My partner Albert shared this line on his blog almost five years ago now.  I find myself using it all the time. And it is an important lesson that I have learned in my career.

When something goes badly in your company, for many the initial instinct is to keep things under wraps as much as possible to avoid freaking everyone out. I would argue that it is better to acknowledge the crisis and use it to your advantage.

Schools in Europe will be able to benchmark their students’ proficiency in reading, maths and science against the world’s top education systems using a new tool being administered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD has developed the new tool based on its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to help individual schools benchmark their students.

The tool, intended for assessing 15-year old youngsters, will give teachers a more complete picture of student performance and attitudes than normal tests allow so that they can work out the best way to improve results.

I love this quote because it sums up the tug-of-war between creativity and the practicalities of running a business. In the advertising and design sector, guess which side usually falls over? Many agencies perpetuate the feast or famine nature of their operations, hitting the business development accelerator only when work is desperately needed and ceasing all sales activity the minute it gets busy.

This paper assesses the potential of the newly introduced Patent Box to boost UK innovation. While we are optimistic about the promise of additional public resources in this area, we have very significant concerns that a Patent Box might not offer as high returns as more targeted investments.

It is hoped that the Patent Box will encourage more UK firms to invest in innovation, will encourage international companies to locate their innovation activities in the UK and to domicile valuable patents in the UK for tax purposes. Unfortunately, there is limited evidence that these effects will work in practice. There is a real risk that the Patent Box could have a negative net impact on tax income from patents. Perhaps of greater significance however, the Patent Box may create distortions in our economy which skew investment away from the most productive areas of our economy, excessively towards patent intensive industries, formal IP arrangements, large firms and away from service-based business models in technology industries. This should be cause for concern since these are areas where we need to be looking to improve the offer of our intellectual property regime, a major area of further research for the Big Innovation Centre in 2013

The first article of the series focused on the identification of innovation ecosystems. This second part focuses on technology evolution (technology roadmapping) and the identification of value within the product segments and architectures (value chain).

Technology Roadmaps

A high level roadmap identifies key strategic issues in a single page representation of technologies within an industry or sub-segment. It identifies key market drivers and mega trends, technology maturity, from first application and obsolescence. It can also assess the potential risk/reward profile of each technology all mapped in a 10-15 year timeline.

It’s no secret that anchor customers – market-leading companies that provide the first substantial orders for a new product or start-up – are crucial to the success of small businesses. In an earlier post, I discussed that because of their status as market leaders these anchor customers can establish the credibility new products or companies need to trigger additional purchases. But there’s a flipside to the story, as well: Becoming an anchor customer has obvious benefits for large companies.

Anchor customers often are significant value chain participants, such as large material suppliers, or original equipment manufacturers with a major position in a particular market. They can provide small businesses with strategic partnerships, substantial sales revenue, and access to channel or equity investments. They will often launch a period of rapid growth in these small business partners.

Idea Champions is a consulting and training company specializing in creativity, innovation, team building, leadership and out of the box products. Since 1986, we've been helping forward thinking organizations unleash their collective brilliance and achieve extraordinary results. Our work, however, goes well beyond getting people out of the box. Beyond brainstorming. Beyond ideas. Beyond the fuzzy front end of the corporate innovation process. What we do, ultimately, is help our clients establish humane, inclusive, sustainable cultures of innovation - the kinds of environments that become fertile ground for the natural expression of creativity, collaboration, commitment and uncommon success.

This week’s Mobile Summit, organized by VentureBeat and held at the Cavallo Point resort just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, brought about 200 industry executives together for deep discussions of the mobile technology market.

The event featured a number of boardroom sessions with 20 or so people apiece, focused on intensive conversations around the Summit’s main themes.

Developers have a reputation.

The word “developer” evokes an image that has become synonymous with someone that writes code. As someone who codes, I am well aware of the most common images and words that people think of when they learn that, yes, I am a developer.

However evolving, these reputations have followed many developers into their day job, and employers end up benefiting solely from the skills that their coders brought to new hire orientation.

Working in the online world is all about multitasking. Whether you’re a developer, an entrepreneur, a marketer, or a biz dev hustler, you always have about five tasks and a Twitter feed to keep an eye on. And with your smartphone buzzing away in your hand and notifications for every imaginable service constantly streaming into view, the ability to multitask is only becoming more valuable.

But are you really cut out for multitasking, or are you out of your element when you can’t focus on one thing at a time?

There are three purposes of reverse-engineering the brain. One is to do a better job of fixing it and because that's a business opportunity. Being able to master the information processes underlying biology, which includes the brain but actually includes the body also, is enormous opportunity.

We're going to transform this multi-trillion dollar health and medicine industry with these techniques.  Perhaps even more important, we're going to have an eye that really works well. Consider that Watson was actually able to read Wikipedia and understand it well enough to play a game of Jeopardy!, which is a complex, subtle, ambiguous game of language and got a higher score than the best players put together.

Throughout my career I’ve been surprised. Perhaps the most amazing surprise to me was actually one that I ultimately proposed but it defied everything I'd thought before. And that is this amazing result that empty space has energy.

It is so weird to think that you can get rid of all the particles and all the radiation in space and it still weighs something.  It seems crazy.  And when I was a graduate student, we were all certain that the energy of empty space was zero.  And ultimately we were dragged - in fact, I was dragged, kicking and screaming by the observations - to propose this incredibly crazy idea that empty space has energy.

Is this the end of days for iron-clad prenuptials between Purdue University and its researchers?

Top leaders — along with the university’s newest organization aimed at commercializing research — seem determined to get rid of the stigma that Purdue does more to hurt than help researchers cross the “valley of death,” the precarious stage before innovation hits the market as a tangible object or service.

Over the past 10 years or so, many organizations have recognized the conceptual value of data and have started recording and retaining more and more of it. But after doing this for a while, they’re asking, “What the heck do we do with it?”

Google, Netflix, and other big companies have taught us that data is valuable for insights that can be obtained from it, so others have started exploring their own data and want to do more with it. Some companies have been doing this in a way that sets no expectation as to what can be learned from it.

After a particularly down day, my husband turned to me and said, “You know what? You are your own worst enemy.”

How many times have you heard or thought that yourself?  Usually, this phrase comes up when you’re being a little too critical or hard on yourself.  But did you ever consider that this is actually true?  I don’t mean figuratively, I mean literally true.

We all know that our brains and our evolutionary wiring hasn’t quite kept pace with our culture or environment. Our brains still act as if we’re in the stone age; hunting and gathering and running from saber-tooth tigers, while the biggest threat we face in the Western world is a long line at the Starbuck’s that might make us late for our next meeting.

When my daughter was a teenager, about a dozen years ago, she went through a vegetarian phase. Back then, the payoff for orthodontist visits was a trip to Taco Bell, where the only thing we could eat were bean burritos and tacos. It wasn’t my favorite meal, but the mushy beans in that soft tortilla or crisp shell were kind of soothing, and the sweet “hot” sauce made the experience decent enough. I usually polished off two or three.

The next time somebody reminds you, yet again, that more than half of the country's population is under 25, mention this number to them: 10 crore. That's 10 times the population of Sweden. It's also the number of people in India above the age of 60.

Such a 'market', although not as palpable as those for gadgets, gizmos and Gucci, throws up attractive opportunities for entrepreneurship as well as billion dollar corporations keen to wear their conscience on their sleeves. And, sure enough, a number of private sector firms and non-governmental organisations have jumped into the fray, with either good intentions or profit or both as the drivers.

The University of Kansas will be well-represented at one of the nation’s most exclusive venture capital events.

Two KU technologies will be featured at the annual University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium, a showcase of the most promising university-based inventions for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, which will be Wednesday, April 3, in Cambridge, Mass.

A number of our major business successes are not from outsiders bringing offices to North Dakota, but rather North Dakotans building business success around innovation, creating viable and valuable ventures in agriculture, energy, manufacturing and technology. These businesses include MDU Resources, Basin Electric, Bobcat and Acme Electric, among others.

Our work ethic is second to none, and businesses here enjoy a competitive edge from our innovative workforce, stable and solvent government, fair tax and regulatory climate and overall positive business environment.

My big insight about innovation these days would make Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, proud.

"Now that we have met with paradox," explained Dr. Bohr, "we have some hope of making progress."

Innovation is full of it -- paradox, that is.