Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation recently launched its first Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition. “We know that more women than ever are leading U.S. businesses and hold a nearly three-to-one majority in undergraduate and graduate education, but too few pursue the path of high-growth entrepreneurship,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president, Kauffman Foundation. “The Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition is designed to illuminate world-changing concepts that have significant commercialization potential, and to escalate their visibility so that more female scientists and engineers are encouraged to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas.”

Learn more about the competition at the Kauffman Foundation’s website.

Also, be sure to read our fascinating Kaizen interviews with two highly-educated female entrepreneurs, Reena Kapoor and Judy Estrin. Both women share their thoughts on the effect of culture on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Kaizen interviewee Reena Kapoor wrote a chapter for the recently-published book 42 Rules of Product Management: Learn the Rules of Product Management from Leading Experts from Around the World. She also posted the chapter, entitled “Be All You Can Be – Think like a General Manager!”, on her website. The article urges product managers to think more like general managers, but the methodology applies to anyone who wants to run a business. Ms. Kapoor’s theme is that one needs to learn to ask the right questions about the overall context of a product, and the process of researching and answering those questions will result in a better strategy.

Mary Mazzio is an award-winning independent filmmaker, Olympic rower, and former law firm partner with Brown Rudnick. She received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, a law degree from Georgetown University, and studied film production at Boston University. Her company, 50 Eggs, LLC, has produced five independent films shown across the United States on television, in classrooms, and in theatres. We met with Ms. Mazzio outside of Boston, Massachusetts, to explore her thoughts on entrepreneurship and the challenges and excitement of making documentaries.

Kaizen: You’ve been a lawyer, an Olympic rower, and now a documentary filmmaker. When you were young, did you have any idea your adult life would be so varied?

Mazzio: Not at all. Although as a kid I remember always having a sort of boundless enthusiasm for whatever it was that I was doing. So I always thought that good things would happen in the end but I had no idea.

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John Chisholm is the founder, former CEO and chairman of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (now part of Google), and of CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools). A 30-year veteran executive of Silicon Valley, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He chairs the MIT Club of Northern California, serves as trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, as member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, and as mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. Previously, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, one of Stanford’s twelve independent laboratories; as a member of the visiting committee of the MIT Department of Mathematics; and as vice president of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association. He is author or co-author of two patents in online polling. We met with Mr. Chisholm in the San Francisco bay area to explore his thoughts on the benefits and challenges of entrepreneurship.

Kaizen: You have founded two high-tech companies, Decisive Technology and CustomerSat. Were you technically oriented as a youth?

Chisholm: I think you would say so. I liked to take clocks apart and try to figure out how the gears and springs worked together. I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, a small town about 20 miles north of West Palm Beach. In junior high school, my best friend Al Pion and I each memorized pi to over 100 decimal places—we would recite it alternating the digits, like tossing a ball back and forth. Talk about geeky!

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Dr. Stephen Hicks, CEE’s Executive Director, talks with Dr. Jerry Kirkpatrick, a Fall 2009 CEE guest speaker, about his book, In Defense of Advertising. Dr. Kirkpatrick addresses several typical criticisms of advertising and explains why advertising is important to a healthy, productive capitalist society.

Watch Parts I & II of the interview below.

Part I:

At Small Business Trends, Anita Campbell has collected stories of business owners who found creative ways to save money while growing their businesses.

The latest issue of Kaizen features our interview with Reena Kapoor, founder of Conifer Consulting, a successful marketing company in Silicon Valley. Ms. Kapoor discusses her education in India, her on-the-job marketing training at Procter & Gamble, and gives marketing and general entrepreneurial advice to anyone considering starting a company. This issue also includes the letter from the Executive Director and more CEE-related news.

A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post online the full version of the interview with Ms. Kapoor.

If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.

Business Pundit has compiled a list of 2008′s best business blogs. The winning blogs cover, among other fields, entrepreneurship, economics, franchising, IT and technology, marketing, advertising, and leadership.

At Small Business Trends, marketing expert Ivana Taylor has twelve inexpensive ideas for marketing during the holiday season.