When we make a choice that doesn't work out, we find it remarkably difficult to cut our losses and walk away. Think about the last time you waited for 45 minutes at a restaurant, and there was no sign that your table would be ready in the near future. You should have probably headed to another restaurant, but you'd already waited 45 minutes, so how could you leave?

Image: Flickr

Nils Bunger raised a great deal of money for his first start-up venture, Pano Logic, in 2006.  Only later did he realize that he might have raised too much money.  When he launched his next venture, MobileSpan, in 2006, he intentionally left some on the table.

“Too much capital is toxic,” Bunger says. “Too much capital early in a company’s life can hamstring a company and its options. When you raise a lot of capital, you’re effectively saying you’ve found your business model, and it’s time to scale it.  But if you do that before you’ve truly figured it out, you’ll run into a lot of problems, because your board expects you to scale the business while you’re still working out what your business actually is.”

Today, Governor Walker signed into law 2013 Wisconsin Act 41, which establishes a state-funded pool of venture capital for investment in Wisconsin companies.

The legislation appropriates $25,000,000 from the Department of Administration's general funds for investment in at least four venture capital firms, which will in turn make investments in Wisconsin companies. The selection of those venture capital firms will be made by an investment manager hired by a five-member committee, comprised of three representatives of the State of Wisconsin Investment Board and two representatives of the capital finance office of the Department of Administration.

Supporting programs for innovative, technology-driven small businesses under SBA's Federal and State Technology (FAST) partnership program, the U.S. Small Business Administration has granted 20 awards, of $95,000 per award, for FY 2013 to 20 state and local economic development agencies, business development centers, and colleges and universities. Candidates were submitted by the governors of all 50 U.S. states and territories.

The FAST Program is designed to stimulate economic development among small, high technology businesses through federally-funded innovation and research and development programs like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR).  The project and budget periods are for 12 months, starting October 1, 2013.

No, you didn't fall off the list, your SBIR Insider has been silent since February 28, 2013. There is a lot of SBIR news to report but first I owe you an explanation of my absence.

Those of you who are "mature" enough to remember the ever garrulous Howard Cosell, may recall the Larry Holmes / Tex Cobb fight in 1982 that ended Cosell's illustrious boxing commentary career. Because the fight was so one sided, potentially tragic, a public mutilation,

A recent article by Larry Rulison in the Times Union posed the question, “Research Triangle found the right formula -- can we?”  As the article acknowledges, there is no simple answer to this question.   Champions of the concept of university–driven innovation made it happen: creative faculty and administration at North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; a committed state government; and, industry leaders who saw the competitive advantage of partnering with faculty at research-intensive universities in areas of research and development relevant to their particular product lines.  

The Silicon Valley startup Morpheus Medical hopes to save lives by commercializing software for diagnosing heart failure from MRI scans. But because of trouble securing a visa, its plans almost ended last December.

“It would’ve been hard to continue the company if I had to go back to France,” says chief innovation officer Fabien Beckers, who had just helped three cofounders he met while at Stanford University land a $2 million investment. The new investors had put a condition on the term sheet: before the funds came through, Beckers had to get a visa.

What, exactly, does innovation mean to an entrepreneur? How do we innovate? Can you be too innovative? At the World EY Entrepreneur Of The YearTM event in Monte Carlo in June, we spoke with some world-class entrepreneurs to find out.

For an entrepreneur, innovation can be defined as a change that brings improvement — in products, or in the way those products are marketed and sold — and increases customer or client satisfaction. It can involve a new take on existing products, or it can be a product or service that fills a need the customer didn’t know existed.

Entrepreneurs are inventors and athletes in one. They are inventors because they need to see the marketplace like nobody before them has seen it, understand all the market dynamics, and invent a product or service that enhances people’s lives. They are also athletes, because once they have come up with the invention they need to work incredibly hard to turn it into reality, no matter what obstacles the business environment throws at them.

Ever since the movie,  “The Social Network,” came out I’ve seen “Entrepreneurs” pop up everywhere with one simple goal – to find a venture capitalist to back them. I even get people emailing me and adding me on LinkedIn LNKD +1.58% with the self-proclaimed title “Entrepreneur”!

In the downtown of the nation's capital, there is a magnificent building of steel and glass that is now home to what may be a remarkable tech experiment.

The D.C. Public Library took an 11,000-square-foot space and installed 80 computers, including 16 Macs. A 3D printer was added as well as a machine that can print and bind a book from a file in just minutes. There are tablets of all types -- Android, Windows, Apple -- and e-reading devices, available to try out. It opened last week.

Ontario’s aerospace industry will continue to explore the outer limits of research and technology development under a unique new partnership designed to help the sector reach the next level of technological advancement. 

With a remarkable history of trailblazing, the aerospace sector in Ontario has evolved into one of the province’s and Canada’s most robust and innovative industries.

Over the past 13 weeks, these founders have worked tirelessly to refine their technologies and business plans. They've worked with some of the most renowned experts in auto R&D from across the Southeast. Mentors included executives, researchers and engineers from: Nissan, Eastman Chemical, Oak Ridge National Lab, Mercedes, University of Alabama, General Motors, University of Tennessee, Tech 20/20, Clemson University's International Center for Auto Research and many more. 

When the mythical narrator in the above-quoted Warren Zevon tune found himself  in a bit of trouble, he knew he needed three things:  “lawyers, guns and money.”   Presumably, whatever the problem or scale of the trouble, the combination of these three things would be a likely solution.

If you are faced with understanding, building, or nurturing a culture of innovation in your organization, you may be looking for a similar combination of resources that can be a total solution . . . sort of the “lawyers, guns and money” approach to innovation challenges.  One place to start looking for this answer is in the informal roles that often serve as the unseen engine of innovation cultures:  Brokers, Role Models and Risk-takers.  Where you find these functions or roles being filled,  you’ll find innovative cultural states; where these functions are not being filled, you’ll will find a relatively bland, safe and predictable organizational dynamic.

If you've ever wanted a tiny figurine of yourself, a studio based in Hamburg, Germany, by the name of TWINKIND can now make your dreams come true. The creative minds at TWINKIND have embarked on an ambitious project that involves 3D printing at a commercial level, allowing interested customers to take part in a revolutionary process that could very well make pictures and picture frames obsolete.

I took up kayaking three summers ago after a health issue that landed me on the couch for several months. It felt important to reconnect with the physical world in a new way. And it was great. Nothing felt better than filling my lungs with fresh air, experiencing the cool tingle as the wind touched the water and surrendering to the repetitive motion of paddling.

Still, I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue kayaking when I moved from Connecticut to Pittsburgh. With the Long Island Sound at its border, Connecticut has a nautical culture. Pittsburgh was the City of Three Rivers, sure, but weren’t they mostly used for barges and postcard photos taken from Mt. Washington?

Image: KAYAKING ON THE ALLEGHENY RIVER - BRIAN COHEN

The world’s leading technology clusters grew organically, over decades. The question for countries and regions setting out to develop their innovation ecosystems, is how to capitalize on university research and catch up quickly. It’s possible to accelerate the process, says Matt Van Itallie.

High tech clusters like those around MIT in Boston and Stanford in Silicon Valley have long benefited from commercialising innovations coming out of nearby universities and national labs, spurring regional economic growth, boosting institutional wealth, and providing a magnet for excellent researchers and students.  

I see a consistent attitude among a lot of young entrepreneurs both technical and non-technical that I think leads to more harm than good:

They’re always in a huge rush.

They’re always in a huge rush to get the prototype out, to get it on TechCrunch, to get it to go viral, to raise money, to reach a million users in the first year, to be bought for a billion dollars the year after that, to retire to a beach somewhere before they’re 25.

Paul Solman: There aren't enough IT jobs to meet demand? Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University and a fellow at Stanford Law School, questions that claim. He responds to Wednesday's post on the Making Sen$e Business Desk from Hal Salzman, B. Lindsay Lowell and Daniel Kuehn, in which they argued that competition from high-tech guest workers is keeping domestic workers' wages low and making it harder for native STEM graduates to find jobs in their fields.

Wadhwa, the author of "The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent," takes issue with much of their reasoning and shows that the demand for STEM workers in this country is still higher than the supply. "Data may say it's a sunny day, but you need to open the window to make sure that it isn't actually raining," Wadhwa says, confronting Salzman's work.

Yesterday I was in Austin to give a talk to a group of science and technology educators from two-year colleges around the country. As part of the talk, I put together a set of videos to illustrate 10 emerging sectors that I think will create a lot of high-growth companies — and jobs — over the next 10 years. Here's my list of promising areas, which obviously isn't intended to be comprehensive. I made a few tweaks here (it's slightly different from the talk I gave on Tuesday), to highlight companies with Boston ties.

Six Michigan companies recently received investments from the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, totaling $1.5 million.  To date, the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, a collaborative effort of Michigan's SmartZones to support start-ups' product commercialization, has awarded 89 Michigan companies with seed funding totaling more than $20 million. 

More information on the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund awardees is available via video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObGGMHUAdkU&feature=youtu.be