Two creatives from the ad world and 26 contemporary artists team up to create an illustrated alphabet of the terms that define the modern creative condition.

What are the 26 most important words that sum up the state of modern creativity, and once you know them, how can you remember what they are? It turns out, the answers to both these questions are as easy as ABC.

As in A is for API, B is for Beta, and C is for Craft.

There are brilliant technologists and business leaders in today’s tech world, but while startups have their own, great talents, we’re seeing one common weakness: lack of understanding elementary financial concepts.

This impacts long term financial strategy as well as ability to negotiate and set up basic cost structures within the company.

Apple will hold its first major product event in nine months on Monday, a stunning gap for a company that relies on regularly impressing customers with new innovations.

At its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) is expected to unveil an update to its iOS mobile operating system, a new "iRadio" streaming music service, a refreshed MacBook lineup and potentially an Apple TV update.

For a company that's had such an amazing track record of successful product launches over the past decade, that lineup feels a bit dull -- particularly considering the long wait since CEO Tim Cook last took the stage.

Europe is giving  particular attention to the role of Innovation Hubs. Firms, universities, centers for innovation are developing a new collaborative strategy towards a new agenda for a new competitiveness centered in the value creation.   Like Jose Manuel Barroso  stressed recently in Lisbon during an important summit, it´s essential to learn the lessons that more than ever emerge from a Europe that is trying to rebuild its competitive advantage  and to reinvent its effective place in a complex and global world.  Innovation, once again, is the right key for the future of Europe.

The explosive growth of China’s emerging middle class has brought sweeping economic change and social transformation—and it’s not over yet. By 2022, our research suggests, more than 75 percent of China’s urban consumers will earn 60,000 to 229,000 renminbi ($9,000 to $34,000) a year.1

In purchasing-power-parity terms, that range is between the average income of Brazil and Italy. Just 4 percent of urban Chinese households were within it in 2000—but 68 percent were in 2012.2 In the decade ahead, the middle class’s continued expansion will be powered by labor-market and policy initiatives that push wages up, financial reforms that stimulate employment and income growth, and the rising role of private enterprise, which should encourage productivity and help more income accrue to households.3 Should all this play out as expected, urban-household income will at least double by 2022.

Dear Friends,

In this issue of Innovate@EDA, we are pleased to be joined by the leading authority on business clusters, Dr. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, who answers some probing questions about the vital role that clusters play in our nation’s economic life. Dr. Porter also talks about an impressive new online tool, the U.S. Cluster Mapping website, developed through a partnership between EDA and Dr. Porter’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.

Regional economies have of course long been a focus of our efforts at EDA, and we highlight several of them in this issue, including the food processing and dairy cluster located in upstate New York and bioscience cluster in St. Louis anchored by BioSTL.

By Julinna Davies

2012 has arguably been the year of the medical start-up in Maryland. As the coming article emphasizes, though, entrepreneurs must be both savvy and careful in their organization if the state is to realize sustained growth and prosperity from these new ventures. Julianna Davies, a specialist in the healthcare MBA and its requirements, takes an in-depth look at the need for strong company culture in startups -- and discusses the price of getting it wrong.

Medical Startups Need Company Culture, Not a Room Full of Suits with Healthcare MBAs

Unlike established companies and large corporations, the culture at a startup can change quickly and dramatically. A startup company’s leaders and first employees are setting a precedent for where the company is headed and what they believe in. Thus, unlike a large corporation with values and business models that have in many cases been established for decades, business leaders at startups must develop and ensure their employees are staying true to the ideology that will inform their culture.

When Sir Alex Ferguson waved to the crowd at a stadium just outside Birmingham (U.K.) this Sunday, he was ostensibly saying goodbye to the most distinguished coaching career in the history of professional soccer, but in reality he was bringing down the curtain on one of the great displays of leadership in the past quarter of a century.

Alex Ferguson took over the role of Manager of Manchester United when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Margaret Thatcher lived at 10 Downing Street, Deng Xiaoping was undoing the calamity of the Cultural Revolution and Cristiano Ronaldo was just starting to cut his teeth. In the annals of American sports, Ferguson’s accomplishments dwarf those of Vince Lombardi who coached the Green Bay Packers for nine years, or John Wooden who led the UCLA basketball team for 17 years. (In top-level American sports only Mike Krzyzewski's run at Duke is longer.) Ferguson’s 27 year run at the helm outstrips Steve Jobs' 14-year reign as CEO of Apple or Andy Grove’s 11 years as CEO tenure of Intel.

Business is changing. To be successful in the twenty-first century, businesses in developed economies must connect with people’s emotions. This move towards greater emotional intelligence explains why “storytelling” has become so fashionable in marketing and therefore, in the following article, we will explain how you can bring storytelling into your innovation work. The aim:helping you create novel concepts that also connect emotionally.

Innovation is quickly falling into the category of cliché words, an epic vagueness that connotes little more than some activity outside the realm of maintenance. It's a shame because there is real innovation happening in some IT shops. And by innovation, I mean CIOs tearing up the playbook on creating value for the business and making a real investment in entrepreneurial change.

A more creative agenda requires a serious influx of fresh air and perspective. Fortunately, the people who can supply that are probably already in your organization -- they just haven't been tapped effectively yet. The best way to unlock their potential is to assemble them into small innovation teams.

In light of Tesla Motors‘ May 2013 announcements that the company earned its first quarterly profits in its 10-year history and, subsequently, repaid its loan from the Department of Energy (DOE) nine years ahead of schedule, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit the question: Can Congress and federal agencies play a significant role in developing innovative solutions to the nation’s most intractable problems? In modern American history, one must look no further than the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to make the case that the federal government can play a role in creating and promoting innovation.

Innovation is a big corporate buzzword, and it’s one of the hottest topics on this blog. That’s because it’s one of the biggest mysteries to business leaders. A new study from Accenture, “Why Low Risk Innovation Is Costly,” revealed that fewer than one in five chief executives believes their company’s strategic investments in innovation are paying off. Because of the high percentage of failure, nearly half of the executives surveyed said their companies were less likely to risk implementing breakthrough ideas.

I was very happy to be invited to attend the BSHR HealthPort Press Study Tour, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark on May 28-30.  After all, Denmark has consistently been ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world, according to the “world map of happiness” and as reported by 20/20, Oprah and the World Happiness Report.

The invitation said “the press study tour will focus on commercialization of ideas from clinics and hospitals and give an insight into the Danish health and biotech sector  through an innovative agenda with recommendations on how to create a competitive health economy in the Baltic Sea Region.”

Five to ten years.  That’s how long it will be before drug reimbursement in the United States becomes as stringent as in Europe, according to a range of consultants, analysts, and health policy experts with whom I’ve spoken.

This new reimbursement environment – and the expectations leading up to it – is expected to emphasize the value of “profound” innovation, at the expense of less dramatic, incremental innovation.

As George Bernard Shaw once said, “youth is wasted on the young”, but why not learn from younger generation. Following are five lessons I’ve relearned by observing how kids interact.

Every new person you meet is a potential new friend

We all have friends and we tend to congregate with them but why not include every person you bump into in what you’re doing. On the playground, kids are always happy to add new people to whatever game they’re playing. By comparison, at conferences, some people tend to congregate only with the people they know and fail to see that the new people can become new sources of inspirations, and new friends.

NBC Montana wanted to know more, so we contacted Butte-Silver Bow Chief Executive Matt Vincent.

He said the program aims to help small companies grow local jobs using their own entrepreneurial talents and the city is looking for a select group of businesses for the project.

"Butte has a lot of very committed and talented entrepreneurs in our community here," Vincent said, "that I think this might be a little help from the outside that they might need to reach that next level."

Canada has some of the most skilled engineers in the world. Just ask Steven Woods, Google’s director of engineering in Waterloo, Ontario. He recently told the New York Times that the University of Waterloo is one of his company’s top three universities in the world for recruiting new hires.

Kunal Gupta, CEO of Toronto-based Polar Mobile said at the GE Look Ahead Executing Innovation summit in Toronto last week that his country is an ideal place to start a business. But, he also said that Canada is not a good place to achieve that all-important scale needed to succeed on a global level. “The piece that hasn’t been covered off is … how do we take our products or services or business and market them at a global scale?”

You’re a small business owner and have a fantastic idea about an innovative approach to tackle a major health issue. You need development funds, however, and are considering applying for a federal Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) grant. Before you do, have you thought about how you will build partnerships with companies that might be interested in your product or program? Have you thought about your sales and marketing strategy and how to explain it in your grant application? These were topics discussed recently at the National Small Business Innovation Research Conference held outside Washington, DC.

Europe is giving  particular attention to the role of Innovation Hubs. Firms, universities, centers for innovation are developing a new collaborative strategy towards a new agenda for a new competitiveness centered in the value creation.   Like Jose Manuel Barroso  stressed recently in Lisbon during an important summit, it´s essential to learn the lessons that more than ever emerge from a Europe that is trying to rebuild its competitive advantage  and to reinvent its effective place in a complex and global world.  Innovation, once again, is the right key for the future of Europe.

Apple will hold its first major product event in nine months on Monday, a stunning gap for a company that relies on regularly impressing customers with new innovations. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) is expected to unveil an update to its iOS mobile operating system, a new "iRadio" streaming music service, a refreshed MacBook lineup and potentially an Apple TV update.