Today, innovation is almost always supported—if not driven—by technology. No stranger to this rule is Todd Park, who in March ended a three-year stint as chief technology officer (CTO) of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to take on the role of CTO of the United States. In this interview—part of a series of articles from McKinsey’s public-sector practice (for more, see sidebar, “About this series”)—Park explains how he has tried to find creative ways to use IT and data to benefit the public. Among his achievements at HHS were the launch of programs such as the consumer Web site HealthCare.gov and the Health Data Initiative, which encourages the development of innovative applications using publicly available government data. McKinsey’s Eric Braverman and Michael Chui recently met with Park in Washington, DC, and asked him about his plans for accelerating innovation in the US government.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), along with the Institute of Medicine (IoM) and other members of the Health Data Consortium, are co-hosting the third annual “Datapalooza” focusing on innovative applications and services that harness the power of open data from HHS and other sources to help improve health and health care.

The Health Data Initiative Forum III is featuring more than 100 new or updated solutions, up from 45 solutions last year, that help serve the needs of consumers, health care providers, employers, public health leaders, and policy makers.

“The innovators present today are a great example of how data and technology can be used in powerful ways to help consumers and providers improve health,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “We’re not just creating new technology, but we’re empowering Americans to make better decisions about health and health care by putting information at their fingertips.”

Rich Bendis and Dr. Mark Rohrbaugh will discuss a new Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program financed by BioHealth Innovation (BHI) which places a full-time, experienced, serial entrepreneur inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Technology Transfer. This EIR is designed to be an active partner with research institutions to source, fund, and grow high-potential, early-stage products through project-focused companies. The entrepreneurs in the program support the formation of new companies based upon innovative discoveries in the areas of drugs, vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical devices from the intramural research programs at the NIH and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as from universities and businesses. The EIR will find, evaluate, and support the development of new start-up companies based upon technology license agreements from technology transfer offices or equivalent units within the research institutions.

BHI, a new regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, announced on March 26, 2012 its selection of Todd Chappell as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) for BHI at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). Mr. Chappell, a venture capital-backed entrepreneurial leader and inventor with more than ten years of experience in molecular biology research, drug development and life sciences business strategy, will help support the development of new start-up companies based upon OTT technology license agreements. As the first EIR, Mr. Chappell – who will have dual responsibility to both BHI and NIH – will assist OTT in the evaluation of existing technologies, provide an entrepreneurial perspective to OTT in its evaluation of new licensing proposals from start-up companies, advise OTT on opportunities for new ventures based on NIH/Food & Drug Administration (FDA) technologies, assist with developmental strategies, and mentor scientists to help ensure their research becomes commercially valuable.

With pharmaceutical industry research budgets shrinking, large drug companies are instead looking to support early-stage biotechnology startups. Merck, Eli Lilly, and GlaxoSmithKline have all announced investments in such companies in recent months.

The multinational drug giants are moving to partner with venture-capital firms and nascent biotechnology companies in hopes of feeding their drug development pipelines. "We are going toward external innovation. We're dealing with more academics and biotechs than we ever have," said James Schaeffer, Merck Research Laboratories' director of West Coast licensing and external research, speaking at a BioVentures's C21 conference in California last week.

Developers should go back to basics and stop trying to load products with special features: turns out, consumers don't care about them.

According to consultant Donald Reinertsen and Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke, tons of features actually frustrate consumers and overcomplicate the product.

In an article published by Harvard Business Review, Reinertson and Thomke say it's ridiculous that even toasters have complicated instruction manuals:

This series of articles has explored the definition and scope of innovation governance as well as the different organizational models that companies typically choose to allocate responsibility for innovation. This last article will discuss questions linked to the perceived general effectiveness or inadequacy of innovation governance endeavors, and it will characterize the managers’ level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the various organizational models that their companies have adopted.

This IM Expert Panel Discussion on making innovation pay offers insights on new methods to increase the rate of innovation, reduce individual level costs per innovation and encourage fail fast methods. This session is all about unusual ways that organizations have managed to drive innovation execution to make returns on their innovation investments and the key learnings that can be applied and replicated in your organization.

Facebook has flopped on the public markets, and now we have vivid evidence of how badly Silicon Valley is reeling in the fallout. Paul Graham, cofounder of Silicon Valley's most important startup incubator, Y Combinator, has sent an email to portfolio companies warning them "bad times" may be ahead. He warns: "The bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. "No one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle."

It’s not about the money or the time, not really. It’s about what you do with them, how you use money and time to enhance your life and your business.

Money Means More In Wise Hands

If it was just about the money, every lotto winner would be happy and financially set for life. But resources have a way of slipping through fingers that aren’t ready for it.

The same is true for time. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, yet some accomplish amazing, smart and creative things and others just kind of tread water. Time gets away from us without a plan.

Seven years after earning tenure at the College of Wooster, Judith C. Amburgey-Peters is still working a "nonstop, crazy schedule on 6,000 different things." But she is not sure whether the 80 hours a week she spends leading the chemistry department, advising students, and trying to squeeze in time for research will ultimately qualify her for promotion to full professor.

"When I asked a few years back who could help me with my five-year professional plan, the looks I got back were: What planet are you from?" she says.

Business success begins in the mind of the startup founder and his team. A winning startup is a team of entrepreneurs who build and run the business as an extension of who they are, rather than some extrapolation of the Google or Facebook model.

It’s not so easy to fake the important attributes when the going gets rough. So before you risk it all by jumping into a startup, do a reality check on your own mind to see if you can find a majority of the following attributes, summarized from the book “You Can Win” by Shiv Khera:

Positive believing. This starts with positive thinking that your startup idea will work, but is a lot more. It is a confidence bolstered by intelligence, preparation, and experience that your business model addresses a need in the market, provides a solution, and will beat the competitors.

Mark Kvamme has this crowd rapt, and he isn't even speaking. We're in a cavernous Italian restaurant called Mr. Anthony's on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio, and the lunchtime audience is filled with members of the local chamber of commerce. He has just told the story of how as a consultant back in 1997, he advised Steve Jobs to try narrating Apple's iconic "Think Different" television ad. While he plays a recording of Jobs toasting "the crazy ones" over an orchestral swell, Kvamme, eyes downcast, looks prayerful. The clip ends, and he snaps to attention. "Let's be crazy!" he concludes. "Let's change things here in Ohio!"

Kvamme (pronounced KWAH-me) is a partner at venture capital powerhouse Sequoia Capital, and he might easily be mistaken for a guest speaker flown in to inspire the local business set. But the Silicon Valley native -- and son of tech industry icon Floyd Kvamme -- is an Ohio fixture now. In January of last year he accepted an offer from John Kasich, an old friend and the state's newly elected Republican governor, to revamp Ohio's economic development agency, a temporary gig that by June of 2011 had evolved into a $1-a-year, full-time post as the state's jobs czar. His mandate: to Think Different about how to reverse Ohio's generation-long economic decay.

Social Innovation refers hereafter to social processes of innovation or collaborative innovation, such as open source methods and techniques. Collaborative innovation has developed over the past ten years through different types of approaches, and has reached momentum on the ground of realizing fast knowledge circulation across boundaries:

Open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) completely changes the innovation funnel, by discovering and embedding new solutions and expertise more rapidly that an internal R&D lab might accomplish; reversely, by “making unused ideas and technologies available to others, companies develop new business out of collaboration”;

In Mashable‘s new video series, Behind the Launch, we’re taking cameras behind the scenes at Vungle, an in-app video advertising startup. This week, we see the biz dev team — Colin and David — try to attend a mobile gaming conference, only to be rejected at the door. In true Vungle fashion, the guys call on their trademark “hustle” to chat up some big names in the industry, despite not getting past registration.

Watch today’s episode and join the conversation on Twitter, #BehindTheLaunch.

You will fail. It's inevitable, so you might as well begin preparing for it now. The failure may be small, like, say, making a mistake on a client engagement. Or it may be quite grand, like losing a job you valued. How you handle that failure can raise or lower the risks of failing again — and shape your legacy as a leader.

Some people handle these setbacks well. Others not so well. In my work, I've observed several common themes among those leaders who tend to cope particularly effectively with the inescapable.

We have become a society of specialists. Business thinkers point to "domain expertise" as an enduring source of advantage in today's competitive environment. The logic is straightforward: learn more about your function, acquire "expert" status, and you'll go further in your career.

But what if this approach is no longer valid? Corporations around the world have come to value expertise, and in so doing, have created a collection of individuals studying bark. There are many who have deeply studied its nooks, grooves, coloration, and texture. Few have developed the understanding that the bark is merely the outermost layer of a tree. Fewer still understand the tree is embedded in a forest.

Valuations of early-stage companies on one hand, and growth businesses, on the other, though different in many aspects, have at least one thing in common: in both cases dilution would negatively impact pre-money valuation of the target companies. We analyze data extracted from the BvD’s Zephyr database. The relevant sample consists of 330 angel investments in the EU27 area that were completed over the past 9 years. We therein try to investigate possible drivers of companies’ value, which according to the above article is positively related to the pre-money evaluation of a company. 

The preliminary analysis shows that the average deal value is of approximately 255.5 th €, while the median is closer to 250 th €. These figures, however, refer to the entire sample, and therefore we try to analyze how the value invested differs in relation to different factors.

When Twitter moves into its new headquarters in downtown San Francisco this month, it will occupy three floors of an 11-story 1937 Art Deco building that has sat shuttered for five years. Outside, its blue bird logo will replace the former main tenant’s sign, whose analog clocks remain frozen at 9:18, 4:33 and other times past.

Far from Silicon Valley’s self-enclosed campuses, Twitter and other tech start-ups are gravitating to an urban core here that has defied development for decades. Its soon-to-be neighbors include liquor stores, check-cashing stores and discount hotels.

College graduation is supposed to be a giant step on the way to a prosperous future. But the weak labor market means that graduates lucky enough to find good jobs will face reduced starting salaries, while many others will struggle to find work or have to settle for lower-level and lower-paid positions that do not require college degrees.

Even after the economy strengthens, many recent college graduates may never catch up. Research shows that early bouts of joblessness and low pay can damage career prospects and earnings over a lifetime.

Older adults often take longer to make a decision than young adults do. But that does not mean they are any less sharp. According to research at Ohio State University, the slower response time of older adults has more to do with prizing accuracy over speed.

In the study, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, college-age students and adults aged 60 to 90 performed timed tests of word recognition and recall. All participants were equally accurate, but the older group responded more slowly. When the researchers encouraged them to work faster, however, they were able to match the youngsters’ speed without significantly sacrificing accuracy. “In many simple tasks, the elderly take longer mainly because they decide to require more evidence to make their decision,” says co-author Roger Ratcliff. When an older mind faces a task that requires speed, he says, a conscious effort to work faster can often do the trick.