The US Small Business Administration (SBA) recently conducted focus groups to learn what entrepreneurs, investors and others believe we need to do to enhance entrepreneurship in America. One of their findings was that we need to improve entrepreneurship education in our K-12 schools.

While it’s hard to argue with “improving education” for anything, this recommendation appears misplaced. More representative surveys show that Americans believe their schools are doing a good job of preparing kids to be entrepreneurs, at least in comparison to what people from many other industrialized countries think.

The practice of collaborative innovation opens the door to meaningfully transforming the ways in which people engage with one another as they pursue the critical questions facing the organization. Understanding the extent to which people continue to use incumbent means of collaboration can help you to understand the extent to which they have embraced the practice. In this article Doug Collins suggests having a look at our old friend, e-mail.

New product startups rightfully begin with a heads-down focus on creating the ultimate product – whether it’s a new technology, a new look and ease of use, or a new low-cost delivery approach. Most then add customer service at the rollout, but very few really understand what it means to be truly customer centric, and even fewer really achieve it.

Customer centricity is far more than providing excellent customer service, although that’s a step in the right direction. Customer centricity is a strategy to fundamentally align a company’s products and services with the wants and needs of its most valuable customers, with the aim of more profits for the long term.

Last year I had a chance to visit Washington D.C. and tour the Washington Monument. I later learned that this magnificent national icon was, in fact, an early example of crowd funding. Crowd funding is the process of aggregating small amounts of money from a large number of people in order to accomplish great things.

It turns out that the construction of Washington Monument was crowd funded by small contributions from individuals across the country. Fund-raisers even placed donation boxes (like the one in the photo) next to ballot boxes on election day in 1860, when voters chose Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln as president.

The first rule of starting any entrepreneurial venture is: Find a problem that needs solving. Detroit, as we all know, has some big social problems: poverty; crime; homelessness; abysmal literacy rates; rampant unemployment. It should hardly be a surprise, then, that a motivated young class of social entrepreneurs has sprung up in the city, and the successful startups they’ve created are gaining the attention of the region’s veteran entrepreneurs. The local boom in social entrepreneurship has even spawned a business incubator, Wayne State University’s Blackstone LaunchPad, and a capital fund, University of Michigan’s Social Venture Fund.

“Detroit is a great testing ground,” said Jeremy Schifeling, a fellow at the Social Venture Fund. “We want to make this city the epicenter of social impact.”

Whenever we see a heated debate going on for or against young entrepreneurs we just have to jump into it. Recently Steve Tobak published an article on Bnet labeled “Why Gen Y Entrepreneurship Will be a Disaster“. Now this kind of title is just something we can’t overlook as we pull for gen y entrepreneurs everyday and see great things happening in the space. However it also sparked another young entrepreneur advocate, Donna Fenn, to write a rebutle on Inc.com titled “Will GenY Entrepreneurship be a Disaster?” In true form Donna didn’t just bash Steve’s piece but recognized how some of his points are very valid but also pointed out the flaws.

What makes a health app effective? With more than 10,000 consumer health apps available for smartphone users, experienced app developers are just beginning to find answers to that question.

Join MobiHealthNews and two other healthcare industry thought leaders for a complimentary webinar focused on the world of health and medical apps. MobiHealthNews Editor Brian Dolan will present exclusive findings from our recent apps reports, which include an analysis of health and fitness apps published during the past three years. The webinar will also include a presentation from a leading health application developer who believes that health apps must be tethered to the healthcare system to be effective.

For hospitals, Apple’s iPad tablet computer is about much more than checking and updating electronic health records.

Some hospitals develop their own iPad apps for patients and staff, but even for those that don’t, there are a growing number of apps aimed at helping healthcare professionals better care for and communicate with their patients.

With iPad adoption among physicians so high — a survey this year estimated it at 27 percent — the importance of the tablet device to the healthcare industry should only grow in the next few years.

Everyone who cares, even modestly, about design can name a few decisive events that set them on that path. Steve Jobs was no different, but he was also extraordinarily lucky: The formative design lessons he got were so far ahead of their time that they would lay the groundwork for Apple's success with the Macintosh, the iMac, iPhone, and the iPad. Here's six of the defining design lessons that Jobs learned, and which imbued every product he created:

After all these decades, that memo is still Apple's DNA. 1. Craft, Above All

Under Jobs, Apple became famous for a level of craft that seemed almost gratuitous: For example, on the "Sunflower" Macintosh of a few years ago, there was an exquisitely fine, laser-etched Apple logo. As an owner, you might see that logo only once a year, when moving the computer. But it mattered, because that single time made an impression. In the same way, Jobs spent a lot of time making the circuit boards of the first Macintosh beautiful--he wanted their architecture to be clean and orderly. Who cared about that? But again, that level of detail would have made a deep impression on the few people that would have seen the inner guts.

Isaac Newton was just 23 years old when, while on a brief hiatus from Cambridge University, he developed his theory of gravitation. “For in those days I was in my prime of age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since,” he later wrote in a letter to a fellow scholar.

Similarly, at age 26, Einstein published the paper on the photoelectric effect that would win him a Nobel Prize 16 years later in 1921. Marie Curie was around 30 when she, along with her husband Pierre, discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium.

For researchers working in technical fields, inventions are to be expected.  Unfortunately, many university inventors receive little, if any, training on what to do once they have an invention on their hands. Our team has put together a handy FAQ to help orient inventors to the world of university-industry technology transfer.  We’ve also put together a quick overview of what we see as the key steps for inventors to transform their ideas into commercial solutions.

Step One: Understand the problem that you are solving

Few inventions are truly novel visions of the world. Usually, they are combinations of known ideas that, together, solve a new problem. Understanding the problem is often 90% of the invention battle. Understanding the problem also helps you to articulate market applications for your invention, and gives you a mechanism to compare your solution to alternatives. The latter is particularly important in the commercial context, where it really doesn’t matter *how* a problem is solved. I frequently read new project proposals that proudly promise to speed up a particular technique by 10x – only to overlook the fact that a different type of technique already solved the problem years ago. It doesn’t matter that you have the world’s fastest horse when people drive cars. If you are looking to have your idea commercialized, save yourself some time and make sure that what you are doing really is novel, and makes sense in the technology landscape.

American Express wants to have a stake in the next big digital commerce startup, and it’s establishing a new $100 million fund to make sure it doesn’t miss out. The fund will be spread out over multiple years and will focus on early-stage startups that can create innovative ideas that will ultimately benefit AmEx and aid in its digital transformation.

The company is looking at all kinds of companies offering everything from mobile and online payments and location-based offers to loyalty and rewards programs, security and analytics. American Express will look to take a minority stake in these companies and create partnerships with them that will ultimately help bring new technology to the company’s audience of more than 90 million customers worldwide. Portfolio companies will be able to leverage not only American Express’ customers but also its employees, customer service and data analytics.

Unlike in the U.S., venture capital on the other side of the Atlantic is a relatively young industry. It had an inglorious and stuttering start in the 1980s, often as an extension of the activities of conventional banks or as a limited part of fund managers’ remits. The first Gulf War and 1990 recession were among several setbacks, even before the promise of the first Internet boom culminated in the dot-com bust. This left many investors bruised—and venture capital out of favor in Europe.

As we approach the end of 2011, it’s clear that European venture capital has finally come into its own. There are now a number of well-established firms based in London and elsewhere that invest across the region and have helped entrepreneurs build significant businesses during the past 15 years. The early big wins of ARM, Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR), and Autonomy have been followed by ASOS, Betfair, Lovefilm, Playfish, Skype, Spotify, Wonga, and Vente-Privé in recent times, to name just a few.

A popular set of questions that I get asked repeatedly by clients and audience members includes the following:

We know we need to innovate, but who has time?

How do companies balance the day to day operations with the need to innovate?

Without a budget to allocate people to innovation, how can I make innovation part of people’s day jobs?

We all know that when it comes to business, and life in general, that there are two major constraints we all face – and often trade off one against the other – those two constraints are time and money.

I know that many, many entrepreneurs are feeling dejected because of investor rejections.

Today, I want to share with you a story of an amazing entrepreneurial team led by Alex Bouzari, CEO of Data Direct. In How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds, Alex and I explore the company's journey to $200 Million in revenue, while their VCs wrote them off. From what I have seen, this is one of the few companies that can cross the elusive billion dollar mark in due course.

Six organizations were named winners of SSTI's 2011 Excellence in TBED award, serving as national models for states and regions investing in science, technology and innovation to grow their economies and create high-paying jobs. Among the winners, a newer program was selected as the first Most Promising TBED Initiative, recognized for a creative approach to growing industry clusters.

Awards were presented today during SSTI's 15th Annual Conference in Columbus, OH, attended by local, regional and national leaders in economic development. The following initiatives were named 2011 recipients of SSTI's Excellence in TBED award

Madison-Yesterday Governor Walker issued Executive Order #51, which recreates the Wisconsin Technology Committee. This formation of an advisory committee consisting of members of the Wisconsin Technology Council will facilitate a deeper collaboration between state government and the Wisconsin Technology Council-enabling the State's full utilization of the Wisconsin Technology Council's policy recommendations and programs.

"I look forward to continuing to work with the Wisconsin Technology Council," said Governor Walker. "We are going to need to innovate and utilize fresh ideas from the private sector to move our economy forward. It is my hope that some of these ideas, proposals or recommendations will come from this committee."

Innovation, simply defined, is the process that takes new ideas and implements them in a way that creates value. It's not the same thing as invention, which is an event that occurs at a distinct point in time, often resulting in a single product. Innovation is the extension of invention, the act of bringing things that are invented to market, repeatedly.

An innovation process creates measurable value, by increasing productivity, improving quality, generating new markets, or creating other benefits to consumers, producers, or both.

As Dell Services' chief innovation officer, I spend a lot of time talking with people about innovation and I'm often amazed how many misconceptions there are about it. Here are three popular myths about innovation, along with some comments about how we at Dell are addressing the issues they raise.

In the late 1990s, a handful of physicists and engineers began to take a greater interest in biology. The Human Genome Project was spitting out more and more gene sequences—blueprints for the protein building blocks of the cell—generating a flood of new information about the molecular machinery of life. Trouble was, there were not enough biologists doing the job of figuring out how all these genes and proteins worked together to create a living, breathing organism.

It was around this time that Boston University bioengineer James Collins saw his chance to inject a little engineering know-how into the study of biology. There were two ways to go about it, he figured—either disassemble cells or build them. “A burgeoning young engineer is either the kind of kid who takes stuff apart to try to figure out how it works, or he’s the kid who puts stuff together,” Collins says. Though both approaches seemed promising, there simply wasn’t enough known about the structures or functions of the genes and their protein products to infer how all the parts worked together by taking a cell apart, piece by piece.

Is there any doubt in your mind about the importance of innovation? Do you feel that innovation is vital to the future of your company? Then perhaps you’ve already discovered that the process of innovation is difficult to manage. It’s risky, expensive, and unpredictable. Further, some leaders look at the innovations that come from companies like Apple or P&G, and think, “We don’t have people or resources like theirs. We can’t do that kind of magic.” But the truth is that Apple’s success, or P&G’s, or Toyota’s, isn’t due to magic; it’s because they follow a disciplined innovation process. So the best way for your firm to become an innovator is to adopt a systematic approach applies the best tools, and also goes beyond tools to help you manage the large scale risks and opportunities that your organization faces. This system elevates innovation to what it really should be, a strategic asset to your organization. Defining that system is the intent behind The Innovation Master Plan.