A spin-off is merely a startup spawned by a mature parent (company), and conventional logic would dictate that it has a survival advantage over the lowly startup. Yet spin-offs seem to most often fail to launch in the real world. I was part of one myself a few years ago, and felt the pain, so the phenomenon has intrigued me ever since.

My first thought is that spin-offs are like struggling adolescents with over-protective parents. When companies spin off a division (sometimes called a demerger or deconsolidation), they naturally want it to grow and succeed on its own merits, just as they have. But like protective parents everywhere, they tend to shelter it in ways that stunt its growth in the long run.

IN the wake of the hugely disappointing budget deal and the S.& P.’s debt downgrade, maybe we need to hang a new sign in the immigration arrival halls at all U.S. ports and airports. It could simply read: “Welcome. You are entering the United States of America. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.”

Because our country is now finding itself in the worst kind of decline — a slow decline, just slow enough for us to keep deluding ourselves that nothing really fundamental needs to change if our future is to match our past.

Everyone who works in the start-up realm — whether tech, biotech, cleantech, or other — tends to live in the future. All day long, they're working on products that will be launched and sold in a month or a year or a decade. So when the stock market soars or swoons, they tend to ignore it. "That's today's news. We're tomorrow's," the thinking goes, no matter how many points the Dow has lost.

Of course, vertiginous plunges in the public markets do tend to have an affect on young companies that need to continually raise venture capital money, and hope to one day go public themselves or be acquired by a bigger entity — as we saw in 2000 and 2008. They're bad news.

But here's how the various players in the innovation economy rationalize away stock market drops and other macro-economic bad mojo...

Internationally renowned entrepreneurship guru Dan isenberg believes Puerto Rico provides fertile ground for entrepreneurship, and in 20 or 30 years, he sees the local economy buoyed by a number of native companies exporting their goods and services to the world.

"I think it could happen five times faster with some intelligent facilitation," isenberg told CARIBBEAN BUSINESS. "Entrepreneurship is part of the human condition. It is like art and music. It is here in Puerto Rico. You can't stamp it out, even though you have done a pretty good job here at trying."

The world investment guru doesn't buy the oft-stated refrain that Puerto Ricans, shaped by the Section 936 experience, are skilled workers and managers, but by and large aren't entrepreneurial.

"Entrepreneurs exist here. I know the people who are trying to do it. There are barriers and obstacles, but they do exist," isenberg said. "You don't need gazillions of people to be entrepreneurs. Not everybody should be an entrepreneur. You need a couple hundred."

Two-thirds of US companies expect to increase hiring in the coming year, according to a recent survey by social recruitment software developer JobVite.

If you're hunting for one of those jobs, it's going to help to be on social networks. But make sure you keep them updated and professional -- nearly half of recruiters always try to track down your online profiles, according to JobVite.

INNOVATION is today’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. Rich-world governments see it as a way of staving off stagnation. Poor governments see it as a way of speeding up growth. And businesspeople everywhere see it as the key to survival.

Which makes Clay Christensen the closest thing we have to Sir Galahad. Fourteen years ago Mr Christensen, a knight of the Harvard Business School, revolutionised the study of the subject with “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a book that popularised the term “disruptive innovation”. This month he publishes a new study, “The Innovator’s DNA”, co-written with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, which tries to take us inside the minds of successful innovators. How do they go about their business? How do they differ from regular suits? And what can companies learn from their mental habits?

I hear many executives and professionals in large corporations talking about their dream of jumping ship, and starting their own company. What they don’t realize is that the longer they wait, the more big-company habits they are acquiring, which will make their eventual decision harder and entrepreneurial efforts less and less likely to succeed.

Certainly, the longer they wait, the greater the variety of excuses they will find for why now is not the time. Common examples include; need to work on my resume, broaden my experience, enhance my skills, save my income, and maintain a stable family life until my children are gone. Most will then NEVER make the step, and remain unsatisfied through much of their career.

Name: Catchafire

Quick Pitch: Catchafire matches volunteers and social good organizations for pro bono work.

Genius Idea: Carving out a niche for pro bono work instead of compiling a general volunteer database.

Catchafire founder Rachael Chong is not especially well-suited for building houses. As a physically not-large person, her hoisting power is relatively limited, and she doesn’t consider herself to have any particular carpentry skills. So why, when she had valuable skills in finance and business that she was willing to share, was she tacking on shingles for Habitat for Humanity — a cause she believed in but nonetheless frustrated her?

Double dip may be back.

It has been three decades since the United States suffered a recession that followed on the heels of the previous one. But it could be happening again. The unrelenting negative economic news of the past two weeks has painted a picture of a United States economy that fell further and recovered less than we had thought.

When what may eventually be known as Great Recession I hit the country, there was general political agreement that it was incumbent on the government to fight back by stimulating the economy. It did, and the recession ended.

The New York Times asked me to give them an opinion piece on the Mayor's effort to bring a new science and technology University to NYC. They also asked a few others, like Caterina Fake, Eric Reis, Dave Tisch, and several more students of NYC and technology. The entire discussion is here.

But the best thing I've read on this topic was not in the NY Times. It was on a blog, of course. Written by NYC's very own Chris Dixon. He nailed it.

Data drives everything we know and don’t yet know. Data also drives the economic value of the internet. Every time we type an email, dial a number, add a tweet or publish content we are adding data to the “network” and that data carries meaning and meaningful indicators of behavior.

Data is exploding faster than most imagine and with explosive growth organizations, people and machines are learning more about human behavior and people’s preferences faster than ever before.

Moore’s law states that the amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. The social web is accelerating data. According to Cisco by 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes.

This was a question recently posed on the website Gamification.org. The interesting and hugely important thing about the folks at Gamification.org is that they are trying to bridge the reality chasm between entertainment games and economic games.  This, I believe they are rapidly learning, is yet another game.

So, sure, I’ll play…

The questioner asks that the respondents keep in mind the things that matter when raising money.  These are called the initial conditions:

• Traction
• Team
• Technology
• Validation

Want to make sure you never come up with a great idea? Here are twenty suggestions to help you kill your creativity.

Always think the way you've always thought. When confronted with a problem, fixate on what you were taught about how past thinkers solved it. Then analytically select the most promising logical past approach and apply it to the problem, excluding all other possibilities.

Be focused. The key to logical, linear thinking is knowing what to exclude from your mental space. Exclude everything that is dissimilar, unrelated or is in some other domain from your subject. If you want to improve the can opener, only study existing can openers and how they are made. Then work on improving what exists.

As a serial entrepreneur and professor in Silicon Valley, I am frequently asked what it takes to create an ecosystem of start-up innovation. Usually, the question is phrased like this: "What does it take to create a Silicon Valley in our backyard?"

I give everybody the same answer: "Invite a bunch of entrepreneurs into a room. Then leave."

One of the most important, and underrated, aspects of entrepreneurship clusters is location. Entrepreneurs don't need "teaching" so much as space. A place to gather, share ideas, experiment, fail, and settle on an innovation.

From my experience, there are five elements to every success "ecosystem" of entrepreneurship.

1) A culture of collaboration: To lean over to a group engaged in conversation at a table next to yours at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, and ask, "Do you know anything about [programming platform] Ruby-on-Rails?" is tantamount to saying, "Oh hi." We ask people we meet about technology, about trends, and what they're up to, and what new project their friends just started. There is an informal air of collaboration in Silicon Valley. It's network-building friendships. It's informal mentorships. And it's everywhere.

MEET the British Bill Gates. He studied computer science at Cambridge—dropping out to start his career in nearby “Silicon Fen”. Then he launched his own start-up, based at “Silicon Roundabout”, a new hub of tech firms in east London. Bolstered by finance from the City, he resisted the lure of a foreign takeover, ultimately listing on the London Stock Exchange.

It is a plausible biography—given the necessary addition of animal spirits—but an imaginary one. Britain has no digital equivalent of the 18th-century industrial innovators who turned technology into commercial leadership. Its more recent prowess in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology has not been emulated in the digital sphere. David Cameron’s government should ponder this failure and address the reasons for it. Luck is one of them, but so are national and European regulations and a tepid climate for entrepreneurs.

The quick expansion of social and mobile technologies is creating a widely distributed workforce. To better suit employees who come into offices more sporadically, some companies and design firms are testing radically new—and more efficient—configurations for physical offices, and betting that improved technology will make the experiment more successful than similar ones in the 1990s.

A project at the headquarters of Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, for example, overthrows decades-old conventions about office space. Called Connected Workplace, it replaces individual cubicles with open clusters of wheeled desks that belong to groups, not individuals; personal belongings are largely confined to lockers.

Albert Wegner (Union Square Ventures) has today’s VC Post of the day titled If You Need To Raise Money, Get Your Financing Done ASAP. In it, Albert expresses his belief that given the current macro economic environment, companies should focus on getting their money raised quickly – as in right now. He’s conveying global / macro pessimism that many people are talking about. While there are obvious timing disconnects between the long term value of a startup (often much more than five years), there is often a sentiment shift in the funding environment – all the way through the funding supply chain – when the economy goes south.

The next decade will bring remarkable changes in the way office work is done. Perhaps nowhere will change be more profound than in countries such as India, where improved network access and smart technologies could make it possible for certain tasks to be divided among people working outside major city centers, including in rural areas.

Xerox is one of many companies researching this trend and developing the technologies that will pave the way. CTO Sophie Vandebroek described some of the efforts of the company's two-year-old Xerox Research Center in India with Technology Review's chief correspondent, David Talbot.

Recent trends in economic indicators R such as unemployment rates and job growth clearly favor Nebraska. However, these trends may differ from the state’s performance in core mehasures of economic strength such as entrepreneurship, net migration and capital formation. Given this, the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Bureau of Business Research seeks to track these core economic measures in Nebraska and in all U.S. states.

The state entrepreneurship index is one effort to traEck these core trends. Specifically, the index is used to track entrepreneurship in Nebraska and compare with the other forty-nine states.

The index was developed by Eric C. Thompson and William B. Walstad in Entrepreneurship in Nebraska: Conditions, Attitudes, and Actions (GBallup Press, 2008). In this report, we use the same methodology to calculate a 2010 index and compare it to the 2008 index.

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