Babson students, alumni, parents and staff are currently leading programs in Sekondi, Ghana and Byimana, Rwanda designed to create more entrepreneurial cultures in these countries.

Babson students, alumni, parents and staff are currently leading programs in Sekondi, Ghana and Byimana, Rwanda designed to create more entrepreneurial cultures in these countries. The programs involve teaching students about entrepreneurial thought and action while also training teachers of entrepreneurship to be more effective. 

If you are right-handed, chances are you will make different choices than your left-handed friends. A series of recent studies shows that we associate our dominant side with good and our nondominant side with bad, preferring products and people that happen to be on our “good” side over those closer to the other half of our body.

The theory of embodied cognition, widely embraced by cognitive scientists in recent years, holds that our abstract ideas are grounded in our physical experiences in the world. (See above: “embraced,” “holds,” “grounded.”) Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research, began to wonder: If our bodies shape our thinking, do people with different bodies think differently? He has been using handedness as a test bed for this body-specific hypothesis.

The all-time hottest month on record in the United States came in July 1936, during a low point for the country marred by the dust storms of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

With reports of weather records pilling up this year, it may be natural to wonder if this summer, and specifically, this month, might surpass even this record.

That's unlikely, said Christopher C. Burt, the weather historian for the website, Weather Underground. "1936 is probably unassailable frankly," Burt said.

I’ve heard it said that a new entrepreneur learns much from the hard work, the team-building and leading, even the failures that come with starting a new business. Developing a product, finding a market, dealing with logistical issues—wouldn’t it be great if these lessons could be learned sooner than later?

A Los Angeles-based company called Kidworth is focused on doing just that—exposing young people to the business world by introducing them to how the startup game is played in the hope of creating young entrepreneurs with the basic skills to turn their creativity into a business.

The big idea: A top-down research and development portfolio strategy can ensure that R&D projects implement your corporate strategy.

The scenario: Lockheed Martin Space System Co. designs, develops, manufactures and operates advanced technology systems for government and commercial customers. The company is focused on nine core business segments: human space flight; global communications systems; commercial space; sensing and exploration systems; missile-defense systems; strategic missiles; commercial launch systems; surveillance and navigation systems; and special programs.

Like many who pursue their MBA, you’ve probably already spent some time considering the possibility of one day starting your own business. For most would-be entrepreneurs, the thought of trying to start a business presents a wide array of challenges, and in the tricky business of starting your own company, the idea of “failure” is usually the most daunting opponent. In today’s tech saturated economy, the start-up culture has grown consistently more prevalent, with entrepreneurs and dreamers packing up and heading in droves to pursue the dream of tech stardom. While not every business is going to turn into the next Facebook, and certainly not every CEO will become the next Mark Zuckerberg, there is nonetheless something exciting about starting fresh and working your way up to running a company worth putting you name on. However, getting to that point takes a great deal of time, talent, and resources that even the most ambitious of entrepreneurs are daunted by. If there’s one thing a seasoned business owner will tell you, however, it’s that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs; or rather, to succeed in a start-up, sometimes a little failure can be the best thing for you and your company.

The industry has been abuzz this week with the release of the first market research on the crowdfunding industry, the Crowdfunding Industry Research report from www.crowdsourcing.org, which also coincides with the launch of the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA).

I wrote about the report last week in my May 10 article for Harvard Business Review: bit.ly/K6D4rz. I also thought it would also be interesting to pose some of the tough questions to the authors themselves. Here they are: Massolution CEO and Crowdfunding Professional Association executive committee member Carl Esposti and Sr. Analyst Gerrit Ahlers. Their first full presentation of their findings will take place in my own region, at the 2012 Crowd Funding Symposium in Salt Lake City, which I will be keynoting on May 31. Mr. Esposti will be presenting the new report as the first presentation on the second day of the event, on June 1.

Here’s some of what they said in our interview this week (I’ll post additional information in next week’s column as well).

When posed with a major (big) innovation effort, why do some people freeze?  Is it the size that intimidates them?  Yes in a way.  But size is relative.  If you have no perspective, then eveything can look big and daunting.

To build your perspective so that big programs aren’t so scary, you need to grow your innovation skill and experience.  So what are the steps?

Incremental Innovation

Incremental innovations have a bad reputation.  Some in the innovation space look down on incremental innovations as the lazy way out.  I don’t agree.  They have a role when it comes to meeting the quick, short term needs for innovation enhancements to current offerings.  Incremental innovations are low risk but allow the innovator to learn the skill of presenting an idea and getting it through the process.

JumpStart Inc., a Cleveland-based nonprofit focused on entrepreneurship and economic development, will team with the New Economy Initiative (NEI) to open a new high-tech accelerator in Detroit, says NEI executive director David Egner. Egner (an Xconomist) says a variety of state and regional investors will fund the accelerator and he expects it to have an annual operating budget of between $1.5 million and $3 million.

Egner says the accelerator, which will likely open this fall inside TechTown, will join a field of local accelerators and incubators that some feel is already too crowded given the relatively small geographic area they cover in Southeast Michigan. But Egner says that although accelerators like TechTown and Ann Arbor SPARK nurture high-tech startups, they aren’t solely devoted to them. “We don’t have a designated organization doing marketing to increase deal flow,” he says. “There currently isn’t capacity to go out and find new deals. We’ll have a $5 million fund with the ability to move $250,000 per deal.”

Every startup wants to hire rock stars, but in a hyper-competitive market like San Francisco, finding — and keeping — top-level talent is daunting. Matt MacInnis, co-founder and CEO of publishing platform Inkling, believes he’s found a way to scale his workforce without sacrificing quality. For MacInnis, it’s about making sure the company’s values are perpetuated with every new employee. That sounds amorphous and touchy-feely, but the process becomes rigid during the interview phase. Only a small number of people conduct interviews, MacInnis still meets every prospective hire, and the interviews are designed to be exhausting for the applicant so the company can see what the person is like when they are tired.

First, we will examine the inflows into the venture capital market: dollars raised by venture capitalists. Then we will explore the outflows, VCs’ investment pace, contrasting the dollars deployed over time. Last, we will investigate market sentiment and consequent price fluctuations.

Venture Dollars Raised Fall 27% Below 15 Year Trailing Median The venture capital industry is in the midst of a contraction. Since 2001, limited partners have invested a median of $22B each year in venture capital. Over the last 3 years, those figures have dropped by 50% to $16B annually.

Lobsters are flooding the market here.

A combination of warm weather and good conservation techniques has led to what could end up being a record lobster harvest across Maine waters. The glut is particularly noticeable here in Stonington, a fishing village on an archipelago by the Atlantic Ocean that has more lobster “landings,” or catches, than anywhere in the state.

But the bounty has come with a downside for fishermen. A relatively warm winter prompted soft-shell lobsters to appear in June, about a month early, and their abundance turned into an overabundance.

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.

My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus. State regents and legislators — and much of the public — take it as self-evident that every young person should be made to master polynomial functions and parametric equations.

Online crowdfunding, where regular folks shell out money to back a project or a company in return for rewards and sometimes equity, is pretty hot right now. And it’s set to get hotter when the U.S. JOBS Act goes into practice, which will make equity funding broadly available to unaccredited investors. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Felix Salmon at Reuters has a well-executed takedown of a widely cited global estimate for crowdfunding, which had pegged the market at $1.5 billion in 2011, with the potential for $3.2 billion this year. This came from Massolution and Crowdsourcing.org, an industry organization focused on crowdfunding.

Now let’s get one thing straight from the start: I’m a huge fan of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the number of similar crowdfunding sites that have sprung up recently to provide capital directly to exciting business ideas. There’s something very “American Dream” about being able to build one-on-one engagement with consumers — not to mention how nice it is for companies to have a viable alternative to traditional VC and angel capitalization.

That said, Kickstarter (or any other crowdsourcing platform) isn’t a viable option for all companies, and I believe it’s irresponsible at best to herald the company as a “people-first,” egalitarian solution for all business financing needs.

SBA has just concluded the public comment period for the size rules on the SBIR program.  As we had hoped, the input and comments we received on the rules were robust and included a wide range of opinions.   As we now begin the process of digesting the comments and evaluating how to change the proposed rules, I’d like to take this opportunity to let people know where we go from here.

Here are four things you should know about the proposed SBIR size rules:

SBA was given a tight, congressionally mandated timeline.  Congress gave SBA aggressive deadlines to draft the rules and get them out to the public.  And we had significant work to do to turn the statute into detailed, practicable working regulations. In order to meet these deadlines, SBA took the approach of drafting the rules and as quickly as possible putting them out for public comment in order to get reaction and input that will shape what the final rules look like.

If your first startup fails, you are about average. Most entrepreneurs fail on at least one attempt. Investors agree that an entrepreneur who has never failed probably hasn’t pushed the limits. What investors look for is not that you never fail, but that you learn from the failure, maintain a positive attitude, and work with integrity on the next one.

According to Harvey Mackay in his book “Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door,” how to rebound from failure or rejection is an essential skill to acquire for success. His bullets are about job hunting, but I believe the principles apply equally well to starting a business:

With an election coming up, President Obama touts his policy of encouraging “in sourcing” and discouraging “outsourcing” of services and manufacture of goods. In an effort to accelerate job creation, the Obama administration has reiterated its full support to entrepreneurs. Policies and regulations relating to applications for immigrant and nonimmigrant investor visas have been revisited since last year to encourage investment.

Types of investor visas

There are various types of foreign investor visas. The most known is the “one million dollar” investment visa that will give the investor the status of a green card holder.