Via The Wall Street Journal: a list of other entrepreneurship blogs worth checking out. Of course, that means alongside ours.

A recent story via Forbes.com tells how some of today’s self-made billionaires, such as George Soros, Sandy Weill, J. K. Rowling, and Oprah Winfrey, built their successes from very small beginnings.

Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford’s Engineering School, illustrates two “weird ideas that work”. This presentation is based on his book Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation, of which a preview is available here.

A great story of international entrepreneurship: At Risky Business, Matt Bandyk writes about how one entrepreneur used his time working in China after college to establish connections with Chinese artists. Back in the United States, he founded Photolimn, a service that lets customers submit their favorite photographs online and have them transformed into paintings by Chinese artists.

How much do you know about entrepreneurship? Take this quiz to find out. It was developed by Scott Shane, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, and based on his recent book The Illusions of Entrepreneurship. Shane gives a quick overview of the Top 10 myths here.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page offer an inside look into Google search patterns and their strategies to motivate employees and increase innovation.

In the journal Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, an essay by R. Duane Ireland, Laszlo Tihanyi, and Justin W. Webb examines the continuing challenges of developing an entrepreneurial culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Here is the abstract:

“Following the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, Central and Eastern European countries initiated attempts to adopt capitalist economic frameworks and promote entrepreneurship. However, persistent economic difficulties and high levels of unemployment have led to dissatisfaction with political parties favoring capitalism. We integrate identity, institutional, and social movement theories to describe the emergence of four competing social movements (capitalist democracy, socialist command, social democracy, and populist command) that are undertaken to pursue politico-economic reforms. We discuss the implications for developing an entrepreneurial culture in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Donald McFetridge, in an April 2008 report (PDF) for Canada’s Institute for Research on Public Policy, offers a series of analyses and reflections upon Canada’s relative sluggishness in innovation.

The increasing popularity of social media such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter sparks an interesting discussion at Small Business Trends over whether businesses should take advantage of them for marketing purposes or whether their use would do more harm than good. And over at Fast Company, Stanford professor B.J. Fogg explains why Facebook is “the most powerful tool in human history.”

When firms go IPO, should the founding CEO stay on or should a new CEO be brought on? In the Journal of Business Venturing, Bharat A. Jain and Filiz Tabak look at the factors involved.

Here is the abstract: “Despite the innate advantage founder CEOs have by virtue of their founding vision, organizational influence, positive image, and ownership stakes to lead their firms at their initial public offering (IPO), extant empirical evidence indicates that between a third to half of IPO firms go public with non-founder CEOs at the helm. Relatively little however, is known regarding factors that influence the choice of founder versus non-founder CEO for firms issuing IPOs. This study examines the impact of factors such as founder characteristics, size of founding team, governance structure, ownership structure, top management team independence, venture capitalist influence, and the demand for equity financing on the probability of founder CEO at IPO.”