Those who choose to become an entrepreneur do so for a wide variety of reasons.  When challenges arise in your entrepreneurial path, as they inevitably do, it’s useful to remember why you became an entrepreneur in the first place.  It can help you “maintain a level head,” tap your willpower and continue to fight to achieve your entrepreneurial goals and dreams.

So, what are some of the reasons we become entrepreneurs?  Here are some thoughts:

We want to change the world.

When well-known people or people we know well pass away, it reminds us of our own mortality and often makes us think about what our own legacy will be.  Have you thought about your legacy?  What do you want to be remembered for?

I recently wrote an article entitled, “Entrepreneur? Why Did You Do It“?  The article was meant to remind myself and my fellow entrepreneurs of why we took the leap into entrepreneurship.  One of the reasons I mentioned in the article had to do with leaving our mark on the world.  What does that mean?  The meaning is likely different for each one of us.

Fremont: There is several evidence that the world is under the shadow of recession; the entrepreneurs do not have any chance to make mistakes. If so done, it might cost them their blood and soul, i.e., their company. So there is no chance or very few chances for them to make mistakes. Below mentioned are few of the mistakes that entrepreneurs usually tend to make and which should be avoided during recession.

Chucking the Best The main goal behind starting an organization is to be profitable throughout the year. However during recession, your organization is not just the one whose profit dwindles and as a result, many organizations chuck their best employees out just to save few dollars. Losing a talented employee may further weaken your business and may become incapable of competition.

“Open innovation” isn’t a term you associate with Australia. We don’t even fund it anymore.

When we used to, it was called Innovation Exchange. But it collapsed. Listening to accomplished speakers highlighting this point at the recent Innovation Series event at Langham Hotel, I asked myself: “Why?”

Why, in a country as great as ours, are we so bad at collaboration?

We came up with the Victor lawnmower, Vegemite, Fosters and Greg Norman, and even managed, rightly or wrongly, to sell them overseas (except Norman, who went willingly and after that 60 Minutes thing, where Chris Evert sucked his toes, we willingly obliged).

Venture capital investment in the life sciences has fallen 39 percent over the past three years as the costly, lengthy process of getting approval for pharmaceuticals from the Food and Drug Administration has spurred companies to shift their investments to overseas markets in Europe and Asia.

According to the survey of 150 venture capital firms, more than 40 percent of companies have slashed investment in biopharmaceutical companies and another 42 percent cut investment in medical device companies. More than half of the companies surveyed said they expect to increase their investment in healthcare IT companies.

A decade ago, Maryland companies were reeling in more than $1 billion annually in venture capital.

These days, they are lucky to get one-third of that. Last year, businesses in the state attracted $412 million in capital, more than the decade low of $314 million the previous year, according to figures from the MoneyTree report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

In the first half of this year, the total of $157.5 million was 22 percent less than a year earlier. Columbia customer relationship services company Merkle, which CEO and entrepreneur David Williams acquired in 1988 and took to a higher level, has received the biggest venture capital infusion in Maryland in the last two years with $75 million last year.

With great sadness did I receive the news today that Steve Jobs, Apple’s former CEO has died. He leaves behind a great legacy and a much improved technology world that is finally able to deliver some tangible social economic value. We wish his family the best and great strength in time to come. Steve Jobs leaves a hole in the heart of those who cherish meaningful innovation.

Apart from teaching the technology world how to enter and own certain markets Steve Jobs demonstrated that in an industry built to engineer groundbreaking technology innovation, its financial arbitrage (venture capital) was wrong. Dead wrong.

I am pleased to welcome you to the U.S. Cluster Mapping and Registry Project website where you can access the latest data, tools and information to maximize your economic development efforts. The U.S. Cluster Mapping and Registry Project was created through a strategic investment by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to Harvard Business School designed to generate new practical, user-friendly cluster tools.

Today there is a growing demand for quality data and comparative benchmarks across regions, as governments and organizations need to understand and map their strengths and assets in order to develop and implement strong regional economic development strategies. With severely strained budgets and ongoing austerity measures, local governments and their partners must be nimble and effective to adopt the very best practices whenever possible. The U.S. Cluster Mapping and Registry Project responds to these needs by providing a rich database, an interactive map and new tools to mobilize clusters, foster collaboration and strengthen regional economic development efforts.

When you first built your company website you had a primary goal in mind. Maybe you hoped to better market your business. Maybe you hoped to enhance your professional credibility and standing in your industry. Maybe you just wanted a website because everyone else had one and you didn’t want to get left behind.

Regardless of the type of business you run, you built a website because you hoped it would help you sell stuff: products, services, or even just yourself. Clean, simple, to the point.

Then, over time, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man your website took on a life of its own.

I recently walked into a packed hall of 200 Parsons students for an event called “Start Something--Why Creatives Need to Become Entrepreneurs,” organized by the NYCreative Interns group. Four women entrepreneurs, including Laurel Touby, the founder of Mediabistro, were up front, talking about their experiences of launching their respective businesses. The incredible energy in the room highlighted an emerging trend--the headlong crash of creativity into capitalism to forge a startup model for the future. In this new model, designers drive the force of American entrepreneurialism.

This business model is a cause for true optimism. It’s not the big business capitalism that no longer generates jobs or income or tax revenues. Nor is it the old, slow attempts by design and design thinking to reform big corporations to make their culture more innovative, with limited success. Rather, it’s the capitalism of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic--the original, early form of entrepreneurial capitalism. It’s the promise of design fusing with startup culture to increase innovation by raising the success rate of venture capital from 10% to as high as 80%. This growing desire among designers to bring their user focus, strategic vision, iterative methodologies, and propositional thinking to the still-geeky, tech/engineering-centric world of startups promises to be transformative and explosive.

China's journey from a seriously poor, insular, economy to the "shop floor of the world" took a little more than two decades. Today, less than a decade later, it appears poised to evolve into becoming a leading global innovator. But can China actually make this next great leap forward?

Many observers think that China is ripe for innovative leadership. TomsonReuters observed, on the basis of patenting trends, that: "an epic industrial revolution has brought China to its current state of development, but it will be China's intellectual revolution that will carry it forward." Further analysis of this same data (recently posted by Mark Perry) would certainly support the view that China appears to be fast becoming a global innovation power.

If you are a non-technical person ready to put together a startup, there are some very important things you must do before you start to look for a technical co-founder, though in fact, you can launch your tech startup without one.

One of the first things I did when I left my  job at Goldman Sachs was to start looking for a technical co-founder.  I read multiple blog posts and commentaries about the difficulty of finding a technical co-founder.  Some were nicer than others.  But the less encouraging ones put zero value on being a business co-founder.  The comments section for many of these posts were filled with “How could you possibly think someone will want to join you?”

FDA released a report containing immediate steps that can be taken to drive biomedical innovation, while improving the health of Americans. The report addresses concerns about the medical product development pipeline, one of the most pressing challenges facing the biomedical industries.

Release of the report, kicks off a new FDA-wide Innovation Initiative, which promises to redouble the agency’s efforts to encourage innovations that will promote public health as well as strengthen the American economy.

“Dissatisfied entrepreneur” should be an oxymoron. After all, you’re the boss, so you have the opportunity to create your job, set your terms, and choose who you work with—a seemingly perfect trifecta.

So why is it so common for us entrepreneurs to utterly exhaust ourselves in the process of building our businesses, even though we plot the course? Why is it so hard to set a sustainable pace despite the fact that we are clearly thinking long-term and know that stamina matters? Why are we so frequently burnt out?

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A procedure that treats hard-to-control high blood pressure by delivering low-power radio-frequency energy through a catheter to surrounding nerves near the kidneys is being hailed as the medical innovation of the year, chosen from nearly 150 candidates by physicians at the Cleveland Clinic.

The top 10 medical innovations for 2012 are being announced today at the Clinic's ninth annual Innovation Summit. The groundbreaking medical inroads chosen hit almost every aspect of health care, from new treatments for diabetes and brain aneurysms, to technical advances that detect concussions in athletes, to the management of computerized medical data.

In my post Key terms in a termsheet Part 2 I covered the basics of anti-dilution.  In that post I wrote:

Anti-dilution is a term which compensates the investor if there is a subsequent round of investment done at a lower share price, often called a down-round.  The mechanism by which it works is a retrospective adjustment of the share price so that the investor gets more shares and it is as if they they had originally invested at a lower share price.

DES MOINES – Advanced manufacturing has been a “powerhouse” of economic growth and good-paying jobs in Iowa in recent years even while global recession and competition have posed significant challenges, according to a research consultant who assessed innovation strategies state officials adopted in 2005. Agriculture-based bioscience and biomedical advancements also have been growth areas but could become a key worldwide engine if north-central U.S. states could devise a one-stop process that could nurture business opportunities in a region that is home to a mix of big U.S. and multi-national manufacturing companies, top-notch research universities and the most productive farm land in the world, said Simon Tripp, senior director at the Pennsylvania-based Battelle Memorial Institute.

Steven P. Jobs, who died Oct. 5, 2011 at 56, co-founded Apple, popularized the personal computer, made music accessible and revolutionized the cellphone industry. Mr. Jobs was ousted from his own company but returned to build it into the most valuable technology company in the world.

He was my generation’s Henry Ford and Walt Disney rolled into one.

He was the hippie who rescued business. This follower of Gandhi made capitalism cool for a generation of sixties radicals.

He was an artist by heart. If Apple is Athenian and Microsoft is Roman, then history needs be rewritten to show that Athens ultimately trumped Rome.

Innovation is like love, aptly described by those old posters I used to see at my dentist’s office, “if you love something, set it free, and if it comes back to you, it’s yours…”  Same thing for innovative technologies, novel methods and creative people.  Here’s a poster that should hang in hallways:  “If you want innovation to take place, set it free, and if it comes back to you – well – it’s not precisely yours, but at least you’ve succeeded in introducing genuine value to the rest of the world….”

So what’s the problem?  The problem is that universities and the federal agencies keep trying to improve university innovation strategy by creating initiatives and programs whose intent is to gain more, not less control over university research.  However, throwing more money and resources at the problem without gaining a deeper understanding of the problem won’t change anything.  Without a more radical approach, we’ll keep recycling the same programs and initiatives that merely re-mix the status quo.