A startup accelerator is an opportunity to dramatically increase your network, gain expert advice and mentorship, grow your team, meet with investors and much more. Just applying to an accelerator can improve your startup by challenging you to rethink and articulate your goals – some accelerators even provide expert feedback to entrants who aren’t accepted.

Here are some quick tips to consider when applying to an accelerator:

Boil down your pitch to your startup’s core. An accelerator application and pitch is excellent preparation for development. If you ever want to hire team members or raise any funding, you’ll need a pitch that is concise and simple – think tweetable. Don’t muddy the waters with speculation and projections. Stick to the core problem and your proposed solution.

Ohio State University and Ohio University have teamed up to create a $35 million venture-capital fund to turn campus research discoveries into products and jobs.

“Universities — with our depth of research expertise, creative faculty, business capabilities and eager, well-prepared students — are uniquely positioned to help innovative companies grow and succeed,” OSU President E. Gordon Gee said yesterday at a news conference announcing the fund.

Research, science and technology parks are catalysts for job creation. As communities look for ways to create jobs and drive economic growth, many are finding innovation to be a key element.

“University research parks are having a major impact on their communities – by creating high-wage jobs,” said Kevin Byrne, AURP President and the Chief Operating Officer of the University Financing Foundation.

One example of this is the Purdue Research Park Network. According to a recent economic impact study, the park network is responsible for a $1.3 billion annual impact for the State of Indiana and “more than 4,000 high-tech, high-quality jobs paying an average annual salary of $63,000 – 65 percent higher than the Indiana average.”

In our industry, it’s not uncommon for entrepreneurs to become so mono-focused on the novelty of product innovation that they forget to innovate equally around their business model.

In my estimation, a disruptive business model is at least as important as disruptive technology.

As an investor, the perfect scenario for me is a disruptive technology wrapped in a disruptive business model, targeting a new market opportunity or underserved target segment. That’s the perfect storm.

For the owners of Laloo’s ice cream company in Petaluma, Calif., business was sweet in early 2011. The five-year-old company had recently secured a major customer in Whole Foods, giving Laloo’s a chance to become one of the country’s few nationwide boutique ice cream brands.

There was just one problem: Laloo’s makes its ice cream with goat milk, and goats produce less milk in spring time — which also happens to be when grocery stores order inventory for the summer ice-cream season.

California last year attracted more venture capital than any other state, pulling in almost five times as much money as No. 2-ranked Massachusetts.

A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Assn. said that California received more than half of the country's $28 billion in 2011 venture capital investments.

The report was cited Thursday in a blog posted by Dennis Meyers, the principal economist of the California Department of Finance.

For scientists pursuing careers in biotech, clusters of life science-related companies and research institutions in the eastern United States may be a promising place to look for jobs. These so-called bioclusters have a 30-year history in the region and, in recent years, have seen an uptick in active support from academic institutions and state and local governments. We focus on three leaders in the region, the bioclusters in Massachusetts, Maryland/Washington, DC, and North Carolina. By Shawna Williams

Bioclusters have their roots in a pair of 1980 government decisions, explains Peter Abair, head of economic development and global affairs at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, an industry group. One of these, the Bayh-Dole Act, for the first time allowed discoveries made with federal dollars to be licensed for commercial purposes. The other was a Supreme Court decision that DNA could be patented.

Startups and investors call me when they’re having founding team issues. It’s no surprise given the health of the two founding teams in which I’ve been a part.

Founding Team 1.0: Khalid Shaikh, Amir Shaikh, and I started YouSendIt in 2004. I stayed on and built the company for 6.5 years and am still on the board. The business had $39 million in revenue in 2011. Amir was fired by the board and Khalid is awaiting sentencing for launching a denial of service attack against YouSendIt.com.

At press time, about 60 percent of The United Inventors Association of America members were 50 or older, estimates executive director Mark Reyland, and overall membership had grown 243 percent in a little over a year. “Older adults have more experience, plus the insight and persistence to get a product to market,” says Jeffrey Dobkin, president of Philadelphia’s American Society of Inventors and author of How to Market a Product for Under $500! You can make money, but don’t expect to get rich.

Britain launched on Thursday a £20 million (€24 million) contest to support up to two pilot wave energy projects, as the government hopes to scale up the clean technology to power more homes and businesses and curb carbon emissions.

Marine power has the potential to provide up to 20% of current electricity demand in the United Kingdom, as well as help the country reach its climate targets and support thousands of jobs, the Department of Energy and Climate Change said.

"This scheme will help move marine power to the next stage of development, the demonstration of a number of wave and tidal devices in array formation out at sea," Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker said in a statement.

Most people, when they put their mind to it, can come up with a wacky or novel idea, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they have the ability to be consistently creative. In fact, is consistent creativity really possible?

Being creative requires far more than original thinking.

Being creative means that your idea needs to be able to be executed and produced. It needs to engage, be humanly relevant and ultimately drive the response that’s expected of it.

Stanford junior Aditya “Adi” Singh had a problem. Struggling to form effective teams to work on projects, and weary of being approached by fellow students mainly searching for a technical “code monkey,” Singh wanted something different.

“There was no platform where students could gather teams effectively,” Singh said. “At social gatherings, people are under such social pressures to put the best foot forward, it can cause people to be misleading, sometimes even verging on lies.”

So Singh and fellow classmate Pukar Hamal began developing farmGeni.us, a platform for connecting members of the Stanford community who have specialized skills.

When thinking of tech hubs, Africa doesn’t exactly spring to mind. But the continent has had some amazing spurts of open innovation, with 45 collaborative hubs now open.

Africa faces some hurdles in developing information technology. Even though global Internet penetration is about 32%, it’s lower in Africa, where only around 11% of the population have access to the Internet through a computer or mobile phone. Within the continent, too, there are enormous divides. While a country like Nigeria has 28% of its population online, Ethiopia has less than 1%. But all that is changing: Internet usage in Africa has grown faster than on any other continent over the past decade.

Companies spend billions each year to get young consumers on board with their brands.

Some are purely marketed towards children and will be abandoned once the kids get older. Others try to gain valuable lifelong customers by getting them hooked early.

So which brands do kids cherish the most?

Harris Interactive recently released the results of its Youth EquiTrend study, which determines which brands "spark the strongest recognition and loyalty" in the youth market (defined as 8-24 year olds, though age ranges vary per category).

Wharton isn't satisfied with how its brand is perceived, because it thinks that all the top 20 business schools are far too similar, reports Melissa Korn at the Wall Street Journal. So, it's making some changes to focus its brand around a single word.

Knowledge.

Everything will be built around the promise of knowledge. Wharton's blog, for instance, is already called Knowledge@Wharton. Its new tagline is "Knowledge for ... ," which will be completed with a variety of words like "life" and "action."

Google’s mission to collect all of the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful has been placed under the veritable microscope with the introduction of Glass

In December last year news broke via Mashable and 9to5Google that Google was working on a “top secret” eyewear project in Google X: its clandestine lab of experimentation famously spearheaded by uber-geek and co-founder Sergey Brin. Sceptics might have thought this was the early emergence of one of Google’s fabled April Fools’ jokes but yesterday’s Google+ page posting of the project confirms what might be the biggest hardware coup since the iPad — Google is going bifocal.

Sustainability may still not be on the top of everyone’s priority list, but those who do take green action get results, and big ones. Chris Sherwin, Head of Sustainability at Seymourpowell, shares his reaction to this year’s Fast Company 50, where a few pleasantly surprising sustainability innovators could be found among the trend setters.

COMMENTARY There's no magic formula for coming up with the next big thing, and there's no shortage of people trying. Luckily, there doesn't appear to be any shortage of demand for innovative ideas and products.

Having been around entrepreneurs, startups, and innovative companies my entire career, I've seen quite a few methods that seek to foster innovation. Here are eight "innovation catalysts" that really work:

Standing on the shoulders of giants. Innovators often elevate others' ideas into products people can use. There's a device called a ScareCrow that detects pesky animals like birds or rodents and shoots water at them. It's actually a motion sensor combined with an impulse sprinkler. It works, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's ingenious because there's nothing new; it's just two inventions used together in a unique way.

Working at a startup is not a typical 9-5 — it’s a lifestyle. If the following resonates with you, then there’s a high probability that you work at a startup … or wish you did.

You can’t do anything without wondering if it was user-tested. When ordering from an unnecessarily complicated menu, you make a snide comment about it not being tested on users. The consoles for keeping score when bowling and playing songs at karaoke leaves your heart throbbing for the user testing that could have been. You want to stop and do guerrilla improvements on all machines. Don’t even get you started on the vending machine!

As I explained in the first post in this series, the AIA replaces the “first-to-invent” system with what is commonly called a “first-to-file” system. The first-to-file rules will apply to patent applications with an effective filing date of March 16, 2013 or later.

There has been much dispute over whether this shift will benefit American innovation over the long term. However, when it comes to the issue of intellectual property (IP) security, the verdict is already in: The first-to-file system increases the risk of invention theft.