Add Us In Initiative: Department of Labor Office program to develop and evaluate replicable models, strategies and policies to ensure that youth and adults with disabilities from diverse communities have access to a broader range of employment and mentoring opportunities. The program is designed to increase the ability of businesses owned, operated and controlled by African Americans; Asian Americans; Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender individuals, and women to employ adults and youth with disabilities. Consortia applying for the cooperative agreement must have representation from a number of organization types. Deadline: September 1, 2010.

Disability Employment Initiative: The Department of Labor announced a solicitation for grant applications for approximately $22 million to fund programs that will improve educational, training and employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities. Funds will be awarded to state workforce agencies, which will collaborate with workforce investment boards and local areas. Grant awards will range from $1.5 to $6 million each to be spent over a three-year period. Closing date: September 8, 2010.

With a growing number of people seeking entrepreneurship as an alternative path in this rough economy, there is increasing competition for the key resources that can make or break the startup venture.

New entrepreneurs are competing for essential resources, such as the funding, the customers and the staff they need to build a successful business. Attracting these resources often relies on how well the entrepreneur can deliver "the pitch" for his new business.

An effective pitch starts with a hook -- something that grabs the attention of the person one is talking to about a business. The most effective hook lays the groundwork to show the underlying need in the market for what the new business aims to offer.

There really is no choosing to become an entrepreneur; there are some who are simply born to bring new ideas, products and solutions to the marketplace and others who do not have an entrepreneurial bone in their body. But even those who have the skills and ambition to become an entrepreneur must be prepared to face the harsh realities of the business world and to gain the knowledge required to bring their brilliant ideas to fruition.

Before you quit your day job to devote your time to becoming a successful small business owner, there are 10 important laws you need to become intimately familiar with as you begin your journey down the road to become an entrepreneur. Ignore them at your peril because each comes with a sting in its tail for those who, intentionally or due to ignorance, abuse them..

Venture-capital firm Institutional Venture Partners said it raised a new $750 million fund, as the overall venture-fundraising environment begins to show some signs of improvement.

The Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, Calif., venture firm, which primarily invests in later financing rounds of start-ups as opposed to the earliest stages of a start-up, said its newest fund is larger than its 2007 fund that closed at $600 million. The new fund–dubbed IVP XIII–was also originally targeted to be $600 million but was oversubscribed, said IVP General Partner Todd Chaffee.

Mr. Chaffee said investor interest in the new fund was particularly driven by IVP’s results over the past few years, with the firm having taken stakes in hot start-ups such as micro-blogging service Twitter and online games company Zynga. Since IVP largely invests in start-ups when they are more mature, Mr. Chaffee said some of the risk is also dminished for an investor.

Looking over The Forbes annual Midas List there was something strange and awry, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I finally figured it out. Where are the women venture capitalists?!

The Midas List, which started in 2001, did not rank one single woman. This should certainly strike as a surprise given the space and time women have entered the workforce. Over the past 30 years, the position of women in U.S. society has changed dramatically.

Four women from Forbes’s 2009 list were named the most powerful VCs and five more from Forbe’s 2007 list. Venture capital is not just a boys club anymore and hopefully there are more to come this year. Including female investors has proved to benefit companies. For example, being familiar with women-run businesses can result in funding with at least one woman partner as opposed to those who only have male partners. Though there are social barriers to overcome for female venture capitalists, there has been some significant change within the last three decades. Women have risen to the top recently and succeeded in the male dominated world of finance and business. As part of the ever changing world we live in, I predict that more women will go into venture in these coming years.

No patent?  No problem.

The results of a recent study challenge the standard notion that most businesses started by academics are based on patents (“Start-up model patently flawed” in Nature magazine, July 2010).

The study found that the majority of companies started by US academics are started without patents.  This is contrary to the generally accepted wisdom about how entrepreneurship occurs in a university, which usually goes something like this:  academics disclose their invention to universities, get it patented and then spin-out their company from the university.   This is actually only part of the entrepreneurial picture in universities — and a smaller part of the picture at that.

Let's face it: Working for someone else is a great way to get started in the business world, but it is not where an entrepreneur with lofty goals will want to remain.

If you're tired of being just another cog, and you crave a sense of personal fulfillment and long-term passion, then it might be time to take the plunge. Here are seven signs you should quit your job and start your own business.

1. You're Extremely Confident

To be a truly successful entrepreneur, there can never be any doubt in your mind that you will accomplish your goals, even if you must occasionally alter your plans or refine your targets. Your success is as much a matter of your belief in yourself as it is of the skills you will develop on your journey.

An ambitious new ad campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky tries to convince kids that baby carrots are like Doritos. (But what about the cheese dust?!)

Can the carrot industry sex up its image by branding baby carrots as a munchworthy junk food a la Cheetos or Lay's Potato Chips? Crispin Porter + Bogusky seems to think so.

The high-profile ad agency is launching an ambitious $25 million campaign to help the carrot industry compete with the junk food industry. The campaign is being launched with the help of almost 50 carrot growers, including carrot behemoth Bolthouse Farms.

Brazil, which has seen the number of foreign patients rise from 48,000 in 2005 to 180,000 last year--and is growing at a 30% clip year-over-year--is poised to draw still more from its neighbors and the U.S. thanks to shorter flights and a bump from futebol.

Brazilians endlessly repeat the old saw that the world thinks of only three things when it thinks of Brazil: samba, carnivale and football. But its healthcare industry would like to add a fourth--surgery. As part of Brazil’s efforts to leverage both the tourists and the infrastructure investments expected in the wake of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, the country hosted its first medical tourism conference last week in São Paulo.

In the last year, the Top 30 Most Active Venture Capital Firms had their hands in one out of every four deals which amounted to nearly $9 billion in funding.  The internet sector in particular was a favorite destination of investment for the top venture capital firms with 36% of their deal flow and 26% of their dollars invested going to net companies.

The wealthiest members of Congress grew richer in 2009 even as the economy struggled to recover from a deep recession.

The 50 wealthiest lawmakers were worth almost $1.4 billion in 2009, about $85.1 million more than 12 months earlier, according to The Hill’s annual review of lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) tops the list for the second year in a row. His minimum net worth was $188.6 million at the end of 2009, up by more than $20 million from 2008, according to his financial disclosure form.

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The end of Google Wave and rumors that the company is building a Facebook competitor has a lot of people talking about Google's need to get better at social. Fortune's article on Google's future growth last month, apart from highlighting absurdity a company becoming "too successful," speculates as to what Google will need to do in order to continue growing in the future. The article's authors dismiss Google Apps for Enterprise and move on to sexier fair, discussing what Google needs to do to be more "social." But it's clear that Google has big plans for the enterprise. First, of course, because Eric Schmidt has said so, but also because of the various steps the company is taking.

Why should Google focus on the enterprise instead of social networking sites? As pointed out by box.net's CEO Aaron Levie, enterprise IT spending dwarfs online advertising spending. The $79.4 billion budget for federal IT spending alone is more than three times the $24.2 billion spent on online advertising in 2009, making Google Apps for Government look like a very smart business venture.

The product you've built, the team you've assembled, the customers you've won, the growth you're predicting - all crucial for winning investor support. And you can have all those pieces in place and still blow it during your pitch. This can happen because of your demeanor or something you say.

"Startup killers" is how Cynthia Kocialski describes them. "When speaking to someone about the new product or the business proposition, there is often the moment when you know that you have lost your listener," she writes in a blog post titled "How to Lose an Investor Before You Finish Speaking." "One misspoken comment and everyone wants to leave as soon as possible. They've made their decision and they want you to stop wasting their time."

I ran into a venture capitalist colleague coming out of Palo Alto's Whole Foods yesterday evening. I mentioned a VC-funded solar startup CEO I had just interviewed, and this VC, let's call him Sanjay, just rolled his eyes and said, "Solar is done."

Sanjay pointed out, in-between bites of raw fawn hearts, the logic that now made solar investing, at least in solar panels, a lost cause for venture capital investors. He explained, "Let's s

ay your capex is $1 per watt for your solar panel factory. Given the moving freight train that is the current solar industry, you're going to have to ramp up to half a gigawatt or a gigawatt. That's $500 million to one billion dollars just to build your factory."

One year ago I predicted that in 2010/11 the economy, far from being on the path of permanent recovery was on a temporary resurgence and there was a strong possibility of a “double dip” recession. 

My advice to entrepreneurs was and is “when the hors d’oeuvres tray is being passed take two” (e.g. raise money now to weather any storms).

My original thinking from Oct ’09 was, while I didn’t (and still don’t) have a crystal ball I worried that: consumers were over-stretched with debt (and make up 77% of the economy), unemployment would continue to rise, which in turn would drive the stock market south and cut the rate of M&A activity and VC investment even further.

Forget the "Ground Zero mosque," Michelle Obama's Spanish holiday and even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When future historians look back to the summer of 2010, the event they are most likely to focus on is China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy.

Mostly, this is a very good thing. The rise of China, and the related,
albeit slightly slower, emergence of India, is the story of hundreds of
millions of very poor people joining the global economy and getting a
little richer. Gross domestic product per capita in those two countries
was basically stagnant from 1820 to 1950. Then, it increased 68 percent
from 1950 to 1973, and a whopping 245 percent from 1973 to 2002.

But we need to be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from China's
resurrection. The most dangerous one is that authoritarianism works.

Against the backdrop of Biotechnology Region Rhein Neckar, Germany's award winning top-cluster, The Technopolicy Network is organizing its 7th Annual Conference on 30 September & 1 October. Experts from over 15 countries will focus on the aspects that are needed to create a knowledge region that is truly of world-class. Topics include clustering strategies, benchmarking, ingredients of a successful knowledge region and the importance of international alliances. Poh Kam Wong (Singapore University and Silicon Valley Entrepreneur), Richard Bendis (venture capitalist and US cluster policy advisor), Peter Nijkamp (regional economist and Dutch government advisor) and Tony Rahilly (DG National Research Council Canada) are among the many eminent speakers.
 
The conference is hosted by Bioregion Rhein Neckar (BioRN). This leading life science region has developed into one of the leading clusters in Europe in the field of personalized medicine and cancer. Christian Tidona, cluster manager of BioRN, will be introducing this impressive cluster. Within a radius of 30 kilometers around the University of Heidelberg, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are amongst the 60 highly innovative biotech and pharma companies with a total of nearly 20,000 employees, working on new drugs, diagnostics, technology platforms and services.

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On Christmas Day last year, I posted a list of ten great free e-books for innovators. Today isn’t as festive, but I have another ten great free e-books that can help you become more innovative. Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation, and one of the ways to do this is to read widely in order to gain exposure to a wide variety of ideas. This is a list of great resources that will help you do precisely that.

Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy by Steve Daniels – We’re starting to hear more and more about highly innovative people in developing countries – when the innovations they develop migrate to developed countries, some call it reverse innovation, a phrase I’m not too fond of. This book tells the story of many interesting innovations in Kenya, including looking at the knowledge networks that facilitate collaboration within communities. No matter what you call it, innovation takes place everywhere. For other great stories, check out the Afrigadget blog, or do some research on Jugaad in India.

As your organization continues rebounding from the financial meltdown, here are 50 ways to ensure that it becomes increasingly conducive to ongoing innovation. Commit to a few of these today and make some magic. Your next step?

1. Remember that innovation requires no fixed rules or templates — only guiding principles. Creating a more innovative culture is an organic and creative act.

2. Wherever you can, whenever you can, always drive fear out of the workplace. Fear is “Public Enemy #1″ of an innovative culture.

3. Have more fun. If you’re not having fun (or at least enjoying the process) something is off.

4. Always question authority, especially the authority of your own longstanding beliefs.

For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?