Some 1.8 billion people have internet access in the world today, but 1 billion people lack access to adequate amounts of freshwater. Harsh realities about water inspired Blog Action Day this year, an initiative led by Change.org, to rally bloggers to explore the global problem, to raise awareness and money to help solve it. The issues around water in 2010 concern scarcity, access, pollution and more.

But it’s not all grim. There are new opportunities for tech startups, engineers, investors and creative people to solve problems around the water crisis. Water and waste water technology is a hot market that could get hotter.

Eight companies in this subcategory of cleantech ranked on the 2010 Global Cleantech 100 list which we reported on earlier this week: Aqwise, Danfoss AquaZ, Emefcy, NanoH2O, Oasys Water, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, TaKaDu and WaterHealth.

Do you possess the "entrepreneur gene"? That's a common quandary for people I know, especially those who work at large companies.

It's a myth that innovation is only valued and encouraged at small companies, a fact reinforced by IBM's (IBM) 2010 CEO Study, where more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries said that creativity—not management discipline—will help navigate today's volatile and complex business environment.

Creativity is key to being a successful entrepreneur—from how you run your business with slim resources to how you think about new business models.

In the past few weeks,  American media has paid homage to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 26, whose resourcefulness aided him in starting one of the largest cultural phenomena of our time or any other, as well as to Michelle Rhee, 40, Chancellor of Washington DC Public Schools who has helped to make great strides in education in DC and elsewhere.  American innovation and technology has found a valuable resource in its younger generations, and for many Americans, the power and influence wielded by people ages 20 to 40 does not come as a shocker. Imagine, then, how different life would be in a country where the older generations had a monopoly on jobs, particularly jobs for college graduates.

In Italy in 2009, 79% of jobs lost were to people between the ages of 18 and 29. The country is experiencing a stagnation of innovation and development on a political and social realm.  This problem promises to get worse as more and more young professionals are leaving their homeland to find work abroad.

Last month’s Scottish Low Carbon Investment Conference reinforced the claims of the renewable energy industry and government sectors, that Scotland are the innovators and potential leaders in the race to become a renewable energy super power.

Speaker after speaker made the point that we have the potential, and asked whether we were doing enough to keep ahead?

The Scottish Government is being bold and committing finance and resources to ensure the green sector leads the competition. We have the natural resources and personnel to make this happen, but we need more support and commitment as well as finance.

The industry needs investment in education, awareness building and incentive schemes to ensure that we are attracting the right skills and that the supply of these skills can be sustained. Though the transferable skills market is an important short-term resource to fill the skills gap, the future lies in education and training schemes for school leavers.

There is a Portuguese riddle that asks you to guess which being grows rapidly during its youth, takes 18 years to reach adulthood, usually lives to celebrate its 70th birthday, is able to survive adverse conditions, and produces sufficient wealth to feed a family.

In Portugal, a school kid who already knows the answer will smile at you and point his finger at a poster of an oak tree on the wall of his classroom. On the other hand, if you ask the same question during an evening course at a business school in Lisbon, students are likely to give you a different response. “What you mean is an entrepreneur,” they will tell you.

Inherited behaviour models are crumbling in our midst. Old morality is taking the blame for current problems, although often through spurious argumentation. Never mind. Ethical decay has reached such an extent that many parents have given up all attempts to provide moral guidelines to their offspring.

The recently introduced Apple iPad is the latest wowing of the world by the pioneering computer company. Taken in totality, with its iPhone, iPod, MacBook laptops, and the original Macintosh computer itself, Apple’s ability to hit innovation home runs has changed technology — and the way people relate to electronic devices, and thus, each other.

What was the inspiration behind these products? How does a man — CEO Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak — foster such an upwelling of inspiration? How does leadership’s vision motivate teams in the organization, and ultimately transform consumers into loyalists? More importantly, how can you foster such inspiration in your organization?

This interview with Jenny Ming, president and C.E.O. of Charlotte Russe, a clothing chain, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Ms. Ming is a former president of Old Navy.

Q. How do you run meetings?

A. I want a really authentic, good conversation. We had interns this summer, and in the beginning they were afraid to speak. But in the meantime, they are our customer — I mean, literally — because they’re 21, 22, and that’s who we sell to. So in the beginning, they wouldn’t say how they feel.

And I said: “Tell me what you love, what you don’t love. You have to have an opinion because actually I pay for your opinion. I pay you to have a point of view, good or bad.” And toward the end of the summer, they couldn’t wait to tell me what they thought. Most people can’t wait to tell you what they think anyway, but they didn’t know that they could.

Q. Have you always done that?

A. I’ve always done that, even when I was in Old Navy and Gap, because I think that kind of environment is very important. We get probably the best advice or the best decisions when it’s a little bit more democratic. I don’t always have to agree with them, but I certainly should listen to them because they are more of the target customer than me.

A. You need an inspirational, aspirational and measurable mission and vision.

B. Second, you need clear, aligning and measurable short and long term objectives.

C. Third, you need to bring together groups of peers who can share knowledge and "Do Stuff".

Most businesses and leaders do points A and B above, with some degree of success. I am going to focus on point C, forming peer groups and getting stuff done through networks. This is the part that most leaders have trouble with because they confuse business networks and social networks.

Reconstructing the Icelandic economy will take more than increased fishing quotas. More than a new aluminium smelter. It will require a new way of thinking.

In a downtown office loft, the staff of Caoz is immersed in the making of ‘Thor: The Edda Chronicles – Iceland’s first full-length 3D animation film, adopted from old tales of the Nordic God of Thunder. Caoz is perhaps not what you would expect of a movie studio. In fact, it is not so much a studio, as it is a computer cluster. One of the largest one in Iceland at that.

“We are a high-tech company, really. Every frame in the movie contains 10mb of data,” explains Managing Director Hilmar Sigurðsson. “There are 250.000 frames in the 3-D version of the movie, and behind every frame, there is probably twenty times that amount of data. So we need considerable processing power.”

The venture capital industry is facing real competition for the first time in decades. Not only that, but the growing battle between venture capital firms and “super angels” presents an amazing opportunity for entrepreneurs trying to build the next big thing.

All of this is according to Paul Graham, co-founder of the early-stage investment fund Ycombinator. During a presentation at Startup School at Stanford University earlier today, the prolific investor discussed the state of startup funding with a packed auditorium of students and entrepreneurs. Specifically, he said the funding world has been turned upside-down.

So what’s causing this fundamental shift? The answer is the rise of super angels, Graham said. He explained that startup funding used to consist of relatively small angel investments ($20,000 to $50,000) from individuals or multi-million dollar investments from venture capital firms. In the middle of that was a gaping hole.

We already know that immigrants will become an increasingly important part of Canada's workforce as baby-boomer retirements trim the workforce in this country.

What we need to know is something more: Not only will they be an addition to our talent pool, but potentially, an exceptionally innovative one.

A new report from the Conference Board of Canada makes this point with striking force, documenting the disproportionate contribution new Canadians have made in every field, from the arts to science to entrepreneurship.

Communities leaders are working hard to make their community known to site selectors, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and existing stakeholders. This task can seem overwhelming in the face of social media, print advertising, web sites, radio spots, brochure, and limited staff and time. So how can an economic development staff or economic development leader improve their community’s exposure? Where should a community leader start? Start simple and just accomplish a couple tasks and the momentum will build.

1. Encourage the community leaders to spread the word on Facebook. Members of your community are already using Facebook. They connect to family, friends, and their customers. Ask them to connect to your community Facebook page and to post comments and to “like” your Facebook posts. Don’t have a community Facebook page? Create one today. They are easy to create and the content is picked up by the search engines easily. If you are uncomfortable creating a community Facebook page, search out someone in your community or office that has created one. Keeping it up to date does require someone’s attention. But overall it is an easy way to spread the word.

Europe's top research universities have urged the European Union to take finance, competition and entrepreneurship fully into account when charting a future for the proposed EU 'Innovation Union'. Universities have an important role in innovation: "They do not operate in isolation but are an intrinsic part of a larger innovation ecosystem," said the League of European Research Universities, LERU.

LERU, which comprises the 22 top research-intensive universities in the EU member countries, said that while Europe was highly competitive when it came to developing new knowledge, "it is less successful at turning this knowledge into the innovative products and services that drive world class economies".

Barely two generations ago, the rolling hills in Brazil's heartland were a knot of short, brittle trees and acidic soil considered unfit for agriculture. But on a recent morning, a harvester cut through golden husks of wheat on Paulo Kramer's farm. Wheat, of course, is a temperate crop that flourishes in places like Kansas. But in Cerrado, a vast savannah, wheat varieties created for tropical climates and nutrient-poor soil bloom alongside corn, soybeans and cotton.

Once a wasteland, the Cerrado is now the motor of an agro-industry so potent that Brazil threatens to surpass the US as breadbasket to the world. The answer to how that transformation happened can be found at a government-run agricultural research centre Embrapa where scientists make Brazil's poor soils fertile while developing crop varieties that will thrive.

It is probably one of the most abused words in the technology industry: innovation. Some companies spend billions on it and hardly seem innovative and others seem to live and breath it. How can we get more and what exactly is it? Here are some tips on how to recognize it, use it and avoid it if necessary.

Is Innovation really what you need?
The very first thing you should look at is whether innovation is really what you need at this moment. Innovation is fun but maybe all you need to do is do more sales. I recently spoke to a start-up that was way to busy building new stuff. All very ‘innovative’. Unfortunately they were running out of funding quick and asked me for advice. They told me people loved their product, paid for it and told their friends about it. It was just that they themselves thought the product lacked exciting features, so they were adding those.

Today at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for a lengthy interview with Jessica Livingston. The topics discussed ranged from Facebook’s beginnings (including a brief discussion of The Social Network) to the social network’s strategy in China, which has proved to be problematic for other Western tech companies like Google.

Zuckerberg says that for years Facebook didn’t have a strategic plan for international growth — each month, the site would take off in a seemingly random country with no apparent pattern (obviously this approach paid off). But there are still a handful of countries that Facebook isn’t winning in, or isn’t on a path to win: China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

Today Y Combinator is holding its sixth Startup School, where a roster of Silicon Valley’s most experienced and successful founders and investors come together to lecture hundreds of eager entrepreneurs. The event is always extremely popular, and today is no exception — the lecture hall on Stanford’s campus is packed to the brim.

Today’s event will feature eleven talks, including lectures from the likes of Paul Graham, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ron Conway. The first session — which featured Andy Bechtolsheim, Paul Graham, and Andrew Mason — just ended. You can find my notes from each talk below, and we’ll be posting more later today on each cluster of speakers. You can also watch a live stream of the event right here.

When President Obama called for us to look to other countries with “green economies” to see what such an economy could do here, he didn’t mention the Czech Republic. And because things haven’t worked out so well in the countries he did mention, he doesn’t even bother offering green-economy paragons anymore.

But Reuters has a quick item telling us what’s happening in the Czech Republic anyway:

Generous feed-in tariffs helped make the Czech Republic Europe’s third-biggest solar market in terms of new capacity last year behind Italy and Germany as investors locked in guaranteed high rates for electricity with little risk.

The boom has led to predictions of a sharp rise in electricity prices next year, which could hurt competitiveness of the heavily manufacturing and export-dependent country.

Does public speaking make you sweat?

Do you worry your slide deck is boring?

And you’re stumbling over your words?

Good news!

If all that's wrong with your upcoming pitch to potential investors, there is NO WAY its going to go badly as the meetings this story is about.

“Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it’s about trading: buying and selling.”

“An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”