While business plans demand careful thought and concentration, the mechanics of putting one together have gotten easier than ever, thanks to planning software and free online resources. For a basic, no-frills plan, you can visit the Small Business Administration's website, where a series of prompts guides you through the process. The SCORE website has a number of business plan templates, including one specifically for existing businesses.

If you want to take your plan up a notch with graphics and visually compelling layouts, Ultimate Business Planner software gives you access to a number of different formats, as well as sample business plans you can customize according to your needs. If you're working on a plan with partners who live in different locations, Funding Roadmap is a cloud-computing solution that allows collaboration.

On a midafternoon stroll with his wife on a Sunday in January 1997, amateur dinosaur hunter Ray Stanford stumbled upon something extraordinary. While walking in the riverbed near his home in College Park, Md., he found the tiniest example of an armored dinosaur anyone has ever seen.

It took awhile for Stanford to realize the find he had on his hands. The impression left by the 5-inch (13 centimeter) baby dinosaur was covered in silt from the riverbed. One night, when a dim overhead kitchen light hit the stone in the right way, the shadows highlighted what was really there, the impression of a tiny dinosaur.

In a previous blog, I discussed the five business fundamentals that I learned at Wharton. Today, I discuss five keys to business success that I did not learn at Wharton (and that may not be learnable in a classroom environment).

1.  Politics matters

One key to business success is to do business with the right people, people who are ethical and will deliver. As such, people usually prefer to do business and work with people that they know and are comfortable with. An unknown with incredible talent does not stand a chance against a mediocre that is known and politically linked in. Is it fair? Maybe not. But, it is what it is. As such, playing the political game, networking and getting yourself known, getting good mentors to help you and to open doors, being physically proximate to the top, and (yes) the proper flattery of key leaders are all vital in the vast majority of companies and in business in general.

Mashable‘s Social Good Summit is in full swing. David Armano, Edelman Digital’s EVP of Global Innovation and Integration spoke Monday about how digital innovation is impacting global health.

Edelman surveyed more than 15,165 people to create a global confidence index: how healthy different countries believe they are. While most values seem high, the survey shows how cultural views of health can skew responses. In India, Armano said, percentage is high because good health is measured just by access to clean water. Japan’s percentage might be low, despite its record of long life-expectancy, due to the recent earthquake, tsunami and ensuing crises.

I recently wrote a post with some tips on avoiding a busted VC deal.  One of my tips was to be ready for diligence before you sign the LOI.  Here’s some more thoughts on getting ready.

The key to a successful and pain-free venture capital raise is to be informed, prepared, and engaged. To be informed, you need to regularly speak with bankers, VCs and lawyers that cover your space.

Start fund raising 12-18 months before you need the money. You will need that time to sift through and qualify various VCs. Also, spend a year qualifying VCs by building relationships and getting to know them well enough to qualify the ones you like from the ones you don’t.  Picking a VC is not about the money (yes, all VC money is green).  It should be all about picking the right firm with the culture and expertise that fit your company’s culture and aspirations.

The most radical thing a new company can do is sell their product, says serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. He believes that the company founders - not the sales team - should be the first to try to turn a profit, as they will learn firsthand about their product's shortcomings and usability. Great engineers directly understand what their customers need.

The antidepressant Paxil was approved for sale in 1992, the cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol in 1996. Company studies proved that each drug, on its own, works and is safe. But what about when they are taken together?

By mining tens of thousands of electronic patient records, researchers at Stanford University quickly discovered an unexpected answer: people who take both drugs have higher blood glucose levels. The effect was even greater in diabetics, for whom excess blood sugar is a health danger.

The research is an example of the increasing ease with which scientists now scour digitized medical results, like glucose tests and drug prescriptions, to find hidden patterns. "You're not constrained by the need to actually get patients lined up in a clinical trial that would be incredibly expensive," says Russ Altman, director of Stanford's Biomedical Informatics Training Program, whose group published the Paxil/Pravachol result in the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics this July. "We had most of this paper done probably in a month."

The Startup Genome Project just released a very interesting study.

In the study, which took 6 months to conduct, they gathered and analyzed data on over 3200 startup companies in the technology field.

Their goal: to identify the reason why some startups succeed, while others fail.

Importantly, in their research, they identified the ONE reason that stood out more than all the others for business failure. That reason: premature scaling.

So, what is “premature scaling?” Premature scaling is trying to grow your company too quickly.

Things, life, business – they don’t just fall into place. We have to manage things to make what we want happen. Three of our small business experts give some quick advice on how to:

• manage your meetings so that you don’t waste time,
• manage your marketing so that you pay only for what you need, and
• manage your money by cutting costs on export sales.

The goal is to move your business forward by solving a core problem for your core people — and that takes management.

Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression. While we are in a recovery period, this recovery does not appear to be off to a strong start. And yet start-ups are still being created, companies are still growing, and many are achieving significant revenues.

These companies are proving that, if a business has strategic growth drivers in place from the very beginning, it will have the opportunity to grow, no matter what the economic climate. A fundamental piece to this puzzle is ensuring that the business model that you create and develop enables value creation and the possibility for creating a successful business, not just a successful product line.

There is no age bar for entrepreneurship. It's never too late to start. Colonel Harland Sanders, founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken, a chain of fast food restaurants based in Louiseville, Kentucky in the United States, was recognised by the world as a businessman when he was in his 60s, said Mohan Kuldeep Ponnada, CEO of a Hyderabad-based newly-launched indigenous mobile phone company Unixell, on Friday.

Speaking on “Entrepreneurship in youth”, a session organised by the Rotary Club of Vijayawada, as part of the club's ongoing New Generation Month celebrations, Mr. Mohan said the spirit of entrepreneurship was very powerful. It teaches an individual to think out of the box.

Silicon-whatever is the craze. Whether it’s a city hall or community, everyone wants to be Silicon Valley-style. They want to have a top notch STEM college, lots of cool companies and trendy restaurants around – just like the Bay Area.

Some advice for the local Chamber of Commerces: I would not copy that model. Instead, create your own ecosystem.

Thinking about the Bay Area, the right confluence of factors came together to create a unique place. Certain institutions were in place and the right individuals brought the environment to a new level. In that specific place, there was a culture of tinkering and innovation and thinking big.

I enjoy the ride on a good commercial airline flight. It’s time that I can use to catch up on tasks that require focus. I throw the headphones on, listen to the best music ever created by mankind (70s music - as if I needed to spell that out), and get to work on the laptop. Nary a thought is given to the route the plane will take to get from point A to point B. Once we do our initial turn after taking off, it seems like a pretty straight shot to me.

Well, it’s anything but a straight shot. The auto-pilot is correcting constantly the entire route. It is being temporarily taken off course the whole trip. And, each time the elements take it off course, it corrects and gets back on the right path.

In the world of venture capital (VC), ideas are plentiful but fundable businesses are hard to find. Despite the perception, VCs do not fund ideas alone, no matter how solid passionate entrepreneurs believe they are. To negate risk, VCs evaluate proposals based on several characteristics, often in-line with their specific funding mandate, to bridge the huge divide between a cool idea and a fundable business.

Differentiated

VC funds are inundated with requests for capital to get start-up businesses to the next critical level but very few offer significantly differentiated product or service in the eyes of their target market. The tech behind the business maybe amazing but it still needs to meet the customers’ burning need and deliver greater benefit to them.

tudent loan defaults are rising fast, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Department of Education. While much of the press coverage focused on defaults by students attending for-profit schools, defaults at state colleges and universities went up, too. The bad job market is a big factor: Unemployment in 2010 was 10.1 percent for people between the age of 25 to 34, and those numbers are even higher when you remove people above the age of 30. At the same time, state budget cuts to higher education have led to big tuition hikes at many public colleges. California students graduated from public colleges with the least debt in the country in 2009, but tuition jumped 18 percent last year for in-state students in California and double-digit increases are projected for the next several years, as well.

Climate change is here, and as it worsens, it will affect the entire planet. But it's the hard truth that it won't happen equally: some areas will be affected more than others. Those areas, one would hope, would be spending the most time and energy preparing for the eventualities of drought, food shortages, and rising sea levels. But this is largely not the case. The most ill-prepared countries are the ones that will be hit the hardest.

That's just one of the major conclusions of the Global Adaptation Index (GAIN), which provides scores for every country based on their vulnerability to climate change and their readiness to deal with those issues. Denmark is ranked the highest (it isn't very vulnerable to begin with, and has done a lot to get ready), while Ethiopia, which is doing very little while being very threatened, is the lowest. On the map above, the more red a country is, the worse their score.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is worried that high U.S. unemployment could lead to the same kind of riots here that have swept through Europe and North Africa.

"You have a lot of kids graduating college, (who) can't find jobs," said Bloomberg, during his weekly radio show on Friday. "That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."

That was the mayor's response when asked about the poverty rate, which rose to 15.1% in 2010, its highest level since 1993, according to census data released Tuesday. About 46.2 million people are now living in poverty, 2.6 million more than last year.

The Canadian university system costs about $25 billion a year. The total income for all Canadian universities from licensing their intellectual property is around $50 million. Subtract the cost of managing that IP and you’re left with a net income of only $15 million. Getting technology to market is clearly not a big income stream for the typical Canadian university.

Those numbers come from The Way Ahead, Meeting Canada’s Productivity Challenge, by Tom Brzustowski, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. While the book is a few years old, the overall trend illustrated by those numbers hasn’t changed. However, Brzustowski also quotes Doyletech’s Denzil Doyle, who puts these numbers in their proper context. According to Doyle, the IP income to universities represents only 2.5 percent of the new sales generated by products based on it. Do that math and you arrive at $2 billion — $2 billion in annual sales for the Canadian economy. That isn’t an insignificant sum.

The fact that we all have technology at our fingertips has caused a disintermediation within traditional commerce, and significant disruption for retailers big and small. Consider the impact of Netflix on Blockbuster and local video stores, or how Amazon upended book buying. What we know for sure is that innovation, and the speed at which a business is able to innovate, is no longer an option. Rather, it is paramount to survival.

In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.The reason? Four mega trends being driven by consumers are dramatically changing buying and selling habits as we know them. Merchants of all types—from brick-and-mortar retail outlets to non-profits, to manufacturers and even those selling online, need to ensure they’re keeping pace or risk going the way of Blockbuster, Borders and the dinosaurs.

What city do you think is the best place for a young entrepreneur to start a business?

We have nominated 12 cities that are great start-up spots for young entrepreneurs. Take a minute and vote for the one that you think is the best or add your own.

Remember to think beyond just the business environment. Young entrepreneurs are looking for a balance of business and lifestyle. So the culture, activities, social scene and even climate matter when a young entrepreneur is trying to decide where to setup shop.

The poll will be open for 1 week and then we will be publishing the results to determine the best city for young entrepreneurs in 2011. Check out last years results – Top Cities for Young Entrepreneurs in 2010