Raising funds in emerging markets may not be a walk in the park, but the process has become easier. Though some have complained the current economic environment is not favourable to startups, the current mindset is favourable to good ideas – no matter where they are. For startups with global vision based in emerging markets, here are eight sources of capital to consider.

Venture Partners

The US-based Venture Partners (USVP) has helped build great companies in the last three decades. Since its inception in 1981, USVP has invested more than US$2.7-billion in about 450 companies. After the investment the company’s partners have work with early-stage startups, many of which have become industry leaders. The majority of its investment activities fall into three categories: information technology, life science and technologies for adapting to or mitigating climate change.

In January 2011, the Mission for Science and Technology (MST) and FACCNE sat down with Dr. Wessner, National Academy Scholar and Director of the Program on Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, to discuss innovation policies in the U.S.A, the role of the federal government, and the growing importance of states and regions.

A first step is to discuss entrepreneurship versus intrapreneurship, and the setting – inside a university. Entrepreneurship is widely studied, with many established definitions. Most of the definitions include the idea of an individual finding or creating an opportunity, meeting that need by organizing people or resources, and profiting from meeting that need. Many focus on identification of the ideas, organizing the people or things, creating the businesses, and profiting from the activities. Some talk about risk, and opportunity for failure or success.

Intrapreneurship is less studied, but there is a reasonable amount of literature on the subject, with the term coined by Pinchot. It’s focused on many of the same topics as entrepreneurship, but within an existing, usually corporate, institution. Quite a few examples abound, and given Google and 3M as common examples, focus is on innovation by individuals or groups within companies focused on products or services. It also varies from entrepreneurship in that the resources often come from the parent company, and often the innovations innure to the benefit of the parent company rather than the entrepreneur. There is some literature focused on reward structures for intrapreneurs and their groups.

The apps that get pitched to us cover granularities you never really thought of before. It puts you into a certain state of mind, constantly asking yourself:

Is this useful? Am I missing something?

To be fair, a lot of these apps have specific use cases in the enterprise. But the great apps we see are used across the organization. They have a universal appeal.

Great enterprise apps have four things in common:

1. They save time
2. They get the job done
3. They're dead simple to use
4. They act as a rising tide, increasing collaboration and the use of other apps.

Ketan Karia, CMO and Senior Vice President of Ingres Corporation, provides 11 big data analytics predictions for 2011. I thought we were through with predictions for 2011, but this is worthwhile. Karia focuses on the fact that big data alone doesn't bring big insights: analytics does. He looks at key trends such as in-memory analytics and self-service business intelligence, but what he really emphasizes are the chips.

"In 2011, expect to see more solutions hit the market that enable business software to exploit the tremendous capabilities of modern chips that aren't currently doing so, rather than forcing chip customization or blindly throwing hardware at the problem," he writes.

His 11 predictions are:

1. We'll hark the chips, not the hardware.
2. Chip scale-out will date MPP and shrink big data networks.
3. Memory will go RAM.
4. Chip companies will spend more on R&D in 2011.
5. Acceleration of analytics will support the agile enterprise.

Successful business leadership depends on the words and ideas that the leader contributes to the organization. But even more significant, is what the business leader does. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:

Your actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you are saying.

So, what should a business leader do every day to speak so loudly?

1. Start Out Proactively - How do most of us begin the day? Perhaps, we get a cup of coffee, read through our E-Mails, listen to our voice mails, maybe even read the newspaper or quickly surf the internet for the major news stories. No, No, No, No and No. These are all reactive activities. Instead, begin the day proactively. Pick the most important task that you need to do and do it first thing (even if for only 30 minutes). Get it done or get a good chunk of it done. Then, you can go get that cup of coffee and begin to go through E-Mails confident that you have completed the most important task for the day.

Venture-backed companies outperformed the market by 4.2 percent over 500 trading days, according to research conducted by the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (EVCA). The study shows that VC-backed companies floated on the stock exchange 'significantly outperform other IPOs'.

The EVCA study looked at post-IPO performance of nearly 400 large VC-backed companies on five markets including NYSE, London Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, SIX Swiss Exchange and Deutche Borse. The results proved that venture-backed companies performed better early on, outperforming by 9.6 percent in the first 250 trading days and by 11.7 percent in the first 125 days.

Categories of State Funding for Start-Ups & Technology Companies
States governments are often forced to the forefront to preserve the business environment inside their borders. Over the last decade, state economic development strategies have shifted from being solely focused on recruiting new businesses for state growth to developing strategies to grow their own businesses through innovation and entrepreneurship. Often states collaborate with their most competitive and innovative assets in the forms of universities, private and federal research and development laboratories, and concentrations of specialized workers.

Seed Capital Funding
These funds often act like early venture capital funding. They are equity or debt positions taken by a state of interest in high-tech companies for the overall purpose of growing that company inside the state and retaining it and its employees.

A new era is under way for global high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship, marked by the rise of China, declares Yinglan Tan in Chinnovation: How Chinese innovators are changing the world (www.wiley.com). “During the past several decades, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other cities have developed as centres in key information communication technology industries. More recently, from Beijing to Pearl River Delta, markets for new products are expanding, competencies in new technologies are growing, and a new generation of high-technology regions is emerging,” he notes.
Zingy buzzwords

Ruing that innovation in China is a topic understood by very few, the author cites a typical quote, of ‘a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist' – that Chinese people aren't entrepreneurial, they don't create things, and they're just good at ripping them off. However, after interviewing a variety of entrepreneurs, the author reports that the reverse is true. “These start-up founders are as scrappy and willing to take risks as their peers anywhere, at times even surpassing the people who flocked to Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.”

I recently received the student feedback from BUS213: Monetizing Marketing Models, the course I taught for Stanford Continuing Studies during the Winter 2011 quarter. Overall, the course was well received. But the number one area where students would have liked to go deeper was in how to set pricing.

So for those of my former students who may be reading this blog, I've decided to do a series of in-depth posts that I hope will be helpful in this area. The first few posts will deal with an overview and frameworks. The last with tactics and practical tips.

Pricing Overview
As anyone who has studied Marketing 101 knows, Price is one of the classic "4Ps" of the marketing mix (the others being Product, Promotion, and Place). In setting prices, three major elements need to be considered:

1. Pricing Strategy
2. Business Revenue Model
3. Pricing Mechanisms

Google is famous for analyzing the hell out of everything.

And this habit has now helped the company learn how to help its employees lose 10-15 pounds a year without going on a diet.

The amazing Google secret?

Use smaller plates.

Google has learned that people tend to finish what's on their plates even when they're no longer hungry.

Is there an app for improving America’s educational system? Will watching a PowerPoint presentation about the nation’s educational challenge help to understand the opportunities and difficulties facing the country?

Two college dropouts, Steve Jobs (Reed College) and Bill Gates (Harvard University) have articulated theories about education. And their viewpoints are as different as are their companies (Apple and Microsoft, respectively), presenting a contrast in style and philosophy.

We all intuitively believe in maintaining personal and business contacts, but most of us don’t do well in this area. It takes real time and hard work to maintain contacts. Social networking can help, but a large list of online friends and followers is no substitute for a smaller list of personal and ongoing business relationships.

As background, I attended several educational institutions both in the US and abroad. My professional life started with a BS in Chemistry, an MA in International Relations and a Master of Business Administration. This provided me with a good education and numerous important contacts around the world.

Identifying the Need.

GLIDEIn 2001, Lorain County Community College, in partnership with the Lorain County Commissioners and Lorain County Chamber of Commerce, launched GLIDE, the Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise, a technology incubator located on the campus of Lorain County Community College. GLIDE’s purpose: help technology entrepreneurs succeed to create jobs in new industries through mentoring, space and wrap around business support services.

As GLIDE began operations, a significant hurdle for young, start-up technology companies was clearly identified: access to capital. Entrepreneurs with promising technology ideas struggled to find the financial resources at the proof of concept stage – often referred to as the valley of death. They needed bridge support to reach a point of maturity where the technology and business might be attractive to angel and venture capital investors. But, because the financial risks at this stage are so great, support needed to be from the public sector.

It's not Helen of Troy or the assassination of an archduke, but this spelling-bee-worthy 10-cent word also launched a war, the Great Search Engine War of 2011, between Google and Microsoft. Over the past few years, one of Google's primary technical goals has been to improve its search engine for misspellings of unusual queries. It's relatively easy for Google to figure out that you mean "Obama" when you type "Onama." But what about something that people rarely search for -- and that they rarely spell correctly when they do? For a search scientist, that's the beautiful challenge of tarsorrhaphy, a gruesome-sounding surgical procedure.

When Google's search team figured out how to offer the results it would return for tarsorrhaphy after a user typed in "tarsoraphy," it was a quiet-but-important upgrade for the company's most important, and most-taken-for-granted, product. Best of all, it was something that Microsoft's competing and increasingly lauded search engine, Bing, couldn't do.

In just a few days, the largest and broadest collection of speakers and attendees in bioenergy and its related fields comes together at World Biofuels Markets, and in just a few weeks the industry’s leadership gathers at the Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference.

We do so just as the advanced biofuels sector approaches a crossroads that divides the R&D phase from the commercialization phase.

We note that Clean Tech Reports has announced that biofuels revenues globally grew more than 30 percent last year, to $58 billion globally, and advanced biofuels leaders predicted 44 percent growth for 2011. That’s astonishing, and welcome, but its not always a bed of roses every day in the business of bioenergy.

It is worth noting a series of trends that will challenge, or make easier, that transition from promise to reality.

That claim was made at the launch of the 10th InterTradeIreland annual venture capital conference.

Niall Olden, who founded Kernel Capital, said now is an extremely vibrant time for Irish venture capitalists, adding "there has never been a better time to start up a business in Ireland".

He will be among the speakers at the conference which is being held in association with Kernel Capital.

It is due to take place in the Institute of Chartered Accountants on April 7. Paul Kerley, chief executive of Norkom, will be the keynote speaker at conference, designed to facilitate networking between Ireland’s leading venture capitalists, business angels and start-ups that are seeking funding from across the island.

Investors who take part will have access to more than €250 million available for new investment opportunities.

During the dot-com craze, just about every company this side of your corner hot dog stand set up a venture capital arm. With Wall Street and Main Street slavering for tech investments, corporate chiefs launched seed funds to boost their bottom lines and scope possible acquisitions.

Then the market crashed, and most corporate venture capital went with it -- until now. Experts say that, thanks to bulging corporate balance sheets and a growing reluctance among traditional venture investors like state pension funds to dabble in risky investments, big companies are getting back into the game in a big way.

Information overload is a constant these days. But transformation overload? Obstacle removal overload? Never gonna happen!

We need teachers and guides: What do I eat? How do I raise happy, kind kids? How can I be more peaceful? We’re a curious hungry bunch these days.

Which is good news for all you know-it alls teachers out there. You have information learning we’re hungry for. You know how to help us turn “good ideas” into bright new realities. And we want to pay you for what you know.

Only sometimes, perhaps, you find yourself not being paid. I’m with you! Here is what I’ve learned to help us stumble a bit less.

Psstt… this isn’t just about making more money – it’s way bigger. When you make your way of serving sustainable for you – financially and energetically – you will serve more, better, and easier. That will help more people. That’s really good news.