Entrepreneurs are everybody’s favourite heroes. Politicians want to clone them. Popular television programmes such as “The Apprentice” and “Dragons’ Den” lionise them. School textbooks praise them. When the author of this blog was at Oxford “entrepreneur” was a dirty word. Today the Entrepreneur’s Society is one of the university’s most popular social clubs.

Image Courtesy of vectorolie / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It started with an ambitious idea to fix the bleeding music industry in an age of rampant piracy, and it ended with an email. Just after 5pm one Wednesday evening, South African tech entrepreneur and Airborne founder Justin Melville finished composing his letter of thanks and farewell and hit ‘send’ on the message informing his users that his startup was dead. “We had a dream that one day we might help remake the music business,” he wrote in the email explaining the decision to shut down his startup to the people who had supported him.

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

Upon arriving at the Gener8tor accelerator in Madison, Wis., my co-founder, Aaron Hoffman, and I believed we’d be able to work part-time on the accelerator and focus the rest of our time building our business. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

We quickly learned there is a big difference between working on your business and working in your business. Up to now, we’ve been focusing almost entirely on our business. This week however, we’ve been able to put most of our efforts in our business. As it turns out, you need to do both to grow a startup and raise money.

Image Courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The venture arm of European engineering company Siemens, Siemens Venture Capital, has launched a new $100 million “Industry of the Future” fund for early-stage startups, the firm announced today.

Siemens said it will focus its investments on industrial tech involved with machine automation and new technology related to manufacturing processes. The fund will also go towards previous investments the firm has made.

Image: Via Siemens 

Drama, greed, controversy, conspiracy, crime, risk, theft, speculation, wealth — such was the world of Bitcoin in 2013.

The crypto-currency captivated us with its soaring highs and plunging lows in 2013, rising from $10 to $1,200 in the course of a year. It surpassed the value of gold at its peak before crashing down to $500. Today it flutters between $380 and $682 on different exchanges.

Image: BTCKeychain 

When I am home, I am surrounded by chefs. My husband is a passionate cook and my two daughters are self-proclaimed foodies. Our Vitamix blender is probably the most-used tool in our house and the Food Network has a monopoly on our television set. Shows like Chopped, Iron Chef and Restaurant Impossible are among the favorites in the Bagley household.

I usually get some work done while my kids and my husband are glued to the television. Every once in a while my attention drifts to the TV and I find myself surprised by how much you can learn from these shows – not only about cooking, but about entrepreneurship and innovation.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology, (EIT) opened up the bidding process for two new Knowledge and Innovations Communities, (KICs) in Innovation for healthy living and active ageing; and Sustainable exploration, extraction, processing, recycling and substitution of raw materials.

Two grants will be awarded to consortia of companies, research institutes and universities, to set up KICs in these fields, joining three existing KICs focussing on climate change, ICT and sustainable energy.

For years, corporate campuses like Silicon Valley were known for innovation. Located in suburban corridors that were only accessible by car, these places put little emphasis on creating communities where people work, live and go out.

But now, as the economy emerges from the recession, a shift is occurring where innovation is taking place. Districts of innovation can be found in urban centres as disparate as Montreal, Seoul, Singapore, Medellin, Barcelona, and London. They are popping up in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Cambridge, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Silicon Valley is betting big on virtual currency. Developers have been launching new Bitcoin projects at a rapid pace, and now a crop of incubators such as 500 Startups and Boost has emerged hoping to discover the next great idea in the space.

The latest to enter the fray is Plug and Play Tech Center, a California-based startup accelerator that in early March will commence a three-month program to help entrepreneurs build businesses around the cryptocurrency. The Plug and Play Bitcoin Accelerator will host its first group of five startups in the Tech Center's Sunnyvale, California, flagship space. Each startup will receive a $25,000 seed investment for a 5 percent stake, but Plug and Play founder and CEO Saeed Amidi says his organization is willing to invest $100,000 to $500,000 for the right company.

With the rise of accelerators and incubators, the increase of outside investor options and the constant coverage of funding news, the prestige of seed capital has many entrepreneurs focused on wooing investors rather than developing their business plan and strategy. Making the mistake of allocating a great deal of time and energy towards chasing down venture capital and accommodating the needs and desires of investors may ultimately detract a business from focusing on what’s actually valuable: a sustainable and desired product. (Keep in mind, resources are just a small portion of what it takes to launch a successful business.)

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Managing and motivating a team in a startup is more than just using the right interpersonal skills. It’s more than providing recognition, tangible incentives, and clear work goals. A key influencer of satisfaction and motivation, top-ranked by employees, is positive progress and the completion of meaningful work. Sometimes you have to manage progress, not people.

“Busy work” and “grunt work” are deadly terms in a startup environment. So are setbacks, project cancellations, and frequent changes of direction that make people doubt that the work they are doing will ever see the light of day. These points are illustrated in detail a while back in “The Progress Principle,” a book from the Harvard Business School, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.

Many people jog in places they consider beautiful, but these running maps look more like works of art themselves.

Statistician Nathan Yau, Ph.D., at FlowingData sampled public data records from workout app RunKeeper to map where people run in 22 cities across America, Canada and Europe. The result is a series of gorgeous and intriguing visualizations.

Image: FLOWINGDATA.COM NATHAN YAU 

It was with great interest and mostly pleasure that I read Martin Baily and Barry Bosworth’s new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “U.S. Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future.”

The article attempts to analyze recent trends in U.S, manufacturing performance, including output and employment. This is an area ITIF has been working on for a number of years. And in the past, Baily has been skeptical of our analysis, which claimed that U.S. manufacturing was in fact worse off than official statistics, in part because of the overstatement of computers and electronics manufacturing output. So it was with great delight, and some surprise, to see that Baily and Bosworth have now embraced this analysis.

Image: http://www.innovationfiles.org 

As entrepreneurs, we seem to be busy all the time. This can leave us tired and drained and, more often than not, can take a toll on our relationships. It has been suggested many times that entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate than that of average people, which makes sense given the added financial strain and pressure. Add a holiday like Valentine's Day to the mix, and you're basically screwed. How can you find the time to get the perfect gift when you're busy (feeling like you're) running the world?

Image: http://www.inc.com 

There’s no firm evidence that he actually ever said it, but President George W. Bush’s reputed utterance to British Prime Minister Tony Blair that “the trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur” probably echoed a widely held notion that France wasn’t a country one immediately associated with entrepreneurs.

Wrong. The country is full of them. It’s just that building big name international companies has traditionally never been their strongest point. French start-ups, for the most part, been content to stay local and enjoy success at that level.

Image: The french flag of the former Meteorological frigate “FRANCE 1″ in La Rochelle, now the musée maritime (Photo credit: Wikipedia) 

When wide-eyed business owners walk down the corridor of the hit TV show Shark Tank, there is only one investor they will stand before who created a $6 billion enterprise that gave birth to a new wave of black entrepreneurs: Daymond John.

Russell Simmons has said that if there were no FUBU, there’d be no Phat Farm—and, while he’s at it, no Rocawear, Sean John or any other clothing line that the superstars of hip-hop’s golden era peddled as an extension of their music brands. John began selling his FUBU T-shirts to his rapper friends in the 1990s while he was waiting tables at Red Lobster. He leveraged that into a multibillion-dollar franchising opportunity that allowed him and his business partners to slap their logo on other entities, like women’s clothing, a suits collection, eyewear, perfumes, hats and shoes.

Image: http://daymondjohn.com 

by Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute, architect of technology that measures Teamability® 

Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore. The moral compass that Auntie Em and Uncle Henry provided has been spun through the eye of the tornado and it has lost its direction.

I just read that McKinsey, one of the most prestigious consulting companies in the world, has instituted a new set of rules to prevent another ‘incident.’ That’s my mild-mannered way of saying that two senior leaders in the firm had been caught in a high-stakes game of insider trading. As a result, the new Global Managing Director has decided that McKinsey’s 87-year tradition of individual and corporate integrity wasn’t working anymore, and needed shoring-up by stringent directives and compliance testing.

Silicon Valley Bank, financial partner to the global innovation economy, and MasterCard introduce Commerce.Innovated., a customized commerce accelerator program that will help a select group of commerce focused startups access operational and technology expertise to effectively advance their go-to-market commerce platforms. Established by experts in the global payments industry, Commerce.Innovated. is a four-month program for four to six startups. The program is custom designed for each startup to address key operational and technology challenges by working with subject matter experts across the commerce space.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ 

Employees looking for a little more cheer in their lives should consider moving to the U.S. West Coast, new research shows.

California is home to three of the 10 happiest cities to work in, including San Jose, which tops the list. San Francisco and San Diego were also among the 10 cheeriest cities for employees, the study by online career community CareerBliss revealed.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ 

Not all entrepreneurs get to take their companies public. And even if they do, not all of them are prepared for what awaits them. I certainly was not prepared when I took my first startup company, Gupta Technologies, public in 1993. But I learned a lot from that early experience and applied the lessons to my next IPO in 1999. Fifteen years after happily running Keynote Systems as a public company, I recently sold it to a private equity company.

Here are five important lessons I learned during my two journeys from tech founder and entrepreneur to public company CEO.

Image: http://medcitynews.com