This post appeared on the Fortune Magazine site here and was adapted from my new book, The Business Model Innovation Factory.

Believe in the power of design. Through it, we will chart the landscape of possibility - designing, testing and prototyping new terrain. Be a market maker rather than a share taker.

Business model innovators are always seeking out places and events with a strong design vibe. They love to hang around really smart design thinkers and the places they hang out in hopes that some of it will rub off. I am convinced that design thinking and process is a key enabler of business model innovation so I have been hanging out with lots of design types. If you hang around enough designers you immediately get pulled into their active conversation about design’s place in the innovation narrative. After participating in many of these conversations I am left with a strong sense that the design community needs to move on from the incessant argument over the importance of design thinking and process. It is time to claim victory. Get over it. The argument is boring. Design is important. We stipulate that design is about more than sexy products. We get that design is about delivering a compelling customer experience. We know that business model innovation is fundamentally about designing new ways to create, deliver and capture value. Now, can we get on with putting design thinking and process to work to enable business model innovation?

Building on a long-term trend, the nation's business startup rate fell below 8 percent for the first time in 2010, marking the lowest point on record for new firm births. New firms as a percentage of all firms continued a steady downward trend in 2010 – going from a high of 13 percent (as a percentage of all firms) in the 1980s to just under 11 percent in 2006 before making a steep decline to the 8 percent in 2010 – the most current year of data available. 

This and other findings based on newly released data on U.S. firms and establishments with paid employees is included in the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) briefing, released today. Partially funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the BDS provides annual business data from 1976 to 2010.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who claimed to have played a big part in starting up Facebook and sued CEO Mark Zuckerberg for their share, have now become venture capitalists, announcing their new firm Friday morning on the CNBC show Squawk Box.

They’re off to a good start, considering that Winklevoss Capital is presumably financed by the equity they drew from the settlement with Facebook CEO Zuckerberg.

After a date, a pitch or a job interview, there’s a good chance you’re going to get Googled. Online reputation manager BrandYourself now helps you figure out who is searching for your name.

The startup, which helps individuals control Google results for names through SEO, launched a new feature on Tuesday that shows users where visitors to their BrandYourself profiles work and where they’re located.

The U.S. Small Business Administration    is inviting managers of early stage investment funds to apply for SBA-guaranteed funding of up to $50 million.

Recipients must apply and qualify for licensing as Early Stage Innovation Funds, and they must commit at least 50 percent of their investment dollars to early stage small businesses, said SBA Administrator Karen Mills in a news release.

“Early stage small businesses face difficult challenges accessing capital,” Mills said. “At the same time, in this financial climate, venture capital funds are finding it difficult to raise money from institutional investors. By licensing and providing SBA financial backing to Early Stage Innovation Funds, we hope to expand entrepreneurs’ access to capital and encourage innovation as part of President Obama’s Startup America Initiative, launched last year.”

In an era of crowdsourcing CanadaOne.com has launched an ‘open innovation project’, the Business Innovation Challenge, to help small and medium-sized businesses discover practical ways to innovate.

The idea behind the project is simple: Companies are asked to share practical things they have done that have improved the way they do business. Their stories will then be shared openly to help others explore and visualize ways they can improve their own companies.

“Many smaller businesses are reluctant to implement new ideas and innovations into their companies, because they have difficulty understanding how the pieces fit together and don’t have examples to follow,” says Julie King, co-founder and managing editor of Candaone.com. “As a magazine we are limited to sharing a few ideas at a time. By creating this open innovation project, we are expanding the opportunities to develop a more robust knowledge-base.”

BioCrossroads will be able to remain in the business of seeding life-science startups, thanks to $8.25 million in payments.

The new dose of money should provide hard-to-get seed capital for about 16 promising biotech and other life-science companies across the state over the next four years, according to BioCrossroads, which promotes the 50,000-employee life-science industry in Indiana.

BioCrossroads' first seed fund, established in 2005 with $6 million, ran out of money this year after investing in 12 companies.

For years, drug companies have known that their days of plenty were numbered, that the moment would arrive when the best-selling drugs that had driven two decades’ worth of profits would lose their patent protection and succumb to competition from generic alternatives. Without new blockbusters to replace them, profits would tumble. 

For Pfizer, that day has arrived. Pfizer profited from hits like Lipitor and Viagra, and swallowed up smaller companies from the 1990s onward.

But it has no immediate successor to Lipitor, the best-selling drug in history, which lost patent protection last fall. The problem was punctuated on Tuesday when the company said that profit declined 19 percent last quarter, largely because of declines in Lipitor sales.

I often speak and write about how important it is to let your creative juices flow to start and grow a business. And every once in a while I happen upon folks who actually put that concept to the test and can serve as an example of what can happen when the creative imagination is unleashed.

A couple months ago my 10 year-old niece called to see if I could help her with how to write a short story. I thought it would be easy to search the Internet for a possible website that would give a quick list of the elements needed to craft a story.

Innovation is in these days. The word is on the lips of just about every CEO, CFO, CIO, and anyone else with a three-letter acronym after their name.

As a result, many organizations are launching all kinds of "innovation initiatives" -- hoping to stir the soup. This is understandable. But it is also, far too often, very disappointing.

Innovation initiatives sound good, but usually don't live up to the expectations. The reasons are many.

What follows are 56 of the most common ones -- organizational obstacles we've observed in the past 25 years that get in the way of a company really raising the bar for innovation.

56 Reasons Why Most Corporate Innovation Efforts Fail

1. Innovation framed as an initiative, not the normal way of doing business

2. Absence of a clear definition of what "innovation" really means

3. Innovation not linked to company's existing vision or strategy

4. No sense of urgency

5. Workforce is suffering from "initiative fatigue"

"Gordon Moore is my boss, and if your boss makes a law, then you'd better follow it," says Mark Bohr, who leads Intel's efforts to make advances in microchip design practical to manufacture. Moore's Law, of course, was first proposed by Bohr's boss in 1965, when Moore pointed out that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every year. The current form of Moore's law has been set since 1975, when Moore altered the pace to a doubling every two years. Remarkably, the computer industry has maintained that pace ever since, training us to expect computers to become ever faster in the process.

After Monday's launch of Intel's newest line of processors, named Ivy Bridge, Moore's prediction is still looking sound. The chips are the first to become available from any company with features as small as 22 nanometers (the finest details on today's chips are 32 nanometers), allowing transistors to be smaller and packed more densely. Ivy Bridge chips offer 37 percent more processing speed than the previous generation of chips, and can match their performance while using just half the energy.

Contest: To find clean technology innovators worldwide interested in building their company in Nova Scotia, Innovacorp ran a competition. The prize included $100,000. A local company won, but the competition created links with global innovators, including a Dutch company now negotiating a move to the province. Percy Paris (R), Minister of Nova Scotia Economic and Rural Development presented winner Mather Carscallen (L) with his prize April 24.

Anyone can come up with one good idea. Visionaries come up with big ideas over and over again. Now, here's a secret: Anyone can learn to be a visionary.

"People seem to think that innovation is a special gift. That someone's got, they are born with it. That's bogus. Innovation is a skill that you can learn, practice and become skilled at," says Phil McKinney, an innovation consultant and former CTO of HP's $40 billion PC division, formerly known as the Personal Systems Group.

As executive director of the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Development at Purdue University (AMIPurdue) since its inception, I would like to comment regarding the “Purdue Lessons in Mann Deal” editorial in Sunday’s paper.

Yes, history has shown it was a “coup” back in 2007 when Purdue was able to attract an Alfred Mann Institute to the university. The fact is, since that time Al Mann has donated $15.5 million which has funded development of 11 life science projects thus far and produced four startup companies. Five students earned their Ph.D.’s while their work was funded by Al Mann.

Many CEOs and business owners will agree that the benefits of ownership far outweigh the struggles and daily challenges. While entrepreneurship is still one of the best ways to fulfill the American dream, only a small percentage of companies are truly “great to own.”

Is your company valuable to someone else?

Creating value in a company is still considered by many to be one of the great ways to create wealth, create jobs and realize the American dream. However, many businesses are not sellable for a value that would motivate the owner to sell and others are not sellable at any price. Are you creating a company that will realize its full sales value without you? Is your hard work focused in areas the marketplace will value most and reward with you with a premium valuation? Do you have a clear strategy to not only create but maximize company value?

A Boston-based startup is pursuing an unorthodox approach to helping smokers quit—it's attempting to make the world's first successful nicotine vaccine.

The company, Selecta Biosciences, was cofounded by MIT engineer Robert Langer and Harvard immunologists Ulrich von Andrian and Omid Farokhzad. Its goal is to develop a treatment that deprives a smoker of the habit's addictive effects by inducing an immune response that can last several years.

The XXIII ISPIM Conference – Action for Innovation: Innovating from Experience – takes place in Barcelona, Spain on 17-20 June 2012. Organised by ISPIM, and hosted by La Salle University in partnership with Orbita97, this conference will bring together around 450 innovation experts from 55 countries.

The three-day programme will include: Industry-Leading Keynote Speakers; Luminary Speakers; Innovation Thought Leaders; "Hot Topic" Roundtable Discussions; Facilitated Themed Sessions with around 230 Academic and Practitioner Presentations; Workshops; Special Interest Groups; Academic Research Development Sessions.

As with all ISPIM events, delegates will experience a taste of local culture at magnificent dinner venues so there will be plenty of time for networking.

StudentAdvisor.com’s Spring 2012 Top 100 Social Media Colleges© rankings demonstrates the varied power of social media in colleges and universities around the world today. Harvard University (#1) has risen back to the top of the rankings displacing Johns Hopkins University (#2). Both schools have extraordinary social media communities and continue to innovate and execute their social media strategies exceptionally well.

“In addition, the use of image sharing social networks, like Pinterest and Instagram, has exploded in popularity. The schools on our list do an incredible job of harnessing the power of social media to keep their own communities informed and show the world what they are all about.” The University of Kentucky (#7) proves they are not only excellent on the basketball court by winning the NCAA 2012 title, but that they are also actively engaged through social media. According to the university, the social media elements of their “see blue” admissions marketing campaign targeted at prospective and incoming students have even been embraced by the faculty, staff and alumni on their own accounts. In addition, they had remarkable social media outreach during the NCAA March Madness Tournament. When the Mayor of Lexington, KY declared Friday, March 30 – Monday, April 2, 2012 as “Big Blue Days”, the university alerted their social media community far and wide of the momentous recognition.

Toss out another old wives’ tale: Sleeping too much does not make you fat. Quite the opposite, according to a new study examining sleep and body mass index (BMI) in twins, which found that sleeping more than nine hours a night may actually suppress genetic influences on body weight.

The study looked at 1,088 pairs of twins and found that sleeping less than seven hours a night was associated with both increased BMI and greater genetic influences on BMI. Previous research has shown that genetic influences include things like glucose metabolism, energy use, fatty acid storage and satiety. In this study, the heritability of BMI was twice as high for the short sleepers than for twins who slept longer than nine hours a night.

It was exciting to see the creation this week of the New York Digital Health Accelerator in New York. The New York State Department of Health, the New York City Investment Fund and the New York eHealth Collaborative all have partnered to provide funding, mentoring support, development expertise and more to health app startups in the state. 

The group is awarding $300,000 each to 12 startups that are producing apps for care coordination, patient engagement, analytics and messaging. The deadline to apply is June 1. What we'll really be watching for, though, is to see if other states follow suit, and fund health startups in, say, Nebraska or Mississippi. Such localized startup/development support really could be a boon for hospitals trying to develop their own clinical apps. Most incubator programs thus far have been in New York or California, leaving hospitals in the rest of the country out of the running.