Many people who start businesses, including me, have little or no experience and just jump in. Over the years, I have compared notes with many fellow entrepreneurs, and I have seen them make the same mistakes over and over again — I recognize them because I have made them all, too. Here is my list of the biggest rookie mistakes:

1. Keeping your rent as low as possible. The key to business is to keep expenses low, right? Wrong. Sometimes it is worth paying more rent if it will generate more customers, if it gives a better image and inspires confidence, if it helps attract the right employees or if it makes it easier to deal with suppliers. In retail, this one mistake can determine success or failure.

The conventional wisdom is that the world’s largest cities are going to be the primary drivers of economic growth and innovation. Even slums, according to a fawning article in National Geographic, represent “examples of urban vitality, not blight.” In America, it is commonly maintained by pundits that “megaregions” anchored by dense urban cores will dominate the future.

Such conceits are, not surprisingly, popular among big city developers and the media in places like New York, which command the national debate by blaring the biggest horn. However, a less fevered analysis of recent trends suggests a very different reality: When it comes to growth, economic and demographic, opportunity increasingly is to be found in smaller, and often remote, places.

Dear President Obama:

As you and the rest of our nation’s leadership grapple with the momentous questions of restoring our collective financial stability and eminence, I am hopeful that some lessons from my background as an immigrant—now naturalized citizen—might prove instructive. The undeniable fact that runs throughout all the lessons I have learned, which seems to be overlooked by many in this country, is that America is truly the land of opportunity.

I arrived here from Iran as a young man, with some experience as a sales representative at my family’s pharmaceutical company. My father strongly encouraged me to get a “real education” and out of respect for him, I traveled to this land of opportunity, and earned an advanced science degree at the University of San Francisco. Fortunately for me, a chemistry professor at USF assumed the role of my mentor and convinced me to undertake a career in chemical research and discovery. As the doors to my native country closed as a result of the 1979 revolution, I arrived at the University of California-Davis, where I earned a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry. The caliber of students and professors I have worked very closely with at every step of the way proved the U.S. educational system is truly second to none.

The Kauffman Foundation, which has ties to the venture industry, has issued a damning study of the business that addresses long-running concerns about poor performance and concludes that the limited partners who invest in funds have no one but themselves to blame.

The report, “We Have Met The Enemy…And He Is Us,” draws on lessons from 20 years of investing in venture capital by the foundation, which currently has about $249 million of its $1.83 billion portfolio allocated to venture. The Kansas City, Mo.-based organization promotes entrepreneurship and education, and is known in the venture world for creating the Kauffman Fellowship to train venture capitalists, a program that it spun out in 2003.

China presents life sciences opportunities, but to Western pharmaceutical and medical device companies seeking business deals, the Chinese business world can be a mystery.

To understand the Chinese way of thinking about business relationships, it might help to consider the experience of an American. Michael Batalia, director of technology asset management at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, grew up in rural Illinois. Batalia recalls farmers who relied on each other based on relationships going back decades. Beyond the farm work, families knew each other well. It was a blending of work life and family life.

Here's an uncomfortable truth about innovation: No matter how great your idea, you can't deliver breakthrough innovation without breakthrough organizational design. Some companies are great at finding opportunities, diagnosing what customers want, and even designing the perfect offerings to satisfy them. But even if you get all of that right, your effort will fall apart if you build the wrong team to execute.

Most companies take the team building step far too casually. To build the right kind of team, for any breakthrough innovation effort, you have to think, quite literally, as though you are building a new company from scratch. You have to discharge all of your company's rarely challenged assumptions about how the work gets done and by whom. Rather than throwing a team together based on who is most readily available, you have to build a team that is custom-designed for the task at hand. This may mean inventing new jobs, hiring new kinds of experts from the outside, and rethinking hierarchy.

Here's a quick quiz for you. Is it easier to get

A: 1% of a huge, established market? or B: 100% of a completely new one?

If you work for Apple, you might have picked B. But too often when companies embark on innovation projects, they pick A: that is, they start by believing that nothing could be easier than to capture a small chunk of a very big, existing market.

But to unleash the power of innovation to capture big markets, what matters is not how big any existing market is but how many people are wrestling with some problem that no current offering really solves, what we here at Innosight call the "important and unsatisfied jobs" of consumers — and non-consumers. When sizing an innovation opportunity, what you should be looking for are jobs what are widely held and currently poorly served, not lots of people who haven't bought your own products yet.

TATRC within the Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command is taking steps to move research forward according to the article “TATRC: Translating Research into New Medical Products” published in the May 2012 issue of “Mercury”.

Ron Marchessault, Director of Technology Transfer and Commercialization for TATRC, is busy developing a comprehensive commercialization program for more than 1,800 research projects funded since 2000. So far, 2.3 percent have resulted in commercial products, generating $209 million in sales from a total federal investment of $74 million. TATRC manages these projects at universities, government laboratories, and high-tech start-up companies.

Today the National Crowdfunding Association, www.NLCFA.org , launched its nationwide initiative: Women in Crowdfunding to open the doors of new financing and job opportunities to women coast to coast. "In my experience with crowdfunding, women 'just get it' better than men do," said David Marlett, Executive Director of the NLCFA. "Crowdfunding at its heart is people coming together to invest in their community and their fellow citizens, for the advancement of the greater good. I apologize in advance to my competitive-at-all-costs gender, but women have a natural and immediate affinity to crowdfunding and I expect women will lead the way in many respects."

Heading the initiative is NLCFA founding member CrowdFundingLIVE, www.CrowdFundingLIVE.com , a women-owned crowdfunding platform and events firm based virtually in California, Nevada and Washington, focusing and fostering women in business. CFL founder and partner, Debe Fennell said, "This form of direct investment is revolutionary, and informing women about this opportunity is part of our mission, and the mission of Women in Crowdfunding. We will be providing an arena of support, mentoring, education and networking about crowdfunding for women so they can share ideas, get involved, use crowdfunding for the benefit of themselves, their families and communities, and prosper on a more even playing field."

Right now there are probably thousands of late-stage cancer patients waiting for drugs that could prolong their lives. Where do they look? Research labs all across the country. In a process called technology transfer, drugs go from the lab to the market, with a few steps in between, and the push is on to speed up the process, without leaving any loose ends.

Recent technology transfers have resulted in treatments for fibromyalgia, a joint and muscle pain illness, called Lyrica; a form of fatal breast cancer, now leaving the disease undetectable, Herceptin, and new chemotherapy agents.

In business, irrational fears encompass everything from fear of rejection, fear of authority, and fear of criticism to fear of failure and even fear of success. Such fears keep us from being able to “just figure things out” and making the flip that can propel us in a good direction. Let me tell you a story to illustrate this point.

A good friend of mine, Tom, is one of the most talented sports agents in his business. Hard-charging, funny, and smart, Tom has a natural touch with his clients and is on the fast track toward senior management.

Blueseed is an ambitious project to build a floating startup incubator and anchor it off the coast of Northern California, near Silicon Valley (Fox Business video). Because the vessel will be in international waters, entrepreneurs will not be subject to the stringent work visa requirements of the United States. Blueseed is projected to launch in late 2013 or early 2014.

Yesterday I sent emails out passing on participating in two seed rounds for companies I really like. They had lots of investors trying to invest and each company was competitive with two other seed stage companies we’ve seen in the past 30 days. All are exciting, all are working on something that we like, and all of them are at the starting line with different strengths and weaknesses.

So far this year the number of high quality seed investments we are seeing in themes that are relevant to us is overwhelming. This is an awesome situation – for us and for entrepreneurs – and something I’m extremely excited about. But it forces us to think about our strategy, especially at the seed stage, and make sure we are comfortable with it. We are, but it occurred to me that it’d be worth putting it out there both so it’s known how we are thinking about seed investing and to get feedback on how we are approaching it.

Where do you go in this world if you’re young, smart, ambitious, and want to start a business and make millions?   The U.S. of A. of course, everyone knows that!  Or do they? The U.S. has a history of being a home for entrepreneurs and the place where anyone can come, from anywhere, and make millions of dollars by founding their own business.  It’s completely apropos that the father of the U.S.A., George Washington, was himself an entrepreneur and farm owner.

One could argue (and many do) that the U.S. has fallen from its perch as THE place to come to to start your own business.  Various reasons can be given for this, including one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, a highly progressive tax system that is under pressure to become more progressive every year, increased government regulations that raise the cost of doing business, unions (which, of course, are effectively businesses in themselves with political top cover and the advantage of being able to automatically grab their revenues from workers’ paychecks in many states), and high labor costs.  I have heard that many other countries have surpassed the U.S. as THE place to go to start a business, including Israel and Canada.

After returning from the 2011 Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyad last January, I started pulling together a few thoughts on something I’d been pondering for some time – “reluctant innovation”. That first post paved the way for further work, and more recently a guest article in Wired Magazine in the UK called “Genius happens when you plan something else”.

Reluctant innovators are people who unexpectedly come up with an innovative solution to a problem they’ve experienced or witnessed, one which has angered, bugged, disturbed or frustrated them so much that they end up dedicating much of their lives to solving it. They’re innovators, but not through choice, since they never set out to innovate.

The University of Michigan, in a bid to expand and broaden its base of scientific research, is offering faculty members a new microgrant plan that would directly finance the exploratory phase of an idea.

Under the plan, which begins today, all Michigan faculty will be eligible for a $20,000 credit that can be redeemed only if they work with two other faculty members, including one outside their academic field.

The idea, which appears to be unique among American research universities, has numerous elements that Michigan leaders believe will be attractive to professors and the institution, including its emphases on encouraging interdisciplinary work and helping faculty compete for a tightening pool of federal money.

Ben Horowitz of super-powerful VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has no time for "the cry babies of Silicon Valley."

Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily talked to Horowitz today about the recent practice of VC firms funding "scouts" -- they're like angels that get their initial funding from big traditional VC firms, then use it to make seed-stage investments.

The scouts don't always disclose this relationship to the companies they're investing in.

Starting a business requires financing. Today there may be as many funding sources as ever, yet finding the money needed to start or even expand a business can be tricky. Our roundup of news and tips should help all entrepreneurs navigate the complicated world of small business financing and end up with a better understanding of what their businesses need. Enjoy!

Funding Basics

Finding the right financing for your business. Not every kind of financing may be right for your small business. In fact, when it comes to funding of small businesses, one size definitely does not fit all. With changing times, it’s important to look for new opportunities. Small Business Trends

One of the characteristics of a great leader–no matter whether that leader is a person, a brand, or a company–is the ability to stay “tuned-in” to the needs of their audience.

Is your audience still with you? Do they get where you’re going? Do they have confidence in the direction?

Out of college, my first job was at Walt Disney World in Orlando. I was a tour guide at the “Listen To The Land” boat ride at Epcot’s Land Pavilion.

In the last episode of TechStars, we witnessed the early success of one startup team give its founders a potentially dangerous overconfidence.

In this episode, we see why mentorship is the bedrock of the TechStars program. Startups are put through the ringer by early stage investors, entrepreneurs and successful tech executives, whose job is to point out potential flaws and help teams to really evaluate their business models.