innovation DAILY

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The Canadian government last week revealed its Economic Action Plan 2012, which highlights its commitment to support entrepreneurs, world-class research and innovators. Citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney said: "Our government's top priority remains jobs, growth and long-term prosperity. Canada cannot afford to lose out in the competition for foreign entrepreneurs among immigrant-receiving countries." He added: "We need to proactively target a new type of immigrant entrepreneur who has the potential to build innovative companies that can compete on a global scale and create jobs for Canadians."

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has published a report arguing that the venture capital model is broken. And it lays blame not at the feet of general partners, but rather of limited partners who have continued to invest in venture capital without insisting on structural changes.

This comes, of course, just days after I revisited the whole "VC model is broken" discussion from several years back, in the wake of Sevin Rosen basically returning its entire eighth fund (on paper) from the successful Splunk IPO. So a lot of you asked for me to chime in on the Kauffman study. Or, in the words of one reader, "admit that you don't know what you're talking about."

Germany sets an example worldwide for cutting-edge technologies, innovations, and a strong workforce, from political offices to the classroom. At the “Manufacturing, Innovation, and Workforce Training: What Works in Germany and the United States for Jobs and Growth” conference to take place this Wednesday at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC, leading experts will examine approaches through which policy can further strengthen the overall competitiveness and capacity for innovation in Germany and the U.S.

United States Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Rebecca M. Blank will deliver the keynote address for the conference, providing domestic perspectives on manufacturing and commerce.

Last November, Costa Rica joined the global movement to unleash startups by celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW). The response surprised its local champions. Costa Rica´s host, Yo Emprendedor, managed to get strong support from 28 key partners from across the private, public, NGO and education sectors—including the Ministry of the Economy, the largest media group in the country and angel investors.

Students responded enthusiastically to the campaign, judging by the wide participation in GEW events. The National Business Plan Competition Yo Emprendedor, for instance, brought to light 200 startup projects for everything from specialty foods to innovative wind turbines. This means something in a country where tradition dictates that university graduates should get a ‘real’ job with either an established, national company or with one of the many multinational corporations that came to Costa Rica for its educated workforce and proximity to the United States.

Richard Florida’s interview with Jonah Lehrer over at the Atlantic Cities about “creative density” got me thinking about the work I did on “degree density” in 2010. The concept that Lehrer describes is relatively simple: lots of like minded people in close proximity to each other drives creativity because these people can bounce ideas off of each other and learn from each other.

Lehrer talks about David Bryne of the Talking Heads:

David Byrne, after all, wasn’t influenced by the Latin rhythms of some distant musician. Instead, Byrne was seduced by his local dance clubs, blasting those songs he could hear from the sidewalk. It is the sheer density of the city — the proximity of all those overlapping minds — that makes it such an inexhaustible source of creativity.

What are the signs that innovation in a company is set up to fail? Wouldn’t it be great to have a checklist on this? Unfortunately, innovation is too complicated and company-specific for one standard rule. It is possible, however, to become better at spotting the signs of failure.

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the red flags I look for when I talk with executives and innovation leaders trying to get an understanding of their corporate innovation capabilities.

1. The lack of an innovation strategy

Executives and innovation leaders have failed to link innovation with overall corporate strategy. As a result, the innovation efforts have no clear direction, and there is not the necessary mix of incremental and radical innovation. No strategy, no focused effort, no results.

The National Research Council will publicly release Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Prosperity and Security on June 14, 2012, at 11:00 am.  The release event will be held in the Lecture Room of the National Academy of Sciences building at 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20418. 

This report, a follow-up to Rising Above the Gathering Storm, examines the health and competitiveness of our nation’s research universities and their strong partnership with government and industry that is critical to the nation’s prosperity and national goals.  The report responds to a request from Congress for “the top ten actions that Congress, the federal government, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence in research and doctoral education needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century.”  

You're the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day. Here's how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic." 

Whatever that means.

Whenever I try to conjure up what innovation looks like, the same slideshow of images clicks across my mind: that photo of Einstein with his tongue sticking out, Edison with his light bulb, Steve Jobs onstage in his black turtleneck, introducing the latest iThing. Unoriginal and overdone, to be sure. And not all that accurate.

Because it’s not just about that romantic “ah ha!” moment in front of a chalkboard or a cocktail napkin, it’s about the nitty-gritty work that comes after the idea:  getting it accepted and implemented. Who are these faces? And, most importantly, as I’m sure you’re all asking yourselves: where do I fit in?

Around this time each year, career-minded college students are busy sewing-up internships for the summer months. A new study by Millennial Branding illustrates that entrepreneurial experience is in demand by nearly 1 out of three employers.

The study, conducted with Experience Inc., compiled information from 225 companies about their hiring practices.

You might assume that experience would rank at the top of employer wish lists.  But for entry-level positions that students and recent grads apply for, employers say they place a high degree of importance on so-called ‘soft skills.’  Effective communication, a positive attitude and teamwork skills ranked as important or very important to employers.

I sent a tweet out last week that resulted in some healthy debate:

“three years ago, I was telling everyone I met to start companies. These days, I’m telling everyone to think twice”

Of course, it’s not fair to give general advice like that.  But what I meant was, 3-5 years ago, when I met someone who was thinking about starting a company, my bias was one of action. Today, my bias is one of caution.

What’s changed?  Couple thoughts:

1. First, part of my perspective is just driven by my natural instincts to be counter-cultural. When there seems to be a lot of hype around an area or activity, I find myself pretty un-attracted to it.  Bill Sahlman has a wonderful chart he shows students about the trends in the industries that HBS students tend to flock to, and the subsequent performance of those industries.  When a surge of students start pursuing an area, you can almost predict that a crash is coming. I can tell you that the surge of HBS students pursuing startups right now is at a new high.

John Herb came up with a business idea while he was still in high school. So when it was time to choose a college, he looked for one that would help him develop that idea: scanning people's old photos and creating a private social network around them. Syracuse University stood out for the Syracuse Student Sandbox, a business incubator, and other resources it offers to would-be entrepreneurs. Mr. Herb just finished his freshman year there,

Little by little, Hawaii’s iconic beaches are disappearing.

Most beaches on the state’s three largest islands are eroding, and the erosion is likely to accelerate as sea levels rise, the United States Geological Survey is reporting.

Though average erosion rates are relatively low — perhaps a few inches per year — they range up to several feet per year and are highly variable from island to island and within each island, agency scientists say. The report says that over the last century, about 9 percent of the sandy coast on the islands of Hawaii, Oahu and Maui has vanished. That’s almost 14 miles of beach.

Just when you thought the employment picture for recent grads couldn’t get any worse. A report out today shows that students are increasingly having trouble landing internships — making the experience gap between recent grads and older workers even more pronounced.

Fifty percent of employers haven’t hired any interns in the past six months, according to a survey of 225 employers by the Boston-based Gen-Y consulting firm Millennial Branding, using data from career-services operator Experience Inc. The survey also shows that 91 percent of those employers think that students should have between one and two internships before they graduate.

These six factors can erode the grandest of plans and the noblest of intentions. They can turn visionaries into paper-pushers and wide-eyed dreamers into shivering, weeping balls of regret. Beware!

 1) Availability

We often settle for what’s available, and what’s available isn’t always great. “Because it was there,” is an okay reason to climb a mountain, but not a very good reason to take a job or a free sample at the supermarket.

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

You can’t succeed in business without an operational model that delivers value to customers at a reasonable price, with an underlying cost that allows you to make a profit. There are no “overrides” – for example, businesses don’t thrive just because they offer the latest technology, or because everyone wants to be “green, or because their goal is to reduce world hunger.

I expect that should seem intuitive to all entrepreneurs, but every investor I know has many stories about startup funding requests with major business model elements missing. The most common failures are solutions looking for a problem, lack of a defined market, and giving away the product.

In Mashable‘s new video series, Behind the Launch, we’re taking cameras behind the scenes at Vungle, an in-app video advertising startup. Last week, we met the the founders and saw them bring on Colin Behr to head up business development.

Now that they have a promising platform and a “closer,” it’s time to chat with investors. Silicon Valley names, such as 500 Startups‘ Dave McClure, DFJ Esprit‘s Krishna Visvanathan and AOL Ventures‘ Adam Smith, appear in this episode, as Jack and Zain court investors and learn from the best. “They don’t want ‘Yes men,’” says Smith.

What would you want to get out of an investor? Watch today’s episode to see what happens, and join the conversation on Twitter, #BehindTheLaunch.

In the last episode of TechStars, we learned why it is so important for startup teams to have expertise in the businesses they are trying to create.

In this episode, we’ll see what happens when a startup realizes that its initial concept just isn’t working, and with help from mentors, pivots in a completely new direction.

Flickr was once a role playing game. Groupon was once a web community for mobilizing social actions. YouTube was once an online dating site. Some of the most successful startups of the past decade had to pivot toward a new idea before catching on. Will pivoting help any of the Techstars teams find success?

Welcome to our annual celebration of business innovators who dare to think differently. They're the ones taking risks and discovering surprising new solutions to old problems. This year, they tell you exactly how they do what they do. Click on their names in the list below to find advice and read about their career milestones. Or for tips on a set of creative skills, browse the tool box to the right.

Is the venture industry going up, down or sideways?

With fundraising a difficult task for most venture firms in 2011, you’d expect the ranks of active firms to keep shrinking.

But that’s not what happened, according to an analysis by Dow Jones VentureSource, which shows that 923 firms made at least one investment in a U.S.-based company last year, up from 900 in 2010.

That’s still well below a peak of 1,312 active investors in 2000 and the uptick is more a sign of the persistence of firms, whose funds last a decade or more, than an indication that the industry has started growing again.

The premise of the knowledge-driven economy originates back to the 1960s, described as an efficient system of distribution and access to knowledge for increasing the amount of innovative opportunity.1 However, policies supporting transformation of regions into knowledge-driven economies are primarily focused on setting the most favourable conditions for supporting the innovation, talents and creation of knowledge-based companies and their growth. Under the current paradigm, knowledge-based entrepreneurship is recognised as the key ingredient of regional future economic growth and competitiveness.

Science and technology parks are one of the key institutions of the regional innovation ecosystem, viewed as a catalyst facilitating flow of knowledge and innovation between the academic, public and business environments towards market. The core objective of the technology park is to link innovations with knowledge-based business. By providing companies with the necessary infrastructure, services, education/training and promotion, it motivates entrepreneurial potential and assists in the realisation of initiatives with high levels of knowledge and market potential. At the same time it enables matchmaking and synergies with the domestic and foreign development, research, financial and market environments.

Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are overweight.

We spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Dr. Chow, 49, gave a presentation on “Illuminating the Obesity Epidemic With Mathematics,” and then later by telephone; a condensed and edited version of the interviews follows.

You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?

Major League baseball pitchers spend far more time preparing to pitch than they actually do pitching. The same should be true of an entrepreneur who is attempting to secure money from sophisticated investors.

The steps outlined below represent an ideal approach to raising capital from sophisticated investors. Unfortunately, your fundraising efforts will be less linear. You might be at Step 2 with one VC and Step 3 with another. However, the greater degree that you can sequentially follow these steps while keeping your discussions with each venture capitalist (VC) at relatively the same stage, the sooner you can spend less time in the company of investors and get back to running your business.

If you talk to a software engineer, they're probably most interested in attacking difficult and interesting problems that affect a lot fo people.

But it's really not surprising that some of the most popular software companies among engineers and developers also pay the best, according to salary data we pulled from GlassDoor.

We've assembled a list of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley that pay their software engineers and developers the best.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked: "As an author of creativity books, how on earth can you live in Singapore?"

And when I reply, "Because I think it is the best place in the world to live for a creative person", most people think I am kidding and everyone asks me to explain.

But no, I am not kidding. And yes, let me explain.

I moved to Beijing from my native Sweden in 2005 because I wanted to be in Asia when Asian countries truly started to embrace creativity.

Demographers were stunned last month when new data revealed a trend reversal: immigrants are no longer flocking to the U.S., and some have made a U-turn and returned home. Data from the Internal Revenue Service show that 1,800 people, mostly living abroad, either renounced their U.S. citizenship or handed in their green cards—more than the total number of people who did so in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. A few made the choice to avoid paying U.S. taxes on income earned abroad, but others are seeking greener pastures in the global economy. 

With the U.S. facing a shortage of skilled workers, the wave of immigrants who are turning their backs on America is foreboding. A growing population of highly-educated Americans and foreign nationals educated in the states are less committed to living and working in the U.S., preferring to return to their homelands, many of which are emerging economies.

Most entrepreneurs expect to face the “normal” challenges of starting a business, which include finding the right opportunity, building and executing a winning plan, and financing their venture. But many forget the pitfalls associated with traditional business jobs which can apply even to the smartest and most dedicated people running their own business.

Often these facets of entrepreneurship don’t rear their ugly head until well down the road. Yet before you start, you should think about what the impact might be on your psyche, and how to neutralize these challenges in your own plan. I’ll summarize them here, but you can see more detail in an article by David Finkel in D&B Small Business Solutions:

Last summer, Pipedrive was fortunate to be part of Angelpad, an accelerator run by a few very smart ex-Googlers. The 3 intensive months thoroughly changed our understanding of how to build a successful  product, and a successful company. And more importantly, it boosted our growth to the next level. Here are the five most important lessons I learned from this crazy time.

1. Be open to being challenged, be prepared to be wrong

Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly.

Paul Graham

The Angelpad team and mentors challenged us in many ways. “You have too many things on your home page” was something we didn’t agree with at first, but we’re happy to test. And it turned out we had been wrong indeed. We removed 80% of the content, and left one sign-up button and one Learn More link on the home page. Conversion to sign up increased by 300%.

I'll bet you don't know where the Center of NY's Tech Community and Center of Creativity is.

Give up?

It's in the Financial District--right at 55 Broad Street.  It says so right on their website.  In fact, it is "well-known internationally as the original home of New York's technology community."

I'll bet you didn't know that--mostly because it never was.  Back in the late 90's, a lot of money and real estate brokering went into trying to make it so, however.  Names like Sun and Cornell (ironically, given the new tech campus) were brought in to try and tech-ify NYC's downtown area.

When the president signed legislation that reauthorized the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs for six more years, entrepreneurs and scientists across the country breathed sighs of relief.

Finally, the uncertainty brought on by years of Congress’s spoon feeding temporary extensions (14 since 2008), was over.

The new law also remedies another long-standing issue with the program. Previously, program rules stated that to be eligible for these awards, a business had to be “at least 51 percent owned and controlled by one or more individuals who are citizens or, or permanent resident aliens in, the United States, except in the case of joint venture.”

Starting a small business can be psychotherapy meets MBA. It is challenging on practically every front, including having to make tough decisions and have tough interactions. Reprimanding an employee, getting very specific about money and dealing with setbacks will all be part of your existence as a small businessperson.

Looking back at my own entrepreneurial career, I know the challenges I struggled with in the early days would amount to a minor blip in my day now. I learned the hard way how to enforce my boundaries, demand clients pay me what I’m worth (instead of trying to negotiate a better deal) and navigate the countless icky conversations you encounter as an entrepreneur. Here is my list of lessons and advice about what you'll need to do to survive and thrive in small business.

Startups can often barely afford proper office space, marketing budgets or, according to Mark Zuckerberg, even the time to write a business plan. In an always-be-shipping environment, it’s challenging enough to manage the traditional bottom line of profits, let alone the “triple bottom line” of social and environmental impacts.

But increasingly, tech startups and investors are supporting business models that make companies accountable to not just their shareholders, but also their customers, workforce, environment and greater community.

This calculator might have a future in our underperforming schools:

From the moment pupils start using calculators they stop using their heads – for all quantitative work. The detrimental effect on maths education is well known.

Calculators, however, cannot be removed from classrooms anymore- they are indispensible because many results can only be received from calculators (e.g. root7, cosine70 etc.)

Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. According to a recent study in PLoS One, resting brain activity varies with a person’s scores on a well-established personality test. When awake but not engaged in a task, each subject displayed activity patterns distinct from those found in someone with different traits.

Even at rest, the brain hums with neural activity. Re­search­ers think these resting-state patterns reflect how the brain typically operates when we interact with the world. “You can think of it as showing which connections in the brain are on speed dial and which ones aren’t,” says Michael Milham, a psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, who led the study.

There’s a lot of money floating around Silicon Valley right now, and it’s becoming easier and easier for entrepreneurs to get access to the capital they need to get their companies off the ground. Resources like AngelList are trying to level the playing field, and facilitate conversations between founder and investor, and the passage of the JOBS Act will alter the landscape for early-stage companies by giving them access to crowdfunding from the masses. There are even charity initiatives like the ones launched by Exec and Motion To Dismiss Cancer that give a select few access to top entrepreneurs and VCs.

At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. As the Kauffman report points out, most VC funds aren’t generating more than the three to five percent return one finds in the public markets — the yield investors expect, the report finds. In fact, the report states “VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late ’90s”.

During the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney lamented that incumbent president, Barack Obama, spent too much time at Harvard. Romney, who has two degrees from Harvard, does not doubt the value of intellectual life, but knows well that today’s heroes are successful business leaders, like himself, and not the men or women of ideas.

Amid a global economic crisis that seems to be without an end, policy innovators with the ability to link the world of ideas with the real world are increasingly missed. The world’s attention seems to have shifted from policy innovators to the “technopreneurs” - celebrity technology entrepreneurs - such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Around the world, these Silicon Valley-styled technopreneurs are given hero status. Their opinions and advice are sourced at summits, conferences and by media outlets while politicians compete for photo ops.

Following  the election of French socialist President François Hollande, the European Commission has tacked firmly towards the growth agenda and called for a new industrial revolution for Europe. After an anti-austerity backlash by voters in Greece and France on Sunday (6 May), European Council President Herman Van Rompuy called yesterday (8 May) an informal summit of EU leaders for May 23 to discuss the growth agenda.

The informal dinner on May 23 will lay the ground for another meeting on June 28-29 when leaders are to take formal decisions on their growth and budget consolidation strategy.

What is Open Innovation? For any entrepreneur innovation is crucial to success, but if innovations are developed in isolation, the benefits can be limited in comparison to the effort.

At a recent event in Norwich, our speaker Stephen Clulow, kicked off the discussion (See photos) with a brief introduction about the meaning and importance of innovation. Innovation is the commercial application and successful exploitation of an idea. Innovation means introducing something new into your business. This could be a single major breakthrough – eg a totally new product or service – or it can be a series of small, incremental changes.