Confidence in ourselves and in our skills allows us to push our limits, achieve more than we otherwise would, try even in those borderline cases where a less confident person would bow out. But is there such a thing as being too confident, a flip side to this driver of success? Absolutely. It’s called overconfidence: when confidence trumps accuracy. In other words, we become more confident of our abilities, or of our abilities as compared with others’, than would be wise given the circumstances and the reality. And this surplus of belief in ourselves can lead to some not so pleasant results.

• Group: International Commercialization Alliance
• Subject: 2012 International Commercialization Forum

The 2012 Forum Steering Committee has started planning the March 20-21 event to be held in Toronto. We would like to invite you to submit suggestions for 1) leaders of intermediary and other commercialization organizations from around the world to invite 2) keynote speakers and 3) topics to be discussed in breakout sessions. The more suggestions, the better!

Thank you.

View or Add Comments

Years of discussion and wrangling by lawmakers, lawyers, biotechnology businesses, and others over reform of the patent system are expected to end today, when the Senate is scheduled to vote on a motion to end debate on the America Invents Act of 2011 and then vote on the bill itself.

The bill to be taken up by the Senate is word for word from HR 1249, the patent reform measure passed by the House of Representatives on June 23. Last year, the House used a similar maneuver when its then-Democratic leadership persuaded a bare majority to pass verbatim the Senate version of President Obama’s healthcare measure, over the strenuous objections of Republicans. In both cases, the maneuver avoids the additional time required by a conference committee to hammer out a compromise bill amenable to both chambers of Congress.

“Will the dogs eat the dog food?” This rather crude expression weighs heavily on the mind of all good startup founders, no matter how confident they appear. We all know the products they give away, and the ones purchased by family and friends don’t count. The real milestone, proving the business model, is that first product sold for full price to a total stranger, leaving him happy.

So what can you do to expedite this event, or even improve the odds that it will happen at all? Of course, one sale isn’t really enough, so you need to get the first customer to recommend you to a second, and make sure rate of sales ramps up quickly enough to keep the business alive and growing.

A new social network, called Jig, aims to be a place where users do more than just share personal news or play games. It's a hangout where they can help solve one another's problems.

Jig was founded by Joshua Schachter, the creator of the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, which in the early 2000s popularized the idea of tagging, as well as the notion of publicly sharing links people found interesting. Schachter's new site is pitched as halfway between a social network and a marketplace for advice and help, whether restaurant recommendation or diet tips.

How long does it really take to drive from point A to point B? Though mapping applications have long given a guess along with directions, a group at Microsoft Research has built a system that gives a much more accurate estimate based on real-time road conditions and the user's driving habits. The system also predicts which route will be fastest for each user, and will adjust its suggestions if a person's driving habits change over time. The researchers presented their work last week at the 17th Association for Computing Machinery conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in San Diego.

The research is based on data from GPS sensors installed in more than 33,000 taxicabs in Beijing, China. Yu Zheng led the study at Microsoft Research Asia. His team previously analyzed that data simply to find quick routes around the city, since cab drivers are intimately familiar with changing driving conditions. Their newest application, however, integrates several additional factors.

Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”

One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result.

Written on the whiteboard on the first day of my entrepreneurship class at Tufts was a sobering statistic: 80 percent of startups die in their first four years. There exist a variety of factors that can kill a business. Luckily, Boston is full of programs and organizations designed to help entrepreneurs navigate through the startup process. The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance’s Sustainable Vision VentureLab, led by James Barlow, is a five-day intensive incubator program for companies doing business in emerging markets (it ran August 26-30). I initially thought that it would be an abbreviated version of a conventional business class curriculum, somewhat similar to what I had experienced in the five-day boot camp organized by MassChallenge: what are the best ways to structure a company, to manufacture, distribute, and market product X in market Y, and how to go about getting VC funding?

On the contrary, it is a back-to-basics introspective program that emphasizes the human element of a business, such as being able to communicate your value proposition in an effective and clear manner. This may sound elementary. The reality is that this is the foundation for any business. James compared it to humming a song in your head. When vocalized you can clearly hear the tune and the words, even though the person across from you may be shooting you a puzzled look. This is a problem many entrepreneurs unknowingly struggle with. Having become so familiar with the intricacies of their businesses, they have lost the ability to break it down into its simplest and most coherent forms. When hearing these entrepreneurs pitch, the listener finds himself unable to understand the core of their idea, akin to listening to a hummed song.

Can you offer readers a quick primer on what exactly rare earths are and their history with regard to global manufacturing. What are the industries that rely most heavily on these elements?

Rare earths, or rare earth elements (REE) as they are often called, are a group of 17 uncommon minerals including lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, samarium, and europium. Although not exactly "rare," as their name implies, the rare earth elements are not usually found in concentrated deposits but typically are mixed with other minerals (including radioactive substances), making them hard to find and extract. Each of these elements possesses distinctive characteristics that make them useful for various high-tech industries: lanthanum, for example, is used as a catalyst in petroleum refining, while both neodymium and samarium are used in high-temperature magnets.

The Amish are natural entrepreneurs and business people.  After all, they’ve supported themselves with farms for centuries.  Their approach to life has been infused with the concept of free enterprise and self-employment.  But as has been documented over the past decade in  books and articles in magazines like Forbes, the Amish are leaving their farms to start businesses.

About 15-20 minutes from me in Ohio is the largest Amish settlement in the U.S.  I see evidence of Amish  entrepreneurship all around me.  Amish tourism (i.e., people traveling to visit Amish country, buy Amish furniture and crafts, and eat Amish food) has become a sizable business here. In the summer it’s especially noticeable, because you will see evidence of Amish enterprise literally right under your nose.  This photograph shows an example:

President Obama has signaled a new commitment to combating unemployment, with a major speech planned for later this week. The big question is whether his battle plan will go beyond indirect means of encouraging long-run employment growth (such as tax incentives) to include public job-creation programs that could significantly lower unemployment over the next year.

His Republican critics take a “been there, done that, didn’t work” approach to economic stimulus. But President Obama’s stimulus plan, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, relied primarily on tax cuts and increases in aid to the states, shying away from direct federal job-creation efforts that were considered politically risky. (Jared Bernstein, chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the time, provides a clear account of the administration’s rationale).

New research suggests that you are likely to be more creative when you imagine the problem is someone else's instead of your own.  Evan Polman and Kyle Emich describe their studies in their April 2011 article that support this conclusion.

In one study, 262 participants were instructed to draw an alien for a story that they would write, or alternatively for a story that someone else would write. When drawing an alien for someone else's story, they produced a more creative alien. In another study, 137 students were instructed to picture either themselves or a stranger stuck in a tower and to think of a way to escape using only a rope that did not reach the ground. Of the students who imagined a stranger in the tower, 66 percent found the solution—divide the rope lengthwise and tie the pieces together—compared with 48 percent of those who pictured themselves in the tower.

I've had the pleasure of serving on a Board with Scott Weiss for the past six years. Scott is one of the best entrepreneurs/executives I know. Sadly, he's given up being a CEO to become a VC. That's the kind of competition I do not need.

Scott wrote a post on his partner Ben Horowitz' blog on Friday. I got around to reading it this morning. It's about the way Scott's company IronPort used a very high level of transparency with the employee base as a competitive advantage and the challenges they faced with that transparency as they approached an IPO. It's a really good post.

When Howard Schultz came on board with Starbucks in 1982, he advised the company to evolve its business from coffee beans and accessories to coffeehouse culture and espresso by the cup.  The idea was initially met with rejection from company founders.  Given Starbucks’ meteoric rise since then, the rest is history, with the lesson that businesses must be cognizant of market trends and embrace new channels that promise growth.

Similarly, retailers ignore social channels at their own risk, and a number of recent market trends have coalesced to make social commerce top of mind.  A majority (58%) of all consumers now research products online before purchasing, and half of those consumers publish comments or reviews online about the products they buy. Global e-commerce revenue figures continue to grow at a faster rate (19%) than the economy as a whole.  Over 750 million users have flocked to Facebook to interact and share with friends.  These developments have created a fertile ecosystem for retailers seeking to cultivate new revenue streams using social media.

Why do some entrepreneurs hit gold, while others hit dirt? Is there a pattern to success, and if so, what is it?

Business Insider has analyzed a paper by the Harvard Business School [PDF] on ”Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship” and boiled it down to ten questions to try to discover the alchemist’s stone of entrepreneurship.

Do serial entrepreneurs succeed more than first time entrepreneurs? Who is more likely to get funded by a VC firm, a new entrepreneur or a tried and true one? Is entrepreneurial success a skill, or is it luck? Does success breed success?

Not understanding and agreeing what “Entrepreneur” and “Startup” mean can sink an entire country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

I’m getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I’ve spent the last week reviewing several countries’ ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.

1) They sure killed a ton of trees

In addition to youths aged 15-24, supporters of the National Coalition Party and the Centre Party were most optimistic about the idea of entrepreneurship, according to the study.

Women held more favourable opinions on entrepreneurship than men.

Of the newly minted entrepreneurs who responded to the survey, half are planning to continue in this career. About every sixteenth entrepreneur who has worked in this job for under five years plans to shut or sell the company.

The recent announcement that California's unemployment again nudged up to 12 percent—second worst in the nation behind its evil twin, Nevada—should have come as a surprise but frankly did not. From the beginning of the recession, the Golden State has been stuck bringing up a humbled nation's rear and seems mired in that less-than-illustrious position.

What has happened to my adopted home state of over last decade is a tragedy, both for Californians and for America. For most of the past century, California has been "golden" not only in name but in every kind of superlative—a global leader in agriculture, energy, entertainment, technology, and most important of all, human aspiration.

Here it is, a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a long weekend. And like many others, I’m anticipating the Labor Day holiday – not as a day off, but as a “catch-up” day. Working.

And I’m not the only one. You know who you are…

The majority of people I worked, talked, met and communicated with this last week said they’d all be online, working away; some on their mobile devices; some at their computers; all working. It seems like even when we aren’t working, we’re talking about work… texting or posting about work, or chatting about how to be more productive… at work. At almost midnight last Wednesday, a large group of entrepreneurial types were on Twitter talking about “Work-Life Balance”.

At any company level, the board of directors has a direct impact on the organization’s product strategy, hiring, fundraising and much more. And startups have to be very selective in choosing board members who will advise the company in the right direction.  In the big company realm, both the media and the company’s shareholders have questioned Yahoo’s board, which continues to employ a floundering Carol Bartz as CEO and supports a bizarre product and business strategy. Then you look at Facebook, where founder Mark Zuckerberg has strategically assembled an all-star board to help the company grow as a public company and expand into new directions. Most recently, Facebook added Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings to its board, joining Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Donald E. Graham, Peter Thiel and Zuck himself. Hastings not only will add his experience in taking a web company public, but he will also help Facebook navigate potential movie and TV show streaming opportunities. Facebook has a rock solid board—almost every member has been a strong innovator in the past few decades.