Some more cash should be flowing in Baltic investment deals thanks to the launch of the Baltic Innovation Fund (BIF) launched by the European Investment Fund along with the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian governments. The fund is a €100 million fund of funds investing in Baltic private equity, with the goal of pumping up deals and increasing the region's attractiveness.

Advertorial featuring a point of view from Anindya Basu- Managing Partner, Products Operating Group, Accenture in India on ‘Top line growth from the bottom of the pyramid’ which appeared in Hindustan Times.

When her mother fell ill, a student from Kerala had to take responsibility of the household chores including washing clothes by hand. Since the family could not afford a washing machine, the student created a machine that is powered by pedals and did not require electricity. The cost of the machine: just US$45!

SPECIAL REPORT / EU ministers with research portfolios have agreed new funding procedures for SMEs so that they can more easily access funds from the EU’s next framework programme for research – called Horizon 2020 – but the exact sums remain in doubt.

Ministers agreed on 11 October to an incentive mechanism within the Horizon programme, with its proposed €80 billion budget, designed to encourage the participation of small and medium enterprises.

This will see a proportion of the Horizon budget set aside for SMEs within a special legal instrument, designed to target businesses with a potential to grow rapidly and expend internationally.

No shocker here: One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners is finding the funds necessary to launch – and eventually grow – their businesses.  If you’re reading this, you’re likely looking right now.

There have never been more funding choices to consider for prospective entrepreneurs.

As a social entrepreneur for more than four decades as well as an angel investor and venture capitalist, I’ve experienced the highs and lows of business funding myself and have learned the hard way what investors are looking for before committing to fund.

4000 people attended this year’s Dublin Web Summit conference and watched two days of speeches and exhibits by leaders in the technology industry. 250 startup companies set up base in the conference halls, eager to share information, seek investors, and attract potential customers.

The Electric Ireland Spark of Genius Award went to a US-based startup SmartThings. Besides enormous recognition, the company was awarded with a €100,000 cash prize. CEO Alex Hawkinson thanked Ireland for being an “incredible host” and hopes to open an Irish office in the near future.

Inspiration and creativity drive your entrepreneurial spirit. Without original ideas and strategies, businesses lose their unique identities. However, it can be difficult to keep the creative fire stoked on a daily basis. The last thing you want is for your inspiration to grow stagnant. So how do you ensure you’re continually moving forward with new perspectives and fresh ideas?

Be Playful

It’s nearly impossible to create on demand. Consider a writer staring at an empty page, paralyzed by writer’s block. It is a frustrating, helpless feeling when the creative muse has left the building.

New York edged out London by one point for the top spot in the annual Cities of Opportunity report by  PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report measures  a city's comprehensive potential for business across ten economic indicators. The categories range from intellectual capital and innovation to sustainability and the natural environment to city gateway—an indicator of global interconnectedness and international attraction. 

There are thousands of books, magazines and blogs proffering advice to small business owners. But the advice I heed the most comes from CEOs, founders and presidents that have successfully run their businesses (or even sold them).

While at the New York XPO on October 17, 2012 (I was there for the Small Business Influencer Awards Gala), I caught the session, “How I Did It: Lessons From America’s Best-Run Companies.” Three business owners shared their tips for running successful companies, moderated by Steve Strauss, senior business columnist for USAToday, and a Small Business Influencer Champion. Here’s the good stuff.

Nowadays, you see the newest and latest products marketed by components that relate to the benefit of the environment. The green economy is rising by the second. Businesses and people are placing more of a value on “going green.” The attention on the global environment is growing. For this purpose, more jobs have been created or altered to go green.

Environmental Entrepreneurs In general, entrepreneurship, along with internet businesses, is a rising field. Environmental innovation and entrepreneurship inquires those with a passion and mission to improve the environment. These people do not necessarily need a business degree, but may have an expertise in the field and the action to create the applications. Featured on the MSNBC website is a section dedicated to environmental entrepreneurs. The section includes world news, interviews of environmental entrepreneurs, and daily tips. With the growing popularity of the going green culture, many people are beginning to take an interest in green businesses.

A popular approach for aspiring entrepreneurs these days seems to be to corner anyone who will listen, with a pitch on their current “million dollar idea.” The initial monologue usually ends with the question “How much money do you think this is worth?” In my humble opinion, ideas are a commodity, and are really not worth much, outside the context of a visionary leader and a plan.

Over the past couple of decades, experts have perfected the art of brainstorming and other idea-generation techniques. Executives and investors are now increasingly exposed to a wealth of ideas. The result is that ideas are no longer in short supply, and no longer a differentiator in competition.

If your elevator pitch is a hyper-compressed two-minute overview of your hopes, dreams and the thing you've been building for the last three years, you're doing everyone a disservice. I'll never be able to see the future through your eyes this quickly, and worse, if you've told me what I need to know to be able to easily say no, I'll say no.

The best elevator pitch doesn't pitch your project. It pitches the meeting about your project. The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it. It's not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it's a little fractal of the entire story, something real.

Tech companies are starting to get pretty creative with employee perks, and they're oozing into workers' lives outside of the office. Evernote is a company the helps you access notes, photos and more from any device, and it's been valued by investors at $1 billion. Last year, it started giving employees one of the best perks yet. Now, twice per month, its 250 workers are able to get their houses cleaned on Evernote. The idea came from CEO Phil Libin's wife.

When Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital decided to relocate to University City from the office submarket of Conshohocken, Pa., he settled on 4040 Locust St. The space was familiar to him. As a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Kopelman remembered frequenting 4040 Locust when Salad Alley and Bacci Gourmet Pizza were housed in the space and then when it was a bowling alley. At one point, it served as Urban Outfitters’ first store.

In theory, crowdfunding appears to be a great way for people with good ideas to take advantage of the Internet. Throw your idea online and a slew of like-minded investors will give you money to bring your idea to fruition. Artists have been doing it successfully for a few years on Kickstarter to fund creative projects, and teachers on Funding4Learning to fund education projects. To bolster this burgeoning concept, in April 2012, the United States Government passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which contains crowdfunding provisions to help these entrepreneurs raise funds. Taking a closer look at crowdfunding reveals a system fraught with peril that will likely lead to an increase in litigation.

Maybe it’s because Web start-ups require less cash to get started these days. Or maybe it’s because valuations got a little out of hand and venture investors decided not to get into bidding wars for deals. One thing is clear, though: Investors got a bit stingier in the third quarter, as companies raised $6.92 billion, a 32% decrease from the same period in 2011, according to new data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

It’s a natural goal to want to maximize resources. But sometimes pursuing “more” causes businesses and leaders to push ahead in the wrong places in the wrong ways. As much as we’d like to think people can continue to increase hours and maintain quality of output, it simply doesn’t work. As long as humans remain human there will be a point of diminishing returns.

Most people, if they’re being honest, don’t have a clear plan for what they’ll be doing in their careers five years from now.

But career planning is serious, high-stakes business for biotech venture capitalists. When a firm raises a new fund to invest in biotechnology, the partners have to personally commit to oversee their investments for 10 to 12 years. While most people get an annual performance review from their boss, biotech VCs generally have to wait a decade to get a true read on their performance.

Like many other engineering types, I dreamed for years of starting my own high-flying technology company. Like a moth to light, I am inherently drawn to the idea of creating something from nothing and seeing it grow. It was thus no surprise when I left my big-company career at Accenture a few years out of college to join the startup world. It was Mark Andreessen’s cover shot on Time magazine in 1996 after Netscape’s era-defining IPO that finally pushed me over the edge. Sixteen years later, I am on my fifth startup. It’s been a phenomenal ride that has culminated (so far, at least) with my current startup, Zenoss, of which I am co-founder and CEO.

In startup circles, nothing about my story is particularly surprising on the surface. In fact, to the degree that there is a “typical” entrepreneur story, mine would be it. What is novel and contrary to conventional wisdom, though, is that I don’t live in Silicon Valley (or even Cambridge). I live in Annapolis, Maryland, the nation’s Sailing Capital. And most of Zenoss is in Austin, Texas, the world’s Live Music Capital.

Taking the plunge into the world of self-employment is exciting. You’re finally gaining the independence you’ve been seeking, putting your expertise and skills to use exactly how you see best fit. But with this professional independence comes financial independence – a much less exciting endeavor when you’ve become accustomed to a steady salary and benefits under a corporate gig.

But financial independence doesn’t have to be daunting. Here are six tips to help you get off on the right fiscal footing.

Is college worth it? The question almost seems ludicrous on its face.  The unemployment rate for people with a college degree is only 4.2% versus 9.1% for people with a college degree and 13.0% for people with less than a high school education. In this economy, that should be an open and shut case.

Yet in an uncertain world, many are questioning the value of college. There’s significant talk of a “higher education bubble.”  Skyrocketing tuition rates and the correspondingly high levels of student debt has driven a lot of this. Tuition has been rising at a much faster rate than inflation overall. Total student loan debt is now at $1 trillion. And unlike other forms of debt, student loans can’t be easily discharged in bankruptcy.