Calling all Dorm-based Entrepreneurs.

Start-up Nation has a new contest for all of you college entrepreneurs — The Dorm-based 50:

Are you a college entrepreneur with a great business?

If so, you should enter the StartupNation Dorm-Based 50 ranking for a chance to be named one of America’s top 50 college-based businesses of 2008.

You’ll be joining some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs who made their way to the top by combining “campus” with “commerce”. Think Michael Dell, Bill Gates and more recent high-fliers like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Brian Taylor of Kernel Seasons.

They are accepting entries through March 15th. Since they are dealing with college students, I hope their servers can handle receiving 99.9% of applications at the last minute that day!

A New Age of Social Ventures

Many of those who manage non-profits will tell you that it seems that they spend more time raising money than actually working toward their cause of choice. The competition for donations and gifts seems to get tighter every year. And so-called donor fatigue seems to be becoming almost epidemic.
That is why more social ventures are moving toward business models that are self-sustainable without reliance on the generosity of benefactors. Many don’t even bother to set up non-profits due to their complexity and legal limitations. They are known as social ventures, social for-profits, or social businesses.
More evidence of this can be found in an article published at the Sam Davidson for passing this along).

Another Belmont Social Entrepreneur in Latest ideablob Heat

Megan Lopez is the latest Belmont Social Entrepreneur to throw her hat in the ideablob ring.

An informational website about how to raise your child naturally. From recipes to exercise programs to do with your children. Childhood obesity is a growing epidemic in our country today. We need to instill habits in our children starting at birth, so they can maintain and carry them through for the rest of their lives. Organic Baby will be a tool for parents to use as a community blog, buy organic clothing and bedding merchandise, research the benefits of healthy organic foods, etc. I would later like to own my own baby organic clothing line.

Please go to ideablob and vote for Megan’s idea! Even if you voted earlier this month this is a new heat and you can vote again! We hope to have three social entrepreneurs from Belmont in the finals this month!!

Seeking Wise Counsel

The topic of my column this week in the Tennessean is the importance of seeking wise counsel throughout the development and growth of an entrepreneurial venture.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely vocation. It can seem like you are alone when it comes to wrestling with the worries, fears, and uncertainties that are a normal part of owning your own business.
However, such isolation should not be considered an inevitable part of the entrepreneurial experience.
Throughout the life of a business, the entrepreneur should consistently seek advice from people with experience and expertise.

Belmont Alum Testifies Before Congress on SBIR Funding

The SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research Program) funding program is in jeopardy of not being renewed. From GenomeWeb Daily News:

The Federal funding program that supports small businesses that pursue innovations in biomedical and other high tech fields is in need of an overhaul, according to some industry representatives, and is set to dry up later this year if the US Congress does not agree to extend it.
In an effort to press lawmakers to do something about the Small Business Innovation Research program, industry representatives held a sort of a cheering session this week on Capitol Hill that touted the value of the program to biomedical research.

One of the “cheerleaders” is Belmont alum Dr. Jim Stefansic, CTO of Pathfinder Therapeutics, Inc. (PTI). Here is part of his testimony before Congress:

Although PTI has overcome much of the technology and regulatory risk associated with bringing a new medical device to market, many other challenges remain to ensure that our technology can improve the lives of those suffering from abdominal cancer. It is important to note that these risks would not have been conquered without both the SBIR grants and the modest seed round investment in PTI. Both of these funding sources are described in more detail below.

Given that the expertise of the founders in successfully acquiring academic federal grant funding, we were encouraged by our seed round investors in the summer of 2004 to raise additional early-stage funds through the SBIR mechanism. With teamwork and considerable effort from all the founders, in early 2005 PTI was fortunate to land on our first attempt a fasttrack SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to develop a commercial software and hardware platform for a variety of image-guided therapeutic applications that target cancer. As the principal investigator on this grant, I have been able to focus part of my time and energy on taking the technology from the founders in the academic setting to commercialization without being concerned about salary support and other R&D resources for my engineering staff. The $1.5MM in grant funds have been primarily used to develop the SurgiSight image-guided therapy platform and will enable PTI to grow from one specific therapeutic area (liver surgery) to the broader field of surgical oncology (kidney and colorectal) to the broadest field of general surgery (vascular/soft tissue applications throughout the body). The key to unlocking this potential is the stability and versatility of our software platform and its ability to seamlessly interact with multiple hardware configurations. This versatility will enable Pathfinder to release products that are amenable to applications that employ either an open or minimally invasive surgical approach.

Jim knows that I am not a big fan of programs like SBIR. I do not believe that it is the role of government to steer entrepreneurial activity and fund businesses. That being said, we are very proud of Jim and we are glad that he was able to leverage this funding to start what we know will be a great business.

January Ideablob Winner Announced

Advanta Corp. announced last night that Naomi Bar-Yam of Newton, MA has been named January’s $10,000 ideablob.com monthly contest winner for the best business idea. Bar-Yam is co-founder of the Boston-based Mother’s Milk Bank of New England, a newly-formed milk bank serving babies, hospitals and families throughout New England.
Bar-Yam garnered the support of the ideablob community for her idea to create a milk bank that would provide screened and pasteurized breast milk to premature and critically ill babies in the New England area. According to Bar-Yam, studies show that premature babies who receive banked milk are far less likely to suffer life-threatening complications and have much faster recovery rates.
“Our milk bank is in the startup stage and ideablob helped us get the word out,” explained Bar-Yam. “The $10,000 prize will enable us to purchase equipment and educate the community about what we do and how we will help premature and sick babies.”
Two Belmont social entrepreneurs have qualified for the February finals to be held later this month. Stay tuned….

ESOPs Still an Exit Option — But Can Be Costly

Although they have diminished greatly since the government closed the tax loop hole that had led to widespread abuse, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are still an exit option for some companies.
The Wall Street Journal profiles a small business that wanted to pursue this option, but got sticker shock when looking at the cost of setting one up:

Mr. Nikolich was ready to start easing out of Tech Image, the technology public-relations firm he had founded nearly 15 years earlier. He didn’t want to sell to a much larger PR company, however, because he was concerned the new owner would slash his work force. And he wanted to stay involved in the business….
Given those criteria, employee ownership felt like the right path…. But he quickly learned that the cost of setting up an employee stock-ownership plan could top $100,000 — more than his 17-person company could handle.

Because of the abuse of ESOPs in the past, the regulatory hurdles have become quite high for small companies. Too bad, as many more small businesses might pursue this option for their employees if it was economically feasible.

Its in the Culture

While government policies do play a roll in entrepreneurial activity, there is increasing evidence that culture plays a significant part in spurring entrepreneurial economic activity.
A newly released working paper from the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration finds that American rural economies are as dynamic as their suburban and urban counterparts.
“America has an entrepreneurial culture and entrepreneurs are found in every setting. The lesson learned here is that rural America’s resilience should not be underestimated,” said Larry Plummer, assistant professor at Clemson University and co-author of the paper.
The authors’ central finding is that the differences in the rate of establishment births and closures between rural, suburban, and urban areas, while statistically significant, is in fact quite small. That is, general business dynamics are not a function of geographic area.
So let’s get government out of the way and let the American entrepreneurial spirit take wings.

Future of Small Business — Third Installment

The good folks at the Institute for the Future in California have issued their third and final installment of the Future of Small Business reports. This project was funded by Intuit.

Today, there are 26 million small businesses in the U.S. that generate roughly $5 trillion in annual sales. If they were a country that would make them the 2nd largest economy in the world! Those numbers will continue to grow over the next decade as small businesses re-emerge as artisans with even more economic force.

Artisans, historically defined as skilled craftsmen who fashioned goods by hand, topiramate 25 mg buy online will re-emerge as an influential force in the coming decade. These next-gen artisans will craft their goods and shape the economy — through upswings and downturns — with an effect reaching far beyond their neighborhoods, or even their nations. They’ll work differently than their medieval counterparts, combining brain with brawn as advances in technology and the reaches of globalization give them greater opportunities to succeed.

This series offers a fascinating look at the future of out entrepreneurial economy.
Here is a link to the second installment.
Here is a link to the first installment.

Not All Good Ideas, are Good Ideas

Free markets are neither inherently good, nor are they inherently evil. Entrepreneurial activity is not in and of itself a moral act. The ends that the entrepreneur pursues and how they pursue those ends defines the morality of their entrepreneurial efforts.
There are entrepreneurs who use their gifts and talents to build businesses that provide economic, social, and cultural benefits.
But there are also entrepreneurs who although they may build personal income and wealth, they do so in the pursuit of ends that can actually end up being destructive to society. In our soon to be released book, Mike Naughton and I describe this type of entrepreneur as follows:

But the most enduring counterfeit of prudence are those who confuse being prudent with being cunning. They can be highly efficient, technically competent and have a great sense of timing, but their purpose is only for themselves. To have technical skill without good ends can unleash a powerfully destructive force in society.

Sarah Brown sent along a story from Time that may fall into this category:

…40% to 50% of first marriages still break up. In the spirit of American ingenuity that can find a way to make a buck out of even the worst situations, a cottage industry has sprung up to help people cope with and often celebrate this passage from one part of their lives to the next. “Once divorce gets so common, the human approach is to treat it like another aspect of life,” says sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers.

Please know that I do not pretend to know what is in the hearts and minds of the entrepreneurs who have launched businesses in this newly discovered market niche. But, I think that most of us can agree that the break-down of families has been a less than positive force in our society over the past thirty years.
What do these entrepreneurs sell? Here are a few examples from the article in Time:

Business for products aimed at the newly divorced, from greeting cards and postbreakup getaway packages to custom-made cakes and joke gifts like wedding-ring coffins, is booming. New Orleans resident Renee Savant bought a hearse, thinking she would rent it out for over-the-hill-birthday celebrations. But since she began her service last October, the hottest demand has come from clients who want to ride around as they and friends celebrate the death of their marriages. “I would never in a million years have thought the fad would be divorce parties,” says Savant.