Venture capital investments continued to grow at a rapid clip in the second quarter of 2011, with VC firms investing $7.5 billion across 966 deals, according to the latest MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA.) But some industry experts are saying that the current level of VC activity could be too good to be sustained.

The second quarter of 2011 saw the highest total amount of money invested by VCs since the second quarter of 2008, according to the MoneyTree report released this week. Quarterly venture capital investment activity increased 19 percent during Q2 compared to the first quarter of 2011, during which VCs invested $6.3 billion in 814 deals (click on image to expand):

Venture-capital funding in biotechnology companies jumped 46 percent in the second quarter, as investors looked to replenish their portfolios after an increase in acquisitions and initial public offerings.

Venture-capital investing across all sectors rose 19 percent to $7.5 billion in 966 deals, compared with $6.3 billion and 814 deals in the first quarter of 2011, the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC said today in a report. The three months that ended June 30 represented the biggest quarter for venture funding in two years.

Biotechnology companies attracted $1.24 billion in 116 deals, ranking second behind software makers, who earned $1.52 billion, a 35 percent jump, in 254 deals. Biotech garnered about $847 million in 97 first-quarter investments. Funding for medical device and equipment makers gained 20 percent to $841 million in 90 deals.

Schools and startups in economically challenged areas share a similar problem: a difficulty in attracting and retaining young talent. Teach For America has worked for decades toward fixing the education issue by placing top-notch college graduates in struggling schools. Venture For America, a nonprofit that launched this week, aims to do the same thing--but for startups.

Like Teach For America, VFA will bring promising college graduates to work in underserved communities for at least two years. Startups that focus on up-and-coming industries (i.e. education innovation, energy, biotechnology) will be offered a VFA fellow for a salary of $32,000 to $38,000 annually. At the end of the two years, the companies can opt to hire fellows under new terms.

Private research organizations employ almost 31,000 people in San Diego County, more than the number of similar employees in any other California county, according to a new quarterly innovation report from Connect, the local non-profit group for technology and entrepreneurship.

Researchers teased that statistic from U.S. Department of Labor data for the third quarter of 2010, the most recent quarter available, according to Steve Hoey, a project leader at Connect who called the new finding “a testament to the strong R&D base we have in our region.” The report ranked Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County second, with almost 19,000 working at private research institutions. Los Angeles was third with more than 17,000.

There has been a recent dialog around a theme I’ll call “hacking the corporation” – creating novel approaches to building young companies, particularly when they are in their formative start-up stage and pre-product market fit.  One of them, reinventing board meetings (or, “Why Board Meetings Suck”), has gotten some attention from leading thinkers like Steve Blank and Brad Feld.

I’d like to submit another item to add to the “hacking the corporation” punch list: Eliminating titles.

At business school, I learned all about titles and hierarchies and the importance of organizational structure.  When I joined my first start-up after graduation, e-commerce leader Open Market, I found the operating philosophy of the founder jarring – he declared no one would have titles in the first few years.  If you needed a title for external reasons, our founder told us, we should feel free to make one up.  But we would avoid using labels internally.  In other words, there would be no “vice president” or “director” or other such hierarchical denominations.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday announced that he has redesigned the process for the state to distribute $1 billion in economic development money, enabling applicants to fill out just one form when seeking to tap funds from nine separate state agencies.

The procedural streamlining is part of the governor's effort to get more bang for the state's economic development dollars by having regions compete for funding. The governor also released a “blueprint” for his regional economic councils, which will represent each of the state's 10 economic development regions.

Mr. Cuomo described the new Consolidated Funding Application as a “one-stop shop” for organizations seeking economic development money.

New York City aims to be the next Silicon Valley by attempting to attract excellent students and professors. But it's unclear whether this approach will make any gains for the city.

Is New York City the right place to build the "next Silicon Valley"? The Mayor appears to believe so and he is prepared to use a fair bit of $ to try to achieve this goal.

"The RFP is the next step in the initiative – unveiled in December 2010 – that seeks a university, institution or consortium to develop and operate a new or expanded campus in the City in exchange for access to City-owned land – at the Navy Hospital Campus at theBrooklyn Navy Yard, the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island, or on Governors Island – and the full support and partnership of the Bloomberg Administration. The City is also prepared to make a significant investment in site infrastructure, offering up to $100 million in a competitive process designed to select the proposal that yields the most benefit to the City for the lowest commitment of City resources. The City expects that any public contribution will be matched several times over by resources raised by the winner or winners themselves."

Will it be able to come up with a new one? Here is a story that Robert O’Brien tells in a recent paper in the journal China Security. In 2005, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, which had the power to set government procurement policies, said that state-owned wind farms could only buy turbines that had 70 percent of their parts made in China.

China, starting around that time, has become a major force in wind power, growing in the last 5 years at a dramatic pace: Chinese producers now control about 85 percent of the Chinese market, and half of the market globally, according to the New York Times, as O’Brien points out.

In 2005, Gamesa, a thirty-five year old Spanish company and one of the world’s largest producers of wind turbines, controlled about a third of the Chinese market. In response to the new rules, Gamesa started teaching local suppliers how to make parts of its turbines. But the suppliers then started to abandon it, and Gamesa’s market share is now a only 3 percent. Up to now, China’s growth has been dramatic enough that no one complains–that 3 percent of today’s market is double what Gamesa was selling in 2005. This bonanza-like atmosphere has given the Chinese government license to act with license.

The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. Many things can go wrong during the process of creating new products, services or business models. I give you ten examples.  Perhaps it is a ‘feast of recognition’, which in this case is unfortunate but rest assured, you are not alone.

1.  We don’t know what we want.

Ideation of new products and services happens ad hoc, usually at a time when a problem arises or the turnover decreases suddenly or when a competitor enters the market unexpectedly.  The question is then: What now? ‘Jack Smith create a list’, becomes the creed. At this moment it becomes clear that the existing strategic business plan hardly provides footing or direction for innovation. This lack of clear answers leads to random thought processes, which in many cases are interrupted because the management, after consideration, decided to concentrate on either a different market, product or target group or on another country. When you are suddenly confronted with this during the creative process, it causes a spanner in the wheels of the creative car, which then, under loud protest, comes to a screeching halt.

A dustpan called the Broom Groomer and the XC2V FLYPmode combat vehicle have something in common: both were created with the help of crowdsourcing, in which a community of people unite online to contribute anything from color recommendations to engineering designs.

Crowdsourcing has been around for nearly five years, mostly as a way for Web-savvy marketing departments to solicit design ideas and build online buzz around a product. But it also has promise as a way to inject fresh ideas into traditional manufacturing, speed up production cycles, and cut costs.

The U.S. government may be serious about supporting the role of manufacturing in creating jobs – especially those new, high-technology jobs that are supposed to abound in a growing, green economy – but it’s not maintaining funding for the kinds of programs needed to train the new green-collar technician.

A recent New York Times article says, instead, federal funding to provide such vocational and technical education is at risk. The government has made it a priority to raise overall academic standards and college graduation rates, and aims to shrink the small amount of federal spending for vocational training in public high schools and community colleges. That aid comes primarily in the form of Perkins grants to states.

The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent.

These days, your online Internet reputation is your reputation. Of course, having no reputation is usually better than a bad one, but don’t wait for someone else to establish a good one for you. It’s time for every business and business person to proactively create a positive presence, before someone else puts you in a defensive mode that is hard to win.

The first step in the process is to claim your online identity. This is simple in concept, but requires real effort and can be time consuming, and even expensive, if someone gets there before you and tries to sell you the rights to your preferred business or personal domain name. See my previous article on “When to Pay a Premium for Your Company Domain Name ”

Michael Fertik and David Thompson bring this issue and many others together in their book “Wild West 2.0.” After you claim your identity with placeholder domain names, accounts in social networks, and common blogging platforms, your next challenge is to create enough positive content as a “Google wall” to keep negative info out of the top Google search results.

Nine years ago, when the Australian Institute for Commercialisation (AIC) was first created, we were quickly forced to ask ourselves how we could add value to our own market – those entrepreneurs, researchers, or businesses seeking to commercialise their ideas. It took time to understand the real market needs, and to develop and commercialise our own products and services. In some we failed, but in others we succeeded.

What is the test of success?

For us, as a not-for-profit company, success of our own products and services has been measured through various key performance indicators, such as the number of our customers, our customers’ success, and degree of our product uptake. However, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, perhaps our success can best be measured by the degree to which other governments and innovation groups are now offering the services that we first pioneered and innovated ourselves. These include our flagship TechFast program, which is a “demand-pull” commercialisation service that helps SMEs to establish collaborative relationships with research organisations or others in an open innovation model, and our TechClinics, which help businesses to enter or even establish new value chains to take products to market in collaboration with others.

A couple weeks ago there was a boot camp session for MassChallenge’s annual startup competition. The competition tries to get new, high growth business in any industry off the ground with training, feedback, PR and networking support. The highest-potential startups receive three months of intensive mentorship, free services in an office space in Boston’s Innovation District, and cash prizes totaling $1 million.

The competition got me thinking about how so many innovative new programs keep emerging and spreading across the nation to kick start entrepreneurship and fund new companies. And, while Northeast Ohio might not be home to a Y-Combinator, TechStars or AlphaLab, we have a lot of diverse funding (and mentoring) sources right here.

Sunday's Boston Globe column collected advice from all sorts of places — non-profits, venture capital firms, and public companies — about how to run shorter, more effective meetings. The opening:

Two people sitting in a room is a conversation. Three is a meeting, and things start to deteriorate from there. As the number of participants grows, the odds increase that PowerPoint slides will be shown, meaningless “action items’’ distributed, pet projects trotted out, oratorical skills exhibited, and BlackBerrys checked.

Here's some supplemental info:

- From Forrester Research, a great guide to handling the different personality types that populate the typical company meeting.

I first learned about the Pomodoro technique from Maren Kate and have loved it ever since.  If you are not familiar with the technique it goes a little something like this:

Set a timer for 25 minutes and work on one thing.

When the timer goes off, set the timer for 5 minutes and take a break.  This is one Pomodoro

Repeat until your heart is fulfilled

To avoid have a physical timer I use this app at work and this app on my Mac.

One of the new ways I’ve strategically started using this technique is to make a goal of doing two Pomodoros every morning before I go to work.  If though this is only about an hour of work, I find that something magical happens when I press the start button to begin a Pomodoro.  I develop instant laser-focus and procrastination instantly fades.

A new theory suggests legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at 35 due in part to a vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D is produced when the body is exposed to natural sunlight and Mozart spent his life in high-latitude Austria, working at night and sleeping during the day.

I’ve recently been thinking of the type of businesses  we create. Are they setting us free? Or are they simply keeping us too busy, too tired and too disconnected from the most important relationships in our lives?

Below are three things  I came up with that small businesses can do to celebrate independence - because it’s never to late to set yourself free.

1. Take a Day Off

Disconnect from business and have some fun. Even if you love your work, take a break and come back to it. I bet (I hope) there are people who want to see you.

Take a random day and change the flow of things. Besides, ideas on how to fix what’s broken and how to move forward just may come from those down moments—down from work and up into the rest of life.  I’m just saying, take care of the other side of your life too, and I’m taking my own advice.

Most people think that Subchapter S Corporations tend to be larger small businesses. However data from a study of small business tax compliance led by Donald DeLuca of IBM Global Services show that the vast majority of Subchapter S Corporations are micro-businesses – companies with fewer than 10 employees.

As the figure below indicates, 77 percent of S corporations have five or fewer empoyees and 87 percent have fewer than 10. In fact, counter to the common notion that virtually all self-employed people without employees operate their businesses as sole proprietorships, the data show that 44 percent of Subchapter S corporations have zero employees.

Today on MBA Mondays Startup Financing Options series, we are going to talk about the financing option that I specialize in - preferred stock.

Almost all venture capital firms and many angel and seed investors will require the company they are investing in to issue them preferred stock. The vast majority of equity dollars invested in startups are securitized with preferred stock. So if you are an entrepreneur, it makes sense to understand preferred stock and what it means for you and your company.

Preferred stock is a class of stock that provides certain rights, privileges, and preferences to investors. Compared to common stock, which is normally held by the founders, it is a superior security.