In a bid to foster life sciences startups, Johnson & Johnson is refurbishing part of its pharmaceutical research and development facility in San Diego to create an “innovation center” for new biotech and health IT companies.

The New Jersey pharmaceutical and healthcare giant anticipates housing from 18 to 20 life sciences startups in the new center, to be called “Janssen Labs at San Diego.” (The name anticipates an internal reorganization that has been consolidating Ortho-McNeil and other J&J pharmaceutical businesses for much of the past year under the Janssen brand.) J&J’s pharmaceutical R&D center, which employs about 300 in San Diego, is slated  to officially become part of the Janssen group later this year.

The Japanese casual wear designer replaced designer Jil Sander, who helped drive the brand to prominence, with experimental Japanese designer Jun Takahashi, just as the company invests heavily in the U.S. market. Takahashi's first collection with Uniqlo will debut in the spring, while Sander's wildly popular +J brand collection this fall will be her last.

Twyla Tharp’s revamp of Movin' Out was widely acknowledged to be the most rapid and total transformation of a Broadway show in many years. Michael Phillips, the Chicago Tribune reviewer whose stern review had been so controversially picked up by Newsday, also applauded, but added a question whose answer should interest us all: "How did this happen?"

Part of the answer lies is the very institution of the out-of-town tryout, the show business equivalent of the corporate “skunk works” idea: creating a space to experiment in which failures can be instructive and recoverable. As Tharp writes in her book The Creative Habit, “The best failures are the private ones you commit in the confines of your room, alone, with no strangers watching. Private failures are great.” Quite so: you can learn from them without embarrassing yourself. But the next-best kind is in front of a limited audience. If your new show is going to fail, better that it does so away from Broadway, giving you a shot at recovering before it hits the big stage.

While traveling in the Valley I had a chance to catch up with a few local entrepreneurs and accelerators. Many of them are doing interesting work, but I noticed a disturbing trend: entrepreneurship has become “cool” for a whole generation.

As a an entrepreneur who had gone through several popular accelerators told me, “It used to be that if you didn’t know what to do at the end of college you would go to grad school. Now the same people go to accelerators instead.” And they bring with them their culture: beer games, lawn chairs, geek gadgets, and “bro culture” galore. Everybody is a ‘rebel,’ but in exactly the same way.

When Newsweek ran its first Green Rankings two years ago, climate change was high on the agenda. The U.S. House had passed a cap-and-trade bill to put a price on carbon, and the world’s biggest economies were about to make history with an agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Since then, green momentum has seriously stalled, at least in the public sector. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 ended without an agreement, and climate science in the U.S. has been politicized by Tea Partiers and others. A skeptical Congress, plus the on-going economic downturn, have made environmental regulations a tough sell. Elsewhere in the world, there is some movement—such as in Australia, where the lower house has just passed a carbon tax—but it’s slow.

Intel executive Kirk Skaugen said today that his company expects 15 billion devices will be connected to the internet in the coming years. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Skaugen said that the growth of data on the internet is racing ahead and data center computing is being pulled along with it.

Skaugen spoke because his boss Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, was sick. He said that Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore back in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, is expected to hold up in the next few years.

You may hear about the dearth of "green jobs," but statistics show that solar jobs are rising, even as the overall economy lags.

As of August, there are 100,237 solar jobs across all 50 states in over 5000 companies.

Despite the hoopa around Solyndra, the US solar industry  is gaining a greater share of the global market and is an economic bright spot in an otherwise sour economy.

The US is poised to install 1,750 megawatts of solar PV in 2011, double last year's total and enough to power 350,000 homes.

100,237 jobs as of August 2011, according to The Solar Foundation's "National Solar Jobs Census 2011: A Review of the U.S. Solar Workforce." The survey examines employment along the solar value chain and includes data from more than 2,100 solar companies.

Even though Mayor Bloomberg disagrees, Boston’s doing some amazing things in the innovation space. Despite being one of the oldest cities in the country, Boston is consistently on the cutting edge of finding, inventing and capitalizing on everything hot and new. From TechStars to MassChallenge, startups are popping up left and right around the Hub. For innovators, there’s no better place to be, in our opinion.

Now, 2thinknow has proven Boston is indeed the innovation center of the world. 2thinknow has released their 2011 Innovation Cities Index, which looks at cities across the globe and analyzes just how innovative they are. Out of 331 international cities, Boston ranked number one. According to a press release from 2thinnow:

Challenge Driven Innovation enables companies to tap into diverse perspectives and talent to solve problems faster, more cost-effectively and with less risk, ultimately resulting in accelerated innovation outcomes and improved business performance. In this article Steve Bonadio introduces the concept of “Challenges” and their role in the emerging innovation management framework called Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI).

Using images throughout your business' web presence—in blog posts, on Facebook, in online presentations, etc.—presents a great marketing opportunity to capture people's attention and create brand awareness. But how do you choose the right images?

If you've spent more than 10 minutes on the web, you've probably seen photos of multicultural people pointing at a computer and laughing together. Or after clicking on a company’s Contact Us link, you must have seen some stock photo model with a headset on, representing the customer services department. These practices are widely used and, frankly, a little bit absurd.

In today’s episode of the Weekly Marketing Cast, we discuss how to choose the right images to include throughout your web presence.

As banks have tightened terms over the last few years, alternative loans are quickly gaining in popularity. So much so that banks are noticing the competition, and starting to loosen their belts. Crowdfunding is one of the newest alternative loans, which are very similar to peer to peer loans. Our friends at Intuit have designed a great graphic detailing everything you’d want to know about Crowdfunding:

We've polled everyone from First Round Capital's Charlie O'Donnell to Steve Blank and Brad Feld in the past few years, and they told us what books have shaped their careers.

From Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" to Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," these books will teach you how to think -- no matter if you're a serial entrepreneur or are just starting a business.

New Zealand's investment in science, research and development, at present about 1.2% of GDP, should be more than doubled, Federated Farmers believes.

In a speech to the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science in Wellington recently, Federated Farmers national vice-president Dr William Rolleston said New Zealand had one of the lowest investments, about half the OECD average of 2.3%.

Federated Farmers believed New Zealand needed to aim for 3% of GDP - and fast, Dr Rolleston, a South Canterbury farmer and biotechnologist, said.

Let’s face it, some of us have a chip on our shoulder the size of a 24-row planter.

We groan when a presidential candidate nuzzles a pig. A corny football trophy creates a furor. If an outsider mentions that Iowa is No. 1 in pork, corn, soy, eggs and ethanol, we’re quick to respond: But we’re so much more!

True. We sell a lot of annuities.

New hires learn the ropes of a new company in a variety of different ways. Some methods are formal, others are informal, but either way, the new employees are provided the important and essential information they need in order to be a productive member of the team.

It’s extremely important to understand exactly what employees need to know in order for them to become valuable team members. But companies also must learn when an employee needs to know the information and what is the best method to convey that knowledge to a new hire.

ELYRIA — A worldwide nonprofit organization eager to connect investors with entrepreneurs and provide seed money is locating its first bricks and mortar headquarters on the campus of Lorain County Community College.

Jim Jaffe, president and CEO of the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds, was in Elyria on Friday and spoke about the partnership with LCCC. He was scheduled to publicly announce the partnership today at the NASVF’s national venture capital conference in Arlington, Texas.

The NASVF Education Institute will establish its headquarters in Lorain County by early 2012, bringing with it up to four employees. The global organization has 775 members and 175 member organizations in 43 states. It plans to hold its 2012 national conference in downtown Cleveland.

Innovators aren't exceptional as much as they are confident. So says David Kelley, the founder of the venerable Palo Alto, Calif., design firm IDEO.

Mr. Kelley, whose company is responsible for designing a wide range of products and services, including the modern computer mouse, believes—and research suggests—that virtually everyone has the capacity to innovate. It's just that somewhere around the fourth grade most of us stop thinking of ourselves as creative, he says, so our ability to innovate atrophies.

Mr. Kelley has made it his life's work to help people regain their creative confidence. In his three decades as a designer and as a professor in the design program at Stanford University's engineering school, from which he graduated in 1978, Mr. Kelley has developed a set of techniques for solving all kinds of problems—techniques that he came to believe could be taught as a methodology. His approach is called "design thinking."

An Innovation Award is a recognition of achievement but also of promise. It's up to the innovators to fulfill that promise. Here's how some recent award winners are doing.

Liquid Robotics Inc.

Location: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Award: Robotics category winner, 2010

Innovation: The company developed an unmanned seagoing craft propelled by the power of ocean waves, a system that allows it to remain at sea for long stretches. The craft, called a Wave Glider, consists of a surface buoy and a submerged glider with wing-shaped panels. It converts the up-and-down motion of waves into forward thrust, propelling the buoy indefinitely without relying on batteries or other power sources.

There’s not a lot to add to this great Dilbert cartoon about Dilbert’s boss making a toxic attempt to instigate creativity in his team. I wrote a post for Talentculture last year on how to make your team more creative as a leader. The answer was just as depicted in the Dilbert cartoon: non-existent team creativity almost always indicates a problem with the boss and not a problem with the team’s innate creativity. – Mike Brown

You may be surprised to find many of your products and services conform to the five innovation patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking.  If so, it means your employees are predisposed to use innovation patterns when developing new  products.  Like many innovators, they are using patterns probably without realizing it. Given this predisposition to using innovation templates, a company can realize huge gains in innovation effectiveness by taking the next step.

Take the case of a large industrial company in the energy sector.  It leads the industry producing a product that is relatively simple in design but incredibly challenging to produce.  Despite its strong reputation and market success, the company worries it is not innovative.  Yet when I reviewed its project pipeline, I spotted concepts with each of the five patterns of S.I.T. (Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Attribute Dependency, and Division).  The teams did not use S.I.T. in the classic way (apply templates and work backwards using "Function Follows Form" to find a potential benefit).  Instead, they used trial and error, experimentation, and good old fashioned tinkering.  Their innovations embody the templates nevertheless.