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Are you one of those people who insist on driving over the posted speed limit, no matter the circumstances? How do you feel about regulations prohibiting cell-phone use while driving – not to mention the obnoxious restaurant patron blathering away in a loud voice next to you about the inconsequential trivia of his life? And then we have Rick Perry and the Republican presidential candidates, all “fed up” and bothered by “regulations” they claim restrict the growth of business and the formation of startup companies. Has the American enterprise system indeed become so constipated by regulations that innovation is squelched and only a dose of Ex-Lax or “deregulation” will cure the problem?  Since when did “regulation” become a four-letter word!

Long Island, Western New York, the North Country and Central New York were the top winners in a competition for $785.5 million of state job-creating grants.

The top four regions were deemed the most promising economic development projects throughout the state. In all, 720 projects chosen by regional leaders based on local strengths such as higher education and geography will be funded statewide.

The state is giving Central New York the largest grant award, $103.7 million; followed by the North Country region, including the Adirondacks, $103.2 million; Long Island, $101.6 million; and Western New York, $100.3 million.

“We need to help young innovators and SMEs to become more innovative and competitive facilitating their access to funding,” Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier told a press conference.

EU executive research shows that a company with long-term venture capital investors is more successful than a company that has to rely on short-term finance from banks. However, strict screening criteria and limited funds make it difficult for companies to access this capital.

It was the kind of entrepreneurial breakthrough that China counts on to make it a global leader in innovation.

Cathay Industrial Biotech, a private company here, developed a way to ferment hydrocarbons in industrial vats and turn them into advanced nylon ingredients for use in lubricants, diabetes drugs and other 21st-century marvels.

The patents Cathay won prompted Dupont, a leading global producer of nylon, to become one of Cathay’s biggest customers. And the $120 million that Goldman Sachs and other backers have pumped into Cathay in recent years primed investors in China and abroad to eagerly await a public stock offering that had been planned for earlier this year.

2012 is going to be a huge year in tech.

We already had a number of big surprises in 2011 and there's an enormous amount of talent in Silicon Valley poised to break out next year.

We've assembled a list of more than 20 entrepreneurs that are carrying a ton of momentum into the new year. These entrepreneurs have either just launched something new that looks like it will see huge growth in the next year or are ready to launch something big in 2012.

My first blog post for HBR.org went live in February 2008, when the platform was still in its infancy. Here's what I've learned about market demand in three-and-a-half years and (now) 200 posts. While I thought that a reflective post might be a little self-indulgent, I think these lessons transfer to other domains, so I wanted to share them with my readers.

1. Distilling ideas down to straightforward lists can help bring clarity to murky situations. At the end of 2010 the combination of an unusual presentation and work on The Little Black Book of Innovation inspired a post that was a long list of one-sentence answers to common innovation questions. When the post appeared on December 27, I figured it would land in a holiday wasteland. But strong readership in December carried into January, and turned "31 Innovation Questions" into my most popular post.

German researchers armed with smoking candles have come up with a cheap and easy way to coat surfaces so that oil droplets bounce or roll right off. The advance could eventually lead to eyeglass coatings and tablet computer screens that can evade the mark of even the greasiest fingerprints.

Making surfaces able to repel fluids—whether water- or oil-based—is also important for industrial and biomedical applications. But it's harder to make a surface that repels oil or organic solvents as opposed to water because oil has a far lower surface tension than water.

Are you in the restaurant, foodservice or food manufacturing business? No matter how tough the economy is, people still need to eat. And foodservice entrepreneurs have shown a lot of creativity in the past few years—in fact, you could almost say the recession has sparked a renaissance of restaurant industry creativity. Beyond food trucks, burgers and beer, what are some of the hot food trends for 2012?

Here are 10 of the most promising trends I’ve featured on my food trends site, SmallBizTrendCast.

Artisanal everything: Not new, but still going strong, “artisanal” originally referred to handcrafted foods but is now springing up everywhere. The term has even trickled down to quick-service restaurants, with major chains like Jack in the Box touting “artisanal” breads as a selling point. One product that’s not quite so mainstream: artisanal marshmallows.

University researchers are now considered by many as key actors in the building of knowledge economies in their regions, as universities are assumed to be important engines of regional economic well-being. Yet within the academy not all faculty are accepting of these roles for their institutions, for a variety of reasons. We measure faculty attitudes towards their universities being involved in (a) assisting regional economic development and (b) the commercialization of knowledge more generally using web-based surveys. Then using secondary data from a variety of sources, we attempt to explain the variation in attitudes among faculty in terms of: (i) individual attributes and professional experiences, (ii) scholarly disciplinary of the faculty member, (iii) institutional characteristics of their respective university, and (iv) regional economic conditions. Using ordered logit models, we test to see if faculty view a distinction in appropriateness of universities assisting economic development versus appropriateness of the commercialization of knowledge, whether there are differences between U.S. and EU faculty in their attitudes towards each type of activity, and whether faculty in regions undergoing industrial restructuring or in economic distress have more favorable attitudes towards each activity. Results to-date indicate that faculty have more favorable attitudes towards their universities assisting regional economic development compared to commercialization of knowledge, that universities individual and disciplinary variables are more important than institutional and regional economic variables, and that there are strong similarities in attitudes between U.S. and EU faculty attitudes, but with a few interesting exceptions.

Sites that depend on online advertising could also have their revenue completely cut off, as the act would empower the Attorney General to ban them from using online payment facilities such as PayPal and Visa.

Despite fact that the law is American, its jurisdiction does not stop at US borders. Court orders will be given to those outside of American jurisdiction who infringe American copyrights. This means foreign websites will be just as vulnerable as those established on the act’s home soil.

Online insurance quote provider Business Insurance Quotes has put together an infographic detailing the timeline, concerns, major players, and activist organisations around the act.

Where is the place to go to if you want to be on the forefront of open innovation in Asia? Well, that place does not exist. OK, but what are the top 5 countries to look out for if you are interested in open innovation in Asia?

This is a tough call as there is not that much open innovation activity in Asia. However, here you get my picks based on my insights and interactions in this region. It is a quick-and-dirty list, but let’s use it as a discussion starter on open innovation activities in Asia.

My top 5 open innovation countries in Asia:

1. Malaysia: This is a controversial choice as Malaysia is not known for open innovation activities at all. However, I think the country has the potential to become the open innovation hub in Asia. Imagine a place where the best conferences happen, universities that encourage research on open innovation practices, service providers that choose Malaysia as their Asian HQ, small companies that huddle up in clusters while they innovate together with larger companies in Malaysia and globally.

A few weeks ago I was reading a blog post by MG Siegler that really struck a chord. The title was “The Jerk,” which is a reference to both the Steve Martin film but more precisely to Robert Scoble’s interpretation of Steve Jobs having just read his biography.

The gist of MG’s argument is that he’d rather work with people who are openly critical of his ideas if it helps him to perform better than to have a bunch of “yes men” around who just say what a great job he’s doing. I agree with that mentality. And the problem is that most people are “yes men” because it’s easier.

After years of development, personalised health care is starting to move into clinical practice - and patients, healthcare providers and payers could all benefit. This conference highlights:

Case studies - where, and in for what indications, has it been shown to work already?

If you fit that job description, you may be in luck. The European Commission’s new, €80 billion, seven-year plan for research and innovation is stuffed with new initiatives for research, finance, and networking at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs.) Indeed, support for SMEs is supposed to hit at least €6.8 billion - and it underpins a dominant theme of the plan, called Horizon 2020: Using research and innovation funding to create economic growth and jobs.

Horizon 2020 aims to make Europe “a better place to do business and create jobs,” said Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science. And “SMEs are the backbone of the European economy.”

AUTM has published the U.S. and Canadian versions of its Licensing Activity Survey: FY2010. (For high-level data analyses, see here and here.)

During FY 2010, 651 companies were formed in the U.S. as a result of university research, an increase of 9% over the previous year, according to the 20th annual survey report. “The data offer a glimpse into the state of academic technology transfer,” says Shawn Hawkins, AUTM vice president for metrics & surveys. “This year’s data reveal that the economic recession has continued to affect universities. However, we are pleased to see that start-up creation has remained strong.”

I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time in 1975 when I was about 10 years old. I’ve read it several times over the last 35 years, but probably hadn’t read it in over a decade. My first business partner, Dave Jilk (now the Standing Cloud founder / CEO), gave it to me as a birthday gift last week.

I just read it again and it was as powerful, inspiring, and enlightening as I remembered it. I’m often asked what books I’d recommend to an entrepreneur (especially an aspiring entrepreneur). There are two: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Bruce Niswander, who as the head of three business incubators helped dozens of startups get off the ground, has left his post at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University to perform on a larger stage. Named director of economic development initiatives for United Nations media organization South-South News, Mr. Niswander is focusing these days on bringing entrepreneurial savvy to the less-developed world. His mission: to work with universities, businesses and governments to help entrepreneurs in developing countries gain access to world markets. The idea is to identify promising businesses and products, help them find customers in other countries around the world and, in exchange, get a percentage of a company's sales.

It’s probably safe to say that most life sciences startups are familiar with the federal government’s SBIR and STTR programs for funding research.

But there are plenty of other federal funding opportunities out there for startups that know where to look.

The Department of Defense, in particular, can be a fruitful source of grant funding for biomedical firms in industry sectors such as telemedicine, infectious disease, chemical defense and environmental medicine, according to Liz Powell, founder of G2G Consulting, a Washington, D.C.-based government affairs group.

Republicans and Democrats may finally agree on something: Small business owners and entrepreneurs need better and more plentiful opportunities to gain access to capital, grow their businesses, and create more jobs.

Last month, the House voted 407 to 17 to pass passed the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, which seeks to makes it easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs to raise capital through crowdfunding. The new bill would let let small companies sell up to $2 million in equity online. Investors would be allowed to put in as much as $10,000 or 10 percent of their annual income—whichever is less.