We all know what creative genius looks like: a young man working feverishly to produce a stunning new artistic breakthrough (Pablo Picasso) or write groundbreaking code (Mark Zuckerberg). But, says University of Chicago economist David Galenson, that stereotype gets the nature of creativity fundamentally wrong – and it’s an expensive mistake for businesses. “I don’t go out and measure the cost of the errors people make on the basis of this belief,” he says, “but it could be significant.”

Writer’s block? In a static slump? Think green.

Yup, Kermit's favorite color may actually get our creative juices flowing, according to a recent study.

The study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, asked 69 men and women to take two minutes to come up with as many uses for a tin can as they could. Before the time started, half the group was shown a white rectangle, and the other half a green one. After the two minutes, a trained coder rated each idea for its creativity. The findings? Participants who saw green before the test came up with the more interesting, imaginative answers.

China, as you’ve often heard, is the world’s fastest growing economy, and not just for its low-cost manufacturing. It’s also home to a rapidly growing consumer market. Big American companies like GM, Harley Davidson and Amway have made big bucks selling to Chinese consumers.

But for smaller American companies, breaking into the Chinese market can be difficult, confusing and expensive.

This week, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation announced a new program to help small businesses make that leap. It’s the first program of its kind in the country.

So we can easily agree that seeking a better understanding of the dynamics of the innovation ecosystem is desirable. The point I want to make is that misunderstanding those dynamics through fatuous quantification mechanisms is in fact damaging to the system itself. Talking about the “pace of technological change” is only the tip of the spear of MBA-speak that is stabbing the academy.

Think for a second about the atomic bomb. There’s a big, just gigantic, technological change. But when did it happen? We can argue that the “speed of change” was really slow until July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico—the speed of change was super-fast on that particular day. This would be silly. So we have to average out the “speed of change” somehow. But over what timescale? So many industrial inputs (precision machining, computing and the like) and basic scientific insights (being able to calculate the likelihood that a neutron hitting an atomic nucleus will cause it to split in two) went into building the bomb that it’s unclear where to start.

Web users have become used to the idea that most of what they read online—whether it's Facebook comments or personal e-mails—is scanned by software that tries to serve up relevant ads. But soon online advertising companies may start serving up ads based on the age of people in photos that you're viewing on a page.

That's thanks to startup Face.com, which already offers a face-recognition service that websites or apps can use to count the number of faces in a photo, tell their gender, or match them to known individuals. Starting this week, that service will also guess the age of the faces it spots in photos and ad networks and other Web and mobile companies already have plans to use it.

Clay Shirky — the writer, teacher, and consultant on all things online — recently told an audience of innovators, tech enthusiasts and creative minds what they’d least been expecting to hear. There are no rules for creativity.

The event, organised by innovation news site PSFK is designed to inspire and impart knowledge from those who’ve taken risks and succeeded, with experience and insight to share.

Shirky’s talk underlined a point that had been illustrated by those who took part in the event. The true potential success of an idea, a brand or startup is the ability to produce valuable novelty. That, he believes, is where the future lies.

The short answer, at least in the US, is “most of the time.” It’s pretty standard for every employee of a VC-backed company to get at least a minor option grant as part of their compensation. Employees should expect these grants to vest over time (usually four years) and have a one year cliff (which means the person has to be employed for a year to have any of the options vest.)

The importance of entrepreneurs and small businesses has been a central theme in discussions of the national recovery. On the local level, city leaders understand first-hand the importance of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Entrepreneurs and small businesses:

• Create new jobs and employ local residents;
• Play a pivotal role in creating a unique sense of place that enhances a community’s quality of life; and
• In a more footloose, global economy, homegrown businesses may have deeper roots than those gained through attraction strategies.

Aspiring and early-stage founders of life science startups have one week to apply for the Kauffman Life Science Ventures Summit being held June 22-23, 2012. The deadline is April 9, 2012.

The comprehensive two-day conference will provide practical answers to founders seeking solutions to the daunting hurdles facing life science enterprises. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is hosting the inaugural Summit, which will be held at QB3 at the University of California-San Francisco.

Industry experts and successful entrepreneurs will provide practical guidance on commercializing innovations in each of four sectors: medical device, therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health. Speakers and panelists representing each industry sector will share lessons, advice and insights. Speakers include Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur and author; Stephen Spielberg, deputy commissioner for medical products and tobacco at the Federal Drug Administration; Paul Yock, founder, Stanford Biodesign; Karl Handelsman, managing director, CMEA Capital; Sean Duffy, CEO of Omada Health and more.

Visit www.kauffman.org/lifescienceapp to learn more.

That’s the implication of a new research report just released by Capgemini Consulting and the IESE business school. Their annual global Innovation Leadership Study, based on a survey of 260 innovation executives around the world, finds 43% of its respondents saying their companies have a formally accountable innovation executive, up from 33% a year ago. But only 42% have an explicit innovation strategy, and only 11% have a strategy that involves employees, and not just executives, in its development.

Moreover, only 30% say they have an effective organizational structure for innovation, and a mere 21% say they have an effective system of key performance indicators for measuring and promoting innovation; 54% says they don’t have any formal KPI set-up at all.

Not so long ago, doctoral students were viewed as the galley slaves of the scientific world, spending long hours in the lab for a meagre wage and the promise that three precious letters — PhD — would eventually burnish their name.

But that attitude has changed. Recognizing that few graduates spend their entire careers at the bench, research funders and education authorities are reshaping the PhD to train students in non-science skills such as networking as well as research. One of the most radical expositions of this philosophy is unfolding in the United Kingdom, where PhD students are increasingly coming out from under the wing — and the shadow — of a PhD supervisor. Instead of being trained individually in one academic’s research group, they are being taught in cohorts in a doctoral training centre (DTC) — a university-based hub focusing on highly specific areas, such as chemical synthesis or nuclear fission. DTC courses last four years rather than the three of a standard UK PhD, and include formal coursework as well as lab experience.

Companies like Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) aren’t healthcare companies, but one venture capitalist believes their example can guide personalized medicine.

Bob Kocher, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock, said that these consumer-focused companies have all taken steps toward personalizing their offerings. Personalization increases the value of those offerings and helps the companies make delivery of services and products more efficient.

Many multinationals are hungry to sell their goods and services to the emerging markets’ growing middle class, comprising nearly two billion people, with $7 trillion in spending power. That immense opportunity has put this group at the center stage of many global corporations’ strategies. But the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies are holding back: the top five generate less than 20 percent of their sales in these markets.

Business has gotten to be quite accomplished at dealing with a predictable universe. Corporate chieftains and strategists have sussed out most of the relevant laws that govern this universe and learned how to profitably apply them.

But that universe is a thing of the past. We now live in a volatile marketplace where uncertainty rules and disruptive technologies are the order of the day. In this world, the old laws no longer apply. Success is no longer a fixed point; it's becoming a moving target. Certainty is yesterday's news.

In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic."

Whatever that means.

If you find yourself resisting "being strategic," because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you're not alone. Every leader's temptation is to deal with what's directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you'll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you're on is leading off a cliff.

The need to accelerate the pace of energy innovation continues to be top of mind these days. In my previous post, I discussed advanced energy research and government’s role in supporting the development of emerging advanced energy technologies.

While federal government and various agencies are focused mostly on big-picture approaches driven by research, new technologies, regulation and investment, states and regions are becoming significant driving forces in accelerating energy innovation, too.

DURHAM, N.H. – Following a considerable contraction in investment dollars in 2008 and 2009, the angel investor market continued to recover in 2011, a trend that began in 2010 in investment dollars and in the number of investments, according to the 2011 Angel Market Analysis released by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.

Total investments in 2011 were $22.5 billion, an increase of 12.1 percent over 2010 when investments totaled $20.1 billion. A total of 66,230 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2011, an increase of 7.3 percent over 2010 investments, and the number of active investors in 2011 reached 318,480 individuals, a substantial growth of 20 percent from 2010.

The University of South Florida is growing its research capacity at a torrid pace. From 2000 to 2007, no public institution received federal funding at a higher rate -- a staggering 213 percent increase, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac.

In 2010, according to the Intellectual Property Owners Association, the investigative activities of USF students and faculty placed USF 9th among just 13 universities (and university systems) IN THE WORLD to be honored with the distinction of ranking within the top 300 patent-earning organizations.

Listening to the discussion of the new JOBS Act, I am of two minds.

First, lets get rid of the idea that it's a jobs bill in the usual sense. What it really is, is a "company formation" bill that proceeds on the assumption that if we create more companies we will create more jobs. This hypothesis comes from Kauffman Foundation research that says most jobs are created by new companies--specifically companies less than five years old.

In the last two years, this hasn't been proven true, as many new companies can't afford to hire, or--more important--don't really need to hire when they can collaborate, outsource, or automate. In the last two years, again, according to Kauffman, many startups have been solopreneurs. Of course. Either there wasn’t enough money for them to hire additional workers, or these entrepreneurs were really laid-off workers with no great idea of how to scale a company but wanted to create jobs for themselves. So as usual, the data itself isn’t clean.

Over the past few years, the mere utterance of the term “Regional Innovation Clusters” (RICs) has either ginned up folks or struck a gut-wrenching chord within the startup and technology world. No fiercer critic has emerged than Vivek Wadhwa, who has been opining thoughtfully on his belief that government sponsored Regional Innovation Clusters, are doomed for failure. He believes the current strategy of constructing an incubator in an area with cheap real-estate and sprinkling a few smart folks in the area to “create magic” is insufficient.

As someone who has worked for the US government for seven years as a civil servant, on a variety of endeavors including matters related to RICs, I understand and concur with many of Vivek’s sentiments. But I do question his supposition that it has to be that way.