The Babson Venture Accelerator has been established at Babson College to support and advance student entrepreneurs in each phase of their startup venture-from opportunity exploration and pursuit with an action plan to the ultimate launch. The Accelerator has several levels:

* Exploring-Students generate and explore ideas, conduct research, and validate market opportunities. This involves industry and market analysis to determine the feasibility of an opportunity, an articulation of the problem, and the social and/or economic need. A feasibility study must be completed before moving to the next phase.

* Pursuing-Students shape the opportunity and create a plan of execution through market research, talking to customers, building prototypes, proving technologies, and building leadership teams.

What sustains great organizations over time? Great talent. And what do talented people want? Most want influence, money, personal fulfillment, and the chance to make a difference. But more and more, talented people also want a great place to live.

The answer seems obvious, but the phenomenon is fairly recent. In the past, the attractions of working for the right company often trumped the desire to live in a great place. No longer: A landmark study by the Chicago-based CEOs for Cities released in 2008 found that 64 percent of highly mobile global knowledge workers said they were more likely to choose a job because of where an organization was located than because of the organization itself.

Intel Intel said it wil invest $6 billion to $8 billion on its new chip factories in a move that will create thousands of construction and engineering jobs.

The world’s biggest chip maker said it will create 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and 800 to 1,000 permenanent high-tech jobs at its manufacturing sites in Arizona and Oregon.

The money will create a new development fab (short for wafer fabrication plant), or a factory for building prototype chips, in Oregon as well as upgrades to four fabs that will manufacture chips with 22 nanometer process technology. That process technology can create circuits that are just 22 nanometers apart (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). Chips that use this process will be faster, cost less, and have longer battery life.

Developing a good, healthy culture is extremely important at a startup. Culture reflects the essence of a startup’s operation because it directly affects the success of a company’s hiring practices and overall strategy. It is, at its core, essentially a set of shared norms and a key source of strength and guidance when a startup goes through those virtually inevitable trying times.

Some fundamental practices are obvious “must-dos” in building a strong culture.

You must, for example, work to engender trust. As a decision maker, you rely on information being passed to you by the people who report to you. As the CEO, however, you cannot rely solely on this information. You also need to “dip” down into your organization and learn directly from employees at all levels and virtually all skill sets. As a leader, this is how you develop an intuitive sense of your business, one that can only be formed by hearing directly from staff in every corner of the company.

Mike Elgan at Datamation writes about a social media monitoring company called Social Intelligence. Social Intelligence provides not only social media screening of potential candidates, which seems pretty common these days, but ongoing surveillance of employees. It continuously monitors employees social media behavior - including what they post when they're not at work.

Fear Factor

Social Intelligence is using scare tactics to appeal to managers to use its service. Quoting Elgan:

What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You'll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That's why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.

A top commission official says the EU's flagship innovation union initiative has a "whole host of policies which will favour SMEs".

The recently-unveiled initiative is part of the EU 2020 strategy whose objectives are designed to boost jobs and growth over the next ten years.

Speaking in Brussels, Marion Dewar said, "Innovation union pursues a broad, balanced concept of innovation."

She said the initiative will produce "efficiency gains in production processes and improved performance of products."

Dewar is a senior member of cabinet of EU research and innovation commissioner Maire Geoghegan Quinn and was addressing a meeting organised by the Brussels-based EU-wide business organisation Eurochambres.

By coordinating energy use for electricity, heating, and transportation, four Japanese cities plan to reduce their carbon footprints and increase reliance on renewables. The cities are pledging to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by up to 40 percent by 2030, employing systems that will go beyond smart-grid proposals like those being implemented in the U.S. and elsewhere. While smart-grid projects manage electricity, the Japanese "smart community" demonstration projects will also manage energy for heating and transportation, said Hironori Nakanishi, a director at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, describing the projects at a recent smart-grid conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The projects, which got under way this year, were instigated by the Japanese government in part to fulfill a pledge the prime minister made last year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. They will cost about $1 billion over five years and are being implemented by consortia of dozens of companies including Toyota, Nissan, Nippon Steel, and Panasonic.

Achieving the emissions goal, Nakanishi said, will require installing some 28 gigawatts of solar power, the equivalent of about 28 large nuclear reactors. Smart-grid technology will help grid operators accommodate large amounts of electricity from solar and other renewable energy sources: as clouds pass overhead or wind patterns change, for example, signals could be sent out to smart appliances to pause operation or decrease their power consumption. In a smart community, this adaptability would be augmented by also managing heat. "More than half of energy is used as heat, so the integration of heat and electricity is quite important," Nakanishi said.

Digital marketing and advertising are experiencing explosive growth, both in the U.S. and globally. In this presentation of nine infographics, you can see what types of digital media are fighting for money and attention. But in keeping with our Business Impact theme of "technologies of persuasion," we also zoom in on the psychology that drives consumers. After all, marketing and advertising dollars are only well spent when they prompt consumers to click or purchase--or at least trigger positive brand attributes such as trust.

 

Preliminary data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 2008 Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) provide a map of the incidence of innovation by businesses located in the United States. These data are based on respondents to the survey and represent an estimated 1.5 million for-profit companies, publicly or privately held, with five or more employees, active in the United States in 2008.

The new data indicate that in the period 2006-2008, about 22 percent of the manufacturing companies introduced product innovations (one or more new or significantly improved goods or services) and about 22 percent introduced "process innovations (one or more new or significantly improved methods for manufacturing or production; logistics; delivery or distribution; and support activities). In comparison, about eight percent of companies in the non-manufacturing sector were product innovators and eight percent were process innovators. Nonetheless, much higher innovation incidences were observed in the manufacturing sub-sectors of chemicals, computer/electronic products, and electrical equipment/appliances/components, and in some parts of the non-manufacturing sectors of information and professional/scientific/technical services. Further, the BRDIS data indicate that companies that perform and/or fund research and development (R&D) have a far higher incidence of innovation than do companies without any R&D activity.

Preliminary data indicate that overall about nine percent of the estimated 1.5 million for-profit companies were active product innovators in 2006-2008. The corresponding figure for process innovators was also about nine percent. Nevertheless, a wider range of innovation incidences is evident when more narrowly defined industry groups (manufacturing, non-manufacturing, and their subsectors) are distinguished. These data indicate that the incidence of U.S. innovation varies substantially by industry sector.

For additional information, the entire survey results may be viewed here:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf11300/nsf11300.pdf

I bring outstanding news to absent-minded academics everywhere: According to Steven Johnson, recent neuroscience suggests that “the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.” Although the mechanism is not well-understood, Johnson suggests that this disorganization, moments when clusters of neurons seem utterly out of sync, allows the brain to seek out new organizational patterns–literally to make new connections.

Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From will interest ProfHacker readers across at least three different axes: how to fruitfully pursue longterm research; how to foster collaboration, whether among colleagues or among students; and, most surprisingly, its lucid defense of universities as a public good, a critical repository of research and development–and one made more necessary, not obsolete, by the explosive growth of the Internet.

Small Business Trends has been a media partner of BlogWorld Expo for several years but this is the first year I attended the show in Las Vegas.  I just got back late last night, so while it’s still fresh in my mind here’s a report of 5 trends about blogging I noticed from the show:

1. From Early Adopters to Mainstream

BlogWorld had over 4,000 registered attendees this year.  The show just keeps getting bigger each year.  So if nothing else, it suggests that interest in blogging is not declining, but growing.

And when you look at the different conference tracks, you see just how broadly blogging has woven its way into our society.  No matter what your occupation, your passion or your circumstances, it seems there’s a blogging community for you.   You could see these different interests at BlogWorld.  For food bloggers, Jenn-Air had a large exhibit booth with a stage where they held cooking demonstrations, including food for the audience to sample.  Military bloggers had a substantial presence — the U.S. Army was even a show sponsor, with members of the military visible in uniform.  There were specific blogging tracks for health, sports, travel, real estate and causes.

Google is one of the great modern innovators. Even though its search engine is already the world's most widely used, it still continues to introduce new features. One such new feature is Google Instant, which took the suggestions feature to a whole new level.

Google Instant wasn't just a simple experiment for the search company that it rolled out blindly. Rather, it was tested down to details that included tracking the eye movements of users to see where the attention goes on a web page.

The remarkable economic development achieved by Korea within a short time has generated widespread interest about Korea’s development model.

After coming to Korea in 2008, I attended a number of seminars on Korea’s development experience to learn more about it. In my quest to learn about its development process, the series of articles published by The Korea Times under the title “Rags to Riches” has come in handy as the most comprehensive account of Korean development history.

By publishing this series on the eve of the G20 summit to be hosted by Korea, The Korea Times has done a great service to promote Korea’s image by helping foreign readers with a better insight into the Korean development history.

Anyone who works in the venture business or frankly just lives in Silicon Valley will be used to hearing a buzz word rise up out of nowhere to capture the technology zeitgeist and find its way into every entrepreneur’s product development plan or every aspiring entrepreneur’s pitch deck.

I call this “the puck at your feet” because it’s not where the industry is heading but rather where the industry is today. By the time you launch your buzz word feature we’ll be on to the next fad and everybody will be offering your buzz product so it won’t be differentiated. As an entrepreneur you need to think about where the puck is going.