I used to think Silicon Valley was a model meritocracy. From 1995 to 2005, 52 percent of the Valley’s startups were founded by people born abroad. Immigrants from India had become the dominant company-founding immigrant group. They had achieved this by mastering the Valley’s rules of engagement and building their own mentoring networks.

Then I moved to Berkeley, Calif., and started frequenting networking events in Silicon Valley. It soon became blatantly obvious that the immigrant data didn’t tell the full story. This “meritocracy” didn’t include many women, blacks, or Hispanics. And an important and influential segment of the Silicon Valley community denies that any imbalance exists.

Trendwatching firm, JWTIntelligence, recently released its seventh annual trend forecast, JWT 10 Trends for 2012. Which of the 10 are most likely to affect small business going forward? Here are my picks.

Navigating the new normal: With the current economic situation showing few signs of major change, JWT says companies in developed nations will start introducing new products and services at lower price points. “Stripped-down offerings and smaller sizes” are one way to take advantage of this trend, JWT notes.

If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re hiring employees for your business, give yourself a pat on the back. This is a major milestone for any company – and one that millions of entrepreneurs never achieve. Now your challenge is finding the right employee and putting them to work in a way that will help propel your company’s continued growth.

We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, this question:

“What one employee management tip would you give entrepreneurs who are building their team?”

Susan Cain (“The Rise of the New Groupthink,” Sunday Review, Jan. 15) writes that creative people are more likely to be introverts; that students learn better when alone; and that solitary computer programmers write better code. In each of these cases, research shows just the opposite.

Decades of scientific research have revealed that great creativity is almost always based in collaboration, conversation and social networks — just the opposite of our mythical image of the isolated genius. And educational research has found that deeper learning results when students participate in thoughtful argumentation and discuss reasons and concepts.

The increasing use of collaboration, in classrooms and in the workplace, is not a short-lived fad; it is solidly based in research, and it works.

These questions have no right or wrong answers.

Because sometimes asking the right questions is the answer.

Talked about this on the smooth home drive

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

Which is worse, failing or never trying?

If life is so short, why do we do so many things we don’t like and like so many things we don’t do?

Phil Longyear and his laboratory partner were just a few minutes into their experiment, but they had already gotten ahead of their fellow biology students here at Finger Lakes Community College.

When their classmate Carey Phillips walked over to their lab table, they found out why.

"Did you guys heat your samples?" she asked.

"No," Mr. Longyear answered. "Oh. Darn."

The ‘Innovation Barometer’ found that four of the five European countries included in the survey of 22 nations came in the top 10 when all were asked to rate the leading innovation champions.

Germany took second place – pipped by the US – with the UK, France, and Sweden bagging seventh, eighth and ninth spots respectively.

Italy came 11th, whilst Poland, the final EU member state in the survey, remained unrated.

However, when businesses in the same survey countries were asked how satisfied they were with the innovation environment within their home nations, Poland, France, the UK and Germany were the third, fourth, fifth and eighth most pessimistic, respectively.

I moderated a panel of venture capitalists last night at the historic Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill, talking about what mattered most in tech and VC last year, and what they expect to see in 2012.

I'm posting the audio below; it runs for about an hour. The quality is good, though audience questions are tough to hear. The speakers started off in this order: Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, Jonathan Seelig from GlobeSpan Capital Partners, Rob Go from NextView, and Jo Tango from Kepha Partners.

President Mary Sue Coleman told a Washington, D.C., conference Wednesday that the university is constantly expanding its "campus culture of entrepreneurship."

At the sixth annual Presidents-Investors Summit, Coleman pointed to numerous examples of activities designed to help start new companies and encourage students and faculty to engage in business creation.

One such new program is the Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups. That program has funding of $25 million over the next 10 years dedicated to accelerating businesses that could contribute to the Michigan economy. The program invests in select venture-funded U-M startups — new companies built around inventions born in faculty members' labs.

(Honolulu, Hawaii & New York, New York, January 18, 2012) – The Intelligent Community Forum named its 2012 Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year today at a luncheon ceremony at the Pacific Telecommunications Council’s annual conference (PTC’12) in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (13:00 HAST, 18:00 EST, 23:00 GMT). The ICF’s Top Seven are communities that provide a model of economic and social development in the 21st Century using information and communications technology to power growth, address social challenges and preserve and promote culture. The Top Seven announcement is the second stage of ICF’s annual Intelligent Community of the Year awards cycle.

The Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year

The following communities, drawn from the Smart21 of 2012, were named to the Top Seven based on analysis of their nominations by a team of independent academic experts:

• Austin, Texas, USA. In the late Eighties, fourteen semiconductor manufacturers and the US government created a partnership called SEMATCH to solve common manufacturing problems. The selection of Austin as its headquarters sparked a technology boom. Growth was so robust for so long that the Austin economy began to look recession-proof—until the dot-com collapse of 2001 tripled the unemployment rate. In response, city government partnered with the Chamber of Commerce on a long-term economic development strategy that led to a nearly $6 billion increase in regional payrolls over five years. A second five-year plan launched in 2010 seeks to add another $11 billion. To address a workforce challenge, Austin has established a program that puts College Enrollment Managers into public schools to guide the choices made by students has helped boost the graduation rate for low-income students 14 percentage points to 75%. Oulu, Finland. Over the past 200 years, Oulu has seen industries come and go, from tar and

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.

New legislation pending in Congress could create crowdfunding sources like NY-based startups Kickstarter and RocketHub that provide equity capital to businesses. The bills have supporters among Democrats, Republicans and entrepreneurs.

“I see crowd funding as a positive,” Ian Fichtenbaum, vice president with NY-based Near Earth, an investment banking firm specializing in satellite technology, told Crain’s New York Business. “We see a lot of business plans from the edge of believability and the edge of technology, and some are actually good. When we raise capital for some of these companies, we have to find nontraditional sources or find people with a particular interest in the sector.”

Observational epidemiologic studies relating wine and alcohol to health all suffer from the fact that they, of necessity, compare people who prefer certain beverages, but not the beverages themselves. While there have been many intervention trials in animals, randomized trials in humans are less common. Randomized crossover trials, in which each subject receives all interventions in sequence, can be especially important as they tend to avoid baseline differences among subjects and can detect effects of different interventions with smaller numbers of subjects.

This study by Chiva-Blanch G et al, just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, included 67 male volunteers in Spain who were considered to be at “high-risk” of cardiovascular disease on the basis of increased BMI, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, or other risk factors. About one half of the individuals were taking ACE inhibitors, statins, aspirin, and/or oral hypoglycemic drugs, so the results of this study may be especially relevant for patients in the real world.

Johnson & Johnson’s West Coast research leader, Diego Miralles, has met with a lot of biotech entrepreneurs who are curious about what J&J is doing to foster more startups at its facility in San Diego. At some point, a skeptical question usually comes up.

“What’s the catch?” Miralles says he’s sometimes asked.

He insists there isn’t any catch.

“We are genuinely trying to help the industry,” Miralles said last week in a meeting at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. “We think helping the biotech industry helps us. We strongly believe that a rising tide lifts all ships.”

Mobile health startup CellepathicRx has upgraded its technology and added a couponing capability to its client-branded apps for retail pharmacies.

The addition of front-store couponing to the apps will help retail pharmacy customers increase store traffic and build store loyalty, according to a statement from Cleveland-based CellepathicRx.

CellepathicRx sells patient-adherence mobile apps to retail pharmacies that are intended to help those pharmacies sell more drugs. The company’s software can deliver medication and refill reminders and educational materials to patients via mobile apps, text messages or email, for example.

A classic dilemma which an entrepreneur faces today is whether to choose between a Pvt. Ltd. Company and an LLP. In addition to Partnerships and Proprietorships, these two have become popular options for people starting businesses. Since we get asked this question all the time, and have heard quite a few stories and helped entrepreneurs choose, we thought we would clear the air a little bit with a few case studies to help you choose between these options. Please note that none of these are real client case studies and no confidential information has been discussed.

Case study 1: We are four friends who have an idea for a social networking platform which enables bloggers to showcase their blogs to like-minded folk. How should we start?

Good question. The best option here would probably be a simple Partnership, because a Partnership comes without the regulatory shackles which a Company or LLP bring with them, and more importantly, is cheap to form. A strong revenue earning potential in this site will be realized only when it gains serious traction. And that may take a long time.

1. "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." - Peter Drucker

2. "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw

3."Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." - William Butler Yeats

4. "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." - Epictetus

5. "Speak when you are angry -- and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." - Laurence Peters

Penn Medicine is holding an “innovation tournament” for staff and faculty to propose ideas to improve the patient experience throughout its health system.

In a phone interview with MedCity News, Judy Schueler, Penn Medicine chief human resources officer and vice president of organization development, said the competition is scheduled for a February 7 kick off.

Faculty and staff at the Philadelphia health system will submit ideas through the Web, e-mail or idea boxes with the contest culminating in a town hall meeting in which competitors will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges representing Penn Medicine’s leadership.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas isn't just a place to see new products from gadget giants like Samsung and Sony; it's also a place to see small companies with disruptive ideas that become big consumer technologies in the future.

This year, several of the most promising small exhibitors were showing off technology that could free us from having to peer down at our mobile devices—glasses that can overlay digital data onto the world around us.

Charlie O'Donnell, former founder of Path101 and principal at First Round Capital, has left the firm.

Up next, he'll pursue a fund of his own, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.

O'Donnell began his venture career working with Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures.   The Brooklyn native says it has always been his dream to be a partner, and now is as good a time as any to start his own firm.