Finding success as an entrepreneur in the competitive world of business requires more than a great idea and influx of cash. Success (or failure) depends heavily on personal traits that keep the real entrepreneur moving forward effectively despite setbacks, sleepless nights, and whispers of doubt.

Open Forum and Business Insider contributor Shira Levine picked the minds of several entrepreneurs to find out the characteristics required to make a successful run at entrepreneurialism.

A sampling:

* Motivation. Making it happen without get distracted by shiny objects along the way.
* Focused passion. Passion is great, but make sure you construct a road map.
* Nonconformity. Don’t fit in? Who cares?
* Street Smarts. Building a successful business doesn’t necessarily require an MBA, or even a college degree.

The sFund announcement passed me by this week, but its implications are immense for the way the web is moving.

It is effectively a quarter of a billion dollar fund to help entrepreneurs be creative with web technologies and is intended to, more than anything foster a feeling of innovation without boundaries.

What is especially interesting – other than the sum of money is that it is backed by 3 of the most influential trading names on the web today, Facebook, Amazon.com and Zynga. The very fact that a retailer, the largest social network in the world and the largest social gaming company in the world should give you a pretty big idea of where the web (and the opportunity that lies within it anyway) is going

With universities facing pressure to show the value of their research, to promote economic development and to find new sources of revenue, links between academic researchers and business are being encouraged and scrutinized intensely. The essays in a new book -- The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University (University of Pittsburgh Press) -- explore these issues. The authors of the essays and their content explore these issues in the United States and other countries as well. The editor of the volume is Hans Radder, a professor of the philosophy of science and technology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who responded to e-mailed questions about the themes of the volume.

A few weeks ago, Julie tweeted the following: “timeline tool, schmimeline tool. chalk ftw.” This post led to a conversation among a few of us, ending with Siva Vaidhyanathan requesting a ProfHacker “entry on chalk and boards.” Siva, this one’s for you! (Don’t let it ever be said that we don’t take requests here!)

Here at ProfHacker, we have frequently espoused the wonder of whiteboards. George’s first wish for his ideal classroom is whiteboards, and lots of ‘em. Amy lists a small whiteboard among her favorite academic tools. Jason likes them so much that he likes to turn his iPad into a whiteboard at times. In a post from last year, one of my top pieces of advice for new teachers was to make sure they had their own whiteboard markers with them at all times.

Plastics, as we all know, were the future in the 1960s. And they still are: The sheer breadth and pace of innovation in the material has been nothing short of amazing, and shows no sign of slowing.

A new book, Plastic Dreams, by Charlotte and Peter Fiell ($45) offers a whirlwind tour of that history. In all, it covers almost 100 years of innovations in plastics, starting with a Ribbonaire table fan from 1931 and ending with the avante garde experiments of Konstantin Grcic and Zaha Hadid. All of the designs speak to the time they were made, the same way an old arrowhead might.

Earlier today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers unveiled their latest massive fund: the sFund. This $250 million fund has one mission: to find the best startups in the social space out there and fund them. But Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr has a better way of putting it: “I’m thinking of it like it’s a quarter-billion dollar party.”

Fair enough.

I sat down with Doerr after the announcement and subsequent press conference with partners Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon, to talk a bit about the new fund. Doerr noted that the fund itself bubbled up from an idea he put out there at our own TechCrunch Disrupt conference this past May: the “Third Wave“. That is, Doerr believes that the “First Wave” was in the early 1980s with the microchip and the PC. The “Second Wave” was in the mid-1990s when the web came along. Now it’s time for this Third Wave: social, mobile, the cloud, and commerce all coming together.

At today's roundtable, we had some very interesting discussions on creative bootstrapping. I am always fascinated by how innovative entrepreneurs get when faced with resource crunches.

First up today was Justin Beck with PerBlue, a mobile and social gaming company that makes the iPhone and Android game Parallel Kingdom that has been in the market for a couple of years. PerBlue develops and markets its own game, and today, is at about a $35,000-$40,000 per-month run rate from 200,000 users.

Justin is looking for a more efficient customer acquisition model, and my suggestion to him was to look into using distributors, instead of trying to do all the development and then also all the distribution himself. With limited resources, this is a tall order, and it seemed to me that Justin's heart really is in the creative.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama hosted win­ners of stu­dent sci­ence fairs at the White House on Mon­day, part of the lead-in to this weekend’s cel­e­bra­tion of sci­ence on the National Mall. The USA Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing Fes­ti­val, which also includes some 50 satel­lite events around the coun­try, aims to engage and excite more than 1 mil­lion peo­ple nationwide.

This focus on sci­ence and sci­ence edu­ca­tion couldn’t come at a more crit­i­cal time. America’s abil­ity to com­pete in a global econ­omy, to cre­ate good jobs and to sup­port our stan­dard of liv­ing is heav­ily depen­dent on the inno­va­tion that flows from sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery. Engag­ing stu­dents early and fos­ter­ing an inter­est in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is essen­tial. So, too, is sup­port­ing these pur­suits through high-caliber K-12 edu­ca­tion in the STEM areas (sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, engi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics) and strong fund­ing for basic sci­ence research at the under­grad­u­ate and post-graduate levels.

(CNN) -- When Gavin Ovsak started multiplying double-digit numbers in his head in kindergarten, his mother, Cathy, was astonished.

"We were like, where did that come from? When did they cover that today?" said his mother, who lives in Hopkins, Minnesota.

Today, Gavin is a 16-year-old award-winning inventor who's finishing up applications for two prestigious science competitions. His entry is the Circuit-Hat Accessibility Device, an electronic hat that allows disabled people to use a computer without a mouse. When he's not working on these kinds of projects, he's performing improv comedy, leading a robotics team and heading his school's foreign exchange club -- and, of course, homework.

My top-level take away from the recent InformationWeek 500 Conference is that the economic doldrums may not be completely over, but people are working as if they are. I sensed more pent-up enthusiasm in the conference hall than at any time during the past three years. CIOs are chomping at the bit, not just to keep their business in the game, but to pull ahead of competitors.

I can't tell you how many times I heard the tired saw, "Nobody ever shrunk their way to success." Well, nobody's in shrink mode now, though peoples' budgets don't necessarily match their developmental ambitions. Perhaps that's why the ideas floating about the collective industry subconscious as we wrap up 2010 all seem to have a heavy ROI component. Here they are, in no particular order.

A new meta-analysis study, “The Neuroimaging of Love,” conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue, reveals that falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.

Ortigue is an assistant professor of psychology and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology, both in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University.

Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, dropped by the Googleplex on Friday for a fireside chat on renewable energy and the state of America’s green tech industry.

Speaking to Urs Hölzle, Google’s SVP of Operations, Chu told a room full of Googlers that although he was largely optimistic about America’s green future, he was frustrated by how much the US had fallen behind and how “we have taken our technological leadership for granted.”

Several times throughout the session, Chu brought up the example of China, a country that has been uber aggressive in funding green initiatives. He rattled off numerous examples of their unbridled ambition, including China’s plan to erect 25 nuclear power plants and the installation of “the highest voltage lines in the world to port renewable energy — they can now port electricity 1900 kilometers, at a 6% loss.”

Companies that let customers design their own products are becoming the next big thing. Just three months ago, I wrote that this trend of “customer co-creation” was one to watch. But it may prove even hotter than I thought. Since publishing the story, I’ve seen quite a bit of new funding activity in the space.

Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures probably explains this phenomenon of mass customization the best: “We’re pretty convinced that mass-market consumer products are now so cheap and widely available that they’ve lost a lot of their appeal. We think people are looking for something unique and customizable. We’re interested in the social fabric — bringing people together that design things, and people who want to buy them. Mass produced goods are dominated by a few large brands. But everywhere you look there are movements seeking to bypass those brands, whether it’s the locavore movement in food, or something such as NikeID, which has seen double-digit growth year over year.”

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has announced the establishment of a technology commercialization company, named 'CSIR Plus'.

The company was incorporated in 2009 with a start-up capital of 200 thousand Ghana Cedis.

Director-General of the Council, Dr. Abdulai Baba Salifu, says the initiative is to further enhance the corporate goal of generating science and technology products for the benefit of society.

He disclosed this at the 21st Annual General Meeting of the Council's Research Staff Association in Kumasi.

Dr. Baba Salifu says Pricewaterhousecoopers are currently putting together a business plan for the CSIR Plus. There are also discussions with IBM to develop an electronic roadmap for an enterprise network for data governance at the CSIR.

Some people may be surprised to learn there is a venture capital industry that specializes in providing financing to fledgling companies.

Financing start-up companies isn’t for the faint of heart. Those involved in the venture capital business must be on their toes.

Veteran venture capitalist, Mike Grandinetti, managing director of Southboro Capital LLC of Boston, says the venture capital industry, which started in Boston in the mid-1950s, is now undergoing major adjustments.

Part of the change has been brought about by the recent economic recession but the industry has gone through lots of economic cycles before and survived. This time, the more significant change, is "a structural issue," he says.

A FEW young women are gathered around a conference table dotted with bottles of colorful vitamin drinks, iPod cables and slender laptops. A whiteboard with lime-green writing almost swallows a wall in the room.

One bites her lip; another taps lightly on the table. They’re all quiet, deep in thought, as they decide whether it would be a good idea to add a music feature to the Web site they’re working on — a new online shopping site called PlumWillow.

“The problem,” says one of them, Sarah Murphy, “is that there are so many genres of music that it’d be hard to get it right what people want to listen to.”

“Right,” Carla Larin concurs, tossing her wavy brown hair. “But it’d be cool to have, like, a PlumWillow station full of songs we think are cool.”

Yesterday afternoon, I hopped onto the F Train and got off at Bergen Street, my old subway stop. It brought back memories. I love that area of Brooklyn. Court Street between Atlantic and the Gowanus is my favorite street in all of the five boroughs of NYC.

I strolled up Smith a half block to The Invisible Dog to attend an event called Brooklyn Beta. This is my kind of conference. There was one other VC in the room, Charlie O'Donnell, who makes it a practice to be everywhere something is interesting happening. The rest of the room was filled with designers, coders, and especially designers who code. That last group is a special breed and the heart and soul of many of our best companies.