate this.

Snow, a graphic designer, freelance writer, entrepreneur and would-be musician based in New York City, saw his youthful aspirations of topping the rock and roll charts crumble as he and his bandmates went their separate ways after college. During that time he has been writing about technology, running a few startup sites, and designing websites and infographics. One such infographic was inspired by his dual experiences as a musician and an entrepreneur and shows that the path to success for both is marked by similar milestones.

Work in Japan and Australia has revealed that a deep-ocean current is carrying frigid water rapidly northward from Antarctica along the edge of a giant underwater plateau.

Other research teams had previously identified a deep current along the eastern edge of the Kerguelen Plateau, a more than 2,200-kilometre-long rise some 3,000 kilometres south-west of Australia. But estimates of its speed, taken as "snapshots" by instruments deployed from research vessels, had been "all over the place", says Steve Rintoul, a physical oceanographer at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, Australia, and a co-author of the new study.

SALT LAKE CITY - (Business Wire) Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic predisposition, but is the product of honing five discovery skills, according to research conducted by Dr. Jeffrey H. Dyer, professor of strategy at the BYU Marriott School of Business.

Dyer discussed his research at the Utah Technology Council’s (UTC) (http://utahtechcouncil.org/) recent industry breakfast.

Dyer is co-author, along with Hal B. Gregersen, professor of leadership at Insead, and Clayton M. Christensen, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, of the Harvard Business Review article “The Innovator’s DNA” published in December 2009. The article examines research that highlights how key innovators are able to develop great ideas and set themselves apart from the rest of the pack.

“The habits of great innovative leaders define the foundation of their creative thinking,” said Dyer. “The research we conducted shows that these five discovery skills distinguish the most innovative entrepreneurs and executives from other executives.”

Google (GOOG) invested $38.8 million in two wind power farms in North Dakota on Friday, the company announced today

Google has been dabbling in alternative energy for years now, mostly through investments in early stage green tech companies.

This represents Google's first investment in an actual, utility-scale project. The two farms generate 169.5 megawatts of power, "enough to power more than 55,000 homes".

Last year, Google applied for a license to trade energy and renewable credits, ostensibly just to move surplus power from its campus and servers.

The Apple founder birthed the personal computer, was banished from his empire and then saved it from ruin. Along the way, he changed the way we work, play and communicate. And he's not done yet.

On a foggy, cool day in January, Steve Jobs and Apple are bidding to change the world again. Jobs sits comfortably in a leather chair in front of a rapt San Francisco auditorium crowd, a large video screen tracking his hand movements on a thin, slate-looking object resting comfortably in his hands. Dressed in his trademark blue jeans, dark turtleneck, and New Balance shoes, the wire-framed Apple co-founder and culture-shaper peppers his speech with “remarkable, awesome” and “amazing” references to his company’s latest new wave—a notebook device called the iPad. This “truly magical and revolutionary product” fills a category need between his company’s successful laptop and iPhone and iPod business lines, Jobs says.

Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Esquire Magazine recently named him one of the ‘Best and Brightest’. He is author of the best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which was cited as a major breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review. His ideas have been featured in major ad campaigns, such as BMW, and are being used globally to change the way regions, nations, and companies compete. He is founder of the Creative Class Group and has also been recently named European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation. He is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

• Every single human being is creative.
• The real challenge of our time is figuring out how to harness that creative energy so that creative furnace inside of each human being is growing.
• The social categories we impose on ourselves [race, religion, gender ,etc] undermine creativity.

As we are finalizing our year at HBS and thinking about jobs, it is important to stop, relax, take a deep breath and take another look at the LEAD essay we wrote on "our 10-year reunion". Ten years seems like such a long time, but just as we are finalizing our last cases at HBS, it might come sooner than you think. Aided by Professor Youngme Moon's words to dare to be different, this article is about finding your way to those non-traditional careers that are harder to find. This week, 3 alumni give advice on what it takes to get into VC portfolio companies & startups. For all you entrepreneurs out there, this is a call to action.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Rock Center reported a record year for the number of teams that applied for the business plan contest. It could be that desperate times require desperate measures, or that the crisis inspired creativity and maybe a bit of courage in people. You often hear that only when things hit rock bottom do we fully utilize our capabilities. So perhaps that is what happened, or maybe not, but the drive to go into entrepreneurship certainly seems to be there among current students.

Lots of out-of-work folks are starting their own businesses. And many of them are not spring chickens. But, it’s still not clear whether these businesses have staying power. Or these people are cut out for entrepreneurship.

First, about the general trend for laid-off workers to launch a business, a phenomenon termed “accidental entrepreneurship”. There have been a number of studies showing it’s on the rise. Most recently, a survey of 900 workers by CareerBuilder.com found that 32% of those who were laid off in the last six months and have not found jobs are considering starting their own businesses.

-- GET VIDEO --

It's become a classic business mantra: you learn more from your failures than from your successes. But what if that idea is all wrong? Alex Bogusky, co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, believes it is--and recent MIT research showing that we learn more from success backs him up. "You create a fearful culture where you spend a lot of time looking at where you screwed up," he says. Instead, his company has bred a culture in which success is celebrated, and failure is forgotten.

While many cleantech companies require very large amounts of capital in order to get to market, there is a quiet group of cleantech companies bucking that trend. 

Companies including Heartland Biocomposites (green building materials), RealTech (water testing) and TerraLUX  (LED lighting) all built significant and growing businesses with compelling intellectual property and did so initially without multi-millions in capital from venture funds (let alone tens or hundreds of millions). Because TerraLUX is one of our portfolio companies and I therefore know them best, their story is one I am able to share.

TerraLUX boasts customers including Cooper Lighting, Phillips, GE Healthcare, Snap-On Tools and many others. It has six awarded patents and eight more filed. Dr. Anthony Catalano founded the company in 2003 and, with exceptional technology smarts, creative boot-strapping and some of his own capital, he built a business with significant revenue, exciting gross margins and deep intellectual property – all without a penny of outside investment capital. And now, only after all those accomplishments, has TerraLUX closed a $5.6 million financing from Emerald Technology Ventures and Access Venture Partners.

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Georgia Bio, the Georgia Research Alliance, the State of Georgia, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the Innovation Crescent business community have formed a partnership to create the Georgia Bioscience Commercialization Center (GBCC), which will act as a start-up catalyst and resource center for bioscience entrepreneurs in Georgia.

Seed funding for the GBCC was provided by Georgia Bio (GaBio) and the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). The GBCC will be headquartered in the GaBio offices at 1180 Peachtree Street NE, Suite 4150, Atlanta, Ga, 30308.

Laurence Downey, M.D., former President and CEO of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, and Robert Derricotte, Medical Marketing Insights LLC, led development of the GBCC and will serve as the primary contacts for the commercialization center.

It’s a rough time for start-ups seeking financing. Venture capital firms may have loosened the purse strings somewhat, but finding that magic formula to catch an investor’s eye is harder than ever.

This presentation (the first of two parts – the second of which will be posted here next week) is meant to assist both Limited Partners and entrepreneurs alike and has been wrought from a life in startups and studying the business of innovation.

It’s an overview of forces at work, driving sub-par returns in the Venture Capital asset class, and identifies the attributes of VC which will yield viable startups and stronger returns to LPs.
Currently, the internal rate of return across the VC industry is dismal, and will continue to be so, except for those innovative firms who adapt and pioneer the necessary new model.

Last year the U.S. government doled out $6 billion to ailing carmakers promising to crank out hybrid or electric models. Even foreign competitors, such as Nissan, were able to cash in.

Lard on an anemic federal small-business stimulus package (see "They Call This A Stimulus For Small Biz? Pshwaw!" and "A Funding Fix For New Businesses") and a lingering credit crisis and it's all enough to make small business owners think the game is rigged against them.

Things are a bit rosier at the state level. Many states offer incentives for entrepreneurs to put roots down and create jobs. Grants, loans, equity capital: It's all out there if you know where to look. Some of the best programs have been operating for more than two decades and, collectively, have doled out billions of dollars.

Earlier today we ran a post from Mark Cuban arguing that the future of TV is TV, not the Internet as some people like to say.

Mark's reasoning is simple: "follow the money," he says. People are buying brand new HDTVs left and right. Peter Kafka at All Things D picked up on Mark's post and published the chart below.

Goldman Sachs and derivatives will likely be hot topics of conversation this weekend when Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger field questions at the love-fest that is the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) annual shareholder meeting. There is always some good learning and good chuckles at the Q&A session. But if you’re looking for an investing lesson, diving into Buffett’s personal portfolio can be even more illuminating.

Thanks to a terrific post at Morningstar you can now delve even closer into the investing mind of the Oracle of Omaha. Robert Miles spent some quality time poring through recent SEC filings and has created a profile of Buffett’s personal portfolio. It’s a who’s who of dividend paying stocks.  Retirees (and pre-retirees) looking to generate income outside of the increasingly risky bond market can get some great ideas from Buffett’s personal dividend-paying stock portfolio. For that matter, anyone looking for strong returns should take note. According to Ned Davis Research, dividend-growth stocks within the S&P 500 have grown at an annualized 9.4% since 1972. The non-dividend payers within the S&P 500 muddled along at a 1.5% annualized pace over that stretch.