As good as modern rim brakes have become, it's clear that the tide is changing as nearly one-third of Cyclingnews Reader Poll respondents voted disc brakes for road and cyclocross bikes as the top tech innovation of 2012.

That so many voted for disc brakes is particularly impressive considering that nearly all of the most popular models have design roots more than a decade old and save for a handful of mechanical-to-hydraulic conversion systems, all of them are cable actuated as well. Even so, the stopping power and modulation provided by a stainless steel rotor, two nearly non-compressible brake pads, and a stiff, compact caliper body easily trumps squeezing two blocks of rubber against an aluminum or carbon fiber rim - and the advantages only grow exponentially in wet conditions.

From a national day of giving back to an inspiring show of corporate support after Hurricane Sandy, 2012 was a remarkable year for social innovation, philanthropy and corporate responsibility.  Below, I share my picks for this year’s social innovation highlights and best-in-show campaigns.  I’d love to hear your top picks too, so please share in the comments section!  

Most Innovative Partnership for Good: 10×10 & Intel

10×10 is a feature film, Girl Rising, and a social action campaign created and launched by an award-winning  team of former ABC News journalists in association with The Documentary Group and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions. The transmedia project, funded mainly by Intel, uses the power of storytelling and the leverage of strategic partnerships to deliver a single message: “Educating girls in developing nations will change the world.” Intel has worked for decades to improve education around the world understanding that if the education gap is closed for girls, not only are their lives transformed but so are the lives of everyone they touch.

As anyone who has ever watched the BBC’s Dragon’s Den will know that wrongly valuing a company is one of the most common mistakes made by entrepreneurs when looking for investment or a profitable sale.

This is because such valuations are, by their very nature, an inexact science. Ultimately, a business is worth only what someone will pay for it, and not a penny more. That said, taking the following factors into account will help to guide your valuation process.

University Ventures, a $100 million fund created earlier this year to invest in higher education companies, announced Monday that it has launched a startup of its own.

Led by Satish Menon, former CTO of the Apollo Group (which owns for-profit education giant University of Phoenix), UV Labs will partner with universities and other higher education providers to build products addressing a range of issues, from accessibility to affordability to accountability. UV Labs, which will operate as an independent company, currently includes only Menon, the co-founder and CEO, but he said his first order of business is building out a team and focusing on a set of priorities.

Backed by German media company Bertelsmann, as well as the University of Texas Investment Management Company and other smaller partners, University Ventures has also invested in UniversityNow, an online learning site focused on making degrees more affordable; Synergis Education; and Ameritas College Educational Services, which offers degree programs targeting Hispanic Americans.

A woman who is completely paralyzed below the neck has regained the ability to reach out and interact with the world around her thanks to the most advanced brain-computer interface for operating a robotic arm so far.

In February, surgeons implanted two four-millimeter-by-four-millimeter electrode arrays into the participant’s motor cortex, the region of the brain that initiates movements. Each chip has 96 electrodes and is wired through the skull to a computer that translates her thoughts into signals for the robotic arm. The work, performed by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, is reported in the latest issue of The Lancet.

In a scene from the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln tells her husband: "No one is loved as much as you by the people. Don't waste that power." Spoiler alert: He doesn't.

While the movie focuses on the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, it also gives a lot of insight to Lincoln's strong leadership skills -- those things that have made him so admired.

Not so long ago, training to meet the press and television reporters was a realm reserved for top business executives only. Now, even the earliest stage startup can rise to visibility or be forever lost by their first media spotlight, so it behooves us all to know the rules early. Most entrepreneurs I know admit to a poor first media interaction, and many are still waiting for the instant replay.

On the social media side, the stakes are just as great. Ask Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, who raised over $10 million on the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform for his relatively low-tech wristwatch with programmed clock faces. Kickstarter may take a bit of the credit for this, but they admit the majority of projects without media attention don’t even approach their funding goals.

I got a call Sunday from a business colleague while I was sitting in the lounge at LAX waiting for yet another delayed flight.

This colleague is a lawyer with whom I work on a deal and have done so for a couple of years. By all accounts I now consider him a friend. He caught me while I was sipping a Bloody Mary and thinking a bit a business situation that bummed me out. He called to try and put things right.

It was partly a professional call and partly a personal one. I have often written about how lonely it can be to be a CEO and and have very few people with whom you can talk about difficult situations. But honestly there are times when being a VC can feel like that, too. It’s not exactly like you can disclose complex and confidential situations to outsiders.

Last week, DealBook hosted a fabulous conference where the heads of the most important investment banks in the world spoke, along with some big names in the tech and economics.

One thing that stood out was the way money was and was not discussed.

The CEOs of investment banks were pushed to talk about money, inequality, and compensation. The tech people weren't asked about money at all.

During the first interview of the conference, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Jamie Dimon, "How do you think about money?" Sorkin asked because there is still resentment in this country about inequality, and because there was a story that when Dimon was 9-years old he told his parents "I want to be rich" when I grow up.

In case you hadn't heard, 2012 was the year that crowdfunding exploded onto the scene. Sure, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rockethub and others were around before this year, but the last 12 months saw the very concept permeate much deeper into the collective consciousness. 

Numerous new platforms like WhenYouWish.com and niche platforms like Medstartr opened their doors, the JOBS Act in the US and other laws in Europe opened the door for equity crowdfunding, and donation-based campaigns began to collect seven-figure totals from the crowd.

As we barrel toward the end of the 2012, it’s time to tie up any loose ends regarding the financial and legal aspects of your business. Ending the year the right way will give you a running start going into 2013.

While this is undeniably a busy time of year, here are eight things every small business should do as he or she closes out the year.

Years ago, I was involved with a firm that experimented with teaching leadership principles to elementary school children. We were introducing the same skills to 3rd and 4th graders that we teach managers in large corporations. These nine- and ten-year-olds had no trouble understanding such concepts as the importance of preserving self-confidence in your colleagues or the dangers of focusing on personalities. In fact, they lost no time in applying the principles to their parents (who are, after all, their immediate supervisors). I can't help smiling when I think of a 3rd grader informing her parents that they were not focusing on the problem, but only on the person. From this we concluded that it's never too early to teach leadership skills.

I'm not suggesting that fostering leadership skills in the schools is a corporation's responsibility (that's really a subject for another day). But I am arguing that leadership development can be taught at any age — and that companies wait far, far too long to begin. And when I say late, I mean very late.

Back in 2008, I wrote a post on start-up survival rates that has proved to be very popular. Because that post was based on the 1992 cohort of new companies, many people have asked me if the numbers are true for today’s start-ups. Roughly speaking, the answer is yes.

But don’t take my word for it. Look at what the U.S. government data show. In the chart below, I present the latest available numbers from the two government statistical agencies responsible for providing data about new businesses: The Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The chart includes both new establishments, which the BLS defines as new economic entities doing business at a particular location, and new firms, which it defines as new companies. While new firms may have more than one establishment and new establishments may be started by existing companies, researchers have found that the number of new firms and the number of new establishments are similar.

What makes for an innovative company? An innovation initiative is not enough. Having the word “innovation” in your company slogan or all over your web site is not enough. Indeed, I would argue that any kind of focus on innovation as an end is detrimental to innovation. Innovation is nothing more than a tool that enables companies to achieve unique, strategic goals. Here are seven essential characteristics of innovative companies. How well does your organization do?

1. Unique and Relevant Strategy

Arguably, the most defining characteristic of a truly innovative company is having a unique and relevant strategy. We all know what companies like Apple, Facebook and Google do. That’s because they make their strategies clear and relentless follow them. An innovative smaller player may not be recognised globally, but its leaders, employees, business partners and customers all will have a clear idea of the company’s strategy. If a business does not have definable, unique strategy, it will not be innovative. Bland strategies, such as “to be the best”, do not provide a path to innovation in the same way clearer strategies, such as “to be on the cutting edge of mobile communications technology,” “to build the world’s safest cars”or “to deliver anything anywhere” do. If your strategy is vague or fails to differentiate your company from the competition, you should change this situation as quickly as possible!

Studying how companies in the emerging markets innovate can offer Western engineers and designers important inspiration, and challenge them to develop products that are much cheaper. Such “frugal solutions” will become increasingly important in order to stay relevant in the stagnant markets of the West – as well as for the upcoming global middle class of developing countries. This study focuses on the “jugaad” innovation of India.

Jugaad is an Indian phrase used to describe the kind of ingenuity that enables Indians to manage the large and small challenges of everyday life. The essence of Jugaad is to improvise, and to quickly and cheaply cobble a solution together from the materials you have at hand.

Being an effective innovator is not an easy task. The good news is that you can learn from others’ experiences. Gijs van Wulfen walks us through some of the important lessons he learned as a marketer, strategy consultant and innovation facilitator.

Innovation is one big struggle. Not being able to change habits within the organization. Being creative at the wrong moment. Frustrated by budget cuts. Confronted with a lack of entrepreneurship. Putting pressure on people in operations who resist change. Taking the credits as team leader instead of praising the team.

Yesterday, I posted about the Collaborative Web--which I suppose you could call Web 3.0, even though we all agreed that versioning for web software is stupid.  But wasn't Web 3.0 supposed to be the "Internet of Things"?  Sensors, objects, all sorts of non-desktop computer-like stuff that collected info and connected us to our physical world in a more interactive way was supposed to be the next big thing.

Well, if you stop and piece together the vision behind the wacky Google stories about internet connected glasses, fiber to the home, or self-driving cars, you might notice Google throwing the long ball to a very advanced and very connected future. 

General Electric has a new name for where it thinks its business is headed: the “industrial Internet.”

The term, coined inside GE’s R&D division, reflects the company’s hope that adding more sensors to machinery will result in a deluge of data that will in turn let companies squeeze more efficiency out of locomotives, jet engines, MRI machines, and other equipment GE sells.

GE says it is investing $1.5 billion in the idea over a three-year period. Some of that money is being spent on research at a large new software R&D center the company has created in San Ramon, California.

Over the course of three trying decades, the Rust Belt has scraped off years of oxidation and is in the process of polishing itself into a shining new landscape of technological advancement. But try telling that to the rest of the country.

"When people think of the Rust Belt, they think of a hard work ethic, blue-collar values, stick-to-itiveness. There's always a sense of true American grit associated with the Rust Belt, which I don't think we take advantage of as much as we should," said Sewickley-based startup adviser Kit Mueller.

While Americans sit down for a sumptuous Thanksgiving meal, a grand policy buffet is being planned for 2013: comprehensive immigration reform. However, several policy chefs have cooked up some tantalizing appetizers to feed an innovation economy starving for skilled talent.

These appetizers — proposals to bring a semblance of fairness to talented immigrants, and provide additional employer green cards to help US employers recruit and retain job-creating talent — will make the innovation economy even hungrier for a comprehensive policy meal and not, as some suggest, spoil their reform appetite.