We like to think of ourselves as in charge of our own destinies. The American Dream is all about being able to achieve what you are capable of — regardless of who your parents are or what they do for a living.

But a new book by Professor Scott Shane argues and establishes that our genes do indeed affect our work lives.  In Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders, he posits that genes have an impact on the occupations we choose, our success in those occupations, and whether we start a business.

The most obvious way genes affect us is our physical abilities.  Scott Shane starts the book off by noting that:

“At the most basic level, you probably believe that being tall is important to becoming a professional basketball player, and you might even blame your height for the fact that you don’t currently play for the New York Knicks.  …[Y]ou probably have a gut sense that your DNA is at least partially responsible for your failure to get drafted into the NBA.”

Large companies can be strange sometimes. As startup entrepreneurs we all want to work with them because having their name as reference clients makes it so much easier for marketing, PR, selling to other customers, fund raising and even recruiting. Plus, we’re all allured by the false sense that our contract with BigCo is going to “make us” because once they start using us it will spread like wildfire and the revenue will flow in. Sometimes it actually does. Usually it goes more slowly than we hope.

But I say they can be strange because of their behavior in working with startups. I’ve observed the following scenario in both of my companies and in countless others I’ve advised or invested in:

• your company becomes moderately high profile in a few press articles
• BigCo calls you to review your product and decides they want to use you
• They negotiate a “master agreement” to work with your company with some maybe minimum guarantees in terms of revenue
• Somebody high up in the company reads the agreement and says, “if we’re going to work with these guys and make them successful then we better share in the upside.”
• What they mean specifically is ownership in your company. I’ve heard the following so many times that it still makes me scratch my head, “if those guys are going to get rich off of our backs then we’re going to look like fools if we don’t have equity.”

Described by co-author Andresse St. Rose, an AAUW research associate, as “a big lit review,” the report is not intended to be groundbreaking in its findings, but rather to publish all the best research on women in STEM in one booklet. “Very often there’s a lot of good research going on that gets printed in academic journals,” she said, “but the people who could use it don’t necessarily look there to find it.”

In examining hundreds of studies, St. Rose and her co-authors -- Catherine Hill, AAUW’s director of research, and Christianne Corbette, a research associate – found eight major factors that helped depress the numbers of girls and women in STEM: beliefs about intelligence, stereotypes, self-assessment, spatial skills, the college student experience, university and college faculty, implicit bias, and workplace bias.

Stanford is training a new type of engineer for a fast-changing world and James Plummer wants to get the word out that students needn't be a total techie to apply.

"We're looking for kids who think of the world in terms of finding solutions to big problems, like global warming, international development, the environment," Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, said in an interview. "We want to attract students ... who might have a wider world view" than those in the traditional math- and science-laden programs featured at the nation's top technical schools.

"We are not - and should not be - a technical institute," Plummer told the university's Faculty Senate last month. "If (students) come here, they can take advantage of all the other pieces of this campus, which are equally as good as the School of Engineering."

Australian innovators now have access to an extra $40 million in venture capital funding with the establishment of new fund manager OneVentures.

Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, has congratulated OneVentures on being awarded a licence under the Australian Government’s Innovation Investment Fund (IIF) program.

The IIF program provides fund managers with $20 million which they must match with private sector capital to establish new funds to invest in promising early-stage Australian companies commercialising Australian research.

OneVentures, headquartered in Sydney, will invest in emerging Australian companies in the cleantech, new media / information technology and life sciences sectors.  

“The successful raising of $20 million in private sector investor capital to be channelled into early-stage technology-based businesses is remarkable considering it is being done against the backdrop of the global financial crisis.  

Some people argue that immigrants to the United States are more likely than the native-born to become entrepreneurs, and that to enhance entrepreneurial activity America needs to bring in more immigrants.

For instance, Jonathan Ortmans, president of the Public Forum Institute, wrote on the Kauffman Foundation blog, “Evidence shows that immigrants start a disproportionately high number of new U.S. firms.”

Others counter that the data don’t show that pattern and that we should not change public policy toward immigration on the basis of these data.

It turns out that who is more likely to be an entrepreneur—the foreign- or native-born—depends a lot on what you measure and when you look at it.

According to data from the 2008 Global Entrepreneur Monitor Report (GEM) for the United States, when entrepreneurship is measured as starting a new business, immigrants appear more entrepreneurial than the native-born. But when entrepreneurship is measured as owning a more mature business, the native-born score higher. The GEM figures show that immigrants have a slightly higher rate of “total entrepreneurial activity”—a composite of the share of the population that is either “actively planning a new venture” or is an owner-manager of a business of between 4 and 42 months old—than the native-born (9.43 versus 8.81 percent). However, the native-born have a higher “percentage of individuals in a population who have set up businesses that they continue to own and manage and who have paid wages or salaries for more than 42 months”: 7.90 for the native-born as compared to 6.74 for immigrants.

There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and -- most importantly -- creating jobs.

America's future prosperity depends on our ability to maintain this lead. But today, it is getting harder and harder to maintain. A quick glance is the rear-view mirror reveals that other countries are catching up and at an alarming rate. Part of this is due to their determination to overtake us, but part is due to structural changes in the nature of entrepreneurship.

Startups are the lifeblood of our economy. In the past two decades, they have accounted for nearly all the net job growth in our country. Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. But many more are true American success stories, out of the limelight, quietly creating jobs and securing our future.

Until recently, it was not ‘natural’ to be a high-growth entrepreneur in Portugal.

“It used to be ‘if you cannot find a good job, you become an entrepreneur by creating your own small business,’” says INSEAD Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, Filipe Santos, who is also the Director of the school’s Rudolf and Valeria Maag International  Centre for Entrepreneurship (Maag ICE).

“There was a tradition of family business, a long tradition of industrial organisations that dominated sectors; we had government-held companies that were privatised.” High-growth, high-impact entrepreneurship was not mainstream.

Today, the status of entrepreneurs is evolving and, in order to recognise the achievements of the country’s entrepreneurs, the INSEAD Portuguese Alumni Network presents an annual entrepreneurship prize at a ceremony in Lisbon. Dozens of companies applied, judges created a short list of eight, and the top prize this year was shared by two: Frulact, a fruit processing company, and TIM, a mobile and interactive global marketing company. A global technology company, ISA - Intelligent Sensing Anywhere, received an honourable mention.

Xerox Corp, the $22-billion iconic inventor of products like computer mouse and laser printer whose name has come to be synonymous with
photocopy, has finally set up an innovation lab in India, a move that some analysts have dubbed as a little late in the day. But Xerox’s global CTO Sophie Vandebroek calls it a timely move as the company’s sixth innovation hub in Chennai will be different, based on a new model of collaborative research and open innovation. She discusses the model, future of work and the new technologies for emerging markets that the lab will focus on in an interview with ET. Excerpts:

Microsoft, Intel, GE and IBM have set up research centres in India long ago. Xerox seems to have discovered India only now. Why so?

We have research labs in California, Rochester (in the US) Canada, Grenoble (France) and a joint venture in Japan. We have had Indians working in our labs across the world. On an average, we have filed 10 patents a week. We wanted to understand how a research centre in India can truly add value to our work being done in the five labs across the world.

More recently, Xerox moved into research for global services business. Now with the acquisition of ACS (a BPO company bought in 2009 for $6.4 billion), that focus on services has increased. India has a lot of expertise in IT and services to allow us to tap the talent and this was the best time to launch here.

The best work habit you can ever get into is very simple: Do your worst task first thing in the morning. Every given day, you've got one major to-do that's highest priority. But when you've got the whole day stretching out ahead of you, it's easy to put it off until after you get your coffee, check our email, or go to that meeting. But just like breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the first thing you accomplish at work sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Do your worst task first. By "worst" I mean "most important," and by "most important" I mean the task you're most likely to procrastinate on. The deadline you're dreading, the slides for the presentation you're terrified of giving, the research you're sure will turn up information you don't want to know. Do it, before you do anything else, before you have time to think about it too much.

Author Brian Tracy calls this "eating your frog," quoting Mark Twain. Twain famously said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you. Your frog is your worst task, and you should do it first thing in the morning.

The European Commission will publish a new 'Research and Innovation Plan' ahead of an autumn meeting of EU leaders in Brussels. The plan, first floated last year as the European Innovation Act, was originally to be published by spring 2010.

The document is currently being drafted by Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani and will take a broad approach to boosting innovation.

Tajani explicitly dismissed suggestions that the six-month delay in publishing the plan resulted from difficulties between his directorate and Commission services working for Geoghegan-Quinn.

You’ve done everything that your coaches have told you. You’ve written a convincing business plan. Your financial projections outline a reasonable investment opportunity for someone. You have piles upon piles of legal documentation making you compliant with securities laws. You have letters of intent, letters of endorsement and some high-powered personal references. Your PowerPoint presentation is professional. You have your presentation down pat. You’re getting in front of people with money, but no one is writing checks.

If this sounds like your frustrating situation, you’re definitely not alone! Raising capital is not an easy task. In the majority of cases, the first investors are by far the hardest to win. You may have all of the tangible requirements in place, and they may be in a first class presentation. But when you’re approaching friends, family and others to be angel investors, it often takes more than just numbers and a slick sales pitch to win them over.

Here are some less obvious observations that may be causing you to have a challenge:

1. You’re not passionate about your business. People can tell when you’re just going through the motions. It doesn’t matter if the numbers show a huge financial windfall for potential investors. Many people want to see the fire in your eyes before they open their checkbooks.

2. You’re passionate about your business, but it is not being conveyed strongly enough. This could happen for several reasons. Maybe you’ve rehearsed your pitch so much that it sounds canned. Maybe you are so anxious to get the money that you come across as desperate. It may be as simple as trying so hard to be professional that you hide your excitement about what you’re doing. Let loose, have fun, and let your excitement become contagious!

“The built city is the most complicated cultural artefact humankind has invented,” wrote Phil Wood and Charles Landry in “The Intercultural City.” And as such, cities cannot be understood from any one vantage point or through any one academic lens. A small but significant conference in Munich, Germany, in late February 2010 brought a dozen of these lenses into one room and raised a number of timely questions relevant to all of us concerned with cities, culture and social equity.

The financial crisis has highlighted deficiencies in knowledge-based skills in Europe and unless they’re tackled now, the region could get left behind. That was one of the key messages from an event held recently at INSEAD’s Europe campus in France.

The crisis has masked these deficiencies due to the drop in demand, says Bruno Lanvin, Executive Director of INSEAD’s eLab. This, however, makes the issue more urgent “because if we don’t do it now in terms of the crisis, when the recovery starts, the lag of Europe may be significant.”

Lanvin and his team, which includes senior research fellow Nils Fonstad, have been working on a European Commission-funded project, aimed at developing a set of guidelines for building knowledge-based skills, increasing the number of tech- and business-savvy practitioners and managers, and consequently strengthen Europe’s capacity to innovate.

Ingenuity and innovation have been mainstays of the American economy since Thomas Jefferson issued the first patent. Discoveries made by American inventors and research institutions, produced by our companies and protected and promoted by our patent laws, have made our system the envy of the world.

Despite our patent system’s importance to the U.S. economy and job creation, Congress has not passed major reforms in more than 55 years. During that time, advances in technology and manufacturing have changed the way our patent system is used.

Innovation has been impeded in recent years by a patent system that too often grants low-quality patents with overly broad claims, which have been used by opportunists to extort royalty fees from manufacturers — particularly in the high-tech sector. The problem of low-quality patents is exacerbated by a litigation system that yields unpredictable and often overcompensating damages determinations, which divert investment and resources from innovation.

Late last night the United States House of Representatives passed the Senate Health Care Bill that has been debated for nearly a year.  Like the clear majority of Americans who oppose the bill, I think this was the wrong thing to do and will ultimately be a disaster.  I realize there are 30 million Americans without health insurance, but they will remain without health insurance for the next 4 years, so it is hard to believe that anything will change for the better for the uninsured in the near term.  The debate also seems to completely ignore the 270 million Americans who have health insurance.  Yes, costs are rising and need to be reigned in, but creating another entitlement is the wrong thing to do, particularly when Social Security and Medicare alone are collectively going to already be in the red to the tune of $50 trillion in coming years. See Statement of Judd Gregg (R-NH).  But at least BIO was able to get provisions into the bill that will truly spur biotech innovation.

Buying insurance across state lines, opening government funded clinics for the uninsured, elimination of third party payers and giving tax credits to individuals to purchase insurance and health care all would have worked to lower costs and drive market forces so people would demand quality for a fair price. It would also have assisted the uninsured. I fear we have put our foot on the accelerator and are heading for a cliff. This spending is simply not sustainable. A jobs plan and stimulating economic activity by lowering taxes would have created jobs, increased tax revenue and provided more health care. But elections have consequences.

Yale University, which has the second largest endowment behind Harvard and is the top performing endowment in the U.S., has increased its allocation to private equity, including venture capital, according to a report released yesterday. The endowment is boosting its private-equity allocation from 21 percent to 26 percent, despite having lost 26% of the value of its private-equity investments in 2009.

The decision, made at a June 2009 committee meeting, is a pleasant surprise for venture capital firms. The consensus in the industry has been that pullback from endowments, pension funds, and other big institutions that keep funds flowing to the global Silicon Valley will leave the venture industry at half its size within five years. But those were the optimistic folks. Others argued that poor returns in the VC industry was the main reason the for the pullback, and that as a result, the VC industry could be cut even further – or possibly even go away.

He was breathless, but determined.

This Navy veteran had worked an eight-hour shift until Saturday morning and then driven three hours from the Central Valley to participate in Catapult Innovation and Learning in San Jose. The program was half over, but as soon as he got the attention of 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology selectees Mike Beasley, Arnold Brown and Ed Young, he began his elevator speech.

First, he pulled out copies of his resume which included a new bachelors degree in information technology from DeVry University, host for the workshop on building aad financing growth companies along with the Bay Area Chapter of BDPA.

While serving in the U.S. Navy, he had served aboard several ships as a LAN administrator a decade, but he had not been able to find work in the field as a civilian for the past four years.

Earth's population is now closing in on 6.5 billion, having tripled in the 20th century. Our use of water resources, however, actually has increased six-fold over that same time period!

With world population expected to increase by half over the next 50 years and with urbanization and industrialization growing at an alarming rate, especially in the most populous "developing" countries, our demand and hope for fresh water, sanitation and a clean environment are clearly in jeopardy.

More than a billion people today lack safe drinking water while moe than two billion lack adequate sanitation. The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 4,000 children die every day of water borne diseases. Half of those facing sanitation challenges don't even have toilets, latrines or other means to separate human waste from daily life.

The effect on women and girls in particular is shocking. Half the girls who drop out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa do so because there are no facilities for their use and/or because they must spend that potential learning time carrying water long distances for family use.