Just because you are an entrepreneur, or work in a startup, you can’t ignore the rules of building and maintaining relationships. Many despise these experiences in corporate environments, and leave for a startup, only to find that they have to be able to navigate a similar minefield there of workplace and business relationships to be successful.

Jan Yager, Ph.D., an author and speaker on this and related subjects, outlines in her recent book “Productive Relationships: 57 Strategies for Building Stronger Business Connections.” From my experience and hers, here are ten top relationship strategies for people in startups:

I have to laugh every time I hear this saying:  Put Your Big Boy Pants On, or, so we don’t leave anyone out, Put Your Big Girl Pants On!

I never thought I’d be inspired by anything Kobe Bryant said, but I heard this expression most recently when he was talking about how, after some early season difficulties, his teammate Pau Gasol had to step up, stop whining, and make it happen.

When most people in Boston talk about the fiscal cliff, they’re talking about the deadline-driven negotiations in Washington over taxes, spending, and the federal debt. But Boston entrepreneurs and investors are obsessed with hurtling over a different cliff right now.

They worry that the feast of initial “seed” funding available to young companies over the past few years is going to lead to a major famine in 2013, as the crop of start-ups that raised their first $1 million discover that there isn’t enough follow-on money to support all of them.

If you think about some of the most exciting areas of innovation today, whether it’s 3D printing, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, augmented reality or facial recognition, they all have at least one thing in common: they can be seen as either “cool” and “creepy.” Facial recognition, for example, is “cool” when it helps one find a lost child in a crowd, but it’s “creepy” when the government uses it for surveillance. These “cool or creepy” innovations are even more exciting than many “disruptive” innovations of the early Internet era because they have the potential to disrupt not just one industry, but an entire society.

As recently as twenty years ago, innovations were simply expected to be bigger, faster and cheaper. Then, during the early Internet era, innovations needed to be billion-dollar ideas with the ability to create entirely new markets. Now, ideas and innovations need to be so far-reaching that they challenge some of our fundamental beliefs about human existence.

Google launched its start-up incubator in Tel Aviv on Monday, hoping to create a center for the entire Israeli high-tech industry. The incubator, named Campus TLV, takes up an entire floor of the Electra Tower.

Nike wants to help give athletically inclined startups a running start.

The company said this morning that it will open a technology incubator in Portland next year, working with an established organization called TechStars to boost the prospects of entrepreneurs developing technology for its Nike+ products.

The Nike program will run from March into June; the company said it hasn't chosen a specific location yet, and indicated that it hasn't decided whether it will repeat the program in the future.

"That's just the way it is," sounded like opportunity to our hall-of-fame list of maverick entrepreneurs, each of whom disrupted entire industries. Here is our list of ten innovative business leaders who changed the game in their fields.

Entrepreneur. It's a tough word -- both to spell and to call yourself. Being an entrepreneur brings with it a love of leaping head first into the unknown. Life-long entrepreneurs love new challenges, and live their lives in a constant growth phase. One of the common resources an entrepreneur turns to is a mentor. Asking for advice and bouncing ideas off of others is essential to the success of an entrepreneur's journey.

I've been fortunate to have a variety of mentors over the years, and I can't imagine standing where I am if it wasn't for them. Despite all the challenges of running a business, the biggest constant in my life is those mentors, and their advice.

The National Institutes of Health, the largest provider of basic research money for universities in the United States, has long struggled with both the reality and the perception of bias in its grant awards.

Over the years, it has taken steps to help black researchers, scientists at lower-prestige institutions, and those offering riskier proposals. It has tried to keep personal idiosyncrasies, financial conflicts, and opaque methodologies from skewing its grant-making processes.

Now, for the first time, the agency is considering a relatively simple step that might help resolve many of those problems: anonymity.

Chances are your college apartment didn’t have walk-in closets, granite countertops and a resort-style pool with private cabanas.

( University Students, Faculty and Staff Receive 5% off purchases of $25 or more. )

But for a growing number of college students, these luxury amenities are becoming the norm.

Nationwide, student housing totaling more than 30,000 beds is estimated to be under construction around campuses, the Wall Street Journal reports. Low housing inventory combined with booming enrollment and a demand for luxury are resulting in new high-end developments that rent for top dollar.

Which brainstorming techniques should you use to attack your next innovation challenge? Here are the “super seven” that innovation consultant Bryan Mattimore says have the advantages of being easy to learn, flexible to adapt to different types of creative challenges and are diverse enough to deliver different types of ideas.

KwaMsane Township sits amid rolling hills in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province. Drive 30 minutes to the west and elephants, giraffes, zebras, and rhinos often stroll by the side of a highway that cuts through a game park. A few kilometers to the east lie sprawling sugarcane fields, which shimmer in the subtropical sun and appear to spill into the Indian Ocean. KwaMsane is beautiful, but it has one of the world’s highest rates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis, an often fatal form of the disease.

In November 2011, Jabu Ngcobo, 25, felt a pain in her side and went to the KwaMsane clinic, which resembles a trailer park. The clinic’s trailers—called parkhomes here—surround a small covered courtyard that serves as a waiting room, with patients sitting in plastic chairs. “I was all along thinking I had MDR TB because my two brothers and my sister had it,” says Ngcobo.

This year has afforded me the opportunity to visit dozens of nations and talk with their entrepreneurs. One nation remained elusive to me. In 2011, Thailand participated for the first time in Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) and I was keen to visit in either 2011 or 2012, but despite good faith efforts, I have been unable to make it there, mostly due to the likes of tragic flooding, the worst in 50 years last year for the country. So I turn today to virtual research.

For the launch of Global Entrepreneurship Week, students from Chulalongkorn University’s Hi-Tech Entrepreneurship Club “mapped” the country´s entrepreneurial ecosystem through a comprehensive listing of support groups, activities and resources for entrepreneurs. I am happy to report this entrepreneurship ecosystem looks much stronger a year later, with Startup Weekend events, the 3 Day Startup entrepreneurship education program, stronger emphasis on entrepreneurship at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, the Thai-US Creative Partnership, the Chiang Mai Creative City initiative, and other players all combing for and nurturing local startup talent.

Want a culture of innovation? Choose a few of the following guidelines and make them happen. If not YOU, who? If not NOW, when?

1. Remember that innovation requires no fixed rules or templates -- only guiding principles. Creating a more innovative culture is an organic and creative act.

2. Wherever you can, whenever you can, always drive fear out of the workplace. Fear is "Public Enemy #1" of an innovative culture.

Ok you have the next big idea in clean tech and you have assembled a great team. What’s next? Capital. If you have ruled out traditional methods of financing like – banks, family or angel investors for your business, it is time to approach a Venture Capitalist. How do you get on their radar? Remember VC’s usually have a lot going on and very little time. Here are a few tips to put your best foot forward via Cleantech Open.

Cleantech Open partnered with Chevron to develop a series of videos to provide guidance on the practical things entrepreneurs must do to transform their ideas into thriving businesses. In this video, Trond Unneland, vice president and managing executive of Chevron Technology Ventures, and other representatives from venture capital funds discuss how entrepreneurs can secure an initial face-to-face meeting with a venture capitalist.

A system that made patent registration up to 60 times more expensive in Europe than in China is being scrapped in favour of a one-size-fits-all pan-European process. But Spain and Italy refused to join the scheme because of language concerns. Signing off on a plan first considered in 1973, 25 of the EU's 27 industry ministers – apart from Spain and Italy – agreed to allow inventors to register their idea with one EU agency.

The old system makes the process 18 times more expensive than in the United States and 60 times more than in China. Under the previous system, patents had to be registered separately in individual EU countries.

I am very pleased to share with you the 2011/2012 Annual Report for Ontario Centres of Excellence Inc. (OCE), “Return on Innovation”. We hope you find it helpful in understanding the work that we do in supporting Ontario’s innovation agenda.

The report reflects OCE’s strong commitment to generating the best commercial outcomes from academic research sponsored by industry and OCE. In 2011/2012, OCE attracted new levels of investment from our partners, launched exciting new programs, forged some major new partnerships and benefited from a spirit of collaboration amongst funding agencies.

You may view the report, with audited financial statements, at http://www.oce-ontario.org/annual-report-2011-12.

Our accomplishments are due to the outstanding efforts of our staff, Board of Directors, Sector Advisory Boards, the ongoing support of the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, our ONE colleagues, the federal government, including the NCE, and our strong collaborative partnerships with industry, academic institutions and the investment community.

Together, we are working to ensure that Ontario-based innovation is prominently showcased in the global marketplace.

RICK DeVOS could not wait to leave Grand Rapids, Mich. After high school, he made a beeline to Pepperdine University near Los Angeles and spent a year studying in London, but eventually returned home to finish his degree at Calvin College. “My family has deep roots in Grand Rapids,” he said. “I missed the grounding and humility of the Midwest.”

Now, Mr. DeVos, 30, the grandson of the Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, is trying to infuse the entrepreneurial spirit of big cities in his hometown of 190,000 people.

In April, he began Start Garden, a $15 million early-stage venture capital fund backed by his family. Start-ups, which initially receive $5,000 in seed capital, have three months to prove their ideas and compete for additional financing at a monthly event called Update Night. It is not nearly as cutthroat as “Shark Tank,” Mr. DeVos said, referring to the reality show about entrepreneurs. “But it is a little counterculture to the Midwest, where people are used to hearing: ‘That’s a nice idea. Let’s keep in touch.’ ”

"If (Iowa) can do it, we can all do it," Startup America Partnership CEO Scott Case says in a white paper released Thursday that examines the Startup American Partnership at the 18-month mark. The Kansas City, Mo.-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which provided funding for the Partnership's launch in January 2011, published the paper, "The Start Uprising."

StartupIowa, along with the other 28 startup regions, follows a new grassroots model that was instituted by the Startup America Partnership (SUAP) earlier this year.

Last week’s post on Misfit Wearables, the company that’s raised nearly $500,000 for its new activity tracker from a crowdfunding campaign, is just one illustration of what can happen when a lot of people each give a little bit. Everything from open data to reconstruction bras for breast cancer survivors is now finding early stage funding by tapping into populations of patients, advocates, doctors and researchers, each willing to give a little bit.

Wondering if a project you’re working on is a good fit for crowdfunding? In a Saturday morning Twitter chat, health crowdfunding site MedStartr‘s Alex Fair joined others in sharing observations about successful projects in healthcare. The chat started with the question: Which was more important when deciding whether to contribute to a project, the idea or the founder’s reputation?