A willingness to fail. A willingness to be misunderstood. And maintaining a childlike wonder in the world.

Whether you’re a 25-year veteran in the tech industry or a sixth grader, these are are the traits Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos thinks are necessary for a successful innovator.

When we ‘cast around’ we are looking for something; to try it out, to think about it, to search for connecting a vague idea with something more tangible. So let’s go innovation fishing.

The word ‘cast’ is around us in so many ways – anglers cast their line, we are cast adrift, we cast or drop anchor, we cast to put about, to tack, we cast our eyes upon the speaker, we cast light, we cast aspersions, we cast someone in a play, we cast a plan, we cast into a certain mould, are all just some of the many examples of how ‘cast’ is part of our everyday thinking.

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A new study indicates that roughly 35 per cent of jobs in the EU rely on sectors that build their products and services around patents, trademarks and copyright.

A new study measuring the importance of intellectual property (IP) rights in the EU economy has found that about 39 per cent of total economic activity, worth some €4.7 trillion annually, is generated by industries that are reliant on intangible IP assets as the basis of products and services.

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Just before graduating from the University of Michigan, Calvin Schemanski began his start-up.

With two classmates, he got free office space on campus and $7,500 in funding from the university's student startup accelerator, TechArb.

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In 2009, the tech scene in New York City was just emerging. People were looking for alternatives to a traditional career, for work they found meaningful and many were landing in entrepreneurship — but the growing community lacked a physical space.

Having launched some ventures of his own in high school and college, Matt Brimer fit right in. He started General Assembly as a community for entrepreneurs, and with a grant from the City of New York in 2011, began offering educational classes related to entrepreneurship. General Assembly now has campuses in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Sydney and just launched in Washington, D.C.

We had a fascinating week trying to get everything figured out on our FG Angels initiative with AngelList. Our syndicate, which we are going to max out at $450,000, is currently right at $300,000 after one week. We are humbled by all the support and interest.

Geir Freysson, founder of Five Hundred Plus, did a super cool visualization of some of the top syndicates and how the participants in the syndicate relate to each other.

At the 5th European Innovation Summit, big names in research agreed that it was high time for a ‘wake up Europe’ call. A five-point declaration addressed to European Union policy-makers and member states was agreed after several speakers sought to identify ways to remove obstacles in the way of Europe becoming a successful innovation economy.

The summit was organised by Knowledge4Innovation, or K4I, and was held at the European Parliament from 30 September to 2 October.

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With Twitter’s high-profile IPO, the media and much of the pundit class are revisiting one of their favorite themes: the superiority of the brash, young urban tech elite, who don’t need to produce much in the way of profits to be showered with investor cash.  Libertarians will celebrate the triumph of fast-paced greed and dismiss concerns over equity; progressives may dislike the easy money but will be comforted when much of it ends up supporting their candidates and causes.

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True or False?  The cost to build a product has dramatically decreased in the past 10 years.

True.

True of False?  The cost to build a company has dramatically decreased in the past 10 years.

False.

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The iPhone is the most beloved brand in America.

NewMediaMetrics released the results of its annual LEAP survey today, which indexed the 25 most loved brands in the U.S..

Fifty percent of them are tech, and most of these are gadgets.

Four of the top 25 are Apple. The company ranked as the fifth most loved brand, while the iPad and iPod came in 12th and 13th.

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The name Sputnik stands tall in history books as the vessel that helped spark a space race with the U.S. But a new Russian project with the same name is planning to play catch-up in an area where the U.S. already has a huge lead: search engines.

The artistic process is very similar to the entrepreneurial path. Both artists and entrepreneurs create something from nothing, face rejection and fine tune their approach to succeed.

Since our journeys are so similar, entrepreneurs can learn a thing or two from our artistic brethren. Here are five places to start:

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The focus for this year’s United Nations’ International Day of the Girl Child on Friday, October 11, is innovating for girls’ education. It’s a more than fitting theme in a year that has seen 16-year-old education advocate Malala Yousafzai make a remarkable recovery after being shot in the head by the Taliban and become a popular favorite to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

These brilliant engineers, designers, and dreamers captured our imagination by creating swarms of smart rescue robots, cars that drive themselves, and a rugged rover that could change the way we think about exploring the Red Planet. They are PopMech's 2013 Breakthrough Award winners.

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Many startups and mature businesses have not yet adapted to the fact that customer satisfaction in this “always connected” age is more than product and service quality. It’s more about which customers broadcast their pleasure or unhappiness to others. With incredible ease, they can influence thousands or millions of potential new customers, or say nothing.

Most existing metrics and analytics for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, including the popular Net Promoter Score (NPS), don’t distinguish between recommend messages to others (word-of-mouth), detract messages, or no message.

Starting a business isn’t easy. Anyone who’s tried to do it will tell you that. And if you haven’t started one, you have a serious failure of imagination if the thought of it doesn’t scare you just a little bit. It can be a little less scary, however, with the right kind of guidance. During the One Young World Summit in Johannesburg, a group of young people from around the globe got a taste of that guidance from a set of experienced entrepreneurs. We took some of their best pieces of advice and distilled them into a very brief guide to what the complete novice can expect when they start a business.

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I’m going to guess that most of us didn’t go into academe for the money. Given the market forces at play in hiring in higher education, you might have been tempted to not even negotiate when offered a job. (Of course, you should always negotiate.) Perhaps that’s why questions about money are often difficult to answer when we encounter them.

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The Technopolicy Network is proud to announce the 10th Annual Conference on Innovation Based Regional Development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia!

At the 10th Technopolicy Annual Conference you will experience how ground breaking knowledge regions get shaped. In the heart of the Gulf region you will meet the main investors in its science and technology and its brand new research institutes. Regional innovation experts from all parts of the world will exchange experiences in effectively turning political ambitions into regional innovation.

The QuickChip sounded like a killer idea: a gadget about one inch square that could, in just 15 minutes, identify bacteria, fungi, and viruses at a patient's bedside. Instead of sending samples to a lab and waiting hours or days, physicians would know immediately what they were dealing with and how best to treat it.

In 2011, Doug Weibel, an assistant professor of biochemistry at UW-Madison, was developing such a device — but instead of plunging ahead with prototyping and marketing, he hired Adam Siegel as an "entrepreneur-in-residence" to figure out whether and where a market existed. In startup lingo, this process of figuring out the market is called a needs assessment.

San Francisco is a hotbed of innovation around networked, shared transportation.  The city’s young tech-savvy denizens, wanting to get from A to B, can use app-based services to fetch a ride (Uber), find parking (SFPark) and gain hourly access to just about everything with wheels—from cars and rides to scooters and bikes.

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