While Americans focus on the results of the midterm election, something far more important is at stake. A large segment of America is in the midst of an economic and education crisis that threatens to relegate a vast majority of our future generations to the front seat of the bus: the driver's seat.

Consider the following data from the Census Bureau compiled by Scott Shane, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University:

• One in five white-owned businesses employs at least one person.
• One in 18 black-owned businesses employs at least one person.

According to a report by the Angel Capital Education Foundation (ACEF) the angel investment process is typically comprised of 4 steps. According to the ACEF report only between 1 and 4% of entrepreneurs that apply for angel investment funding will make it through the entire 4 stage process. That means that if you really want to stand a chance at securing angel investment you need to understand each of the 4 stages in detail. The 4 steps are as follows:

Stage 1 – Executive Summary – Typically the first stage of the angel investment process, also known as pre-screening, is simply an executive summary round. You will start by sending in your 2 page executive summary. This round determines whether or not you will have the opportunity to meet with your potential investors face-to-face.  According to the ACEF, only 25% of applicants will make it through this round, so do not take round 1 lightly.  Famous venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki said in his book, The Art of the Start, “Of the effort you put into write a business plan, 80 percent should go into the executive summary.  These are the most important paragraphs of your organization’s existence.”

Stage 2 – Investor Presentation – If you are lucky enough to make it to the second round you will typically have the opportunity to meet with your potential investors. You will be asked to prepare a short presentation, after which, the investor group will have an opportunity to grill you with questions.  Going back to Guy Kawasaki again, make sure to follow his 10/20/30 rule.  “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”  About 1 out of 3 will make it to the next round.

It’s about to get very cold over the next few months in New York City, San Francisco, London and Europe. But down in South America, spring is melting into summer and the Chilean government wants to give you cash to move to Chile and run a start-up.

Got a bright idea or an existing start up? Check out Start-Up Chile, a program funded by the Chilean Government that aims to attract early stage global entrepreneurs. The government is offering $40,000 grants (which goes a long way in Chile), one-year visas and free office space in Santiago to entrepreneurs who agree to live and work on a new high-tech venture for 6 months. “The minute you step onto Chilean soil there will be a mentor waiting. We’ll help you open bank accounts, connect you to all the engineers and the engineering schools,” says the program’s director Nicolas Shea Carey.

Biotechies around the country are feeling a lot of love toward the Internal Revenue Service today. And the impact is being felt in Washington state’s biotech cluster, as 83 local biotech companies were awarded grants worth a combined $34 million, in one of the little-known postscripts to the new healthcare reform law that was enacted last spring.

This program, called the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project Grants, was part of an overall tax credit and grant program set up by the IRS to support research project spending during 2009 and 2010. The total budget for the program was supposed to be $1 billion in credits and grants.

Here’s some eye candy that has nothing to do with politics. It just shows awesome people doing awesome stuff. Whoever wins the elections will mean nothing to these folks.

I am standing in a living-room-of-the-future. You can navigate the TV using hand movements, instantly swishing and touching to get subtitles to any international programming. Yes, a la Minority Report – but from across the room. Doesn’t every good living-room-of-the-future have a nod to Minority Report? (cc: Qwiki)

Meanwhile, on the patio-of-the-future, just off the living-room-of-the-future, a hologram of a lady tells me that the glass-sided windows of this loft are coated with a self-cleaning glass. Dirt beads up and, when it rains, it’s washed away. “Oh those rainstorms in the tropics!” she says with a slightly stilted laugh.

Perhaps tonight’s elections in California should be a lesson for technology executives at big tech companies. The pedigree of being an executive at a major tech company isn’t necessarily a winning background for California politics.

Both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are projected to lose their races tonight, according to all major news organizations. Barbara Boxer has held off former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina in the race for the U.S. Senate, while former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is currently losing to Jerry Brown in the race for governor of the golden state. Both women spent huge amounts of their own personal fortunes on the race.

Economic Gardening, a project that uses technology and business expertise to assist small businesses has begun in the South Okanagan.

70 per cent of job growth in the past 15 years has come from small and medium companies.

The 20-month, $183,000 project will use geographic information technology to analyze business data and will then use the information to help the business make plans to expand.

Over the last month I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to both guest lecture in University entrepreneurship courses and keynote and Entrepreneurship Conference at Queens College.  I’m also fortunate in that The MouseDriver Chronicles continues to serve as an inspiring story for students (and others) around the world who dream of someday becoming entrepreneurs.  You know your book has staying power when hundreds of Universities are using the book and numerous  professors have structured their entire syllabus around chapters of the book.  Seriously.  I’ve counted three so far.  Now that’s cool.  And a little bit scary.

And over the last month, I’ve found myself frequently passing along the same advice to students that I did back in 1999 when Kyle and I first took MouseDriver from a classroom at Wharton to the shelves of WalMart.  Granted, advice is just advice and every situation, every idea, every individual is completely different.  But I stand behind the points below, which I view as absolutely timeless if you’re starting a company while in school.

NASA officials have confirmed that studies are being conducted to assess whether astronauts can be sent on a one-way mission to the Red Planet. So far, the mission amounts to US$1.1 million in seed capital that NASA’s Ames Research Centre and the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency hope to turn into the $11 billion the mission could cost.

Ames Director Simon Worden confirmed the studies at the Long Now Foundation’s “Long Conversation” conference in San Francisco last weekend…

Worden’s admission offered few details beyond a possible 2030 launch date, but its coincidence with a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology suggests how such a mission might look.

In their paper “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars,” Washington State University geobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Arizona State University cosmologist Paul Davies suggest a one-way trip sidesteps the potentially prohibitive costs involved.

Jennifer Black isn't a fan of technology. Until college, she didn't know much about online classes. If the stereotypical online student is a career-minded adult working full time, she's the opposite—a dorm-dwelling, ballet-dancing, sorority-joining 20-year-old who throws herself into campus life here at the University of Central Florida.

Yet in the past year, the junior hospitality major has taken classes online, face to face, and in a blended format featuring elements of both. This isn't unusual: More than half of the university's 56,000 students will take an online or blended class this year, and nearly 2,700 are taking all three modes at once.

As online education goes mainstream, it's no longer just about access for distant learners who never set foot in the student union. Web courses are rewiring what it means to be a "traditional" student at places like Central Florida, one of the country's largest public universities. And UCF's story raises a question for other colleges: Will this mash-up of online and offline learning become the new normal elsewhere, too?

There are lots of collections of tips for startups that have excellent business advice on building your team, hitting product milestones and pitching to VCs; but not that many that give a corporate lawyer’s perspective. So here’s mine*:

1. You May be a Genius, but You Are Not a Lawyer
* Your idea is brilliant and you have what it takes to be a CEO, but you are still not a lawyer (or an accountant).
* Hire professionals and use them to help you figure out what you need and when.
* This doesn’t have to be expensive. Figuring out priorities isn’t billable work – executing them is.

A Casa da Música recebeu no passado dia 7 de Outubro, o VI Encontro COTEC Europa, evento que reuniu as congéneres espanhola, italiana e portuguesa com o intuito de reforçar contactos e trocar experiências entre empresários e dirigentes empresariais dos três países. 

Com a inovação como tema de fundo, este Encontro contou com a participação de Richard Bendis, Presidente e CEO da Innovation America, que partilhou com a audiência as últimas novidades em termos de inovação. Entre elas, um traço em comum: a colaboração. “A colaboração é a chave para juntar as peças que constituem um bom ambiente de inovação”, sublinhou Richard Bendis, que assegurou que o caminho do sucesso passa pelas parcerias público-privadas, onde “o Governo participa, mas não lidera”. Para o Presidente da Agência de Inovação Americana, o futuro europeu está nas mãos das PME e dos países mais pequenos que, por serem mais flexíveis, tendem a ser mais inovadores. “Portugal e Espanha têm mais potencial para inovar”, observou.

It is one thing to learn a new piece of information, such as a new phone number or a new word, but quite another to get your brain to file it away so it is available when you need it.

A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School suggests that sleep may help to do both.

The scientists found that sleep helps people to remember a newly learned word and incorporate new vocabulary into their “mental lexicon”.

During the study, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening, followed by an immediate test. The volunteers slept overnight in the laboratory while their brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram, or EEG. A test the following morning revealed that they could remember more words than they did immediately after learning them, and they could recognise them faster demonstrating that sleep had strengthened the new memories.

Product launches are complex. That was the main takeaway of the PDMA 2010 Lab E – Launch for Commercial Success which I had the privilege of attending last week. The session kicked off with an apt and literal example: a NASA launch. When NASA launched the Saturn V, its engineers were depending on the successful integration of two million distinct systems. Two million! And, as Richard Koppel pointed out, NASA operates in a space (get it?) where getting it right the first time is “mission critical” – if something goes wrong, not only are millions of dollars wasted, but people die. Fortunately, product launches are not as high stakes as shuttle launches, but you still want to ensure your innovation is brought to market as seamlessly as possible. So how do you launch successfully given all of the variables, risks and uncertainties inherent in the process? Here are the top seven themes of the day which will help you make sure all systems are go when you blastoff.

1. Lay Out Complexities Up Front

Before you can begin coordinating all of the different components, you need to take time to map out all of the different layers of uncertainty that exist. Take a step back and list the factors that you will need to consider – distribution channel, supply chain, marketing, competition, timing, the position of the sun at 12:52 pm on July 17th, 2013… whatever will influence your launch. Make sure the team is aware of all of the variables before you start planning contingencies.

More ideas mean better ideas, because more ideas bring more chances of hitting upon a really great idea. You can increase your chances of generating really, really great and new-to-the-world ideas when you enlist a more diverse group of creative ideators. The more diverse, the better.

The key is to reach beyond your comfort zone and outside your normal circle of ideators, advisers, and creatives.

Why cross pollination works
Just as in the plant world, where new life arises from the introduction of pollen from other plants, all great ideas arise from combinations of ideas that haven’t met yet. In both cases, we call this process cross pollination. You get a greater diversity of ideas by collaborating with a greater diversity of creative people—people from a variety of disciplines, departments, cultures, ages, mindsets, motivations, and orientations.

A few weeks back we talked about stock options in some detail. I explained that the strike price of an option is the price per share you will pay when you exercise the option and buy the underlying common stock. And I explained that the company is required to strike employee options at the fair market value of the company at the time the option is granted.

The Board has the obligation to determine fair market value for the purposes of issuing options. For many years, Boards would do this without any third party input. They would just discuss it on a regular basis and set a new price from time to time. This led to some cases of abuse where Boards set the strike price artificially low in order to make their company's options more attractive to potential employees. I sat on many Boards during this time and I can tell you that there was always a tension between keeping the strike price low and living up to our obligation to reflect the fair market value of the company. It was not a perfect system but it was a decent system.

In the past year I have witnessed a burgeoning of interest on the parts of major cities from Bogota to Cape Town to kick start entrepreneurship. Here are some do's and don'ts for committed leaders, whether you are a private or public sector leader:

-- Be clear that the objective is high aspiration, high ambition, high impact entrepreneurship. Micro-enterprise (what I call employment-substitution) is often necessary for getting food on enough tables in the short run, but it is not real entrepreneurship and does not drive economic development. These are often lumped together in policies and practices but they are very different from each other and require different types of support.

-- Get together a small but powerful coalition of committed leaders representing different parts of the public and private sectors, including successful entrepreneurs, universities, family business, multinationals, domestic companies, and the mayor. Make sure all of you, including but not limited to the mayor, are clear, vocal, and public advocates for entrepreneurship. Invite the national government to have a seat at the table, but don't rely on them for support or guidance or expect them to do the job. Do make sure this coalition will do everything possible to make change.

Two campaign seasons ago, a group of young staffers schooled in new media helped President Barack Obama win office.

Now, some have left politics behind and are using similar skills, plus lessons learned on the campaign trail, to start their own entrepreneurial ventures. One even funded his start-up by scalping tickets to the Commander-in-Chief's inaugural balls.

Not surprisingly, the staffers-turned-entrepreneurs are launching technology-heavy ventures, betting they can convert campaign techniques—such as raising $500 million online and registering millions of voters—into success in their own organizations.