Suntech Power, the large Chinese solar panel maker that filed for bankruptcy last month, isn’t the only solar company teetering on the edge. Almost all of the world’s largest solar panel makers are in danger of going bankrupt within a year, and the downturn is having an impact on innovation.

New solar cell technologies developed at these companies and at startups are stuck on the shelf or in low-volume production while manufacturers put off buying new equipment to make new kinds of solar cells. These companies are focused instead on finding ways to reduce installation costs and making incremental improvements to increase power output of conventional, now commoditized, solar technology.

Australian entrepreneurs planning their next move should consider this statistic before any other: the number of middle-class consumers in the Asia-Pacific region is estimated to grow from about half a billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2030. That has to be the entrepreneurial opportunity of a lifetime.

The forecast, from Homi Kharas and Geoffrey Gertz’s 2010 paper, The New Global Middle Class: a cross-over from West to East, was cited in the Federal government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, released last year. Even if the forecast is half correct, Australian business will have to reinvent itself within a decade or two.

African lions roar and strut and act the apex carnivore, but they’re lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue. Great white sharks have 300 slashing teeth and that ominous soundtrack, and still nearly half their hunts fail.

Dragonflies, by contrast, look dainty, glittery and fun, like a bubble bath or costume jewelry, and they’re often grouped with butterflies and ladybugs on the very short list of Insects People Like. Yet they are also voracious aerial predators, and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom.

Since the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act (H.R. 3606) last year, the financial and medical press has been buzzing about the potential for crowdfunding to revolutionize fundraising for early-stage biotech companies. Even more recently, a portal that is exclusively dedicated to crowdfunding biotech and healthcare start-ups launched at medstartr.com. Although there may be reason for biotech entrepreneurs to be excited about crowdfunding, there are significant limitations and risks to this approach as well.

The nurturing of new and young firms has so far not been given much attention in prominent global gatherings. International government meetings have mostly concentrated on passive SME policy and others like the World Economic Forum have treated entrepreneurs as a side ring at the circus. The maturing of the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) to fill this gap is thus a welcome development.

This year’s GEC wrapped up a week ago in Rio de Janeiro following an intense week with more than 2,000 people from 130 countries. In the first editions of the annual Congress, participants focused on simply discovering like-minded advocates for new, young firms with growth-potential. Four years later, the GEC has become an established platform for entrepreneurship leaders focused on further refinement of data, ideas and methodologies around the needs of growth entrepreneurs.

Most aspiring entrepreneurs believe their initial idea and inspiration requires the most important creative thinking. Experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that the initial idea is the easy part, and it’s the later implementation, and the competitive business marketing that are the real creative challenges.

There is a tough balance here to achieve, since a large portion of starting and running a business requires analytical, logical thinking. In fact, our education and training to logically associate related concepts reduces our ability to add the creative side, even though we were all born without that bias. Maybe that’s why “thinking outside the box” is so rare.

You may have heard the description that founding a company is like leading a volunteer army.  I couldn’t agree more and want to dive deeper into the analogy to see if we can pull out some useful nuggets.

It’s true, most startups are formed by individuals who are passionate about their idea.  But, the fact is that passion does not actually get the work done and they cannot do it all on their own.  They will need to attract other talented individuals who fill gaps in their skills to join the cause if they want to see it succeed.

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Despite generally upbeat public markets, 2013 got off to a slow start for venture capital liquidity.

There were nine initial public offerings of venture-backed companies in the U.S. during the first three months of this year compared with 20 a year ago, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

Mergers and acquisitions were also off last year’s pace with 94 compared with 105 in the first quarter of 2012.

I’m posting this on the second day of April, also known as the day after April Fools Day. You probably opened a few trick emails yesterday and checked to see Google’s infamous prank-of-the-year.

It occurs to me that perhaps the world is out of balance. We all like to have fun, and an April Fools Day fills the bill. But isn’t it odd that we have no official day on which we celebrate wisdom? Why that is, I have no idea, but maybe it’s time to correct the omission.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is making way for a number of startups and online investment platforms to enable startups to crowdsource investment. Early last week, Y Combinator-backed FundersClub received notice from the SEC that the agency would not pursue action against its crowdfunding platform. But it wasn’t alone: a few days later, AngelList received a similar letter from the SEC. (hat tip to Danielle Morrill)

The regulatory response came after AngelList requested its own assurance from the SEC that the agency wouldn’t pursue enforcement action against its investment platform, AngelList Invest.

Creativity is tough to come by, so we want to make sure it flows as easily as possible. LifeKraze CEO Ben Wagner explains a few of his team's secrets for keeping those inspired juices flowing.

The LifeKraze team consists of software developers and designers working alongside sales and biz dev, so we've had to adopt schedules--not to mention best practices--that work for all of us. The 9-to-5 model isn’t us, because sometimes we have to be 24/7.

Startups are young, sexy--and therefore sometimes have growing pains. Which is why it can be really smart to bring some been-there gray hairs into the mix.

When Yahoo announced its flashy hire of 18-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, his age got top billing as onlookers marveled at how a teenager built a multi-million-dollar business that could shake up the mobile offerings of a tech giant. That’s impressive, certainly, but in some ways, D’Alosio’s algorithmic app invention may turn out to be the easy part.

Companies all across America are starting to see a critical talent gap as older employees retire. Arts students may not have all the traditional skills, but they have the most important one: creativity.

An estimated 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 every day for at least the next 17 years, according to data from the Pew Research Center. And while many of them might choose to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, leaders everywhere are facing the same daunting issue: A great tsunami of Baby Boomer retirement is coming.

Many companies are going exactly the opposite direction from Yahoo when it comes to remote work--and have best practices to prove it.

Despite the recent Yahoo ban on working from home, many organizations are eager to reap the benefits of a remote workforce. But just as with any organizational change, getting started isn’t easy, in large part due to the struggle of managing information and creating a collaborative environment across a geographically remote workforce. Specifically, it is hard to create a water cooler environment where spontaneous collaboration occurs when working remotely.

“Transformation” is the best description of what is happening in health care right now. We are seeing historic changes in how health care is administered in the United States—with increased focus on quality of care versus just paying for a service. We are seeing changes in how people can enroll in health insurance—with the upcoming establishment of a new market place that will help more people get insured in this country than ever before.  And, we are seeing changes in how people understand and make decisions about their own health—with an increasing number of tools and services becoming available to help individuals access health information and manage their own personal health data. 

Mark Bolton has a problem. To be more precise, he has 250 problems. Bolton runs Louisville, Ky.’s metro jail system. Its main facility -- two aging structures joined by a pedestrian sky bridge -- is designed to hold 1,353 inmates. Another facility across town has another 440 beds. But on this particular day in early February, Bolton has 2,043 people behind bars. For weeks, he’s been adding cots to the barracks-style rooms that house most inmates. But the jail is so overcrowded that he’s now considering opening another wing of the facility, even though it’s not up to code.

The numbers seem astonishing: Last year, Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding site, raised over $312M from over 2 million backers, funding 18,000 projects.  Though raising money from large crowds to fund new artistic and cultural endeavors is not new, the speed at which internet crowdfunding has taken off – from almost nothing to hundreds of millions of dollars in just a couple of years – has caught the notice of policy makers, entrepreneurs, and investors.

On this wave of optimism, in April of 2012, President Obama signed the JOBS act, legalizing equity crowdfunding (previously, crowdfunding investment was strictly a donation, perhaps in return for a product or reward).  As of today, the SEC is still writing the rules that will allow equity crowdfunding to occur in practice, and over 1,000 companies appear to be ready to enter the equity crowdfunding space as soon as those regulations are finalized.  But not everyone is excited about crowdfunding, a number of pundits and analysts have expressed concern that crowdfunding, especially equity crowdfunding, is likely to lead to a lot of fraudulent projects, failed businesses, and naive investments.

There are several definitions for the term entrepreneurship. If you are an entrepreneur or aspire to be one, you truly want to understand what it really means to be an entrepreneur and what it is all about.

You may think that entrepreneurship is about becoming a millionaire, or being your own boss or doing it your way or becoming famous. This is not completely true. Those are only some of the side outcomes of entrepreneurship, that may or may not always happen. More importantly they are not necessary to happen.

Alliance for Global Good Funding Supports Nonprofit Mission and Sustainability

Greensboro, NC – Building upon the success of its 2012 inaugural launch, the Alliance for Global Good today announced the opening of the Second Round of competition for grants from its Innovation Fund. Venture philanthropy grants of up to $90,000 will be made to support nonprofits in implementing mission-relevant, revenue generating strategies.

“The tremendous diversity of our first round grantees—which ranged from the pursuit of organic certification for nuts grown in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco so as to multiply gross revenue many times over, to an order of Catholic Nuns running a cyber café in the Congo—points up the immense need for this type of grantmaking,” said David Brand, AFGG’s president and CEO. “The fund is an extraordinary new program that already shows potential for sparking fresh thinking and critical changes. It supports nonprofits’ moving away from relying solely on traditional financial sources such as government funding and individual contributions, and toward mission related market activity that contributes to organizational sustainability.”