Richard Grayson, an American composer and pianist, has a knack for improvising on the piano. Ask him to play Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars in the style of Beethoven, and he has it covered. (Watch above.) The same goes for The Muppets’ Theme in the style of a Bach fugue; “Singin’ in the Rain” in the style of Wagner, or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in the style of a Tango. You will find 70+ improvisations on Grayson’s YouTube Channel. Find it here.

Creative workers, creative enterprises and creative communities bring the entrepreneurial strengths of the private sector to economic development. In 2006, arts industry wages alone infused more than $3.9 billion into North Carolina’s economy, according to research by Regional Technology Strategies (RTS), which estimated creative sector employment at more than four percent of total employment in North Carolina.

In 2009, the market value of goods and services produced and sustained by North Carolina's Creative Industry was more than $41.4 billion, or 5.86% of the state's total production. According to research by the N.C. Department of Commerce, the Creative Industry creates and sustains nearly 300,000 jobs or 5.54% of total state employment.

Read the latest research on the Creative Industry in North Carolina »

You also might find the following links and documents helpful:

• Other North Carolina Arts Research
• Fact Sheet: The North Carolina Arts Council
• Background: The North Carolina Arts Council
• North Carolina: The Creative State - Jobs Talking Points
• The Arts = Jobs: A National Perspective

The fourth quarter has gotten off to a good start, as private company financing rose to $363 million on 115 deals recorded in the past week (versus $294 million and 110 deals in the prior week).  As always, California retained the top position, however, its share of total funding fell to 35% for the week (versus 50% in prior week).  Illinois took over the second spot and continues to build a case for Chicago as an emerging venture capital hub.   New York beat out Massachusetts for the third spot.  The Empire State kicked off the fourth quarter with its single largest week of funding since mid-July.  The Top 5 funding league table was rounded out by Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.  After a lackluster third quarter, Massachusetts continues to register lower than expected private company financing.  Pennsylvania was the sixth most funded location in the third quarter, behind the big three (CA, MA, & NY), Texas and Washington.  Last week, Pennsylvania got an early jump on the competition (Washington and Texas) taking in nearly $20 million in funding.  Interactive charts on the past week’s dealflow are below (they may take a second to load).  To see profiles on the private companies receiving funding in the last week, logon to CB Insights.

This is part of my various Series on Venture Capital, Angel Investing and Entrepreneurial Culture.

As described in this recent post, this mapping project evolved from that late night a few months ago when I decided to first map-out the Silicon Alley early-stage investor ecosystem. I wanted to provide a resource for entrepreneurs wherein they would be able to actually see the entire venture ecosystem in one glance. Due to much encouragement and postive feedback, I eventually created maps for Boston and then for Silicon Valley. This was of course not enough. I wanted these maps to be interactive and eventually, crowdsourceable. That's when I reached out to my good buddy Shane Snow. As I've mentioned here before, he is a super-talented entrepreneur, hacker, designer and journalist extraordinaire who can basically do anything.

Well, after quite a bit of effort, I'm happy to say that today we're releasing the next iteration of all this. We've now created a crowdsourceable global map of what we hope will one day be the entire world's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Either click here or on the global map icon on the right-hand side of my blog's homepage to enter the map environment. You will find instructions for using the map there- it's very straightforward.

The Babson Venture Accelerator has been established at Babson College to support and advance student entrepreneurs in each phase of their startup venture-from opportunity exploration and pursuit with an action plan to the ultimate launch. The Accelerator has several levels:

* Exploring-Students generate and explore ideas, conduct research, and validate market opportunities. This involves industry and market analysis to determine the feasibility of an opportunity, an articulation of the problem, and the social and/or economic need. A feasibility study must be completed before moving to the next phase.

* Pursuing-Students shape the opportunity and create a plan of execution through market research, talking to customers, building prototypes, proving technologies, and building leadership teams.

What sustains great organizations over time? Great talent. And what do talented people want? Most want influence, money, personal fulfillment, and the chance to make a difference. But more and more, talented people also want a great place to live.

The answer seems obvious, but the phenomenon is fairly recent. In the past, the attractions of working for the right company often trumped the desire to live in a great place. No longer: A landmark study by the Chicago-based CEOs for Cities released in 2008 found that 64 percent of highly mobile global knowledge workers said they were more likely to choose a job because of where an organization was located than because of the organization itself.

Intel Intel said it wil invest $6 billion to $8 billion on its new chip factories in a move that will create thousands of construction and engineering jobs.

The world’s biggest chip maker said it will create 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and 800 to 1,000 permenanent high-tech jobs at its manufacturing sites in Arizona and Oregon.

The money will create a new development fab (short for wafer fabrication plant), or a factory for building prototype chips, in Oregon as well as upgrades to four fabs that will manufacture chips with 22 nanometer process technology. That process technology can create circuits that are just 22 nanometers apart (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). Chips that use this process will be faster, cost less, and have longer battery life.

Developing a good, healthy culture is extremely important at a startup. Culture reflects the essence of a startup’s operation because it directly affects the success of a company’s hiring practices and overall strategy. It is, at its core, essentially a set of shared norms and a key source of strength and guidance when a startup goes through those virtually inevitable trying times.

Some fundamental practices are obvious “must-dos” in building a strong culture.

You must, for example, work to engender trust. As a decision maker, you rely on information being passed to you by the people who report to you. As the CEO, however, you cannot rely solely on this information. You also need to “dip” down into your organization and learn directly from employees at all levels and virtually all skill sets. As a leader, this is how you develop an intuitive sense of your business, one that can only be formed by hearing directly from staff in every corner of the company.

Mike Elgan at Datamation writes about a social media monitoring company called Social Intelligence. Social Intelligence provides not only social media screening of potential candidates, which seems pretty common these days, but ongoing surveillance of employees. It continuously monitors employees social media behavior - including what they post when they're not at work.

Fear Factor

Social Intelligence is using scare tactics to appeal to managers to use its service. Quoting Elgan:

What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You'll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That's why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.

A top commission official says the EU's flagship innovation union initiative has a "whole host of policies which will favour SMEs".

The recently-unveiled initiative is part of the EU 2020 strategy whose objectives are designed to boost jobs and growth over the next ten years.

Speaking in Brussels, Marion Dewar said, "Innovation union pursues a broad, balanced concept of innovation."

She said the initiative will produce "efficiency gains in production processes and improved performance of products."

Dewar is a senior member of cabinet of EU research and innovation commissioner Maire Geoghegan Quinn and was addressing a meeting organised by the Brussels-based EU-wide business organisation Eurochambres.

By coordinating energy use for electricity, heating, and transportation, four Japanese cities plan to reduce their carbon footprints and increase reliance on renewables. The cities are pledging to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by up to 40 percent by 2030, employing systems that will go beyond smart-grid proposals like those being implemented in the U.S. and elsewhere. While smart-grid projects manage electricity, the Japanese "smart community" demonstration projects will also manage energy for heating and transportation, said Hironori Nakanishi, a director at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, describing the projects at a recent smart-grid conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The projects, which got under way this year, were instigated by the Japanese government in part to fulfill a pledge the prime minister made last year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. They will cost about $1 billion over five years and are being implemented by consortia of dozens of companies including Toyota, Nissan, Nippon Steel, and Panasonic.

Achieving the emissions goal, Nakanishi said, will require installing some 28 gigawatts of solar power, the equivalent of about 28 large nuclear reactors. Smart-grid technology will help grid operators accommodate large amounts of electricity from solar and other renewable energy sources: as clouds pass overhead or wind patterns change, for example, signals could be sent out to smart appliances to pause operation or decrease their power consumption. In a smart community, this adaptability would be augmented by also managing heat. "More than half of energy is used as heat, so the integration of heat and electricity is quite important," Nakanishi said.

Digital marketing and advertising are experiencing explosive growth, both in the U.S. and globally. In this presentation of nine infographics, you can see what types of digital media are fighting for money and attention. But in keeping with our Business Impact theme of "technologies of persuasion," we also zoom in on the psychology that drives consumers. After all, marketing and advertising dollars are only well spent when they prompt consumers to click or purchase--or at least trigger positive brand attributes such as trust.

 

Preliminary data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 2008 Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) provide a map of the incidence of innovation by businesses located in the United States. These data are based on respondents to the survey and represent an estimated 1.5 million for-profit companies, publicly or privately held, with five or more employees, active in the United States in 2008.

The new data indicate that in the period 2006-2008, about 22 percent of the manufacturing companies introduced product innovations (one or more new or significantly improved goods or services) and about 22 percent introduced "process innovations (one or more new or significantly improved methods for manufacturing or production; logistics; delivery or distribution; and support activities). In comparison, about eight percent of companies in the non-manufacturing sector were product innovators and eight percent were process innovators. Nonetheless, much higher innovation incidences were observed in the manufacturing sub-sectors of chemicals, computer/electronic products, and electrical equipment/appliances/components, and in some parts of the non-manufacturing sectors of information and professional/scientific/technical services. Further, the BRDIS data indicate that companies that perform and/or fund research and development (R&D) have a far higher incidence of innovation than do companies without any R&D activity.

Preliminary data indicate that overall about nine percent of the estimated 1.5 million for-profit companies were active product innovators in 2006-2008. The corresponding figure for process innovators was also about nine percent. Nevertheless, a wider range of innovation incidences is evident when more narrowly defined industry groups (manufacturing, non-manufacturing, and their subsectors) are distinguished. These data indicate that the incidence of U.S. innovation varies substantially by industry sector.

For additional information, the entire survey results may be viewed here:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf11300/nsf11300.pdf

I bring outstanding news to absent-minded academics everywhere: According to Steven Johnson, recent neuroscience suggests that “the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.” Although the mechanism is not well-understood, Johnson suggests that this disorganization, moments when clusters of neurons seem utterly out of sync, allows the brain to seek out new organizational patterns–literally to make new connections.

Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From will interest ProfHacker readers across at least three different axes: how to fruitfully pursue longterm research; how to foster collaboration, whether among colleagues or among students; and, most surprisingly, its lucid defense of universities as a public good, a critical repository of research and development–and one made more necessary, not obsolete, by the explosive growth of the Internet.