Most of the entrepreneurs I know realize they have some bad habits, like maybe procrastination or not listening well, so they focus on dropping these. New studies indicate that a more productive approach would be adopting new good habits and behaviors that clearly move your business forward, like good time management and implementing customer recommendations.

These two approaches may sound similar, but actually require different skill sets. For example, learning to stop smoking may leave you with a gap to fill, but finding activities that remove your urge to smoke really gets you where you want to be. I recommend the following six techniques for solidifying good habits from “The Compound Effect,” by successful entrepreneur and writer Darren Hardy:

The Wall Street Journal put together a list of its top 10 articles of 2012. #1 — Why French Parents Are Superior, by Pam Druckerman published back in February. Here's the Druckerman's basic point (WSJ): ...for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

If you’re lucky and you’re not working this Christmas Eve, you may be just settling in for a cozy evening with family and friends. You may be going off to candlelight church services, or staying home, lighting the Christmas tree, listening to carols and sipping champagne with loved ones. Soon gifts will be exchanged and yummy food will be eaten. As the song goes, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” Or is it?

While innovation is recognized as an important element for America’s manufacturing and information technology sectors, it also plays a critical role in advancing U.S. agriculture and making our farmers the most productive in the world. This was the theme of Agriculture: Growing Innovation & Opportunities, a conference hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today in Washington.

Conference speakers cited several innovations in agriculture that enable farmers to grow more food on less land, with fewer inputs and a smaller environmental footprint. These include better soil management practices, improved water conservation methods, the use of GPS technology and other smart applications, better nutrient management systems, and the development, maturation and utilization of agriculture biotechnology crops.

If you had only one hour to teach and impact a group to be more creative and innovative, what would you teach them?

Virtually any article today about big data inevitably turns to the notion that the country is suffering from a crucial shortage of data scientists. A much-talked-about 2011 McKinsey & Co. survey pointed out that many organizations lack both the skilled personnel needed to mine big data for insights and the structures and incentives required to use big data to make informed decisions and act on them.

What seems to be missing from all of these discussions, though, is a dialogue about how to steer around this bottleneck and make big data directly accessible to business leaders. We have done it before in the software industry, and we can do it again.

Year end is always time for either year in review style articles or predictions for the upcoming year. Instead, as the clock inexorably marches on, I wanted to give a shout out to some old school technology. While it’s my job as a venture capitalist to spend time thinking about new disruptive technologies, it is fascinating to think about the venerable older technologies that are still enterprise workhorses and the tremendous amount of inertia start-ups must overcome to displace them.

I got thinking about this because I was recently on a panel where someone pointed out that a large portion of server revenue is in alternative Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) i.e. anything non-x86 such as Power, IA-64/Itamium, SPARC, etc. This seemed like an interesting factoid so I looked into the data, which is indeed shocking. Although non-x86 serves, which I categorized as Everything Else in the chart below account for 1.8 percent of the volume of units, they are over 28 percent of the revenue in 2012!

Statistics and big data took over baseball scouting some years ago, with the rise of Moneyball. More recently, those tactics have spread to the political world, with presidential candidates using big data to maximize their vote, and Nate Silver using algorithms to correctly predict outcomes in all 50 states.

Now we’re doing it, too. Instead of relying on the gut instincts, punditry and armchair quarterbacking that VCs are notorious for, our firm is pattern replicating to decide which entrepreneurs to fund.

“BRITAIN does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community,” asserted Margaret Thatcher in 1988. Now, increasingly, it does. Opinion polls show that most Britons are in favour of leaving the European Union. Baroness Thatcher’s Conservative Party, which took Britain into Europe four decades ago, is divided between those who long for an arm’s-length relationship and those who want to walk out. The second camp is swelling.

Even the fiercest British critics of the EU are astonished by the speed at which things are moving. Parliamentary rebellions over Europe are becoming easier and easier to organise. Euroscepticism is hardening in the Conservative Party, in much the same way as social conservatism has gone from being a powerful current in America’s Republican Party to an intolerant orthodoxy. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which wants to leave the EU, has abruptly moved from the political margins to the mainstream. A referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU now seems a matter of timing.

If there are any entrepreneurs still on your shopping list, here are a few gift ideas that are almost as easy as Amazon’s one-click. They range from free to extravagant and should cover anyone just launching a new company or someone with a little more experience who needs to go to the next level.

Books Any one of these books will start the year off right.

• The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care by Dr. Eric Topol – Everyone in healthcare should read this one. 
• The Lean Startup by Eric Reis – Because you can never be too thrifty or too good at pivoting. 
• Work the System by Sam Carpenter – The audio and PDF versions of this book are free and what entrepreneur wouldn’t like leave a world of chaotic, amorphous conglomeration for one of orderly individual linear systems?

I expect many companies looking for their Series B rounds to struggle to find them, and many companies looking for their last pre-IPO rounds to face substantial valuation pressure. I also expect substantial evolution or reinvention of business models for some of the recent high-flyer Internet companies.

Are you all prepared for the end of 2012 and the start of 2013? I hope so, as there will likely be someone, somewhere determined to force you to celebrate the new year whether you want to or not.

If you can’t think of a legitimate reason why the date changing on the calendar is cause for celebration, then you should perhaps don your geek hat and sit in the corner thinking about the tech innovations of the past 12 months.

That’s what we did last week, when we asked you, the loyal MakeUseOf readership, to nominate your candidates for the best tech innovations of 2012. As always, you delivered.

Contrary to popular belief, publishing your research will not guarantee that someone will notice your discovery and continue developing it into a tangible product that will reach the end user. As I previously mentioned, technologies first need to be developed and that is achieved through collaborations with industrial partners. For example, once a lead compound is identified it must go through a drug development process that includes pre-clinical research, development, and clinical trials. Additionally, drug development is focused on addressing the regulatory requirements of regulatory authorities, such as the FDA and later on for marketing approval. Overall, the process can be quite expensive and may exceed $100 million dollars per drug compound.

As communities around the world look for new ways to promote economic growth, business incubation programs continue to play a vital role. NBIA just completed the 2012 State of the Business Incubation Industry report and the results are fascinating.

The report presents a snapshot of the industry using survey data collected from business incubation programs throughout North America. NBIA has conducted the industry assessment periodically since 1989, and last published the SOI report in 2006.

Nothing can sap your energy, finances, and relationships more than stubbornly sticking with a dead end project. Successful entrepreneurs know that one failed business hardly defines them. After all, the end of one venture often means the start of something new.

However, closing your business doesn’t just mean shutting down your website or storefront and calling it a day. You’ll need to formally close your LLC or Corporation. Otherwise, you can still be on the hook for filing your dead business’ annual reports, filing state/federal tax returns, and keeping up any business licenses.

Claudia Steinman saw her husband’s BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody’s mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — “Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear Dr. Steinman, I have good news for you. The Nobel Assembly has today decided to award you the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2011.” Before she finished reading, Claudia was hollering at her daughter to wake up. “Dad got the Nobel!” she cried. Alexis, still half-asleep, told her she was crazy. Her father had been dead for three days.

With another list of the Top 10 Internet Scams and more identity theft, there seems to be a growing population out there worried about all the people intent on hurting them. Why is everyone so paranoid these days? My plea to entrepreneurs is to recognize these concerns as an opportunity, and go the extra mile to make people’s life better, rather than stoke the fires.

I must be the only one who believes that most of the data gathering in the real world, and on the Internet, is done by businesses to help you find what you want, protect you, and improve your experience, rather than invade your privacy or scam you.