Unemployed Americans are turning to entrepreneurship more than ever before, pushing the rate of startups to a 15-year high, according to a new study released today by the Kauffman Foundation. But while more individuals are starting businesses, they’re often opting to go it alone rather than creating companies with the target of hiring.

That trend could be troubling to the fragile jobless recovery currently under way in the U.S. “Far too many entrepreneurs are choosing jobless entrepreneurship, preferring to remain self-employed or to avoid the economic responsibility of hiring employees,” Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, said in a press release. Notwithstanding that 565,000 new businesses were created in 2010, the quarterly employer rate dropped to 0.10 percent last year.

David Kappos, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, says the United States needs new ways to measure innovation and also to give fast-track status to green technologies.

First, Kappos says his office is looking at new ways of measuring innovation. After all, open-source software, which explicitly rejects traditional intellectual property rights, powers large parts of the technology industry, such as the Android mobile operating system. Additionally, corporations often take out huge pre-emptive patents to prevent competition from forming.

Y Combinator, a startup funding firm, has announced their Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator program. New York startups can get a $25,000 investment, free legal services, office space in New York, and have 140+ mentors including Fred Wilson and Esther Dyson by joining the program.

As venture capitalists scramble to get a piece of Silicon Valley's new Web boom, entrepreneurs like Aaron Levie are finding they have the upper hand.

Mr. Levie, 26 years old, founded online storage provider Box.net in 2005. While his 140-person Palo Alto, Calif., company has money in the bank, Mr. Levie saw the Web investing environment heat up recently, driven by interest in fast-growing start-ups such as Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc.

So Mr. Levie decided to tap that interest and raise new capital. In less than three weeks last month, he closed a hefty $48 million round of financing from venture-capital firms including Meritech Capital Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. In the process, Mr. Levie said he turned down several other venture firms that wanted a piece of the deal.

Can cleaner sources of energy not only power our economy but also drive a recovery from the Great Recession? That's the question confronted by policymakers across the U.S.—and by debaters in the Intelligence Squared series held March 8 at New York University.

The list of political proponents of a clean, green energy economy is long, ranging from President Obama down to John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania. And the anecdotal evidence thus far seems strong: 2,600 manufacturing jobs in Colorado as a result of Danish wind turbine-maker Vestas—plus the farmers in that state who reap profits from the wind blowing over their fields while continuing to grow crops like wheat. Or the green jobs growth in China, Germany or California.

At some point in their life, hopefully everyone strives to be the best in their chosen profession. Most people think that being the best requires more intelligence, more training, and more experience. In reality, in business or even in sports, the evidence is conclusive that it is as much about how you think, as what you do.

I saw this illustrated well recently in a sports excellence book called “Training Camp: What the Best Do Better Than Everyone Else”, by Jon Gordon. His evidence and real life stories conclude that top performers in all professions have the same key traits listed below. I agree they certainly apply to the great entrepreneurs I have known. You need to think about how they apply to you.

What separates successful entrepreneurs from you? If you are already successful, then what have you got that others don’t? Well, the truth is each of us have different qualities that help us succeed, but very few successful entrepreneurs have low self confidence. Being sure of yourself at every step of the way is crucial to finding success. It will dramatically improve your marketing, product development, and pricing.

I started making more money with my business when I realized I was really good at what I do. Understanding that gave me the confidence to price my products and services at a rate that was fair to myself. I started making more money when I had greater confidence in the products that I created. Realizing that helped me write and talk about them in a way that my time and energy deserved. I started making more money when I turned down potential projects and clients that I knew weren’t worth my time. Figuring that out helped me allocate my time and energy to projects and clients that valued what I offer.

IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.

Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.

They wanted to build better bosses.

So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.

Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.

Do it! Cut the cord and free yourself from the tyranny of the cable mafia. The movement is slowly gaining traction but the whole task is daunting. What do you do next? Where does your TV content come from? What are the options? So many questions you need answered before you take the scissors to the coax line.

What follows are the basic steps along with the best alternative services. Follow these steps and the transition from cable to Internet streaming will be painless as possible. Still, before you proceed, you must know that there is a break-in period. Cutting cable might be hard for some. Some will go crawling back to their cable provider. But press forward and take it a day at a time. You’re going to be a better person without it.

Electric-car maker Tesla Motors announced this week an update to its plans to deliver its Model S sedan, a hotly watched launch for the company.

It’s not just electric-car fans who are itching to hear the progress on the Model S (pictured), which starts at $57,400 before federal tax incentives. Investors are watching the Model S’s progress closely too. This represents the first time Tesla is building a car from scratch, and the company aims to ramp up to a capacity of 20,000 of Model S cars a year by 2013.

Investors are looking for Tesla to hit the benchmarks it has set for itself. Tesla has to get the $42 million former NUMMI factory up and running, train hundreds of new hires and actually become a successful startup in the auto manufacturing business. The factory is meant to be a future ground for other Tesla models, too.

Unless you really don’t give two hoots about the world of technology, it’s highly unlikely you would have missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing equipment & services provider. VeriFone accused Jack Dorsey’s product of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied.

This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. To me, they are a company that provides payment-processing services to big retail outlets, fast food chains and other large transaction volume establishments. That’s what really makes them a good company. Square isn’t going after those customers.

Plans have been announced for an £89m innovation centre which aims to place Scotland at the forefront of new and emerging 21st Century technologies.

The centre, at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, will engage academics and industry in areas such as energy, pharmaceuticals and engineering.

It aims to create 700 new research jobs and support 850 existing research jobs.

Ministers hope the project will increase research investment in Scotland by up to £150m in five years.

Yesterday I wrote a post on the difference between a reason and an excuse. The conclusion to that post was that you might have a reason for something but that a reason isn’t an excuse.

But sometimes you just happen to miss a deadline or you might really run late for a meeting. So then what? My advice: don’t apologize.

If you bump into someone on the train please DO apologize. If you forget your girlfriends birthday I suggest you apologize profusely. But in a business-situation different rules apply. Let me explain…

SHERBROOKE, QUEBEC--(Marketwire - March 11, 2011) - The Honourable Denis Lebel, Minister of State for Canada Economic Development, today announced the awarding of $293,500 in non-repayable funding for the establishment of the Accélérateur de création d'entreprises technologiques, a technology business accelerator. A number of partners, including the Université de Sherbrooke, have joined in the initiative to ensure the startup and success of this new organization.

"The Accélérateur de création d'entreprises technologiques will become a true one-stop service, providing all of the tools necessary for the successful creation of innovative businesses," explained Minister of State Lebel.

The mission of the new organization is to stimulate, facilitate and accelerate the creation of small and medium-sized technological enterprises by assisting young university graduates in their business undertakings. The funding of growth-generating projects like this one is made possible through Canada Economic Development's Business and Regional Growth program. A total of $3 million is being allocated to this project by various financial partners.

The U.S. Department of Energy joined with the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) and its Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship today to announce the opening of the $12 million i6 Green Challenge, which will also be conducted in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The funding will support awards for six teams around the country with the most innovative ideas to drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in support of a green innovation economy, increased U.S. competitiveness and new jobs. The Department of Energy will invest up to $2 million to support the $12 million multi-agency i6 Green Challenge, which will establish or expand Proof of Concept Centers across the U.S. In order to be eligible for DOE funding, applicants will be required to demonstrate innovation in the areas of renewable energy, energy efficiency, or green building technology.

What were the top ten notable events in 2010 in the world of university technology commercialization and innovation management? In no particular order, here’s what stands out for me.

1. The Bayh-Dole Act turned 30.

In an interview with Gene Quinn of IPwatchdog.com, former senator Birch Bayh described the essence of his goals in creating the Bayh Dole Act: “there’s something to be said for the private enterprise system and we think we ought to hook the private enterprise system up with the intellectual enterprise in our universities so we have the entrepreneurial skills of the free enterprise system and the intellectual capacity of our researchers, we meld those together.” At an AUTM-sponsored event in DC, I had the good fortune to hear former Senator Birch Bayh speak about how the Act came to be. Bayh described his and Senator Bob Dole’s bi-partisan efforts, back in the 1970s, to pass legislation that would make federally funded university research more commercially accessible to the tax-paying public.

The leaders who helped forge a new partnership between Kansas State University and animal health company Abaxis Inc. often describe the joint effort as a four-legged stool.

Each of the legs of the stool has collaborated and will continue to do so as the partnership develops in coming months, driving community and university economic development. The four legs include Abaxis, K-State, the K-State Veterinary Diagnostic Lab and the National Institute for Strategic Technology Acquisition and Commercialization, or NISTAC, which is the university's business development and commercialization arm.

Forbes released its annual list of the billionaires this week.

We pulled out the names of the 20 richest American founders and noticed some interesting changes from last fall.

Several new people made the cut; others were bumped down the list.

These people, who include a son of a cabdriver and a gas station attendant, worked hard to build empires from scratch, and came out with a pile of dough.

Many of them are tech founders, but some are just good, old-fashioned businessmen.

The massive magnitude 8.9 earthquake that struck near the east coast of Honshu, Japan's main island, at 2:46 P.M. local time and unleashed a fierce tsunami claiming hundreds of lives is already being felt as far away as the west coast of North America, about 8,000 kilometers away. Much of this has to do with the depth of the ocean that the tsunamis waves traversed as well as the sheer size of the quake, which was the strongest recorded in Japan's history.

The tsunami hit Hawaii about seven hours after it washed away entire towns along Japan's northern coast. Whereas the waves that struck Japan have been reported as high as seven meters, Hawaii was spared serious damage. Still, the threat of the tsunami closed ports in Honolulu and Guam and led to warnings, watches and coastal evacuations in 20 countries, including the U.S., Indonesia and Chile.

If you’ve been following this blog over the last couple of days you will know that along with Nicholas Lovell I’ve started a series of posts answering the fifty questions you should ask before raising venture capital. This post explains the series in more detail yesterday I wrote the first in the series, an introductory post answering the question “What is venture capital?”.

Today we are publishing the list of questions, or rather the first draft of the list (which only has 46 questions). It got much better last week when we solicited feedback from a couple of friends and I hope it will again with your help. If you have anything to add please let us know in the comments.