The lifeblood of any small business enterprise is money. But like with any commodity, such as oil or gold, access to money has a price tag on it. There are investors who may well provide capital for your business. However, it's not your interest they have in mind but their own.

More specifically, business investors have one question they want you to answer: What's in it for me?

To better answer that question, business owners seeking funding have to figure out what type of capital investment they should pursue. Usually that means venture capital (VC) versus angel funding.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced the first batch of organizations for Health Care Innovation awards. Made possible by the health care law – the Affordable Care Act – the awards will support 26 innovative projects nationwide that will save money, deliver high quality medical care and enhance the health care workforce.  The preliminary awardees announced today expect to reduce health spending by $254 million over the next 3 years. 

“We can’t wait to support innovative projects that will save money and make our health care system stronger,” said Secretary Sebelius. “It’s yet another way we are supporting local communities now in their efforts to provide better care and lower cost.”

The new projects include collaborations of leading hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technology innovators, community-based organizations, and patients’ advocacy groups, among others, located in urban and rural areas that will begin work this year to address health care issues in local communities.  This initiative allows applicants to come up with their best ideas to test how we can quickly and efficiently improve the quality and affordability of health care.

Professional 'free divers' have no trouble holding their breath for minutes at a time. What stops us from doing the same? In this episode, Scientific American's Katherine Harmon--and Katherine Harmon--explore the limits of human physiology.

Until Kickstarter started gaining attention for giving people a place to raise huge amounts of money very quickly, the term crowdfunding didn’t mean much. Now, crowdfunding has become a full-fledged industry, contributing $1.5 billion to new ventures in 2011. That total includes pledges from average people backing quirky projects like the Pebble smartwatch as well as seed funding for startups.

The first ever Crowdfunding Industry Report, from research firm Massolution, reveals that crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Crowdfunder, raised $1.5 billion spread out over one million campaigns in 2011. Of that $1.5 billion, $837 million came from North American investors.

This week's $75 million injection into classified advertisting site Avito.ru is further proof of the investment attractiveness of Russian startups, which are a key element in the government's push for diversifying the country's energy-dependent economy.

But while innovative ventures are offering big opportunities, they are desperate for investors who are able to give not just cash but experience as well.

The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School has reorganized to focus its degree programs on the study of business issues related to healthcare and the life sciences, Interim Dean Phillip Phan has announced.

“We’re making this move not just because we are Johns Hopkins, with the best medical institutions in the world, but also because health care is an increasingly important part of the economic discussion in the United States,” said Phan. “Health care is approaching 20 percent of the national gross domestic product, and it’s a key factor in the costs of any economic model, whether in manufacturing or services. Understanding the complexities of the modern health care industry is a crucial skill for any business manager. For those who manage in the healthcare sector, Hopkins is the place to learn.”

More and more women over the last decade have climbed the corporate ladder into top management, but if they’re leading a company that’s trying to go public, they’re more likely to run into trouble than men.

Female chief executives are perceived as less capable than males, according to an experiment conducted recently at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, and the companies that women lead are seen as less attractive investments.

Many regions around the country have been hanging tough since the recession began in 2008. While it’s created a complicated web of economic uncertainties, it’s also created a huge opportunity for the U.S. to emerge stronger and more resilient.

Recently I spoke on a panel about economic resiliency at an event hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation where they convened leaders from across the country to discuss innovations that will make an impact over the next 100 years. We examined the threats facing our society and innovative ways to build greater economic, social and environmental resiliency so we are prepared to meet future challenges.

Kevin Spain has punched a whole lot of golden tickets on his way to a partnership at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. And some of his most interesting ideas on building start-ups have to do with acquiring start-ups to bolster one of his firm’s portfolio companies.

Spain came out to Silicon Valley after winning Wharton’s business plan competition in the late 1990s. He decided that was the place to turn his plan for a Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor to small businesses — into a real company.

The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman is another book that belongs on every entrepreneur’s bookshelf. It’s excellent.

I met Noam for the first time last week when I was at HBS. I was on a panel of VCs (me, Mike Maples Jr., Kate Mitchell, and David Frankel) talking to a room full of HBS alumni who are VCs. Noam and I had exchanged several emails over the past few months and he sent me a review copy of the book but it got lost in my infinite pile of books to read. After seeing him and talking to him briefly, I decided to put it on the top of the stack. I laid on the couch all day yesterday with Amy and the dogs and demolished a pair of books. The Founder’s Dilemmas was the first.

I get asked endless questions about founder dynamics, solo founders, optimal number of founders, equity allocations between founders, roles of founders, alignment between founders, and investor – founder relationships. I’ve been involved in many conflicts between founders, transition in roles between founders, emotional struggles with founders as businesses grow and change, investor conflicts (other than me) with founders, and the list goes on and on and on.

Every so often, an interview sticks with you for weeks or months. I have thought about a refreshingly honest comment from Billie Goat Soap founder Leanne Faulkner, about the downside of media stories on successful entrepreneurs. I profiled Faulkner for BusinessDay in March.

To recap, Faulkner suffered depression when her venture struggled with the weak retail climate. She said: “I used to read all these stories about successful entrepreneurs and wondered why I was such a failure. I thought I was the problem, not the business.

As we recover from some tough economic times, more and more people seem to be turning to entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional employment. I applaud this trend, but caution all of you thinking this direction to approach entrepreneurship with your eyes wide open. It is not for everyone, as the entrepreneur’s path is fraught with challenges.

Many experts have tried to clearly lay out the criteria for success in a way that allows you to judge your own situation and your own temperament, and make a rational decision before starting down this path. One of the best summaries I have seen is a recent book by Bill Murphy, Jr., titled “The Intelligent Entrepreneur,” which outlines the ten rules of successful entrepreneurship, as follows:

It's such a cliche -- "I need someone who thinks out of the box." You hear it all the time. What does it mean? What's out of the box thinking anyway, and what's so great about it?

Let's think about the box, first, and then let's figure out how and whether to climb out of it. What is the box that people are always talking about? The box is a frame, the traditional way of thinking about a problem. In business, we are very good at in the box thinking because business is structured around the box, aka the Standard Operating Procedure. "Here are the facts, here's the problem. Let's look at solutions A, B and C and pick the best one." That's in the box thinking. It's a break/fix model, and it's not known for generating radically new or interesting solutions to vexing problems.

About a year ago I was asked to participate in a roundtable discussion on innovation at the University of Virginia.  The participants were senior innovation executives from companies such as Bank of America, Corning, Northrup Grumman, and AT&T, among others. One of the topics we discussed was “open innovation”, beginning with the typical references to Henry Chesbrough and his work on the topic. We spoke about technology licensing, intellectual property, joint ventures, and the challenge of managing this type of innovation.  Within a few minutes, however, something interesting happened.  A few of the participants challenged the group’s singular focus on the business models and mechanisms that are often associated with open innovation a-la Chesbrough. They spoke about innovation projects in their organizations that were certainly “open”, but not focused on licensing, joint ventures, or other issues typically considered under the realm of open innovation. That session led me to realize that there is some confusion regarding open innovation, or at least there is a need to cast a wider net around what open innovation is all about.

Baiju Shah leads BioEnterprise, which helps locals innovate. He also chairs the new Global Cleveland, which draws talent to town.

What are your innovators like?

They're inspiring. Our entrepreneurs all have a notion of how to improve the human condition: curing a disease, extending life, making life easier. They're making products to diagnose cancer earlier. They're figuring out how to reprogram nerves to allow individuals to use their hands and feet and lungs.

Forget about Madison vs. Middleton. Or Verona vs. McFarland. Or even Dane County vs. Rock County.

Instead, let's focus on the Madison region's strategy for economic growth. And in doing so, we must recognize the inescapable truth that national and even global competition for economic vitality is far more important than localized "we're better than you" squabbles.

Such thinking is the core building block of Advance Now, a five-year strategy for economic growth put forth recently by the eight-county Thrive initiative. (Full disclosure: State Journal publisher Bill Johnston is co-chair of the Advance Now initiative.)

If anyone knows anything about the web, where its been and where its going, it’s David Weinberger.  As a co-author of the seminal Clue Train Manifesto, Weinberger gave a generation of web innovators a clue as to how the web would evolve.

In Too Big To Know -  Weinberger sets out to argue that the very nature of information and ideas is changing, even as you flip the pages of his book.

The world was, almost since the beginning of time, built around the concept of triangular knowledge. At the bottom of  the triangle is data. Raw and unstructured.  The Knowledge Triangle presented first in 1988 by Russel Akkoff presented DIKW (Data, Information,  Knowledge, Wisdom) as the basis for our information ecology.  Weinberger says our Information Age was built on this pyramid – creating an elaborate filtering system to sort Wisdom from Data.

A talented Ph.D. candidate labors for years and ultimately gets a doctoral degree in biology. He fails to find a job as a faculty member at a research university and eventually ends up teaching at a high school. But he still yearns to do scholarly research.

A paper released last week by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a body devoted to entrepreneurial ideas, offers a solution for people who once harbored dreams of conducting quality research, but instead ended up working outside the university system doing little or no research. The authors of the paper, Samuel Arbesman and Jon Wilkins, said these scholars, who tend to be underemployed, could be put to work as researchers under a system called “fractional scholarship.”

Building a startup without having background in coding or a tech co-founder is a challenge.

Dwolla founder Ben Milne tried to teach himself how to craft a website by doing what everyone solving a problem would do:

"I have f***ing Google. I can get on the Internet and say 'What's html?"

Yesterday, we hosted our Startup 2012 conference in New York. To kick off the conference, our BI Intelligence team—Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Alex Cocotas, and I—put together a deck on the current trends in the startup world.

We looked closely at VC financing and exit trends and where the money is going. We also addressed the latest round of nonsense about there being another "tech bubble."