Browsing through these paragraphs will take you approximately two minutes. If you read them more carefully, four perhaps. Not a lot of time or investment. In this blog Susanna Bill reminds us why time is key for innovation and organizational change.

Innovation efforts take a lot of time until there is evidence of profound change. In 2007 when I was Innovation Manager at Sony Ericsson, I met with my counterpart at Ericsson Magnus Karlsson to discuss and compare notes about what kind of idea systems to chose in order to enable joint efforts. At the time we represented parts of the same industry group: I was mobile phones, he the network, and we liked the idea of collaboration.

The auto and electronics industries have served as the economy's main locomotives for decades, but now they are being eclipsed by heavier global competition, particularly from their aggressive Asian rivals.

To offset the dip in dominance, the government is turning to Japan's cultural exports, including animation, fashion and food, to promote Japan's "soft power" in a PR strategy called "Cool Japan."

Everyone is looking for the genius innovator, killer application or product that will rocket them to top of the growth league. If you find another Steve Jobs, your country's wealth could increase by US$600 billion (the market capitalisation of Apple), or roughly the annual GDP of Switzerland or Saudi Arabia.

There are two mainstream views of innovation, both attributed to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Drawing on his explanation of the Industrial Revolution, he argued that economic growth is driven by innovation created by entrepreneurs who combine technical or scientific knowledge with business models that propel growth in the economy.

Name: Kyck

Quick Pitch: A social sports network tailored exclusively for fans of international and club soccer.

Genius Idea: Eliminating the clutter of other sports and giving soccer fans options to curate content relevant to them.

With Euro 2012‘s knockout stage underway, there are a number of ways to follow the action — Twitter, TV, online news, or one of the social sports apps that have been proliferating over the past several months.

If you like your soccer with a dash of social, however, you could do worse than Kyck, a soccer-specific app aimed solely at fans of “the beautiful game.”

About 56% of the projects posted to Kickstarter don’t get funded, according to a dashboard the site launched Thursday.

Around 7,000 of Kickstarters have never received a single pledge. (The site has hosted more than 60,000 projects in total.)

But you won’t be able to find Kickstarter’s flops via Google. The crowdfuding site prevents search engines from indexing its failed projects — a practice that had led some to cry conspiracy.

During the past month, a handful of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate reached across the partisan divide to introduce the Startup Act 2.0, a bill to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs in the United States by easing restrictions on immigration. It's a great bill, but it could be better. In addition to its immigration measures, it should also advance a plan to boost entrepreneurship and technical skills at home. Here's one important way to do that: Encourage public schools to teach American children how to code just after they learn to multiply.

The drug discovery business is going through tough times. Drug candidates aren't moving through the pharmaceutical industry's pipelines fast enough. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs struggle to get the funding they need to bring their new ideas to fruition. These issues are driving new alliances and partnerships between academic researchers, venture capitalists, and big pharma, but whether the new models will solve the problem was a question on the minds of many of the 15,000 attendees at this week's BIO International Convention in Boston.

The themes are familiar: venture capitalists are limiting their investments in biotech, in part because it's hard for fledgling life-science companies to go public, and although big pharma is desperate for innovative ideas and depends heavily on small biotechs for new drug candidates, these larger companies don't want to take on risky, early-stage projects. The new alliances, some of which involve direct collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and academics, are a response to what one panelist called this "crisis."

You can’t say everything in front of everybody. In fact, your team cannot afford to hear your confusion, your complaining or your income. All three will mess with their head and their focus in one way or another.

Your Team Needs a Clear Message 

They need an unshakable understanding of their assignment. Your goal — in communicating your expectations — is to deliver the assignment in a way that makes it virtually impossible for them mess up. It’s not about “I told you so,” it’s about impact.

Finding a partner who wants to play ball with you seems like a difficult task, but when you take a look at the process, it’s negotiating the terms of a partnership agreement that requires true business savvy. Like Ben Hogan’s legendary golf swing, follow-through is the key, consistent element to make sure the terms of partnership are mutually beneficial.

Do yourself a favor – don’t leave it all up to the lawyers. Partnerships are about a shared vision, so make sure business comes first and foremost.

Business, university and economic development leaders pitched the benefits of operating in Iowa on Thursday, hitting issues that ranged from encouraging innovation to developing a strong workforce.

About 40 site selectors, who help businesses decide where to expand, listened to the state’s online presentation Thursday. Steven Leath, Iowa State University’s president, moderated the virtual panel discussion, largely a sales pitch about the benefits of operating a business in Iowa.

• Josh Abramson 
• James Altucher 
• Phin Barnes 
• John Borthwick 
• Mike Brown Jr. 
• Marissa Campise 
• Brian Cohen 
• Dennis Crowley 
• Anil Dash 
• Owen Davis

Entrepreneurs often get the advice from their lawyers and friends to always get a Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA or CDA) signed before disclosing anything about their new venture. Most investors and startup advisors I know hate them, and refuse to sign them. Who is right?

Let me try to put this question in perspective. If you are totally risk-averse, then push to always get signed NDAs. You won’t last long as an entrepreneur in this category, since a startup is all about taking risks. On the other hand, if you intend to patent an idea, you need a signed confidentiality agreement from everyone knowing details, or you will legally lose patent rights.

Innovation is the name of the game these days — in business, in science and technology, even in art. We all want to get those big ideas, but most of us really have no idea what sets off those sparks of insight. Science can help! In the past few years, neuroscientists and psychologists have started to gain a better understanding of the creative process. Some triggers of innovation may be surprisingly simple. Here are five things that may well increase the odds of having an "Aha!" moment.

1. Take a shower.

A seemingly mindless task — showering, fishing or driving — might help spur creative thoughts, as the mind wanders from "lather-rinse-repeat" to a recent problem, and then back again. There's even history to back this up.

This article in Harvard Business Review helps CEOs and other senior executives answer a perennial question: How much should they take on? The authors analyze how the CEO's span of control logically evolves and offer advice for managers as they progress through their career.

Download the PDF

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

—The Beatles

I had the pleasure of attending a “salon” type dinner hosted by Xconomy and its chief correspondent and San Francisco editor Wade Roush last week (and graciously sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and Alexandria Real Estate Equities). The dinner included about 24 people, all of whom in some way had a connection to the emerging field of digital health. In addition to the sponsors, the group featured many CEOs of newly minted companies, some highly experienced and at their second or third rodeo, and some very new to the big desk in the corner. Also present were a few industry thought leader and advisor types, including representatives of Rock Health and Singularity University, as well as a few venture investors, just to be sure all the air would get sucked out of the room. Because the dinner was meant to be off the record, I have not attributed points below to specific individuals.

If you’re fond of delicious ironies, as I am, there’s a new book that will leave you positively gorged. It’s called Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems, and last week I got to speak with one of its authors, Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey.

The central irony that fascinates Palfrey and his co-author Urs Gasser, who directs the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, is that complex systems—especially those designed to support a high degree of interoperability—often bite back, achieving the reverse of what we intended. Think of the Challenger disaster as an example. The way NASA designed the shuttle system, more than 80 percent of the thrust required for liftoff came from the reusable solid rocket boosters, which consisted of four segments each (an arrangement that made it easier to refill the boosters with solid propellant between missions). Rubber O-rings between the segments were supposed to seal the joints and keep hot gas from escaping during launch. But January 28, 1986, was a very cold day at Cape Canaveral, and the O-rings turned out to be so brittle under those conditions they failed to hold the seal after ignition, allowing a gas leak that burned a hole in the main external fuel tank and destroyed the vehicle.

Initial Crowd Offering, Inc. today unveiled its equity crowdfunding intermediary website, http://www.initialcrowdoffering.com.    

An Initial Crowd Offering (ICO) is the IPO for small and emerging businesses. It is the newest way to invest and raise capital for small and emerging businesses.

ICO’s state-of-the-art technology provides the most transparent environment for investing in small and emerging businesses, allowing direct, real-time investments in exchange for equity ownership through a secure site.

Startup accelerators continue to grow in popularity. There are now more than 200 around the world attracting twice as many applicants as they did just two years ago. But there’s a dirty little secret: A lot of accelerators are just spinning their wheels.

Last year, Aziz Gilani, a director at Houston venture capital firm DFJ Mercury, ran a study of 29 North American accelerators for the Kauffman Fellows Program. He found that 45% of them produced not a single graduate who went on to raise venture funding.

Not Enough Exits to Evaluate But wait, it gets worse. The original goal of Gilani’s study was to evaluate accelerators based on the number of exits achieved by their graduates. That aim proved to be “delusional,” he says. “There were not enough exits to evaluate. The only two accelerators that had any meaningful exits were Y Combinator and TechStars.”

Sons of fathers with high incomes tend to end up with higher than average incomes themselves, but new research shows that it’s not just dad’s money that helps a son on his way.

According to a study recently published in the Journal of Political Economy, human capital endowments passed from father to son—perhaps in the form of smarts, advice, work ethic, or some other intangible—could be more important to a son’s success than the size of dad’s paycheck.

“We know there’s a correlation between fathers’ income and sons’.” said David Sims, an economics professor at Brigham Young University and one of the study’s authors. “What’s gotten less attention is the mechanism. We wanted to see if the intergenerational income correlation is due to money—what we can buy for our kids—or if human capital attributes passed from father to son play a role as well.”

As an employee, you have three choices: Accept what you've been given, change what you've been given, or leave what you've been given. We want to focus on the second option. If you feel underused and undervalued, you can do something about it. You may be tempted to hold the organization accountable for your engagement. If you still don't buy the argument that you're in charge of your own engagement, ask yourself: have you ever had true passion for something in life?