If you are an entrepreneur for the first time, or entering a new business area, it’s usually worth your time to assemble an Advisory Board of two or three executives who have travelled that road before. But if you select the wrong people, or use them incorrectly, the impact will not be positive for your company or your image.

For perspective, you need to remember that boards of advisors, unlike directors, have no formal power or fiduciary duties, but rather serve at the pleasure of you the business owner. But they are not likely to stroke your ego, or be cheerleaders. They need to tell you the truth about your business, good or bad.

Phone calls. We all have important ones and want to maximize the impact, which can be hard to do when you aren’t face-to-face.

Many first-time entrepreneurs have grown up digital natives so have a really good intuitive feel for technology & design but don’t yet have the business basics down.  

This shows itself when people try to do an elevator pitch, send concise, actionable emails or have a quick phone call with you to ask for help.  

The World Wide Web, together with other ICT enabling technologies, has made it increasingly easy for companies to conduct business online. The expansion of the online environment has also brought with it an additional development: the potential for any individual to have a commercial presence. The growth in internet users is having a significant impact on businesses, and for entrepreneurs looking to start their own business, the opportunities are compelling. This is especially true for small to medium enterprises that are looking to expand their value by entering the ecommerce space.

No matter what kind of trip you’re going on this summer, whether for work or play, half a day or two months, you’re probably going to bring some stuff along with you. As I’m beginning to get ready for my own upcoming conference and research trip, I thought I’d bring together two strands in the ProfHacker tradition — the posts on your bag and posts on travel.

In an early post, Billie asked What’s in Your Bag, Jason commented on Stuffing Your (Work)Bag, Heather wrote about choosing your bag, and Ryan reviewed his Ideal Commuter’s Backpack.

Managers at every level almost universally complain that many of their meetings are a waste of time. It's an old story, repeated over and over: "We didn't have an agenda." "We didn't manage the time well." "We didn't have the right people to actually make any decisions." It's a long list of dysfunctional behaviors that are familiar to just about anyone who has worked in an organization.

Of course the really dysfunctional thing about this litany of misbehavior is that everyone knows these activities impede progress — and everyone knows what's needed to do things right. The "secret tips" to effective meeting management are not very secret. Just about every manager has been exposed to them at one time or another — in standard management training programs, on posters, even wallet cards and trinkets. Yet despite all of this investment, meetings are still a problem, forcing companies to periodically run campaigns to make them more productive.

That's a question I am almost guaranteed to hear during any social media workshop, or indeed, in one-on-one conversations about social networking. Even committed LinkedIn users are often uncertain of which connection requests to accept, or which invitations to extend: Someone who regularly shares your blog posts on Twitter? That guy on your condo board? Your cousin's girlfriend with the commemorative-gold-coin business?

The problem of who to connect with on LinkedIn puzzles people precisely because the network itself is neither fish nor fowl. Is it a social network like Facebook, where your connections are (at least notionally) "friends"? A public platform like Twitter, where people can see and judge you on the number of your followers? Or just a really awesome address book?

Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called Functional Fixedness and while you probably won't need to build a fort during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from it and it is impacting your work. How can I be so sure? Well ... you're human, right?

Like the Curse of Knowledge I've written about before, Functional Fixedness is a well-known cognitive bias. I'm actually glad it exists because if it didn't, my industry probably wouldn't exist. Clients often hire Open Innovation companies like ours when their research and development teams can't get past — or maybe over is a better word — the way they have always looked, and where they have always looked for solutions.

Dubai: Crowdfunding can be a suitable option for those looking to invest small amounts in startups, particularly in an economy where funding is hard to find, speakers at the ArabNet Digital Summit said on Sunday. Crowdfunding refers to the use of relatively small amounts of capital from a large number of investors to finance business ventures of startups or more established businesses. Crowdfunding or crowdsourcing can be employed by individuals who don’t wish to invest large amounts of capital or investors seeking to diversify their portfolios.

A global race is on to create the next Silicon Valley, and Latin America is rapidly embracing technology and innovation as it vies to be the epicenter of the next tech boom. The stakes aren’t trivial. It’s clear that the countries that can develop new ideas and technology will be the economic winners of the 21st century.

That’s why the Brazilian government, for instance, recently launched Startup Brazil, a business accelerator that aims to attract local and foreign talent to build tech companies in Brazil.

Every day, our to-do list gets filled with various tasks. But not all "to-do's" are created equal. Far from it.

Unfortunately, our natural tendency is to start with the small, easy tasks first, and push back the big, important ones because they're more uncomfortable.

That’s a costly mistake that greatly reduces our productivity while increasing our stress levels. It makes us focus on things that don’t always matter, and creates anxiety about finally facing the tasks we’ve been avoiding all day.

A new report on sea level rise recommends that the State of Maryland should plan for a rise in sea level of as much as 2 feet by 2050.

Led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the report was prepared by a panel of scientific experts in response to Governor Martin O’Malley’s Executive Order on Climate Change and “Coast Smart” Construction. The projections are based on an assessment of the latest climate change science and federal guidelines.

More than 70% of Americans don't know--or don't believe--that they could suffer from eye strain, the Vision Council reports, though the most adults are on digital media from four to six hours a day--with 14% of young adults spending more than 12 hours a day looking at screens.

And yet anybody who spends all day in front of a screen is susceptible to eye strain--the all-too-familiar face fatigue we don't know quite how to fight.

OCAST’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget was approved for $17.8 million, the same amount the agency has administered for the previous two years.  There were no cuts in the 2014 OCAST budget. When considered with the fact most state agencies received standstill budgets could indicate an improving financial position for the state of Oklahoma.

The agency budget remains at 22 percent below the previous high appropriations experienced in FY 2008.

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) has announced two funding opportunities relating to solid-state lighting.

Both opportunities seek proposals for “transformational advances in wide-bandgap materials, device fabrication, and device architectures”, with the goal of enabling the development of high-voltage, high-current, single-die power semiconductor devices:

The year as Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Wharton School has profoundly impacted my research. Wharton offers a stimulating environment of world-class academics, insightful PhD courses, extensive data resources and a vibrant research community. Since the research is at the interface between disciplines, I discussed my ideas and preliminary results with academics from the fields of entrepreneurship, strategic management, finance, as well as business economics. I obtained valuable feedback by presenting my research at the Wharton School’s Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurship Center, as well as in the PhD student seminar series. My research benefited from taking PhD courses on quantitative methods and organizational theory. During my time at Wharton, I joined the Wharton Investment Management Club, which in combination with conferences at the Mack Center, provided valuable practitioner insights.

Despite all the challenges small businesses have faced in the past five years, seven out of ten of entrepreneurs would start their businesses all over again. Not only that, almost half of all Americans are haboring entrepreneurial dreams of their own. That data comes in spite of the fact that the same new research to reveal those stats has also found that most small business owners say running their business has become more challenging in the past half decade.

When you write and read about startups all day long, you see founders make a lot of mistakes. As an observer of and dabbler in startups, I've kept track of all the things I'd try to avoid as an entrepreneur.

Here are the most common mistakes early stage startups and new founders make.

For most office employees the desk is the center of their work world.

While over the past few years, some people have started shifting over to a standing desk versus a sitting desk, a select few have opted to ditch their desks all together. Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman is one. 

Heiferman doesn't have a desk or a traditional private office. He works on his laptop or iPad in any available spot in the Meetup headquarters – a temporarily empty seat of another employee, or in the lounge area. He also spends a lot of time in meetings.

We are thrilled to welcome 43 incredible Americans as new Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIFs), here to serve 6- to 12-month intensive “tours of duty” in the US Government, where they will work hand-in-hand with top government innovators to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and help fuel private-sector job creation. 

The PIF program was created in 2012 to tackle five inaugural projects—each focused on making a part of the Federal Government work better for the American people.  In keeping with the “lean startup” philosophy of the PIF program, the 18 individuals who were selected from around the Nation to take on those challenges produced significant results in a matter of months, not years.