WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2014 -- The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has amended its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program Policy Directives in response to public comments and input from all parties involved in the program.  These amendments - - published on January 8, 2014 in the Federal Register - - can be found and reviewed at https://federalregister.gov/a/2013-31374 for SBIR, and https://federalregister.gov/a/2013-31376 for STTR.

You stare across the desk at the hiring manager. You're poised, confident, ready for anything. You nailed the handshake, you're making great eye contact, nothing can stop you. You've earned this job. It's yours.

The interviewer leans in close and whispers, "Why is a tennis ball fuzzy?"

Today I’m going to talk about the movie Gravity and how it relates to innovation..

This talk is based on a workshop we provide called Thinking outside the Box. Many of our clients want their teams to “think outside the box”. To do that, you first have to realize that a “box” exists, and think about life outside that box. In doing that, we decided to use astronauts as people who definitely work “outside the box”. Astronauts work in locations with zero gravity, wild temperature fluctuations, and of course the issue of no oxygen or atmosphere for that matter. In that regard, astronauts become very aware of working and thinking in a new box.

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HOUSTON — In space, heads swell.

A typical human being is about 60 percent water, and in the free fall of space, the body’s fluids float upward, into the chest and the head. Legs atrophy, faces puff, and pressure inside the skull rises.

“Your head actually feels bloated,” said Mark E. Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut who flew on four space shuttle missions. “It kind of feels like you would feel if you hung upside down for a couple of minutes.”

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org - File:Soyuz TMA-01M crewmembers after the landing.jpg 

Using tiny biodegradable particles to disrupt the body’s normal immune response after a heart attack could help save patients from tissue damage and certain long-term health problems that often follow. Researchers have shown that injecting such particles into mice within 24 hours of a heart attack not only significantly reduces tissue damage, but also results in those mice having stronger cardiac function 30 days later. The inventors of the new technology now plan to pursue human trials.

Mobile phones have generated enormous insight into the human condition thanks largely to the study of the data they produce. Mobile phone companies record the time of each call, the caller and receiver ids, as well as the locations of the cell towers involved, among other things.

The combined data from millions of people produces some fascinating new insights in the nature of our society. Anthropologists have crunched it to reveal human reproductive strategies, a universal law of commuting and even the distribution of wealth in Africa.

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This week, I am on the ground in Italy where startup savvy policymakers are experimenting with new policies as fast as their startups are testing disruptive ideas. Both are racing in tandem to restore sustained economic growth to the Italian economy.

The big startup story here in Italy began in 2012, when, amidst persistent economic woes, Italy surprised the entrepreneurship community by swiftly and unexpectedly implementing a comprehensive legislative package to boost startups and scale-ups. Known as Startup Italy or Decreto Crescito 2.0, the package included reforms in various areas ranging from tax policy to incubator accreditation and labor laws.

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Open innovation can be a powerful force. When hundreds of people collaborate openly things can evolve in all kinds of creative ways. That kind of energy is fantastic to see and I am always excited to follow real-time open innovation events implemented through our application WE THINQ. Ideas spread like wild fire and comments come in by the minute as lately seen in an exciting project with the Deutsche Welle.

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At the onset of 2014 we find crowdsourcing where cloud was just a few short years ago — widely discussed, unevenly adopted and on the cusp of widespread industry impact. Similarly, we will see crowdsourcing experience hypergrowth but also leave some damaged bystanders that were caught up in the hype and mislead (aka private cloud circa 2006-7).

In 2005, while working in SAP corporate strategy, I read the “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki and decided to put to test an experiment from the book using the strategy team. I asked each team member to guess the number of marbles in a (virtual) jar.

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PHILADELPHIA (MNI) - New U.S. companies that do business on the internet are reporting strong revenue growth and expanding payrolls as investment surges, new ventures prove their viability, and startup costs decline, according to web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Internet-based businesses including a maker of employee-management software, a reseller of mobile devices, and a web-based provider of seed capital to small businesses - many of them internet-based themselves - are seeing double-digit growth, and building their work forces to meet the demand, officials told MNI.

When offshoring entered the popular lexicon, in the 1990s, it became shorthand for efforts to arbitrage labor costs by using lower-wage workers in developing nations. But savvy manufacturing leaders saw it as more: a decisive change in globalization, made possible by a wave of liberalization in countries such as China and India, a steady improvement in the capabilities of emerging-market suppliers and workers, a growing ability to transfer proven management processes to new locales, and increasingly favorable transportation and communications economics.

UnitedHealth’s acquisition play for Audax Health is the latest in a series of efforts by payers to develop consumer technology in-house, through acquisition or strategic partnerships to help members do a better job of managing their own health, Jerry McGuire notwithstanding.

Audax’s Zensey platform provides a way to collect health data in one place and sync it from fitness trackers like FitBit. It also has a social component to ask questions anonymously and a gaming component in which users can set health and fitness challenges for themselves and compete against friends and colleagues.

In the Creative Economy, inspiring a sense of play in culture, marketing and innovation is critical to success. You have to engage your people so that they can engage prospects and customers with a lively sense of mission and purpose. Too often the roles we assign diminish this sense of play.

In a tightly wound corporate culture, business people can become stuck in the role they are forced to assume while at work. They are not allowed to be human and expressive. Like a mask they cannot take off, they turn into a predictable cliche with a limited set of expressions to new ideas.

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The best way for a manager to be successful is to build a top-notch team.  But when most managers take on new positions, they hesitate to act quickly in replacing poor performing incumbents.  Months later, when reflecting on what they could have done differently, almost all of these managers say that they should have moved faster in making the tough “people calls.”

Why are these tough calls so tough to make?  Let’s look at three possible reasons:

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Imagine a towering, sheer cliff. Imagine a deep canyon below, full of ruined cities. Now imagine, on the canyon’s other side, a bountiful plain, rippling in the breeze, stretching into the sunset.

Welcome to the economy of the twenty-first century.

For young people today, the economy basically feels something like the portrait above, and they’re the ones stuck at the bottom of the ravine.

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Earlier this month, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), a trade association representing the U.S. venture capital industry, released the results of its MoneyTree Report on venture funding for 2013.  The report, which is prepared by NVCA and PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP using data from Thomson Reuters, indicates that venture capitalists invested $29.4 billion in 3,995 deals in 2013, which constituted a 7% increase in dollars and a 4% increase in deals over the prior year (see chart below, which shows total venture funding from 2004 to 2013; data from MoneyTree Reports; click on chart to expand).

Threat and opportunities are two sides of the same coin here. While cancer is one of the biggest threats the healthcare sector is witnessing today, it has also thrown open a number of investment opportunities.

Cancer detection and treatment focused companies attracted almost $17 million from VC ( venture capital) investors during 2013. Norwest led the charge, which deployed $11 million in the cancer-focused medical devices maker Perfint Healthcare and $4 million in cancer-focused diagnostics chain Nueclear Healthcare. Cancer-focused drug development firm Invictus Oncology attracted $1.9 million from Aarin Capital and Navam Capital.

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Every year at this time we are bombarded with numerous articles on New Year’s resolutions and goal setting for the year ahead. And yet the average person makes the same New Year’s resolution 10 separate times without success. In a similar manner the entrepreneurial equation is equally hope depleting as business failures track at around nine out of every 10 initiatives started. Imagine if one simple question could unlock the answer to greater success. Surely life is not that simple?

When delving into the stories of individuals who have achieved great significance in the world of entrepreneurship and business – people such as Mark Shuttleworth, Elon Musk and Herman Mashaba - the question of why these individuals are so successful arises. Was it pure luck and serendipitous happenings? Was it a special God-given gift or talent with which they were born? Or was it something else – something in their character?

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Ever misplace your keys, forget someone’s name, or lose your train of thought? Of course you have. Everyone struggles with their memory from time to time.

While they can be frustrating, these little slips are common and normal, says Gary Small, MD, director of the UCLA Longevity Center and author of The Memory Bible.

“We become more forgetful as we age, and by 45 the average person has a measurable decline in their memory ability, but we have more control than we think,” says Small. “The MacArthur Study of Successful Aging found that genetics only accounts for a third of memory success. The rest is our cognitive and physical health.”