In his State of the Union Address next week, President Obama will shift gears back to job creation after his inauguration speech focused on wider themes. As the debate about how the government can help the economy regain its pre-recession strength enters a new phase, the Kauffman Foundation’s annual “State of Entrepreneurship Address” last week in Washington, DC, focused on how financial constraints have been blocking the success of new and young firms that create most of the net new jobs.

The debate surrounding entrepreneurial finance has begun a new chapter partly because of recent innovations in the field, such as crowdfunding and the success of efforts like AngelList, an online platform to connect startups and investors. The question on the table is how to best leverage these innovations to increase the pool of capital while protecting investors.

“Our decreasing investment in education puts our leadership in the world at risk.”  Erskine Bowles

Erskine Bowles is known as a business and public policy leader. He is perhaps best known currently for his leading role as an advocate – along with partner Alan Simpson – for responsible debt and deficit reduction. Bowles also served five years as President of the University of North Carolina, the governing body of the 17-campus North Carolina university system.

We talked recently about the critical role of education in business growth, innovation and competitiveness, and in driving America’s global leadership.  Not surprisingly, Bowles links many of our current challenges in education to a debt-saddled economy.  Following are some highlights from that conversation:

Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen literally wrote the book on technology disruption, and he thinks Apple, Tesla Motors, venture capitalists and most of the nation’s colleges and universities should be afraid. The author of The Innovator’s Dilemma said Wednesday that all of them could be killed by less advanced competitors in the same way that many once dominant technology companies have been in the past. Christensen shared his theories about how innovative giants are felled and replaced by relatively less sophisticated rivals, speaking to an attentive crowd of young entrepreneurs and funders at the Startup Grind conference in Mountain View on Wednesday.

We all know that venture capitalists help entrepreneurs create and grow great companies. Those great companies create jobs and improve our standard of living. Yet what many don’t realize is that the traditional venture industry is consolidating.

Washington area private firms, such as New Enterprise Associates, Grotech, New Atlantic Ventures and Novak Biddle, that raise money from third-party investors are becoming fewer and farther between, with just over 500 such firms in the U.S. last year. Yet, our country’s most promising start-ups continue to get funded in part because of the rise of corporate venture capital.

For a century, schoolchildren have been taught that the massive ocean current known as the Gulf Stream carries warm water from the tropical Atlantic Ocean to northwestern Europe. As it arrives, the water heats the air above it. That air moves inland, making winter days in Europe milder than they are in the northeastern U.S.

It might be time to retire that tidy story. The explosion of interest in global climate has prompted scientists to closely study the climatic effects of the Gulf Stream only to discover that those effects are not as clear as conventional wisdom might suggest. Based on modeling work and ocean data, new explanations have emerged for why winter in northern Europe is generally less bitter than winter at the same latitudes in the northeastern U.S. and Canada—and the models differ on the Gulf Stream's role. One of the explanations also provides insight into why winter in the U.S. Northwest is warmer than it is across the Pacific in eastern Russia.

On Tuesday, February 5, I hosted back-to-back events with Fred Wilson, Partner at Union Square Ventures, and Josh Kopelman,Partner at First Round Capital, on behalf of the Alpha Kappa Psi Aspire to Excellence Speaker Series. It was demanding, but the opportunity to listen to Fred and Josh–two of the most prominent venture capitalists on the East Coast–speak about their paths after Wharton, and lessons learned along the way, was well worth the effort.

Fred Wilson – On Being A Contrarian

Fred Wilson (WG’87), who has invested in companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Zynga and who blogs on AVC, spoke about being a contrarian and the importance of going against the current, beginning his speech with a quote from 18th Century investor Baron Rothschild, who said, “Buy when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.” He added that when there is panic in the markets, and everyone has lost of fortune, including yourself, “this is the time to stand by your convictions and buy.” 

When you hear the words “business conference,” most likely you don’t get too excited. Oftentimes employees relate conferences to more work – not a place where they can have a good time. Ideally, a business conference will combine work with pleasure to help encourage creative thinking and team building.

Below are a few tips on balancing work and fun during business conferences:

Provide some food

Everyone loves food, so a great way to make a business conference a little more enjoyable is to provide lunch or some snacks. Having food immediately shows employees that you want the conference to be casual and carefree, as opposed to rigid and uptight. Food also encourages socialization among coworkers and can be a great icebreaker.

Stating your own business has become not only easier over the past several decades, it has become a popular choice for college students and for the general public. There are many benefits of starting your own business. Among the obvious benefits are getting to work your own hours, increasing your income, and not having to deal with a boss. Although those benefits still exist for college students, there are others that are not always known.

This article highlights 10 reasons why every college student should start his or her own business. These businesses do not have to be the next Facebook or Apple computers, but getting something started has many great benefits.

They say it takes a village, and this is especially true when startup ventures are looking for the perfect location. The presence of entrepreneurs in communities helps bring prosperity and a progressive spirit to those locations; startups drive local economies, promote job growth, and help carve an identity for a city or town. Conversely, many communities provide incentives and programs to attract and support entrepreneurial ventures that make the area thrive. Communities and companies rely on each other for growth.

Benefits for Local Communities

Attracting entrepreneurs to a city is an important part of not only job growth for the community, but also of the community’s personality as well. Entrepreneurs are smart investors, and they realize the benefits of supporting and investing in their own communities. But there are three specific reasons you should work to build an entrepreneurial community:

Small U.S. investors can donate money to a startup on a crowdfunding site such as Kickstarter, but they won’t get a stake in the company in exchange.

Despite changes in federal law, Americans can’t yet legally put money into a startup in an “equity crowdfunding,” an investment method that is open to ”accredited investors” only.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, enacted and signed into law in April last year, was meant to enable this. It eased accounting and disclosure requirements on smaller companies to help them go public, aiming to spur growth and create jobs.

Has this happened to you? You needed to consult with a friend about an important matter, but when you finally met, you realized that he was hardly interested in your problem. Even worse, he half-heartedly gave you vague and remotely related advice. Could it get more frustrating?

Similarly, a CEO may feel that the board of directors does not help the company. She may be right — board meetings could be a waste of time; board members may be unproductive or burdensome; in the worst cases, lack of board cooperation may prevent a successful exit. Kevin Rose got an offer to sell Digg for $60 million a few years ago, but his board rejected it. Digg was sold for mere $500,000 back in July 2012.

The Iowa Innovation Corporation is pleased to announce its preview of the new innovation-based programs that will be launched in the second quarter of 2013. These programs are a result of an intensive review of the present Iowa innovation ecosystem and thoughtful, business-led planning to determine if and how those gaps should be filled. Before we preview the new Innovation Corporation programs, we want to first tell you more about us ...

Who is the Iowa Innovation Corporation?

The Iowa Innovation Corporation is a private non-profit organization created by the 2011 Iowa General Assembly at the recommendation of the Iowa Innovation Council. The Iowa Innovation Council is a business-led volunteer association that was formally created in early 2010. It is the result of consolidating three existing organizations, the Iowa Bioscience Alliance, Advanced Manufacturing Council and Information Technology Council into one comprehensive unit that is charged with the development of strategies to grow the state’s innovation-based economy. The ultimate goal is to double the GSP attributed to the advanced manufacturing, biosciences and information technology industries within 10 years.

Startup Maryland (www.startupmd.org), a state-wide initiative FOR Entrepreneurs...BY Entrepreneurs, today announced a partnership with CoFoundersLab (www.cofounderslab.com) to provide the Maryland entrepreneur community with a free way to find a co-founder/business partner. To meet this need Startup Maryland and CoFoundersLab combined efforts and brands to develop a TeamFinder portal - which is also unveiled today as a new Resource at: http://startupmd.org/buildmyteam/  

The branded TeamFinder portal is the first component of Startup Maryland's Connection initiative. Connection joins Celebration, Coaching and Capital as four primary Areas of Concentration for Startup Maryland throughout 2013 and beyond. These four guiding initiatives were officially announced last week at a White House reception during which Startup Maryland highlighted past successes and future plans for Presidential advisors and officials from several government agencies. (See Empowering Entrepreneur Champions below for more detail)

Congress created the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976, but Barack Obama was the first president to appoint a White House chief technology officer. In 2012, Todd Park became the second person to hold the position. 

So what does does the position entail? "I function as tech adviser at the White House, and as a kind of tech entrepreneur-in-residence," Park says, "So what I'm really doing with a lot of my time is effectively running an incubator inside government."

Much of Park's expertise lies in mining big data, particularly health care data, and he's applied that knowledge to innovation within the White House. His office's Open Data Initiatives program aims to "liberate data from the vaults of the government, while rigorously protecting privacy." The program, inspired in part by President Reagan's decision to open access to the military's global positioning system in the 1980s, works with the belief that data can "be used as fuel for entrepreneurs and innovators to create jobs, improve lives, and advance national priorities."

Welcome to Angel Insights, the new blog of the Angel Capital Association. We want to use this blog for more dialogue with our member investors, but also to engage with the startup funding and support community, policy makers, and others interested in active angel investment and the innovative startups angels support with money and expertise.

This week and over the coming months, Angel Insights will include postings from me as ACA's Executive Director, but also from ACA Chairman David Verrill and members of ACA's Board of Directors. We also plan to include some of the great blog posts from our members and partners. Please feel free to add your comments as you like. Agree, disagree, add new points - one of my favorite things about angel investors is that they have quite a variety of opinions, and they're not afraid to share them!

SPECIAL REPORT / Europe seeks to capitalise on clusters of internet-driven businesses – such as those in Dublin and Helsinki – whose success relies on a mixture of policy initiatives ranging from education through to taxation, but also word-of-mouth. One of the key drivers leading companies to gather in Silicon-Valley-style hubs, however, is the simple fact that others have done so.

“When you gather a lot of talented people in one location there is obviously a natural exchange of ideas and cooperation between the companies in that cluster,” said Kenneth Fredriksen, vice president of Huawei’s Central European and Nordic region.

Buying airplane tickets, the odd concert ticket, movie ticket and books online is pretty much where most of us feel comfortable when we talk ecommerce. We generally like to touch and feel things when we are looking at buying tangible goods. But while we have been looking and touching; the rest of the world has taken to ecommerce like a humpback whale to krill. A recently released eMarketer report estimates that Business 2 Consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales rose 21.1% in 2012 to a stunning one trillion US dollars. This all-time high figure is predicted to increase a further 18.3% to US$1.298-trillion in 2013.

Here is the plan. Customize several Gulfstream business jets with military engines and with equipment to produce and disperse fine droplets of sulfuric acid. Fly the jets up around 20 kilometers—significantly higher than the cruising altitude for a commercial jetliner but still well within their range. At that altitude in the tropics, the aircraft are in the lower stratosphere. The planes spray the sulfuric acid, carefully controlling the rate of its release. The sulfur combines with water vapor to form sulfate aerosols, fine particles less than a micrometer in diameter. These get swept upward by natural wind patterns and are dispersed over the globe, including the poles. Once spread across the stratosphere, the aerosols will reflect about 1 percent of the sunlight hitting Earth back into space. Increasing what scientists call the planet’s albedo, or reflective power, will partially offset the warming effects caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Warren Buffett may be the third-wealthiest man in the world, but that doesn’t mean he writes checks easily. Learn what it’s like to be rejected by America’s favorite billionaire octogenarian, plus more, in this week’s top Influencer posts.

What’s It Like to Ask Warren Buffett for Money? (John A. Bryne) How does it feel to be turned down by Buffett? Just ask Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard, who is raising $500 million for a new campus – without much help from the Oracle of Omaha.

Is your blog a snooze? Are people unfollowing you faster than you can tweet? Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing shares his strategies for killer online content.

At the dawn of blogging in 1995, Mark Frauenfelder moved his Boing Boing ‘zine online. Boing Boing--whose mission was to explore “the coolest, wackiest stuff”--became and remains one of the Internet’s most popular blogs. Defying the corporatization of the blogosphere, Boing Boing has remained a curio of oddities, tech news, gadget tips, and real-life marvels with 2.5 million unique visitors a month. Now, Frauenfelder shares daily blogging duties with a troika of other passionate editors: Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. “The recipe for an excellent blog is to be so deeply obsessed with something that you need to communicate it to others,” says Frauenfelder. “If Boing Boing stopped making money tomorrow, I’d still need to do it.”