Point: Innovators can use various tactics to evaluate (Manitowoc), protect (J&J), bridge (Whirlpool), and ferry (J&J) innovations across inevitable organizational gaps.

Story: Innovation in large organizations often faces obstacles due to the natural divisions within the firm. Gaps can occur between risk-taking vs. risk-avoiding groups, diverse business units, and functional silos. Open innovation adds a fourth type of division: that between the investor/buyer of an innovation and the inventor/seller of an innovation. Presenters at the 2nd Annual Open Innovation Summit discussed these four different types of gaps and some methods for carrying innovation across the gap.

I was at the BVCA conference in Manchester yesterday (which was a good event btw) and one of the sessions was an interview of Stefan Glaenzer (founder of online auction company Ricardo and Executive Chairman of Last.fm).  He said a number of interesting things, not least that his biggest mistake was allowing himself to be persuaded by the public market investors in Ricardo that he should expand internationally, but the one that most struck a chord with me was:

“Greenwashing” – when companies claim they’re good environmental stewards when they’re really not so much – has become so rampant in recent years that consumers don’t know what or whom to believe. That makes it extra difficult for businesses that are truly taking meaningful steps to reduce their footprint to get their message across.

The video below is what it takes to stand out in the sea of resumes. New grads, this is especially important for you because of all the experienced professionals in the job market. You must stand out and innovate.

A CEO friend of ours recently complained about the difficulty of keeping creativity alive in his business during this difficult period. He had previously cut back on "discretionary" spending—such as development of new products and marketing plans—in order to survive the Great Recession, and he hasn't yet seen his company's revenues bounce back enough to invest heavily in future growth.

We told him he was nuts—that creativity is even more important in times when sales are harder to come by and customers are less loyal. We also told him that two separate research studies (one by Bain, the other by Booz Allen) showed long ago that market share gains made during bad times are more likely to stick than those made during growth periods. Despite our scolding, he still felt he couldn't afford to invest more resources to foster creativity, and simply had to get more from what little resources he had. So, could we help him or not?

I want to be the first to advocate the ignorance-based economy. Exhortations by public officials everywhere to build knowledge-based economies have skyrocketed in popularity since the OECD first published its manifesto in 1996, accruing a whopping 40,000 articles on Google scholar alone. Unfortunately, like many sound bites, this one has more flavor than nutrition. As I help societies around the world increase their levels of entrepreneurship, I’ve found the “knowledge-based economy” mantra, ubiquitous as it is among public leaders everywhere, has become empty for three reasons.

1. All economic activity is knowledge-based. What is not knowledge-based? The term’s original intention was to describe an alternative to economic activity based on resource extraction, commodity sales and rent-seeking. However, these activities also require and generate tremendous amounts of knowledge. Today, diamond sales require complex regulations and tracking processes, oil production must rapidly invent unique solutions to unforeseen problems, and cement pricing and distribution must be optimized with complex algorithms. Knowledge infuses all economic activity everywhere, and when something is everything, it is nothing.

Email is taking up too much time in our lives.

Do yourself and your recipients a favor by making your emails 3 sentences or less.

If we all do it, imagine the time we’ll have to do other things.

If this was an actual email reply and not a blog post, it would have ended before this sentence started. I’ve been trying a new solution to email overload by limiting emails to 3 sentences or less. You can learn the details in just 5 sentences at three.sentenc.es. The basic concept is to treat all email replies like SMS messages. I take this one step further and try to write initial emails in 3 sentences or less whenever possible.

I first learned about 3 sentence emails from a post by Kevin Rose, where he lists 5 good email time saving tips.

Seedcamp is most easily described as Europe’s Y Combinator. It provides seed investment of up to €50.000 in exchange for 8 to 10 percent of the startup in question. Seedcamp stages events all over Europe which culminate in 20 or so companies being selected to participate in Seedcamp week in London.

Following an investment, the companies spend three months in London working with mentors to develop their product. Erply (received funding of €2 million) and Zemanta (received funding of €2.35 million) are among the most successful investments made by Seedcamp in its three-year history.

Experts from over 15 countries will be gathering from September 29 to October 1 in Heidelberg, Germany, in order to reveal the secrets of “Building A World-Class Knowledge Region” during the Technopolicy Network’s 7th Annual Conference. As partner of the TPN conference the BioRN Cluster Management has the possibility to offer 10 free tickets to TCI members who are interested in the regional development of science based regions.

Innovation requires a global perspective, which is a key reason for all the travel I do in order to meet with innovation leaders around the world.

Right now, I am in Sao Paulo, Brazil and being here I began wondering which countries do well on open innovation. Brazil is not on this list yet but I am quite sure their time will come. There is just too much potential in this land of opportunity.

So which countries do well on open innovation? This is my quick snap shot.

1. United States. No surprise here. This is where it happens. We have the companies, intermediaries/service providers, top academics and all the best conferences. There are simply too many to mention here.

IMAGINE you are a venture capitalist. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

You don’t know what “the game layer” is, let alone whether it should be built atop the world. But he has a passionate speech about a business plan, conceived when he was a college freshman, that he says will change the planet — making it more entertaining, more engaging, and giving humans a new way to interact with businesses and one another.

What a contrast. In a year that’s on track to be our planet’s hottest on record, America turned “climate change” into a four-letter word that many U.S. politicians won’t even dare utter in public. If this were just some parlor game, it wouldn’t matter. But the totally bogus “discrediting” of climate science has had serious implications. For starters, it helped scuttle Senate passage of the energy-climate bill needed to scale U.S.-made clean technologies, leaving America at a distinct disadvantage in the next great global industry. And that brings me to the contrast: While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.

Our portflio company Etsy has a person who is focused on the office, company culture, and making the work space as comfortable as possible. They have a chef come in and cook a healthy lunch for everyone three times a week. They called that program Eatsy.

Etsy launched in June 2005 and is over five years old. The company has well over 100 employees and is growing fast. They can afford to invest in things like the office and feeding their employees healthy lunches.

Researchers argue that the increasing commercialisation of science is restricting access to vital scientific knowledge and delaying the progress of science, a claim seen on bmj.com today.

Varuni de Silva and Raveen Hanwella from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka argue that copyrighting or patenting medical scales, tests, techniques and genetic material, limits the level of public benefit from scientific discovery.

The Eco-innovation Platform (Eco-IP) is a European platform established under the Europe INNOVA initiative, with the aim to accelerate the take-up of eco-innovative solutions in Europe. The initiative focuses on the development and testing of new or better innovation support mechanisms for innovative small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), in particular in technological and industrial fields.

The Eco-IP brings together public and private partners from different countries willing to cooperate in developing new forms of support for innovation, taking into account the specific needs of those companies holding eco-innovative solutions, as well as the potential role of services innovation in support of societal needs. This includes experimentation with new forms of intermediation between companies holding prototype eco-innovative solutions and companies willing to produce greener and available to test the prototypes as first users. The Eco-IP will thus contribute to bridge the demand for and supply of environment-friendly solutions and, in doing so, to the development of innovative eco-industries in Europe. Market failures that still hamper the wider take-up of eco-innovation are expected to be alleviated.

Earlier this week, I participated in a fascinating series of discussions at The Economist magazine’s summit called “The Ideas Economy: Human Potential – When the world grows up”. I came away with the realization that we’re not tapping into even a tiny fraction of the potential that human beings have. Additionally, we have a unique opportunity, today, to leverage the entire world’s talent.  In Silicon Valley, in particular, ideas are the currency that matter, and these are the keys to innovation and economic success. Knowledge creation has globalized and there is a fierce race underway for talent. We can fear this all we want, but we have a choice: raise protectionist barriers and lose the race, or recognize the new reality and take advantage of the opportunities for collaboration and innovation.

During the summer, two of my best friends and former colleagues asked me for guidance about making the transition from professor to administrator. Both had just been named directors of major academic programs at large public universities.

I made that transition myself in 2003 when I was appointed director of the journalism school at Iowa State University. No one prepares you for the position of department chair or director—arguably one of the most difficult jobs in academe because it requires you to navigate between the dean's dictums and the faculty's demands. Upon hearing the news of my friends' appointments, I pondered what I had learned as an administrator over the past seven years and came up with the following "rules," most of them adopted through trial and error.

In popular culture, the image is common: a lone wolf CEO rises to the top of a competitive field by sticking to his guns and following his instincts. In reality, businesses are made from networks, the result of the collaboration between partners, advisors and distributors.

The social innovation practice at MaRS is embarking on a new project designed to help companies leverage contacts in their field to scale their businesses. The idea is to make efficient use of distribution channels, manufacturing capabilities and networking partners.

Every advisor at MaRS will tell you that the core to a successful business model is a clear and concise value proposition. If we take a step back and look at the value proposition of a sector in aggregate, certain commonalities emerge that help us evaluate points of collaboration between traditional competitors.

It’s very easy to look at ultra-successful people and think they have something you don’t. They are inherently better than you and I. Born with greatness in their genes. The truth is that they aren’t. They failed more times than they succeeded, most likely. But the key is that they built off of those experiences and took those insights to make success happen.

This video from Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi is a perfect example of two very successful people talking about their failures and several false starts.