Entrepreneurship thrives in poor economic times — the opportunity cost for taking a risk with a business idea is quite low when the alternatives are less than lucrative. It’s times like these that also lead some to think about a starting a business that serves a social purpose as well. As individual consumers and city, state and federal governments tighten their purse strings, start-ups seeking to fulfill goals of profit and social value creation need to recognize this changing environment and adjust accordingly. What follows are some considerations to take into account for moving that “change the world” business idea from paper to practice in 2012.

Despite hiccups in the IPO and M&A markets, venture capitalists were still mighty busy in 2011. Investors in privately-held companies sunk $30.6 billion in 3,051 companies last year, the largest dollar and deal total in the past 10 years, according to a report out today from CB Insights.

Just by comparison, in 2010 VCs invested $23.7 billion in 2,792 deals. The boom in venture capital investing led CB Insights to predict that the “bubble talk will shift into overdrive.”

Perhaps that’s the case in New York or California or Massachusetts, each of which saw upticks in fourth quarter investing over the previous period in 2010.

Imagine it’s 1997 and you’re sitting in a small room in Los Gatos, California. You’ve decided that you are going to get into the movie rental business. That’s right, you want to dethrone a huge entrenched competitor that has been dominating the industry for years, Blockbuster. How would you design the next big idea to disrupt the industry?

Most conventional wisdom tells you the next step should be one of three possibilities. You can either do some brainstorming and come up with 100 new ways to improve the movie rental experience, do some research to understand movie renters’ deepest needs, or do some accounting and find out how to build a business that operates at a lower cost than Blockbuster.

Columbus is hardly going to be confused with Silicon Valley, but central Ohio’s growing technology economy is beginning to get noticed, just the same.

It’s something that Ted Ford takes some pride in noting. As founding president and CEO of technology-business incubator TechColumbus, Ford for six years has been a leader in the drive to expand the ever-more-important segment of the economy.

It's extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.

For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell. Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.

Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:

Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)

A Montgomery County-based nonprofit is planning to extend to Baltimore its mission of translating laboratory research into startup companies.

Where it differs from previous efforts is that it plans to get its drive from the private sector, rather than from government or universities. Organizers of BioHealth Innovation Inc. have plans for entrepreneurs to root out business ideas in federal and university labs and build an accelerator in which they can grow in response to market demand.

I hate Woody Allen. Here’s why. Because if you’re Jewish and a little neurotic then it has become a cliché that nerdy neurotic Jewish people describe themselves as “Woody Allen-esque” thinking it will attract women. They do this on dating services. The idea is that they will then attract some waif-like Mia Farrow-ish  (or the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan) blonde who will love all of their neuroses and want to have sex all the time and will, in the ideal case (the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, the 21-year-old Juliette Lewis in Husbands & Wives), be the most mature  in the movie and yet still be madly in love with the 30-year-older Allen.

Richard Bendis, President and CEO of Innovation America and Vice Chair of NASVF said in a last year’s interview, “Cleveland’s regional ecosystem is one of the most robust regions in the US at this time.” To prove Mr. Bendis’ point, Ohio’s venture capital activity in 2010 strongly recovered from the economic downturn. Investment was up more than 80%, well above the national average of 20%, with over $567 million invested in 341 Ohio companies.

During the last decade, Ohio has been carefully crafting its innovation ecosystem from the“top down” by putting in place unique programs like the Ohio Department of Development’s Ohio Third Frontier initiative and the Ohio Capital Fund and from “bottom up” by supporting strong regional partners like JumpStart and TechColumbus, etc.

I had a great breakfast meeting at the Cambridge Marriott with Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT yesterday morning. We had never met before and I loved the conversation – his brain was bubbling with ideas that are relevant to many of the things I’m interested in, he challenged some of my thinking, and we had a deep and awesome conversation about open source hardware, makers, and MakerBot.

This morning Raj Bhargava (who recently co-founded two companies I’ve invested in – Yesware and SkedulMe) sent me a blog post by Michael titled Tip for Getting More Organized: Don’t. In it Michael makes the argument that the notion of spending time each day organizing your tasks, the concept of email folders, and the idea of productively organizing yourself is obsolete

We know that social media is a huge part of the modern job search. But being active on social media also can prevent you from searching stealthily. Coworkers and bosses can see who you’ve recently followed on Twitter (handles of job boards could tip them off), Facebook friends can see your new friends in the ticker (what if they’re recruiters?!) and misapplied settings on your Google+ circles could blow your cover. So yes, in addition to the difficulty of trying to find a job in this economy, the very tools that could prove most useful could also majorly backfire. In fact, according to a study last October by Wakefield Research and commissioned by TheLadders, 76% of survey respondents say “it’s impossible to maintain your privacy when searching for a job online.”

It’s no surprise that confidentiality is an ever-more important aspect of the job search — 88% of people say privacy and confidentiality are important when they’re cruising for a new career.

Adam Katz is happy to talk to reporters when he is promoting his business, a charter flight company based on Long Island called Talon Air.

But when the subject was his position as one of America’s top earners, he balked. Seated at a desk fashioned from a jet fuel cell, wearing a button-down shirt with the company logo, he considered the public relations benefits and found them lacking: “It’s not very popular to be in the 1 percent these days, is it?”

A few months ago, Mr. Katz was just a successful businessman with five children, an $8 million home, a family real estate company in Manhattan and his passion, 10-year-old Talon Air.

Introducing the AUTM Global Technology Portal (GTP): AUTM's exciting new tool for showcasing academic technologies available for licensing. If you're an AUTM member, you're already signed up for the GTP. Join us for this free tutorial on how to make the most of AUTM's newest member benefit. We'll walk you through every step for setting up your profile, and provide an overview of all of the GTP's many features.

With the AUTM GTP you can:

• Have your technologies automatically pulled from your institution's database
• Post information about your success stories and startups
• Connect with others in the technology transfer community
• Market your technologies at no cost to you
• Find other universities for collaborative research projects

President Obama announced yesterday an initiative to merge commerce-related departments of the federal government into one entity and to promote the Small Business Administration head to Cabinet member. Franchisor and franchisee advocates are generally positive about the move.

Using his executive authority, he took the first step in promoting the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Karen Mills, to White House Cabinet Secretary, alongside the Secretaries of the Treasury, Labor, Defense and others. At the same time, the President is asking Congress to grant him the authority to merge at least six entities into a single department.

On stage at last month’s Le Web conference Shervin Pishevar, a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, stated “The World is a Startup.” It’s an interesting perspective, and I think what’s true for the world is also true for countries, states and municipalities. With developments like last month’s announcement that Cornell was selected to build a new tech campus in New York City, it seems to follow that if “a city is a startup,” then the best mayors are the ones who are looking at their cities in much the same way as entrepreneurs look at the companies they have founded.

Incubators are playing an increasingly vital role in acquiring meaningful investment for first-time entrepreneurs. TechCrunch reported that elite accelerators like Y Combinator receive on average one application every minute, and AngelPad reminds its participants that it is many times more selective than the Harvard Business School.

Incubators ask for a 2 to 10 percent stake in your company, a sum that could alternatively be used to attract a junior co-founder or provide meaningful ownership to the first few engineers you enlist. In return, incubators offer intensive coaching, networking with other founders, and warm introductions to likely investors. Incubators give first-time entrepreneurs and international teams alike a crucial link to Silicon Valley.

You married an entrepreneur.

You married an unending source of ideas and passion…the eternal optimist.

You may not have known it at the time, but you agreed to travel down an ever-changing path of life.

In fact, you’re probably traveling down multiple paths at once.

You married a person who considers sleep as optional.

How about money? Oh yeah, that thing that entrepreneurs periodically think about.

Yes, there will be countless moments when your spouse appears unfocused, spread too thin, and/or distracted by impossible dreams. (In most cases, you’re probably right!)

I am looking to start an angel fund and was wondering how easy it would be for mainland Chinese investors to invest in it. Would they have to apply via the EB-5 visa program, even if they didn’t want a green card? –K.S., New York

There is no requirement for mainland Chinese, or for any non-U.S. resident who wants to invest in the United States, to participate in the EB-5 program, which has been growing in popularity. “Many Chinese nationals invest directly—and fully legally—in the United States through various non EB-5 vehicles and entity structures, including funds,” says Janet Carmosky, chief executive officer of business networking group The China Business Network.

Tech Launch Arizona, headed by UA President Eugene Sander, is a hub that allows UA students and researchers to get their inventions out in the marketplace.

Sander and Len Jessup, the dean of the Eller College of Management, are spearheading the program, which will provide a more direct avenue for UA inventions to be licensed out to companies.

Tech Launch, which began in November, will promote all types of concepts, such as science and research, in addition to inventions from students within the entrepreneurship program and patents already in the process.

Whether it’s a business or personal interaction, multiple studies show that as much as 50-65% of the communication is nonverbal. That means that people who are addicted to text messaging and email may be sending only half the message, and receivers often misinterpret even that half.

Yet the use of text messaging for business purposes continues to grow, in concert with more of Gen-Y entering the workplace, and a continuing increase in the global rate of texting by everyone. This total rate for 2011 has been estimated at 7 trillion, or nearly 225,000 text messages sent every second, according to the Quora statistics website.

President Obama announced Friday that he is elevating the head of the Small Business Administration to a Cabinet-level position, as he urged Congress to also grant him permission to consolidate that and other federal agencies in an attempt to make government more efficient.

The decision to bring SBA Administrator Karen Mills into the president's Cabinet does not need congressional approval. However, Obama's much broader proposal to merge overlapping agencies does -- the president appealed to Congress Friday to help make that happen.