Venture capital performance was up about a percentage point in the first quarter, returning 2.5%, according to the National Venture Capital Association's performance benchmark, the Cambridge Associates LLC U.S. Venture Capital index.

“All of us in the life sciences, medical device, and consumer industries are trying to get better at collaboration,” observed Robert Urban, PhD, head of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Innovation Center in Boston. For the Boston Innovation Center, which opened June 27, “getting better” includes enormous flexibility in the details of the early stage collaborative deals it inks with individual entrepreneurs, small companies and research institutions.

Innovation is a hot topic in organizations today. And no wonder. Customers want new and different. Costs can’t be reduced any further. Business pressures abound. The economic picture is spotty. Competition is fierce.

Innovation to the rescue!

But innovation is not as simple as it seems. Here are seven myths of innovation that trip up countless businesses, from the mega-corporation to the nimble start-up.

Last month the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) reaffirmed in a report that fiber-rich whole grains lower the risks of diabetes and heart disease. Media outlets such as Reuters duly reported the news, but many failed to point out a crucial detail: some whole grains may do nothing to reduce disease risks. In fact, many foods legally marketed as whole grains could actually harm health.

While I don’t have to remind you about the value of studies – many company-funded studies are best dropped directly in the trash after publication – this one about 3D printing does have some merit. Produced by the authors at Michigan Technological University, it posits that at a home 3D printer can provide a return on investment of 200 to 40 percent and can save the average home up to $2,000 in avoided purchase costs.

Venture capitalists are warming up to the idea of investing in hardware. It’s not that they hated gadgets in the past; it’s that it’s far more costly to launch and market a hardware startup than a new piece of software.

In Silicon Valley, hardware is having a Renaissance, perhaps even a “glamour moment.” Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and other crowdfunding sites have opened the floodgates and are making it easier for startups to get funded. Some of these campaigns have been so wildly successful that even the most traditional investors are taking notice.

The National Institutes of Health will fund up to $24 million per year for four years to establish six to eight investigator-initiated Big Data to Knowledge Centers of Excellence. The centers will improve the ability of the research community to use increasingly large and complex datasets through the development and distribution of innovative approaches, methods, software, and tools for data sharing, integration, analysis and management. The centers will also provide training for students and researchers to use and develop data science methods.

How might you foment authentic breakthroughs through collaborative innovation? The fuzzy front end, by name and nature, fails to lend itself to foregone conclusions. Yet, as the innovation practitioner, you can take certain steps that increase the likelihood of achieving breakthroughs. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores the most critical steps for people who see the practice as a means of transforming the organization.

Fred Wilson had a post yesterday titled Mentor/Investor Whiplash. His recommendations for dealing with it can be summarized as “collect all the data, think about it, discount what investors have to say, and ultimately listen to what the market is telling you over what advisors / investors tell you.”

I then read through the comments on the post and was bummed out. Many missed the point of what I thought Fred was trying to say. Then I reread the post more carefully and noticed how he framed the issue. The paragraph that caught my attention was:

I was recently introduced to Michael Porter through a book called Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy by Joan Magretta. While Porter is no doubt a seminal thinker in economics, I’d like to raise his thoughts on competition aimed at debunking commonly held notions of the term. I believe this will be beneficial to both newcomers to his ideas and business strategists alike who could perhaps use a contrary idea to think about competition in a more fruitful (profitable) manner.

Entrepreneurs can grow faster and better with more than one mentor, according to Jon Bebo, a management consultant and international start-up mentor.

Bebo told StartupSmart entrepreneurs need to seek a variety of mentors suited to their needs and the stage of their business.

“It often takes a village to get a company off the ground,” he says.

“The type of support the entrepreneur should seek will depend on what stage they’re at in the cycle. At the very start, entrepreneurs might seek mentors that can help with product-market fit or how best to tell their story in a pitch.

More and more software is being delivered to businesses through the cloud. But despite Silicon Valley’s reputation as the world epicenter of technology, the Bay Area is losing out on these newer software companies, according to one East Coast investor.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News OpenView Venture Partners Managing Director Adam Marcus, whose firm is in Boston, pulled together a list of 96 public companies that deliver business software as a Web service and found that two-thirds of them were founded and continue to be headquartered outside the Bay Area, in places ranging from Weston, Fla., to Tulsa, Okla., to Israel and Beijing.

Image: Flickr

The private sector may help entrepreneurs launch businesses in myriad ways, but today the academic sector is where things are getting really interesting for startups, spinouts and spin-offs.

Though innovation and discovery has long been the territory of educational institutions, academics haven’t been programmed to consider how their research could be marketable.

Image: Flickr

Gaming companies getting started in Canada have a new option to help them through the rough early stages of founding a company.

Canadian game incubator Execution Labs (XL) announced Monday that it has teamed up with BDC Venture Capital to offer $150,000 in convertible notes to firms that graduate from the labs’ incubator program.

Image: Execution Labs - MacGuffin Quest, one of the games Execution Labs submitted to the App Store.

Maryland's venture capital fund has announced that two tech companies in the state will get a total of $350,000.

Gov. Martin O'Malley made the announcement on Monday.

A Baltimore firm called SocialToaster has received approval for $200,000. The company specializes in social media and customer engagement.

Image: Flickr

"I want your help developing my direct reports into stronger leaders," John* the new CEO of Fasseni, a $350 million technology company, told me several years ago.

Initially, I approached the request like any consultant might.

First, I asked John why he wanted my help. He told me that Fasseni had stagnated. They had been hovering around the same revenue point for years and their competitors were gaining market share. He saw opportunity and knew that success lay in the hands of his direct reports. That made sense to me.

Image: Flickr

Earlier this week my post dealt with how managing your startup is dramatically affected when you actually have paying customers. For most businesses, the commencement of revenues also leads to an increase in headcount. You move beyond the comfort zone of your trusted founding team and must learn to accomplish things through people of varying skill sets and motivations who are mainly interested in a paycheck.

Here then are ten considerations that come into play at the employee milestone in the life of your startup. Note they have exactly the same headings in the same order as the previous ones for customers:

Image: Texas TechPulse

One of the most ambitious expeditions ever to tag great white sharks will set sail tomorrow (July 30) off Cape Cod, Mass. The researchers hope to tag as many as 20 of the enormous sharks, about which very little is known.

The project is expected to be the largest shark-tagging mission in U.S. history, according to the nonprofit shark research group OCEARCH, which is leading the mission along with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The effort is part of an initiative to better understand the animals and to inform the public about the importance of sharks, which serve as top predators and are vital for the proper function of ocean food webs, said WHOI researcher Simon Thorrold. As many as 100 million sharks are killed per year due to both legal and illegal fishing, a recent study found.

Image: i.livescience.com

José Domingo Villarroel, a researcher at the Teacher Training College in Bilbao (UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country) has studied the capacity to differentiate between living and non-living beings and how this relates to environmental awareness.

118 girls and boys between the ages of 4 and 7 from public primary schools in Plentzia, Urduliz and Sopelana participated in the research and were interviewed by Villarroel himself. He himself says that the work was very laborious, “but enjoyable and what is more, the results were very striking.”

Image: Flickr