Feeling adventurous? If simply creating a start up isn’t exciting enoough for you, try doing it outside the borders of the United States. You might find that the advantages outweigh the added excitement.

There are plenty of good reasons for starting up a company abroad. Your new company may be targeting an overseas market, or you you could be in search of a more affordable labor pool or less government regulation. And some countries - like Chile, for example - offer startups significant financial incentives.

Whatever your reasons, in addition to everything required for a domestic startup, doing it in a foreign environment requires a lot of extra research, a good deal of patience and - as always - a bit of luck.

Ask most people to identify a creative person, and they’ll probably describe an artist — Picasso, Shakespeare or even Lady Gaga.

But what about a Nobel prize–winning chemist? Or a team of engineers that figures out how to make a car engine operate more efficiently?

Creativity, it turns out, is not only the domain of painters, singers and playwrights, says Robert DeHaan, a retired Emory University cell biologist who now studies how to teach creative thinking.

For more information: 

The summer before her freshman year at Cornell University, Lindsay Boyajian was touring Italy with her family when her father had a fashion crisis. “He was sick of looking like a tourist,” says Boyajian, 21. After assessing what the locals were wearing, her dad went shopping — and she went to work on a business idea: WeareverYouGo, a social media platform for sharing and shopping for fashion trends around the world. Though still in the early stages of development, the service aims to help tourists and business travelers solve the perpetual problem of what to pack — whether their concerns are practical, cultural or purely aesthetic.

This summer, while most college kids are working odd jobs or making copies as unpaid interns, Boyajian, a rising senior, is camped out in the Manhattan offices of OMD, the global media and marketing conglomerate with more than 8,000 employees. As a participant in the GE/OMD Incubator, she’s testing her elevator pitch on executives, fine tuning her business plan, and getting a crash course in marketing and funding, all the while working on the beta launch of her site.

You want to raise money online, and, like most of us, you’re in a hurry. You get to a popular crowdfunding site and you’re excited to start. But then after creating an account, bam, you’re hit with a ton of questions and forms. Suddenly, you feel less like you’re asking your friends for cash to help you throw a retirement party for your aunt, and more like you’re filling out a form to rent a car. Trust me, I’ve been there. It’s ironic, but crowdfunding platforms don’t always make it easy for you to raise the money you need quickly.

I’ve used most of the popular crowdfunding platforms, and this is how it goes: Up-front, you’re are asked for your credit-card information, your billing address, and your plans for your campaign. Many insist that you learn lessons about crowdfunding before getting started, and they require that you make reward levels & custom thank-you emails right then & there. When you are done with all of it, you realize: Woah, I just spent over an hour online, and all I wanted to do was to raise some cash to throw a party.

So-called hacker hostels in the Bay Area have become popular among aspiring technology entrepreneurs. Young programmers, designers and scientists come here to work, eat and sleep. Most come for the camaraderie and exchange of ideas.Pictured are Jiahao Li, left, and Bill Kilmer in a house in Mountain View.

James Sun the CEO of Pirq and one of the contestants on Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice recently gave a talk at Seattle’s Thinkspace regarding his personal philosophy on how to avoid being an “entrePOORneur” (his word, not mine) and becoming a successful businessperson.  

  “We Literally Have a Pivot Every Day”

“The world is changing and the question is, as an entrepreneur, can you master change?” Though Sun’s father disagreed with this concept, believing that the right way to run a business was to set a goal and go for it, Sun points out that the world is changing. Between advancements in technology, not to mention the rapid uptick in new businesses being created, the flexible businesses are the ones that survive.

An outsourced sales company has said entrepreneurship could overcome unemployment after a dramatic increase in self-employment in the last quarter.

In the last quarter, the number of self-employed people in the UK reached a total of 4.2 million with over 600,000 self employed entrepreneurs in London. It is also reported that there has been a rise in the average income for self-employed individuals with earnings in the first two months of 2012 increasing by 63% compared to 2011.

In Automate This, a book due out next month, author and entrepreneur Christopher Steiner tells the story of stockbroker Thomas Peterffy, the creator of the first automated Wall Street trading system. Using a computer to execute trades, without humans entering them manually on a keyboard, was controversial in 1987—so controversial that Nasdaq pressured him to unplug from its network. Then, with a wink, Peterffy built an automated machine that could tap out the trades on a traditional keyboard—technically obeying Nasdaq rules. Peterffy made $25 million in 1987 and is now a billionaire.

Today, automated trading bots account for nearly three-quarters of U.S. equity trading by volume. Trading houses plow millions into fiber optics and microwave dishes so their algorithms can send trades a millisecond faster than the next guys'. And although the first trading robot was built 25 years ago, most of the change on Wall Street has occurred during just the last few years. When it comes to automation, we may be in the elbow of an exponential curve.

The Atacama Desert in Chile is on the wrong side of the Andes. The trade winds that might bring moisture from the east get caught in the mountains instead, making this the driest place on Earth. But this turns out to be perfect for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array—the most powerful telescope in history. At 5,000 meters—about as high as Everest Base Camp—light pollution is minimal, and the heavens seem near.

It always takes time for what we know to become what we do. This is true in many areas, but particularly economic development. Recent research from the Kauffman Foundation, an economic think tank, found that job growth comes not from small business, as is often believed. It comes from new companies and is especially pronounced in fast growing companies under two years of age.

For the past three years the Connecticut Technology Council been looking at what this means for Connecticut. From the Council’s Competitiveness Agenda project, it was found that the state has not kept up with our neighbors in terms of how well we help new company formation and growth. That effort, along with the work of many like-minded colleagues, has supported the state in launching an exciting new initiative called the Innovation Ecosystem (IE). Led by Connecticut Innovations and the Department of Economic and Community Development, the Innovation Ecosystem’s goal is to significantly increase the quality and quantity of support for new, fast growing companies in the state.

At Behance's annual 99 Percent conference, author Jonah Lehrer, who writes about neuroscience for the New Yorker, spoke about the latest research on creativity and what makes people successful. 

He concluded that the character trait that separates successful people from the rest is grit:

A leading business lobby group in the UK has called on the government to pursue the potential of the green economy.

John Cridland, director-general of the CBI said that there was no conflict between going for growth or going green and that this was being misrepresented as a “false choice”.

“The choice between going green and going for growth is a false choice. Green and growth do go together, and the statistics back this up. The UK’s low-carbon and environmental goods and services market is worth more than £120bn a year. That’s equivalent to more than eight per cent of GDP,” said Cridland.

If your startup is looking for an angel investor, does it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up? In reality, hitting large numbers of angels in multiple locations with a generic pitch is one of the least productive approaches.

Here are five key things you need to know to quickly find the right angel for your startup:

Angels invest in people, more often than they invest in ideas. That means they need to know you, or someone they trust who does know you (warm introduction). For maximum credibility, start networking for potential investors to build relationships a few months before you start asking for money.

Alltop co-founder and former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki recently shared some of his strategies for outperforming competitors at WOBI’s World Innovation Forum. 

Kawasaki knows firsthand that, like Apple, companies can succeed when they believe in their products. But how does a business gain that sort of confidence? According to Kawasaki, by building something that has meaning and is innovative. 

Kawasaki's "rules" have served as his own guidelines, and have helped propel him to success. Here are his must-know strategies that could change how your business operates: 

Three recent articles by innovation experts suggest that the term has been so misused and abused by the innovation-obsessed that it has lost all meaning. According to Leslie Kwoh of The Wall Street Journal, along with Bill Taylor and Scott Anthony of the Harvard Business Review, we should chuck the word entirely and essentially start from scratch.

Let’s assume that two of their assumptions are true. 1. The business world is (still) obsessed with the concept of “innovation.” 2. This concept is confusing to many of those same people, and therefore the word is usually misused. But what about number three? Has the word innovation lost all its meaning, and should it be abandoned altogether? I would maintain that regardless of how fuzzy the word and the concept have become, the fact remains that innovation is still a very real force in the world, and one that is accessible to anyone who wants to do genuinely innovative work.

New York City's billionaire mayor is using his personal fortune to try to spark innovation in the nation's cities — inviting 1,300 mayors to compete for millions of dollars in funding for new programs meant to solve urban challenges and enhance city life.

For the second year running, Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore lead in overall innovation performance according to the Global Innovation Index 2012 (GII): Stronger Innovation Linkages for Global Growth, published by INSEAD, the leading international business school, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations.

The report ranks 141 countries/economies on the basis of their innovation capabilities and results. It benefits from the experience of Knowledge Partners Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Company, and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), as well as an Advisory Board of eleven international experts.

There's something special about entrepreneurs whose startups take off and those whose stay small--starting with how they begin.

In studying successful entrepreneurs for my new book, Breakthrough Branding, I was struck by a series of contrarian habits that set them apart. Here are five contrarian lessons that I learned from them.

1. Think "small" rather than search for a "big idea."

Contrary to everything we've heard about finding a "big idea," there's a fundamental paradox in business. Big ideas are small--simple, focused and different so they can occupy a specific niche and dominate their category. Kevin Systrom was building a location-based mobile business like Foursquare, but found that only one piece of it, the photo app, was different and had real traction with customers. So he focused on the photo app, named it Instagram, and became insta-rich. If you can't write your business idea on the back of your business card or explain it to a ten-year old, you probably have a big, bad idea.

Stepping away from your work, if only for a few hours at the beach, can be important for a healthy lifestyle and a thriving business. Feeling guilty for taking a break? Stay in a productive mindset this summer by picking up favourites recommended by successful entrepreneurs. From lessons in leadership to controlling fear, their picks might be just what you need to recharge.

Despite a persistently high U.S. unemployment rate and sluggish overall economic growth, one segment of the U.S. economy continues to exceed expectations – entrepreneurs. According to data compiled by Ernst & Young LLP from more than 600 finalists of the 2012 US Entrepreneur of the Year® program, innovation-driven entrepreneurs continue to defy the odds, expanding their companies, spurring job growth and creating momentum in an otherwise moribund economy.

Research compiled from these companies, which together employ nearly 700,000 workers, affirms that, nationally, these innovative, expansion-oriented entrepreneurs continue to grow impressively, achieving the following between 2009-2011:

• 30 percent job growth, compared to negative overall U.S. job growth (approx. -1 percent)
• 48 percent revenue growth, compared to overall U.S. revenue growth of 5.6 percent