Anyone who has ever been around entrepreneurs and early-stage companies knows that early-stage business projections (revenue, cash flow, profit) are overly optimistic. Experienced investors always cut them down before analyzing the company. And experienced investors also know that a top-down set of projections (such as, “We’ll get .5% of a $10 billion market and that’s how we’ll become a $50 million company.”) are virtually worthless.

But I’ve just identified another type of problem–I need to come up with a clever name for it– that for now I’ll call RED (Revenue-Expense Disagreement). RED is when the expense line doesn’t match up to the (usually overblown) revenue projections.

This is the first of my Nine Guiding Principles.

About 10 years ago Tom Churchwell, a VC in the Chicago area, said to me, “I’ve never seen a technology company fail because of the technology.” I’ve come to really understand this statement since I’ve now seen first hand, time and again, technology startups that manage to get their technology to work correctly yet still flame out.

What happens is that the founders, who are often technologists, are focused on making sure they can get the technology to work, but the businesses fail because they didn’t take the time to really understand the needs and motivations of their target customer audience. I won’t call this a “build it and they will come” phenomenon because I think that’s insulting (even though it happens). Rather I’ve learned first hand that its hard, make that REALLY hard, to understand how customers will respond to new technology…especially if the team doesn’t have anyone with domain expertise from the customer industry. The list of products that get to market, but which aren’t positioned properly, priced correctly, promoted through the right channels or provided with the correct customer support are legion.

Late September is always a busy time in New York and Washington for world leaders. New York is crowded with heads of state and visionaries at the UN Assembly or the Clinton Global Initiative, and in Washington, DC, the World Bank Group and IMF Annual Meetings that took place this past weekend always spur an assortment of organizations with global economic development missions to gather their flocks. We all wonder what all these expensive ‘meetings of the minds’ are accomplishing. To share my own bias, it prompts me once a year to check in and see how much development bureaucrats are really seeing and listening to the entrepreneurs on the ground doing the work.

In case you missed them, there are a couple of commentaries you should check out.

The first is from the front page of the Wall Street Journal on September 24 by Peter Wonacott. “Small Factories Take Root in Africa” offers an example of how a 34-year-old Brooklyn entrepreneur, Tim McCollum, located a rare source of premium cocoa in Madagascar and is now helping villagers learn how to deal with local customers. McCollum is an example of how entrepreneurs are going where many large firms will not, and—whether through shoes in Nigeria or hot sauce in South Africa—how abundant natural resources and low per capita income in Africa offer a still-untapped opportunity for startups and the resulting value they bring to those developing economies.

Yesterday the 8^th Annual Conference of The Technopolicy Network started in Tampere, Finland. It promised to be an interesting event as experts and practitioners from all over the world gathered in one of the centers of Finnish ingenuity. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Open Innovation for Regional Development’ and the city of Tampere is full of excellent examples of best practices in this field.

To take full advantage of the local knowledge the three day event started with an Innovation Tour to some of the most exciting projects around town. The first stop was the Nokia Research Centre, where presentations by Nokia’s top researchers offered a peek into the future of handheld devices. The focus on Open Innovation projects has secured Nokia with an influx of new ideas and state of the art knowledge. Strong links between the company and Tampere’s three universities have resulted in over 1500 patents on an annual basis. This formula for success has also been applied in other regions, in collaboration with top universities such as MIT, Cambridge and Tsinghua University.

Now nearly three months into his position as this university's vice president for research, Patrick O'Shea launched an inaugural initiative last week to create a more globally-engaged campus through fostering innovation and expanding entrepreneurship.

The multifaceted plan will change the face of the university, moving it beyond just a research-based institution to one that will better help students turn their ideas into real world, commercialized products on a regional, national or international scale, O'Shea said. The university has the resources to accomplish this feat, he added, and the next step is organizing and funding pre-existing programs to meet these goals.

On September 21, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Department of State hosted a half-day conference that brought together 50 representatives from the private, academic, and not-for-profit sectors involved in promoting and spurring entrepreneurship around the world. The event, Successful Approaches to Fostering Entrepreneurship, also served as a platform to launch a new Entrepreneurship Toolkit and provided an opportunity for participants to share experiences, research, and best practices in supporting early stage entrepreneurs around the world. The event and toolkit are part of the State Department-led Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) launched by Secretary of State Clinton during the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in April 2010.

Eric Ries started off programming computers. Over time, he began building technology he thought was amazing, but that no one else would ever end up using. Failure after failure, he continued along, developing unique products and brainstorming new ideas. Nothing, however, ever clicked. The projects never worked. He was waiting to get rich and famous. He figured it’d be easy. How long does it take to get on the cover of a magazine? What Ries once thought was “cool, sexy and new,” he finally realized wasn’t.

“Entrepreneurship is not cool, it’s not sexy and it’s totally uncomfortable,” Ries said. “It’s boring and grueling, and that part is never part of the movie.”

September 22, 2011 (CLEVELAND) – Northeast Ohio is one of 20 regions in the country selected as a winner in the Obama administration's $37 million Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, a multi-agency competition to support the advancement of high-growth industry clusters across the country.

The region will receive a $2,062,945 million grant for a collaborative program led by Jumpstart, Lorain County Community College, MAGNET, and NorTech, which will stimulate job creation. This program, the Northeast Ohio Speed-To-Market Accelerator (STMA), is designed to accelerate the speed-to-market for near-production or pilot-production prototypes in the advanced energy and flexible electronics industry clusters in Northeast Ohio.

We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. From recent survey feedback, it seems evident that the urban legends leading to success are wrong. The average entrepreneur is not the one who dumped a promising career, sketched his idea on the back of a napkin, and accepted millions from an investor to make billions of his own.

I was just perusing a more realistic report from the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, titled “Making of a Successful Entrepreneur.” They surveyed 549 successful company founders across a variety of industries, and gathered their views on success and failure factors. Many are predictable, all were interesting, and a few even surprised me:

Stick with the business area you know. We all have a tendency to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but 96% of these founders ranked prior work experience in their business area as an extremely important or important success factor.

After much anticipation and preparation, the 2011 Fall DreamIt Ventures Accelerator Program has officially launched in Philadelphia. Week one is over and the excitement is just beginning. This year is unique because five of the 15 companies participating are minority-led startups that are part of the Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program (MEAP), sponsored by Comcast. The partnership with DreamIt is Comcast Ventures' first investment initiative from a $20 million fund created by Comcast as part of the NBCUniversal transaction that is committed to expanding opportunities for minority entrepreneurs.

We received hundreds of applications for only five company slots and were thrilled with the quality of entrepreneurs who applied from all over the world. As a result, it was very difficult to narrow the companies down to just five. However, through a rigorous review and interview process, we selected the following companies, which include founders who are African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and Indian:

When we kissed the 1990s goodbye, none of today’s major social networks existed. LinkedIn was the first to launch, but that wasn’t until 2003, followed by Facebook (founded in 2004), YouTube (founded in 2005) and Twitter (launched in 2006). In a lot of ways these social networks are still “babies.” Their “parents” are working to grow them up in order to see the full potential of what they will become and what they can do for the “family.”

As for us, the small business owner, we often have at least one ear in the game trying to see where we should spend our marketing energy. Well, LinkedIn may be the spot. LinkedIn states that it “operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 120 million members in over 200 countries and territories.”  According to comScore, LinkedIn is now the #2 social networking site online. That same comScore study from June of this year shows LinkedIn has had a 63 percent increase in unique visitors (while MySpace continues to drop—experiencing a 50 percent decrease during the same one-year timeframe).

Regions within the United States, hit hard by the economic recession are actively seeking foreign investors to help create more jobs. In exchange, the U.S. government is giving permanent residency, known as green cards, to the investors and their families. Quite a few investors from China are taking advantage of this opportunity.

The ERC launched the new funding initiative, called "Proof of Concept", in March 2011, open to researchers who have already been awarded an ERC granti. ERC grant holderis can apply for this additional funding to establish the innovation potential of ideas arising from their ERC-funded frontier researchi projects.

ERC Proof of Concept in brief All Principal Investigators benefitting from an ERC Advanced or Starting Granti that is either ongoing, or where the project has ended less than 12 months before the publication date of an ERC Proof of Concept call. The Principal Investigator must be able to demonstrate the link between the idea and the related ERC-funded project Funding per granti: up to € 150.000 Duration: 12 months Calls for proposalsi: published once a year with two deadlines

Google and Apple are not only competitors… they are collaborators. Indeed, Apple and Google both offer top level smartphones – The iPhone from Apple and the assortment of Android devices by Google (Google not only has its own phones but is the main proprietor of the Android open source project).

In the same world, Samsung and Apple are rivals (and becoming even more rival-ous) with competing smartphones (Samsung runs Android) sparking ferocious lawsuits back and forth, but Samsung is also a major supplier of parts to Apple.

Innovation is a term often used but rarely defined. We tend to dismiss it as a marketing pejorative, in the same way as "lite" and "quality".

I've seen the word innovation being so abused that even minor design changes to a website are promoted as such. I die a little inside each time.

Advertisement: Story continues below So it was with trepidation that I got my hands on the Federal Government's Australian Innovation System Report 2011 at www.innovation.gov.au. (Yes, I was surprised we have a dedicated innovation website too.)

Michigan companies are becoming increasingly attractive to private equity investors looking to profit from the state's strong talent pool and manufacturing potential.

Private equity firms invested more than $5 billion in 35 Michigan-based companies last year, ranking the state seventh nationwide in such investment, according to a report from Washington, D.C.-based Private Equity Growth Capital Council, an advocacy and resource center for the private equity and growth capital investment industry. The council didn't identify the companies that received investment.

Michigan's ranking, bested only by California, Illinois, New York, Texas, Connecticut and Massachusetts, suggests that the Great Lakes State is pulling through the recession faster than most of the country, said David Brophy, director of the Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

What do Bill Belichick defensive schemes, Tom Clancy novels, Google+ and Facebook have in common? The answer is that all are so byzantine that they leave many people scratching their heads to figure them out.

For NFL playbooks and spy novels, such intricacies are the norm. Social networking should not be that way. The trouble is the latter is rapidly descending into a black hole of complexity that you now really do need one of those Missing Manuals to figure out the basics.

On August 11th the Mississippi Development Authority and the Mississippi Arts Commission released our report on the state’s amazing creative economy.  The report demonstrates that the creative economy generates more than 60,000 jobs within the state. You can find project director and RTS founder Stu Rosenfeld’s presentation on the report here.

The report examines the various segments of the creative economy including visual and performing arts, design, film, literary and publishing, culinary arts and museums and heritage.  We also detail the support structure for the creative economy such as organizations, education and training, creative spaces and the investments that the state has made to build the creative economy.

Today is the premiere of Moneyball, a Brad Pitt movie about using computer modeling to creatively analyze baseball players’ statistics to get an edge.

When I watched the film trailer, it made me think about how far sports analytics have come in the last decade. It seemed old-fashioned to me, because at the University of Southern California Center for Body Computing (CBC), we are studying, testing and developing many of the new technologies that athletes will use in the very near future.

New sensors, many as easy to apply as a small bandage or stick-on tattoo, can wirelessly track body heat, heart rate, perspiration and other vital signs and send the information wirelessly to a mobile phone, tablet or computer.

Few would argue that STEM-educated workers are vital to advancing innovative ideas and new products. But here’s another fact borne out by labor market data: The regions with the strongest presence of STEM-related employment are heavily dependent on government funding.

Washington, D.C. has more than two times the concentration of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) jobs than the national average, according to EMSI’s latest employment estimates. Fairfax and Arlington counties — whose economies are interconnected to D.C.’s — have helped Virginia expand its presence of STEM-related workers, on a per-capita basis, more than any other state in the last decade.

Meanwhile, the two counties in the U.S. with the most STEM workers per capita — Los Alamos, N.M., and Butte, Idaho — are home to major Department of Energy national laboratories.