We’ve all heard the old joke “In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.” This quote epitomizes the true essence of commitment. We all know at least one self-professed entrepreneur who claims to committed, but seems to treat it like a part-time hobby, won’t put any personal skin in the game, and is quick to give up when things are tough.

There are no middle roads to real commitment, and if you are not ready to fully commit to all the rigors of a startup, you are better off sticking with your current role. For your calibration, here are some characteristics you will recognize in a truly committed entrepreneur:

Vijay Vaitheeswaran surveys the landscape of the global economy and sees "wicked problems," to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of his bestselling new book, Need, Speed and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems. He sees a global middle class that is being squeezed and left out of the benefits and opportunities that breakthrough technologies have created. He sees an educational system that is seriously outdated and divorced from the real needs of 21st century knowledge workers.

And yet, Vaitheeswaran is an optimist. Yes, it is true that our current disruptive age is more dangerous and riskier, Vaitheeswaran argues you can find "enormous opportunities for profit--you must move nimbly, open wisely and fail gracefully." This is not just advice for big players. Vaitheeswaran's formula is designed for the little guys, the upstarts, to compete. So what does he mean by "Move Nimbly, Open Wisely and Fail Gracefully"

Gartner analysts see many CIOs and IT leaders who are frustrated that they are unable to lead technology related innovation in their companies. IT is too often pushed back into a supplicant role. So I’m always on the lookout for examples of people in business who are really breaking through walls of disinterest and cynicism, against the odds – to see how they are doing it.

I recently had the opportunity to chat briefly with the CEO of a company that is trying to advance human spaceflight (no – it wasn’t Richard Branson).  Now that’s a tough sell. I mean, many of us may fantasize about going into space one day .. but we don’t really believe it will happen. Imagine you had to sell the idea that it can be a reality. That it is worth funding. That government should take it seriously. That one day space tourism could be a major industry.. not easy. But this gentleman is making quiet progress.  So I asked him how. What would he say to other leaders seeking to learn from his technique. The answers he gave me boiled down to three things.

In a recent WOBI webinar, we hosted a discussion with Dr. Henry Chesbrough of the Program for Open Innovation at Berkeley Haas, as well as speaker at this year’s World Innovation Forum New York 2012, along with Bill Schulz of Walden University. The conversation was focused on open innovation and how companies can begin to incorporate outside ideas/participation/talent, and then develop it to be put back into the market. Here were our top ten takeaways:

1. Innovation is becoming Open Innovation

2. This means it is about taking down the fences around your Research and Development facilities

3. Start breaking down internal silos preventing open sharing of ideas

THE retirement dream seems further away for a lot of baby boomers, and they appear to be responding to that by holding on to their jobs if they can. But that may have worsened the employment prospects for younger workers.

Labor Department figures indicate that the percentage of workers over the traditional retirement age of 65 is at a record high. But, the figures show, job totals fell sharply for men under 55 during the recession and have only started to recover, while the proportion of women ages 25 to 54 with jobs also slid and is close to the lowest level of the last two decades.

Positioning job creation at the top of his “to-do-list” with just over two months remaining on the legislative calendar, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and top House Democrats outlined a bill Monday afternoon that DeLeo said would allow the state to “directly compete with and outshine many of our closest rivals.”

The bill includes a new $50 million innovation investment fund to support research and development at universities and research centers where House leaders say the state’s economic strengths lie. Projects would need to secure at least $3 for every $1 of state funding provided through the new capital program.

A new manufacturing grant program to support small businesses, increased funding to advance large economic projects, and expanded efforts to expedite permitting were also included in the job creation legislation presented Monday afternoon at the capitol with labor and business leaders. 

Nick Hanauer toddled through his early years in a cramped Greenwich Village apartment. His mother waited tables at the Bitter End. His father worked low-level jobs on Wall Street and as an editor at a publishing house. When Nick was 5, his folks left New York to join a family pillow-making business in the Pacific Northwest. They raised their three sons in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs and sent them to public schools. After Nick, the eldest, earned a philosophy degree at the University of Washington, he went to work for his father. In his 30s, he scraped together $45,000 to invest in a small start-up that sought to revolutionize American retail. It was called Amazon.com.

This is how Nick Hanauer has come to be standing in the owner's box at a Seattle Sounders FC professional soccer game, snacking on chicken fingers, and listing the very expensive things he owns.

This weekend finds NYC in between Internet Week (which I largely missed because of my London trip) and Disrupt NYC (which I will be at on and off this coming week). So the development of NYC as a startup hub is very much on my mind. And so I thought I'd post about the development of startup hubs.

This theory, which I like the call The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs, is not new and I certainly didn't come up with it. But I think it is important for everyone to understand and so I'm going to blog about it.

If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

What a week. After eight years, Mark Zuckerberg takes Facebook public at a $104 billion valuation. His longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan gets her medical degree from the UC San Francisco. He has his 28th birthday.

And to top it all off, they get married today! Mazel tov.

Apparently, the wedding had been in the works for four to five months, according to a source authorized to speak on behalf of the couple. It wasn’t tied to the IPO, but rather Chan’s graduation from medical school on Monday.

Swirling in your brain is an idea for the next big technology company. You have the drive, the revenue model, even the team, but a few roadblocks stand in your way, namely access to funds and mentors. Wouldn’t it be great if someone gave you $25,000 (in exchange for a percentage of equity) and three months to do nothing but work on your company, talk with the best minds in the industry and get in front of potential investors?

This dream is realized for entrepreneurs granted access to startup accelerator programs. Such programs are popping up all over the country and grooming promising companies into big-time successes. Most choose around 10 companies to participate in an intense three-month program culminating with a "demo day" in which entrepreneurs present to investors and hopefully attract enough money to keep running.

Jobs in tech are stronger than ever. In 2011, Amazon hired 22,500 people, bringing its workforce up to 56,200, and Google hired 8,000 people — more than ever in a single year. The technology sector is booming, and while not all of these jobs require an engineering degree, getting a gig can be harder than getting into an Ivy League school. Competition between businesses is too steep for firms to hire those who aren’t qualified, and demand for these positions is greater than the skills that exist in the marketplace.

Incredible job opportunities exist, if you know how to get them. Yet, college students are still earning educations for jobs that technology will eliminate in the next decade, and people without backgrounds in technology are stuck in unemployment or at the dead-end of a long career, hoping their field will be revived before their luck runs out. But none of these people are actually stuck.

There are many stories of hot startups raising killer seed rounds, and it can feel like money is flowing everywhere. Times might be good right now, but raising external capital is a complicated process, and it’s something every entrepreneur needs to think about carefully. Here are tips that can help you achieve your goals as quickly and pain-free as possible.

The Iowa Innovation Corporation is a private, non-profit created by the state legislature to be the state’s innovation intermediary. Despite recent setbacks resulting from inaction by the Iowa Legislature the Innovation Corporation continues to make strides establishing an innovation ecosystem in Iowa.

The Iowa Innovation Corporation sought to have the state legislature change the parameters of the Iowa Innovation Seed Fund Tax Credits. Despite broad preliminary support, the Innovation Corporation was surprised that the bill didn’t make it to the House floor. The bill, HF 2454, would have adopted changes in the tax incentive structure needed to raise the seed capital funding for Iowa’s start-up companies. These changes would not have cost taxpayers any additional money.

People with a victim mentality should never be entrepreneurs. We all know the role of starting and running a business is unpredictable, and has a high risk of failure. For people with a victim mentality, this fear of failure alone will almost certainly make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’m sure you all know someone who is the perennial victim. The problem is that most of these people aren’t likely to accept your assessment, so it’s hard to help them. They don’t see themselves as others see them, and many simply refuse to accept the reality of the world in general.

It’s finally official. Startup Beach House announced today that it is now accepting applications online to spend a week building a business at the beach and have it recorded.

A couple things have changed since Technically Philly first reported on Startup Beach House. The house, as you’ll notice above, and it’s location are different. The new digs are located in Stone Harbor, N.J., not Avalon.

For a lot of hiring managers and small business leaders, hiring remains the most crucial pain point. If you magically get the right people, stuff just gets executed. However, we never make the perfect hiring decisions all the time. Sometimes we are in a hurry to fill the role, and the options available seem more attractive than the list of skills and qualities we carefully created.

Of course, every manager has a different outlook – some of us “hire fast, learn fast and fail fast,” whereas some of us passively look at many resumes and only make an addition to the team when it feels right. I’ve made my fair share of errors and would like to share an example that might help when you are at the next crossroads and in a hurry.

Are you resisting offering employees at your small business flexible working hours because you think it’ll give them an excuse to slack off? Well, some new research should convince you otherwise. It seems flextime may actually be less flexible than a regular schedule.

The 2012 National Study of Employers, released by the Families and Work Institute (FWI) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), found that U.S. employers are offering employees more options for managing when and where they work. The tradeoff for the employees, however, is that employers offering more flexibility are also requiring  them to essentially work more.

Facebook is the gateway to the Internet for a growing number of people. They message rather than e-mail; discover news and music through friends, rather than through conventional news or search sites; and use their Facebook ID to access outside websites and applications.

As the keeper of so many people's social graph, Facebook is in an incredibly powerful position—one reason its IPO this week is expected to be the largest ever for an Internet company.

But potential investors should take note that there's a flip side to Facebook's explosive growth and power; that flip side, as one analyst put it, is its bid to become a core piece of the Internet's infrastructure. Facebook's own technology infrastructure is expensive to build and operate, and it must scale rapidly.

For David Owens, innovation on a personal level can be hard-wired.

“I am genetically an engineer,” he says. “My wife remarked one day as we were traveling, ‘Why do you always have a bag full of wires when we go on vacation?’ It’s just always been part of my identity.”

On a business level, innovation is a much slipperier commodity, says Owens, who studies the subject as Professor of the Practice of Management and Innovation at Vanderbilt. Although all businesses rely on timely innovation, most of them too often block it, according to Owens’ latest book.

Creative People Must Be Stopped: Six Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying), published in 2011 by Jossey-Bass, takes a clear-eyed look at six levels of stumbling blocks we unintentionally place in front of new ideas and their implementation. “I believe that everyone is creative, that everyone can and will move toward positive change given the opportunity,” Owens says. “My interest is understanding ways we stop people from doing that.”