Heat-Releasing Walls

To keep a room cool, just let the walls melt. That's the trick with National Gypsum's Thermalcore, wall panels that absorb and release heat to maintain a comfortable ambient temperature without air-conditioning. At the core of each panel are paraffin-wax capsules made by BASF. When the temperature climbs above 73 degrees, the paraffin melts, drawing in heat and slowing the rise -- much as a melting ice cube "absorbs" the heat of warm water to cool it. If the room dips below 73 degrees, the wax turns to a solid, releasing the heat it absorbed earlier.

Based on my own experience and feedback from friends, every investor is approached by at least ten entrepreneurs with a “hot idea” for a new business, for every one who has a real “plan” for a new business. That’s why I often say that ideas are worth nothing, until they are put in the context of a business plan and real people committed to executing the plan.

In fact, you can find websites full of ideas, like these “Free Innovative Ideas,” by serial entrepreneur Kim E. Lumbard of CalTech. Or you can find books of free ideas, like “Ideas,” by Matt Schoenherr, providing 101 great ideas for increasing your visibility and profitability. Most investors will tell you that they rarely see a new idea that they haven’t heard before.

When looking at the fabric walls of your small chunk of cubicle nation, it's easy to think that the entrepreneurial life is sexy. After all, anything seems sexier than staring at the gray-walls, white-ceiling combination that most cube farms sport. (See also: Is Now the Time to Start Your Own Business?)

While it may be true that the entrepreneurial life is the one for you, before you leave cube-sweet-cube, you should remember that the entrepreneurial life isn’t always sexy. In fact, there are times when the cube life seems damn sexy indeed. If you don’t believe me, consider the following scenarios.

Tulsi Tanti, who built the world’s third largest wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy Ltd. after launching it in 1995, has some advice to clean-tech start-ups.

To make it big, said Tanti, who’s chairman and managing director of Suzlon, clean-tech companies have to follow four rules.

First, “they should be dependent on several geographies,” said Tanti, speaking Thursday at The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. His company is selling in 32 countries, he said. For clean-tech, which is often policy driven, it’s important to diversify so that changes in policy in one country don’t change a company’s entire value proposition.

TechMaine, other Industry Groups and many individuals involved in the formation of new, high growth firms, supported the bill to strengthen Maine’s high growth economy.

The Fund of Funds is now the Innovation Finance Program:
The Innovation Finance Program will invest in high quality, professionally managed venture firms who have made a commitment to consider equity investments in businesses located within the state.

Maine’s Opportunity:
To help strengthen and reignite Maine's high growth economy by stimulating the availability of venture capital and the range of “investment themes” to increase the number of young companies that will grow into large, vibrant businesses headquartered in Maine that will create jobs and help to diversify the state’s economic base.

At the end of November, Pfizer stands to lose a $10-billion-a-year revenue stream when the patent on its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor expires and cheaper generics begin to cut into the company’s huge sales.

The loss poses a daunting challenge for Pfizer, one shared by nearly every major pharmaceutical company. This year alone, because of patent expirations, the drug industry will lose control over more than 10 megamedicines whose combined annual sales have neared $50 billion.

This is a sobering reversal for an industry that just a few years ago was the world’s most profitable business sector but is now under pressure to reinvent itself and shed its dependence on blockbuster drugs. And it casts a spotlight on the problems drug companies now face: a drought of big drug breakthroughs and research discoveries; pressure from insurers and the government to hold down prices; regulatory vigilance and government investigations; and thousands of layoffs in research and development.

A reader asks: A former employee is going on FaceBook, threatening to sue us, making negative and untrue statements about things she claimed happened at our company while she was there—what can we do?

Answer: This is one of those situations where an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. By fashioning a strong separation agreement, you can prevent bad-mouthing former employees from posting negative comments about your company, spreading trade secrets, suing you and/or doing other things to hurt your company.

You might be like my friends, who thought that the computer mouse was invented at PARC, Xerox’s R&D lab.

It wasn’t.

Instead the computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI International and, in the mother of all demos, showed it, and a number of other key features of computing that we all know like windows and hypertext, off in December, 1968.

While Einstein was not a neuroscientist, he sure knew what he was talking about in regards to the human capacity to achieve. He knew intuitively what we can now show with data—what it takes to function at your cognitive best. In essence: What doesn’t kill you makes you smarter.

Not so many years ago, I was told by a professor of mine that you didn't have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth. He explained that efforts made to raise the intelligence of children (through programs like Head Start, for example) had limited success while they were in practice, and furthermore, once the "training" stopped, they went right back to their previously low cognitive levels. Indeed, the data did show that (pdf), and he (along with many other intelligence researchers) concluded that intelligence could not be improved—at least not to create a lasting change.

Innovation is at the top of agendas for governments in the U.S. and U.K. Now the U.K. has sprung into action again with its $82 million Growth and Innovation Fund (GIF), launched today to help businesses drive economic growth in the U.K.

“This government understands that to rebalance and grow our economy, we need to tackle the skills shortages that hold companies back. Through this fund, we will support employers that take collective action to overcome these blockages to expansion, said Secretary of State Vince Cable. “By putting the employer voice at the heart of the process, we will reward inventive approaches to training that deliver real help to get business moving.”

The focus of the investment is on advancing the breadth of skills of the U.K. workforce--the thinking is that more competent and knowledgeable workers will lead to more experimentation and innovation.

Have you ever seen a friend or a loved one completely sabotage their success? Of course, we all have. As a friend, we're there on the sidelines trying to help them but they are so blind to their surroundings and so set in their ways that they are like a run away train that nothing can slow down.

That’s often a negative belief at work. If you don’t believe you deserve to earn over $50,000 a year, you probably won’t. You will turn down opportunities because they seem too good to be true, and you will miss lucky breaks because you aren’t expecting them. Heck, you aren't even looking for them.

NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last month to meet immigrant entrepreneurs. At Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, he met with a dozen of them. More than half said that they might be forced to return to their home countries. That’s because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had. Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India. In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon. Instead of creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating them in New Delhi.

At a time when our economy is stagnating, some American political leaders are working to keep the world’s best and brightest out. They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American jobs away. The opposite is true: skilled immigrants start the majority of Silicon Valley startups; they create jobs.

At Scuttlefish today, an item on the largest set of shark jaws (outside of a living shark, I suppose) going up for auction. All 182 teeth, 11 feet of width, and more than 8 feet in height. "The jaws, which once belonged to a megaladon, will be placed up for bid in Dallas, Texas in June at the Heritage Auction Galleries. The asking price is set at $625,000, but would anywhere shy of The Museum of Natural History have sufficient room to accommodate the jowls?"

When she was growing up, Ella Bitton had two heroes. One was her father, Paul, who set up his own bathroom and kitchen design company. The other was Richard Branson. "I do love Richard Branson," she says with a dreamy sigh. "But seeing my dad do it all from scratch – he was my real inspiration."

Ella is 20 years old, petite and professional in appearance: her hair is glossy and blow-dried, her outfit neatly accessorised. She is studying for a business management degree at King's College London and talks animatedly with one eye constantly on her iPhone, checking it for Twitter updates or text messages.

Entrepreneurs who have outgrown their garage and want to transform their passion into a product have several options for growing their business in the region. The area is home to a handful of nonprofit incubators that cater to a wide range of emerging businesses, from architects of sustainable products to inventors of medical devices.

Each of the incubators offers customized training programs and access to consultants as well as assistance with operating and marketing plans, grant applications, and legal issues. Companies that wish to set up shop in these incubators must go through an application process; not every candidate makes the cut.

The startup accelerator recipe for establishing Foundational Capability seems to have the following ingredients: someone with ‘founder potential’ (an ingredient even more mysterious than the foundational capability you are attempting to obtain) plus a new idea, plus a little startup success (maybe involving successfully securing some initial investment) plus applying to an accelerator, plus being accepted by an accelerator, plus completing an accelerator course.

Once fully baked, the recipe produces a massively raised likelihood (but no guarantee) of startup success, plus massively raised likelihood of credible foundational capability (ability to found or accelerate future successful startups at will): so what is wrong with this picture?

Startups vie for a chance to be part of the SXSW Accelerator competition for the opportunity it brings — 41% of the companies that have participated in the first two competitions received funding after the event. Only 40 companies are selected, but that doesn’t mean your startup can’t make a splash in Austin. Just being at SXSWi and exposing a solid product to the conference’s 14,000 attendees and a 1,500-person-strong media swarm can ignite a business.

But it can’t be engineered with snazzy swag and marketing dollars — you have to have great credibility and a great product.

A month ago, a public-private partnership — Startup America Partnership — was announced, reiterating the Obama Administration's keen focus on small business innovation, entrepreneurship and access to capital. With organizational funding from the Kauffman Foundation and the (AOL Steve) Case Foundation, the initiative seems designed to coordinate a variety of existing and emerging (not yet funded) public and private sector resources and efforts focused on advancing Obama’s agenda as it relates to supporting strategic sectors (including energy, advanced manufacturing and information technology) and small, high-growth ventures with capital and counsel. The capital portion of the plan included statements that partners such as IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. would commit specific dollar amounts to supporting or investing in emerging growth companies.

There are an infinite number of ways one can start a business. There also seems to be an infinite number of things that can go wrong during the business startup phase. Fortunately, there are also many ways to fund a startup. One method you may not have considered is crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding has its roots in charity work, and indeed works similar to a public television pledge drive. You put out a certain amount you want to raise for your business and family, friends and acquaintances pledge as much or as little as they want until the goal is reached. This differs from using an angel investor or microloan because your funding comes from several different sources.

The ‘Third Way’ of university research commercialization focuses on systemic change, rather than on single stakeholder intervention. It reflects a third generation of innovation policies that focuses on training, awareness raising and the leverage of cluster effects, rather than the development of physical infrastructure (i.e. science parks).

This is a unique approach that outperforms existing best practice in many ways; i.e. it focuses on the leverage of network effects among the various academic institutions, rather than repeating the traditional ‘one university – one commercialization’ approach.

The ‘Third Way’ also outperforms existing best practices by adopting latest trends in IP management , such as online trading, perceiving IP as financial asset, leveraging open innovation for improving patent quality.