This evening, Barack Obama will deliver his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination at Denver’s Invesco Field to a roaring crowd of 75,000. Not since John F. Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960 has a candidate stepped outside the convention venue to address the masses. It’s daring, it’s confident, but is it also risky? After all, it’s a grand and wildly expensive stage upon which Obama hopes to portray himself as a man of the people, so you can expect to hear some grumbling.

I’m betting that you won’t hear many complaints from his younger supporters, though. GenY is highly communal; they want to feel that they’re part of something big and the more like-minded people they can gather around them, the happier they are. Take note: Obama’s Facebook page now has over 1.4 million supporters (compared to McCain’s 226,000); on the official campaign website my.BarackObama.com, the largest single group is Students for Barack Obama. Let’s face it the guy’s a rock star.

But there’s something else going on here as well. Obama’s speech in Denver will resonate with young voters because the very grandeur of it will touch a cord of what Newsweek’s Jon Alter calls “imaginative nostalgia” for the days of JFK and Martin Luther King. “This longing for an emotion they never experienced, but feel they missed, is part of what brings them out in such numbers at [Obama’s] events,” Alter wrote in a recent column. “Having come of age in the '70s, '80s or '90s, they see Obama not only as a ticket to the future, but a means of transporting them across the years to a mythic past, where politics could be a force for good.” But Obama’s challenge tonight will be to convince voters – young and old alike – that they’re not just voting for the mythic past that his extraordinarily well-branded image invokes, but for a future that GenY’s children might also look back upon with imaginative nostalgia. Will he succeed? Weigh in tomorrow.

Over the past few months, I’ve been in touch with Becky Oliphant, a professor of marketing at Stetson University in Deland, FL, who takes a very hands-on approach to teaching her MBA students about business, much to the advantage of local companies. In the spring, for instance, Oliphant’s students helped develop a marketing plan and SWOT analysis for a local business called Complete Parachute Solutions – a $33 million company that supplies government agencies with parachutes. You can read more about that in this NYT story.

And this summer, Oliphant took 27 international marketing students on two, two-week trips to Europe (Italy, Austria, and Germany) to visit companies like BMW, Swarovski, Riedel, and a small bicycle tour and rental company called Mike’s Bike Tours, owned by American expat Mike Lasher. Among the students’ suggestions to Lasher: add local advertising to each bicycle; begin using Google AdWords; start doing a night tour that includes a pub crawl; create and sell more branded paraphernalia. It’ll be interesting to see what advice he takes to heart.

To me, this sounds like a great way to spend a summer vacation – not just for the students, but for the business owners who host them and receive the benefit of their youthful perspective. I wonder how many other colleges and universities send out teams of student consultants to both local and international companies and what kind of impact the student suggestions have had. Share your stories with me, please!

An interesting footnote: While they were touring Europe, Oliphant challenged her students to be on the lookout for the “made in China” label as they shopped. “It was not until the next to last day in the trip that someone found batteries in a grocery store that said ‘Made in China,’” says Oliphant. “Most clothing and souviners were made in Germany, Austria, Italy or Switzerland. The people of these countries support their own manufacterers even if items are priced a little higher.” Hmm. The last time I visited a souvenir shop near Times Square, I had an equally hard time finding items that weren’t made in China. Food for thought.

I recently had an interesting conversation with Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School, and the author of an HBS case study on Threadless, which Max Chafkin wrote about in our June issue. I continue to be fascinated by the subject of community/user innovation since it’s a topic I’m covering in my book, and one that I think is especially relevant to Generation Y entrepreneurs. “Gen Y has grown up with IM, Facebook, MySpace, and all these platforms, so it’s a natural thing for them to think about business models that involve community, “ says Lakhani. “In my generation, GenX, the geeks have been doing it for a long time. The mental switch for Gen Y is that we can leverage communities for a range of economic opportunity. You see a lot of experimentation. They’re just trying to get a community going and then they figure out the business.”

That seems to be Ben Kaufman’s approach to Kluster (see Democratizing Innovation) -- a venture that’s fun and instructive to watch for anyone interested in this topic, since there’s lots of experimenting going on. Kluster’s first project, Knewsroom, a community-created online newspaper, folded after just 38 days. “We realized that to make this work, there needed to be an editing process and as soon as you do that, it becomes too complicated. We watched it, tweaked it and made the decision that it was not for us.” So Kaufman killed Knewsroom unsentimentally at around the same time he launched NameThis.com, where you can pay $99 for the community (about 11,000 strong but growing) to christen your new product or service with a new name. $80 of the $99 goes to community members who contribute ideas. So far, the company seems to be getting some traction, as does the other element of Kaufman’s business model: selling customized and subscription-based versions of the Kluster platform to companies that will use it for internal reward-driven idea generation and problem solving.

Another new company that’s worth watching is Local Motors, an “automotive 3.0 company” that will use an open source platform to design innovative, fuel efficient cars, to be manufactured in local “micro-factories” that will also sell and service the cars. Like Threadless, it’s both a collaborative design community and a social network. Weekly design contests pay out $1500 to winners; if a car is actually built, the designer gets $10,000. In addition to “cool car” appeal, the company makes lofty promises: greener automobiles; and local economic growth through the creation of small manufacturing facilities. Take that, GM.

It seems to me that while companies like Threadless, Kluster and Local Motors do have the potential to be industry disrupters; it’s really the process of user innovation that I find more interesting than the result. It’s messy, unpredictable, and demands that you throw yourself into experimental mode, and declare yourself willing to fail. In the meantime, though, you’ve succeeded in assembling an engaged global community of members who talk to and collaborate with one another under your watchful eye, and who just may generate the spark for your next great success.

How much chutzpah is too much chutzpah? Somehow, I doubt it’s a question that Jake Sasseville has ever asked himself. Sasseville is the 22-year-old producer of The Edge with Jake Sasseville, a Manhattan-based late night talk show that debuted last February on 39 ABC affiliates right after Jimmy Kimmel Live. If you want to know how a kid from Maine muscled his way onto late night TV, watch the show here, because that’s what The Edge is basically about – it’s a show within a show, where viewers not only watch Sasseville interview celebs like Katrina Bowden of 30 Rock, but also witness his struggle to keep his fledgling show on the air by cajoling sponsors like Overstock.com to give him an advance of $30,000 so that he can make payroll (they did, btw). Companies like Overstock, Ford, Bed Head, Denny’s, and Air Tran like Sasseville because his whacky and unscripted show speaks to a large and important demographic – 19 to 30-year-olds – and because he integrates sponsors into The Edge in a way that’s, well, edgy.

Now, he’s set his sights on State Farm as a potential sponsor, but there’s just one problem: the suits in Bloomington, IL are reluctant to open their hearts and their wallets. So how far do you go to land a piece of business? “I don’t like being told no, so I wanted to get in their back yard and gently bang on their door,” says Sasseville. So he went to Bloomington a couple of weeks ago, talked his way into co-hosting a local early morning show, HOI News Daybreak, and announced on air Tuesday that he was holding an open casting call for a new character on his show: State Farm Dude (or possibly Dudette). Think Rupert Jee on Letterman.

Yesterday, he was back on the morning show with clips of the auditions. So what was State Farm’s reaction? Sasseville hasn’t heard from them yet, but he’s optimistic. Earlier this week, before the broadcast, State Farm execs who had heard the buzz about his upcoming on-air appearance, agreed to hear his pitch. “I think I dealt with all their objections,” says Sasseville. And that included an offer to cast an actual State Farm agent as State Farm Dude. So will Sasseville’s antics pay off? Will State Farm Dude play a major role in season two of The Edge? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, though, what’s your take on how much chutzpah is too much chutzpah? What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done to land a new piece of business, and was it successful, or did it backfire?

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to Sean Rush, the relatively new president and CEO of Junior Achievement Worldwide, an organization that focuses on teaching kids workforce skills, the basics of entrepreneurship, and financial literacy.

A few months ago, Rush sat in a classroom of fourth graders and watched JA’s curriculum in action. Here’s what he saw: “They divided the class of 30 students into six groups of five each and they gave each kid three or four different pieces of candy. Then the teacher asked them to optimize the candy distribution within the groups, so they had to negotiate among themselves. And they kept track of the distribution on a projected computer screen. Then they began to optimize across groups, with each group representing a country, and those results went up on the screen as well.” What followed was a discussion about international trade and open markets. “Where does China get its bananas? From Latin America. It pays for the bananas with cash. Where does China get the cash? China manufactures goods that are sold in the U.S., for which China gets cash to buy bananas from Latin America.”

That’s right, China. Rush was sitting in the back of a classroom in Beijing with a translator, and what struck him most was that “I could have been in Grand Rapids, or Johannesburg or Moscow and seen the same curriculum played out. I was blown away by the commonality. These kids absolutely got it. They began to understand at a very basic level where things come from, and it had nothing to do with politics or ideology.” JA now serves 4 million kids in the U.S. and 4.5 million in 118 other countries, including 600,000 Russian students. And all JA curriculum is taught by 400,000 business volunteers, some of whom stay connected to students as mentors or advisors.

Creating a new generation of entrepreneurial, financially literate, globally minded kids who understand the delicate balance of economic interdependence of nations probably won’t cure all of the world’s ills. But it seems to me that it’s an awfully good place to start.

One of themes I talk about at length in my first book, Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack (Collins, 2005), is reinvention. A CEO with Alpha Dog aspirations must regularly examine not only the company’s position in the marketplace, but the internal operational structure that supports revenue growth. If he/she attends to the former but not the latter, the result is a company that grows, but doesn’t grow up, and that’s a recipe for disaster. It always strikes me how tricky this dance can be for even the most seasoned entrepreneurs. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve visited plenty of $5-$10 million companies (and some that are much bigger) that seem operationally stuck in the start-up phase. Why? Because growing revenue is really, really fun; creating systems and procedures really, really isn’t. The result: cash flow suffers; customers are poorly served; employees have no idea what’s expected of them; vendors lose faith.

It strikes me that young entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to the “growth without maturity” problem. If they’re savvy, they recognize what’s going on before it’s too late and they do something smart, like hire seasoned managers, reach out to mentors or perhaps even sell their companies. That’s what Josh Kowitt and Scott Neuberger did. The co-founders of Boston-based College Boxes (and #23 and #24 on Inc.com’s 2006 list of 30 Under 30: America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs), sold their company in January to Store to Door, a mobile self-storage company that had been a trusted College Boxes vendor for years.

For Kowitt, who I caught up a few days ago, the final straw came last September, when operational snafus had him sleeping on sofas in a New York City warehouse for six weeks because the company had not properly tracked the boxes that its customers had mailed home from college. “I was digging through boxes all day,” he says. “I lost 15 pounds. We had grown very quickly and we didn’t keep up on the operational side. I think we kink of lost our way and we didn’t deliver on our promise. We had moved into a fancy office in downtown Boston and I think that was the beginning of the end. Instead of spending money on rent, we should have spent it on bar code tracking.” The company’s systems are back on track now and Kowitt, who is leaving College Boxes in a few weeks to backpack around Asia, plans on starting another company within the next few months. Next time, he won’t just grow his company; he’ll also make sure it grows up.

What do you think? Do young entrepreneurs have more trouble scaling their companies than their older counterparts, or is there a little Peter Pan in every entrepreneur?

I loved Max Chafkin’s story on Threadless in our June issue. The Chicago-based online t-shirt company produces garments that are designed by a community of over 700,000 registered users who function as a social network cum design team. Users submit their ideas, the online community votes for its favorites, and the winners are put into limited production. Winning designers are paid $2500; win the weekly contest several times and you just might land a job at Threadless.

The co-founder of this $30ish million company, 27-year-old Jake Nickell is a modest guy; you won’t find him boasting that he’s on the cutting edge of a trend. But he is, and it’s one that I believe is distinctly GenY-related. I think this generation craves intimate relationships with the companies it does business with, and so the idea of having an impact on what a company produces and sells – and getting paid for your input – is very appealing. I’m willing to bet that a majority of Threadless customers are in their twenties or younger.

As Max points out, big companies like Pitney Bowes and Ford, are just beginning to experiment with user innovation, also called crowdsourcing, and they're applying it not just to product development, but also to problem-solving. I think we’ll see more of this as companies get up to speed on how to create, engage, and leverage online communities. I’m also keeping an eye out for startups whose business models are similar to Threadless because I suspect we’ll see an increase in those as well.

Take a look, for instance, at Knewsroom, a community-driven online daily newspaper just launched by 21-year-old Ben Kaufman, who was #1 on Inc.com’s list of 30 Under 30: America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs last year. Kaufman sold his Mophie brand of iPod accessories shortly after I wrote about him and created a new company called Kluster which he launched at TED earlier this year. His goal is to start several community-driven businesses over the next several months under the Kluster brand. Knewsroom, which has been up and running just a few days, empowers its community to suggest news topics for coverage, contribute content, and invest in favorite stories using Knewsroom’s special currency called watts, which accumulate the more a user contributes to the site. Investing in stories that actually get published on the site earns you more watts, plus a cut of the ad revenue generated that day. Your take is loaded onto a Knewsroom MasterCard. “We’ve paid out over $5,000 in the last eight days,” says Kaufman.

So what do you think of this phenomenon? Are companies that use crowdsourcing opening the door to great ideas and rich content, or are they destined to spend precious time and resources separating the wheat from the chaf? Do you know of other mature companies that have mastered the art of crowdsourcing, or startup companies that are using it as an integral part of their business model?

Generation Y’s indifference to traditional forms of marketing and advertising has some big companies and their ad agencies scrambling for creative ways to reach and engage this demographic. “We were born digital,” says 23-year-old Josh Spear, a Manhattan-based blogger turned digital marketing savant. “And so we have certain expectations as consumers in the way a brand moves in that space.” Spear founded a company called Undercurrent, and big firms pay him handsomely to advise them on how to market to Gen Y. One of his recent projects – the digital marketing element of a BMW “mockumentary” called The Ramp – may have you scratching your head and muttering under your breath, but I think it’s a glimpse into the future of Web marketing.

The 35-minute film, which lives only online, chronicles the story of Rampenfest, an event (that never happened) conceived and orchestrated by marketing genius Franz Brendl (not a real guy), who builds a gigantic wooden ramp (digitally concocted) from which to launch the BMW One Series (an actual car!) from the Bavarian town of Oberpfaffelbachen (doesn’t exist) to the U.S. It’s all a spoof cooked up by Scott Brewer and Ryan Carroll at BMW’s ad agency, Austin-based GSD&M, to get the relatively economically-priced One Series on GenY’s radar screen. Once the film was in the can, the two realized they need help making it come to life online. Enter Spear and his team at Undercurrent. To build buzz before BMW’s March launch, Undercurrent created a blog for The Ramp’s “filmmaker”, Jeff Schultz, an actor. More teasers followed, including trailers on YouTube and a Rampenfest fan page on Facebook. Closer to the March launch, GSD&M built micro websites for the characters and businesses in the film, including a site for the mythical town of Oberpfaffelbachen, a Facebook page for Franz Brendl, and a store selling Rampenfest souvenirs on Café Press. The result: within the first two weeks of the launch, 1.2 million people had been exposed to some element of the campaign. It’s worth noting that BMW isn’t even mentioned until six to seven minutes into the film.

It seems to me that the campaign is less about the actual product than it is about delivering a specific message to a target market: we understand what gets your attention, so we’re going to plant our brand where you live, give you fun stuff to look at and play around with online, and we’re going to facilitate an ongoing conversation that will engage you far longer and more intimately than a 30-second television commercial.

So what do you think about this type of marketing? Will it ultimately sell cars? The jury’s still out, of course. But in the meantime, you might want to grab a glass of Liebfraumilch and watch The Ramp.

The Center for Information on Civic Learning and Engagement (Circle) reports that “at least 20 percent of eligible Indiana citizens and 15 percent of North Carolina citizens under the age of 30 participated in last night’s Democratic primary.” Obama was the big winner among these voters: 74% voted for him in North Carolina and 62% supported him in Indiana. But how many young voters were turned away from the polls in Indiana yesterday because of that state’s ridiculously restrictive photo ID law, which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court? Given Senator Clinton’s narrow margin of victory, I wonder how the evening would have ended if everyone with a Constitutional right to vote had been allowed to do so!

Remember when it was de rigueur to characterize Generation Y as apathetic and politically ignorant? Not anymore. 44 million of them (21% of the U.S. voting population) will be eligible to vote next November and there’s strong evidence that they’ll head to polls in droves.

According to research from the Center for Information on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) and Rock the Vote, steady declines in the youth vote began to turn around in 2004 and 2006, when turnout among that age group spiked 9% in the general election and 3% in the midterms compared to four years prior. That’s more than double and triple the increased turnout rates among voters in other age groups. CIRCLE also reports equally dramatic increases in the youth vote in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries and in at least seven of the Super Tuesday states. So, yes, Gen Y is doing more than just adding their names to supporters lists on the candidates’ Facebook pages; they’re out there pulling the levers.

I’ll be visiting the CIRCLE website frequently to keep an eye on youth voting numbers as the contests continue. And, just for fun, I’m checking out those Facebook pages as well. Supporter tallies as of this morning: Obama: 797,858; Clinton: 151,823; McCain: 118,992.

Lastly, if you’re still on the fence about who you’re voting for in November, I’ve come across two websites that are designed to help you choose. Both were started by Gen Y entrepreneurs. VoteGopher.com compares the candidates on a variety of issues and provides succinct summaries of their positions; and Glassbooth.org quizzes you about your positions on a number of hot topics then tells you which candidate is most closely aligned with your views. The results might surprise you! BTW, I first learned about Glassbooth.com on one of my new favorite blogs about young entrepreneurs, CollegeMogul.com.