The Wave Glider from Liquid Robotics was created as a way to conduct persistent, long-term research on marine life in the open water. But it could come in handy for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, too.

Invented by company founders Joe Rizzi and Roger Hines, the device was originally invented as a vehicle that would let researchers eavesdrop on whales, but they soon turned to scientific, military and commercial applications.

Finding a hit in innovation is a lot like swinging at a piñata blindfolded. You know a treasure is there, but success is a matter of random luck because you don’t where where and when to strike. Add a pair of outside eyes, though, and your ability to reap rewards greatly increases. Outside eyes, freed from corporate and cultural blindfolds, are sometimes the key. That was one lesson I learned at the PaperCon 2010 conference when I listened to Steve Wilhelms of Appleton Papers talk about their successful microencapsulation technology that is now being used in many open innovation projects with companies like Procter and Gamble.

Since YouTern launched last month, the debate over paid vs. unpaid internships has received national attention.

We’ve heard from nearly everyone – start-up executives, employer associations, career center professionals, students, parents and media. We’ve even received anonymous emails from people upset because we don’t insist that every post on YouTern be a paid position (perhaps they didn’t read our ‘Intern Law 101’ post).

Despite the passion, federal “laws” are the problem.

We have laws – universally ignored – that govern speed limits. Laws exist to keep people from smoking near the entrance of office buildings;  everyone knows how well that works.

Marty Anderson, a business lecturer at Babson College, devoted the first part of his career to corporate turnarounds and supply chain management. In the course of his worldwide travels, he's begun documenting what he calls "innovation at the edge of electricity." He spoke recently to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein about the use of technology by entrepreneurs in some of the world's poorest places. Edited excerpts of their interview follow.

Karen E. Klein: How did you begin studying entrepreneurship on the fringes of the developed world?

Marty Anderson: I've been living at the edge of the First and Third Worlds for most of my life, in the course of my previous work. And I noticed the Anglo view of the Third World was completely erroneous. If you wanted to do the most advanced Toyota (TM) techniques, for example, it was much easier to roll out in places such as Brazil, where they don't already have resources and technologies and think they know it all.

In  1998 Meg Whitman took a leap of faith and accepted a job as chief executive of eBay, then a small tech firm with 30 employees. The payoff was equity in the burgeoning company

Thanks to that decision, Whitman soon joined the ranks of the 1,011 billionaires in the world. Rarer still, she’s one of just 14 female billionaires in the world right now who earned their fortunes, rather than inherited them. The richest of them is China’s Wu Yajun, worth $3.9 billion and ranked 232nd in the world in March when we published our 2010 Billionaires list. By contrast, 665 men are self-made billionaires including the three richest people in the world, Carlos Slim Helú , Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

All of these self-made female billionaires have impressive personal stories, but the dearth of them is itself a story, and begs the question of why so few?

Creativity is the most important tool for every designer; technology can’t replace it and as a personal opinion it won’t replace it until the end of days. I saw a lot of great works done in earlier version of Photoshop which still impress the users of the latest version of this program (CS5,unfortunately I am not a user of this “wow” version).

Here I present a list of some tips to increase your creativity; these work for me and I noticed from various forums and blogs of the world-wide designers that these tips also work for them.

Please write your impressions in a comment so that I discover what the best tips are, and maybe I will republish this article as being better informed than now.

China, with the most Internet users of any country in the world, has issued its first government whitepaper declaring an overall Internet strategy--one that advocates Internet growth while implicitly defending censorship policies amid global concern over online repression and China-based cyber espionage.

"I think this whitepaper is a statement that the Chinese Communist Party intends to stay in power, and also intends to expand Internet access, and be on the cutting edge of Internet innovation, and that there isn't any contradiction in any of those things," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a China Internet expert who is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Culture has to be one of the most popular topics, yet analytically hard to quantify.

It thus gets relegated to the “soft stuff” because there is little evidence-based research supporting how to create a viable culture, what a good culture is, etc.

And perhaps a high-performance culture is a little like the quote about how to know if something is pornographic. It is self-evident to the observer and participant.

Cairo - When it comes to the Muslim world, the media often focuses on foreign policy, terrorism and the differences between the Muslim world and the West. But in the book 1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World, University of Manchester's Professor Salim Al-Hassani draws a different picture of Muslims, highlighting their artistic and scientific progress. This progress, in fact, was the spark that initiated most modern Western advances in medicine, mathematics and science starting in the 16th century.

But Muslims around the world are also contributing to innovation today. In the Middle East this contribution is evidenced in the growing science culture.

One of these projects is Stars of Science, a pan-Arab television contest showcasing young Arab innovators aged 18 to 30. It is the first of its kind: a Middle Eastern science-based reality television show.

Barring an economic bailout of mammoth proportions, the economy of Spain is completely and totally doomed. The socialist government of Spain is drowning in debt, unemployment is running rampant and everywhere you turn there are major economic problems. So will Spain be the next Greece? No. When the economy of Spain implodes it is going to be a whole lot worse for the world economy. The economy of Spain is more than four times the size of the economy of Greece. Spain accounts for 11.5 percent of eurozone GDP while Greece only accounts for approximately 2.5 percent. Spain is the 4th largest economy in the 16 nation eurozone and it is the 10th largest economy in the world. If the economy of Spain fails it will cause a shockwave that will be felt in every corner of the globe. In fact, there are quite a few analysts that believe if Spain defaults it would ultimately lead to the breakup of the eurozone.

I have always believed in the saying, “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” It’s a way of life. It’s not about abusing situations but about knowing when to push the boundaries. It’s about knowing that the overwhelming number of people in life are naysayers and “no sayers” and sometimes you gotta just roll the dice and say WTF.

So I have a short story to exemplify my credo and my friend Tyler Crowley has been telling me to write this story for a while so here goes.

Having grown up in Northern California and living near a Japanese family when I was really young, I always had a fascination with Japan and wanted to live there.  And during the 1980’s in California there was also a period of explosive growth of sushi restaurants (introducing Americans to a little bit more of the Japanese culture) as well as a growth in the Japanese economy that had all American companies trying to understand Japanese processes and business structure (Kanban, Keiretsu, etc.).  Both Tyler & I are Nihon-files.

Each year, Southern Growth Policies Board honors Southern initiatives that are improving economic opportunities and quality of life in the region. Innovator Awards are presented annually to one organization in each of Southern Growth’s thirteen member states, and winners are recognized at Southern Growth’s Chairman's Conference. The 2010 Innovator Award winners were chosen from creative initiatives in the region that aim to help communities recover from the recession. The 2010 Innovator Award winners are as follows:

In yesterday's posting on EDA and incubators, I noted that EDA needs to move beyond a focus on bricks and mortar. They understand that and last month, EDA, along with NIH and NSF, announced a new technology commercialization grant called the I6 Challenge:

The i6 Challenge is a new $12 million innovation competition administered by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). EDA will award up to $1 million to each of six winning teams with the most innovative ideas to drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in their regions. NIH and NSF will award a total of up to $6M in supplemental funding to their SBIR grantees that are associated or partnered with the winning teams.

The joint conference committee on financial reform has met and the verdict appears to be in. Private equity funds with more than $150 million in assets under management will have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, joining their hedge fund brethren. Venture capital funds of all sizes, meanwhile, will escape registration, although they will be subject to some reporting requirements.

As work on reconciling two different versions of financial reform passed by the two houses of Congress proceeded Tuesday, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said that the Senate would accept the House of Representatives’ provision that would require private equity firms with $150 million or more in assets under with the SEC. He added that the Senate would also accept an exemption for family offices and venture capital firms, as everyone agrees that the business model for venture capital differs from that of private equity firms.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. filed documents Tuesday for an initial public offering of stock that could net nearly $180 million.

In addition, Tesla plans to sell $50 million of its stock to Toyota Motor Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!tm/quotes/nls/tm (TM 72.78, -0.26, -0.36%) immediately following the IPO. Tesla recently agreed to buy Toyota's Fremont, Calif. manufacturing facility for $42 million, while receiving an investment from the Japanese auto maker as part of a broader partnership.

Closely-held Tesla said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that 11.1 million shares will be offered at between $14 and $16 a share, and that it will trade under the ticker "TSLA."

Tesla said that as of March 31 it had sold 1,063 Roadsters, the luxury sports car it introduced in 2008. The company aims to start volume production of its planned Model S sedan, which will sell for nearly $50,000, in 2012.

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The goal is true innovation – breakthrough new products, services and solutions – that create tomorrow’s growth engines. But most companies are stuck in traditional development: line extensions, modifications and improvements, which won’t generate the desired sales and profits. InnovationManagement asked Dr Robert Cooper about the importance of innovation.

Everybody is talking about innovation and how important it is. Do you agree – is it really that important, and why is that?

– Most companies have ambitious growth goals. The trouble is there are only so many sources of growth. Four of these – market growth, market share increases, new markets, and acquisitions – are proving difficult or expensive. Markets in many countries and industries are flat and increasingly commoditized; gains in market shares are expensive; and acquisitions often don’t work. New markets – India and China, for example – pose special problems. Even traditional product development – for most companies, this means line extensions, improvements and product modifications – seems depleted, and only serves to maintain market share.

FRIDAY, May 21 (HealthDay News) -- What do creative people and people diagnosed with schizophrenia have in common? According to new research out of Sweden, both share similar dopamine systems in the brain.

Dopamine, along with serotonin, is a key neurotransmitter - chemicals that are vital to transmitting messages via nerve cells in the brain.

"We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia," Fredrik Ullen, associate professor at Karolinska Institute's department of women's and children's health in Stockholm, said in a news release.

From Mrs. Fields to Martha Stewart, many iconic entrepreneurs (as well as other hugely successful businesses like Starbucks) have sparked the creation of other new ventures. By direct example and advice--or by replicating other successful business models--the positive economic ripple effect has been nothing short of remarkable. We decided to profile a few of these firms, to discover what inspired a new generation of mini-moguls and how they are paying it forward in their own backyards.

Doing by Design
In the case of Martha Stewart, a multi-track ripple effect is in full bloom. Her signature lifestyle companies (under the umbrella of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia) actually applaud the development of independent ventures by her staff and associates. By her example (or via personal input and advice in some cases) Stewart has nudged, challenged and inspired many women (as well as a few men) to launch or grow their businesses with gusto.

The 'clumping' of rare isotopes of carbon and oxygen in the bones and teeth of extinct animals offers a method for determining their body temperatures.

The discovery could provide key evidence in the debate surrounding the body temperature of dinosaurs, and might also allow researchers to glean information about the temperature of ancient oceans, say the authors of a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.