The most successful countries educationally make teaching an attractive, high status profession, and provide training for teachers to become educational innovators and researchers who have responsibility for reform. These were among findings presented last week at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, the first of its kind, held to identify best practices for recruiting, training and supporting teachers.

The conference in New York City from 16-17 March was attended by education ministers, leaders of education unions and organisations, and teachers from countries with high-performing and rapidly improving education systems.

I’ve noticed a great tendency among startup founders to ignore the essentials of business accounting in the early stages of their startup. Just because you are not profitable yet, doesn’t mean you can skip the record keeping.

In fact, just the opposite is true. When you anticipate losses for the first year or two, it is more important to properly document all expenses, including tricky ones like business travel, business meals, and your home office. Sloppy documentation and reporting of these expenses is an open invitation to an IRS audit, which is the last thing you need or can afford during the busy startup period.

Expense accounting is just one of the key record-keeping requirements for a successful business:

* Expenses and income. You'll need a check register, a cash receipt system, and a record of bills. Also you should include tax records, bank statements, cancelled checks, bank reconciliations, notices from and to your bank, deposit slips, and any loan-related documents. Keep good backups of all computer files.

The Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, designated Graz as "City of Design," as part of the organisation's Creative Cities Network. With its strong history of design culture, the city of Graz is committed to embracing design and the creative industries as a strategic tool for socio-economic and cultural development.

The city has long demonstrated a growing creative economy with small and medium-sized enterprises across the various fields of design industry, which influences not only the local economy but also the quality of life for its citizens.

In Silicon Valley it’s not just who you invest in that matters– it’s also when you invest in them. The earlier the investment, the riskier the bet. But the more jawdropping the returns if the company hits it big. It’s so lopsided, that typically just 5% of those unsure, early bets create some 95% of the entire venture industry’s returns. Miss one of them, and it haunts you for years. Snag it, and you can brag for even longer. This simple reality is precisely what makes the venture business hard, and the justification for why partners make such huge fees.

So what’s up with the surge of the strongest early stage firms jumping so heavily into late stage mega-deal fray? Have the Valley’s superstars lost sight of these rules or are the rules changing?

It feels like we’re in a Golden Age of the web, led by consumer internet services and e-commerce. Just consider these stats: Facebook—over 600 million users. Twitter—25 billion tweets last year. Tumblr—1 billion page views a week. Zynga—100 million users on Cityville in just 6 weeks. We’re witnessing a generation of consumer web companies growing at an unprecedented rate in terms of both user adoption and revenue.

But here’s a little secret that’s gone unnoticed by most. It’s women. Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies. Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.

Consider some more data. Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web. Comscore says women are the majority of users of social networking sites and spend 30% more time on these sites than men; mobile social network usage is 55% female according to Nielsen.

It’s no secret that the political machine in Washington can be slow… very slow. New legislation — even if it’s potentially vital for the nation’s health — can take months or years to hit the statute books, while politicians engage in their games of horse-trading and back-room negotiations. Take the Startup Visa Act, which was first brought up for debate in 2009 and introduced for the first time last year, has only just now been reintroduced to Capitol Hill by John Kerry and Richard Lugar.

In the meantime, Britain has managed to enact a similar outcome despite undergoing a change of government, debating the ideas and having to institute the changes to immigration laws. In fact, the pace has been so rapid that new rules to grant visas to entrepreneurs will come into force in just three weeks. It’s no surprise officials are crowing about it:

“Entrepreneurs and investors can play a major part in our economic recovery, and I want to do everything I can to ensure that Britain remains an attractive destination for them,” said Damian Green, the Minister of State for Immigration. “Last year we issued far too few visas to those who wish to set up a business or invest in the U.K. — I intend to change that.”

At first blush, crowd-funding may sound like just another attempt to raise money online by getting as many visitors as possible to donate to a cause.

But a growing number of startups see the landscape differently. They see the potential that social networks have to raise money in ways that align with how younger generations practice philanthropy.

They saw the power of crowd-funding work for Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. On a smaller scale, they also saw it work for online microcredit lender Kiva, which channels money to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Kiva, which was launched in 2005, has processed more than $200 million in loans and gotten accolades from Oprah Winfrey.

Richard Bendis, president and CEO of Innovation America tells IM about his personal approach to innovation management and how he is helping others to embrace innovation in the interest of encouraging our future leaders.

What is innovation management to you?

I approach innovation management as a practitioner who has had the opportunity to observe and implement innovation strategies and practices in many diversified settings and industries, both in the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. Several years ago I started to discuss the difference between technology management and innovation management, as most people were inaccurately interchanging the terms. As we all know and accept today, innovation management is much broader and could include new systems, processes, services, methods for interaction or communication in addition to development and introduction of new technologies. Effective innovation management can have an impact on  everyone…..anywhere in the world.

Sales is a process. It’s not done part-time; customers need to feel a connection to the sales person and want you to interact with them differently for different types of products. Companies often focus too much on the technology or product instead of the customer view and customer benefit.

At the latest Entrepreneurship 101 lecture on Sales, MaRS advisor Krista Jones discussed the principles of “selling value” to customers.

Watch the lecture video and read on to find answers to these commonly asked questions:

What role does selling play in a start-up?

Your business doesn’t start until you sell something. Selling is a part of marketing and a sure way to test your product and all other company processes. As a company leader, you need to be directly involved in selling activities from beginning to end. Direct customer interaction will also help you build and improve your product and organization. Read more in our Entrepreneur’s Toolkit article, “Sales 101: The role of selling in a start-up.”

Prior to the recession, many companies and even startups were acclimated to prosperity, maybe too comfortable. We have now been through some turbulent times, but has your strategy really changed? All too many have simply hunkered down to wait out the economy.

Smart entrepreneurs are making changes now, to be more agile in defining strategy, making organizational changes, and analyzing markets for change. The rebound may be here, but business will never be the same. Look for new volatility, caused by inflation or deflation, new government regulations, and of course new technology and even more determined competitors.

Considering how much information we entrust to the Internet every day, it is hard to believe there is no general law to protect people’s privacy online. Companies harvest data about people as they surf the Net, assemble it into detailed profiles and sell it to advertisers or others without ever asking permission.

So it is good to see a groundswell of support emerging for minimum standards of privacy, online and off. This week, the Obama administration called for legislation to protect consumers’ privacy. In the Senate, John Kerry is trying to draft a privacy bill of rights with the across-the-aisle support of John McCain.

Microsoft, which runs one of the biggest Internet advertising networks, said it supports a broad-based privacy law. It has just introduced a version of its Explorer browser that allows surfers to block some tools advertisers use to track consumers’ activities online.

So, you have trained the right people, you’ve listened to them, but when is it time to let them go? That is a question that was recently posed to Richard Branson. According to Reuters, you just need to do it when the time is right.

One important moment took place when we set up Virgin Records to operate alongside our music stores: I moved out of the office and set myself up in a separate location. This was no grandiose headquarters building but, rather, a houseboat on one of London’s canals. I found it liberating to be away from the hurly-burly of the everyday business. This not only gave me time to plot our next ventures, but also ensured managers back at the office “owned” their decisions. My efforts to step back from the day-to-day operations of the Virgin Group were key to the lasting success of many of our companies: We would not have been able to tackle so many different sectors and markets if I kept a tight rein on management and development.

Tony Giordano is the typical biotech entrepreneur. As CEO of TheraVasc, he juggles fundraising with traveling the road to FDA approval, which can often times be long and costly, and doing it all with a lean workforce. But he's found an incredibly effective model to balance capital needs with the restructuring of a workforce: Interns.

In fact, it was an intern who helped Tony submit his latest Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the FDA to study the safety and biological activity of a TheraVasc drug. It might seem obvious or even slightly trivial, but interns offer startups a hardworking, forward-thinking labor pool at a heck of a price.

When Geoffrey Murphy, Ph.D., talks about plastic structures, he’s not talking about the same thing as Mr. McGuire in The Graduate. To Murphy, an associate professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change as we learn.

Murphy’s lab, in collaboration with U-M’s Neurodevelopment and Regeneration Laboratory run by Jack Parent, M.D., recently showed how the plasticity of the brain allowed mice to restore critical functions related to learning and memory after the scientists suppressed the animals’ ability to make certain new brain cells.

Central to the innovation process in business is paying close attention to customer needs and moving swiftly to meet them with new products and services. In that spirit, we asked the 332 nominees for the 2010 Chicago Innovation Awards about their three greatest needs.

As the Chicago region emerges from the recession, its economic engine will be driven by the entrepreneurs who run its small- to medium-size businesses, many of them in the manufacturing sector. One piece of evidence that this sector is growing is that the number of nominees for the Chicago Innovation Awards rose by nearly 100 from the year before, a clear sign that it takes more than a lousy national economy to keep a good business down. It was in the teeth of the recession, for example, that 2009 award winner Groupon was launched and went on to become a multibillion-dollar company.

Some of America's brightest students came to Washington for the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science competition.

The awards ceremony was the culmination of an intense week during which the 40 finalists were queried by judges and the public. They met with scientists, politicians and even President Barack Obama, who welcomed them to the White House.

These high achievers were whittled down from nearly 2,000 contestants nationwide, representing excellence across many disciplines.

Pop quiz: what relationship factor is the single most common trait in the successful entrepreneur?

My answer: the relationship with uncertainty.

Why?

First let me say that I’m not sure. Second, that I might change my mind tomorrow. (Irony intended.) Third, that I know there are seemingly endless lists of traits of the entrepreneur, and I’m guilty of producing several (including my own top 10 list, which is the most popular post on this blog).

Today I’m thinking that the single most important trait of the true entrepreneur is establishing a good healthy long-term relationship with uncertainty. As an entrepreneur, you don’t know for sure, but you act. You program, you contract, you create, you hire, you borrow, you spend, and you act, all like the explorer setting forth into unknown territory.

You’ve heard of high-tech start-ups being in “stealth mode,” meaning they’re not telling anyone what they’re up to yet. It has a glamorous aura to it, conjuring up images of a brilliant project in the works that will soon be sprung upon the world, disrupting established players and leaving everyone scrambling to catch up.

All this is what Jason Freedman learned at Dartmouth’s Tuck Business School four years ago. And … it’s also what led his first company straight into failure. That’s why when he started his next company, he told everyone what he was up to — with the result that it was a hit and was acquired for a nice sum (I can’t give details) three months ago.

Money to build the business is the number one challenge for most startups. Don’t believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and professional investors will throw money at you. In reality, only 3 out of 100 companies who apply are successful with Angels, and the success rate with VCs is even lower. A large percentage of startups never apply to either.

You need to explore more common and more productive approaches for getting your startup moving forward. Of course, every approach has pros and cons. For example, with any outside investment, you give up some ownership and control, and with bootstrapping your growth curve will likely be longer and more organic.

If you’re like many small business owners, you work in a bubble. You figure out everything yourself and rarely, if ever, connect to your industry peers. Bad idea.

My husband has a startup, and this was his story until recently. We moved to San Diego last year, and hadn’t heard about much of a startup community, so he went it alone. Then he found a few groups that support startups, and he saw what he had been missing. Here’s why you should pop the bubble you’re living in.