"Hello, my name is Glen and I represent Mason Shoe Company." That was 37 years ago and I was twelve. I found an ad for shoe salesmen, completed the application and attached a letter written in pencil. In the letter I asked if I was old enough, but I don’t think they ever read it although they did send training materials, catalogues and order forms.

So I got on my bike and set out to conquer the world—a new entrepreneur. I was turned down cold at the first house. The next house was that of a widower who didn’t seem to tolerate kids and kept to himself. I stared at his house for a long time building the courage to approach. Surprisingly he smiled at my introduction and invited me in. He bought two pairs and when asked, I looked at my price list and told him the retail and my cost. He wrote me a check for the retail and told me never to tell anyone the cost.

Since the high-profile bankruptcy of Solyndra, the solar company that received $535 million in federal loan guarantees, many have concluded that government efforts to promote energy technologies are doomed to fail. Critics cite the abandoned synthetic fuels program, attempts to capture carbon pollution from coal plants and next-generation nuclear reactors as further proof of this conclusion.

Many often point to the shale gas revolution as evidence that the private sector, in response to market forces, is better than government bureaucrats at picking technological winners. It’s a compelling story, one that pits inventive entrepreneurs against slow-moving technocrats and self-dealing politicians.

In the Samuel Beckett play "Waiting for Godot," two characters named Vladimir and Estragon wait in vain on a roadside for someone named Godot to arrive. They pass the time by eating, sleeping, talking, arguing, singing and more to "to hold the terrible silence at bay."

A similar plot line seems to be playing out in Wisconsin when it comes to growth capital creation.

While the Wisconsin Legislature slowly immerses itself - again - in the paralyzing Godot of recall politics, other states aren't content to sit and wait. Almost daily, it seems, one state or another is announcing a program or fund aimed at fostering economic growth.

Earlier this week, ABN AMRO, released a report on Open Innovation, titled “Teaming up on Open Innovation: art or science?”. Although solely released for the food sector, it explores Open Innovation theory from a new and interesting perspective. The report is authored by prof. dr. Omta (University of Wageningen), dr. Fortuin (Food Valley) and drs. Dijkman (ABN AMRO).

The core of the article consists of 5 key elements: the critical (failure) factors for Open Innovation.

I am a big believer in VC pitches that the bio slide should come up front. Actually, I think the advice in this post applies to any sales meeting also.

The short answer is that by knowing the key members of the management team the VC firm can quickly identify strengths on your time and know whether you have some competitive advantage in your chose field relative to other people with whom you will compete.

This is especially important since I believe that 70% of the decision of many VCs are based on the potential of the management team in one way, shape or form. I know it’s incredibly important to me in my investment decisions.

Innovation has gone global. The United States is no longer the majority source of patents in the world — though it does lead other countries by a wide margin, at least as measured by the number of innovative companies that call the U.S. home.

In this infographic from Good Magazine, the world map shows what percentage of Thomson Reuters’ “Global Innovators” list is headquartered in each country. The U.S. leads, with 40 percent of that list’s companies based here. It’s followed by Japan (with 27 percent), France (11 percent) and Sweden (6 percent).

Steve Jurvetson is more excited about San Diego than most San Diegans.

He surveys the geometric pattern of the cliffs at Torrey Pines and posts a pic on his Flickr photostream: “The Purple Beach of 92037” — “ ’tis a magical place.”

But Jurvetson is no tourist. It’s the beach above the beach that brings him down from Menlo Park to La Jolla: “Biotech Beach.”

Board meetings. “San Diego’s ground zero for the renaissance that I call Biotech 2.0,” he tells me, and he Flickrblurbs: 2.8x as many companies as the next biggest node, South San Francisco.

The Internet will save higher education, but it may kill your alma mater

Peter Thiel believes smart people don’t need college, and he’s right: There have always been autodidacts who can learn without assistance. Of course, we don’t really need supermarkets and restaurants either; we could all grow and cook our own food.

Yet having professionals help us has always been a cost-benefit decision. What are the costs of a great education, including the opportunity cost of four years of work, and how do these costs balance against the impact of that education on your life?

It's rare for couples these days to stick together for as long as John and Patsy McArthur have. Both now 63, they met in high school in rural Red Springs, N.C., and never ventured far. In their 45 years together, they have run a farm and, since 1987, a contracting business. As recently as 2008, when the housing market was booming, annual revenues of their 60-employee McArthur Construction topped $14 million. This got the McArthurs thinking about selling their company and using the proceeds to ease into retirement, figuring to travel and spend more time with their grandchildren.

Oops. That was before the bottom fell out of the real-estate market. When it did, the McArthurs quickly sold some equipment, paid down debt, and scaled back their payroll by cutting the staff to 45. They closed their office in Charlotte, where the building boom had gone bust, and moved the business back near home, where rent and land cost less. "We kept bidding all the time on new projects, but we had to cut our profit margin to the bone," John Mc-Arthur said.

Can you teach entrepreneurship? Bestselling author Eric Ries thinks so. He also thinks that entrepreneurship must be taught to more people if the American economy is to successfully pivot to a post-manufacturing world. According to Ries, we’ve gotten so efficient at manufacturing that even though we’re making more stuff than ever before, there are less jobs available to do it. That’s why economic survival lies in our ability to better teach the business of creativity and entrepreneurship.

Ries’ new book, The Lean Startup, has climbed to #2 on the NY Times Bestseller List, in the “Advice and Misc.” category. In the book, Ries talks about his strategies for running a successful startup, which are based on the “lean manufacturing” process that originated with Toyota.

The idea is to provide a few start-up firms with four months of seed capital, office space, and intense mentorship, and then see what happens. Amplify opens in Venice with $4.5 million in funding from the likes of producers Brian Grazer and Mark Burnett, investors Tim Draper and Gordon Crawford, and Google's Eric Schmidt. From Socal Tech:

The accelerator joins a long list of accelerators to ramp their efforts in the region recently, including Science (Mike Jones), LaunchLA (Mark Suster), MuckerLab (Erik Rannala), Start Engine (Howard Marks), UpstartLA (Dan Dato and Bruce Brown), K5Launch (Amir Banafatemi, Ray Chan, David Cheng, and Kai Tao)--just to name a few.

The 250 or so people who gathered this month for the 40th annual meeting of the La Crosse Area Development Corp. aren’t without their differences. The crowd included business leaders and educators, Republicans and Democrats, “townies” and academic gowns, and even a few politicians who have butted heads in recent elections.

Fortunately for La Crosse, a picturesque Mississippi River city of 52,000 people, those differences aren’t necessarily divisions.

With a jobless rate of 5.2 percent, more than 2 percentage points lower than the statewide rate, La Crosse and surrounding La Crosse County appear to be weathering the enduring economic storm better than many places in Wisconsin. The question is “Why?”

Perhaps it’s the above-average education rate for its labor force. Or the low cost of living, which runs 10 percent or more below the U.S. average. Or its competitive health-care sector. Or the healthy mix of homegrown companies such as Kwik Trip, Trane, Logistics Health, Reinhart FoodService and City Brewing, which now has more brew house workers than the old G. Heileman Brewing Co. at its peak.

There's only one reason Facebook is going to IPO: To make its employees and investors rich. Otherwise, Mark Zuckerberg would (somewhat ironically) keep the company private forever.

Who's getting rich when the company does IPO? Using information leaked to Ryan Tate at Gawker, we have a breakdown here. Assuming Facebook can get that $100 billion valuation being floated in the press, here's who would be worth what.

Most comprehensive study to-date on women entrepreneurs globally featured at the World Bank as the U.S. Department of State, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women and the Government of Denmark announced a public-private partnership creating greater access to capital for women entrepreneurs

Babson College today released the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2011 Women’s Report, the most comprehensive study ever conducted about the entrepreneurial activity of women across the globe. This unique research, conducted in 59 economies, surveys individuals rather than firm registrations, analyzing how many women are participating in entrepreneurship worldwide, the types of businesses they are starting or operating, their attitudes about entrepreneurship and the challenges they face in starting and growing their businesses. The GEM Women’s Report is authored by Professors Donna J. Kelley, Candida G. Brush, Patricia G. Greene of Babson College and Yana Litovsky, GEM Data Manager.

The 10 most popular postings on this blog in 2011 all had numbers in their headline. Hmmm...

Seems like people are looking for lists and distilled down wisdom -- portals to understanding that somehow quantify the human need to know. Oh, and compilations of quotes.

So here you go, Heart of Innovation's TOP TEN postings as quantified on an scale of 1-10 by our favorite blog analytics service Postrank.

A stab in the heart for Singapore nationalists. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak isn’t a fan of Singapore when it comes to creative thinking. Speaking to BBC, Wozniak questions where are the creative souls in Singapore. Here’s an excerpt from his interview:

When you’re very structured almost like a religion… Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms… everybody is the same. Look at structured societies like Singapore where bad behavior isn’t tolerated. You are extremely punished.

Where are the creative people? Where are the great artists? Where are the great musicians? Where are the great singers? Where are the great writers? Where are the athletes? All the creative elements seems to disappear.

For one reason or another, it might be time to shut the doors on your business. Maybe you and a friend formed an LLC for an online venture a few years ago, but over the past year, you’ve both moved on. Maybe you launched a dog-walking business last year, then decided to get a full-time job instead.

Whatever the reason, you’ll need to formally close your LLC or corporation. Otherwise, you can still be charged fees associated with the business and still be required to submit tax returns to the IRS and submit an annual report to the state.

Nap pods and rock-climbing walls are fun, but what really makes a great company are the simple things: good people, good opportunities, good pay.

Two consulting firms, Bain & Co and McKinsey, beat out the trendy tech companies on Glassdoor's annual ranking, which is based on anonymous employee reviews.

Google, Facebook and Apple also scored near the top.

Clayton Christensen is a giant in the world of technology innovation. The Harvard Business School professor (who stands 6 feet 8 inches tall) came up with the influential theory of disruptive technology and this year was crowned by Forbes magazine as the "the world's most influential business thinker."

Less well known is that Christensen, 59, has staked his personal wealth, and that of his large family, on his academic ideas. The Boston hedge fund he owns, called Rose Park Advisors, operates a "Disruptive Innovation Fund" that has invested more than $100 million into companies fitting his theories about how technology disrupts markets.

The Emerging Technologies Center (ETC) is planning to launch a startup accelerator in Baltimore, citybizlist has learned.

The accelerator will be modeled off the popular Y Combinator, which does seed funding for startups.

Interestingly, ETC's accelerator will look for applicants nationally with the underlying intention of retaining top talent in Charm City.