Major innovations that are already shaping business globally over the next decade are being driven by innovative smaller enterprises, not corporates, says business intelligence providers Index B.

Its new “Ones to Watch” report highlights 25 companies that embody six powerful emerging trends that are already shaping the major economies and will continue to do so over the next decade.

Companies highlighted in the report are of all shapes and sizes from around the globe, which collectively represent the commercial landscape of the future but small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) predominate as the leaders of innovation.

Conscious Consumption. Millennials are still consuming. The Recession proved to be more of a reset button, allowing them to focus on what’s important. Brands like TOMs shoes and FEED are examples of how Millennials are getting great products yet supporting even better causes at the same time. This is a trend that’s here to stay.

Profitable Purpose. This term is frequently used by Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise. For non-profits to survive and appeal to a new generation of donors, they will have to understand the power of profitable purpose. Millennials want to feel a personal connection to the brands they’re supporting. Simply writing a check won’t do; they need the experience.

Cake Baking. No, I’m not literally talking about baking a cake; this is an analogy for the process of making products. Millennials are more interested in the process of, say, baking a cake, than in buying the cake. So what does this mean for business? A behind-the-scenes view of designing the new J. Crew collection might be the push needed to get Millennials interested in the product. Millennials like the process more than the product.

Being an entrepreneur these days requires an understanding of a thousand topics, many of which don’t even exist today in traditional learning vehicles, like schools and textbooks. The Internet and its information wave have changed everything – it’s the problem, with constant change, and it’s the solution, if you use it to navigate quickly and self-educate.

True entrepreneurs love to learn, unlearn, and relearn, whether they are 20 years old, or 60 years old. A new business means change, so they deal in change, and relish the journey. Usually it’s called initiative, dedication, and can-do attitude.

New Enterprise Associates wants to help student entrepreneurs finance their ideas with The Experiment Fund, a new seed stage investment fund focused on student startups and new technologies.

The main focus of these startups are in the areas of information, health care and energy technologies.

Additional support for the fund will be provided by angel investors and advisers in the future, according to a news release from The Experiment Fund.

Iowa business leaders, hoping to jump-start a proposed $100 million seed fund, are expected to ask lawmakers to sweeten the tax credits available to lure investors into backing startup companies.

What wouldn’t change: The existing $8 million annual cap on state tax credits available to attract seed-fund investment. It was set last year by lawmakers and is part of Iowa’s $120 million annual lid on all tax credits used to spark new jobs and investment.

What could change: Boosting the tax credit used to match investment — now at 20 percent — to possibly as high as 100 percent, the amount that South Carolina and Hawaii provide for early-stage investors.

The recent announcement of Richard Branson, the world-famous entrepreneur best known for his Virgin brand empire and his passion for adventure sports, as the headline speaker at the upcoming Global Entrepreneurship Congress has generated a significant amount of attention and interest. Meanwhile behind the scenes, a broad cross-section of delegates are planning their trip to the Congress in Liverpool, looking to see what they can learn about fostering startup ecosystems that can accelerate their nation’s talent to introduce new disruptive ideas and firms that turn them into innovations that change lives and drive markets.

“I never saw myself working in a place like this,” said Don Draper, in the hit series, Mad Men, as he walked out the doors of Sterling-Cooper to start his own ad agency in season three.

If you’re in business for yourself after leaving a corporate job, you may have felt this same way. Now you face a new and exciting challenge: hiring top talent to help make your startup dreams come true. The good news? With 13.1 million unemployed people in the U.S. job market, you should have no shortage of options.

1."Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth -- not going all the way, and not starting." - Buddha

3. "Be willing to be a beginner every single morning." - Meister Eckhart

4. "All great ideas and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning." - Albert Camus

5. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu

The current budgetary and economic crises facing the United States mandates that we must maximize the impact of technology transfer in both the public and private sectors if we are to remain competitive in the 21st century. This is a topic that President Obama has outlined in a recent Presidential Policy Memoranda addressed to the federal laboratory system, and in the Administration challenge for our research universities to commit themselves to fully support commercializing technologies they create using taxpayer dollars.

With billions of dollars invested in R&D at stake, improving the end-to-end management of technology is of critical importance to global political leaders. At present, more than $60B is spent annually on university and federally supported intramural and extramural research in the U.S.

Yet identifying how to improve technology transfer output and outcomes on a consistent and predicable basis remains an ongoing challenge with little consensus on best practices. Unfortunately, most of the recommendations provided do little to address these underlying problems. To find a way out of the thicket, we need to step back and determine exactly what it is that we’re trying to do. Merely running faster if you’re going in circles isn’t productive, just exhausting and discouraging. We need to make sure that we are aligning our measurements of success with our ultimate goal.

While working with some of the world’s leading companies and universities, we’ve had the fortune to associate with top tier technology transfer professionals, thus gaining insight into best practices in the field. These people are unbelievably smart! They regularly seek to have unparalleled performance; constantly looking to identify new management frameworks to raise their productivity to new levels of efficiency, effectiveness and, ultimately, impact. Yet performance management is one of the key areas that remain one of the most difficult for leaders to address. This is not surprising given the gamut of different approaches that have been created over the years.

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As just about everyone should know by now, the seeds of what grew into Facebook were planted at Harvard. Might there be a bunch of mini-Zucks lurking in the dorms of Cambridge? If so, a new venture capital firm — the first housed right on the Harvard campus — wants to find them.

Dubbed The Experiment Fund, the firm describes itself as “a bridge between America’s oldest universities and storied venture capital firms.” Backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the firm is made up of Hugo Van Vurren, NEA co-head Patrick Chung, and NEA General Partner Harry Weller — all of whom have a degree of some form from the school.

I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book,  and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and ”I Was Blind But Now I See”  I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books with traditional publishers, combined.

If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself.

The Internet economy among G-20 nations is expected to nearly double by 2016, reaching $4.2 trillion (up from $2.3 trillion in 2010), according to a projection released today by the Boston Consulting Group.

The big drive in the web economy over the next few years will be a massive influx of new users — with 3 billion users in 2016, up from 1.9 billion in 2010 — the consulting group reports.

“No company or country can afford to ignore this development. Every business needs to go digital,” Boston Consulting partner David Dean said in a statement today. “The ‘new’ Internet is no longer largely Western, accessed from your PC. It is now global, ubiquitous, and participatory.”

Of all the consulting inquiries I get at Red Rocket, fundraising is by far the biggest need of these startups. And the problem is, not all startups are venture-backable, for a variety of reasons, which we will discuss in this post.

It's imperative to ask: Is my industry appealing to venture investors? Is my business appealing to venture investors? And, if so, how can I attract capital for my business?

First of all, angel investors and venture-capital firms invest in a wide variety of industries (e.g., technology, digital media, CPG, retail, real estate, health care, life sciences, manufacturing). So, before reaching out to any investors, make sure your industry is clearly in their sweet spot and skill set. That said, there are certain industries that have a LOT more start-up activity than others. As a rule, businesses that heavily invest in real estate, inventory or other capital risk are materially less desirable than simple technology businesses. So, bad news if you are a start-up restaurant, retailer, REIT or manufacturing business. Good news if you are a dot.com, software or technology business.

Venture capital investors poured $633 million into medical software and information services in 2011, which is the highest level of investments the sector has attracted since 2001, when $759 million was raised, according to figures from Dow Jones VentureSource.

Venture capital investors' interest in health IT has grown significantly over a three-year period, spurred on by the Obama administration's federal incentive programs, which have encouraged hospitals and physician offices to adopt electronic health records (EHRs). Additionally, increasing use of the Internet, mobile devices, and information management software at healthcare delivery organizations has fostered growing attention from the investment community.

In my recent piece Reengineering Capitalism I highlighted a phenomenon that the global entrepreneurship ecosystem is paying very little attention to: Over 99 percent of entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected. Yet, the entire world is focused on the 1 percent that is “fundable.”

The media, when pitched a startup story, is interested in who funded the venture. They seldom ask how much revenue the company has or if it  is profitable.

Incubators take pride in how exclusive they are and how many “deals” they “reject.”

Nearly half of American youth between ages 8 and 24 are enthusiastic about starting a business, or have already have started one, according to a Harris poll done for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2010.

What if big schools developed endowments to recruit entrepreneurship students? In the 2006/2007 school year alone, The University of Tennessee spent $2 million to recruit athletes. Certainly, college athletes can generate a lot of excitement - and a lot of money - for their schools. But entrepreneurs can generate so much more, in terms of jobs and wealth for the U.S. economy. New businesses are job creators. The Kauffman Foundation determined that over the last 30 years, all net new job growth came from companies less than five years old. More entrepreneurs also mean more innovative products and processes for U.S. companies, which make them more globally competitive.

As a young CEO of a growing company, I find that the most valuable insight I’m gaining these days has been from other CEOs. Certainly this realization isn’t revolutionary – YPO, EO, Mindshare and a host of other organizations are set up just for this kind of knowledge exchange.

But who has time for that? This is a social media world. We’re live in 140-character sound bites. So I decided to ping my favorite CEOs via Twitter to see what kind of wisdom they could drop on me. Here’s the great advice they shared.

While we’ve focused plenty of attention and energy on the need for a low-carbon economy over the last several years, one big part of the picture often gets overlooked: the world’s oceans.

That’s a major oversight, considering all the sustainability challenges related to the marine environment:

• There is, of course, ever more dissolved carbon dioxide and the increasing acidity of ocean water — both effects of rising atmospheric carbon levels and both a threat to numerous species of marine life.
• Then there’s the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch,” a wide swath of trash that swirls slowly in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. (There’s one in the Atlantic as well.)

In my January 3rd article, Fueling the Creative Economy I wrote about the appointment of Joe Bookchin to the position of director of the Office of the Creative Economy in Vermont, as well as creative economy initiatives in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and their importance to our industry’s continued health and development.

Subsequently, I was pleasantly surprised to be contacted by Jean Maginnis, Founder & Executive Director, Maine Center for Creativity and Christine Harris, CEO Christine Harris Connections and Executive Advisor Creative Alliance Milwaukee who informed me of their respective creative alliances as well as others, and the newly formed National Creativity Network, an organization that believes in fostering creativity as being key to innovation and economic success in America right now.

Healthcare is caught in a slow-motion collision between two 21st Century realities. The world’s growing and aging population creates ever-greater needs for treatment. At the same time, limited resources constrict the availability of quality care.

Perhaps half the people who die each day – more in poor areas – suffer from diseases that are preventable or curable. While medical advances do help patients live longer, the costs of care are rising. And even as science discovers new mechanisms of disease, medicine relies too much on trial and error.

The good news is, solutions are at hand to improve the health of the world’s 7 billion people. We can transform healthcare systems to care for patients in more sustained and cost-effective ways.