Citing a family member’s health problems, Ioanna T. Morfessis, the state’s new economic development chief, has abruptly resigned, less than a month before she was set to take over.

“This is the most difficult decision I have ever been confronted with from a professional standpoint,” Morfessis said by telephone late Wednesday. “When my family and I connected over the holidays, we learned new information that was unknown to us and a decision had to be made. This is one of those moments in life when your train gets totally stopped in its tracks.”

I [Jeffrey Phillips] read with great interest the post by Grant McCracken that addresses the "brief" moment in the sun for creative types. Grant's concern is that crowdsourcing will allow corporations to source design skills, ideas and other creative concepts from the internet, rather than turning to creative design organizations. In this, he is probably right. There's a growing awareness that there are good ideas "out there" if we can only tap them. You need look no further than Dell's IdeaStorm or BestBuy's Idea Exchange for proof. Currently you can create a campaign or contest to design a new logo. Chuck Frey's new logo at Innovation Tools was designed in a contest, and he allowed many of his readers to vote on the designs they liked best. What I'm having a hard time with is that the concerns McCracken raises are misplaced in my opinion.

Yes, there are thousands of creative types working in their homes and hundreds of thousands of people who have good ideas for Dell, and for BestBuy. And who could provide ideas to firms that really need them, like General Motors, or the Federal Government. But I digress. All we've done with crowdsourcing is leverage the internet to capture the ideas these individuals have always had. The internet has simply provided a marketplace for us to exchange our skills with willing buyers, whether those skills are design skills, or ideation skills, or photography skills in the case of Flickr and other photography sites. While this is happening, this doesn't portend the end of creative design firms or innovation teams in businesses. Here's why.

Geographic Compatibility:

In the early 1990’s, traffic in Los Angeles was so horrendous, it could take hours to travel a dozen miles. Commuting was a nightmare and the last thing anyone wanted to do was sit in more traffic. At that time, single people would always have that elemental question in the back of their minds whenever they met a prospective date – are we Geographically Compatible (GC)?

The sweet spot:

I recall many a magical conversation ending with that mutual inevitable shrug of the shoulders; a secret code for “have a nice life”. In Los Angeles, GC peaked in the sweet spot of 1-6 miles. After that, GC diminished roughly proportional to the square of distance with 20 miles as an absolute maximum. Any more was no closer or farther than, say, Nashville.

Here are our biggest stories of the year, as determined by you, the VentureBeat readers, and where you clicked. The list covers some of 2009’s most important products, announcements, and ideas, but also includes posts that fell squarely into the “just for fun” column.

We’re counting down to the most popular stories of the year:

Emily Medina isn't running a pyramid scheme, despite what people often think. As the petite 26-year-old works her way through some of New York City's poorer neighborhoods, she approaches women selling food and trinkets on the street and offers to lend them money to grow their businesses. The organization Medina works for, Grameen, is one of the world's largest microfinance outfits and has a Nobel Prize to its name for this work. But in New York neighborhoods where loans to street vendors tend to come with interest rates north of 40%, it can take a while to build trust. "I didn't believe it until I had the $1,500 check in my hand," says jewelry seller Rosa Lopez.

Thirty years ago Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen franchise, started lending small sums to poor entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to help them grow from a subsistence living to a livelihood. His great discovery was that even with few assets, these entrepreneurs repaid on time. Grameen and microfinance have since become financial staples of the developing world, but by coming to the U.S. Grameen is taking on a different sort of challenge: one of the planet's richest countries. Yes, money may be tight in the waning recession, but this is still a nation of 100,000 bank branches.

Innovation America wishes you a Happy, Healthy, Prosperous and most importantly an INNOVATIVE New Year!

As we look forward to a New Year , it is also important to reflect on some of the highlights of 2009 that we can build on. Today's innovation DAILY is a special issue that features the most popular articles from  (iD) in 2009. We thank you for your loyal following and hope that you will continue to enjoy our focus on Global trends on Innovation in the new year. We welcome any comments or suggestions you might have to improve our content and hope you share our newsletter with your friends and networks.

Keep Innovating in 2010.

Rich Bendis

[Editor's Note: to view the top articles from 2009, follow THIS link]

Choosing the short route left them snow bound, cell phone GPS saved them

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - A Nevada couple letting their SUV's navigation system guide them through the high desert of Eastern Oregon got stuck in snow for three days when the GPS unit sent them down a remote forest road.

On Sunday, atmospheric conditions apparently changed enough for their GPS-enabled cell phone to get a weak signal and relay coordinates to a dispatcher, Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger said.

"GPS almost did 'em in and GPS saved 'em," Evinger said. "It will give you options to pick the shortest route. You certainly get the shortest route. But it may not be a safe route."

There are lots of ways to tell the world about scientific discoveries. The Ontario Innovation Trust has done it with a beautiful legacy report: Using our Heads: Building Ontario’s economy through research showcases some of the best recent research and discoveries that have happened right here in Ontario.

Not only does the book include feature articles about leading Ontario scientists and Q and A’s with some of this province’s most innovative leaders—it’s also spectacularly illustrated by 23 talented artists, painters and graphic designers and (perhaps best of all) it can be yours for the low, low price of zero dollars.

In the 2009 economic climate, as angels and venture capitalists tightened their grip on the rope, companies seeking funding found themselves playing by a new set of rules. So what’s the state of the playing field today, and what can entrepreneurs expect from investors in the coming year?

Karen Bantuveris entered the spring of 2009 hopeful that her company VolunteerSpot would receive the $450K in seed funding that would take it to the next level. But when the Texas-based startup actually did receive a bite from a local angel group, it decided to decline, and instead to create and go with a plan B.

“We were offered a Series A (the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture funding) in the spring. Their terms were not acceptable to us. They wanted a lot of control for not enough money,” she said.

Before you celebrate New Year's Eve, invest in a few minutes of tax planning. True, taxes might not bring thoughts of confetti in the air or New Year's kisses, but making use of these seven strategies can go a long way in reducing your tax burden.

1) Establish retirement plans.
2) Invest in an IRA.
3) Defer Income
4) Spend, spend, spend.
5) Give to charity.
6) Prepay taxes, (maybe).
7) Visit the doctor.
8) Review your portfolio.

Over the past year, I have been scouring the Internet for resources to help me grow my businesses. It is quite refreshing to discover and learn from others and hear stories from fresh perspectives, rather theory out of a book. Of course there are many ways to build a businesses and while many are figuring it out, the way we communicate is evolving right in front of our eyes. With the ammunition of a blog and a Flip cam, we are seeing many young entrepreneurs becoming prominent voices and in some cases niche leaders while building profitable businesses. In months and years not decades.

As 2009 draws to a close, it’s a good time to review what has transpired and anticipate the year ahead. We humans seem to place particular significance in years that end in “0” which is why the advent of 2010 feels a little special. Or maybe we are anxious to leave behind some of the more tiresome issues that have occupied our attention and get on to some shiny new topics.

The economic challenges of the recent past have rekindled interest in innovation. I’m hoping that the work companies have done this year to increase their capacity to innovate will “stick.” For those brave folks, I’d like to share a list of 10 Innovation Proverbs for Leaders written by Joyce Wycoff, author and InnovationNetwork Co-Founder.

When designers start a new Web site, they often sketch out a first idea of the page layout using paper and stencil.

Designers call this sketch a "wireframe."

Woorkup.com's Antonio Lupetti collected 10 beautiful examples of wireframes.

The pharmaceutical industry is at a transformational moment. The financial returns once realized will be tougher to repeat. With fewer FDA approvals, diminishing pipelines, and a decaying blockbuster business model, the imperative to adopt new growth strategies is paramount.

But for large pharma companies, there’s a host of questions about what these future growth strategies should be.

If you step back and look at the big economic policy issues-- health care, financial regulation, immigration, education reform, the budget deficit -- they appear to boil down to one fundamental question: What is the best trade-off between fairness, stability and social cohesion on the one hand and disruptive and growth-inducing innovation on the other?

At its most simplistic level, this debate plays itself out as the choice between big government and small government, between regulation and deregulation, between European-style socialism and Anglo-American free-market capitalism. The one side takes its intellectual roots from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and the recently departed Paul Samuelson, the other from Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and Milton Friedman.

The news that New Hampshire’s population has eclipsed Maine’s for the first time since the census of 1800 is much more than a statistical footnote. It is definitive evidence of a powerful economic trend linked to geography. Those who care about the fate of the northern two-thirds of Maine would do well to consider its implications.

Both states are in the 1.3 million range, but according to new census estimates, the Granite State has 6,274 more people than the Pine Tree State; New Hampshire gained 89,000 new residents since 2000, while Maine saw just 43,000 newcomers.

State policymakers make little fuss over Maine’s lack of population growth when they decry the challenges the economy faces. Yet population growth is critical.

Excerpts from a speech by CEOs for Cities President and CEO, Carol Coletta on the Washington D.C. creative economy.

Urban Escapism & Neo Rebellion
People are getting tired of saving the world and about negative news about the climate, terror,.. Games, 3D Technologies, Space Flight, iPhone & Apps, Outdoor activities and everything else which is interactive and entertaining is going to boom

Terror, Alternative Energy & China
This is what you already hear in news.
* This is going to be the century of China.
* Alternative energy will displace the old energy sources.
* Apocalyptic scenarios are very in and increasing the fear in people. So far unthinkable techniques (data security) will be accepted.

Information everywhere through mobile devices
Creative Capitalism

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A paper published this past summer providing evidence that the gene variants found in some non-cancerous tissues may differ from those present in blood samples from the same individual was the top-read story on GenomeWeb Daily News in 2009.

That article just edged out a report early in the year that the National Institutes of Health would channel stimulus funds into existing grants rather than restoring previous cuts to existing programs and grants.

Newspapers had a nice run from the 1970s to the 1990s. Unfortunately, as this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes clear -- by way of Marketwatch -- it's over.

Newspaper employment has utterly collapsed in the last 15 years, with employment numbers now around where they were in the mid-1950s.

The good news: It's a great opportunity. The next decade will give birth to new forms of reporting, more in tune with today's technology and news consumption habits.