Four Michigan companies recently received investments from the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, totaling $1 million.  To date, the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, a collaborative effort of Michigan's SmartZones to support start-ups' product commercialization, has awarded 83 Michigan companies with seed funding totaling more than $19 million. 

"It's exciting to see how Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund companies use the investments to drive growth; the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund makes a measurable, positive impact on a start-up's chance of success in the state," said Skip Simms , manager, Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund and senior vice president of Ann Arbor SPARK.  "Early funding recipients, like Compendia Bioscience, have gone on to achieve significant success, including expansion, hiring and attracting marquee clients.  The four early stage companies funded this round are using the award to attract additional outside funding and get solidly on that path to success."

Tech investor Jeff Clavier sums up his investing philosophy with his quirky “three asses rule” — that a startup must have a smart-ass team, build a kick-ass product and serve a big-ass market.

But what considerations go into those three qualities? Anna Vital from Funders and Founders sat down with Clavier to map out what he thinks about when evaluating and making an investment, and created an infographic that gives entrepreneurs a glimpse into the mind of an investor.

Indiana’s life sciences industry has a $50 billion total impact on the state’s economy, according to recently updated data gathered by the Indiana Business Research Center at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and BioCrossroads, Indiana’s initiative for investment, development and advancement of the state’s signature life sciences strengths.

Now with a workforce of 55,000 people at nearly 2,000 companies in the areas of drugs and pharmaceuticals, medical devices and equipment, agricultural chemicals and feedstock, medical, research and testing laboratories and biologistics*, Indiana is ranked as one of the top five states in the life sciences industry – based on the highest number of employees in the sector, the highest number of companies and the highest concentration of employees (BIO/Battelle State Bioscience Industry Development Report 2012).

In "The Icarus Deception," Seth Godin teaches us how to overcome common fears that may be holding back our careers or our lives. Here's what he learned from conquering his childhood high dive.

I (at least part of me) was lucky enough to grow up at Camp Arowhon in northern Ontario. Deep in the north woods of Canada, I spent summers confronting what it meant to do what you wanted to do. That was a loaded obligation, because it meant you had to commit and then execute, without being able to blame the predicament of your choice on anyone else.

A highlight of the lake was the 24-foot-high diving board. Looking back, I think the diving board might have been as low as twenty-two feet, but regardless, it was incredibly high. Icarus high.

I know, sometimes it feels like every day we learn about a new startup accelerator or startup incubator. But this newest program put together by San Francisco-based law firm Equity LLP really seems to bring something different and useful to the table — hands-on help with all the legal documents and affairs that most new companies really need, but often don’t have the resources to tackle. Equity says that the program’s goal is to produce “fundable” companies “that will sail through due diligence with a clean cap table, solid organization, and good contracts.”

Last week I started the list of things I wish I had known before I started my company. Here is the second installment:

3. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Creating a cool product or website is rarely enough to bring success, as viral growth is not a reality for most companies. You should assume yours will require a lot of help to get where it needs to go, and will take lots of time and money (see lesson #1). You need a very strong marketing plan, and ideally a great co-founder, CMO or world class firm to help you along the way. Your business plan won’t ever just execute itself. It is crucial to make sure that every sign of growth in your model is tied to a marketing action item in real life.

Great entrepreneurs often talk about persistence -- pushing past ridicule and doubt to achieve success that no one believed possible. But successful leaders have another skill that often slips under the radar: the wisdom to let go of ideas that fail or lose their luster.

As an entrepreneur, how do you know when it’s time to let go?

Sadly, there's no formula for making that decision. "Many successful people have had success because they pivot and others because they persevere," says Jason Calacanis, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and founder of Mahalo.com. The choice depends on the leader and the situation.

In reality, so-called “founder’s” shares are simply common stock, issued at the time of startup incorporation, for a very low price, and normally allocated to the multiple initial players commensurate with their investment or role. But that’s only the beginning of the story.

These shares are allocated and committed, but not really issued and owned (vested) until later. Typically, vesting in startups occurs monthly over 4 years, starting with the first 25% of such shares vesting only after the employee has remained with the company for at least 12 months (one year “cliff”). Vesting always stops when an employee leaves the company.

Recently we caught up with Clark Benson, Founder and CEO of a great startup called Ranker. During our interview, Clark Benson introduces us to Ranker while sharing advice abut fundrasing, applying to an accelerator program and creating a business plan. Ranker is a graduate of the LaunchPand LA accelerator program, and our first interview with a startup to go through the LaunchPad LA accelerator. A must read for all non-technical founders.

What is Ranker all about?

Ranker’s primary goal is to crowdsource answers to “what are the best” type questions – or any questions that are best answered in a ranked list.  Although our traffic acquisition has strong similarities to “answers” sites (since we get a lot of traffic from search engines), Ranker doesn’t feel like an answers site. We are not a vertical-specific site – you can find anything from best movies of alltime to  best board games to best gluten-free crackers on Ranker. There isn’t really anything quite like Ranker – you can find crowdsourced rankings when you do searches in the travel and local verticals, but outside of that, when you look for answers you will find plenty of lists out there, but they usually will be just one person’s opinion. We have a proprietary algorithm that combines votes on items with users lists to generate Ultimate Lists. Ranker is an openended platform, and a lot of our users make individual lists that reflect just their own opinion – but the aggregated rankings are our unique value proposition. Additionally, we have built a large and rapidly growing “taste graph” based on the voting on Ranker lists, and although at the present moment we are more focused on growing the graph than licensing it, we see massive potential as a unique consumer opinion data play – we’ve already got over 3 million “edges” in our graph – datapoints like “people who like the show Modern Family also like Heineken 400% more than other beers.”

The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published its "Where To Be Born in 2013" list, a measure of which countries provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead. WOND, an infographics and data visualization outfit based outside London, has put together a great repackaging of the data, which also included the list from 1988. Needless to say, things have changed over the past 25 years.

One of the most common savings goals we hear from our readers is travel. We tend to think that we need to save up thousands of dollars in order to justify taking those vacation days and heading out of town. But we might not need quite as much as we think. Even with a tight budget, you can still score amazing travel memories at a great price–you simply have to choose the right place.

There’s been a lot of focus on entrepreneurship as the foundation of innovation, and many complaints that college business schools don’t teach enough of it. One observer, however, says entrepreneurship is a skill that is impossible to teach.

That’s the view of Antonio Neves, founder of THINQACTION, a coaching service for entrepreneurs. In a recent article in Business on Main, Neves observes that the many entrepreneurs he has spoken to over the years represent a broad range of educational backgrounds, from high school graduates to MBAs. However, none of these individuals gained their acumen in classes. And, historically, colleges have trained students to become middle managers in large organizations.

Our briefing and leader on the idea that innovation and new technologies have stopped driving growth drew a big response from readers. Here is a small selection of their letters; more will appear in this week's print edition. 

SIR – In 1970, the primary school I attended merged with one from a neighbouring village where all the children aged between five and 11 had been taught by one teacher in a single classroom. It may sound like “Little House on the Prairie”, but this was just a mile or two from the municipal boundary with Cardiff. Until the 1960s it had not been possible to close the school as it was not safe to assume that families in rural Wales would have a car. This was just one of the social changes still unrolling a century or so after the car’s invention.

Have you ever heard of patent pools? Well, they’re pretty much what it says on the tin: a number of firms pooling all their patents that pertain to a particular technology. Many technologies – whether hardware or software – consist of multiple components, but the patents for each of these components could be held by a number of different firms. This is a bit of a problem, because if a company then wants to use that technology in one of its products, it has to negotiate separately with each of these firms to set licensing terms. And that’s rather cumbersome and time-consuming, and often means that hardly anyone ends up using the technology at all. Which is waste, hampers progress, and prevents inventors from actually making any licensing money. And that ain’t no good for no-one.

Therefore, what these firms then sometimes do is sit together and jointly agree to pool all their relevant patents, basically creating one organisation that becomes the central point for licensing the whole technology. Problem solved.

2012 was a good year for the entrepreneur. Exponential leaps in technology have made it continually easier for widespread adoption of a good idea and for a small business to scale successfully to an empire. As we look ahead to 2013, all eyes are on upcoming trends which will fuel innovation, job creation and economic growth worldwide.

As Dell’s first Entrepreneur in Residence, I constantly have an ear to the ground of the entrepreneur community. In the past year, I was lucky enough to speak with thousands of entrepreneurs, and from those conversations, I predict that the following trends will shape the world of entrepreneurialism in 2013.

Companies all over the world are becoming increasingly worried about their ability to innovate and compete in the fast-changing technology world. That’s according to GE’s third annual “Global Innovation Barometer” released Jan 17.

The survey of 3,100 senior business executives in 25 countries showed the anxiety that these executives feel about innovation and how confused they are about global competitiveness. One in three said the increased competition and accelerated pace of technological advancement is having a negative impact on their local economy. And while 71 percent said they favor the opening of their markets to foreign trade, investment, and technology imports, an equal percentage want protectionist government procurement policies that favor domestic technological development. There was a 53 percent overlap in the people who expressed these two opposing views. Executives from the U.S. were only a little less divided than Indian executives on this issue.

Recently, we've been asking for product recommendations on LinkedIn from those who have attended an FEI event. One such recommendation, written by Mikel Cirkus, Global Director, Conceptual Design at Firmenich, included the following sentence "Innovation without foresight is like hunting blindfolded."

We couldn't agree more, and that's why the Front End of Innovation EMEA program is packed with sessions that will fulfill your foresight needs: from our annual Trenz®Walk: to our Future Trends summit, to our keynote address, "Tapping Into and Profiting from the Hottest Consumer Trends" with Henry Mason, TRENDWATCHING.COM

If you made a New Year’s resolution a few weeks ago, you probably decided to get fit or lose weight – two goals that pretty unavoidably involve a pledge to eat less. Perhaps you’ve stuck with it so far, through some combination of brute will, guilt, and the deployment of winning slogans at spots of greatest temptation. But unless you’re one of the rare successful long-term dieters, your assault on adiposity will be short lived. Sooner or later, you’ll find your way back to foods that are sweet, fat, and synthetically tinted.

Why do we eat bad stuff, and too much of it?

Venture capitalists invested $237 million in digital health companies specializing in health consumer engagement last year, according to a recent report by Rock Health, a "seed accelerator" firm that invests in startup companies developing health-related mobile and Web applications.

The report found that in 2012, venture capitalists invested $150 million in digital health firms specializing in personal health tracking technology, $108 million in firms that offer electronic health record tools and $78 million in companies that provide hospital administration technology.

A lot has been written in recent weeks about the Series A crunch in venture capital. For the uninitiated, the Series A crunch is the widening gap between the number of angel/seed financings (growing) and the number of Series A financings, the second round of fundraising start-ups typically raise (not growing). According to Pitchbook, in 2008, the ratio of seed financings to Series A financings was 1.9:1. In 2012, that ratio stood at 3.3:1.

There are a host of reasons postulated for the widening gap, including a denominator effect: larger VC fund sizes make Series A less appealing, as firms need to put bigger checks to work (not necessarily a decline in Series A funding, just not keeping up with growth of Seed financings); numerator effect: there has been a swell in “angels” over the past few years with the popular success of incubators and demo days; and the cyclical explanation: angels/seed financiers made poor investment decisions, now the reigns are tightening as companies cannot prove their business models.