For many people, email takes up more time than just about anything else. It's entirely too easy to spend hours or even a whole day catching up. According to Don Tapscott, an author, strategy consultant, and Professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, that's a big problem. Email is all about containing knowledge, putting it in defined boxes. That's the wrong way to go about it. Information and knowledge are much more powerful when people can easily access it, then collaborate and build upon it.

The question of when a founder should step aside is a difficult one. The trend used to be that founders stepped aside in favor of more professional management.  This is how they did it at Google, Yahoo, and Cisco. More recently, those examples have been overshadowed by phenomenally successful founder-CEOs, like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison.  In a blog post yesterday, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman gave a detailed account of his own experience of relinquishing power, his mistakes, and how he thinks the transition should go.

When I decided to leave my job as a receptionist, I was exhausted and burnt out from making my job a number-one priority — and to top it off, I could barely pay my bills. I loved what I did, but I didn’t care for the people in charge who showed no appreciation and no passion. I felt I had enough experience and fresh ideas to start my own company and work for myself.

Although I faced a multitude of long days and nights, time away from friends and family, missed gatherings, and the overall feeling of being an overworked lunatic at times, it was well worth it to go from wages to profits — and from being told what to do to running my own show.

In Connecticut, Governor Daniel P. Malloy has proposed a Bioscience Innovation Act, which would create a 10-year $200 million fund to invest in the state's bioscience sector. The proposed fund would be administered by Connecticut Innovations, a quasi-public venture development organization. Governor Malloy's announcement was presented at the headquarters of Jackson Lab, a research and development institute that is being developed with assistance from the state of Connecticut. The Bioscience Innovation Act officially will be released as part of Governor Malloy's legislative package on February 6th.

OTTAWA: Foreign innovators who want to set up new companies in Canada will be able to immigrate under a new start-up visa program that Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said on Thursday was the first of its kind in the world.

The new program, to be launched on April 1, is part of a government push to better align the immigration system with Canada's economic goals. Last year, the government revamped the skilled worker program to try to make it meet employers' needs more nimbly.

"Our new start-up visa will help make Canada the destination of choice for the world's best and brightest to launch their companies," Kenney said in a statement.

In 2011, a Corning researcher named Terry Ott faced a problem that nobody else had needed to solve in the company’s 160-year history: how to make sheets of glass that could be rolled onto spools.

The challenge arose because Corning had developed a new kind of glass, known as Willow, which is as thin as a sheet of paper and acts a bit like it, too—if you shake it, it will rattle, and it can bend enough to be spooled. It could be the basis for displays in thinner, lighter cell phones and tablets—or for entirely new products, like displays that fit the curve of your wrist.

Rapid acidification of our oceans presents a challenge well suited for utilizing the incentivized competition methodology to crowdsource the genius required to create the solutions sorely needed before it’s too late.

Our beautiful Blue Planet has another problem with acid in its waters. In the 1980s, “acid rain” was contaminating lakes and rivers across the Northeast. Eventually, a joint effort across state lines helped develop new air-quality standards, smokestack scrubbers and other improvements to avert the crisis, returning the region’s water systems to viability.

No matter how many times I tell people there's no such thing as a "magic innovation pill," every one keeps asking.

This just in: I don't have the magic pill. But I DO have something even better -- a virtual potion that has the potential to liberate you and all your co-workers from the bothersome obstacles that keep sabotaging your ability to innovate.

Simply read thelist below, pick the CreativiTea you most need to imbibe, and take a virtual drink.

Bottoms up!

People have been trying to reform the office, it seems, since the office first appeared. Who was A Christmas Carol's Bob Cratchit but an early office reformer, whining for heat so that his ink didn't freeze? Office reformers of today point to trends like hotelling, co-working, and (my personal favorite) working from home — worthy endeavors, all. Maybe not as worthy as central heat, but pretty good ideas nonetheless.

But maybe we can learn a lesson from the humble cubicle. No one sets out to design the most hated office furniture of all time, unless perhaps you work for the Spanish Inquisition, and the cubicle is no exception. Originally intended to free office workers from their hierarchical, codified drudgery of an existence (can't you just taste the irony?), the cubicle has become universally loathed.

If you follow me on Twitter, or have ventured over and read my blog posts on Aspyre Solutions, you know that I take a big interest in small business & entrepreneurship as well. I thrive on understanding what breeds the entrepreneurial bug in people, what pushes them to make the transition from employee to entrepreneur and how the actions we take early on set some people up for success, and other for, well, not success. It’s so heavily about brands – creating a brand with buzz, that’s visually appealing, speaks to it’s audience’s challenges, needs, wants and interests, and as such delivers a specific value that allows it to carve its place into the marketplace. And when done right, all of that is worth moola!

You know what else I dig? Career management is very similar to building and running a business. It sounds informal as heck, but you really are a brand, in the sense that you have unique value to offer, and the trick is in how you position and communicate that value to get the right people to pay for it. If you want to propel your career, you know well enough that you need certain things to help you move along, like a solid resume/cover letter/digital presence (I call it a Brand Portfolio), excellent interviewing skills, the ability to recognize obvious and not-so-obvious networking opportunities, a fab portfolio if you’re a creative, etc. And the meat that makes up all those tools is your brand – who you are, what you do, what you have to offer, what it’s worth, and how you say it.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg--trailed by his perpetual entourage of news cameras--stepped through the door of a tiny but neatly kept apartment. He explored the model unit, which currently sits inside of the Museum of the City of New York, pulling down a trundle bed and peering inside of unexpected storage spaces. There wasn’t much ground to cover (only 300 square feet, in truth), and soon Bloomberg migrated to a podium to introduce the unit as the winning design in his AdAPT NYC competition, which seeks to imagine the future of housing in New York.

I got talking with Scott Anthony yesterday, managing partner at Innosight, the innovation advisory firm founded by Clayton Christensen. I asked him for his take on the most important attributes of leaders in companies that innovate.

We were specifically talking about companies in Asia – Scott is based in Singapore. These leadership attributes are applicable anywhere but the interesting feature of them is to compare and contrast US vs Asian leadership attributes.

Here are the three top attitudes or behaviors in companies that he regards as innovative. They’re the ones that make the difference between succeeding and failing, often in the tough business of disruption.

Nestled among Internet startups in the bustling South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco is an innovator of another sort. The year-old Hampton Creek Foods’ 2,400-square-foot office is home to a state-of-the-art lab, with a stainless-steel triple-shaft mixer, restaurant-grade dishwashers, and 17 employees milling around in white lab coats. They’re developing a plant-based substitute for the hen-born egg that’s indistinguishable in taste and price from the real thing.

That, it turns out, is hard work. “We definitely have a new respect for eggs,” says Megan Clements, a research scientist, as she watches a fellow food scientist squeeze oil into a vat of company-made eggless mayonnaise. “Every day we are challenged to get better to make up for what is not there.”

Early-stage Internet startup companies will be able to get their ideas off the ground faster with a better chance to succeed going forward through a new business accelerator launched today in the Kansas City region.

SparkLabKC will support early-stage Internet startups using a proven business accelerator program adapted to the Kansas City region. The program also builds on public-private partnerships and the strengths of the region’s vast entrepreneurial community.

“Our accelerator solves the two fundamental problems for early-stage startup companies—the experience gap and the capital gap,” said Kevin Fryer, SparkLabKC managing director and Kansas City entrepreneur. “We provide a deep pool of mentors who are seasoned entrepreneurs as well as seed capital and access to investors. Startups that have been through this kind of program have a superior track record of generating new companies, new jobs and achieving a significant impact in their communities.”

Believe it or not, not every startup founder today is building their company just to cash out with a big exit. Some entrepreneurs are actually in it for the long haul.

But which metrics actually inform these founders' long-term vision - what keeps the lights on and keeps them personally committed, for years at a time, to their current ventures. We asked eight entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share the yardsticks they use to measure their success.

Public relations is one of the most important aspects of corporate brand management that a company will ever engage in. When things are going great, you can use good public relations to build up a positive reputation for your company. If something goes wrong, then you call on that reputation to help prevent customers from abandoning you in droves.

When it comes to good public relations, there are five rules that a company must never break. If you try to carry on a public relations campaign without sticking to these basic rules, then your plan will be in trouble.

John Chavez is always on the hunt for the next big idea. Literally. The president of the New Mexico Angels and tax secretary to former governor Gary Johnson spends hours each month trolling the research labs of the University of New Mexico, visiting with scientists and their graduate assistants.  John knows universities are fertile ground for raw technology with potentially lucrative commercial applications.

“The goal is to find promising technology before it goes public. The best way to do that is through relationships with university researchers and the (University of New Mexico) tech transfer office,” says John. Over the last few years, he’s uncovered technologies that New Mexico Angels was able to use as the foundation of three start-ups: Lotus Leaf Coatings, Synofolia and Tryosine Pharma.

One of the most common savings goals we hear from our readers is travel. We tend to think that we need to save up thousands of dollars in order to justify taking those vacation days and heading out of town. But we might not need quite as much as we think. Even with a tight budget, you can still score amazing travel memories at a great price–you simply have to choose the right place.

The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published its "Where To Be Born in 2013" list, a measure of which countries provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead. WOND, an infographics and data visualization outfit based outside London, has put together a great repackaging of the data, which also included the list from 1988. Needless to say, things have changed over the past 25 years.

BREDASDORP, South Africa — A scruffy crew of scientists barreled down a dirt road, their two-car caravan kicking up dust. After searching all day for ancient beaches miles inland from the modern shoreline, they were about to give up.

Suddenly, the lead car screeched to a halt. Paul J. Hearty, a geologist from North Carolina, leapt out and seized a white object on the side of the road: a fossilized seashell. He beamed. In minutes, the team had collected dozens more.

Using satellite gear, they determined they were seven miles inland and 64 feet above South Africa’s modern coastline.