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.

Ohio is about to become the center of activity for the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds.

The CEO of the association, Jim Jaffe, is moving to Ohio to establish the group's first physical headquarters at Lorain County Community College and to launch its new educational foundation.

The college and Ohio University will help the association develop educational programming and curriculum designed to assist people in learning how to invest in startup companies. The association — which today is based in Philadelphia and employs a handful of people who work out of their homes — also will hold its 2012 venture capital conference in Northeast Ohio a year from now.

What do 10,000 people with autism, 50,000 people in some remote islands in the North Atlantic, and 1,000 healthy old folks in southern California have in common? They are on the front edge of one of the most exciting stories in science today, and their contributions will have a huge impact on our long-term understanding of biology and medicine.

The headlines from just the last couple weeks in genomics are jaw-dropping. Experiments are being announced almost every week which would have been unimaginable even a year ago when sequencing a whole genome cost around $10,000. Suddenly an individual’s entire genome, the complete 6 billion letter signature of DNA units in each human, can be had for $4,000 or less, in a few weeks. And that has enabled scientists and business people to dream some pretty big dreams, like these:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg didn't live near San Francisco, would he have ever worked with Sean Parker?

That's the question Paul Graham, founder of influential tech incubator Y Combinator, posed recently to a room full of New York tech entrepreneurs.

"Facebook in 2004 needed Sean Parker," Graham said, referring to the Napster co-founder who became Facebook's first president following an encounter with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on the streets of Palo Alto. "To make a startup hub, you need lots of people interested in startups. If you don't have density, the chance meetings just don't happen."

It seems that becoming an entrepreneur is a fad these days. Every week that goes by I meet countless people who profess their desire to work for a startup. They've never done it before, but how hard can it be? They're young, bright, and capable of producing great work. They’ve cut their teeth in the corporate environment, but that no longer provides them with intellectual stimulation, and the grind of the regular workday has become too mundane. What’s not to like about a cool office, great people, and working on the next big thing? It's just a question of pulling the trigger. But are they really right for the job?

It's great to see such excitement among my peers, especially in New York, where the tech scene has literally exploded in the last two years. Companies like Foursquare, Gilt, and GroupMe have fueled interest in startups and popularized the belief that technology can change everything. Having this type of attitude is the heart of innovation. It's the irrational optimism that spurs entrepreneurs into action and allows them to rethink entire categories and ways of connecting with people. But excitement and optimism are only part of the story--they alone won't make an entrepreneur successful. Nor will pure technical or business talent. At some point, things will get tough and the entrepreneur will have to rely on a different set of qualities to power through a crisis and keep the business moving.

FORTUNE -- In business circles, "creativity" has become a buzzword to describe a desired trait among employees. It's widely believed that having creative thinkers on staff will boost overall team levels of innovation. Yes, creativity can lead to a surplus of original ideas. But when it comes time to sell those concepts internally, and then later take those ideas to market, creativity is not enough. More important is conviction.

Look at the most-admired business leaders today. They tend to resist compromises, even when faced with widespread skepticism or even complaints from customers. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's young founder, is known for the exactness of his vision, which drives each design or software tweak of the social networking software that he created, despite the now-requisite uproar each change incites among Facebook's 750 million-plus users (whose own convictions, it should be noted, help drive subsequent iterations and privacy policies of Facebook).

Many of us like to avoid conflict.  In fact, this desire for conflict avoidance is one reason bullies can be so successful.  We’d rather just be quiet and nice and give the bully whatever she wants in the hope that she’ll just go away.

While this strategy works sometimes, sometimes you need to be a jerk.  Okay, not a screaming jerk but someone who says no.  Since Steve Jobs’ death the media has gone wild with stories about him.  He’s close to being deified, but Forbes writer, Gene Marks, reminds us that Jobs was a jerk.

Recently I wrote about things you should never say when you fire an employee. Many of you emailed saying, in essence, “Great… but what should I say and do when I fire an employee?

Fair enough.

Here’s how to make a bad situation better — or at least as “better” as it can possibly be — when you have to fire an employee for cause:

Be sure. Obvious, right? Not always: The heat of the moment can cause you to make a snap decision that is neither correct nor fair. Even if you have a zero-tolerance policy for certain behaviors, take a few minutes to make sure the employee’s action truly falls within the parameters of that policy. When you’re mad (or really disappointed) it’s easy to think, “That’s it… he has to go,” and unintentionally forget about guidelines and precedents. While you can bring an employee back on after you make a mistake, no one will ever forget what happened — especially the employee.

Sofinnova Ventures Inc., a California venture firm with $1.4 billion under management, raised $440 million to invest in health-care companies and experimental drugmakers, the largest fund for the industry this year. Sofinnova will seek out companies with drugs already in clinical trials, as well as purchase therapies developed by other pharmaceutical companies, said Garheng Kong, a general partner at the Menlo Park, California-based firm. “The initial target was $325 million,” Kong said in a telephone interview. “Obviously we over-subscribed that, and had excess demand.”

Gov. Martin O'Malley has convened a special session this week to redistrict the congressional maps in Maryland. The news out of Annapolis says that we will not see a "jobs bill" or any other bills to bolster Maryland's economy during the session. If true, the failure of Annapolis to act to reignite Maryland's economic engine in this time of malaise should be part of the first sentence of an indictment charging our state legislators with abdicating their responsibilities.

Americans — including Marylanders — distrust and question big institutions. They see our nation divided economically as never before (with the increasing consolidation of wealth, increasing financial burdens on the middle class, and less opportunities for springing out of poverty). And they feel that everyone in politics — Democrats and Republicans alike — is in the pockets of special and elite interests.

And what is the response to all of this from our leaders in Annapolis? Outrageous gerrymandering of congressional districts.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) recently released data indicating that domestic credit to the private sector in Saudi Arabia recorded one of their highest growth rates since the global fiscal crisis. That the Gulf Kingdom’s twelve (12) commercial banks are easing credit curbs is good news for entrepreneurship promoters in the country and leaders in the Kingdom seem ready to provide the fuel to ignite a new wave of startups.

On a visit to Jeddah last week, I witnessed a much deeper commitment to advancing a startup culture than I have seen so far in other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries I have visited. While I was there, not only was there a Startup Weekend happening in Riyadh, but in the lead up to Global Entrepreneurship Week, I spoke to a gathering of several thousand startups at the Jeddah Young Business Committee (JYBC) Expo held for new and young businesses. Walking around the booths, not only was I impressed at the number of technology and science-based entrepreneurs, but I was especially pleased to see a big section of the expo center dedicated to women entrepreneurs.

Venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz announced today that it is participating in startup incubator Y Combinator‘s Start Fund, alongside venture capitalists Ron Conway and Yuri Milner.

“We’ve been working with Paul (Graham, founder of Y Combinator) for awhile and we’ve just been really impressed,” said Margit Wennmachers, partner at Andreessen-Horowitz in an interview with VentureBeat. “So when we had a chance to join the program we said ‘absolutely.’”

The Start Fund awards $150,000 to each startup brought into the incubator. Ron Conway of SV Angels and Yuri Milner of investment firm DTS have been running the show on their own since January. With Andreessen-Horowitz’s inclusion, the three will each put $50,000 of convertible debt into the pot.

SBIR is a competitive federal government grant program that funds small businesses in developing innovative, high-risk technologies with the goal of increasing private sector commercialization into the marketplace. SBIR is a highly specialized form of funding for small firms (less than 500 employees) to perform cutting-edge R&D that addresses the nation's most critical scientific, engineering and technology needs.

Enacted by Congress in 1982, there are 11 federal agencies that have R&D budgets of $100 million or more. Each agency is required by statue to set-aside 2.5% of these funds to SBIR/STTR incentives, creating a great opportunity for small and innovative businesses to apply for these funds. This translates to nearly $2.5 billion available annually for awarding grants/contracts under this program.