Eighteen small businesses and six individuals were honored today by SBA in Washington, D.C., for the critical role they play in research and development for the government and for their success in driving innovation and creating new jobs.

The Tibbetts Awards, given by the U.S. Small Business Administration, honor outstanding small businesses and individuals who participate in the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Two past participants in SBIR who represent the very best of the 30-plus-year SBIR program were named to the second SBIR Hall of Fame class.

“Creating an economy built to

Few ivory tower ideas reach the world below. University research often looks too far in the future and is too removed from everyday life and things that people might use. Occasionally, however, a researcher will hit on an idea that has more immediate promise. The University of Colorado recently received $30 million from investment companies for a single invention by one of its faculty members: a new use for Botox that the researcher began developing in the 1990s.   

"That doesn't happen often," said David Allen, vice president at Colorado's technology transfer office.   

Tech transfer offices consider themselves "very successful" if they earn even $1 million on an idea generated by faculty, said Todd Sherer, president of the Association of University Technology Managers. The local paper the Daily Camera reported on the earnings March 24. 

If you want to be a better entrepreneur, don’t miss these important tips. We’ve collected from far and wide on the Web to help you make your business better today.

Success Metrics

Ensuring your business success. Simple tips can make your business better, increasing your odds of success. Is success in business luck, skill or a combination of both. Check this list and you’ll see steps every entrepreneur can take.

I've been looking into it for a project online, but am very confused as to what the difference is between the two?

America has always been the land of tinkerers, from Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford to Steve Jobs and the guy who created the Flowbee. But today’s basement inventors have it easy in ways their predecessors couldn’t have imagined. In the past, someone with a new idea would have had to actually build the thing themselves, find a market for it and figure out how to get it mass-produced. Now inexpensive technology means that anybody can quickly transform an idea into a physical product. Google SketchUp makes it easy for even the sloppiest untrained draftsperson to mock up a 3-D digital model. Any inventor can contact a Chinese factory, many of which are so hungry for American business that they will create a prototype for next to nothing. Sites like Etsy.com make it easier to reach a market, and others, like Quirky.com, allow users to simply suggest an idea and share the royalties if it makes it to the market.

It’s often perceived in the business world that pursuing an MBA degree is analogous to buying career insurance, especially if you attend a top program.

What many aspiring entrepreneurs have found, however is that earning an MBA can actually momentarily slow down an upward career trajectory, considering the degree typically requires a two-year job hiatus at a full-time program.

The real benefit of this advanced degree may be the parachute it serves in times of economic distress.  But for those assessing the risk vs. reward opportunity, the need to consider the likelihood of that parachute opening properly remains paramount.  And perhaps the best indicator of that is how well the parachute is packed, or without the laborious analogy, how talented the individual is and how those talents are channeled toward meaningful professional endeavors.

MaRS today announced the creation of JOLT, a new technology accelerator dedicated to building high-growth web and mobile companies that promise to transform the way consumers and enterprises connect, work and play.

Housed in the MaRS Commons, JOLT will select up to 15 high-potential startups annually, providing them with space, seed financing and mentorship, as well as access to partners and some of the top angel and venture capital investors in the industry. The goal of the program is to accelerate market validation and, in turn, help these companies secure the capital and talent necessary to scale efficiently.

When the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act passed recently, many columnists and bloggers began weighing in with varying opinions, and some conjecture that may have muddied the waters.

As I've written before, thousands of us entrepreneurs will benefit from the law. This could become a very viable and exciting way for small companies to raise capital. But not yet. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has nine months to draw up the regulations.

As regular readers know, I've been writing about crowdfunding to raise investment capital since February 2011. My dream was shattered almost immediately by my trusted attorney, Chuck Hertlein, a partner of Dinsmore and Shohl in Cincinnati, who quickly pointed out that SEC rules prevented me from using crowdfunding in a way that would reward small investors with real investment opportunity while enabling me to raise additional capital to create jobs in rural USA.

Chocolate, considered by some to be the “food of the gods,” has been part of the human diet for at least 4,000 years; its origin thought to be in the region surrounding the Amazon basin. Introduced to the Western world by Christopher Columbus after his fourth voyage to the New World in 1502, chocolate is now enjoyed worldwide. Researchers estimate that the typical American consumes over 10 pounds of chocolate annually, with those living on the west coast eating the most. Wouldn’t it be great if only chocolate were considered healthy?

In fact, chocolate is a great source of myriad substances that scientists think might impart important health benefits. For instance, it contains compounds called “flavanols” that appear to play a variety of bodily roles including those related to their potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory actions. Many large-scale human studies have documented a statistical correlation between flavanol intake and risk for cardiovascular disease. And animal studies suggest that this relationship may be due to the physiologic effects that flavanols have on chronic inflammation, blood vessel health, and circulating lipid levels. However, few controlled human intervention studies have been conducted to test the direct effect of chocolate consumption on these variables.

Queen City Angels’ Chairman Tony Shipley testified before a House subcommittee last week on the value angel investing brings to the U.S. economy.

Shipley represented the Angel Capital Association in making his statement to the House Committee on Small Business Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Tax and Capital Access, according to a statement from Cincinnati-based Queen City Angels (QCA).

“It used to be that angel investors would make one or two investments before venture capitalists would invest in a series A round,” Shipley told the subcommittee. “Now angel groups sometimes need to make four or five rounds of investment before the entrepreneurial businesses are ‘VC ready.’”

Several county governments are helping medium-sized businesses learn to walk, so they can someday be up and running on a booming scale.

Economic gardening, a term coined to describe government support of medium-sized businesses poised for growth, is catching on throughout the country, most recently in Hillsborough County, Fla., though regional and state programs are becoming the norm.

Florida coordinates all economic gardening on a statewide level, through the University of Central Florida’s Economic Gardening Institute. 

You might hear that innovation depends on creativity or on new ideas but leading practitioners have gone beyond that. In fact in my experience many companies still only pay lip service to innovation. Those who are looking to do innovation well, in contrast, are either pioneering or looking to develop eight new elements. Here are those eight new attributes of really good innovators.

The information here is taken from a white paper,”The Evolution of The Innovation Landscape“, that I just completed for the folks at HYPE, in my view the best of the innovation platforms. HYPE helped me access some great practitioners, like Martin Ertl at Bombardier (BBD/N), Fabian Schlage at Nokia Siemens Networks, Mike DiPaola at Procter & Gamble (P&G), and Rebeca Rivera at Casa Pellas in Nicaragua.

IT WAS once only drug firms that developed drugs. But this is changing. Take the case of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a Parkinson’s disease charity. On April 19th it announced that it would pay for a clinical trial of a drug developed by Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical giant, that might treat the mental symptoms of the disease.

The deal is the latest sign of a broader shift—one that is driven by desperation. Patents on blockbuster drugs are expiring. Research and development (R&D) have grown less productive, with billions of dollars yielding only a trickle of drugs.

Some blame stringent regulators. Others grumble that big pharma firms are too bureaucratic. All agree that developing a new drug takes money (well over $1 billion) and time (over ten years in America). Whatever the cause, a shortfall in R&D has inspired a flood of new partnerships.

In the first quarter of 2012, investor confidence rose to the highest point it’s been in more than a year. The latest Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index — which measures how much statup investing confidence VCs have — shows a significant jump in confidence over the fourth quarter of 2011.

Investor confidence rose sharply in the first quarter of 2012, coming in at 3.79 on a five-point scale, according to the report. This is up from 3.27 in the fourth quarter of 2011. The increase is the first time the index has risen in a year, during the 2011 first quarter.

Technology entrepreneurs of past eras took two years to build a product, hire a staff and figure out whether there was any real market for their service. But today all that typically takes only a few months as founders cycle quickly through different ideas until they find one that sticks.

Kevin Systrom's Instagram, which started out as a virtual "check-in" site and wound up as a photo-sharing service, is a recent high-profile example.

The 28-year-old Mr. Systrom started a company about two years ago that attempted to put a new spin on the idea of virtually checking in at various locations via smartphones, then broadcasting that visit to one's social network. His company, which he called Burbn Inc., enabled people to leave messages via their phones that could be retrieved by others visiting the same location.

Yes, yes. It sounds like your mother nagging. But after crunching the data of thousands of users and their meals, the Eatery app discovered the truth: Skip breakfast and you’re going to eat worse food for the rest of the day, and more of it.

Don’t scoff: Breakfast really is important. If you replace it with a cup of coffee (or nothing at all), you’ll eat worse throughout the day than if you had taken the time to pour yourself a bowl of cereal, make some eggs, or even just grab an apple. The information comes from Massive Health’s Eatery iPhone app, which allows users to take pictures of their food, rate it based on perceived healthiness, and then rate other people’s photos. Massive Health extracted its data from hundreds of thousands of users.

The very first email was sent in 1971. In the four decades since, these electronic messages have forever changed the way we communicate. Today, we're an email-dependent society, preferring to pound away a quick response on a smartphone rather than picking up the device to make a call. While we might openly complain about adding quantity to our inbox, there's a trend among my business colleagues of leaving voicemail messages that promptly explain that email is the best way to reach them.

The inbox, for many, is not only an invaluable communications tool but also a burgeoning to-do list. There have been many attempts to better the email experience, but for now the inbox shows no signs of extinction. What we do have access to is a growing number of smart add-ons and plug-ins that can improve your email work flow. Here are some of the most useful.

NUMBERS AND BULLET POINTS AREN’T THE ONLY THINGS DRIVING EXECUTIVE DECISION MAKING. A RECENT COMPETITION PITTING MBAS AGAINST DESIGN STUDENTS REVEALS THAT BUSINESS STUDENTS HAVE A SHORT-SIGHTED SKILL SET.

This year marks the third anniversary of the Rotman Design Challenge. It started out as a commendable experiment by the school’s Business Design Club to expose MBAs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to the value of design methods in business problem solving. This year, the competition drew teams from a few other MBA schools and some of the best design schools in North America. As a final-round judge, I had a front-row seat to the five best solutions to the competition’s challenge: To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.

Twenty-plus years ago, I helped launch the $10K Business Plan Competition now known as the MIT $100K Competition. Back then there was very little of formalized entrepreneurship activities at MIT. The $100K gave rise to the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation after Desh Deshpande had served as a $50K judge and noticed that there weren’t as many cutting-edge early-stage ideas in the competition as he would have liked. Around the same time Professor Dave Staelin, and MIT alum Alec Dingee got the Venture Mentoring Service off the ground, which among other things provided “after $100K support” to entrepreneurs who had entered the $100K.

Over the last 20 years, I have talked to a variety of delegations from other U.S. states and from foreign countries seeking to understand how to be as successful as MIT has been in entrepreneurship. They have seen the MIT Founders Report and the follow up report Professor Ed Roberts did for the Kauffman Foundation that shows that there are 125,000 living MIT alums and that the 25,000-plus active companies founded by MIT alums or professors if taken together would constitute the 11th largest economy in the world.