Who better to define “entrepreneurship” than the school that’s been ranked number one in entrepreneurship for 19 years in a row?

Earlier this year, Babson launched an advertising and marketing campaign designed to “extend the definition of entrepreneurship,” by asking the community at-large to visit their new digital hub — define.babson.edu — and share their thoughts on what the word means to them.

Since launching the campaign, Babson’s Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Sykora says more than 100,000 people have engaged in crowdsourcing the definition, whether it be to leave their own description or read other participants’.

Innovation is in these days. The word is on the lips of every CEO, CFO, CIO, and anyone else with a three-letter acronym after their name.

As a result, many organizations are launching all kinds of "innovation initiatives" -- hoping to stir the creative soup. This is commendable. But it is also, all too often, a disappointing experience.

Innovation initiatives sound good, but usually don't live up to expectations. The reasons are many. What follows are 56 of the most common -- organizational obstacles we've observed that get in the way of a company truly raising the bar for innovation.

Two angel groups in flyover country have been keeping up with firms on the West Coast over the last 12 months, at least in terms of investing in healthcare startups.

The Halo Report included BlueTree Allied Angels and Ohio TechAngels in their list of most active companies in the health space.

Both groups participated in a recent funding round in Neuros Medical.

Tennessee ranks eighth in the country for the volume of federal grants its university research centers receive, but those dollars are not paying off in terms of new products, companies and jobs.

The Tennessean reports (http://tnne.ws/LIPE2y) statistics from the Kauffman Foundation show the state ranks 41st in the number of jobs created from research dollars.

Last month, the Ohio Board of Regents put out a report on the role corporate money should play in public university research.

It followed a similar paper published by the national Committee on Research Universities.

Both groups had the same message: federal funding for research is dwindling, so universities should embrace new partners in the business sector.

Venture capital investment in Maryland companies in the second quarter plummeted to its lowest level in almost 16 years, according to a new report.

In eight deals, investors pumped $25.5 million into state businesses during the quarter. It was the first time such investments have fallen below $30 million since the fourth quarter of 1996, when eight deals totaling $16 million were made, according to the new MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Are you ready to drop $100,000?

I started business school in the fall of 2010. When I applied, I had no intention of starting a company. I was attending to help grow my family’s business. However, your path can change. Mine did.

In March of 2011, I began work on ZipFit.me. I was part way through the business school program and tried to get the most I could out of it. Here is how Chicago Booth helped ZipFit.me:

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And let's go next to Silicon Valley, California, with a program called NewME, or New Media Entrepreneurship. It's a boot camp to encourage women and African-Americans - two groups that are dramatically underrepresented among technology entrepreneurs. We've been hearing about it this week. Seven participants from across the country are sharing a house in San Francisco. They're getting coached on their business plans, and as Amy Standen of member station KQED reports, they're attempting to perfect the art of the pitch.

RACHEL BROOKS: Hi, everyone. My name is Rachel Brooks. I'm from Chicago, by way of...

AMY STANDEN, BYLINE: Rachel Brooks is standing in front of about 100 people at the Google headquarters in Mountain View. It's the second day of the NewME program, and she wants one thing. She wants the people in this room to like her company.

The quality of the founder and the strengths of the team can be just as important as a good business model when pitching to a start-up accelerator, claims Ragnar Sass

With competition in the job market increasingly tough, many individuals are looking to transition their idea into a business. However, with 80 per cent of start-ups failing in the first five years, gaining access to the necessary guidance and capital is more important than ever.

One way of doing this is by applying to a business accelerator, a scheme where startups can apply and, if accepted, receive equity investments and advice in return.

Urban Innovation21 announces the largest and most diverse innovation economy based internship program in the region. Having placed 45 interns just this summer, the organization anticipates providing 80 paid internship opportunities this calendar year. This initiative provides students from Carlow University, Community College of Allegheny County, Duquesne University and Point Park University with work experience, helping young professionals to find opportunities within our region.

As a public-private partnership, Urban Innovation21 boosts regional economic development through 21st century innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Its flagship program is the Pittsburgh Central Keystone Innovation Zone, which offers a variety of incentives to promote the growth of startup clusters in underserved communities. The organization is funded by a consortium of anchor institutions, the PA Department of Community and Economic Development, and has received substantial support from the Heinz Endowments, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Alcoa Foundation, and most recently, it attracted funding from the Surdna Foundation.

Everyone knows they have unique fingerprints, but what about a unique footprint?

Research has shown everyone has a personalized way of walking — pressure of step, length of stride — and a new lab is working to turn those individual foot features into a security measure.

The lab is developing biometric shoe insoles to monitor the characteristics of a person’s feet. Sensors will record the patterns and a computer will compare the measurements to a person’s master file. If it’s a match, it will grant the person access to secured areas and the insoles will turn off. If not, it sounds an alarm.

After Facebook’s botched initial public offering, observers feared that Silicon Valley would plunge into a downturn. But in June, the Bay Area job market came back in a big way, adding  16,900 jobs.

If it seems like it might be getting tougher to hire employees in the tech sector, where there’s always a war for the best talent, this could explain why.

The nine-county Bay Area region — which includes San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and surrounding cities — produced its best one-month job growth since September 2011. It was buoyed by tech jobs and growth in the East Bay, Michael Bernick, a research fellow with the Milken Institute, told the San Jose Mercury News. He said that tech firms, social media companies, and internet commerce companies are leading the recovery.

Despite some of the froth being blown off following the rocky Facebook IPO, it remains the case that talent and hiring are a big issue in the Valley. And you may not know this, but for a long time Europeans looked onward to the U.S. and thought to themselves, “Ha! We have plenty of room left for growth! And plenty of talented, educated people! Mwah ha ha ha !”

Ok, Ok, let’s leave aside that many of them wouldn’t themselves mind moving to the warm climes of Palo Alto and the rest… Instead, let’s concentrate on what actually happened next. What happened next was a good two, three of years of growth. And, we’ve seem the rise of some significant European originated companies such as Spotify, SoundCloud, Badoo, Fon, Moshi Monsters, Shazam, Wonga, Huddle … and the list goes on.

“India is a woman”, so told us a young Indian a while ago in Goa. We were sitting in one of the countless restaurants scattered along the Goan beach and heard for the first time a phrasing of India in one sentence that actually explained something about it that we always had a hard time with. “You must understand, in India the female energy is the dominant one”.

At first, considering the level to which Indian women have to cover themselves in public and the prevalent focus on wedding and children, it sounded a bit peculiar to us. But the young woman went on to explain: “What I mean by feminine energy is… as in the west, in countries like Germany, everything works on masculine energy – order, reason, precision.

Humana Inc. (HUM) continues its commitment to innovation, health and well-being by partnering with Blueprint Health and working together to spark change and make a meaningful impact on the health care community.

As the exclusive health insurance platinum sponsor of the summer 2012 Blueprint Health Accelerator, Humana will work closely with program participants and other health care entrepreneurs, investors, executives and innovators that serve as mentors to the community. Blueprint Health kicked off its summer session on July 16; the intensive program provides seed capital, office space, and most critically, access to a broad range of mentors with deep healthcare, start-up and technology experience.

Aussie start-ups are fleeing abroad, lured by Silicon Valley, which is undoubtedly the best place to nurture a tech business. That said, all is not lost in Australia and you just need to look a little harder for the support and success stories. 

Barkles App closes its doors and poof, another start-up goes up in smoke! It’s no shock with the number of businesses failing in Australia up by 57 percent.  And when you consider startups in Australia have also fallen by 95 percent in the last 12 months it’s a scary scene right now.

To make matters worse businesses going into bankruptcy are also up by 48 percent! It is clear it is not just tech businesses struggling to get going in Australia either, the bricks and mortar businesses are choking as well.

Smart people only visit and buy from credible and memorable websites. In the past, if your startup had a website presence, the company was credible by definition. In today’s world, a website is necessary but not sufficient for credibility. Dreamers and gamblers have found out that if the website isn’t validated as credible, it’s probably a scam, and everyone loses.

Yet most startups I know experience the same shock of disappointment when they first open up their website to offer their “million dollar idea” product, and nobody comes. What validates credibility and makes your site memorable in the minds of consumers, and how much does it cost?

It wasn’t so long ago that venture capitalists kept secrets. The young start-ups they backed certainly sought attention, but most venture capitalists operated under levels of secrecy typically reserved for Swiss banks.

Sequoia Capital, the prominent firm behind such tech behemoths as Apple and Google, and several other top venture firms stopped accepting investments from public institutions like the University of California system just to avoid having their financials disclosed to the press.

The second quarter of the year was a banner one for early-stage companies seeking venture capital funding, according to a report released today. But overall fundraising is down compared with the same time last year, and the biotech and clean-tech industries continue to struggle.  

The good news: More early-stage companies raised venture capital in the last quarter than since the beginning of 2001, during the last tech boom, the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) shows. $2.1 billion went into 410 early-stage deals. Overall, $7 billion went into 898 deals. 

We are entering an era when the United States of America will go through massive changes.  The only question is what kind of changes these will be and which political leaders and policies will prevail.  This could very well be an America that Barack Obama couldn’t even understand.  His highly publicized “you didn’t build that” dialogue reflects how little he really understands how America became great—and what it will take to keep it great.

Whether it is four more years of the anemic Obama recovery or four new years of the (still partially unknown) Romney approach to growth and capitalism will not be decided until November.  But businesses cannot stop in a state of suspended animation.  That is what causes a large part of the current malaise.