Even though innovation never goes out of style, there has been a renewed interest in governmental innovation as all agencies face shrinking budgets and an uncertain economy. The Federal Digital Strategy calls for more innovation in the government’s technical infrastructure and how information is delivered to citizens. There are plenty of consultants, conferences, and groups ready to help governments become more innovative. For the last few months, I have read much of the latest thinking on innovation. The topics range from the Lean Startup movement to the neuroscience of innovation. As with any hot management topic, there are many books, articles, and postings with some great ideas, not-so-great ideas, and downright damaging ideas. So, for this month, I will write a series of posts giving my opinion of the better ideas in current innovation thought.

The Ingenuity Gap was published in 2002 but has relevance for today. Homer-Dixon gives a compelling case for improving our ability to be ingenious. He argues that we not only need innovation (defined as the ability to create new ideas) but also the ability to reuse existing ideas for solving complex technical, social, and economic problems. In his book, he details a number of wicked problems such as climate change and economic inequality that are exhausting our current solutions. We need to increase our ability to rapidly innovate to ensure our survival. This is an important book to read as it builds a compelling case for investing in innovation.

On the sixth floor of an office building in San Francisco’s Financial District, in a boardroom at the back of a bright, spacious office, Rabbi Noa Kushner is doing something most people don’t generally think of rabbis doing: asking for guidance.

“You talk, I’ll type,” a consultant from UpStart Bay Area says to her. “Looking ahead six months, what are your main goals?”

Kushner is the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, a 16-month-old group that describes itself as “one part indie Shabbat community, one part San Francisco experiment, and one part tool kit for DIY Jewish practice.” The rabbi has regular meetings at UpStart to talk about where her young organization is headed.

In the summer of 2007, Highland Capital Partners welcomed eight teams of fresh-faced college grads into its first business incubator program. Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard worked together on tools for marketers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns on Facebook (FB), Twitter, and other social networks. In July, Google (GOOG) agreed to pay $250 million plus performance incentives to acquire their company, called Wildfire. That brought the final price tag to $350 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.

For most venture capital firms this would have meant a big payday and a bottle of Champagne. But Highland didn’t make any money on the deal—the firm never invested in Wildfire. “It kind of caught us by surprise,” says Michael Gaiss, who had run the incubator program since its inception. (Gaiss left his job as a Highland senior vice president in August but says he may still help out with next summer’s class.) “We had a look and talked to the team. I wish we would have invested.”

NEW YORK -- What does it take to become a multimillionaire entrepreneur and business icon? At the World Business Forum in New York City on Tuesday, real estate mogul and Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran shared some of the secrets to her success.

"I really started my business education watching how my mother ran our house," Corcoran says. With ten kids and little income, her mother ran a tight ship. Most importantly, Corcoran says, her mother taught her children to try, even if they didn't succeed. "I learned to jump out the window with the belief that I'd learn how to fly," she says.

Ask a committee of 16 academics, 3 bureaucrats, 2 Fortune 500 executives and 1 Venture Capitalist to provide the President of the United States with a report on improving drug development in the US and they call in a panel of experts consisting of 14 academics, 9 bureaucrats, 12 Fortune 500 execs, 2 venture capitalists and 2 lawyers resulting in: "Report to the President on Propelling Innovation in Drug Discovery , Development and Evaluation".

The recently released report is devoid of any whisper of the existence of entrepreneurs and start-ups. It suggests that more basic research funding, a more efficient drug approval process and longer terms of patent coverage will mysteriously result in more and better therapeutics reaching market.

Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform went public this February, and besides the hiccups in its stock price and all the negative press, there is no doubt that Facebook is worth a hell of a lot of money, its early employees have made billions from just one idea, and the company is inarguably the single most successful social networking site in the world.

But Facebook didn’t become the sensation that it is today by chance. The company has become so successful because it has a leader who was a genius at starting a company, keeping it focused, and disciplined and above all willing to understand and overcome his own shortcomings.

With the number of technology accelerators outside the U.S. reaching over 300, and nations increasing resources in technology and entrepreneurship, the level of GLOBAL INNOVATION IS AT IT’S PEAK.

US-based investors are flooded with Silicon Valley and NYC deals - but who is mining the untapped (and far less expensive) investment opportunities overseas? And how does a game-changing, yet unknown, venture from abroad get on the radar of US investors to secure funding and expand globally.

Its a growing problem that has yet be addressed - until now...

“It’s 2012, and people don’t buy what you do but why you do it. Social media helps companies of all sizes expose the individuals behind the brand, humanize it and build influence,” says Amy Jo Martin, founder and chief of social media consultancy Digital Royalty and author of social media book Renegades Write The Rules, released this week.

Martin, who has 1.2 million Twitter followers herself, works with celebrities like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal and corporate brands like Hilton Worldwide and FOX Sports to get the most out of their social media networks. She believes entrepreneurs are especially poised to gain from social media because it provides easy access to potential customers and partners, facilitating free marketing and market research and efficient customer service.

Nearly every state is focused on promoting innovation. With such a far-reaching concept, however, progress can be a noble if somewhat amorphous goal. To be successful, leaders must have a strong vision, rally numerous stakeholders to their cause, and be able to demonstrate progress. Accomplishing all three is a difficult challenge.

When Governor Pat Quinn convened the Illinois Innovation Council in February 2011, it signaled a new approach. The council, which is made up of business executives and entrepreneurs as well as leaders from science, technology, and academia, was formed to connect the dots between these sectors and to create a more welcoming environment for entrepreneurs and start-ups.

A critical component of this effort was to gain a better understanding of where Illinois is excelling and where it can improve. At the same time, our organizations began meeting to discuss col- laborative approaches that could achieve shared goals: to measure and communicate the status of innovation in metropolitan Chicago and Illinois more effectively and to provide better access to data for analysis by policymakers and the public. These two paths converged, and the Illinois Innovation Index was born.

Lincoln, Neb., October 2nd, 2012 —             North is at the top of the map, and northern states are at the top of this year's U.S. State Entrepreneurship Index from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

            Massachusetts is No. 1 in the SEI, an annual state-by-state measurement of entrepreneurial activity of all 50 states. The Bay State was followed by North Dakota, California, New York and Minnesota. Also in the Top 10 this year were Oregon, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Illinois. Texas, at No. 8, was the highest ranked southern state.

            Economists at UNL's Bureau of Business Research and Department of Economics developed the annual State Entrepreneurship Index by combining five key components -- a state's percentage growth and per capita growth of business establishments, its business formation rate, the number of patents per thousand residents and income per non-farm proprietor in each state.

VILNIUS - The European Investment Fund (EIF) together with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia is launching an initiative which aims to encourage venture capital investment in Baltic companies, reports ELTA.

Over the next four years, the Baltic Innovation Fund (BIF) will invest 100 million euros into private equity and venture capital funds, encouraging risk capital investments in small- and medium-sized enterprises and their growth.

On Sept. 26, the EIF and representatives of the three Baltic States signed the BIF management contract in Vilnius. EIF is investing 40 million euros, while the national agency of each country, Lithuania’s Investment and Business Guarantees (INVEGA), Latvia’s Guarantee Agency and Estonia’s KredEx are allocating 20 million euros each.

Unreal, the company devoted to making candy with more natural and sustainable ingredients, was faced with a challenge: How do you convert people’s guilty pleasure into a healthy(er) snack that still tastes sinful? 

You’ve probably already seen the star power that Unreal has unleashed to endorse their new candy company, which is trying to take on the $200 billion sweets industry with new offerings that use better ingredients.

I was hanging out with Tom Rodgers of Cambia Health the other day and we were discussing the seemingly unrelenting trend of the formation of new technology incubators and accelerators, designed to help catapult the weird and wonderful ideas of entrepreneurs into actionable companies. The idea is to take these entrepreneurs and the light bulbs that have formed over their heads, put them together with each other (often in a physical location with loft-like qualities), wrap them in a burrito of high quality resources and experienced mentors and cook for about three months until what comes out is one big yummy pile of companies ripe for gobbling up by venture capitalists.

This trend has been longer lived in pure technology and medical technology fields (YCombinator,Tech Stars,The Foundry) and more recently has come to the world of healthcare IT in a pretty big way with the formation of Rock Health, Blueprint Health, HealthBox, Janssen Labs, Start-Up Healthand several others founded and in process. One can only imagine that, somewhere near MIT, there is an incubator for incubators in the works. I have, my own self, been approached by three, count them three, newly forming incubators in the healthcare area over the past few months. When they ask for my advice I find myself saying, “Are you sure you want to do this? Does the world really need another one?”

Angel investors play a crucial role in any startup ecosystem, by making bets on companies at their earliest stages—to help them develop prototypes, get through beta phases, and attract early customers and the next level of investors. It seems every time a Boston-area company announces it has landed some seed funding, a mysterious crop of angel investors is behind it. So we wanted to take a closer look at some of these key players around town—where their careers have taken them, what sectors they’re keeping an eye on, and how they go about deciding when to write those checks.

We present to you: the top angel investors from around Boston and New England.

Our method for determining which angels made the cut was more holistic than scientific. We started with existing sources, like techie Jon Pierce’s blog post on top Boston angels from a few years back. His readers suggested plenty of additions in the comments, so we took a deeper look at those and also tapped our contacts in the Boston innovation arena (and beyond) to get their take on who the current movers and shakers are. In the end, our criteria consisted of a mix of recommendations from the community and a vigorous track record of recent investing activity. Some of these angels invest primarily or exclusively through an angel fund, and we tried to note where that was the case.

Several companies from throughout West Virginia are getting business planning and start-up assistance thanks to TechConnect West Virginia’s new StartUp West Virginia Venture program.  The assistance is being provided by The INNOVA Commercialization Group, which is providing its suite of commercialization services to selected small businesses and entrepreneurs.  “The StartUp West Virginia Venture program is providing the entrepreneurs and small businesses with a range of customized start-up services including consultation, entrepreneurial training, mentoring, research and product development, subject matter experts and collaborators, legal, financial and accounting assistance, and marketing assistance, as are necessary and available,” said Anne Barth, Executive Director of TechConnect West Virginia.

Barth noted that selected enterprises are ones that are developing a unique product, process or technology, and priority will be given to those who fall within TechConnectWV’s four defined target innovation sectors: biometrics, chemicals, biosciences and advanced energy.

Correlation Ventures, a new analytics-driven venture firm, just came out with some interesting data on US venture capital returns over the past decade.

Instead of taking a “birth” vintage approach to returns, which is the way venture fund vintages and most benchmarking analyses tend to cut the data, Correlation Ventures’ team has chosen to look at all the realized exits and their returns in any given year.  This data is based on financings (e.g., Series A and B rounds in the same company are two data points), and includes all prior financings into companies that went out of business, got sold, or got public (IPO) in that year. They are also dollar-weighted (e.g., for the top decile, or 90th percentile, 10% of all the dollar’s invested in financings of companies that exited in that year were above the realized multiple). Since 2003, each year represents 500-700 exits and over 2000 financings – so it’s a very robust dataset.

BANGALORE: Indian entrepreneurs are the faces behind a growing number of US tech startups. A study by the US based Kauffman Foundation shows that 33.2% of the cofounders of engineering and technology firms founded by immigrants in the US since 2006 were Indians. The next came the Chinese, at 8.1%.

Another study done in 2007 for the period 1995 to 2005 had found that Indians accounted for 26% of the co-founders during that period. So there's been a 7 percentage point increase in the Indian contribution in the post-2005 period. In fact, the Indian immigrant contribution was the only one that increased; most other immigrant communities saw a decline in their contributions, leading to a general stagnation in immigrant entrepreneurship in the US.

Intel Chief Executive and San Francisco native Paul Otellini is not happy with the direction of his home state and worries that it could go the way of Greece.

Speaking on stage this week at the Intel Capital Global Summit in Huntington Beach, Calif., an annual gathering for executives of companies that Intel has invested in, Otellini was responding to a question from former California Republican Congressman Tom Campbell on whether he was “bullish” on California.

“Oh, God,” Otellini said, “I was born and raised here. I’m fifth or sixth generation. It’s one of the nicest pieces of real estate on the planet, and we’re so close to screwing it up, it’s pathetic. I’d like to be bullish, but I worry that we have to hit the abyss before we can fix things, and I worry that the abyss will be more like Greece.”

WATERLOO, Ontario—Philipe Noelting graduated from Babson College in 2009 with an idea for a job-recruitment start-up.

But instead of staying put in Boston or moving to other start-up hubs like Silicon Valley or New York, Mr. Noelting ended up here—a small university town 90 minutes northwest of Toronto.

Waterloo may be best known as the hometown of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd., recently struggling amid competition from Apple Inc. and Google Inc. But unlike other company towns with swooning corporate titans, Waterloo is thriving, quietly morphing into a magnet for technology start-ups, incubators, accelerators and young inventors.

One of the keys to happiness at work is earning a lot of money, but what is equally important, if not more important, is that our earnings not be inferior to those of our peers, that is, of the colleaugues we compare ourselves to. This is revealed by a study carried out at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) that analyzes the relationship between happiness and income from work.

The study, published by Professor Eduardo Pérez Asenjo of UC3M’s Economics Department, shows that relative earnings affect our happiness and our job performance. Summing up: if the people with whom I compare myself earn more than I do, I will be unhappier and I will work more. “This confirms the hypothesis of what I perceived, but not the way I would like things to be,” the author of the study comments. “I would find it healthier not to compare what we earn to what others earn and I think it would be ‘better’ if these things didn’t affect our happiness,” he states.