Try this thought experiment: Maybe America's Great Stagnation isn't happening because we're failing — maybe it's happening because we're not.

To illustrate, consider the most straightforward example: Wall Street megabanks were propped up and lavishly resurrected, and your grandkids will likely still be paying the price — because they were too big to fail.

But if you look closely, you might see those dynamics just about everywhere.

Entrepreneurs often get the advice from their lawyers and friends to always get a Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA or CDA) signed before disclosing anything about their new venture. Most investors and startup advisors I know hate them, and refuse to sign them. Who is right?

Let me try to put this question in perspective. If you are totally risk-averse, then push to always get signed NDAs. You won’t last long as an entrepreneur in this category, since a startup is all about taking risks. On the other hand, if you intend to patent an idea, you need a signed confidentiality agreement from everyone knowing details, or you will legally lose patent rights.

Inspire Self-Motivation, Not Mandated Performance

A garment made with W.L. Gore products is probably hanging in your closet somewhere at your home. It’s nearly impossible to buy a ski jacket or slicker without seeing the “GORE-TEX” tag hanging from the garment. But W.L. Gore’s reach extends far beyond the cold-weather gear most of us know, to dental floss, guitar strings, surgical products and many other categories.

Revered for its ability to innovate, W.L. Gore has been named “pound for pound, the most innovative company in America” by Fast Company. What lies behind this ability is what founder Bill Gore decided to focus on as he began the business: how people inside a company come to make decisions among themselves. Deciding how to decide has driven the growth, ingenuity and continued innovation at W.L. Gore.

Last year Facebook announced that it will be working to help Y Combinator companies create “transformative social experiences”, giving them preferential treatment and access to company resources. By no means a guarantee for success, but still a big deal.

Today Facebook is announcing a partnership with European startup accelerator and fund Seedcamp. Seedcamp startups will receive product, technical, and design support as well as early access to beta products and programs on the Facebook Platform.

Tim Draper, the gregarious founder and managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says there isn’t reason to fear a big bubble in the technology sector just yet.

Draper said so during a question and answer session after his speech in a windy tent yesterday at the Global Technology Symposium in Menlo Park, Calif. The potential for a bubble is on everyone’s minds in Silicon Valley these days because a lot of people remember the froth around the dot-com days and the subsequent crash. And some fear that we are in the same boat with rising valuations for start-ups such as Groupon, Zynga, Facebook and Twitter.

“Is it a bubble? No,” Draper said. “It feels like the beginning of things coming back and we will have a good five years ahead that look very promising.”

FEDERAL SUPPORT & FUNDING OF INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E)
The ARPA-E program was modeled after the successful DARPA program. ARPA-E’s mission is to improve energy efficiency across all sectors of the U.S. economy and ensure that the U.S. maintains its leadership in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
DARPA’s mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military. All of DARPA's research is performed by outside researchers at businesses (with some opportunities reserved for small businesses), universities, non-profit institutions, government laboratories, and other research organizations.

Browse population growth and decline, changes in racial and ethnic concentrations and patterns of housing development.

Greensburg, KS —

It's no secret that biopharmaceutical research has struggled in recent years. The number of new drugs introduced on the market spiked in the late '90s, but has steadily declined since the new millennium, back to levels not seen since the 1980s.

In response, the Obama administration announced last week that the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will open its doors in October. NCATS, a billion-dollar-a-year program operating under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will work directly on new drug development.

By David Jardin, CPA

Companies are always looking for ways to improve performance. These talent management best practices can not only drive continuous high performance, they’ll also go a long way toward building a high performance culture.

1. Review and adapt. The integration of strategy, organization, and talent should be routinely reviewed and adapted with the Board, and during quarterly business reviews. It may need to be done even more often if the pace or scale of change warrants.

2. Focus intensely on building critical capabilities. Identifying, measuring, and narrowing critical capability gaps drives consistent high performance.

3. Remove obstacles. Identify and fix situations where high potentials are blocked in their advancement. Blockers are employees who have occupied a position for a long time and who are not likely to advance. This places limitations on the number of developmental jobs available. There may be circumstances that justify temporarily leaving a Blocker in place.

Over the next 15 years, 600 cities will account for more than 60 percent of global GDP growth. Which of them will contribute the largest number of children or elderly to the world’s population? Which will see the fastest expansion of new entrants to the consuming middle classes? How will regional patterns of growth differ?

Explore these questions by browsing through the interactive global map below, which contains city-specific highlights from the McKinsey Global Institute’s database of more than 2,000 metropolitan areas around the world. You’ll see why growth strategies focused at the country level may fall short in the future: with new hot spots emerging and household wealth surging in little-known urban centers, companies may have to adopt a much finer-grained approach to tap into the growth that lies ahead.

Senior executives searching for growth face a stark new reality: roughly 400 midsize cities in emerging markets—cities they mostly will have never heard of—are posed to generate nearly 40 percent of global growth over the next 15 years. That’s more growth than the combined total of all developed economies plus the emerging markets’ megacities (those with populations of more than ten million, such as Mumbai, São Paulo, and Shanghai), which together have been the historic focus of most multinationals. Learning about consumer attitudes in the emerging markets’ “middleweight” cities (three-quarters of which have less than two million people), figuring out market entry strategies for them, and deciding how to allocate resources within and across them will all be crucial priorities in the years ahead.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The U.S. Treasury assembled investors, bankers and entrepreneurs Tuesday for talks on how to provide small companies in high-growth sectors with greater access to capital.

With unemployment still elevated at 8.9 percent, the Obama administration is taking a fresh look at the hurdles U.S. entrepreneurs face in launching and expanding smalll companies, which the government says have generated two-thirds of new jobs over the past 15 years.

Eager to pave the way for the next Google or Groupon, a 2-year-old Chicago-based startup reportedly valued at $25 billion, Treasury organized yesterday's conference to address constraints on startup financing.

As regulatory costs have soared, investors said that startups could no longer rely on an IPO for growth capital, leading even cash-generating titans like Facebook to attract investors through private markets.

The city of Akron is planning to create a seed fund that’s aimed at attracting out-of-region biomedical companies to the city and helping local startups grow.

Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic announced the plans to form the “Akron Development Corporation Seed Fund” in his State of the City address on Tuesday. “This seed fund will be directed at attracting early stage homegrown and other biomedical companies to set up operations in our accelerator and in the Akron Biomedical Corridor, then help them grow into their own space,” he said in the speech.

Cleveland-based health insurer Medical Mutual of Ohio is the fund’s first sponsor, having pledged $1 million toward it. Power supplier FirstEnergy has also committed to being an investor, but hasn’t specified a dollar amount.

Perhaps you have an idea for a new business or your corporation is looking to grow into new areas. What should be your first step? Size the market? Write a business plan? Put together a pitch to raise funding? Start building your product? If one of these options came to mind you would be in good company, most people come to similar conclusions when they think of starting a new business or launching a new product. But unfortunately you would also be wrong and if you don’t believe me, simply look at the failure rates of new businesses. Most new ventures, either within a corporation or standing alone fail, sometimes at rates approaching 90%. Such immense failure rates beg the question, are new ventures inherently so risky or could we be doing something wrong?

People start businesses for all kinds of reasons. Other people don’t start businesses for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they are the very same reasons. I have compiled a list of frequently used phrases and comments that I often hear when people are discussing this decision and that I think reflect serious misunderstandings. At best, these misunderstandings can lead to a waste of time. At worst, they can lead to very bad decisions and very big losses. Here are my top eight:

1. Any new business has a 50-50 shot at succeeding. Yes, according to the Small Business Administration, the failure rate of new businesses is around 50 percent after five years. That statistic ought to be scary enough, but the odds of your business succeeding may not even be that good. Some ill-conceived ventures have no chance of succeeding, and others may have a 75 percent success rate. It is not the flip of a coin. It is about execution and the need in the market place. With new ideas, it is obviously harder to predict. What do you think the failure rate is for opening a McDonald’s restaurant?

Ever wondered what a painting worth $106 million looks like? I’ve seen one. It’s pretty good. In fact, it’s the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. Someone really took a shine to it to pay all that money. (It was a Picasso portrait of one of his mistresses.)

What it tells you is that creativity can be worth millions. And in terms not just of dollars but of fans and followers. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a new movement on the rise, and it’s purely devoted to the freshest sometimes fantastical things we can produce. I’m talking about creativity.

Creativity takes countless forms—music, art, sculpture, photography, illustration, and so on—whatever your mind can produce with the help of a few materials. Just Google and you’ll find loads of websites, forums, top tens and favorites devoted to all things creative.

Thinking of applying to one (or all) of the summer accelerator/incubator/angel/mentoring programs like TechStars, Joystick Labs, or any of those found on this comprehensive list?

We collectively get thousands of submissions, but only 1% are selected. If the odds alone aren’t bad enough, consider the imperfect information used to make that selection: A generic online application form, a few emails, and 15-60 minutes of in-person interview.

It should be equally clear that excellent candidates are sometimes not chosen. Part of this is sheer numbers: If only five companies are selected out of thousands, surely “Company #6″ wasn’t a terrible candidate. It mostly has to do with the applications and what happens in those crucial follow-up emails and ephemeral interviews. Since this is the part you have control over, it makes sense to prepare.

Startup executives and venture capitalists are nearly unanimous in their glowing support of U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor’s recent proposal to give tax breaks to so-called angel investors who fund and provide equity for early stage companies.

The question remains, however, on whether or not the bipartisan bill has enough muscle to compete against the small mountain of similar proposals now before the Senate Finance Committee with the stated goal of "cutting taxes and creating new jobs."

Pryor, D-Ark., introduced Sen. Bill 256 in early February to encourage angel investors to invest in small companies that have potential for significant economic growth and job creation.

Sen. Bill 256, known as “The American Opportunity Act,” will provide a 25% federal income tax credit for investing in qualified small businesses, including companies in the advanced manufacturing, aerospace, biotechnology, clean energy and transportation sectors. Qualified small businesses can receive up to $2 million per year in tax credit-eligible cash equity investment, of which no more than $1 million can come from a single investor. The funding is estimated to stimulate $2 billion per year of new capital formation.

Dear SBIR Insider,

This issue brings us mostly disappointing news on SBIR reauthorization, but retains a glimmer of hope for some future SBIR continuing resolutions (CR) if reauthorization fails. This is not a pleasant scenario, and this time the dynamics are different but the theme remains the same.

In brief - Once again it appears that an SBIR reauthorization bill in the Senate is being hijacked to address other congressional interests (over 50 of them!). On the House side, the recent SBIR hearing, by the House Small Business Committee (under new leadership) was dominated by the VC issue but did include some other issues as well. We'll explain.