Hard data on startup and venture capital activity is hard to come by.

Matt Shapiro, a second-year MBA student at Yale, led an effort to change this, conducting the "Entrepreneur's Census."

He surveyed startups across the country about everything from how much money they have raised, to how much they spend on rent.

Innovative companies could see a dramatic reduction in the cost of patenting new inventions, if a controversial European Commission plan is adopted by EU governments. The new rules could pave the way for a single European patent to be issued in one of just three languages – English, French or German.

The move is designed to make translation costs 20 times cheaper and promises to bring to a close a long-running language dispute which has scuppered efforts to streamline Europe's expensive patent system.

However, the decision to examine and grant patents in the three languages currently used by the European Patent Office (EPO) could cause friction with Spain and Italy who are unhappy with the preferential treatment given to English, French and German.

The EU's approach to innovation policy is too focused on science and research, with too little attention paid to business, according to entrepreneurs.

The 'Europe 2020' strategy put innovation at the heart of the EU's blueprint for competitiveness, but plans to publish a 'research and innovation' strategy this autumn are under fire.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels, former Belgian Entrepreneur of the Year Bart Van Coppenolle described the European Commission's approach to innovation as "totally wrong".

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I own a huge library of books on innovation. Mostly hardcover. The $27.95 variety with big indexes and forwards by people who make more money than I do.

Some of these books are actually good. Most of them bore me. (I must confess I have a secret desire, whenever I enter a bookstore, to put glue between pages 187 & 188 in all of the new releases just to see if the publishers get any complaints).

The books attempt to describe the origins of innovation. You know, stuff like “the innate human impulse to find a better way” and “the imperative to find a competitive edge.” That sort of thing.

Corporate-speak, in other words.

I have always thought of July 4th in terms of small business. Historically of course, it is when our country declared its independence from Great Britain.

But, more and more, business people are forced to declare there independence from working for someone else simply because there are no jobs. The unemployment figures released this past week show that job creation is not growing beyond the government sector. Many fear a double dip recession.

This is the year for many of you to declare you independence and start your own business. But it is not for everyone. Take my entrepreneurship test and see how you score!

This vintage clip brings you the first recorded video (with sound) of Mahatma Gandhi, who led India’s nonviolent resistance movement against British colonial rule. Shot some time before 1947 (when independence finally came), the video runs a mere four minutes. But it’s enough to show you the serene and fearless determination that made Gandhi such a forceful figure, and inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation in America a few years later. Great find by @Hudsonette

How can you start your social enterprise for a small amount of capital or even no capital at all?

One key way you can get in the business of social enterprises -- the business of changing the world -- is through bootstrapping.

-- GET VIDEO --

The Internet might be driving down our attention spans and turning us ADD, but Zenhabits is a friendly reminder to disconnect and unwind. Offering everything from productivity tips to ways to beat writer's block, the blog has several years' worth of guides to help you live a more efficient life — as soon as you step away from the computer.

CULLMAN — If the hot weather has people tired and thirsty, and a tall, cold cup of lemonade is just what they are craving, Maddie’s Lemonade Stand on the corner of 9th and 4th Street SW in Cullman might just hit the spot.

Maddie, Roy, and Morgan Grimmett have been working hard for the past couple of weeks from 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m to supply Cullman residents with lemonade and a smile.

Their lemonade stand was custom made by their uncle, Lucas McCollum, and presented to Maddie by her great-grandfather, Roy Drinkard, as an early birthday gift.

Her first thought was that she wanted to earn enough money to pay her own way to Disney World, but a program on television changed her mind.

A reader asks:  My co-founder and I are about to approach VCs for funding for the first time.  We’re both first-time entrepreneurs and don’t want to make any rookie mistakes.  What are some of the common missteps you’ve seen guys like us make dealing with financiers?

Answer: You’re always at a disadvantage when dealing with the venture capital community, since their experience almost certainly outweighs yours. But there are ways to can go into the negotiations prepared. Here are five quick things that startup owners often get wrong:

One of the biggest hurdles on the road to make electric vehicles attractive for the mass market is the long time it usually takes to charge batteries. But a Japanese company called JFE Engineering now claims it has found a solution for that problem. According to JFE, even so-called “quick battery chargers” often take 30 minutes to charge a car’s battery to 80% of its capacity.

Scientists found this sperm whale 77 miles south from the Deepwater spill site off the Gulf Coast.

The benefits of the Internet and social networking technologies will far outweigh the negatives by the year 2020, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center. The study surveyed 895 technology leaders and critics, with 85 percent of the respondents saying that the Internet will be a positive social tool in their lives in the next 10 years. Fourteen percent disagreed with that statement.

Those who noted the positive effects cited how the Internet and social networking technologies have reduce the cost of communication.

"They said "geography" is no longer an obstacle to making and maintaining connections; some noted that internet-based communications removes previously perceived constraints of "space" and not just "place," the report noted.

On Cleveland’s east side there’s a neighborhood called University Circle. It’s an anachronism. The “circle” part disappeared 60 years ago. There is one university. Yet the same area includes three hospital systems, medical and nursing schools, the local biotech trade group and many of the city’s medical startups.

Enough. Down with the name University Circle. Expand the borders a bit and call it what it is: The Medical District.

Branding can be a pithy and overhyped undertaking. But not when it comes to reviving the economic psyche of cities like Cleveland, which have transitioned away from their manufacturing base. An accurate re-branding celebrates and promotes a city’s new economy and can fuel that growth.

Think the trend of businesses making green office renovations is just a passing fad? Not according to the latest issue of EL Insights, which reports that the U.S. green building market value will balloon from $71.1 billion now to $173 billion by 2015. Commercial green building is expected to grow by 18.1% annually during the same time period from $35.6 billion to $81.8 billion. In this case, green building is defined as building with resource use and employee productivity in mind.

At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

I recently overheard someone reply, when asked about her holiday weekend, "It was successful. My New Year's resolution is to overeat on every major holiday. I figure I'm going to do it anyway; why not make it a goal I can actually keep?"

I had to laugh. It made me think about the goals we create in our lives and in our businesses.

Many fall into one of two major categories. The first category is goals we set that we have a 95 percent chance of accomplishing--mostly because we have done it before, so the likelihood is high that we'll succeed.

Most mammals don't live long past their reproductive years, failing to serve much evolutionary purpose after they can stop passing on their genes to offspring.

Only three long-lived social mammalian species are known break that mold. Killer whales (Orcinus orca), pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) and humans (as well as possibly some other great apes) all have females that generally live for decades after they cease being able to bear young. So what might we have in common with these cetaceans?