This is an age old debate.  I realize a lot of people much smarter than I have waxed poetic about it already.  In fact, some really great studies by legitimate organizations have been conducted using millions of dollars in research.  I’m here to offer my observation in a very non-scientific manner, simply basing it off of what I’ve done and what I’ve seen.  So, with that, can entrepreneurship be learned?

About a year or so ago, I wrote a column about the seven attributes of a community with a competitive advantage. One of those attributes is a strong and diversified economy. Recently, I had occasion to think more about what economic development means.

I’ve always preferred Moseley’s definition. He defines economic development as “a sustained and sustainable process of economic, social, cultural and environmental change designed to enhance the long-term well-being of the whole community.”

Many of history's most celebrated creative geniuses were mentally ill, from renowned artists Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo to literary giants Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe. Today, the fabled connection between genius and madness is no longer merely anecdotal. Mounting research shows these two extremes of the human mind really are linked — and scientists are beginning to understand why.

A panel of experts discussed recent and ongoing research on the subject at an event held Thursday (May 31) in New York as part of the 5th annual World Science Festival. All three panelists suffer from mental illnesses themselves.

If there is a founding belief to Silicon Valley, it’s this: the idea is everything.

May’s Facebook IPO seemed like the perfect illustration. A simple idea, conceived by a college student, became a hundred-billion dollar empire in just eight years.

But if you look around Silicon Valley, ideas all seem to be coming from the same kind of people. By one recent estimate, one percent of technology entrepreneurs were African American. Only eight percent of companies were founded by women. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a model of success in the Valley, he’s a blueprint.

Innovations developed a century ago by Andrew Carnegie, George Westinghouse and other Pittsburgh giants of industry and commerce changed the world, spinning off companies and employing thousands.

Will Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg leave a similar legacy?

Though the world's most valuable company today, Apple Inc., still makes consumer products, Facebook and other technology companies have created economies that people might not notice, business experts say.

Last summer when I started working on Undrip, I was in a tough spot. I grew up doing web and graphic design so I was a pretty good front-end developer and designer. But I knew nothing about back-end web development – loops, branches dictionaries or functions were all foreign concepts to me. I was a single founder who couldn’t code.

Against the Odds

Every week I get emails from entrepreneurs seeking my advice asking how I did it before, and how I’m doing it now. They find themselves in similar situations in that they’re looking to build a tech startup with little to no technical skills. They’re frustrated by their inability to make forward progress and they usually either give up and fail, or outsource if they have some extra cash (which usually leads to failure).

The recent Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman got me thinking about the differences between the pitches I hear from entrepreneurs, and why some succeed and others don’t.

Willy Loman’s character did much to lower our society’s already low opinion of sales and selling, but the fact remains that the concept, if not the actual act, of selling is a vital process in our economic system. For example, if you’re an entrepreneur looking for financing, you are selling an idea to a buyer – usually a venture capitalist like me.

Have you taken inventory of your coworkers recently? And have you noticed the lack of women, and specifically women in leadership roles within the science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM) fields? Why is that?

To me, the definition of a leader is someone that looks at the big picture, takes action, guides and directs a group and is strong enough to stand alone in the decision making process. Women by nature are born leaders.

Presents

Monday, June 11, 12:00 pm to 12:30pm ET

Presenters: 

Richard Bendis
Founding President and CEO, Innovation America
and Publisher, Innovation Daily

Mark L. Rohrbaugh, Ph.D., J.D.
Director
Office of Technology Transfer 
National Institutes of Health
Department of Health and Human Services

Until recently, the idea of holding a conversation with a computer seemed pure science fiction. If you asked a computer to "open the pod bay doors"—well, that was only in movies.

But things are changing, and quickly. A growing number of people now talk to their mobile smart phones, asking them to send e-mail and text messages, search for directions, or find information on the Web.

"We're at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront," says Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications, a company based in Burlington, Massachusetts, that dominates the market for speech recognition with its Dragon software and other products. "I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current (computer) interface."

Jabious and Anthony Williams were living crammed with their mom and eight other family members in their aunt’s two-bedroom apartment in Anacostia, a violent Southeast Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Every day the boys walked miles to the nearest Exxon station to pump gas for tips. “Typically, we would earn thirty to fifty dollars a day to help support my mom,” says Jabious Williams.

One day, the Williams brothers met Mena Lofland, a caring business teacher at Suitland High School in Maryland. She got Anthony and Jabious into her entrepreneurship class, which was sponsored by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). The boys had developed independence, grit, salesmanship and hard-won street smarts. As a result, both showed great aptitude for entrepreneurship.

Intel Corporation has earmarked US$400 million as venture capital worldwide this year as part of its expansion and growth strategies.

About $17 million will be devoted to ventures in Southeast Asia, said Sudheer Kuppam, managing director for Asia Pacific at Intel Capital, the investment arm of the world's biggest processor maker.

Venture capital will cover technologies, education, cloud computing, data centres, broadband internet, smart TV, smartphones and tablets, he said yesterday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meetings in Bangkok.

Since 1999, Intel has invested $95 million in a dozen companies in Southeast Asia, out of $10.6 billion invested in 51 countries since 1991.

When we caught up with Chris Arsenault at his downtown office Thursday, he was bubbling with enthusiasm about investment prospects in Montreal.

“There’s so much going on right now,” said the managing partner of venture capital firm iNovia Capital, which has close to $300 million in investment assets.

There’s more activity than there’s been in years for VC investors, who typically provide the seed money and later-stage financing for entrepreneurs with bright ideas.

The 2-and-20 compensation structure for venture capital funds is a one-size-fits-all approach that misaligns incentives and can help VCs to get paid handsomely while their funds perform abysmally.

That was one conclusion from a much-discussed report on the venture capital industry from the Kauffman Foundation last month.

“It’s interesting that VCs have positioned themselves as supporters, financers, and even instigators of innovation, yet there has been so little innovation within the VC industry itself,” the report states.

It appears that Catalyst Health Ventures, an investor in early stage healthcare companies, is looking to raise a new fund.

The firm disclosed a $33 million securities offering — with the first sale yet to occur — in a recently filed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission document.

Managing partner Joshua Phillips declined to comment on plans for the fund, but according to Catalyst’s website, it focuses its investments in technologically advanced medical devices, diagnostics, instruments and drug development. Typically, the firm invests early and takes the lead on investments.

The historic factory town of Elyria, Ohio is perhaps not the most likely place to start a tech revolution, yet something radical is happening on the campus of Lorain County Community College, located just 30 miles west of Cleveland. A group of organizations here are trying to attract new forms of capital to this manufacturing town and others across Ohio.

In a glassy, new office building tucked into the trees at the edge of campus, a brain trust of innovation gurus is studying how to attract more venture, seed and early-stage capital to grow startups across Ohio. The programs they’re developing at the Entrepreneurship Innovation Center could not only attract more capital from the coasts to Ohio, but also help average Ohioans invest in the state’s future.

The government has revealed 20 government buildings standing empty which will be made available for entrepreneurs in the early stages of growing their businesses. The government says it is working with landlords to offer the space at a low cost. The intention is to open up the properties on flexible, short-term arrangements.

The closest building to Cambridge lies within the Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough local enterprise partnership (GCGP LEP) at Peterborough's Blenheim Court.

The costs of a bad hire are staggering. A recent survey by Career Builder reports more than two-thirds of employers were affected by a bad hire last year, according to AOL Jobs. Of nearly 2,700 employers surveyed, 41% estimate a single bad hire cost $25,000; a quarter estimate a bad choice cost $50,000 or more — not to mention the demoralizing effect of the issue on other employees and on the new hire. Losing a job is one of the most stressful events a human can experience.

To avoid that, when we make hires, we screen candidates using a list of personal characteristics we call the Non-Negotiables. First there were four. Ultimately, we've expanded the list to seven. These are the characteristics that have become the primary criteria for hiring decisions — things we value even more than skills and background. When we add people to our nearly 100-person company, these criteria are non-negotiable.

The space for startups is more crowded than ever. First of all, it’s now international, so you have startups from every country in the world competing for your customer’s attention and their business. Then there is the Internet, delivered through every media, including your smart phone, where the volume of data spewing out is like a new Library of Congress every 15 minutes.

According to a recent study done by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, there were 565,000 new businesses created per month in 2010 in the US alone, which is a 15-year high. The days when you could launch your business with a new web site, and the phone would begin to ring, are long gone. Even the Google search engine crawlers may take up to two weeks to find you.

Getting funded is one of the biggest challenges for startups. Venture capitalists and angel investors are bombarded with “great” ideas for businesses, and they can only invest in so many. Banks are turning small businesses away for loans. So what’s a startup founder to do if they need money?

Obama says try crowdfunding. Rather than rely on banks or private investors to help get your business running with an injection of cash, put it in the hands of the people. With crowdfunding, anyone can invest in a company (in smaller increments ranging from $5 to $1000). And with President Obama’s JOBS Act, it will be easier for startups to get that funding without jumping through so many hoops.