Tullahoma is now home to one of nine unique entrepreneur centers across the state designed to “accelerate” business ideas into profitable enterprises.

Aptly named the Southern Middle Tennessee Entrepreneur Center, the venture is the result of Tullahoman Dan Marcum’s recent award from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development under Gov. Bill Haslam’s Jobs4TN program.

On Tuesday, Marcum cut the ribbon for what appears to be one of his most unique and far-reaching ventures to date. The Southern Middle Tennessee Entrepreneur Center (SMTEC) will allow entrepreneurs at any stage in their business’ development to apply for everything they need to bring their products or services to the marketplace, including training, mentoring, technical support and even investor capital.

Today's hottest form of high-tech investment, crowdfunding -- the practice of posting pitches on sites like Kickstarter, RocketHub and IndieGogo and asking Internet users to pledge donations in exchange for merchandise or unique personal experiences -- is exploding in popularity. Credit the success of recent campaigns like the Pebble: E-Paper Watch (over $10 million raised for an app- and Internet-ready timepiece) and Double Fine Adventure ($3.3 million for a video game), which have garnered widespread public support and attention.

While no equity or ownership stake has previously changed hands in exchange for contributions, the recent passage of the JOBS Act may prove a game changer for entrepreneurs. Allowing limited investment opportunities in businesses and startups by qualified backers, it threatens to completely reinvent the worlds of venture capital and angel investment. Looking to enjoy your own piece of the American pie, or launch a million-dollar project, idea or invention right from your kitchen table? The following tips and tricks -- as seen in new free-to-download book The Crowdfunding Bible -- can give you an edge over the competition in any campaign.

It’s great to dream big, but your startup needs a laser focus in the beginning to get market and investor attention. Google did it with search engines, Apple did it with a personal computer, and even Wal-Mart did it through low prices. A business plan I saw a while back to combine all the good features of several popular social networks on one site does not do it.

Trying to do everything at once probably means that none of the items will be done well. Plus it’s almost impossible to craft a message that will make your offering stand out in the minds of customers. I can’t think of a company that launched to superstardom with a broad focus. Can you?

I’m fond of saying that I look for entrepreneurs that have a chip on their shoulder. That they have something to prove. That they’re not afraid to stick their noses up to the establishment.

I have always felt this way. It’s something I kind of seek out. I guess my thoughts are that if you’re part of the country club you have a vested interest in protecting the existing order and that disruption happens more from those that are on the outside wanting to change the rules.

Postmates is already one of the most talked about startups in Silicon Valley, but now it has a brand new app that's going to change the way you purchase goods from stores.

It's releasing the Get It Now application, which will let you use Postmates to order just about anything — from food to a MacBook Pro — and have it delivered to you in under an hour.

You give Postmates a credit card number, and it authorizes your account for the cost of whatever you're purchasing and gives a courier the ability to use that cash to buy the good.

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, one of the world's leading business thinkers best known for The Innovator's Dilemma, has just put out another book, "How Will You Measure Your Life?"

He uses business case studies — like how the Honda Super Cub took over America — to show people how they can achieve personal success.

See our interview with Christensen below, edited for clarity.

Eight years ago, Facebook was started in a dorm room at Harvard University. Now it’s about to become a public company, valued at US$100-billion. Those must have been the craziest eight years of Mark Zuckerberg’s life.

As the social network’s initial public offering (IPO) is scheduled for tomorrow, it seems like a good time to reflect on what the company has become, and ponder if you’ll be one of the investors to snatch up a little part of Facebook for somewhere between US$28 and US$35.

What do your innovators want? What do they need from you?

Earlier this month, we invited the HBR community on Twitter to share their personal insights into what they need to be at their most innovative. "What can your organizations do to help you?" we asked. "If you tell us, we will pass your comments on." A spirited conversation followed, one whose very richness demonstrates just what a challenge fostering innovation really is.

Innovators are, almost by definition, a diverse lot, and our discussion made it clear that different people need different things to be innovative, some of which are organizational, others personal.

"I need to get out of my mind and put pen on paper," said one.

"I need to understand my limitations to innovate," said another, adding "Really believing I don't know works for me. I see new angles this way."

The  $104 billion Facebook IPO testifies to the still considerable innovative power of Silicon Valley, but the hoopla over the new wave of billionaires won’t change the basic reality of the state’s secular economic decline.

This contradicts the accepted narrative in Sacramento. Over five years of below-par economic performance, the state’s political, media, and business leadership has counted on the Golden State’s creative genius to fund the way out of its dismal budgetary morass and an unemployment rate that’s the third highest in the nation. David Crane, Governor Schwarzenegger’s top economic adviser, for example, once told me that California could easily afford to give up blue-collar jobs in warehousing, manufacturing, or even business services because the state’s vaunted “creative economy” would find ways to replace the lost employment and income. California would always come out ahead, he said, because it represented “ground zero for creative destruction.”

Dharmash Mistry has spent the last four years looking for the next billion-dollar company. A venture capitalist in London with the firm Balderton Capital, he specializes in recognizing Europe’s hotest technology startups; he’s met hundreds of entrepreneurs, read reams of due diligence and spent hours tinkering with new websites and software products. To help get through the glut of new innovators, he’ll sometimes hold a rapid-fire pitching session — a kind of pot-luck of technology startups. For his latest session last month, Mistry invited Forbes along to get a peek at what goes on, and find out how tech entrepreneurs pitched him their ideas in just 15 minutes.

VENTURE CAPITALISTS said they remain positive about investment opportunities worldwide in the technology sector even if they take widely different investment approaches, according to a panel on technology investing at the Irish Technology Leadership Group’s annual Innovation Summit conference in Silicon Valley last week.

The panel of venture capitalists also offered advice to Irish entrepreneurs and the Government to help companies flourish. Investment philosophies ranged from Roger McNamee, of U2-backed venture firm Elevation Partners, who invests in very few – but carefully selected – companies, to John O’Farrell of Menlo Park venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, who invests broadly in a search for the companies that will ultimately perform.

Partly it was just bad timing. Back in the '70s and '80s, when Apple and Microsoft and Oracle and Dell and the other tech behemoths were still babies, Philadelphia was dirty, overtaxed, and at that time clearly in decline. The city was the last place a young entrepreneur would choose to set up shop.  

And so the region missed out almost entirely on the first wave of the tech boom. Other metropolises got a huge head start, and ever since, Philadelphia has been little more than a bit player in the most dynamic industry in America.

This week in The New Yorker we discovered much about Stanford University in a piece by Ken Auletta titled “Get Rich U.” For example, Stanford has produced many rich technology entrepreneurs—among both its professors and students. In fact, Stanford has been so successful at nurturing titans of business that it’s causing some unease among certain faculty and school observers.  

There’s a glut of engineering-minded, money-hungry students, and perhaps not enough love of learning for learning’s sake and the humanities.  

The software for this timeline was created by VéritéCo, as a project of the Knight News Innovation Lab.

Consultant Deborah Lovich could be accomplishing the management feat of the mobile era. She's convinced hundreds of agile-thumbed, on-at-all-hours colleagues to put down their smart phones and stop working or checking e-mail all evening long.

True, the break happens only once a week. But Boston Consulting Group's "predictable time off" experiment has been a hit. Since it was widely introduced in 2009, more than 900 internal teams have taken part, and the program has become standard practice at most BCG offices in North America and Europe.

Many investors believe they are deprived of high returns generated by venture capital funds. They read about the success of Groupon, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others with envy because most individual investors don’t have access to these funds. Historically, the biggest investors in these funds have been university endowments like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Duke.

No wonder these endowments have achieved outsized returns. It must be their ability to use their massive investing leverage to access these private funds, right? But a recent report authored by representatives of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is responsible for investing its $1.83 billion portfolio, debunks this myth.

You've come up with a brilliant idea--it could be the next Facebook social network, the next Tesla automobile, the next Half-Life videogame--but you need seed capital to get the project off the ground, and venture capitalists won't give you the time of day. What's an aspiring entrepreneur to do? You could give crowdfunding a shot.

What the heck is crowdfunding, you ask? It's a means of raising capital, usually over the Internet, from people who believe in what you're trying to accomplish. Technology consultant Scott Steinberg co-wrote the The Crowdfunding Bible to guide could-be tycoons through the process, and we interviewed Steinberg to help PCWorld Business Center readers emulate the success of such ventures as the Wasteland 2 videogame project, which has raised nearly $3 million through crowdfunding; or the PebbleE-Ink watch project, which has raised more than $10 million.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are transformational firms, obsessions of the business world and deservedly so. But if you had to pick, which one would you say is the most innovative--literally, the most innovative company in the world? (And then who's No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4?) The four we chose were featured on our cover last November ("The Great Tech Wars"). Since then, they have jostled for the No. 1 title--with Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, Apple's Siri voice assistant, Facebook's Timeline interface, and Google's reinvention of YouTube as a niche-programming powerhouse. Yet each company has fallen victim to hubris, causing public-relations firestorms and some sloppy products.

The top slot can go to only one company, but why should we have all the fun deciding? Click the arrow to find quizzes, games, and brainteasers that can help you rate the Fab Four--measured from their wildest new ideas to their cultural cachet. Then see if your opinion matches ours. If it doesn't, worry not. In a month or so, one of these firms will surely disrupt everything again.

Mayor Sullivan announced the opening of the first application period of Anchorage’s 49th State Angel Fund (49SAF) effective Monday, May 14 through August 5.  The fund was created after the Municipality of Anchorage was awarded a federal allocation of $13.2 million from the State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI).  The 49SAF will provide investments to early-stage high-growth businesses showing significant economic potential either through direct investments in Anchorage based businesses or by taking a partnership interest in locally-focused angel or venture capital funds.

The 49SAF will invest anywhere between $30,000 and $3 million in a particular business venture based on a variety of factors that are outlined on the 49SAF website at www.49saf.com.  Initial review of applications will be conducted by the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation (AEDC) and 49SAF program staff.  The plans are then sent to the 49SAF Advisory Committee, a group made up of members of the business, finance and economic development community, for investment recommendations.  Potential investments then undergo due diligence and are forwarded on to the Mayor and Municipal CFO Lucinda Mahoney for final approval.

The United States is now home to 214 bicycle-friendly communities in 47 states, according to a new list released Monday by the League of American Bicyclists.

Municipalities are evaluated based on their efforts to promote bicycling, investments in bicycling infrastructure and bicycling education programs, the league said in a news release. They must apply to be considered for the list. Localities are also divided into four categories: platinum, gold, silver and bronze.

Boulder, Colo., Davis, Calif., and Portland, Ore., remained the only three communities to earn the platinum distinction on the 2012 list. All three ranked in the top 10 for their percentage of commuters who bike to work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 American Community Survey, as Governing previously reported.