In today's economy, it's easier than ever to start a company: with the rise of angel investors and crowdfunding, raising money has never been easier -- while technological changes mean startups need only a fraction as much cash as they used to. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there's less risk.

In fact, the risk equation has simply moved from the startup phase to the endgame. As IPOs become increasingly rare, more and more emerging companies are looking to be acquired - but there can't possibly be buyers for them all.

Keep Kennedy’s response in mind.  Because at some point in the future, when people ask you how you became an entrepreneur, you are likely to say something similar.  Your response is probaly going to boil down to: “I had no choice.”

I say this with all the respect that is due to the people who are posing the question: It is the wrong thing to be asking.

Last week, Tom Post, Forbes.com’s Managing Editor, and most patient man anywhere, asked me to write about being an entrepreneur.

It took me a long time to get started, mainly because I wasn’t sure what an entrepreneur really is. Finally, duh, I looked it up: Someone who starts a business and assumes risk, anticipating a profit. 

That sounds as if entrepreneurs begin with a PLAN. I sure didn’t. I fell, planless, into my own business – mostly out of desperation.

I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I graduated college, my goal was to be president of IBM. Ten years later, I ran into a boss who had sales contests where first prize was lunch with him! I always asked, “What is second prize, two lunches with you?”

Fortunately, I got inspired by a client who had started his own business and asked me to join him. However, I secretly wondered if I could be an entrepreneur myself. During that time, I took all the entrepreneur tests I could find. They asked questions like:

Q1. Do you want to make a lot of money? My answer: Yes, double yes.

The 16th Semi-Annual Russian-American Innovation Technology Week will be held in Philadelphia and Boston on June 14-21, 2012. It will highlight biotechnology, nanotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry, and the life sciences. RANIT-BIO will open on June 14-15, 2012 with a Welcoming Ceremony in Philadelphia City Hall and the Russian-American Life Sciences Conference. The 16th Semi-Annual Russian-American Innovation Technology Week will conclude with the 2012 BIO International Convention held on June 18-21, 2012 with the Russian country seminar at BIO organized by the Mid-Atlantic – Russia Business Council on June 19. For more information, please see the RANIT-BIO Information Packet and Agenda.

In many international meetings on innovation, a question often asked by audiences and panelists is ‘why is Europe unable to generate an Apple Company, a Google, an Amazon, a Steve Jobs, or a Bill Gates ?’. Maybe it is time to change the parameters of this type of question by raising another one ‘what would a young Leonardo da Vinci need in today’s Europe to start a successful global business ?’. 

Europe is not – and never was – short of ideas, innovative brains or disruptive innovations. Yet, Silicon Valley has no obvious equivalent on our continent, and Nasdaq companies continue to be dominantly American. What Europe still has not been able to build is a comparable eco-system in which universities, research centers and creative individuals can find support and mutual stimulation in a vibrant financial canvas (VCs) and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization (‘organi­zed serendipity’).  A recent study carried out by INSEAD with Booz and Co for the European Executive Council  shows that business leaders worldwide consider indeed that Europe has good or even world-class ideas and people (58% of respondents) and business skills (51%), but they consider that European funding for technology and innovation is only average (37%) or even below average (42%), and 56% regard governmental policies and support as insufficient in this area (see diagram below).

To kick off Startup Month, we’re pleased to sponsor a questionnaire from Kauffman FastTrac. Take a minute to fill it out, and test your entrepreneurial aptitude:

Kauffman FastTrac, which helps aspiring and established entrepreneurs start and grow companies, offers the following survey of traditional entrepreneurial characteristics. This survey is not scientific, but rather a creative and insightful way to see where your traits lie within an entrepreneurial mindset. When you engage in this self-assessment, be honest with yourself. Do you have these traits? If not, think about what you must do to acquire them. There are no wrong answers and the outcome may reveal your preparedness to launch entrepreneurial ventures.

Back in 2003, when The Scientist launched its Best Places to Work series, the biotech and pharma industries looked a bit different than they do today. Ten years ago, in the wake of large industry scandals involving Enron and ImClone, industry research scientists said that they wanted nothing more than to work for a company that had integrity. In this year’s survey, researchers say what they look for most in an employer is the ability to provide deep personal and scientific satisfaction—although high ethical standards still rank as the third most important factor, and  six of this year’s top 20 institutions scored high marks for integrity.

Back then, to fill gaping holes in pharmaceutical pipelines, many companies pumped more money into research and development (R&D), with investment tripling over the previous 10 years to more than $30 billion a year. While R&D investment is still high—at around $65 billion annually—a greater percentage of that money goes into ushering compounds through the costly development and clinical trial phases, with many large companies looking outside for innovative research. Pharma’s change in strategy hasn’t gone unnoticed by the industry’s smaller businesses. Biotech is beginning to look a lot more like pharma these days. As small companies compete for lucrative licensing and codevelopment deals with their larger rivals, they are forced to take their products further down the regulatory pathway toward clinical approval than ever before. Indeed, in the last year, the smaller companies scoring high in our survey have launched or advanced the development of a wide range of clinical products, including broad-spectrum antibiotics (#6); plague and botulinum neurotoxin vaccines (#9); and treatments for eye disorders (#13), cystic fibrosis, and hepatitis C (#5).

As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. Berkeley. This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPad approach (business model canvas + customer development) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century. Over the past couple of years this Lean LaunchPad model has proven immensely effective at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia and, of course, the National Science Foundations Innovation-Corps program. The data from the classes seem to indicate that we’ve found have a method how to make scalable startups fail less.

While we’re excited by the results, we’ve realized that we’ve been solving the problem for the 1% of new ventures that are technology startups. The reality is that the United States is still a nation of small businesses. 99.7% of the ~6 million companies in the U.S. have less than 500 people and they employ 50% of the 121 million workers getting a paycheck. They accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009. And while they increasingly use technology as a platform and/or a way of reaching and managing customers, most are in non-tech businesses (construction, retail, health care, lodging, food services, etc.)

Technology Forecast: Reshaping the workforce with the new analytics explores the impact of the new analytics and a culture of inquiry enterprises can foster with the help of emerging data analysis tools and services.

We often talk about the importance of aligning business and talent management strategy and this is particularly important in the case of the latest set of employees to enter the workplace – the generation known as millennials.

Drawing on the results from our latest millennials survey, this report looks at how their unique characteristics demand an innovative approach to recruitment, retention, management and development, which organisations simply can’t afford to ignore.

Price Waterhouse Coopers and National Venture Capital Association recently released the MoneyTree Report on Corporate Venture Capital. Data from the report show that the average independent venture capital investment was $8.3 million last year, while the average corporate venture capitalist deal was only $4.2 million. Moreover, the ratio of the two has ranged from 1.7 to 2.9 for the past decade.

Why is the average corporate venture capital deal much smaller than the average independent venture capital investment?

Some of our brightest, most innovative thinkers are at start-up companies. But these companies often have a hard time raising capital. Venture-capital firms have become more cautious, unwilling to fund start-ups that have bright ideas but whose products are a long way from commercial viability. Venture capitalists consider such start-ups—such as early-stage biotech firms—too risky to justify their investment.

Portugal is the latest country to create a development based entirely on the ideas of city 2.0. Will these new cities--purposefully designed to avoid the urban planning mistakes of the past--be the model for the future? 

Projections suggest there will be more than 136 new cities containing over 1 million people by 2025. While most of the cities will be in China, they will spring up all over the world. It is one thing to explore how existing cities can gradually (or relatively rapidly in the case in Singapore) get smarter. But what about when you have a blank canvas?

The New York Times published a list of "32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow,"  an eclectic mix of concepts that range from the wild and wacky like SpeechJammer (#14) to more practical ideas like a blood test for depression (#25).

I analyzed each of the 32 concepts to see which ones could be explained by the five patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking.  These patterns are the "DNA" of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations.  Dr. Jacob Goldenberg found in his research that the majority of successful innovations conform to one or more of these patterns.  Conversely, the majority of unsuccessful innovations (those that failed in the marketplace) do not conform to a pattern. 

Most entrepreneurs start their company with the highest of ideals, and wouldn’t dream of building one with a culture of indifference or downright unethical behavior. Yet all too many succumb to the pressures of survival, driven by demanding investors in a cutthroat competitive environment. How does a Founder recognize the warning signs, let alone know what to do about it?

Some key insights on this issue are provided for corporate environments in a new book by David Gebler, “The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance.” I‘m convinced that the underlying points are even more relevant to entrepreneurs, with some adaptation for the realities of the startup world:

Innovation is serious stuff, but Roger Miller and Marcel Côté of the Montreal-based strategy firm Secor Group believe we can also view innovation as a game.

In their new book, Innovation Reinvented, they say that innovation, like hockey, has a context (the market in which the action transpires); ground rules that determine how people compete in that market; and certain competencies (nimbleness, technology, product management, economies of scale, alliances and partnerships) that can lead to success.

In the Innovator’s DNA we discussed whether innovators are born or made. Research has shown that creativity is not a genetic predisposition but a result of a pattern of behaviors – so it can be concluded that all innovators must share a certain set of characteristics that have lead them to success. While innovators speak different languages, come from different cultures and various industry backgrounds, they all have fundamental traits in common.

Robert’s Rules of Innovation suggests three key traits that all innovators possess right off the bat.

Thousands of great ideas flounder at the point where they need to become reality; when great thinkers and idea generators turn to the age-old problem of raising funds to kickstart their new ventures….too often they fail and give up. Getting investment is a whole different ball game to developing products and services.

So when the idea of crowdfunding first emerged, (crowdsourced fund-raising) it was embraced by entrepreneurs like sweet words of love from Juliet to her Romeo. Surely this was it, the easy answer to getting enough capital to fund your idea from like-minded individuals, without having to do all the awful bowing and scraping that raising capital normally requires. Easy? Not really, actually. Scott Steinberg, author of the book “The Crowdfunding Bible” recently shared some of his insights into the most effective way to crowdfund with Read Write Web; insights that should be required reading for anyone looking to raise money via Web 2.0.

European governments are stepping up their efforts to boost innovation ahead of the publication of the EU's research and innovation strategy, which is due next month. EurActiv's network looks at how small businesses across Europe can be part of the innovation ecosystem.  Governments have introduced a range of schemes to help small firms, including tax credits for research investment, the development of "innovation centres," support for business angels and schemes to link SMEs with universities and industry.

The EU's innovation strategy – expected in September – is likely to address several of these issues, although there is much debate as to whether the plan will be a blueprint for business or a researchers' charter.

Business groups have stressed that protecting patents should be at the heart of the forthcoming innovation strategy (EurActiv 09/08/09), while there has been criticism that entrepreneurship may not be given sufficient emphasis in the final draft (EurActiv 07/05/10).