I recently caught up with Gene Marks, who is an opinionated small business management columnist, author, speaker, and business owner. He writes weekly online columns for both The New York Times and Forbes, as well as bi-weekly columns American City Business Journals. His latest book is called In God We Trust: Everyone Else Pays Cash (CreateSpace, 2011). Gene is also a board member of the National Speaker’s Association. In this interview, Gene unleashing his entrepreneurship wisdom, including how to delegate tasks, if a business plan is important or not, and how to get media attention.

What would you say the difference is between an entrepreneur, franchise owner and consultant is?

There is no difference. All are business owners trying to maximize profits. I know entrepreneurs who own multiple McDonalds. I run a 10 person consulting company. My services are consulting. My nature is entrepreneurial.

Los Angeles (PRESS RELEASE – July 17, 2011) - According to new data released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the US remains a very supportive environment for small businesses, though high failure rates represent a lasting concern.

The report, Entrepreneurship At A Glance 2011, is an annual publication by the OECD.  It chronicles the state of entrepreneurship in the various OECD countries through important key indicators.  The US fared highly in small business creation, especially in construction, retail and professional services.  Support for entrepreneurs was also evident, with the US ranked fourth in terms of administrative ease of starting a business.  Financially, venture capital funding in the US totals 0.08% of GDP, which is second only to Israel.

A neat bit of wordplay takes place when people talk about whether U.S. research universities need to change their strategies for commercializing the inventions and patents that arise from on-campus labs.  This particular debate involves two camps:  those who believe universities are underfunded, and those who believe they’re underperforming.

The first camp, the ”Underfunders,” are in favor of the current approach.  They claim that the university unit that patents and licenses inventions – aka the technology transfer office —  is doing fine but just needs more money.  This is the stepping off point for this group’s recommendation that the best solution would be for the feds to give universities more money to keeping doing what it’s doing, but bigger:  hire more staff, set up lots of entrepreneur networking events, institute on-campus classes to teach professors how to be better at business, and build proof of concept centers.

The Tata Group is at the forefront of innovation-led growth in India. Whether the recently announced Rs 32,000 pre-fabricated house or the Nano car, the group is pursuing innovation across businesses. In an email interview with Firstpost, R Gopalakrishnan, director at Tata Sons, says that the culture of collaboration among Indian institutions and Indian companies has been on the rise. He says that the Tata group is not only making products that cater to the bottom-of-the-pyramid market but is also innovating in manufacturing processes at companies like Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Motors. The group is also investing in new initiatives within research and development in the renewable energy sector and in the animation arena.

R Gopalakrishnan, Director, Tata Sons. Courtesy Tata Sons Top 50 companies in India are spending less than $1 billion on R&D. Indian companies now have cash to the tune of $55 billion. In your view why is it that Indian firms are not spending enough on innovation?

New Enterprise Associates is the latest venture capital firm to feel the need to open an outpost in New York as investment momentum continues to build there.

Associated Press One of the largest venture firms, NEA, with U.S. offices in Chevy Chase and Timonium, Md., and in Menlo Park, Calif., has opened a Manhattan office that various partners on both coasts will share, Partner Tony Florence told VentureWire.

“This is a reflection of our continued commitment to the area,” Florence said. “In our opinion, world-class innovation is occurring here, so we’re deepening our presence.”

Columbus – The Ohio Third Frontier Commission recommended more than $13 million in awards, including nearly $8 million through the Ohio Third Frontier Biomedical Program, nearly $1 million through the Ohio Third Frontier Medical Imaging Program, $4 million through the Ohio Third Frontier Sensors Program, and $321,000 through the Ohio Third Frontier Internship Program.

The Ohio Third Frontier programs accelerate the development and growth of the biomedical, medical imaging, and sensors industries and their supply chains in Ohio. The programs provide direct financial support to organizations seeking to: commercialize new products; adapt or modify existing devices, diagnostics, or components; address technical and commercialization barriers; or demonstrate market readiness.

Given what investment bankers did to the financial system just a couple years ago, it surprises me how many people still accept what they have to say at face value. But quite a few people in biotech are still lapping up all sorts of short-sighted, destructive advice from the financial powers that be.

The latest bit of wisdom passed down from Wall Street came in a Reuters story this past week. It speculated about 11 publicly traded biotech companies that various investment pros consider to be takeover candidates. These companies have the kind of novel drugs that Big Pharma needs to replenish its empty pipelines. If you’re a shareholder in one of these little companies, this sounds exciting. Just hold onto your shares a little while longer, or buy some now while you can, and wait a couple quarters for a suitor to pay a 30, 40, or 50 percent premium. Instant returns! That will make everybody happy, right?

Nick Halstead at Datasift seems to have ticked people off the wrong way with a candid assessment of his experience fundraising in Europe. He might might not return emails but he’s also raised money from one of the smartest dudes around (Roger Ehrenberg and his Big Data Band) so if you allow me I’ll pay some attention to his opinion, and in fact expand on it.

Nick’s video interview with Mike Butcher starts exactly as I would like to start my article: I’ve always been a huge advocate of Europe, and a believer that we can blaze our own trail. I would not have invested the amount of time I have in, say, Seedcamp since its founding by being an investor, board member, mentor and contributor (my Prezi slides and a little plug) if I did not believe we could build great things, and thankfully, occasionally, we do.

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.

During his Twitter-fed Town Hall, President Obama admitted that the housing market has proven one of the “most stubborn” pieces of the economic recovery puzzle to try and fix.  The President --- as well the Congress and the building industry --- should  consider a new path to a solution for housing by tapping the potential of the very generation whose votes brought Barack Obama into the White House in the first place.

The Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) represents not just the largest generation in American history but the largest potential market for both existing and new housing in the United States. There are over 95 million Millennials and over the next five years the first quarter of this cohort will enter their thirties, an age when people are most likely to buy their first home.

Barely a day goes by without news of some new accelerator program in Europe dropping onto my desk. In the last few days, for example, I’ve received notice of Poland’s Gamma Rebels (“a 3 month long program in Warsaw”) and Dutch group Rockstart (“intensive support to entrepreneurs for the successful start to their businesses during the first 100 days”). Recently I’ve written about a few others and spoken to a lot more: big accelerators, small accelerators, accelerators with international ambitions and accelerators focused on their home country.

Nearly all of them offer a Y Combinator-style experience: short bootcamps usually lasting two or three months in which entrepreneurs with an idea are given a little money, access to mentors, and the space and time to concentrate on building something. Several of them are part of wider accelerator networks spun out of successful programs, such as TechStars; some of them are closely related to larger venture capital companies, universities or government networks. All of them promise to take your startup and turn it into something bigger and better.

In the past year, big data has emerged as one of the most closely watched trends in IT. Organizations today are generating more data in a single day than that the entire Internet was generated as recently as 2000. The explosion of “big data”–much of it in complex and unstructured formats–has presented companies with a tremendous opportunity to leverage their data for better business insights through analytics.

Wal-Mart was one of the early pioneers in this field, using predictive analytics to better identify customer preferences on a regional basis and stock their branch locations accordingly. It was an incredibly effective tactic that yielded strong ROI and allowed them to separate themselves from the retail pack. Other industries took notice of Wal-Mart’s tactics — and the success they gleaned from processing and analyzing their data — and began to employ the same tactics.

For the past few months, I’ve been discussing the rights of VC investors in connection with preferred stock financings, such as veto rights, redemption rights, liquidation preferences, Board seats, etc.  All of these rights are contractual in nature – that is, they are initially provided for in a term sheet and then incorporated into the definitive documentation.

There is another set of rights that many entrepreneurs may not be familiar with, however: State law rights.  These are rights granted to stockholders pursuant to the respective laws of the company’s State of incorporation and are often the only rights that minority common stockholders have.  Whether a minority common stockholder is a founder, advisor or even a friends/family investor, he or she will usually not be contractually granted any of the rights that are typically granted to preferred stockholders.

Fundraising is a tough name for one of the most important, and sensitive, ways to engage people. Raising funds for your venture really isn't about the money. If you want to be successful in this money business, focus on people, not funds.

One of my greatest funders has been with me for the better part of 10 years. We started out slow at $5,000 and it grew to a consistent, annual six-figure support. Our first big jump in investment was when he funded two new hires, bringing them on board to join our team.

Next year, thinking he might want a creative change, I presented an aggressive marketing plan which could take UniversalGiving to exciting new levels of brand awareness.

One of the three tenets of The Living Organization® model for creating results is the interdependence of the three energy fields of Activity, Relationship, and Context. The Context defines what the possible range of results can be. Yet, we continually lean on our predisposition to understand everything through the lens of Activity, the energy of what we do.

I was reading an article this morning citing a study on obesity in China that was published in the American Journal of Health Behavior. It is considered one of the first to investigate weight among Chinese adolescents. Ya-Wen Janice Hsu, a research assistant at the University of Southern California commenting on the study said, "Findings from this large cohort of data on Chinese youth suggest that weight-related correlates might play different roles in Chinese culture than they do in Western cultures."

Research universities have been abuzz with what some are calling the “next big thing”: convergence, the integration of the life, engineering and physical sciences. This wholesale merging of minds is being billed as critical to helping researchers answer the most profound questions: How does the brain work? What causes cancer? How can we make energy more sustainable? “The convergence revolution is a paradigm shift,” write the authors of a recent white paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Convergence means a broad rethinking of how all scientific research can be conducted.”

Researchers can be forgiven for thinking they have heard this all before. The concept of merging tools and methods from separate disciplines is not new; the x-ray’s arrival in 1895 brought physics to the doctor’s office. More recently, the Human Genome Project spawned integrated fields such as bioinformatics and systems biology. But Phillip A. Sharp, a biology professor at M.I.T. and co-author of the white paper, argues that the true multidisciplinary nature of convergence marks a “third revolution” in science that is following in the footsteps of the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s and the genomics revolution that began in the late 1980s.

If you’ve ever uttered the words “troubled middle child,” you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of The Secret Power of Middle Children:  How Middleborns Can Harness Their Unexpected and Remarkable Abilities by Catherine Salmon, PhD., and Katrin Schumann. The book is a fascinating look at how the characteristics and behaviors of “middleborns” can actually lead to extraordinary success. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Michael Dell were middle kids; so were Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Madonna, David Letterman, and the Dalai Lama “There’s this image we have of middle child syndrome,” says Salmon. “But the majority are extremely successful and have gone about their success very quietly.” Middleborns also make stellar employees, she says. Here’s why:

Flexibility. “Especially today, it’s very important to be flexible,” says Salmon. “When middleborns are growing up, they don’t get their way because they’re the biggest, and they don’t get their way because they’re the baby who was indulged.” And so middleborns learn to roll with the punches, and to get what they need by negotiating. “They also tend to be very open to experience, and willing to try new things,” says Salmon. “They tend to be moderate risk takers.”

If you are European and want to depress yourself, you could do a lot worse than read the Innovation Union Competitiveness Report 2011, published by the European Commission last month. It’s a huge piece of work, so to save you a bit of time, here are its main findings:

• The EU is slowly advancing towards its 3% R&D target - but there is a widening gap between the EU and its world competitors notably due to weaker business R&D investment.

• The economic crisis has hit business R&D investments hard. However, as part of a counter-cyclic effort, many European countries are maintaining or increasing their levels of public R&D funding.

• Europe is host of a large and diversified pool of skilled human resources in particular in Science and Technology, which the business sector is not fully nor optimally making use of; in terms of new tertiary educated graduates, China now weights as much as the EU, the United States and Japan combined.

• While remaining a top player in terms of knowledge production and scientific excellence, Europe is loosing ground as regards the exploitation of research results.

• Member States are introducing reforms to improve the functioning of the public research base and increase public-private cooperation - however knowledge transfer in Europe remains weak.

#1 Good ideas are not enough. It’s not enough to have a good idea for a business. You have to learn how to market and sell that idea. You need to make that a core part of your business activities each day, especially in the beginning when you should be testing your idea in the real world through selling that idea. The market will reveal to you just how good the idea is (innovation) OR how well you’ve presented it (marketing). Entrepreneurs that get both innovation and marketing have figured out 90 percent of entrepreneurship.

#2 Cash flow is key. Building a business is like driving a car, you can get lost and make wrong turns and still correct things all day long, but if you run out of fuel everything comes to a halt. Entrepreneurs that get loads of startup capital have no concept of the importance of cash flow. They can usually lack the disciplined spending and resourcefulness of bootstrapping entrepreneurs that learn very quickly how critical cash flow is if they want to stay in business. Companies that have no concept of cash flow in the beginning like YouTube or Facebook are exceptions rather than the rule.

Morgantown, W.Va., looks like your typical college town in the Northeast, with church towers piercing the skyline and clusters of brick buildings and tree-lined streets abutting a large university. But as you drive down the road and head toward the campus, something unusual emerges: a modest-sized elevated roadway that skirts the Monongahela River and winds its way through West Virginia University (WVU) for several miles. Then a small box-like car, painted in WVU’s blue and yellow school colors, zips overhead and you realize it’s not an elevated road at all, but something very different.

Welcome to America’s one and only personal rapid transit (PRT) system, serving downtown Morgantown and the WVU campus. Though other transit systems may claim they are PRTs, Morgantown’s is the only one in the world where riders can hop into cars and travel directly from point to point without stopping at other stations along the way.