Entrepreneur. Born Steven Paul Jobs on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father Abdulfattah Jandali was a Syrian political science professor and his mother Joanne Simpson worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California's Silicone Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Gov. Jay Nixon laid out a five-year plan Monday to improve the Missouri economy that identifies biosciences and financial services as among the more promising areas.

The Missouri Strategic Initiative is a result of an 11-month effort that kicked off last May at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. More than 600 business, labor, education and economic development officials participated.

The report identified seven target clusters:

•Advanced manufacturing.

•Energy solutions.

•Biosciences.

•Health sciences and services.

•Information technology.

•Financial and professional services.

•Transportation and logistics.

Before I became an innovation consultant I was an industrial designer. For 10 years of my career, I worked as a practising product designer at various agencies including my own. During these 10 years I started discovering a clear pattern in what made certain companies more successful at product innovation than others. This pattern can be summarized in these three points:

1. Companies that are successful innovators know what customers want. They have a very deep understanding of the lives of their customers, and the context in which their products are used.

My clients and I cover miles of ground as we get to the heart of what it means for the people in their organization to achieve leadership in innovation. Over time we visit and revisit, cast and recast, and frame and reframe the matters of…

* What is the critical question which, if we explored it fully with the community, would lead to breakthroughs relative to the challenge at hand?
* Who do we invite to engage with us on the question? What possibilities open when we convene the members in virtual and physical community?
* What commitment do we each choose to make in exploring the question?
* What level of ownership do we each choose to take in the practice of innovation?

My new book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services’ tries to unfuzz the front end of innovation in order to create great ideas: ideas with an X-factor!

Everybody knows the television show where a jury is looking for talent with the X factor: “something” that makes for star quality. As innovators we are also in search of ideas with an X factor. But when do our ideas have it? Which criteria should it meet in order to be of star quality?

Generally, an idea is in this early phase not more than a fleeting thought, a word or image whereby we experience a ‘we-have-to-do-something-with-this’ feeling. It is only a rough diamond, like a lot of candidates in the first round of the X factor. And it has still a long way to go. An important question is, will it survive the corporate stage-gate jury?

Investors and entrepreneurs often ask me to shed some light on how to value pre-revenue companies – an issue often raised when entrepreneurs are looking for external investment.

Teaching courses on entrepreneurship and innovation, which include raising finance, suggests that I have a level of expertise in this area, which enables me to provide a definitive answer. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The more I teach this issue and research different valuation techniques, the more I recognize that valuation of pre-revenue companies is more of an art than of science.

OTTAWA — It’s not just the demise of Nortel Networks that ails the region’s tech sector. Nearly half the city’s largest tech firms have either been swallowed up or have moved their headquarters in just the past two years.

This gem comes by way of the latest annual survey of the country’s tech industry by the Branham Group, the Ottawa-based consulting group.

The 2011 Branham survey, published Tuesday, also shows that four of the five Ottawa firms that made it into the top 40 — based on 2010 revenues — dropped in relative position compared to the year before.

The only exception was Telesat Canada, which did not feature in the previous Branham survey. The satellite services provider was first among Ottawa firms, with revenues last year of $821 million, up roughly four per cent from 2009. That was good enough for 13th spot among Canadian tech firms.

Twenty years ago Wellington was a sleepy backwater populated by grey-suited bureaucrats and seriously lacking in good coffee. Now New Zealand's capital city absolutely positively hums with life and is regarded as a rising barometer for the South Pacific island nation's emerging digital creative wealth.

Wellington's international reputation for creativity took a leap forward when Oscar winning director Peter Jackson established operations in the city over a decade ago. Jackson operates an enormous production facility two minutes drive from the city's downtown airfield, where he parks his corporate jet. Hits such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong came to life there and filming of The Hobbit is now underway. Jackson also has a stake in highly acclaimed studio Weta Digital that famously provided digital effects for science fiction blockbuster Avatar.

June 1-3, 2011 – New York City

The seventh annual Building the Broadband Economy summit will gather the leaders of the global Intelligent Community movement to hear, among others, Suvi Linde, the Minister of Communications of Finland, which declared broadband a universal human right.  Also featured will be Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, whose famous annual show debuts the gadgets that shape our future.  He will speak on the transformative impact of healthcare information technology.  America's most advanced smart grid is in the city of Chattanooga, and its Mayor will describe the decisions that led its municipal-owned utility to leap to the front of the pack.

Building the Broadband Economy is an international summit for community leaders and their technology partners from around the world.  BBE offers a unique opportunity to learn how to use information and communications technology to build prosperous economies and meet the social challenges of the 21st Century.  The 2011 edition of BBE, produced in partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, focuses on "Health in the Intelligent Community ."   

The audience for BBE 2009 is limited to 250 attendees in order to provide the right environment to share knowledge and build relationships.  Attendance is principally by invitation but a limited number of paid registrations are available for Innovation Daily readers at a 20% discount. Register under VIP Registration at www.icfsummit.com using VIP Code PTR2011. 

Intelligent Community Forum
www.intelligentcommunity.org

In the war between east coast and west coast entrepreneurship, these venture capitalists are the generals of the east.

The Forbes' Midas 100 ranked the top tech investors who created wealth and funded new ideas in 2011.

While the list is West Coast heavy, these investment stars are making big across the country.

Success in a startup is not possible as a “one-man show.” An entrepreneur has to engage with team members, partners, investors, vendors, and customers. In my experience, the joy of positive engagement is sometimes the only pay you get in an early startup. Amazingly, many successful startups are built on this basis alone, with almost no money.

I will talk here primarily about building the internal team of a startup, but the same principles apply outside to your “extended team” and customers. I like the ten practical and transformative steps outlined by Bob Kelleher, in his new book “Louder Than Words,” from his many years of experience in corporate environments. These are easily adaptable to the startup environment:

1. Link high engagement to high performance. Don’t confuse engagement with satisfaction. The last thing you want is a team of satisfied but underperforming people. Kelleher defines engagement as “the unlocking of employee potential to drive high performance.” Set and reinforce high performance goals.

What is usually the first thing everyone that gets a new iPad wants to know? Which apps to get. But there are still some cool things that you can do with your iPad, even without buying a single app. I’m not talking about well-known features like Multitasking, Folders, Airplay, Airprint, or even the new HD Mirroring capability of the iPad 2. Instead, here are ten, hidden in plain sight, secret features of the iPad 2. You maybe aware of one or two, but let’s see if you knew about all ten.

Access Your iTunes Library Remotely

There are several ways you can access your media collection from your iPad. The first and easiest is to sync your library from iTunes. However, if you have enabled Home Sharing in iTunes on your Mac, you can also access your entire iTunes Library on your Mac while connected to the same Wi-Fi network. To access your Home Sharing library from the iPad you need to click on the Library tab in the iPod app. From here you select the iTunes Library you want to access (make sure you have Home Sharing turned on in iTunes on the computers you want to share from). Unfortunately it is an either/or situation. You cannot browse both your locally synced library as well as your remotely accessed library.

I was the worst pizza delivery guy. Fraternity guys would chase after me as I was peeling out of their driveways after a delivery. Why? The sauce and cheese fell all to one side. I couldn’t help it. I also never got tips. Wende, my partner in our restaurant delivery business, always got tips. But she was beautiful, blonde, great smile, had personality, etc. And I secretly loved her. I couldn’t compete. I always hoped I would deliver to a frat party where all the girls were running around naked. But that never happened.

We also started a debit card for college kids. From the first day we were open for business we had college kids signing up for our card (there were no credit cards for kids then). And anyone who had our debit card could order food from the 20 or so restaurants in town and we’d deliver, but with a 25% markup.

Importance of Critical Thinking to InnovationThe more I hear from innovators (some successful and others not-so successful) on the importance of being able to make snap decisions based on intuition alone during critical stages of the innovation process, the more I’m convinced that perhaps, just the opposite may be true. Maybe, what really matters in determining success of the innovation effort is not so much intuition skills but rather, having a more systematic approach–something that resembles classic critical thinking skills. What I’m talking about here is a systematic approach to critical thinking made popular in the 1960s and 70s by researchers such as Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe (just to name a few). These classic methods that link problem solving and decision making have been all but discarded by innovators today because of being deemed too cumbersome, laborious and certainly not suited to rapid demands of the innovation world of today.

In the venture capital arena, Wisconsin has long been a laggard.

Despite some growth in its venture capital pool during the last 25 years, Wisconsin still ranked just 25th among all states in 2010, with $234 million under management, according to the National Venture Capital Association's Yearbook 2011.

Wisconsin ranks 20th in population, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

The state's dearth of venture capital has stifled the growth of many young companies, said John Neis, a managing director of Madison's Venture Investors, one of Wisconsin's most active venture capital firms.

"We have so many companies that stall out in their development process or raise inadequate capital and put themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they can't go as quickly as their competitors can," Neis said.

Donald Trump won’t fire anyone, and there won’t be cameras on hand to record embarrassing mistakes.

But young entrepreneurs with ideas for tech startup companies will be in the spotlight this summer in a new program sponsored by Ohio Third Frontier and Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

The Ohio’s New Entrepreneurs (ONE) Fund will encourage the development of those businesses by creating 10 teams made up of two to five young would-be entrepreneurs — people at least 18 who are either enrolled in college or graduate school or have been in the past three years.

The teams will work for 11 weeks with veteran entrepreneurs, industry experts and investors to come up with promising technology concepts and business models.

The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising.

The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public. The new funding techniques, known as “ crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups.

This morning I headed down to Palo Alto with iPad 2 in hand to check in with students and speakers at the Stanford BASES BT National Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. For this event, more than a hundred student delegates from campuses around the country gathered at Stanford for an intensive weekend of workshops and talks given by leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and and investors; the speaker lineup included such stars as Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, TiVo co-founder Jim Barton, and Twitter director of corporate strategy Elad Gil. On top of all that, students honed their own entrepreneurial ideas in a business plan competition.

I spent a couple of hours talking with student organizers and delegates at the event and listening to a keynote talk by Marissa Mayer, vice president of location and local services at Google. The video below includes interviews with six student teams, as well as an outtake from Mayer’s talk. (I shot and edited the whole thing on the iPad 2 using iMovie.)

I remember a little under 20 years ago sitting with a mentor of mine discussing business and ideas to generate cash. Little had I known at this time that I would be a VC 20 years later. I cared even less though about technology. The business idea was to buy a certain plot of land and put up a parking garage. The idea occurred because we had together driven around looking for parking and couldn't find anything. Yet we did see this plot of land with nothing on it, prime real estate near a shopping center and no parking garages open to the public within miles. The country was coming out of it's communist slumber and people were buying cars like mad. Plus stores were going up everywhere in that part of town. Fast forward 20 years and go to that spot. There's a parking garage right where we wanted to build one. Nope, I didn't finance it. F&%K!!!!!!

A year ago, a headhunter invited Kevin Dinino to interview for a job similar to the executive position he had gotten laid off from in early 2009. But he passed on the opportunity -- as well as two more interview invites he received earlier this year.

After getting downsized, Mr. Dinino, 32 years old, launched his own business, KCD Public Relations in San Diego. Though he spent the first year making just 60% of his previous salary, he's now earning about the same as he did before, and says he's too smitten with entrepreneurship to ever work for someone else again.

"I'm the decision maker," he says. "I don't have to take orders anymore."