Sixty engineers, entrepreneurs and financiers were sipping yerba mate tea at a coffee shop down the street from a bong-and-lingerie store on a recent sunny Tuesday in Boulder, and discussing how Boulder — usually seen as an enclave of hippies, marijuana dispensaries and rock climbers — has become a hotbed of capitalism.

Experienced tech entrepreneurs and investors sat alongside people who had just moved to Boulder hoping to start a company in this small city, which is breeding tech start-ups at an attention-grabbing rate. In the first three months of the year, 11 Colorado tech start-ups raised $57 million in venture capital, solidifying Boulder’s place among the country’s up-and-coming tech centers.

THE scene in Salzburg earlier this year was one that Joseph Schumpeter, an economist obsessed with innovation, and Mr Drucker, the management expert, would surely have approved of. Several dozen government officials and academics from around the world gathered at Schloss Leopoldskron, a spectacular rococo palace located on the shores of an idyllic lake. They came not for the fresh Alpine air, hearty Austrian fare or even the hills alive with music. It was for a conference organised by the Salzburg Global Seminar, a non-government organisation, to discuss what they could do to turn their economies into innovation powerhouses.

Holding such a meeting in the heart of Europe seemed only fitting—and not just because the two great theorists of innovation both hailed from the region. After all, it was a European, France's Georges Doriot, who invented venture capital during his time teaching at Harvard. And it was another Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Say, who coined the word entrepreneur two centuries ago to describe the plucky upstart who “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”

BERKELEY seems like a fitting place to find the godfather of the open-innovation movement basking in glory. The Californian village was, after all, at the very heart of the anti-establishment movement of the 1960s and has spawned plenty of radical thinkers. One of them, Henry Chesbrough, a business professor at the University of California at Berkeley, observes with a smile that “this is the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.”

Mr Chesbrough's two books “Open Innovation” and “Open Business Models” have popularised the notion of looking for bright ideas outside of an organisation. As the concept of open innovation has become ever more fashionable, the corporate R&D lab has become decreasingly relevant. Most ideas don't come from there (see chart 4).

BUSINESS innovation in the emerging world has got to the point where all those individual advances add up to more than the sum of their parts. Just as Japan’s quality circles and just-in-time delivery were part of a new system called “lean production”, so the emerging world’s reverse innovation and frugal production are part of a new approach to management.

This new management paradigm pushes two familiar ideas beyond their previous limits: that the customer is king, and that economies of scale can produce radical reductions in unit costs. Companies are starting with the needs of some of the world’s poorest people and redesigning not just products but entire production processes to meet those needs. This can involve changing the definition of a customer to take in all sorts of people who were previously excluded from the market economy. It means cutting costs to the bone and eliminating all but the most essential features of a product or service. And it often stretches the idea of economies of scale beyond what the emerging Japanese giants of the 1970s could aspire to. Most companies in developing countries have access to large domestic markets and all of them have opportunities for mergers and acquisitions that did not exist a few decades ago.

IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.

This special report will argue that something comparable is now happening in the emerging world. Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another.

Before coming to Japan, we asked everyone we knew for advice on how to connect with the startup community in Tokyo. Every recommendation pointed at the exact same place: Open Network Lab.

Open Network Lab (“Onlab”) is a Japanese startup incubator in the same vein as Y Combinator or TechStars. The incubator provides startups with mentorship, office space, and a small amount of cash in exchange for a piece of equity. This model is popular in the United States, and leading Japanese internet company Digital Garage (investors in Twitter, Path, and more) wanted to try it in Japan. Onlab is currently in its second year of operation has incubated three batches of startups. Even though it’s a young program, they are already making an noticeable impact on the Japanese startup community.

Brad Feld articulates guiding principles for creating robust entrepreneurial communities. Based on his experience developing such a community in Boulder, Colorado, Feld explains why experienced entrepreneurs must be involved in the process of creating activities that engage the next generation.

University of California, Berkeley School of Information’s dean, AnnaLee Saxenian, often talks about a visit, in the ‘90s, by a high-level delegation from Japan. The Japanese kept asking where the government’s administrative offices were. They wanted to meet the people who did the central planning for Silicon Valley in order to learn directly from them. They couldn’t comprehend, said Saxenian, that such an authority didn’t exist -- that Silicon Valley thrives without government intervention.

People in Silicon Valley laugh when they hear these stories. But I have friends in Washington D.C. who, to this day, believe that government has a role to play in Silicon Valley-style innovation. They are mistaken, as are countries, such as Japan, that have invested billions of dollars on science parks and top-down clusters. To stimulate innovation, they have to first understand what really makes the Valley tick.

While I may have pulled several all nighters, and slept under a few desks in my day,  I am still pretty soft compared to your typical Brazilian entrepreneur. In fact, most coddled Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are wimps compared to the Brazilian founders I know.

Brazil is the first market for my start-up, Colingo, a service that helps young professionals learn English as a second language. In the process of doing market research in Brazil,  I’ve gotten to know many Brazilian entrepreneurs, and a few weeks ago I traveled to Brazil for Startup Weekend Sao Paulo  during Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Overlapping circles are a common convention for illustrating how the players in an innovation network are connected. It's a simple way to show how investors, academic researchers, private sector scientists, policymakers, and other constituents all play a role in driving science and technology progress.

But there's a reason innovation strategists often use a more complex metaphor—an ecosystem—to describe such a community. As in nature's ecosystems, no single actor in an innovation system functions in isolation. If one member is weak, everyone suffers.

For the past few months, my wife and I have been traveling and meeting startups around the world. We’ve met entrepreneurs in Tokyo, Thailand, India, Israel, and Istanbul. In the next week we’ll be meeting with a community leader in South Africa. It’s been fascinating.

In addition to meeting with the teams, we have been leading Q&A sessions with larger groups. The discussion always includes the group asking “how do we make our startup community as strong as Silicon Valley?”

It’s an important question, as a lot of the startups’ success in Silicon Valley can be attributed to the strong community. However, that community has been growing and maturing for over 40 years. So when people ask about how to replicate it, I try to direct the conversation back to the foundation of the community.

An interview with a pharmaceutical industry analyst on the BBC today illustrated a key point about patents and reminds us they are about stimulating, not rewarding, innovation.

Explaining why AstraZeneca were having difficulties that were making them plan large layoffs, the analyst talked about the “patent cliff”, and the interviewer insightfully observed that it was the motivation to continuing innovation. The “patent cliff” is the end of the 20 year monopoly on an invention. During the 20 years period, the pharmaceutical company is free to charge whatever it wants for a drug, and thus able to make enormous profits.

With each new year, budding entrepreneurs look to turn their vision into a business. These startups are often overflowing with tremendous ideas, energy and optimism — but don’t always have a roadmap for the legal aspects involved in starting a business. In the flurry of drumming up new customers, getting ready for a website launch and building the first prototype, it’s all too easy to put off some of the less glamorous, more administrative aspects of running a company.

Yes, company filings and regulations are not the most exciting parts of your startup. Yet they’re critical to the health of your business and personal finances. Here’s a quick rundown of eight administrative aspects you need to consider for your startup or small business. Of course, depending on your situation and type of business, hiring a tax accountant and/or good attorney with specific experience in your industry can go a long way toward helping you steer clear of trouble.

Over the past couple years, I have successfully launched two companies and there’s another one coming in a few months. One of our key partners is WorkBar, a Boston co-working space. In general, I feel very bullish about the co-working models and the value they bring to a young firm like ours. WorkBar saves us money on office space while providing everything we could ask for in terms of a productive environment.

From the world’s cheapest car to the world’s cheapest tablet, India has emerged as a hub of “Jugaad”, a Hindi term which closely translates as “frugal innovation”. Owing to its booming economy, growing middle class and a talent pool of highly skilled engineers, India has a thriving tech startup ecosystem. While there are thousands of startups across the country, we bring you a compilation of tech startups that have risen above the rest to be the talking points in the startup-technology community.

Based on my conversations and interactions with entrepreneurs, investors and other stakeholders, these startups are shaping the way their respective industries work. In no particular order, let’s look at startups and their offerings:

1. MobStac: “Built for a World Where Mobile is First”

MobStac makes it simple for publishers to reach their audience over mobile browsers across a wide-range of devices. MobStac’s mission is to make it possible for people to consume the internet on any mobile device on the planet by accelerating the availability of mobile Internet content and delivering it to the widest possible audience.

Venture capitalist and billionaire Peter Thiel is financing medical research that would possibly extend the human lifespan to 150 years or more.

"There are all these people who say that death is natural, it's just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth," says Thiel.

Silicon Valley billionaires are pouring money into gene research and modifications, and Sonia Arrison, author of 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, says that recently born babies could be the first generation to live to be 150 years old.

“Through clustering, the right brain has the opportunity to generate fresh perceptions and meaningful patterns” ~ Dr. Gabrielle Lusser Rico, Author of Writing the Natural Way

What if you could break up traffic with a simple gesture? Your super-power, “able to dissipate afternoon gridlock in a single bound.” How much time would that save you, knowing that you had a technique to keep the highways clear so that you never waste another moment sitting in afternoon or morning traffic?

I’m hearing more and more these days about a new type of small business, called a “micro-business” (or micro-enterprise). These are usually characterized as owner-operated, with five employees or less, and less than $250,000 in sales. With the low cost of e-commence entry, and powerful Internet technologies, they require minimal capital to start, perhaps as little as $500.

I see the potential for these to become big business in this entrepreneurial economy. According to the Voice of Microenterprise (AEO) website, if one in three micro-enterprises in the United States hired an additional employee, the US would soon be at full employment. These businesses are usually run out of the home, and range the gamut from consulting services to e-commerce.

For many years, members of Greater Washington’s business and entrepreneurial communities have asked why the region is not nationally recognized as a center of technology entrepreneurship. The question is usually prefaced with a list of the region’s many positive attributes. This setup generally leads observers to conclude that: 1) accelerated development of local entrepreneurial startups is only a matter of time, or 2) the region’s failure to fulfill its promise is attributable to some element missing from the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

If you’re interested in getting your start-up into an accelerator or incubator there’s no shortage of options. But these terms sometimes get thrown around interchangeably. Do you know the difference between the two?

I asked Paul Bricault, cofounder of Amplify, a Los Angeles-based accelerator, to define them.

“An accelerator takes single-digit chunks of equity in externally developed ideas in return for small amounts of capital and mentorship. They’re generally truncated into a three to four month program at the end of which the start-ups ‘graduate,’” he says.