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.

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The Ministry of Economy of the Slovak Republic has assessed how the country could improve its innovation performance, against the background that Slovakia is considered as a “moderate innovator” in the European Innovation Scoreboard. As a result, innovation policy in the period 2011-2013 will focus on a few key priorities and launch relevant, promising measures in these areas.

The Innovation Union Competitiveness Report 2011 states for the Slovak Republic: “At present, the very low R&D investment, both in the public and private sectors, results in poor scientific and technological production that reinforces the international dependency of the system and hinders its ability to create, use and diffuse knowledge.”

For most of her life Jessica England was told she would not make a good entrepreneur. Personality tests deemed her thinking too linear and friends said she was too controlling to work in an unpredictable start-up situation.

But in her second year at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, she decided to try her hand at running a business: Tuckstuff, the campus store that sells school-branded goods. The store is entirely managed by a small team of second-year MBA students.

I’ve been beating around the bush with this topic for the past several months, so it’s time that I met it directly and whacked it on its head. Revenue. Cash flow. Balance sheets. These are words that make me excited. Perhaps they make you want to reach for stimulants, but I find them exhilarating on their own.

Now, I am no certifiable expert on any of the topics that I am going to be writing about for the next 1,500 words or so, but that doesn’t bother me. I’ve worked for young companies, founded one (I still have a patent from that venture), helped run events about them, judged events that included them, and I talk to entrepreneurs every day. I have also taken classes at Booth business school (BusinessWeek’s number one pick), and have spent ungodly amounts of time reading annual reports and running mutual fund simulations. Those are my credentials. Make of them what you will.

We had so much fun a few weeks ago giving a presentation at an Executive Leadership workshop for startups. We chose to speak aboutLeading (Instead of Following) Your Growing Business.

As you probably know entrepreneur’s satisfaction is really important to us. We have dedicated a lot of our work to making sure that entrepreneurs don’t become disenchanted with their businesses as they grow, which it turns out is a very common occurrence. The tendency as an entrepreneur can be to follow the thing that’s making the most noise – your customers, the marketplace, the dollars, your fans, your passion, etc. But we don’t want entrepreneurs to follow their companies or these external forces. We want people to lead, and lead with not just the market and the business in mind but also themselves. Entrepreneurship is your opportunity to get what you want! So don’t give that up, even for noisy clients, dollars, etc. Instead get clarity around what is important to you, specifically three things, and build this into the direction of your business.

[ADDIS ABABA] African innovators and inventors who design products with the potential to drive the continent's economic transformation may benefit from a new awards scheme.

The Innovation Prize for Africa, worth US$100,000, will be given for the first time in February 2012 to the best innovators in three areas: information and communication technology (ICT), green technologies, and health and food security. The runner-up will receive US$50,000.

The prize was announced last month (8 July) by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Innovation Foundation (AIF) based in Switzerland.

There have been plenty of obituaries written for the newspaper business, most of which have a kernel of truth to them — but is journalism as we know it at risk as well? Dave Winer, a programming guru and visiting scholar at the New York University school of journalism, says it is. In a blog post on Friday, Winer argued that “journalism itself is becoming obsolete” because now anyone can do it. Is he right? In some ways, yes. One thing is for sure: Journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing networks and what Om calls the “democracy of distribution.” Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.

The relationship between a small business and its customers can be very complex at times. And although it’s not as intense as the relationships that we have with our loved ones, similar risks can be involved. The relationship between your business and your customers can be blemished by things like dishonesty, broken promises, and betrayals – real or perceived. These types of negative situations can have an adverse affect on your business, through decreases in sales, missed opportunities, and sometimes even litigation.

Of course, negative experiences don’t happen with every business relationship. Plenty of small businesses have been able to maintain healthy and profitable relationships with their customers for many, many years.

“A chronic shortage of engineering students threatens America’s role as the world’s leading innovator and continues to impede our nation’s fragile economic recovery,” wrote Paul Otellini, a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, in a recent opinion piece for The Washington Post. The council is holding a series of meetings to find ways to fix a perceived national problem: an engineering shortage. Otellini and the council claim that such a shortage seriously threatens America’s ability to create jobs, and that the U.S. risks losing its innovation edge to China and India, which are producing a million engineers per year — 12 times as many as the United States. The council hopes to increase U.S. engineering output by 10,000 engineers per year in an effort to deal with this crisis.

The logic behind this argument is flawed in many ways. First let’s tackle the myth of the Rising East’s mastermind engineers. China and India’s engineering graduation numbers have been used for the past decade to justify arguments that the United States is in trouble. My research team at Duke University dispelled common myths about China’s and India’s engineering-education advantages in December 2005. The graduation statistics most commonly touted then were: China graduates 600,000 per year, India, 350,000, and the U.S., 70,000. We found that, in 2004, when comparing apples with apples, the U.S. had graduated more engineers (roughly 140,000) than India had (roughly 120,000).

Every entrepreneur should spend plenty of time thinking about competitors, and how they relate to your business, but you need to be very careful what you say out loud about them to your team, your investors, and your customers. What you say speaks volumes about how you think about your startup, how smart you are, and your personal integrity.

I’ve spent hours talking to startup founders, and heard a thousand startup pitches, and I always listen carefully to what is said (or not said) about competitors. Everyone has a view on competitors, so you will likely get some off-the-cuff questions on this subject as well. Here are some common pitfalls or traps to avoid:

Friday, September 02, 2011:  The Toronto Region is Canada's largest information and communications technology (ICT) cluster and one of the top four in North America according to a new report published by the Toronto Region Research Alliance (TRRA). Information and Communications Technology in the Toronto Region is the first in a series of regional innovation cluster reports designed to highlight the strengths of key research-intensive sectors in which the Toronto Region has a particular advantage.

“This report is the first comprehensive summary of the Toronto Region‟s ICT cluster that focuses on the three pillars that drive innovation – industry, academic and research activity. These findings identify the advantages of the Toronto Region when it comes to attracting foreign investment in ICT-related research and development,” says Patrick Draper, president and CEO, TRRA.

If you suddenly found yourself unemployed, you may have once thought it was the perfect time to launch that new start-up you've been thinking about since college.

But maybe not anymore.

The number of unemployed people who tried their hand at launching start-ups fell to its lowest level in 25 years -- ever since Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outpatient firm, began tracking statistics in 1986 (via Inc.).

There are many factors that can inhibit entrepreneurship from thriving in a particular region. Perhaps it’s lack of access to capital. Or maybe governments put up too many barriers to startup creation, either intentionally or unintentionally. The region may not have existing entrepreneurship models with which to inspire the next generation of growth. Even cultural or societal traditions may serve as roadblocks to innovation and a willingness to try new ideas.

In the following videos, successful entrepreneurs and political figures discuss a number of the specific challenges to entrepreneurship in Latin America.

3 years ago to the day, on September 1st, 2008, I showed up on the HEC campus to start the HEC incubator. Today is September 1st, 2011, and I'm starting a new adventure, a startup. These two events make me want to write the story of these past 3 years.

I've learned a lot.

If I look back on my time running the HEC Incubator, the first thing is how incredibly fortunate I was to learn so much. I spent three years breaking down what makes entrepreneurs successful, learning from their mistakes, living alongside over 80 startups, meeting successful entrepreneurs who have built beautiful things… That stays with you!

ELIZABETH JACKSON: In an ironic development, Australian researchers have discovered that fat could itself be the solution to obesity. But not just any fat - brown fat.

Dr Paul Lee is an endocrinologist and research fellow with the Garvan Institute. He told Timothy McDonald that his team has managed to successfully grow brown fat outside the body.

PAUL LEE: The majority of fat in the human body is actually white fat and white fat basically functions as an energy storage system, storing fat for use during times of energy deficiency.

In contrast, brown fat is like a generator, it actually burns fat and releases the energy as heat. About 50 grams of white fat would store about 300 kilocalories of energy but the same amount of brown fat would actually burn 300 kilocalories per day; so brown fat can be seen as an energy burning organ to generate heat.

Jane and Dick, our fearless cofounders of SayAhh, have set up an accounting system and created their first set of financial statements. This week they set out to create their cap table and hire a CTO.

The founders each have common shares that will vest over four years. The vesting schedule protects each of the co-founders in case one gets hit by a bus or decides to drop the project after a short period of time. Also, there is an important tax election called an 83(b) election that they made which allows them to recognize and pay taxes for very small income of the value of the shares. Later, if they sell, the low tax basis and capital gains tax rates result in a lower tax liability than if they didn’t file the 83(b) election.