When Newsweek ran its first Green Rankings two years ago, climate change was high on the agenda. The U.S. House had passed a cap-and-trade bill to put a price on carbon, and the world’s biggest economies were about to make history with an agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Since then, green momentum has seriously stalled, at least in the public sector. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 ended without an agreement, and climate science in the U.S. has been politicized by Tea Partiers and others. A skeptical Congress, plus the on-going economic downturn, have made environmental regulations a tough sell. Elsewhere in the world, there is some movement—such as in Australia, where the lower house has just passed a carbon tax—but it’s slow.

Intel executive Kirk Skaugen said today that his company expects 15 billion devices will be connected to the internet in the coming years. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Skaugen said that the growth of data on the internet is racing ahead and data center computing is being pulled along with it.

Skaugen spoke because his boss Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, was sick. He said that Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore back in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, is expected to hold up in the next few years.

You may hear about the dearth of "green jobs," but statistics show that solar jobs are rising, even as the overall economy lags.

As of August, there are 100,237 solar jobs across all 50 states in over 5000 companies.

Despite the hoopa around Solyndra, the US solar industry  is gaining a greater share of the global market and is an economic bright spot in an otherwise sour economy.

The US is poised to install 1,750 megawatts of solar PV in 2011, double last year's total and enough to power 350,000 homes.

100,237 jobs as of August 2011, according to The Solar Foundation's "National Solar Jobs Census 2011: A Review of the U.S. Solar Workforce." The survey examines employment along the solar value chain and includes data from more than 2,100 solar companies.

Even though Mayor Bloomberg disagrees, Boston’s doing some amazing things in the innovation space. Despite being one of the oldest cities in the country, Boston is consistently on the cutting edge of finding, inventing and capitalizing on everything hot and new. From TechStars to MassChallenge, startups are popping up left and right around the Hub. For innovators, there’s no better place to be, in our opinion.

Now, 2thinknow has proven Boston is indeed the innovation center of the world. 2thinknow has released their 2011 Innovation Cities Index, which looks at cities across the globe and analyzes just how innovative they are. Out of 331 international cities, Boston ranked number one. According to a press release from 2thinnow:

Challenge Driven Innovation enables companies to tap into diverse perspectives and talent to solve problems faster, more cost-effectively and with less risk, ultimately resulting in accelerated innovation outcomes and improved business performance. In this article Steve Bonadio introduces the concept of “Challenges” and their role in the emerging innovation management framework called Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI).

Using images throughout your business' web presence—in blog posts, on Facebook, in online presentations, etc.—presents a great marketing opportunity to capture people's attention and create brand awareness. But how do you choose the right images?

If you've spent more than 10 minutes on the web, you've probably seen photos of multicultural people pointing at a computer and laughing together. Or after clicking on a company’s Contact Us link, you must have seen some stock photo model with a headset on, representing the customer services department. These practices are widely used and, frankly, a little bit absurd.

In today’s episode of the Weekly Marketing Cast, we discuss how to choose the right images to include throughout your web presence.

As banks have tightened terms over the last few years, alternative loans are quickly gaining in popularity. So much so that banks are noticing the competition, and starting to loosen their belts. Crowdfunding is one of the newest alternative loans, which are very similar to peer to peer loans. Our friends at Intuit have designed a great graphic detailing everything you’d want to know about Crowdfunding:

We've polled everyone from First Round Capital's Charlie O'Donnell to Steve Blank and Brad Feld in the past few years, and they told us what books have shaped their careers.

From Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" to Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," these books will teach you how to think -- no matter if you're a serial entrepreneur or are just starting a business.

New Zealand's investment in science, research and development, at present about 1.2% of GDP, should be more than doubled, Federated Farmers believes.

In a speech to the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science in Wellington recently, Federated Farmers national vice-president Dr William Rolleston said New Zealand had one of the lowest investments, about half the OECD average of 2.3%.

Federated Farmers believed New Zealand needed to aim for 3% of GDP - and fast, Dr Rolleston, a South Canterbury farmer and biotechnologist, said.

Let’s face it, some of us have a chip on our shoulder the size of a 24-row planter.

We groan when a presidential candidate nuzzles a pig. A corny football trophy creates a furor. If an outsider mentions that Iowa is No. 1 in pork, corn, soy, eggs and ethanol, we’re quick to respond: But we’re so much more!

True. We sell a lot of annuities.

New hires learn the ropes of a new company in a variety of different ways. Some methods are formal, others are informal, but either way, the new employees are provided the important and essential information they need in order to be a productive member of the team.

It’s extremely important to understand exactly what employees need to know in order for them to become valuable team members. But companies also must learn when an employee needs to know the information and what is the best method to convey that knowledge to a new hire.

ELYRIA — A worldwide nonprofit organization eager to connect investors with entrepreneurs and provide seed money is locating its first bricks and mortar headquarters on the campus of Lorain County Community College.

Jim Jaffe, president and CEO of the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds, was in Elyria on Friday and spoke about the partnership with LCCC. He was scheduled to publicly announce the partnership today at the NASVF’s national venture capital conference in Arlington, Texas.

The NASVF Education Institute will establish its headquarters in Lorain County by early 2012, bringing with it up to four employees. The global organization has 775 members and 175 member organizations in 43 states. It plans to hold its 2012 national conference in downtown Cleveland.

Innovators aren't exceptional as much as they are confident. So says David Kelley, the founder of the venerable Palo Alto, Calif., design firm IDEO.

Mr. Kelley, whose company is responsible for designing a wide range of products and services, including the modern computer mouse, believes—and research suggests—that virtually everyone has the capacity to innovate. It's just that somewhere around the fourth grade most of us stop thinking of ourselves as creative, he says, so our ability to innovate atrophies.

Mr. Kelley has made it his life's work to help people regain their creative confidence. In his three decades as a designer and as a professor in the design program at Stanford University's engineering school, from which he graduated in 1978, Mr. Kelley has developed a set of techniques for solving all kinds of problems—techniques that he came to believe could be taught as a methodology. His approach is called "design thinking."

An Innovation Award is a recognition of achievement but also of promise. It's up to the innovators to fulfill that promise. Here's how some recent award winners are doing.

Liquid Robotics Inc.

Location: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Award: Robotics category winner, 2010

Innovation: The company developed an unmanned seagoing craft propelled by the power of ocean waves, a system that allows it to remain at sea for long stretches. The craft, called a Wave Glider, consists of a surface buoy and a submerged glider with wing-shaped panels. It converts the up-and-down motion of waves into forward thrust, propelling the buoy indefinitely without relying on batteries or other power sources.

There’s not a lot to add to this great Dilbert cartoon about Dilbert’s boss making a toxic attempt to instigate creativity in his team. I wrote a post for Talentculture last year on how to make your team more creative as a leader. The answer was just as depicted in the Dilbert cartoon: non-existent team creativity almost always indicates a problem with the boss and not a problem with the team’s innate creativity. – Mike Brown

You may be surprised to find many of your products and services conform to the five innovation patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking.  If so, it means your employees are predisposed to use innovation patterns when developing new  products.  Like many innovators, they are using patterns probably without realizing it. Given this predisposition to using innovation templates, a company can realize huge gains in innovation effectiveness by taking the next step.

Take the case of a large industrial company in the energy sector.  It leads the industry producing a product that is relatively simple in design but incredibly challenging to produce.  Despite its strong reputation and market success, the company worries it is not innovative.  Yet when I reviewed its project pipeline, I spotted concepts with each of the five patterns of S.I.T. (Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Attribute Dependency, and Division).  The teams did not use S.I.T. in the classic way (apply templates and work backwards using "Function Follows Form" to find a potential benefit).  Instead, they used trial and error, experimentation, and good old fashioned tinkering.  Their innovations embody the templates nevertheless.

Although women generate about a quarter of US GDP, they contribute less than they could—far too few of them move up the corporate ladder, for example, but not because they lack ambition. A McKinsey survey of about 2,500 college-educated men and women found that women who make the leap from entry-level jobs to middle management and on to senior management are not only increasingly interested in becoming leaders but also increasingly confident that they can. Read “How women can contribute more to the US economy” (April 2011).

Most people, at some point throughout their career, have felt lost, unhappy or unproductive at work. Have you? If so, there’s a good chance your value system was trying to tell you that you needed a change of scenery.

You can think of the value system as a lens through which you view the world. It helps you make sense of it by telling you which things are “good” and which things are “bad”. Without this lens, there would be mental chaos, and therapists all over the world would rejoice.

Soon you, too, will be able to talk to the hand. A new interface created jointly by Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute allows for interfaces to be displayed on any surface, including notebooks, body parts, and tables. The UI is completely multitouch and the “shoulder-worn” system will locate the surface you’re working on in 3D space, ensuring the UI is always accessible. It uses a picoprojector and a 3D scanner similar to the Kinect.

The product is called OmniTouch and it supports “clicking” with a finger on any surface as well as controls that sense finger position while hovering a hand over a surface. Unlike the Microsoft Surface, the project needs no special, bulky hardware – unless you a consider a little parrot-like Kinect sensor on your shoulder bulky. While obviously obtrusive, the project is a proof-of-concept right now and could be made smaller in the future.

Back when we were doing our MBA Monday series on Financing Options For Startups, I got an email from my friend Andy Sack. Andy was one of the first entrepreneurs we funded by in the mid 90s with our Flatiron Fund. He's done something like a half dozen startups since then and he's a veteran in the very best sense of the word.

Andy said "You missed an important option Fred - revenue based financing options. I've got a new firm called Lighter Capital that does just that". I said, "can you write a blog post for MBA Mondays explaining how it works. So today, we have a guest post/advertorial on Revenue Based Finacing from Andy/Lighter Capital. I hope you like it.