NEW DELHI: Impressed by the efforts of social entrepreneurs to make the public delivery service more effective, five African countries want to emulate the Indian models of development, said Sam Pitroda here Saturday.

"At least five African countries are looking at Indian models of development to solve the problems at the bottom of the pyramid" as Western models were not scalable, said Pitroda, adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on public information infrastructure and innovations.

Got a big idea? Think you're too old to create! Think again. Here are some incredible examples to inspire you to go for it! Click "full screen" (bottom right icon) for easiest reading.

Everything begins as an idea.

Whether you're in business, school, jail, or debt, that's how it all gets rolling. First there's the idea, then there's the manifestation of the idea -- assuming, of course, that the person with the idea has their act together.

If you have any doubt, take a look around you.

Everything you see began as an idea: The microchip, the chocolate chip, the fishing net, the internet, the company you work for, and the company you keep. All of it. Everything. Even the Universe, some say, began as an idea in the mind of the Creator.

If there is some kind of digital dogfight in Silicon Valley, chances are that Vivek Wadhwa is smack in the middle of it.

Name a controversial subject: immigration, investment bubbles, age discrimination, women and minorities in tech, Google's search results. Wadhwa, the most provocative voice in Silicon Valley, has likely staked out a controversial position that has everyone in Silicon Valley taking sides. And his penchant for straight talk and challenging the conventional wisdom about the valley being a meritocracy has catapulted him to national prominence online and on the airwaves.

Maybe you love him, maybe you hate him. But you can't ignore him.

"He tells it as he sees it," said Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of Singularity University, the school focused on the future impact of technology, who helped recruit Wadhwa to a faculty position there. "He doesn't dilly-dally or cherry-coat anything. I have a great deal of respect for him."

Robots, underwater phones, online busses, fast follows and powerful vertical supply chains showed me a different model for innovation.

It’s three in the morning in Silicon Valley, or maybe it’s four. I don’t know. I’m exhausted. It’s been a marathon day of meetings, tours, interviews and promotional videos. The clock on my iPhone is telling me numbers that doesn’t seem to mean anything. Whatever time it is back home in Silicon Valley, its dinnertime in Daejon, South Korea.

According to Reuters, the Texas congressman decided to pull the bill in the wake of mass online protests from people in the US and abroad. Smith’s decision comes shortly after US Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said, “in light of recent events” he would postpone a critical vote that had been scheduled for January 24.

Smith said that similar legislation would not be considered “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” said the Republican chairman of the Judiciary house committee. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products,” Smith said.

Blueprint Mississippi is helping chart a course toward great opportunities in economic competitiveness, technology commercialization, educational achievement and resource management. Over the past year, business and community leaders across the state have been involved in the process of ensuring that Mississippi is taking the right steps to be successful in the future.

Our ability to better capitalize on existing possibilities is critical to the success of technology commercialization. By doing so, Mississippi will be able to further expand its technology footprint.

The Blueprint Mississippi report, which was released on Jan. 5, shows we are already headed in the right direction. We have seen tremendous growth of new technology companies in the state thanks to the creation of the Angel Fund at Mississippi Technology Alliance. The new technology incentives that were part of the Momentum Mississippi package have encouraged new investment in technology at companies of all sizes across the state.

Our region continues to lose private-sector jobs at an alarming rate. There is no greater solution to poverty than job creation.

What could Wisconsin and our region do to reverse our declining fortunes?

Ohio built its job growth strategy around innovation. The Greater Milwaukee Committee invited the leaders of the Third Frontier to tell their story because their job creation metrics are very impressive.

As Steve Jobs once famously said when he was brought in to reverse Apple Computer's decline: "The only way to survive is to innovate our way out of this."

As a CEO of a startup, my online voice – a blog called Greg’s Corner — is the place where I share my company news, try to differentiate myself from competitors, and showcase the value I’m offering. But until about a year ago, my online voice wasn’t saying much.

I knew what I wanted to say in these posts but I struggled to find the right words to express my thoughts. I knew my blog needed an objective — a common thread between my posts that would drive home the bigger message. But finding the right chemistry between that objective, the words on the screen, and the tone and attitude that would define my voice was no easy task. Increasingly, it took more time and effort than my schedule allowed.

So I hired a journalist.

More and more people around the world are becoming entrepreneurs, according to a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 report released Thursday. The world’s so-called “innovation-driven” economies saw an increase of 22 percent in early-stage entrepreneurship in 2011 over the year before, as measured by the number of people operating a business that’s less than 3.5 years old. “One of the most surprising things is that the entrepreneurship rates were up in most of the economies we measured,” said Babson College entrepreneurship professor Donna Kelley.

For the study, GEM randomly sampled at least 2,000 adults in each of 54 economies. “Chile and China are have recently become more entrepreneurial countries, and when you look at the wealthier economies like the U.S. and Western Europe, you’re seeing a huge increase in entrepreneurship.”

The San Diego biotech industry has been buzzing this week with the grand opening of Johnson and Johnson’s new incubator, Janssen Labs. But already plans for another San Diego incubator are being laid, this time at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.

Paul Laikind, Sanford-Burnham’s chief business officer, told BioWorld Today the facility will house six start-ups in an open-lab format similar to the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Companies will have access to lab space and can use Sanford-Burnham’s 33 core facilities in animal care, high throughput screening, metabolomics or other areas on a pay-as-you-go basis, Laikind said.

Fortify Ventures LLC    and at least a dozen of its portfolio companies are immigrating to D.C. in a mass headquarters shift, launching the District’s only bona fide startup accelerator with the help of $100,000 from Mayor Vincent Gray.

With the 1627 K St. NW accelerator — dubbed “The Fort” — the region’s newest venture fund aims to correct one of the D.C. tech scene’s most glaring deficiencies: the lack of a centralized, intensive and collaborative hub for startups that offers a mix of office space, mentorship and money.

Elana Fine, who heads an angel investor network organized by the University of Maryland    ’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, has been promoted to replace Dingman’s longtime managing director, Asher Epstein.

The leadership shuffle comes at a time when the Dingman Center Angels is sharply stepping up its investment activity, inking eight early-stage deals in 2011 — twice as many as it signed in 2010. The angel group was formerly known as the Capital Access Network but rebranded last year.

There has been a lot of talk recently about a phenomenon called crowdfunding, a new type of fundraising that relies on social media and the Internet to raise small amounts of capital from large numbers of individuals. Despite the talk, crowdfunding remains impermissible under the securities laws absent a costly registration with the SEC and with state securities administrators. Last year, two people created a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account to solicit funds to be used to purchase Pabst Brewing Company. They received over $200 million in pledges from more than five million individuals, but were later subjected to cease-and-desist proceedings initiated by the SEC. Crowdfunding would seem to be a viable approach to small company capital formation, if only it were legal.

Every startup with any traction quickly reaches a point where they need to hire employees to grow the business. Unfortunately, this always happens when pressures are the highest, and business processes are ill-defined. At this point you need superstars and versatile future executives, yet your in-house hiring processes and focus are at their weakest.

The result is a host of hiring mistakes that sink many young companies, or take years to fix. The solution is to never forget that hiring is a top priority task for the CEO, which should never be delegated, and which often has to supersede the urgent crises of the day.

There has been a huge amount of growth in the outsourcing industry over recent years, so much so that it has become engrained in the way many large enterprises run their business. As the industry matures and the range of outsourcing services extends to higher value activities, client firms raise the bar regarding their expectations, seeking the delivery of high impact innovation from their vendors.

Innovation is and always has been the engine that drives economic growth in the United States. Economists believe that innovation—new technologies, products, processes, and the industries they create—is responsible for between half and 80 percent of all economic growth.

Indeed, U.S. companies and industries, with the help of federally funded research, have invented many things that the world wants to buy—think light bulbs, assembly line automobile production, computers, Internet applications, handheld wireless devices, photovoltaic solar cells, Global Positioning System satellites, and the list goes on. This innovative spirit of the American people, protected by the rule of law, keeps us in the world’s top position in innovation, and subsequently ensures we are home to the world’s best-paying jobs and highest standards of living.

People are the most valuable resource. We see this most clearly among entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and innovators. Creating wealth and new ways of doing things drive economic growth. This is especially true in the technology sector. Encouraged by free markets, individual liberty, and the right incentives, innovators can achieve technological wonders. But unfortunately, our immigration system limits their number.

Nowhere is the positive impact of immigrants more noticeable than in high tech startups. According to a survey by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants have started nearly half of the top 50 venture-funded companies. Software, semiconductors, and biotechnology are the most common venture-backed startup firms started by immigrants. According to another report by Vivek Wadhwa, roughly 25 percent of all engineering firms founded between 1995 and 2005 were founded by immigrants.

Dublin’s case to become Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley is ‘come for the money and stay for the supports and networking’ – and it’s working, writes GORDON SMITH

WAS IT JUST a coincidence that the winners of two Irish technology start-up competitions in 2011 both originated from outside Ireland? Maybe, but in the same year that a €10 million fund was launched to attract international entrepreneurs to these shores, it starts to look like part of a bigger plan.

In December Adjuno, whose principals are from Canada and Bulgaria, won the National Digital Research Centre’s LaunchPad LiftOff award. May’s winner, B-Smark, was founded by Italians. Profitero, winner of the IBM SmartCamp competition in London last month, is headquartered in Dublin and was started by a team hailing from Belarus.

Everybody is talking about mobiles. If the trends in 2011 were anything to go by, 2012 will revolve around mobile phones and tablet computing. So making predictions and talking about what there is to look forward to is pretty easy if you just want to stick to safe topics. Of course, with Solar Maximum all set for 2012, major solar storms could make it a tricky year for the mobile. So I’ve decided to take a look at non-mobile related technology to see what other positive things we should look out for.

1. Cheaper hardware

Flooding in the far-east made 2011 a very tough year if you were interested in buying cheap hardware. In particular, hard disks were drastically affected after Thailand was heavily flooded. That halted production for a good portion of the world’s major hard disk manufacturers. For the first time in a few months, hard drive prices are finally coming down again. While we’re not through the storm yet, it does look like the worst is over and manufacturers are starting to step up production again.