While small business gets talked up in the economic recovery plan, lending to small business is still down--by $40 billion--from what it was two years ago. Entrepreneurs are grumbling. And Karen G. Mills, head of the SBA, is taking questions.

For glass-half-full types, President Barack Obama's proclamation this spring that his administration "is committed to helping small businesses drive our economy toward recovery and long-term growth" was another indication that small business has a true ally in the White House.

For others, however, those words provided another stinging reminder of how policymakers in Washington have failed to back their statements with action. Despite repeated assurances from the administration, accompanied by a flurry of new pro-entrepreneur initiatives, small-business supporters such as Todd McCracken, president of the National Small Business Association in Washington, D.C., are concerned that policymakers remain largely beholden to big business, just as they were when George W. Bush ran the White House.

"It's almost time for our weekly staff meeting. I'm eager for it to start."

Those words have never been spoken or written without sarcasm, anywhere, ever.

Why is that? With e-mail and instant-message software fragmenting professional teams into isolated workers, meetings should be a welcome opportunity to bond with colleagues, share information and even get inspired. Instead, many professionals view meetings with dread.

Often, just one mistake can turn a meeting from the productive, team-building event it could be into an energy-sapping waste of time. Here are some of the biggest meeting mistakes -- and how to avoid them.

#1 Having No Clear Purpose

"It's Monday" is not a good enough reason to have a staff meeting.

If you don't have useful information to share with your team -- information they'll need to perform their jobs -- then it might make more sense to let them spend that hour working, rather than sitting in a meeting "just to get caught up" with the group.

On Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs held a press conference to address "Antennagate", or the issues that iPhone 4 users have been having with the phone's antenna.

With the conference, Jobs ended up coming out on top by promising a free solution for customers and emphasizing that the issue was over-hyped (and backing it up with data.)

The online world was charged with discussions about the presentation (and still is) -- and not only because it concerned Apple. There were a few specific things Jobs did that ensured his presentation would go viral.

Fast Company spoke with Dan Zarella, a scientist who studies how presentations turn into viral sensations, about what Jobs did right during his presentation to make sure it was talked about afterwards.

Small- and medium-sized manufacturers are bringing innovation and value-added to the renewable markets. But will it pay off?

Dowding Industries didn't need to witness the collapse of GM and Chrysler before deciding the time was right to exit the automotive sector. For more than a decade, the family-run manufacturer had witnessed the sinking of too many links within the auto supply chain.

As more and more small- and medium-sized manufacturers fell by the wayside, undermined by the narrow margins and inherent inefficiencies of the car business, Dowding saw potential in new areas, such as components for off-road vehicles, rail cars and wind turbines.

Being an innovator is both a blessing and a curse. Innovators are constantly seeking to improve things by finding a better way. A questing personality is a blessing providing innovators with a source of personal pride, accomplishment, and exhilaration. At the same time an innovator’s job is never done. There is always a better way. A sense of perpetual incompleteness and never being satisfied torments most innovators I know. I think this blessing and curse dichotomy is the secret sauce that makes innovators tick. It motivates innovators to take personal risks, collaborate with unusual suspects to find a missing piece, and jump through incredible hoops seeking a better way. Innovators wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is always a better way. It doesn’t matter how innocuous or small a thing from everyday life it is. You can always tell an innovator because they fixate on addressing small things with the same child-like enthusiasm they readily deploy to large complex societal problems. It’s the little things that often get innovators the most riled up. I learned this lesson the hard way and share one of many personal examples. After a long career as a road warrior strategy consultant I found myself at home trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my career. One morning I came downstairs and opened the cupboard that housed breakfast cereal for our three children and found it filled with twelve half-opened cereal boxes. You know the one I am talking about. Tell me you can’t relate to this important dilemma. I fell into the trap and loudly proclaimed, isn’t there a better way to organize this cereal. The response was immediate and resounding, thanks for the input, now go find something else to do, preferably out of the house! I know my wife is groaning reading this thinking, no, not the cereal box story again. Can’t you come up with a new story for heaven’s sake? P.S. regarding the cereal box story, the children and the cereal boxes have left home and I miss them both terribly. Innovators can’t help themselves, no matter how small the challenge, there is always a better way and they are driven to find it.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) concluded in its regular broadband deployment report to Congress that between 14 and 24 million Americans still lack access to broadband, and the immediate prospects for deployment to them are bleak.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement Tuesday that the report underscores the need for policies in the National Broadband Plan that could help expand access.

"Taking account of the millions of Americans who, despite years of waiting, still have little prospect of getting broadband deployed to their homes, we must conclude that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion," he said.

DEFIANCE, Ohio — From behind a neat, ranch-style house on Melody Lane came the clinking and clanking rhythm of iron striking iron.

Alan Francis stood more than a dozen long-legged strides from an inch-thick stake drilled deep into tacky clay. Perhaps the most dominant athlete in any sport in the country, Francis lifted his right arm, swung it behind him and forward again.

He launched a horseshoe toward the target 40 feet away. It weighed a little more than two and a half pounds and spun slowly, sideways. It rose and fell in an arc until its narrow open end, three and a half inches across, caught the stake with percussive perfection.

Entrepreneurship clubs help students turn their ideas and passions into businesses and develop future business leaders.

Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton met at an entrepreneurship club while attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Within three days of meeting, the two had the idea for their company iContact that helps small businesses manage their e-mail marketing. iContact now has 63,000 customers and generated $26.5 million in revenue last year. With the creation of entrepreneurship clubs, colleges and universities across the country are becoming small business development incubators.

According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, over 2100 colleges and universities were offering entrepreneurship education programs by 2006.  These programs and centers vary in their execution, but often help students cultivate a startup business idea, teach them basic strategies like estimating costs and writing a business plan, and help them network their ideas toward sources of funding.

When entrepreneurs come to me, I always point out the following:

1) The chances of a venture-backed startup being a hit and returning meaningful wealth are about 1 in 10.

2) You're likely to have about 20-25 years in your career where you can found a company.

3) Each time you found a company, you're going to end up spending 4-5 years of your life on it.

4) Therefore, the equation for entrepreneurial wealth is the following: You have a 10% chance of success per startup, and you get 5 swings to hit it out of the park.

Ensuring Iowa competitiveness in the global economy for jobs and business growth, the Iowa Department of Economic Development has empowered a group of Iowa's top business leaders to identify strategic opportunities to spur best practices for long term growth in the state. This new advisory group is known as the Iowa Innovation Council (IIC).

"The Iowa Innovation Council utilizes our state's brightest business minds to ensure we remain competitive in the global business economy," said Governor Chet Culver. "This first meeting marks the beginning of unified efforts between business representatives and government officials to develop methods and policies that will foster innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit."

Moving beyond the parameters of traditional economic development, which often focuses solely on a state's natural attributes, the Iowa Innovation Council will place a renewed emphasis on advancing Iowa's status as a national center of emerging industry. Concentrating on developing an innovation-based economy and working with the state's knowledge-based strengths, such as the community college and university system, the Council will develop strategies to leverage the state's specialized talent pool into available jobs.

INNOVATION AMERICA AND RICH BENDIS ARE PROVIDING CONSULTING SERVICES TO THE  IIC. AND IDED.

I have a friend who works for a company with just one customer. Now, that customer is a huge one — one of the largest Big Box retailers on the planet. My friend’s company does critical infrastructure monitoring work for Big Box Inc.

Good situation or bad?

Many entrepreneurs leading small businesses would give their first born for a huge national account. Great reference account, stable income, and valuable experience all wrapped into one. And all true. But when the big account is the only one you have, problems multiply.

WASHINGTON (TheStreet) -- Venture-capital investors placed $6.5
billion in 906 deals in the second quarter, the most invested in startup
companies since the third quarter of 2008, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers
and the National Venture Capital Association.

Investments jumped 34% in dollar terms and 22% in deal count compared
with the first quarter, when $4.9 billion was invested in 740 startups,
according to the report, which is based on data from Thompson Reuters(TRI).
Year-over-year performance was significant, too: In the second quarter
of 2009, $4.27 billion was invested in 705 transactions.

The number of seed and early-stage investment deals increased from
the previous quarter, rising 54% to $2.3 billion. The number of
nascent-stage deals rose 32% to 429 deals. First-time financing gains
were more modest, with newbie dollars rising only 7% from the prior
quarter to $1.1 billion, but the number of first-time deals climbed 27%
to 281 deals in the second quarter.

If a computer could identify your face as you walked into a store and could offer you personalized discounts, would you like it? If you were a store owner, would you want to do that?

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban thinks that’s the future of the “location” trend. He invested recently in a company that can count people in a video capture, and he believes the next step for the application is to add facial-recognition software, he wrote on his blog Sunday. Mr. Cuban wouldn’t reveal the name of the company but said it wasn’t currently using face-recognition technology.

The economy, job loss and increased competition for promotions and new jobs have all contributed to the trend of older people (55+) making the decision to start a business.

Older entrepreneurs have the advantages of time and experience on their side when it comes to starting a new business. But on the other hand, they may face a wide variety of challenges, including higher technological learning curves to use popular social media sites. (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo).

Older folks might lack experience as a business owner and it normally takes three-to-five-years before the business is generating sufficient funds to provide potential entrepreneurs with a “market rate” salary.

Why does Canada lag other OECD members in almost every measure of business sector innovation? What needs to change?

Creativity lies at the heart of modern competitiveness. Innovation is the ability to create new products and services, to produce existing products in new ways, and to develop new markets. It drives productivity; it drives growth; and it drives our living standards. The problem is that Canada is not an innovation leader.

In 2007, the Canadian business sector ranked 14th among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in business R&D expenditures as a percentage of the economy. Canadian business R&D spending is only 1 per cent of GDP, well below the OECD average of 1.6 per cent. More troubling, it is roughly half of what the U.S. spends and even further behind countries such as South Korea, Finland and Sweden. Simply to raise Canadian business R&D spending to the OECD average would require an additional $10-billion annually.

California is studying a new incentive that could grow renewables—and change everything about the state’s energy supply in the process.

The feed-in tariff (FIT) has exploded renewable growth every place it has been implemented and a new study from UC Berkeley says it will do the same in California. But handling explosive growth is not easy. The people responsible for keeping the state's lights and air conditioning on are scrambling -- and not always wholeheartedly -- to understand and prepare for the FIT.

A FIT is an above-retail rate ("tariff") paid for renewable energy-generated electricity that producers "feed" into the grid. It was first used in California in the late 1970s and early 1980s but failed at that time due to design flaws and lack of support. Revived in Germany with stunning success in the early 2000s, the FIT concept has subsequently been used successfully, according to Professor Dan Kammen, the lead author of the UC Berkeley study and one of the foremost U.S. renewable energy authorities, in at least fifteen countries. Dozens more are considering implementation.

When you go to a fast-food restaurant, you expect to get your fries quickly. But thinking about fast food makes us impatient about other things, too, according to a recent study in Psychological Science. People who examined the aesthetics of a McDonald’s or KFC logo were more likely to choose to take a smaller sum of money immediately (rather than waiting for a bigger payout a week later) than those who had critiqued the logos of inexpensive sit-down chains. After thinking about fast food, people were also more interested in time-saving products, such as 2-in-1 shampoo-conditioner, and they read a paragraph faster despite the fact that there was no time limit. Even when the task at hand has nothing to do with food, this study suggests, you act how you eat.

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - Kids in Fort Wayne are getting a chance to show their creative side with Create-A-Camp at the Arts United Center.

It's a week-long camp to help kids, grades 3-8, express themselves using pantomime, improvisation, theater games and through writing.

Each camper will also create their own original showcase.

The Fort Wayne Youth Theatre and the Arts United Center designed Create-A-Camp.

News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said:“We’re only at the beginning of two of the most profound social and economic trends of our age–globalization and digitization.”

Murdoch’s often refers to the success of News Corp being centered around creativity for the globalization and digitization in the new economy.

The emergence of a new economies are being fueled by creativity coming from small crowds with the intent of disrupting the thinking of the old crowd.

What Drives Creativity?