As any entrepreneur knows, running a successful business takes time, effort, and commitment. Without these three factors in play, many business owners can be shown the door to failure.

According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), more than half of all small businesses close their doors in the first five years, while two-thirds are out of business after a decade. The reasons for such failures include lack of capital, poor planning, and not enough business experience. With that in mind, it’s hard for entrepreneurs to strike gold even once, but twice – that’s when the real expertise comes in.

Here's the deal: You are creative. Really. I mean it. You are. Maybe you know it. Maybe you don't know it. But the fact remains: you are creative. Unfortunately, your creativity doesn't always show up on the job. Work environments tend to subvert creativity and make it hard to access. If this sounds familiar, my newest article in The Huffington Post will be useful to you. Enjoy!

Our friends at YEC asked members of their council this entrepreneurship-related question from a reader… we thought the answers were enlightening. Read on!

Question: What do you consider to be the most common misconception about entrepreneurship?

Investors, it seems, like to invest in investors.

Investing platform FundersClub has closed the largest ever seed round from a Y Combinator company. The company raised $6 million for its marketplace that allows accredited investors invest in startups online.

There is a lot of buzz surrounding FundersClub for its innovative approach to venture capital. It carefully selects startups to feature on the site. Each company creates a profile and sets a fundraising goal. Once granted membership, individuals with an annual salary of over $200,000 or net worth of over $1 million can peruse the list and if they choose, make an equity investment directly on the site.

Boca Raton,FL– More than 250 international and domestic leaders from universities, research parks and businesses will convene at the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University’ s Boca Raton campus when it hosts the Association of University Research Parks (AURP) International Conference in 2014.

“We are honored and extremely enthused to host the AURP’s 2014 International Conference and look forward meeting so many respected researcher professionals from around the globe,” said Andrew Duffell, president and CEO of the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University. “This is a fantastic opportunity for attendees to learn from one another and for us to showcase South Florida’s numerous research endeavors, which support the region’s economic development efforts.”

The days in Russia when gangsters ruled the streets are long gone and in its place a new generation of entrepreneurs are transforming the country's business and how it is perceived in the global community.

Arkan Gukaysan is the CEO of Vizerra, a cloud-based 3D collaboration company that is helping architects and engineers transform the sustainability of cities. He has lived, worked and been educated in Armenia, Russia, Switzerland, the US and France and represents the new face of Russian entrepreneurs that are opening up to the rest of the world

Download the PDF:  High-growth Small Businesses Fueling Florida's Growth (Bendis Presentation - Oct 19, 2012) 

Growth is a mantra that cities, as well as nations and states, everywhere quest after. A growing number of economists caution that growth for growth’s sake does not necessarily equate to higher living standards or increased happiness. A blue-ribbon international commission headed by Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen has called for new, broader measures of economic performance and social progress. Plus, not all "growth" is the same. I've previously called attention to "growth without growth," the misguided notion that adding population equals economic growth. 

A new report from my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute provides a fresh take on this issue. It looks at how regions contribute to four key categories of regional economic development — population, innovation, creativity, and economic output. Basically, the study calculated a metro's share of the U.S. total for each of the four categories. The table below, from the study, charts the metros that top the list in each of the four categories. It lists the category that each metro does best in.

Since launching our own crowdfunding platform, Rock The Post, in 2011, we have seen many small businesses and entrepreneurs flourish and benefit from the aid of this industry. However, being successful in crowdfunding is not as easy as it seems. It comes with a lot of effort and dedication, but if one puts in the necessary work, they can realize fortunes that go far beyond just the raising of money.

Capital doesn’t come so easy to entrepreneurs these days. In 2012, the total number of loans and money distributed in the U.S. via the Small Business Administration has dropped as much as 20 percent! Also, nearly 98% of the business plans received by accredited investors and VC’s are rejected. Without a doubt, the current business-funding environment is in need of disruption.

I began studying angel investing returns about 10 years ago as a result of a problem I couldn’t resolve: The investing world seemed certain that angel investors were rubes. Conventional wisdom dictated that they made reckless investments in very early-stage ventures mostly doomed to fail. And whenever they might come close to succeeding, savvy “professional” investors would just swoop in, cram them down, and win the real returns. In addition, angels were up against a selection problem: All the best entrepreneurs and opportunities would naturally gravitate to the best venture capital funds, leaving only the “scraps” for angel investors.

Waterloo, Ont.'s $30 million technology accelerator is hosting its demo day today as part of a conference dubbed “Techtoberfest.”

Hosted in the Communitech hub that also houses offices for Research in Motion and Google, Hyperdrive launched its technology accelerator in April. The stated goal is to take 10 startup companies, hook them up with some seed-funding and three months of intensive business development under the Communitech roof, provide mentorship, and have them ready for a round of Series A funding two years down the line.

People sometimes ask me why I spend time writing articles and blogs. My response is usually that I feel I have a responsibility to help others. Starting a business is not easy, and maybe my five cents worth will help. This thought was foremost in my mind when I clicked on an audio interview done by the Harvard Business Review with Dan McGinn called, What’s Wrong With Today’s Entrepreneurs. The interview was based on an article written in the Harvard Business Review by McGinn called “Too Many Pivots Too Little Passion” , you can read it and link to the interview here.

The article is based on McGinn reading a slew of new books on entrepreneurship such as; Launch Pad, Lean Startup and The Ultralight Startup.  These books McGinn realized posited a new breed of entrepreneurship.   In days of old, an entrepreneur was driven by passion, endured rejection, skepticism and financial deprivation to realize their dream.  The new breed views entrepreneurship from the viewpoint of the end game, getting funded by Venture Capitalists.  The idea is not driven by passion but by what will get them money, in the article McGinn highlights one example:

SPECIAL REPORT / Pan-European venture capital and US-style 'angel investors' are set to be boosted to fight a continuing malaise in Europe’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) sector, along with measures to reduce red tape.

A report on innovation published in late September by the European Commission noted that since 2009, access to bank loans has deteriorated in more than half of EU member states.

Access to credit was the easiest in Finland, followed by Latvia, Sweden, Poland and Austria. But it remained ''relatively difficult'' or has worsened in Ireland, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Hungary, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain, the report said.

I had a friend who loved to have given a dinner party.

No, there isn’t a grammatical error in that sentence. She loved it when it was over, basking in the afterglow of a wonderful evening. But she really didn’t enjoy the rush of prepping five dishes on a four burner stove, wondering if someone might be allergic to an exotic spice, or just fretting over whether or not certain individuals might come to blows over their political differences.

That’s exactly how I feel after having finished a successful crowdfunding campaign. It was like a fabulous dinner party, in that it brought a lot of good people together to accomplish something. But…unlike said dinner party, which would have concluded with pile of pots, dishes, and soiled table linens…our aftermath will be a new Teamability-powered product ready to hit the launch pad.

The New York eHealth Collaborative and the Partnership for New York City Fund have launched an initiative designed to spur health IT innovation and job creation in New York state, Healthcare IT News reports.

About the Initiative The initiative -- called the New York Digital Health Accelerator program -- aims to support health IT startup businesses. It received 250 applications from companies in 27 states and 10 countries (McCann, Healthcare IT News, 10/15).

This was not the “serious question” I planned to write about this month, but a recent conversation with an association executive director inspired me to tackle it. The CEO had just read my new e-book, Associations Unorthodox: Six Really Radical Shifts Toward the Future, and he wondered whether I actually believe associations are “dead” in the long run. It was an unanticipated, yet not entirely surprising inquiry. The answer, of course, is more complicated than a simple “yes or no.”

For the most part, I find public ruminations on this kind of binary choice to be counterproductive. After all, one response (yes) is more likely to evoke deep feelings of genuine disdain and disbelief, while the other (no) may engender a false sense of security and a willful ignorance of the real world. Not much is gained from a reflection that is so narrowly construed and inwardly focused.

Politicians love tech startups, but not because of an innate curiosity or even a passion for innovation. No, they mostly love them for the jobs they create. All that rhetoric about small businesses and jobs? It’s really a small number of high-growth startups that end up doing the hiring.

And so you can imagine some heads turning in Washington at the New York Times’ headline last week "When Job Creation Engines Stop at Just One." The topic? Lean startups. Here’s the gist:

For more than a decade, start-ups have been getting leaner and meaner ... The lean model bodes well for companies like Leap2 that hope to become power players with much less manpower ... But the implications for the American work force are worrisome, and may help explain why economic output is growing much faster than employers are adding jobs.

Attracting financial backing for your company takes more than just ground breaking innovation these days, say experts. It takes time tested thinking as much as a blockbuster idea.

“I tend to bet on the jockey more than the horse,” said Pete Snyder, CEO of disruptor.com, a seed capital investment firm that specifically targets disruptive innovator startups.

“When I look at a company to invest in, I want a smart, savvy entrepreneur who knows his stuff just as much as I want an innovative product," Snyder said. (More: Top Disruptive Products)

Don’t let rejection get you down--it might be the ticket to creativity, science says. That’s right: If regular rejection doesn’t cause you to lose all self-confidence and withdraw from the world entirely, it just might boost your ability to think outside of the mainstream and draw upon a unique worldview, suggesting that the kind of people society considers “geniuses” might tend to have a go-it-alone, loner mentality.

Research conducted by Cornell and Johns Hopkins University researchers has shown that people who are able to handle rejection in the proper manner--by shrugging it off and blazing their own, independent trails--can experience heightened creativity and even commercial success through an ability to eschew mainstream thought and groupthink and instead pursue their own creative solutions to problems. They tested their hypothesis through a series of experiments in which they manipulated the experience of social rejection; subjects in the study were led to believe that everyone in a group exercise could choose whom to work with on a team project, only to be told later that no one had selected them for a team.

The HBS New Venture Competition (formerly called the Business Plan Contest) provides a unique opportunity for students to put entrepreneurship principles into practice with an integrative learning experience. Whether you are a winner of prizes (totaling over $150,000), go on to implement your proposed new venture idea, or simply take advantage of the learning and apply it later in your career, we guarantee the Competition will be an exciting, challenging, and rewarding experience. We look forward to understanding more about your idea, hearing your pitch, and providing you with some valuable feedback along the way.