Nearly every attempt at success is met with failures along the way, and properly managing those failures can actually benefit the Innovation process. As an Innovation leader, do you celebrate failure and risk-taking in your organization? Doing so will broaden horizons and lead to more valuable ideas towards a culture of sustainable Innovation.

Innovation = Creativity x Risk-taking. And more likely than not, the bigger the innovation means the greater the chance of failure. In the pharmaceutical industry, 1 out of 1000 is considered a great success ratio. In the grocery business, the success rate for new product entries is 1 to 100.. Risk-taking will no doubt require failure management. In order to “manage failure,” an Innovation leader needs to define the risk and bandwidth that is OK to team members. Then if we fail, we make it a learning experience and praise people for it.

Earlier this year, Steve Jobs, along with other tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Carol Bartz, and Larry Ellison (to name a few), had a dinner with President Obama to discuss America's economy and what could be done to create more jobs here.

Thanks to Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs, we have a better idea what was discussed during the dinner.

And it wasn't all polite.

In fact, according to Isaacson, Obama was annoyed that each business leader at the dinner (with the exception of Zuckerberg) seemed more concerned with boosting his own company instead of America's economy as a whole.

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to talk about the financial leader in an organization. Sometimes this person is called the VP Finance and sometimes they are called the CFO. What is the difference? When will a VP Finance do? And when do you need a CFO?

Like all titles, they can get mangled. A person might be promoted from VP Finance to CFO without exhibiting the characteristics I am going to ascribe to a CFO. That happens all the time. But if you really need a CFO and you have a VP Finance, you will know the difference.

LifeLine Ventures seems pretty much like any other venture capital fund except for one thing: the $100 million fund was sourced entirely from one investor.

Not surprisingly, the Farmington Hills, Michigan-based fund’s managing director Ranjit Kommineni declined to identify that investor. (Kommineni is likely the envy of VCs everywhere for his one-stop fundraising.)

“We’re more business guys; we’re not the typical investors,” Kommineni said of LifeLine. “Since we’re funded by one private individual, we’re not in a hurry to get into a deal. We’re patient and would rather get into the right company.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The path from smartphone and mobile device application development to deployment in an online store may have become smoother for Purdue University students, faculty and staff.

Officials in Purdue Research Foundation's Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) have established a service to quickly test, commercialize and market mobile applications developed with university resources.

The first mobile application delivered through the OTC portal was placed in the Apple Store on Oct. 17. Phototate is a free application developed by 3iD that allows users to upload digital photos to a web application, create presentations and catalog photos based on date and description. Because Phototate has a fully integrated GPS map system, users can view the exact location where photos were taken.

CAMPINAS, Brazil — When the investment firm Monashees Capital first called Juliano Ipolito, the co-founder of an online handicrafts marketplace, he assumed that he would have to visit the firm in São Paulo.

Brazilian investment firms have traditionally had distant relationships with the companies they finance and are held in low regard by entrepreneurs.

Instead, three Monashees partners, including the co-founders Eric Acher and Fabio Igel, jumped into a car and drove in blistering heat almost 60 miles to Campinas. They spent several hours with Mr. Ipolito and his wife, Monica Ipolito, co-founder of their start-up, Elo7, getting to know them and explaining their role in developing early-stage Internet companies.

“Motivation is like showering; you need it everyday.”Through the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship, great business owners find ways to keep themselves motivated.  Luckily for us, in the 21st century, some of the greatest leaders of the world have poured themselves into online content to help inspire us on a daily basis.  The following list is filled not only with great pieces of motivation, but video blogs, Twitter accounts, articles and Facebook pages to keep you moving forward every single day.Introducing the Top 50 Motivators on the Web…

1.) Oprah Winfrey: Legendary business woman urging everyone to “Live Your Best Life” Oprah’s latest: Fill in the blank – the one thing I wished I had become is __. The one thing I will become is __. Facebook Twitter

2.) Tony Robbins: Peak Performance Coach Tony’s latest: 100 yr old Marathoner breaks record + 80 yr old champion takes to a new level watch: http://bit.ly/pjS5kO What limit can you break now? Twitter Facebook

s you know I have spent about 6 years on REVEALED and it has transformed me and has had a powerful impact on many people. REVEALED has morphed and grown in such magnitude that I never even imagined 6 years ago. If you haven't visited the site lately, please do so. http://www.revealedproject.com - and I assure you, there is even more coming down the pike in 2012.

The last 4 years I have been exploring my options to make a REVEALED book. There have been many ups and downs, now it's finally here and ready for the world!  Well, almost … I am self-publishing this book and in order to make it actually happen I am using Kickstarter to raise the funds to publish this book, pay for the designer, etc. This is where I need your help!!!  But first, about the book.

Malaysia transformed itself from a producer of raw materials in the 1970s into an upper-middle income country with a multi-sector economy by the late 1990s. The 1997 crisis significantly challenged this technology-exporting country, but it has since successfully sparked two main sources of economic resilience—foreign investment and new firm creation. To my surprise, Malaysian entrepreneurs I spoke with recently gave a great deal of credit to, of all actors on the stage, their government. Did government really do something right?

While governments set the rules and incentives, those trying to build more robust rates of new firm formation in their countries do not generally hold out much hope for any silver bullets from their public sector. The high point of most government programs is too often the day they are announced by high profile political leaders in the bright lights with cameras rolling! Malaysian leaders seem to have taken a more iterative and somber approach to some specific interventions in a national culture that, as was explained to me on my first visit there, did not embrace risk-taking and entrepreneurship easily.

As the U.S. winds down military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and troops come home, many are eager to start work in the civilian sector. But it's been tough: The federal government reports the unemployment rate for young veterans has hovered around 30 percent this year.

Faced with this grim statistic, a new group based in Milwaukee, Wis., called VETransfer is helping veterans start their own businesses. It aims to connect veteran entrepreneurs to financing and equipping them with the resources and knowledge to get their venture off the ground.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the latest celebrity to get in on the celebrity tech investing trend, joining Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and others. Leo is leading a $4 million round in photo sharing app and Israeli startup Mobli.

For background, Mobli is a photo-sharing app where users can share moments and see the world through other people’s eyes. Unlike other photosharing apps, Mobli is made up of subject-based channels and filters such as people, places and topics. The platform has seen significant celebrity adoption and is used by Leo himself, David Arquette and Paris Hilton.

Whether in architecture, dry-cleaning, plumbing or legal services, it is critical business owners understand the importance of marketing their brands. Marketing, after all, is a central mechanism for business growth.

Too often entrepreneurs get lost in the decision of which marketing channels to choose. Direct mail may be effective for local businesses, while national television ads tend to suit large corporations well. Most recently, online marketing tools like websites and social media have taken center stage.

Professor Alan Jacobs posted an excerpt from Michael Nielson’s new book Reinventing Discovery, which is about “the use of online tools to transform the way science is done.” Here’s the excerpt, which refers to mass online collaborations in solving difficult mathematical problems:

Why is mass online collaboration useful in solving mathematical problems? Part of the answer is that even the best mathematicians can learn a great deal from people with complementary knowledge, and be stimulated to consider ideas in directions they wouldn’t have considered on their own. Online tools create a shared space where this can happen, a short-term collective working memory where ideas can be rapidly improved by many minds. These tools enable us to scale up creative conversation, so connections that would ordinarily require fortuitous serendipity instead happen as a matter of course. This speeds up the problem-solving process, and expands the range of problems that can be solved by the human mind.

Last December, I wrote a BNET post about a little secret I discovered while on “maternity leave” (such as it is when you’re self-employed) with my second kid. It was a shockingly productive time. Why? Because I made incredibly limited to-do lists. I would aim to do roughly 3 things besides life maintenance per day. While that doesn’t sound like much, it had some real upsides. I was ruthless about choosing my top priorities. And when you aim to do only 3 things, you’re highly likely to get them done — and then move on. That beats shuffling the same 20 things from one day’s list to the next.

I used to start a university class on entrepreneurship by asking the class to define the word entrepreneur.

It’s a reasonable question. News and discussion is full of pat phrases about entrepreneurs, most of which we take for granted. Politicians talk about entrepreneurs along with job creation, small business, motherhood, and apple pie. Challenge: find a politician who isn’t in favor of entrepreneurship.

But is everybody who claims the title really an entrepreneur? Or, for that matter, do we care? If your annoying neighbor becomes an entrepreneur by having sold one piece of furniture on eBay, do you care?

The fifth edition of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) scorecard was recently released, and shows that even through uncertain economic times, U.S. states are generating cost savings, promoting technological innovation and stimulating growth by implementing energy efficiency as their key strategy, according to EC&M.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the ACEEE Executive Director Steven Nadel said: "Energy efficiency is America's abundant, untapped energy resource and the states continue to press forward to reap its economic and environmental benefits."

Massachusetts took the lead in energy efficiency in the U.S. this year, bumping California from its four year winning streak, according to the scorecard.

Year after year, certain companies succeed in producing innovative new products and services, and in so doing generate superior financial results. As our annual Global Innovation 1000 study, now in its seventh year, has consistently demonstrated, the success of these companies is not a matter of how much these companies spend on research and development, but rather how they spend it. This year, we took under consideration two particular qualities — strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation — that truly innovative companies have put in place that allow them to outperform the competition.

Every company among the Innovation 1000 follows one of three innovation strategies — need seeker, market reader, or technology driver. While no one or another of these strategies offers superior results, companies within each strategic category perform at very different levels. And, no matter a firm's innovation strategy — culture is key to innovation success, and its impact on performance is measurable. Specifically, the 44 percent of companies who reported that their innovation strategies are clearly aligned with their business goals —and that their cultures strongly support those innovation goals — delivered 33 percent higher enterprise value growth and 17 percent higher profit growth on five-year measures than those lacking such tight alignment.

The research triangle down here in North Carolina is a well-known hub of innovation. With vertices in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, the area is packed with world-class universities and the kinds of minds those places attract. It's even got one of those acronymic institutes that seem to do prodigious amounts of research, RTI International. The region has been particularly strong in biotechnology spun out of Duke, the University of North Carolina, and Wake Forest.

We came down in search of a different kind of story, though. We heard that there was a nascent startup scene that had taken hold in downtown Durham, formerly one of the most crime-ridden areas in all of North Carolina. The community and business leaders of the city have put huge resources into revitalizing downtown, particularly around the 1-million square foot complex at the American Tobacco Historic District. Dozens of companies have taken up residence there, including HTC's American R&D unit and scores of small companies in the basement of one of the buildings. The American Underground, as its known, is home to Joystick Labs, a videogame startup incubator, and a half-dozen other companies. The region's angel investors are known to prowl the starkly lit hallway peering through the glass windows.

Too many American policy elites - pundits, economists and policymakers – tragically accept the ongoing catastrophic decline of American manufacturing as inevitable. As some 5.5 million jobs and 54,000 factories have disappeared over the last decade, many U.S. elites have noted that intense competition from low-wage countries has caused other industrialized countries to experience similar declines. This view is wrong.

In fact, the United States’ precipitous drop in manufacturing is actually atypical. Indeed, the manufacturing employment, output and market share of many other comparable countries has actually been stable in recent years.  Between 1997 and 2010, U.S. manufacturing job growth was the worst among a group of ten OECD countries while Germany’s was the best.

Why crowdsource? In addition to funding, the tools below can engage new supporters, constituents and future advocates.

If it’s ideas you’re looking for, collaborative thinking can provide solutions faster and with input from people with diverse backgrounds, thus strengthening the project. Also, by involving people in the early stages, they will feel more connected to the project, and likely repeat their support and advocacy.