You have the idea and you have the motivation, but do you have the money? The credit environment right now stinks and you aren’t thrilled with the idea of applying for business loans. Fortunately, you have other options for raising seed capital. If you are creative-minded and determined, you can locate the money you need to start your businesswithout asking a business bank to help.

Tap angel investors

Angel investors are wealthy individuals who deploy their money in business start-ups. They don’t do it because they’re nice people; they do it to make money. A successful small business start-up can provide an investment return that’s well in excess of what exchange-traded stocks or bonds might produce.

Angel investors do not hand over their money casually. Expect to provide potential angel investors with all the documentation you’d give the bank when applying for a loan, such as your business plan, financial projections, market research, product data, etc.

There are lots of entrepreneurs and start-ups with great ideas that, on paper, have the potential to be world-beaters.

Many of these ideas never see the light of day because they fail to make the leap from innovation to commercialization. It’s one thing to come up with a better mousetrap, it’s another to actually manufacture it and then sell it.

This is probably a sweeping statement that may get a lot of people up in arms but Canadians need to get a whole lot better at commercialization. This country is teeming with world-class engineers and major amounts of research and development but our ability to turn ideas into products can be significantly improved.

Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proposed a new three-track system to expedite filings rather than maintain the standard first-come, first-served basis. This move comes in response to the average review time soaring to nearly 35 months last year from an average of 27 months as recently as 2003.

This accelerated process marks an important step to defend national innovation leadership and promote economic growth. To see where the U.S. stands internationally, consider the results of last September's report from the World International Patent Organization (WIPO) describing global patent filing trends.

Of course, the overarching story last fall was the fallout from the financial crisis: In 2008, there was zero growth in patent filings at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), compared to 7.1 percent the year before. Similarly, filings through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), a system for recognizing patents internationally, increased by only 2.3 percent, compared to 5.9 percent the previous year.

The Leaning Tower was supposed to stand straight and plumb, an imperious monument to the trading power of 12th century Pisa. Built on soft clay, however, the tower began to list only a few years after construction began. Upon completion in 1350, the tower leaned about four and half feet, but as time passed, the angle of the 16,000-ton tower became more precarious. By 1990, the tower leaned about 13 feet off kilter, and nearly two million pounds of lead ingots had to be placed on one of its sides to prevent its collapse. But the nearest the tower has been to destruction had nothing to do with its famed tilt. Allied forces ordered an American sergeant to blow it up during World War II when they thought the Germans were using it as an observation post. Only the reticence of the 23-year-old American saved the tower.

The financial media's coverage of China tends to focus on trade-related topics such as U.S. demands that China revalue the yuan, or the recent 48% rise in Chinese exports.

But to really get a handle on the possible risks and opportunities in China, investors need to keep track of powerful cultural and governance trends that could dramatically alter the financial and economic landscape in the years ahead.

Here are four longer-term trends that will change China, significantly affecting the finances of both its residents and trading partners in potentially unpredictable ways.

1. The Rise of the Labor Movement

Strikes at Honda Motor plants and unrest at tech manufacturing giant Foxconn are not isolated incidents, but rather examples of the growth of a new labor movement in China that seeks higher wages, better working conditions and meaningful respect for labor laws. Whereas in the past, the government's security forces broke up labor demonstrations, the new migrant workers know their rights and are tech-savvy, making use of China's 787 million mobile phones to send text messages about demonstrations and labor-law rights.

Does your startup company culture really matter? It sure mattered to Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, as we noted last week, who describes in an article in Inc, the battles he waged with investors who dismissed his efforts to cultivate a supportive, worker-friendly environment at the company. The importance of preserving that company culture, Hsieh suggests, led in part to his decision to sell his company to Amazon.

Company Culture: A "Meaningless Platitude"?

A startup has to have a lot of things in place: a strong team, a good product, and a market interested in it. Is the company culture another thing that startups need to have situated in order to succeed? Or is it, as Dan Shapiro writes in a provocatively titled post "a meaningless platitude"?

Now that U.S. utilities have taken federal stimulus funds and seamlessly built out two-way advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) connecting utility control centers and end users (OK, not completely, but let's assume that the "stall-ulus" becomes a true stimulus in the near future), the question becomes, what's next? At the moment, this new "comm layer" or "platform" has utilities planning in two directions: upstream and downstream from the smart meters. First, they are examining whether and how to leverage these new communication networks to support distribution automation (DA) and grid optimization -- some have argued that it's the embedding of sensors and IT onto the distribution grid that is, in fact, the true sense of what's meant by 'smart grid.' Second, utilities are asking -- and in many cases, piloting to discover -- how best to involve the customer in energy efficiency and demand response programs via home-area networks (HAN) and/or consumer web portals.

[Last Thursday] was entirely frustrating. At least for me.

As you probably saw, Google decided to get away from its core and spice things up. In her post the art of a homepage on the official Google blog, Marissa Mayer lets us in on a new ‘feature’ they added long enough for people to complain and have it removed. We got background images! The new addition was (I assume) designed to promote the fact that Google now allows users to add their favorite photo or image to the background of their Google.com homepage.

It was silly, it took away from Google’s brand identity (simple search) and, quite predictably, the media had a field day with it.

Washington has been busy on several fronts important to entrepreneurs these past few months.  One we must not forget to reflect on is the recent U.S. Senate approval of a bipartisan-sponsored amendment to the financial reform bill that protects against creating new barriers for high-growth entrepreneurs seeking to raise angel capital. This “Angel Amendment” addressed two of the original provisions in the bill that had the potential of creating regulatory obstacles for entrepreneurs raising angel financing and weakening the pool of angel capital by reducing the number of accredited angel investors.

More specifically, the amendment that passed eliminated the language in the bill requiring a 120 day Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) review period for investors that prove an annual income in excess of $200 thousand and net worth totaling more than $1 million. The incentive embodied in this language could have proven harmful for the availability of seed investment, which is already difficult to attract. Angel capital is essential to entrepreneurial start-up activity in the United States. Angel investors are high net worth individuals who make high-risk equity investments directly into growing companies, usually as the ventures are starting up. A 2007 Kauffman study revealed that the majority of angel investments between 1990 and 2007 were mostly made on seed or start-up firms, with nearly 45 percent of the investments in companies that had no revenues at the time of the first investment. This contrasts the trend among venture capitalists, who are estimated to invest less than 2 percent in seed and start-up companies. Angels thus fill an important void. Not surprisingly, the bipartisan “Angel Amendment” was strongly supported not only by early-stage actors such as the Angel Capital Association and the Association of University Research Parks, but also by those who usually enter the entrepreneurial scene at later stages of the growth of young businesses, such as the National Venture Capital Association, the North American Securities Administrators Association, and the Private Equity Council.

The Council for American Medical Innovation (CAMI), launched in 2009, has brought together leaders in research, medicine, public health, academia, education, labor, and business, who are working in partnership to encourage public policies that
advance medical innovation and the development of lifesaving treatments, enhance job growth, and promote patient access.

CAMI believes leadership in medical innovation is a key part of America's economic recovery, future prosperity and health. For additional information, please visit www.americanmedicalinnovation.org.

Download the complete report here
Download the complete report and appendix here

RICH BENDIS, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF INNOVATION AMERICA WAS ONE OF PARTICIPANTS INTERVIEWED FOR THIS REPORT.

Big news for the coffee house crowd. Starbucks said today it will offer free, "one click" WiFi at stores nationwide starting July 1. Starbucks currrently offers up to two hours of free WiFi for customers now but requires them to log in with a Starbucks card or with their AT&T account. The new system will be available to anyone.

Starbucks is also partnering with internet search giant Yahoo on a digital network that will launch in the fall and be "unique in its content offerings, allowing customers free unrestricted access to various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones."

There is some fine print to the new WiFi system. It will be only be available in Starbucks-owned stores in the U.S., and not in licensed stores, at least initially. (There were more than 8,800 Starbucks-owned stores and more than 7,800 licensed stores at last report in fall 2009; I'm trying to get an updated count).

Clay Shirky doesn't like television. The Chronicle's Jeff Young reports this week that the New York University scholar and Internet guru figures Americans spend 200 billion hours each year of their thinking time—or time they could be thinking—on sitcoms and their ilk. He also figures that all of Wikipedia took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television.

He does like reading, however. In an interview online in The Atlantic, Mr. Shirky says he starts his day checking Twitter, then moves to an RSS feed reader to check sites like Al Jazeera (his favorite for world news) and tech sites like Boing Boing. Then there are books and magazines and newspapers and NPR. But in general, Mr. Shirky says, "there's no real breaking news that matters to me. I don't have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use."

If the United States truly wants to boost the economy and narrow its ginormous trade deficit, then medical technology would seem like a good place to start.

Minnesota’s bread and butter industry generated a $5.4 billion trade surplus last year, one of the few American industries to do so. Which is why Obama Administration officials visited Medtronic Inc. (NYSE: MDT) Friday, to encourage small to medium medical device companies to pursue emerging overseas markets like China, Japan, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Ever since President Obama announced his National Export Initiative (NEI)- an ambitious plan to double American exports in five years- during his State of the Union address in January, top trade officials have been crisscr0ssing the country, “targeting high growth, high potential sectors like medical devices,” said NEI Director Courtney Gregoire.

“Our economic recovery requires that we continue to reach outside our borders,” Gregoire said.

Like a cable TV news show free-for-all replete with raw emotion and derisive accusations, the creative class has recently been confronted with a lively debate between two of its most influential members, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Association of University Technology Managers. They may not be household names, but the disagreement between the two organizations highlights an important public policy issue that must be addressed in order to strengthen America's leadership in innovation, economic growth, and job creation.

Academic researchers should be "unleashed" from the "inefficient, monopolistic" technology transfer offices at their universities, leaders from the Kauffman Foundation suggested in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last November. They then applied the coup de grâce in a January-February 2010 Harvard Business Review piece by calling for "any inventor professor to choose his or her licensing agent—university-affiliated or not—just as anyone in business can now choose his or her own lawyer."

RICH BENDIS PRESIDENT AND CEO OF INNOVATION AMERICA ,HAS THE PRIVILEDGE OF SERVING AS A BOARD MEMBER OF THE SCIENCE CENTER IN PHILADELPHIA, THE OLDEST AND MOST SUCCESSFUL URBAN SCIENCE  CENTER IN THE UNITED STATES.

Cheered on by some of Gainesville's most successful innovators, Gainesville startup company Tutor Matching Service received the first $50,000 Cade Prize for Innovation on Friday night.

The company was chosen from more than 100 inventions from throughout Florida, most from the Gainesville area.

The prize will help the company market its Facebook application that matches students and educators from around the world based on students' learning strengths.

Eight universities and think tanks have all converged on four policy principles to enhance technology innovation in the effort to mitigate climate change, says a new report released earlier this week by the Clean Air Task Force and the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University.

The report, "Four Policy Principles for Energy Innovation & Climate Change: A Synthesis" (PDF) combined the recommendations made in eight studies conducted by universities like Harvard and MIT as well as think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the National Commission on Energy Policy to create the following four policy principles:

1. Recognize that innovation policy is more than R&D policy

2. Pursue multiple innovation pathways

3. Recognize CO2 reduction as a public good, and pursue energy innovation through a public works model.

4. Encourage collaboration on energy innovation with rapidly industrializing countries.

On June 18th, leaders from many of the Greater Rochester area’s leading innovation organizations will be coming together for a unique and powerful collaboration event.  The “Digital Rochester Innovation Jam Session” will bring together many of our region’s most influential leaders to identify solutions to the largest barriers to building a vibrant innovation economy in the greater Rochester area,” said Josh Bouk, President of Digital Rochester and Senior Vice President of Veramark Technologies. “Xerox has been, and continues to be, a global leader in technology innovation and a strong supporter of the Upstate New York region.  So we are thrilled that they have partnered with us to create the first ever “Digital Rochester Innovation Jam Session.”

The Digital Rochester Innovation Jam Session, sponsored by Xerox, will draw together:

• Large enterprise. Executives who drive the research and technology development efforts through global R&D efforts.
• Research universities.  Leaders of our regional research institutions that are driving IP creation and licensing
• Serial entrepreneurs. Those men and women who have repeatedly proven to have the vision and leadership to drive new business creation and technology commercialization.
• Funding partners. The leaders of investor and venture organizations that focus on seed and mezzanine investments.
• Supporting organizations and government. Leaders from the organizations and agencies that support economic development and technology commercialization efforts at the local and state level.

RICH BENDIS, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF INNOVATION AMERICA WILL PARTICIPATE IN THE DIGITAL ROCHESTER INNOVATION JAM SESSION THIS WEEK.

In an April blog post, "Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college," Caterina Fake identified a number of successful tech founders who had quit school. The co-founder of Flickr (YHOO) and Hunch then argued that aspiring entrepreneurs should drop out of college and apprentice.

While Fake's headline is provocative, the data don't support her assertion. Statistically speaking, entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful if they graduate college than if they don't.

Education Increases Entrepreneurs' Performance

A 2008 study by Vivek Wadhwa, Richard Freeman, and Ben Rissing that surveyed chief executive officers and product development heads at more than 500 high-tech companies showed that "education provides an advantage in tech entrepreneurship." Specifically, the companies founded by college graduates had twice the sales and employment of the companies founded by people who didn't go to college, on average. These numbers are consistent with many other studies that show that founder education reduces business failure rates and increases profits, sales, and employment.

How would you like to be part of a 90-day startup accelerator program, that could result in start-up financing for your business idea?

The coIN Loft, Delaware’s first coworking space, has invited entrepreneurs from Delaware and the immediate surrounding regions to apply to be a part of BetaFish, which will result in five businesses receiving up to $8,000 in seed capital.

As the world’s greatest soccer players take to the fields at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many are wearing jerseys made almost entirely from plastic bottles rescued from landfills in Japan and Taiwan.

It is, if nothing else, good publicity for Nike, the maker of the jerseys and the official sponsor of nine teams, including the United States, Brazil and Portugal.

Yet what many might view as a gimmick is also part of a broadening effort by the company to incorporate sustainability, or environmentally responsible practices, into its product design. Around the globe, a growing number of manufacturers are including more recyclable or biodegradable components into products.