Some of Silicon Valley’s brightest minds and top investors have decamped to the UK this week.

Thirty technology experts, led by the ebullient Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and serial investor with stakes in the likes of Facebook and Zynga, are visiting Downing Street, London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’, and universities across the country to encourage the next wave of British dotcom entrepreneurs.

The wide-ranging programme, which began yesterday and runs until Saturday, has been created by Hoffman and Sherry Coutu, an entrepreneur and investor.

In the Fifties, I, together with just about every designer, was preoccupied with aesthetics and fashion. Design was the latest typeface in a modern layout looking like a Mondrian with lots of white space. That’s what I was taught in art school.

I don’t remember when I changed. Whether it happened all at once, or gradually. Eventually, inspired by designers Paul Rand, Lou Dorfsman and Helmut Krone, an art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach, along with the surrealist painter, René Magritte, I became less interested in design for its own sake and more interested in design as it communicates an opinion.

The purpose of this analysis is to narrate and estimate the economic benefits associated with the formation and growth of CrispTek, a company whose ChoiceBatter product was developed using patented technology (U.S. Patent No. 6,224,921) based on research conducted by scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is anticipated that analyses like this, which articulate regional-level economic stimulus outcomes such as value-added generated and jobs created, will increasingly become an important aspect of evaluating federal government research efforts such as those undertaken by ARS.

President Obama announced the Health Care Innovation Challenge — a $1 billion initiative to support the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improve care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and/or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The objectives of this initiative are to:

• Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field and that produce better care, better health and reduced cost through improvement for identified target populations;
• Identify new models of workforce development and deployment that support new models through new infrastructure activities; and,
• Support organizations who can rapidly deploy care improvement models (within six months of award) through new ventures or expansion of existing efforts to new populations of patients, in conjunction (where possible) with other public and private sector partners.

I've been doing a lot of thinking these days about "culture of innovation" -- trying to get down to the root of what the heck it's all about.

It's easy to wax poetic about the topic (and a lot of people do), but too much of the stuff I've been reading sounds like bad advertising copy for motherhood and apple pie.

So, at the risk of oversimplifying the whole thing, here's my blogospheric whack at boiling the mumbo jumbo down to the core.

If you want to create a sustainable culture of innovation, you will need to understand that there are always four forces at work -- four currents that are always interacting with each other:

1. Top Down 2. Bottom Up 3. Outside In 4. Inside Out

Georgia could begin investing nearly $200 million in the next generation of high-growth companies.

The General Assembly is expected to take up a proposal this winter creating a venture capital fund aimed at providing an infusion of much-needed capital to attract jobs, investment and tax revenues to the state.

In a rare case of bipartisanship, the House overwhelmingly passed two bills aimed at helping startups and early-stage businesses raise capital.

On a 407-17 vote Nov. 3, the House passed the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, which makes it easier for businesses to raise capital through “crowd funding.” This technique uses the Internet to solicit small equity investments from large numbers of people.

Steve Jobs died more than a month ago, and the media has gone through its two stages of grief: Deification, followed by a backlash to the deification.

The latter was hastened by the publication of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio, which presented a warts-and-all version of the Apple founder that contrasted with the airbrushed image that emerged from obituaries.

Penguin USA will provide the service through its genre-fiction online community, Book Country, which launched in May offering wannabe authors the opportunity to post their work online and receive feedback. With 500 works of romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and thriller now online from 4,000 members, and “a small number” of those members having secured literary agents, Penguin has decided to provide “a direct path to publication for those who choose to go the self-publishing route”.

As the percentage of senior citizens in the world increase, businesses have been quietly getting themselves ready for the trend.

For years supermarkets have been going crazy trying to speed up the checkout process to get people out of their stores more quickly. Self-checkouts and express lanes have been installed and then expanded in most supermarkets.

Good news, SBIR/STTR/CPP are now extended through December 16, 2011. Both House & Senate have just passed H.R. 2112 which amongst many other things extends SBIR/STTR/CPP through December 16, 2011. The President is expect to sign the bill Friday, when the current CR funding the government expires.

Reading between the lines reveals more good news judging from congressional action on this bill. The major thrust of this bill is to fund Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs through the end of FY-2012 (September 30, 2012).

Almost three years ago, the Montgomery County Biosciences Task Force issued recommendations that included the formation of a public-private partnership to help take the local life sciences industry to another level.

This week, that nonprofit partnership, called BioHealth Innovation, formally incorporated and has raised more than $1 million from companies such as MedImmune of Gaithersburg and Human Genome Sciences of Rockville, along with medical system Adventist HealthCare of Rockville and Johns Hopkins University to start implementing its programs.

“Though we just incorporated this week, this is something that has been strategized for almost three years,” said Rich Bendis, the interim CEO of BioHealth. “There has been a lot of preliminary groundwork.”

The deficit super committee and congressional technology committees, searching for new money, are considering "incentive auctions" of the TV band spectrum. Versions of these plans that focus on simply selling as much spectrum as possible would threaten the future of wireless innovation in the U.S.

For starters, it would threaten what appears to be the next wave in wireless communications—a wave exemplified by two products launched this month. The first product is Amazon's Kindle Fire, which came out as a purely Wi-Fi device from a company that only four years ago launched the Kindle as a cellular-only device with service baked into the device price. The second is a $19.99 unlimited voice, text, and data service from Republic Wireless, which uses Wi-Fi as baseline infrastructure, and cellular as its fallback.

At a conference organized by the Federal Reserve on small business, Chairman Ben Bernanke stressed that the Federal Reserve wants banks to “adopt a balanced approach” toward small business lending. Bernanke wants bankers to:

“. . . foster an environment in which lenders do all they can to meet the needs of creditworthy borrowers while maintaining appropriately prudent underwriting standards.”

Keep the faith. That's what I said to a client who is going through a crisis of confidence. Over the summer he had put together the underpinnings of what on paper looked like a promising growth business. But — as is usually the case — the more he analyzes, the more he doubts; the more he shows the results of his analysis to senior leaders, the more questions they ask, and the more they doubt.

If you are doing something that hasn't been done before, careful analysis will by definition highlight reasons to not proceed. Market demand can't be validated. Experts dismiss technological assumptions. Partnership discussions stall. There is always something that causes this crisis of confidence. Harvard Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has seen this so frequently that she coined Kanter's Law: Everything can look like a failure in the middle. When you first formulate an idea, excitement peaks. But the more you study that idea, the more you realize the challenges that lie in front of you.

It’s Demo Day for Gazelle Lab, the new Tampa Bay-based TechStars Network member, which is seeing its first class of startups launch this morning in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. The accelerator, based on the successful TechStars model, was founded in early 2011 with three goals: build an entrepreneurship community in the Tampa Bay area, create a seed stage pipeline (something notoriously lacking in Florida today) and create more jobs.

Despite its struggle to register as a tech hotspot, there’s actually a fairly sizable tech community in the Tampa Bay region – it just doesn’t always involve early stage startups like the ones you would see featured on sites like TechCrunch. Developers here often seem content to work at larger firms, like in banking, healthcare, and of course, given MacDill’s presence, for the military.

ON NOVEMBER 3rd, surprisingly, a bill was passed by the House of Representatives with strong bipartisan support. The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act aims to make it easier for small businesses to raise money through “crowdfunding”. For the first time ordinary investors would be allowed to put up to $10,000 in small businesses that are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, enabling Joe Schmo to win big if the company becomes the next Google.

Some non-profits and small businesses already raise money through crowdfunding. Websites allow entrepreneurs to post information about their business plan and to offer perks, such as T-shirts, in return for “donations”; but current securities laws allow only “accredited investors”, rich folk supposedly aware of risks of the venture, to buy a financial stake in the business. In spite of this crowdfunding has thrived. Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo, one of the first crowdfunding websites to launch, three years ago, reckons around 250 competitors have sprung up.

Over the past 100 or so years, we have been solving the problems on our planet as if they are linear, independent, and containable—in other words, as if they are largely technical challenges. And in most if not all cases, our solution is another technical intervention which often creates a new set of problems. Examples abound: The focus on making cars more energy efficient with fossil fuels slowed the introduction of true electric vehicles by decades. Or the current discussion of nuclear as the solution to fossil fuels. It’s technology trumping technology with not nearly enough attention to the unintended consequences for future generations.

Too often organizations think innovation is simply about generating a lot of

creative or “out-of-the-box” ideas.  But in organizations where innovation has truly become central to their culture, ideation is simply one step – and not necessarily the first – in an innovation process.  Don’t confuse innovation with ideation.  Ideation is a tool, but innovation is a process. Don’t let the word “process” intimidate you. Instead, focus on these five guidelines to jump start your innovation process.

1.    Inclusion

Innovation isn’t an independent exercise. It takes the collective knowledge and, just as importantly buy-in, of the organization to be successful. Create an innovation team and get key stakeholders involved early and often. First, inform them of the process you want to use to jump start innovation, and then consistently include them in the steps and key outputs of that process. In other words, keep key stakeholders informed and involved.   If you’re thinking that there are a million stakeholders in the organization, focus initially on those that have the power to impact whether the concepts defined as a result of the process will live or die on the vine. You can and should expand/modify the team as appropriate for different phases of the process.

Nevada stands at a crossroads, yet it appears ready to remap its future.

Silver Staters sense that the current economic slump has not been just a temporary reversal but a challenge to the state’s traditional growth model—one that has revealed an economy over-dependent on consumption sectors, prone to booms and busts, and too little invested in innovation and economic diversification. And yet, for all that Nevadans have been early to recognize that the current slump will beget, in some places, innovation and renewal, and in other places erosion—and so requires action.

To that end, this paper draws on an intense five-month inquiry that sought to define the nature of the economic challenges the state and its major regions face; identify industries and industry clusters that have the highest potential for expansion as part of an economic diversification effort; and suggest policy options that will enable the state, its regions, and the private sector to work more effectively to build a more unified, regionally vibrant, and diversified Nevada.