Some time ago, in the early 1960s, a young psychology named Sarnoff Mednick had stumbled on a possible technique for gauging creativity in an individual.

The curious Dr. Mednick wondered, as many of us do today, how exactly do you weigh creative potential? What he discovered was that creativity is representative of associated memory. When your brain connects ideas together, it’s using creativity to do so, and often new ideas can result.

With this knowledge Mednick helped to create a type of creativity test that is still used regularly today, known as the Remote Association Test (or RAT). If you want to weigh your own level of creativity, keep reading.

As head attorney of Morrison & Foerster’s Technology Group, Timothy Harris has seen many entrepreneurs and venture capital firms make the same mistakes — ones that could have been avoided if they had consulted a legal professional. In a presentation on Friday during Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Week, Harris explained how to start a company the legal way.

“I ask company founders, ‘Where did you come up with this license agreement?’ and they tell me that they downloaded it from the Internet, or borrowed it from an old roommate.”

Want to save nearly $800 the next time you purchase a new car?

A recently published paper co-authored by Jorge Silva-Risso, an associate professor of marketing at the University of California, Riverside’s School of Business Administration, can help you do that.

Through surveying more than 1,400 car buyers, Silva-Risso and his co-authors, Fiona Scott Morton, of Yale University, and Florian Zettelmeyer, of Northwestern University, found buyers could save about $800 if they find out what a dealer pays for a car, visit two dealerships, like to bargain and like to do research and price comparisons before making a purchase.

There's a common trope that the United States, having been gutted of its manufacturing jobs by the brute force of globalization, is now on the verge of giving up its crown as the world's leading innovator. Yesterday, The Washington Post published an article on our loss of high-tech manufacturing jobs to Asia that played right into the theme. Here was the apocalyptic lede:

The United States lost more than a quarter of its high-tech manufacturing jobs during the past decade as U.S.-based multinational companies placed a growing percentage of their research-and-development operations overseas, the National Science Board reported Tuesday.

President Barack Obama reportedly asked Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. to which Jobs replied, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

The exchange, according to a Jan. 12, 2012 report in the New York Times, occurred in Feb. 2011 at a dinner in Silicon Valley. The late Steve Jobs was right. Even though advances in automation, 3D printing, and the rising costs of labor in China will cause manufacturing to return to U.S. shores, we won’t need the millions of factory workers we needed in the past. That’s because the manufacturing jobs we need filled today are different from the ones we sent abroad. These jobs require fewer workers with very different skills.

On March 1, 2012, BREDD hosted an online presentation and discussion about our Economic Gardening Strategic Plan and Pilot Project. The presentation was facilitated by the consultants who are working with the Bitterroot Economic Development District (BREDD) to develop the plan.

Christine Hamilton-Pennell of Growing Local Economies, Inc. and Don Macke of the RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship presented the findings from their assessment of our region, addressing the following topics:

Arizona State University’s Venture Catalyst is launching a new startup accelerator which is aimed at individuals starting companies based on the University’s intellectual property. The plan for Furnace entails showcasing the many discoveries that ASU has developed in its research laboratories, with the intent that these technologies will form the basis for new high potential startups.

In partnership with the University’s Technology Transfer Office, Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), the new accelerator will offer an intensive 6 month incubator program that will provide startup funding, space in the ASU SkySong facility and access to top mentors.

“This is a direct follow-on to the Rapid Startup School that is aimed at teaching commercialization to our graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and alumni” said Gordon McConnell, Executive Director of the ASU Venture Catalyst, which works with internal and external startup companies. “The overwhelming, positive response led us to the next logical step; creating a competition to seed fund and accelerate these new ventures based on university technology.”

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One of the unexpected outcomes of the creation of the Irish Technology Leadership Group has been the formation of Irish Technology Capital, a venture capital firm focused on investing in young firms. John Kennedy talks to John Ryan and John Stanton.

One of the reasons why there is no where else on earth quite like Silicon Valley is the sheer concentration and volume of venture capital within a very small area. Access to investment capital is a decisive factor for young technology companies, which is why Silicon Valley is a natural breeding ground for innovation.

The chief executive of French drug maker Sanofi SA, which last year acquired Genzyme Corp. of Cambridge, said Tuesday that his company has established a presence in the Boston area because of its innovation ecosystem.

Citing the area’s dense cluster of universities, hospitals, biotechnology start-ups, and venture capital firms, Christopher A. Viehbacher told Boston College’s Chief Executives’ Club of Boston that “I think the most fertile environment in the world today is right here in the Boston-Cambridge area.”

But he said there are risks to innovation, including budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, rising health care costs, and the inability of big pharmaceutical companies to embrace the “disruptive element” of innovation.

Greetings, and thanks to Megan for giving me a chance to double-blog with all of you. As many of you already know, my day job -- outside of all this lucrative blogging stuff - is in drug discovery. So while I'll confine my opinions on pharmacokinetic assays and fluorination reactions to my own site, my thoughts over here will often have connections to science,  technology, and medicine.

If you think the mess in a house increases in direct proportion to the number of children living in it, you need to get creative about reclaiming your home. Clothes littering floors, toys everywhere and offspring whingeing that they're bored? There are many ways to keep your kids happy in their own spaces without kiddy-fying your entire house.

The whole structure of work and how it happens has been reinvented over the past several decades, in drastic ways and with far-reaching consequences. Lately, companies in the United States have been pulling jobs back from overseas and positions once offshored are returning, if not by the millions, at least by the thousands. The marketplace has spoken, and people want more than just the cheapest product or service made by the cheapest labor, somewhere in the world. Outside the country, business rules got bent, broken, and disregarded -- and companies made billions.

One of the ways people and companies have altered the rules of the online marketplace is by embracing the practice of crowdsourcing creativity, often with questionable results.

The Kansas Bioscience Authority has approved $3.3 million in new investments in the human health, animal health and biomaterials sectors, it said in a news release.

The KBA was created by the Kansas Economic Growth Act of 2004 to help develop a bioscience industry in the state.

Among the grants issued are:

•  The University of Kansas will receive $612,502 over eight years – with matching funds from KU – to support the retention of Michael Detamore, an associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering whom the university identifies as one if its "top mid-career researchers in the biomaterials focus area."

A dollar a month for razors, shipped to your door? Most thrifty guys and gals who wield a blade in the bathroom won’t need much convincing that that’s a good idea for a startup. But how to ensure that they hear about it, and that they have enough confidence in the company to sign up?

Simple: create a funny YouTube video — one with so much swagger, sight gags and bear costumes that it seems poised to go viral.

That’s the apparent strategy behind Dollar Shave Club, a startup from LA-based Incubator Science. The company just scored its first $1 million in funding from heavyweight VCs including Andreesen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that much of that cash was handed over after a viewing of this video.

The New York Times suggests, vaguely, that today on the eve of the iPad 3 announcement the future of the PC looks dim. "As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs" is its hand-wavy position on the matter, with a first paragraph quoting Apple CEO Tim Cook pondering "the day will come when devices like the Apple iPad outsell traditional personal computers." Forget the sales figures--it's not simply about how many of these things are bought ... that's almost irrelevant. In far more important ways the tablet era is already here, and the PC's relevance may end sooner than you think. It's all but over.

The argument starts with the iPad 3's strongly rumored super-high-resolution screen at 2,408 by 1,536 pixels on a 9.7-inch LCD. That's around the level needed to qualify it as a "retina" display, meaning that at typical user-to-screen distances, your fallible human eyeball isn't physically capable of spotting the pixels. To all intents and purposes, your brain will see the iPad 3's screen as equivalent in quality to a (glowing) printed page from a glossy magazine. It's a screen tech that probably surpasses the pixel resolution of your laptop, your home PC, and definitely your fancy full 40-inch HDTV. The screen alone is an innovation that may enable a whole new approach to e-publishing, at an optical quality that bests printed text in books or magazines, and it could change even change gaming--imagine holding this portable high-res unit in your hands, with the characters of the game reacting to the way you move the device.

According to B Lab, at least. After giving a rigorous assessment to its member companies, the organization that certifies triple-bottom-line businesses found that these had risen to the top.

Lab, the nonprofit that certifies B Corporations--companies that meet strict legal accountability, environmental, and social performance standards--has only been around for half a decade. During that time, over 500 companies throughout the U.S. registered as B Corporations.

Several bills pending in Congress would make it easier for biopharma and other tech startups looking for financing other than the traditional—and increasingly hard to secure—venture capital.

The bills would encourage an alternative that has met with success in other fields, namely crowdfunding—the practice of soliciting small amounts of capital from numerous funders rather than a large lump sum by one or more investors.

The House of Representatives signaled its interest in crowdfunding on November 3, when it passed, by a rare bipartisan 407–17 vote, HR 2930, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act introduced by Patrick McHenry (R-NC). This prompted President Barack Obama to support the measure, calling for “a national framework that allows entrepreneurs and small businesses to raise capital through crowdfunding.”

To incubate startups from the ideas to fast-growing companies, you should understand what they really need at different stages. Incubation is definitely not a one-time offer: you feed the startups some money, then leave them to do whatever they want to. We need a pipeline for the incubation process.

Startup Weekend, a two-days program to help startup founders set up the team, approve the idea, work out a simple demo and receive feedback from experienced people or VCs is a good starting point. We’ve reported about the Startup Weekend Taiwan. Then the team should have more time and a small amount of funding to implement and enrich the core ideas, then have a good working product which can clearly showcase the value of the idea. This stage is where the Startup Labs fits. The Startup Labs Taiwan gives every startups 22 days to get their idea out. This so-called acceleration program awards teams 1,000,000 NTD (~US$30,000) in exchange for 8% of company equity (read our coverage on 5 startups in this program). Then for the startups, what would be the problems to solve next: user acquisition, angel or serial A funding, HR, or globalisation strategy etc. They may still need help.

We have been entering some perilous times recently and I can’t imagine when Joseph Schrumpter outlined his groundbreaking efforts for explaining “creative destruction” he or anyone else, could image this being flipped around to what we are facing more today, that of “destructive creation”.

Schrumpter saw “creative destruction” as the renewing, through new innovation, society’s dynamics that would lead into higher levels of economic development and welfare. At the same time recognizing that this destroyed a few of the incumbents to the benefits of many more newcomers and increasing value creation for broader society.

A growing body of research shows where creative innovation comes from. Here are 9 tips:

1. Look outside your field. Innovation comes from outside your field. Mix with experts in a range of specialties, a strategy cultivated at places like Bell Labs according to the recent NY Times article. Study widely.

2. Find the eureka.  The moment of innovation often feels like a eureka moment, according to Columbia professor William Duggan. It will never come if you're not knowledgeable and prepared.

3. Get physical. Use your physical body as well as your mind, based on new research at University of Michigan and NYU.