With the continued weak economy and little hope of recovery anytime soon, we can expect to see even more "accidental entrepreneurs" emerge. These are unemployed people whose best hope of generating income is to become self-employed or to start a business. Ami Kassar is a typical accidental entrepreneur. Kassar had spent a decade in senior management with a large, national credit card company based in Philadelphia. When the recession hit in 2008, he suddenly found himself unemployed. His employer did not survive the recession-induced shakeout in the financial industry. Finding a new job that was similar to his old one did not look very promising, so Kassar decided to launch a business. He started Multifunding, which helps small businesses find debt financing. Like most entrepreneurs, Kassar faced challenges in the startup of his venture. However, many of his missteps can be traced back to habits and expectations that came directly from his years of working in a corporate setting.

“A start-up does not need a CFO. You need a CTO and a CEO. For a tech business especially, you absolutely need your engineer.”

Gina Bianchini, the former CEO of Ning and the founder of Mightybell, said this last week at the WIE Symposium at a panel featuring Lauren Leto, founder of Texts from Last Night and CEO and founder of Bnter, Dana Levy, founder of Daily Candy and Randi Zuckerberg, former head of marketing for Facebook. Without an engineer, you can’t really do anything if your business is web-based or technology driven. A company needs a CTO because they need an individual who can effectively engineer a new and crucial product, says Dan Woods, CTO and editor of Evolved Media. Dana Levy said the tech team is going to tell you what can actually work or cannot work, regarding your business. “Tech people love to say no,” she said.

Early this evening, Sept 26, 2011, the Senate worked out a couple of compromises and overwhelmingly passed (79 / 12) a Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government open and funded through November 18, 2011. This includes SBIR/STTR/CPP. Once again this came in the form of a new amendment to HR. 2806.

This strong bipartisan Senate action increases, but does not guarantee, the likelihood of passage in the House. Right now it's about a 85% chance everything will go through but Speaker Boehner is playing his cards close to the vest.

There is another wrinkle in that the House doesn't return from recess until Oct 4, and the lapse would start Oct 1. The Senate has a reasonable solution to that problem and that is expected to pass in pro forma session keeping everything going until October 4, when the House returns to full session.

FORTUNE -- Fans of Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" will be unsurprised that the formula is still alive and well, even in 2011. Yes, apparently innovation still matters. To see the original effect in action, look no further than your desktop. How much desktop software do you generally use on a daily basis? Now, compare that to how many services you -- and your company -- are using in the cloud, delivered over the web. If you're like most business people, for the past two decades you've been dealing with slow, painful and cumbersome applications to help run your projects, manage your customers and share files. Installations of software tend to take months, maintenance costs more than the original product price, and unexpected delays and down time result in a massive drop in productivity. But all this changes with the cloud.

Cloud-delivered enterprise solutions fit consistently and nicely into Christensen's framework for "disruptive innovation." They offer cheaper, simpler and often more broadly applicable alternatives to legacy models of enterprise computing. They tend to start out as low-end disruptors, bringing cost and performance advantages to over-served customers, but as these technologies mature in their reliability and sophistication, they're spreading throughout organizations and solving some of the most demanding problems. Christensen must be gloating.

The State Trade and Export Promotion Program (STEP) is a 3-year pilot trade and export initiative authorized by the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010. Funded by federal grants and matching funds from the states, the STEP Program is designed to help increase the number of small businesses that are exporting and to raise the value of exports for those small businesses that are currently exporting so they can grow and create jobs.

HOW STEP GRANTS WILL HELP SMALL BUSINESSES:

The STEP grants will help provide:

• support for small business participation in foreign trade missions and foreign market sales trips;
• subscription to services by the Department of Commerce;
• website translation fees;
• design of international marketing media;
• trade show exhibitions;
• participation in training workshops; and
• other export initiatives determined to be appropriate by the SBA.

The first day of the conference was packed with top level speakers from all parties involved in the regional innovation system. Business, university and government experts shared their thoughts on what is needed for successful open innovation implementation. The balanced program produced a clear image of the different needs and goals for the parties involved, but also of the similarity in goals needed to create the ‘Win-Win-Win’ results through which all parties profit.

Part of the program focussed on the various formats for regional development through open innovation. With Nokia’s distinguished researcher and creator of the successful New Factory in Tampere Jukka Saarinen leading the session on business development, in which also George Mason University Professor Roger Stough and DSM Vice President of Open Innovation Robert Kirschbaum participated.

The government has been trying to get doctors to use these systems for some time, but many physicians remain skeptical. In 2004, the Bush administration issued an executive order calling for a universal "interoperable health information" infrastructure and electronic health records for all Americans within 10 years. And yet, in 2011, only a fraction of doctors use electronic patient records.

In an effort to change that, the Obama economic stimulus plan promised $27 billion in subsidies for health IT, including payments to doctors of $44,000 to $64,000 over five years if only they would use EHRs. The health IT industry has gathered at this multibillion-dollar trough, but it hasn't had much more luck getting physicians to change their ways.

Statistics in sports is about to hit a whole new level. A new generation of wearable monitors that measure heart rate, electrical activity in the heart, lung capacity, metabolism, and other metrics is allowing scientists to study athletes' physiology as they play.

The data has obvious potential to enhance players' health, and to help trainers tailor workouts, but device makers and the sports industry seem most excited about the prospects for entertainment. They are already working on ways to display the data during games, in stadiums and on television, giving fans unprecedented insight into players.

A smart-phone app under development for heart-failure patients allows them to keep track of the pressure inside their heart as measured by an implanted sensor. That data could help patients adjust their medication to maintain a healthy pressure, much as diabetics do with insulin and blood sugar readings.

Called Pam+ (for "patient advisory module"), the app is being developed by researchers at the University of Southern California in collaboration with medical device maker St. Jude Medical. The researchers hope it will help patients better manage their health and reduce hospitalizations, which are responsible for much of the $40 million in health-care costs linked to heart failure.

Last year, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the years 2010-20 as India’s Innovation Decade. He followed this up by appointing a high profile National Innovation Council to evangelize the cause of innovation and spread an innovation culture across the country. Can we expect India to emerge as the next Silicon Valley? Are we going to see the likes of a Google or an Apple emerge in India in the next ten years?

WHY INNOVATION?

First, let’s try to understand why there is this sudden emphasis on innovation. As is well known, India made a major effort to cut through red tape and “unshackle the tiger” a little over twenty years ago. The economy responded well, and we have seen a healthy annual growth rate averaging close to 7 percent over this period. Companies active in the Indian market – whether Indian or foreign – benefited from this growth as, to quote our Chinese neighbours, “the rising tide lifted all boats.” However, while opportunities for growth still exist, some product categories are becoming saturated, or at least the most lucrative customers have already been tapped. This is true in mobile services, for example, where penetration has already reached 70 percent. This means that to sustain growth and profitability, companies will have to look at new ways to excite customers. Ergo…innovation is on the corporate agenda.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is introducing 10-year initiative to provide increased flexibility to scientists wanting to start families, the White House announced today. Among the changes, the agency’s new policies will allow researchers to suspend their grants for up to a year to take leave for family reasons, including having or adopting a child. In addition, researchers will be able to apply for grant funds dedicated to paying technicians to maintain lab work during such leaves. The policy would also encourage increased use of “virtual” grant reviews that would allow researchers to do such work from home, and avoid traveling to the NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Private equity is coming of age in China, India and Brazil. While each market has its unique attributes, private equity in all of them performed strongly in recent years, leading to fresh investor interest and large money inflows. Yet the performance of any specific fund still primarily depends on the quality of the manager and his skills in finding and fostering the right companies and structuring the right deals, according to two INSEAD studies of private equity in those markets.

The INSEAD researchers at the Global Private Equity Initiative published two studies, one on China and India, and one on Brazil. Strong economic performances in all three countries, particularly after the 2008 economic crisis, and improved institutional frameworks contributed to making these markets more attractive for private equity, according to Professor Claudia Zeisberger, Academic Co-Director with the Global Private Equity Initiative at INSEAD and one of the authors of the study.

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Success of Vestel Electronics is directly related to its dedication to innovation, to the high-quality research carried on in its large R&D centers and to its connections to national and international research organizations. In this article Mr. Reha S. Senturk, Project Manager at Ege University Science and Technology Centre (EBILTEM) describes an open innovation initiative resulting in a successful innovation.

Asian companies are different from Western companies in their approach to innovation. A recent study has identified four generic elements of the Asian approach that might help any Western company think differently and to be more effective in their business creation. In this article Peter Hesseldahl gives a brief overview of the conclusions.

Today, many seek ways to transform the manner in which their organization convenes to solve problems and to reach a shared understanding of strategic intent. The practice of collaborative innovation offers a path forward. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins suggests a place for people to start their journey focusing on how to work with the enquiry led, internally focused form.

What sparks paradigm-shifting innovation in any business? It’s a special mix of entrepreneur and company, regular in every respect except for having the courage and foresight to make an idea happen that was supposed to be impossible. As an entrepreneur in a startup, how do you know if you have this potential, and what are the steps to get from an innovation to a revolution?

The first step is to meditate on the examples set by others, like Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or Thomas Edison with the electric light. There are many others, like the one I just finished about Ratan Tata bringing out the Nano car in 2009 in India for less than $2,500. The book is called “Nanovation,” by Kevin & Jackie Freiberg.

American policy makers worry about the dramatic increases in the number of academic papers being published and patents being filed by Chinese researchers. They believe that these will give China a formidable competitive advantage when it comes to innovation. After all, China is now only second to the U.S. in academic publications, and by 2015 it will file more patents annually than the U.S. does.

Our policy makers are right to worry, but they are worried about the wrong things.

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Cancer Institute today issued a dozen new funding opportunities totaling $8 million aimed at supporting small businesses, including grants that will fund development of companion diagnostics, microarray technologies, multi-analyte tools, and other innovations.

Funded under the Small Business Innovation Research program, the contract grants will provide $200,000 for Phase I and $1.5 million for Phase II awards, and include a range of tools and technologies, such as diagnostics, imaging tools, nanotechnology-based sensors, anti-cancer agents, and radiotherapy. Applications for the 2012 contract topics are due by Nov. 7, 2011.

Todd Haim, SBIR's Program Manager at NCI, told GenomeWeb Daily News today that the topics for these awards were identified as priority areas and warranted a separate funding track from the annual open SBIR omnibus program.