Paul Graham seemed to take on the role of tech ambassador to the advertising world this week when he spoke at Y Combinator, the startup incubator that he founded. Y Combinator recently held its semiannual demo day for venture capitalists hoping to back its startups. On Wednesday, Graham was speaking to a different sort of audience, with representatives from digital companies and agencies who had come to see Y Combinator's ad-focused startups.

Not surprisingly, Graham placed a big emphasis on technology and measurement. For example, while he acknowledged that creativity still has a role to play in the creation of ads, he also argued that if advertisers have to choose between creativity and measurement, "bet on measurement." In part, he said that's because there will no longer be a single creative unit that's seen by everyone. Instead, advertisers should use audience data to @ycombinator present "a different ad to everybody."

A Wisconsin coalition has recommended creation of a state-leveraged venture capital fund to encourage business development and creation of new jobs.

The report from the Wisconsin Growth Capital Coalition was released Thursday at the Resource Rendezvous conference in Wauwatosa, which attracted startup companies and investors.

The report recommends creation of a master fund-of-funds that would invest in 14 to 20 venture capital funds over time.

The $350 million, state-leveraged, privately managed fund-of-funds would spur private co-investment, the coalition said. These recipient funds would raise an additional $350 million to $1.05 billion and commit to offices, staff and investments in Wisconsin.

STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State officials are reporting significant progress in ongoing efforts to foster entrepreneurship and innovation, form private-sector partnerships, and move more university-developed technology into the marketplace.

That optimistic assessment comes as the White House turns its attention to the vital role major research universities play in the nation's economy during a special event in suburban Washington, D.C., Friday [Sept. 16], President Barack Obama signed the America Invents Act, legislation expected to streamline the patent process and spur invention.

Fulfilling its mission of teaching, research and service, the land-grant institution's central economic development objective is to strengthen collaborations between the university, economic development organizations and businesses to create high-wage jobs, said David Shaw, vice president for research and economic development.

Amid concerns about U.S. innovation and jobs, a new prize—being launched by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in concert with AAAS—will recognize successful university-based commercialization activities.

News of the prize was made public 16 September at the same time that U.S. President Barack Obama signed the America Invents Act into law. Previously known as the Patent Reform Act of 2011, the legislation intends to "convert ideas of American universities and research labs into new products to expand our economy and create jobs," according to the White House.

BERLIN — The courtyard of the nightclub Picknick was packed with partygoers dancing, shouting over the music and snapping photographs of one another, by all appearances just another night in this dilettante party capital. But appearances, on this recent Saturday night, were very much deceiving.

The images snapped with iPhones and Android smartphones were projected in a constantly changing slideshow on the side of the neighboring building by a new photo-sharing application called EyeEm. The plastic foam clouds dangling from the wires crisscrossing overhead were the logos for the popular audio-sharing service called SoundCloud, which has roughly seven million users.

Both companies, co-hosts of the event, are part of Berlin’s rapidly growing Internet start-up scene, which has won the attention of investors in Britain and California, including the high-profile actor-investor Ashton Kutcher, who is a backer of SoundCloud.

My daughter fell on her nose at camp this summer.

This, in a nutshell is why I’m reluctant to seek venture capital or to build my business, FamiliesGo!, in a way that necessitates it.

It’s not that I couldn’t make good use of outside investment money. The deeper into this venture I go the more I appreciate what I could do with an infusion of capital. I could hire or outsource more technical knw-how, and marketing, sales, and public relations help. I could hire freelance writers and bring in an intern or two. All of this would allow me to build the content, tools, and revenue streams I have in mind much faster and improve my odds of developing FamiliesGo! into the Learnvest.com or TheKnot.com of family travel, which it has the potential to be.

But my daughter fell from a very small height flat on her nose. There was a lot of blood and tears and the camp called to have me come get her. After lunch, a story, and much cuddling and reassurance she napped. And I made up for lost time.

Texas A&M University officials today outlined plans to strengthen and enhance research initiatives designed to promote economic development, industry partnerships, commercialization opportunities and student-faculty innovation.

“One way we fulfill the university’s land-grant mission is to ensure that discoveries resulting from important scientific and technological research that transpires on our campus are made available as broadly as possible through research commercialization and outreach,” said Texas A&M President R. Bowen Loftin.

“Public-private research partnerships also help place students in direct contact with industries that can hire them after graduation. Last year the number of organizations that had representatives visit Texas A&M to recruit students increased by 110 percent, and in the fall of 2010, at the height of the recession, approximately 1,500 companies competed for Texas A&M graduates,” Loftin added. “We are firmly committed to further enhancing these partnerships, which we believe are important to the future of our state, nation and world.”

In 1950, more than 30 percent of Americans were employed in manufacturing, working at jobs such as welding, machining and assembly. Today, that number has shrunk significantly: Manufacturing jobs make up less than 10 percent of the U.S. workforce. As the country seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past an economic recession, the state of U.S. manufacturing has become a hotly debated topic.

To examine manufacturing’s role in economic recovery, students, faculty and representatives of MIT’s corporate partners gathered Thursday afternoon in MIT’s Wong Auditorium for a forum on “Rebuilding the American Economy.” The event was sponsored by the Department of Political Science and by Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE), a new MIT initiative that seeks to analyze the relationship between innovation, production and job creation. Throughout the forum, participants sought answers to a pervasive question: Can the United States keep its innovative edge if it loses its production capabilities?

The Netherlands wants to become one of the world's top five knowledge economies by 2020, according to a plan presented to Dutch parliament this week. The strategy, which focuses heavily on boosting private investment in research and innovation, has some Dutch scientists worried that fundamental research will lose out.

At present, the country invests 1.8% of its gross domestic product in research and development (R&D). Speaking before the Dutch parliament on 13 September, Maxime Verhagen, Minister of Economic Affairs, Innovation and Agriculture, outlined a plan that would increase that investment to 2.5% by 2020.

Verhagen says past subsidy schemes have led to Dutch R&D relying heavily on public funding, and he wants to increase the contribution made by industry.

Behind most great startup success stories is a long list of mistakes! Unfortunately, for every success story you see, there is an even longer list of failure stories with mistakes that you don’t see. But rather than dwell on the failures, I’ve tried to extract from them a list of practical action items that will improve your survival probability.

Every startup mentor has his favorite list of basic strategies to avoid pitfalls, and I’m no exception. If my experience and insights can save just one founder from the stress, lost time, and lost money associated with a startup misstep, then I’m a happy man. I offer these pragmatic recommendations:

• Buffer your funding requirements. Consider both the money you need before funding, and the size of investor funding requests. You should buffer the first by 50%, and the second by 25%. You will be amazed at how many items you forgot to cover, and how fast the cash disappears. Severe cash flow problems may not be recoverable.

I recently wrote a post about why I didn’t think early-stage startups should have COOs. I expected it to be controversial and it was.

To be clear, I said that most companies I see pitching have COOs & I don’t have a rule against it. I’ve had several COOs at companies in which I’ve invested.

In bringing up the issue I wasn’t “hating on COOs” – I’m just challenging you to think about whether your CEO + COO structure really provides the right amount of clarity  in your organization.

When I was at school I spent much of my time in class totally immersed in drawing pictures in my books. No margin, introductory page or fly-leaf was spared and when it finally came down to confronting my exam results; I discovered that the time spent on llustrating my fantasies was directly related to my poor marks in subjects that actually didn’t interest me.

During that time function and logic were the passwords to a successful future and the concept of creativity (the stuff behind my drawings) was considered part of the arts; the exclusive domain of painters, inventors, writers, and other weird people.

Sir Richard Branson ( pictured here as a schoolboy). There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would forever be repeating the same patterns - Edward de Bono Fortunately things must change. With the world facing multiple crises, it is now imperative that leaders and business encourage creativity at every level. Because, creativity is the mother of innovation and both are critical to the future of our planet.

NESTA and the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge University Engineering Department have just published a review of current knowledge on the role of business incubation in supporting high-growth ventures. A summary of the key findings are given below (as this topic has strong resonance with open innovation) and the full report can be downloaded from the NESTA publication website.

Incubation for Growth: A review of the impact of business incubation on new ventures with high growth potential Nicola J. Dee, Finbarr Livesey, David Gill and Tim Minshall Business incubators have proliferated since their emergence over 50 years ago. Over this time business incubation has evolved to include a range of incubation practices. Nonetheless business incubation can deliver critical value to tenants. Contrasting early definitions of incubation where survival of tenants was emphasised, we define incubation as “...a shared office-space facility that seeks to provide its incubatees with a strategic, valueadding intervention system of monitoring and business assistance.” (Hackett, S. M. and Dilts, D.M. (2004b) A Systematic Review of Business Incubation Research. ‘Journal of Technology Transfer.’ 29: 55-82). Our key findings follow the structure of the report.

Ever since I was old enough to realize there would never be a want ad in a newspaper that described a job I wanted, I've loved working in cafes. I never really thought much about it until a few days ago when a baffled friend of mine asked why I was so into it.

His assumption? That working in a cafe would be a distraction. A distraction? Dude, quite the opposite.

And so, at the risk of trotting out a few half-baked conclusions that my non-cafe-going critics will have a field day trashing, here goes:

Downingtown Area School District officials approached their predicament like the problem solvers they hope to develop at the district's newest high school.

The equation included student overcrowding, a limited budget, and a plan to modernize programs with a cutting-edge curriculum.

Their solution opened its doors Aug. 29, when the new Downingtown STEM Academy held its first classes for 450 students in one of the Chester County district's oldest buildings.

The new magnet high school offers specialized curriculum in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). It is one of a growing number of similar programs and schools popping up in the region.

The academy offers a program that includes a rigorous curriculum of high school and college-level courses that are recognized internationally. Students pick a special area of academic focus in their junior and senior years. They also must participate in community-service projects and

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.

"The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” is a revised version of the famous book “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber.

It is one of the best books in the field of entrepreneurship. I’ve just read the revised edition and think it is still valid and vital for entrepreneurs.

Gerber says entrepreneurs should work on their business, not in it. When an entrepreneur works in their business, they become a technician, a doer, a problem solver, but they also become a slave of that small business. They cannot change results radically. Instead of doing the daily tasks of whatever the business may be, such as cooking pies in a pastry shop, designing a project in the office or selling goods on the street, an entrepreneur should be working on the business model.

Foreign visitors to Silicon Valley continually mention how willing we are to help, network and connect strangers. We take it so for granted we never even to bother to talk about it. It's the "Pay-It-Forward" culture.

We're all in this together -- The Chips are Down

In 1962 Walker's Wagon Wheel Bar/Restaurant in Mountain View became the lunch hangout for employees at Fairchild Semiconductor. When the first spin-outs began to leave Fairchild, they discovered that fabricating semiconductors reliably was a black art. At times you'd have the recipe and turn out chips, and the next week something would go wrong, and your fab couldn't make anything that would work. Engineers in the very small world of silicon and semiconductors would meet at the Wagon Wheel and swap technical problems and solutions with co-workers and competitors.

We're all in this together -- A Computer in every Home

Jonathan Greenblatt, who served as chief executive of the company that oversees Good magazine and helped create All for Good, an online volunteer database, has been named the new director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.

Mr. Greenblatt replaces Sonal Shah, who stepped down in August after heading the office since it was created in 2009.

Mr. Greenblatt started his new position today, said Shannon Gilson, a White House spokeswoman.

Mr. Greenblatt was a lecturer at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the Impact Economy Initiative, a program of the Aspen Institute that explores ways to encourage social enterprise.

In 2002, the State of Ohio planted the seeds to grow a statewide entrepreneurial ecosystem, and over the past nine years the State has invested $1.1 billion through the Ohio Third Frontier to help efficiently and seamlessly move great ideas from the lab to the marketplace. Ohio is realizing the beginning of a high tech renaissance, and State support for entrepreneurs is stronger than ever. In fact, officials are doubling-down on their support of entrepreneurial ventures, increasing funding and assistance to innovative startups that they hope will drive Ohio’s economic revitalization. At the beginning of this month, the Ohio Third Frontier Commission approved a portion of the investment plan for fiscal year 2012, which includes approximately $184 million of investments in technology-based economic development efforts this year, of which $76 million is expected to be directed toward entrepreneurial support programs. This proposed plan represents a shift in Ohio Third Frontier’s past investment activity. In a discussion with Norm Chagnon, Executive Director of the Ohio Third Frontier Commission, I learned why the State has decided to make some changes to this highly effective program.