Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing.

In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn't, or didn't, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write.

Three blog posts that caught my eye this week demonstrate three different ways that you can fail at innovation:

1. Ignore the small innovations: James Todhunter wrote an excellent post yesterday defending thinking about improvements as innovation. You should read the whole post, but here is a highlight:

Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all points on a continuum of value creating solution generation. Incremental innovation is very beneficial to an organization trying to develop the core competence needed to support a high-performance innovation system. Specifically, incremental innovation delivers both short and long term benefits. In the short term, immediate business benefits can be realized—extended revenue life of a product, increased market share, better contribution to margin, etc. In the long term, incremental innovation provides a low risk platform to hone the basic innovation skills needed for successful, repeatable breakthrough innovation practice.

In my blog post, “How Can Goals Enhance Creativity” I said…

“…As long as everyone in the organization believes they are playing a game which is designed to get them energized today, and it is not specifically about hitting the target, I can assure you that people will be more motivated.”

Games can be a useful tool for enhancing creativity. They make work more fun, they reduce stress, and they get people in action.

The sunlight of summer has begun it's annual transition to equinox, and we are all reviving the pulse of the work-year.

The President has returned from Martha's Vineyard to face what will surely be a challenging fall. It's mid-term election season and the mood of the voting public is downright ornery.

ODS (Obama Disappointment Syndrome) a growing wave of depression, has created a huge anti-incumbent wave. "Throw 'em all out!" seems to be the mantra of the season.

Silicon Valley may be an epicenter of the nascent electric car industry, but don’t expect the battery revolution to mimic the computer revolution, one of I.B.M.’s top energy storage scientists advises.

“Forget Moore’s Law — it’s nothing like that,” said Winfried Wilcke, senior manager for I.B.M.’s Battery 500 project, referring to the maxim put forward by Gordon Moore, an Intel founder, that computer processing power doubles roughly every two years.

“Lithium ion, which clearly is the best battery technology today, is flat, completely flat since 2003,” Mr. Wilcke said last week at a gathering in San Francisco attended by executives from I.B.M. and Better Place, a Silicon Valley electric car infrastructure company.

Today the Obama administration formally launched Challenge.gov, a tool that enables government agencies to solicit ideas from the public to solve issues plaguing the country. Announced by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra at the Gov 2.0 conference, Challenge.gov is essentially a digital age-version of JFK's "ask not" plea--with cash prizes.

Unveiling a crowdsourcing initiative at a summit created to demonstrate the most advanced marriages of technology and government? Yawn.

Sure, it's great to see the public sector harnessing the potential of its citizenry. And this same model worked for the X Prize, which help spur the development of a low-cost, reusable spacecraft with a $10 million incentive. And Challenge.gov is offering similar rewards: $10 million from the Department of Energy for a 100 mile-per-gallon vehicle; $15 million for a replacement for the common light bulb; and $1.65 million for an aircraft that can fly 200 miles using 1 gallon of gas per occupant.

Fast-growing small firms will gain access to fresh sources of money by 2012 via a network of specialist stock exchanges under new European Commission proposals due next month.

EU Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier is set to adopt a French-inspired blueprint for helping SMEs to tap into stock markets as part of the European Single Market Act, due to be published in October.

Documents seen by EurActiv France show Barnier wants to reduce the level of red tape required for small firms keen to list on stock exchanges and to raise the visibility of SMEs in the investment community.

Some time ago, I met with a young entrepreneurial team that had started an e-commerce company. They seemed very excited and gung-ho with the prospects of their company. But there didn’t seem to be any differentiation in their product offering vis-à-vis the many others who too, according to me, were dispensing similar, if not, identical e-commerce services. I therefore asked about their differentiation. I was told that they had not just an online service but also a physical, telephone enabled and mobile versions of their service.

L abor Day in the U.S. is a fading concept. Less than 40 percent of the working population is actually doing what can be called physical labor. The rest are doing data manipulation, handling content tasks.

So, we guess most of us have to take a break from thinking. Jeez…we know people who do that all the time!

The improbable idea was triggered by an article by a friend, Rob Enderle, on the 4th of July when he suggested taking a freedom break from technology. You know, no email, no IMs, no microblogs, no text messages, no social site postings. Gawd, that sounds like a stupid idea.

Most entrepreneurs wait too long to start thinking about their exit.

They usually sell their companies for much less than they could have. The valuation curve, and return to shareholders, usually ends up looking something like this.

That’s exactly what I did in my first company. (It was the first time I lost several million dollars, and the first of many similarly expensive - and valuable - lessons about exits.)

Most of the technology companies I’ve known well exited too late. Yes, most. "Riding it over the top" is by far the most common exit scenario.

The fundamental cause is simply our fundamental human natures.

by Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

Google “teamwork” and you'll get a zillion page hits - mostly useless. People talk about teams as if they were teams of oxen: 'Just work together and keep everyone moving in the same direction, and all will be fine.'

Teamwork Isn't That Simple

Teams like those can work well together if all you expect is that they should do exactly what you tell them to do, and do it when you want it. To keep this nice little system going, you'll have to check up on every little thing they do, pay them well, give them soothing background music, keep their hours short, and fire any rebels that surface. If this scenario actually appeals to you, you probably also think that having cheap, undocumented servants at home is utopian. But if the concept makes you just a little uncomfortable, think about this: You would be paying your people to pretend they are robots, and these days you might find it can be cheaper (and less trouble) to go with the real thing.

Many of the people who make businesses grow profitably have one quality in common: an appreciation for innovation. They need not be scientists or supergeeks. Just people who can spot an opportunity to innovate, and capitalize on it. The caveat here, though, is that there are many different ways to be innovative. Try Googling innovation and you won’t do much better than with teamwork. There are even a lot of 'are you innovative?' tests on the web, complete with all the 'right' answers. The problem? It's entirely possible to 'innovate' in the wrong direction.

Creating a culture of high performance is a common aspiration for many business executives. Most look to tougher appraisals, forced ranking and highly differentiated pay to increase performance. But do these methods actually improve performance? More importantly, which methods deliver the biggest bang for the buck?

In 2003, the Corporate Executive Board conducted a study to determine the effectiveness of 105 performance drivers. These included various types of training (e.g., management development, IT, sales), performance appraisals, incentives, bonuses and 360-degree feedback. The research team gathered performance data on 19,000 employees and managers across 34 companies, seven industries and 29 countries to determine what works.

Three general findings stand out:

1. Traditional performance management may reduce performance.
2. The most effective performance drivers are not incorporated in traditional performance management systems.
3. Performance drivers are "remarkably consistent" across workforce segments, industries and countries. In other words, what works here works almost anywhere.

China’s mobile Internet users may more than double within five years as smartphones that can browse the Web and download music become more affordable, Lee Kai-fu, the former head of Google Inc.’s China division, said.

The number of people accessing the Internet on their mobile devices in China may grow to 800 million within three to five years, from about 300 million now, Lee said today in an interview at the Beijing headquarters of Innovation Works, the technology business incubator he set up after leaving Google.

Lee’s company is investing in a mobile-software maker and 11 other businesses in the country to benefit from booming demand for Web technology. Lenovo Group Ltd., China’s biggest maker of personal computers, expects products aimed at the mobile Internet market may comprise as much as 20 percent of Lenovo’s sales in five years, President Rory Read said in April.

WASHINGTON — Newly installed Medicare chief Donald Berwick, keeping a low public profile after encountering controversy over his appointment, is moving quickly behind the scenes to seed the US health care system with 100 to 300 sites to test new models of caring for patients.

Since July 6, when President Obama bypassed the Senate confirmation process and named Berwick with a recess appointment, the Cambridge health guru and former Harvard professor has made launching the sites a high priority, according to officials and industry executives.

In recent years, the rate of new business formation by women has significantly outpaced the rate of new business formation by men across all ethnic groups in the USA. Similar trends are found across the developing world. However, women still own and manage significantly fewer businesses than men. The explanation for this phenomenon, the behaviour of female entrepreneurs in terms of traits, motivations, and success rates, and their gender-related distinctiveness are complex and multifaceted. Despite a growing literature we still need more research on female entrepreneurship—particularly in developing countries where we are seeing a growing number of initiatives aimed at promoting entrepreneurship and empowering women in the process. The latter tendency reflects a generally growing interest in female entrepreneurship in developing countries, which, in turn, is due to greater interest in the role played by entrepreneurship in the economic development process. Women have been assigned a special role not only because they stand to benefit from entrepreneurship being the poorer and more discriminated against gender, but also because they are seen as a critical driver of entrepreneurship in light of their unique role in the household and the rise in female-headed households across the developing world.

Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, VC, angel, Facebook board member, and hedge fund manager, penned a long and thoughtful piece about the possibility of an impending apocalypse and how that might lead to financial bubbles. It was written in 2008 but I only came across it yesterday (on Hacker News). He calls it The Optimistic Thought Experiment. I you are an investor and haven't seen it before, I suggest you go read it in its entirety.

For those who would rather have the cliff notes, Peter's argument goes like this (Peter's words are in italics, mine are not):

Rapid advances in technology are nothing new; what is new in recent decades is rapid advances in the kinds of technology that require intellectual skills. This has increased the returns to people who have high IQs and good technical education. In addition, fulfilling Max Weber’s prediction that modernity would see ever more activities regulated by rational methods rather than by authority or personality, even low-tech activities, like management and marketing, have become ever more scientific, requiring a high level of intelligence.

High IQ and technical education are complements. But people who have modest IQs also benefit from education, as does society. Education even at its lowest levels helps to instill good work habits, respect for knowledge, simple communication and analytical skills, social skills, and civic values.

Every country, therefore, can benefit from having a good educational system, including pre-collegiate, collegiate, and postgraduate education. How to organize such a system and what the optimal level of resources to allocate to it is are of course difficult questions. There probably are diminishing returns to providing higher education, because IQ provides a ceiling beyond which educational effort is wasted on students. The United States may be in that position today. Many colleges offer what amounts to a remedial high school education, postponing the students’ entry into the work force. If we had better high schools, we might have fewer colleges (or more—if better high schools improved intellectual motivation and performance). With ever-increasing specialization of the workforce, there is an argument for making education increasingly vocational.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

A growing number of people are looking for ways to green their current jobs or find careers in environmentally responsible sectors of the economy.The green economy is just beginning to unfold. The transition from business-as-usual to a new sustainable economy is opening up a wide range of opportunities that are …by Carol McClelland, PhD. By Carol McClelland, PhD. Make a good living in the emerging green economy The green economy is just beginning to unfold.