At Demo Fall 09 in San Diego, more than 60 startups and a few veteran outfits strutted their stuff before a skeptical audience of venture capitalists, tech aficionados, and journalists. A lot of sexy and innovative technology was on display this week, most of it targeting consumers. Even if your mission in life is solving down-and-dirty IT problems, several ideas deserve attention.

In particular, outstanding solutions were presented that addressed videoconferencing, Web security, and e-mail management. Plus, I can't resist reporting on an advancement in acoustic science that turns the wimpy audio produced by ultra-thin LCD TVs into rich, powerful stereo sound.

Talking Innovation at the Clinton Global Initiative
The unique ways we can harness innovation for sustainable development in the 21st century was the topic for the third major session at the Clinton Global Initiative. The dominant theme, unsurprisingly, was the use of innovation to emerge from various crises--of the economic, health, and, yes, climate variety. Al Gore was on hand to issue another call to action on climate, and he revealed the surprising innovation he'd most like to see develop next.

In the introduction to the talks, a CGI producer noted that the nature and implementation of innovation must necessarily change to meet the challenges of the climate crisis. Instead of the incremental, or continuous innovation, that we're mostly engaging in right now, we're going to need "disruptive innovation" that replaces the 'base of the pyramid'. Good example: we're going to need an energy economy that knocks coal-fired power plants out of the picture, and replaces them with wind, solar, and so on.

Innovation as a driver of worldwide economic recovery and growth is the key theme at the Fifth Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, a gathering of top CEOs and world leaders that opened on Sept. 22 in New York and continues through Friday, Sept. 25. "We need new businesses to unleash new innovations," said President Barack Obama, citing the world's economic downturn in his address to the crowd on Tuesday evening. "We need new collaborations to advance prosperity." The President's speech was meant to help set the tone of the entire conference and followed on the heels of the White House's Sept. 21 release of a white paper outlining a national innovation strategy.

With Netflix Inc. paying out a $1 million prize on Monday to a team of outside researchers that improved its movie recommendation algorithm, two venture-backed start-ups are overjoyed that the “open innovation” model is spreading.

Open innovation “like any big change in business takes time to promulgate,” said David Ritter, the chief technology officer of InnoCentive Inc. “The Netflix prize is a bit of a turning point.”

This morning Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke announced the creation of a new office for entrepreneurship and innovation. The announcement was first made during a CNBC interview (see below - note that the interview covered a number of other issues as well, including G-20 protesters and health care).

I had the chance to sit down with 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus today, who was in New York, as I am, for the Clinton Global Initiative meeting. My colleague, Steve Hamm, joined me for the interview and posted his own take.

Over the past six months, Americans have watched with anticipation and increased trepidation as healthcare reform details slowly emerge. President Obama has appropriately led the charge to alert Americans about the crisis and the need for change. At this point we all know our current healthcare “system” does not work and we have all seen plenty of evidence detailing the symptoms and root causes of healthcare’s failure.

It’s now time to develop a *realistic* plan for change. We need to understand that we are attempting to fix an extraordinarily complex problem and it will require the best of all parties to accomplish that. Creativity and quality ideas are the essence to build a lasting solution. Reckless expedience, in this case, may serve a political purpose but is unlikely to serve the public interest. Thoughtful deliberations do not mean we do not move forward, but rather, that we move forward with good ideas on a reasonable and achievable time schedule.

MONCTON, Sept. 23 /CNW/ - From October 5-7, Moncton will be home to the first ever Intelligent Communities Summit. The Intelligent Communities Summit, "Leveraging Technology for Community Development" will bring together international leading-edge community, academic and private sector leaders to share best practices and engage participants to brainstorm next steps in leveraging technology to enhance private sector growth and community development. These next steps will be designed to help businesses and communities weather economic storms, prosper and improve quality of life.

Intelligent Community Forum Co-Founder Robert Bell will join New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham, Canadian Wireless Telecom Association CEO Bernard Lord, and Innovation America CEO Richard Bendis as featured speakers. Some of the other speakers and panelists will include:

You may think street smarts are enough to be a successful entrepreneur, but these top entrepreneurship programs are giving students the practical and theoretical knowledge they need to succeed in any venture. The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine surveyed more than 700 undergraduate and business schools about their offerings in entrepreneurship.

The survey included questions covering everything from mentoring, experiential learning and specific course offerings to alumni successes and career prospects of current students. Schools that ranked high demonstrated a commitment to entrepreneurship both inside and outside the classroom and had faculty, students and alumni actively involved and successful in entrepreneurial endeavors.

I’m thrilled to hear that the Economist has just launched a new column about business, innovation and entrepreneurship in honor of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), the brilliant Austrian economist who, argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress. It gives new businesses a chance to replace old ones, but it also dooms those new businesses to fail unless they can keep on innovating (or find a powerful government patron). In his most famous phrase he likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction”.