This week HubSpot was lucky enough to be included in the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies.  It’s a great honor, we're really excited (and humbled) to be listed next to so many great companies.  In an adjoinging article in Inc. Magazine, our CEO Brian Halligan discusses a key part of our success (and looks impressive in a full-page photo too).  He talks about our approach to experimentation and our methodology for incubating new ideas.   What Brian describes is three tiered approach to promoting and funding unconventional projects.  It’s a methodology that served us well thus far and helped create an innovation pipeline that offsets our traditional disciplined focus on the core business.

“Successful innovation is turning ideas into money,” as Innovation expert Nic Hunt so distinctly and accurately describes. Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into value for your company, customers and shareholders. Successful innovation is not a one time deal, but a process that delivers sustained, long term profitability. Any company can develop one or two innovations over the course of time, but having a focused vision will deliver sustainable innovation - producing profitable results for your company time and time again.

Implementing innovation depends on a disciplined strategy customized to the needs, size and culture of an organization. First determine what type of innovation you hope to achieve with your organization. Innovation can be incremental, which features a new process or way of doing business, or it can be transformative, which debuts an entirely new way to deliver value. Transformative innovations are few and far in between. These true game changers open up new businesses and markets. Organizations tend to use 80% of their resources on incremental enhancements, according to a 2003 study by the London School of Business. However, be warned that companies that focus entirely on incremental innovations have difficulty keeping up with new competitors that enter the field.

University incubators for startup companies are popping up all around the United States with many pundits and bloggers suggesting that we have unsustainable bubbles, both in number of incubators and number of companies being incubated. We’ve saturated the market goes the litany. Maybe so, but I doubt it.

More relevant to many in the commercialization of university research community is the issue of how one creates a university incubator. What are the steps and, in particular, how much does it cost and how does one pay for it? Having personally created two such incubators and having watched the creation of numerous others, I have a simple message to relay: there is no bottom line and no single formula for creation, let alone success. Indeed, even teasing out the costs of forming and sustaining an incubator is difficult and often inextricably tied to other activities. Two examples prove my case.

Last Friday, President Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, which passed the Senate last week by a large bipartisan majority, 89-9. Normally, when both political parties agree on anything, it’s time to celebrate. I wish that were the case here. To the contrary, this law will undermine one of the things that has made America unique and our economy strong: technology entrepreneurship.

There are two main problems in this new law for statups:

The change from first-to-invent (FTI) to first-to-file (FTF) The introduction of yet another (third) form of post-grant review.

The pursuit of entrepreneurialism is a dogged, risky and somewhat sweaty one. For those interested in being educated in the venture, The Princeton Review's annual ranking of the top 25 undergraduate and top 25 graduate entrepreneurship programs offered at U.S. institutions provides a picture of the best places to get schooled.

Babson College tops the grad list for the fourth year in a row.The Babson Park, Mass., school's Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship began offering its program in 1967, making it one of the oldest on the list. The University of Houston's Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship comes in at the head of the class for undergraduate programs. Like Babson and many other schools that made the list, the Wolff Center's faculty is comprised entirely of entrepreneurs. The University of Houston also had the highest enrollment, attracting more than 2,000 students for the 2010-11 academic year.

At a 19 September event, a 'global enterprise project' was launched by the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT), Junior Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE), and the EU education ministries network Schoolnet.

The project will give school students practical exposure to company situations, and allow teachers from different countries to benefit from different experiences and best practices. It is managed by JA-YE in association with Schoolnet, and supported by 18 ERT members, plus the EU Comenius programme.

"Entrepreneurship is not only about creating your own business, but also innovating and creating new businesses inside of existing companies. It is about attitudes and taking responsibility for one's life and career," said Brian Ager, ERT secretary-general in an interview with EurActiv.

Today, in our series on convertible debt, we examine the conversion valuation cap.

The cap is an investor-favorable term that puts a ceiling on the conversion price of the debt. The valuation cap is typically only seen in seed rounds where the investors are concerned that the next round of financing will be at a price that is at a valuation that wouldn’t reward them appropriately for taking a risk by investing early in the seed round.

For example, an investor wants to invest $100,000 in a company  and thinks that the pre-money valuation of the company is somewhere in the $2 to $4 million dollar range. The entrepreneurs thinks their valuation should be higher. Either way, the investor and entrepreneurs agree to not deal with a valuation negotiation and consummate a convertible debt deal with a 20% discount to the next round.

There was a time when all you had to do was have a quality product or service and some good marketing. You put together a marketing budget and plan, and then you executed. The companies with the deep pockets and compelling messages seemed to take the lion’s share of the market.

That was then. We now live in an expertise economy. This is a time when what you know matters just as much as the quality of your product or service. The advent of the Internet turned it into a buyer’s market. Consumers have the opportunity to learn as much as they can, or want, before they reach out to a vendor.

Amidst an increasingly connected world, globalization is the order of the day. The concept poses both great benefits and significant challenges to entrepreneurs. However, while the benefits are many (including more efficient communication and greater potential for collaboration), today’s digital age can put increased pressure on young businesses to expand globally — and to do so quickly.

There is something to allowing your business to grow organically and not to push expansion too rapidly. On the other hand, it’s important to consider the realities of today’s business environment. If you’re a startup entrepreneur, you risk facing a competitive disadvantage if you wait too long to expand your operations.

A few years ago, it dawned on me that I was driving to Detroit—80 miles each way–nearly every weekend. Why? Because there was nothing to freaking do in the city I lived in and Detroit seemed to have it all: concerts of every size and genre, live professional sporting events, awesome bars and restaurants.

I mean, I once went to a show in the basement of a small club and stood there, mouth agape, watching Questlove on the turntables as Black Thought rapped along on the mic while the rest of the Roots Crew sat smirking at a nearby table, all in the company of only about 100 other people. (In case you’re wondering who Questlove, Black Thought, and the rest of the Roots are, you may know them better as the house band for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”) That kind of magical musical experience never happened to me in all my extensive travels: not in New York, or Chicago, or Miami, or Toronto.

Japanese tech powerhouse Kawasaki is working on the so-called Power Assist Suit, a wearable robot that helps humans carry objects weighing 30-40kg without any effort from the muscles. The suit is actually one of quite a few similar models currently available in Japan.

The Kawasaki robot features a total of four motors in the parts covering the hips and knees (see picture below). The control unit and lithium battery are placed in the part placed around the lower back.

No? Well here it is: it’s the Click watch and it’s a standard digital timekeeper with either DIP switches or a tiny rotating switch that you use to set the features. Thats right – you need a small stylus or paperclip to look at the date on this thing.

I get a kick out of nearly everything about this watch except that I can’t imagine when anyone would wear this in real life. The band looks like an IDE cable and it comes in multiple colors and styles including midnight black (for those late night LAN parties). It costs about $150-$175 and is available now at Watchismo.

Many situations require us to make categorical decisions. Jurors look at testimony and judge whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty. Police officers take aim at suspects and have to determine whether they see a gun in the suspect's hand, or something that just resembles a gun. A man in his 40s begins to sweat and experience mild pain in his arms, and needs to decide whether it's serious or not.

New research  suggests gender plays a role in these decisions because men tend to organize the world into distinct categories whereas women see things as more conditional and in shades of gray.

What happened to Generation X? They are generally defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980, sandwiched between 80 million Baby Boomers and 78 million Gen-Y (Millennials). Gen-X has just 46 million members, but they continue to lead the way and set the standards in the startup world.

Gen-X is the group that will bridge the two larger generations of Boomers and Gen-Y. I guess the bridge isn’t as exciting as what has happened on one side or what might happen on the other, so they are often referred to as the “forgotten” generation, or the lost child demographic.

The SEC wants to figure out how to make it easier for small businesses to raise capital without endangering investors.

To that end, the SEC has established a new advisory committee, set to run for two years, which will make non-binding recommendations to the commission.

The committee will focus on ‘rules, regulations, and policies’ relating to how small business can access the capital markets and meet the corporate governance and reporting requirements involved. Excluded from the committee’s focus, however, are any ‘policies, practices, actions or decisions concerning the commission’s enforcement program’. For the committee’s purposes, small business means ‘emerging privately held small businesses’ and publicly traded companies with less than $250 million in public market capitalization.

The Ontario Tax Exemption for Commercialization program supports innovation in Ontario’s economoy by promoting intellectual property developed by eligible Canadian universities and colleges. The OTEC program applies to new corporations and offers an exemption from Ontario’s corporate income tax and corporate minimum tax for the first ten taxation years of the corporation applicant. Therefore, this program is not a grant or loan but a tax incentive type program.

Who is Eligible for this Canadian Tax Incentive?

There are several criteria that make a corporation eligible for this program.

Software developers David Lifson, Chris Maguire, and Haim Schoppik had plenty of experience writing code when they conceived Postling, an online service to help small businesses manage their social media presence in 2009. They planned to perfect the site before asking potential customers to use it, but their mentor, Ellen Thompson, forced the programmers to leave the office and talk to business owners.

The trio, all veterans of handmade-goods marketplace Etsy, wanted a mentor because they felt ignorant about cash-flow management, marketing strategy, and other crucial tasks. “We’re three engineers, so we’re great at building technology but had never done a sales pitch in our lives,” says Lifson, 28, who met Thompson, a 43-year-old serial entrepreneur, through the startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures in Philadelphia in the summer of 2009. Thompson, who isn’t paid, worked closely with the team during the three-month DreamIt program and still talks monthly with Lifson, who now works in New York.

Whether you’re launching a startup or looking for new opportunities, networking events are an essential part of the game. Some lucky individuals dive right into these events and come out with five great leads and a new hiking buddy. But for others, these orchestrated events can be a total drag, full of awkward moments and monotonous small talk.

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or new to the networking scene, here are seven ways to make the most of these events.

1. Remind Yourself: You’re There to Give, Not Get

For a species that prides itself on prowess in language and communication, we humans never fail to amaze when it comes to our ability to use words and concepts in ways that create more confusion than clarity. Good words and solid con- cepts can lose their real meaning in the search for the new idea. Today’s words are “innovation” and “cluster.”

Not There Yet

Over the past two decades, we have begun to accept the notion that putting all our eco- nomic development eggs in the resource industry basket may not be in our best long- term interest.

We have also begun to develop a better sense of what is required to establish an effective innovation system, the environment for globally competitive science and technology-based enterprises to thrive in Canada. This has required collective learning on the part of businesses, investors, academic and research organizations, and government agencies to determine what matters, and to clarify roles and responsibilities.

Rutgers University plans to highlight its business partnerships through two events this fall, focusing on entrepreneurs and the pharmaceutical industry.

Drug Discovery Day will take place Nov. 3 and Entrepreneurship Day will be on Nov. 14. Both will include guest speakers and panels on moving ideas from university labs into the marketplace.

In other initiatives, the Rutgers Office of Technology Commercialization has increased its budget and set a goal of patenting 50 percent more inventions this year, compared with last year.