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I am a perfectionist. When I get a vision for something, I want to achieve that vision in all its glory, whether I'm creating a garden, a dinner or a company.

The result is that I ignore my garden when it gets too weedy, put off having people over for dinner, and drag my feet on launching my business, respectively. By insisting on perfection, I not only don't achieve perfection, I don't achieve any part of my goals.

You would think I would know better by now! After all, I have coached hundreds of entrepreneurs on this very issue: I tell them "Get your early revenue with a simple product.

Concrete contributes fully 5% of annual carbon dioxide emissions globally when one of its primary constituents, cement, is produced. It's a problem that won't go away any time soon: cement and concrete are affordable, strong and practical building materials. The good news is that they represent a great opportunity for reducing CO₂ emissions through innovation.

Sequestering Carbon Dioxide and Making Better Concrete

Almost no aspect of energy use is untouched by the issue of energy storage. We're most accustomed to dealing with it in our daily lives: at what inconvenient moment is our cell phone or laptop battery going to fail us? But far more important from a clean energy perspective is grid scale storage. Wind and solar farms need cost effective storage to smooth out the inherent ups and downs of energy production from the weather. Utilities can put off building new power plants longer if low cost, convenient storage is available to allow them to manage supply and demand more effectively.

The diagram to

This is the third in a four-part series on getting the most out of competing in a business plan competition... or deciding not to enter in the first place. The first two entries were on the Pros and Cons of entering and the second described 6 Questions to Ask Yourself before entering. This introspection was inspired by a conversation with Babson College president, Len Schlesinger during a free ranging discussion about innovation in learning and fueled by my own extensive history in business plan competitions, including having co-founded and chaired one (Ignite Clean Energy), helped it merge

Let me start this out by saying that I am a fan of business plan competitions: I've co-founded and chaired one (Ignite Clean Energy), helped it merge with another (Cleantech Open), been a judge in a few (MIT Clean Energy Prize, ICE, CTO) and a competitor in one (MassChallenge). After a couple years hiatus (a long story), I am now back to recruiting actively for the Cleantech Open Northeast and unofficially for MassChallenge.

We started the ICE Competition (brainchild of my friend and mentor, Jim Walker) in 2004 because we wanted to get people excited about starting clean energy companies (hence "ignite clean energy"). That's why most competitions start: everyone loves a competition, so they're a great way to bring attention to a skill set (innovation and entrepreneurship), a market sector (clean energy, life sciences), a university or other organization, or even the individuals who start them. And of course the winners tend to receive a lot of press and other attention, often from investors.