What the tension between what Christmas is and what some think it should be says about America.

If there's one thing I dislike more than the rampant commercialization of Christmas, it's everybody complaining about the rampant commercialization of Christmas.

Yes, I realize you may have seen Christmas decorations at your local Walgreens well before Halloween this year. And yes, the cheesy Christmas music playing in Starbucks and my barbershop and everywhere else annoys me too. (Frankly, that Mommy-kissing-Santa-Claus song gives me the creeps.) But please spare me the gauzy romanticization of some pure, pre-commercial American Christmas past.

A major new study has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. According to Hal Gregersen, an INSEAD professor and co-author of a six-year-long study into disruptive innovation involving some 3,500 executives, there are five ‘discovery’ skills you need but, he says, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’

Some well-known business leaders such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rely on their own particular strengths since innovative entrepreneurs rarely excel at all five discovery skills. For example, Scott Cook of Intuit is strong in observational skills. Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, does a lot of networking, he says. As for Bezos, “experimentation was his forte,” while Jobs is “incredibly strong at associating.”

Driving from Delhi to Jaipur on the Delhi-Jaipur highway, December 17, 2009—The new 10-lane Gurgaon highway, opened a year back, is already at capacity. The first 30 miles. through the industrial suburbs of Delhi, are stop-and-go traffic. The Maruti-Suzuki car factories and Hero-Honda motorcycle factories and their parasitic ecosystem for auto parts manufactures ring the highway. Commercial trucks, many of them dilapidated and overloaded and lumbering along at 15-20 mph, make up two-thirds of the vehicles on the road. There is a murky haze over the highway, and the industries we are passing by and the winter sun feel distant. The trucks have grizzled, unkempt drivers, many with a navigator/helper riding shotgun with his arm hanging out waving on overtaking vehicles, who blast their horns for added caution. Like in America, these trucks are the blood, and the roads the arteries, of the economy. Unlike America, but like many other things in India, they are inefficient, but supported by abundant, therefore low-cost, labor.

WASHINGTON, Dec 21, 2009 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ ----TechNet, the bipartisan political network of CEOs that promotes the growth of the innovation economy, today released a new poll that found that wide majorities of the American people support their utilities offering more technologies for home energy management and smart metering which are key parts of creating a national energy Smart Grid.

"The American people strongly support cutting-edge innovations to help them save money on their energy bills and change their electricity consumption," said Jim Hawley, Acting CEO of TechNet. "As the world gathered in Copenhagen over the past few weeks to discuss better ways to manage our energy resources, this data proves that our citizens are willing to embrace technology to become more efficient and on save on energy costs. Technology solutions are critical to a robust deployment of a national Smart Grid and helping us be smarter about the way we use energy and our natural resources."

It looks like everyone is buffing up their predictions for another year of astonishing growth by social media. The last several years have brought so many surprises that the next several are promising to yield a bumper crop of “I told you so” fodder for “Pithier than thou” crowd.

My [Dan Robles] prediction for 2010 is that nothing is sacred, including the onslaught 2010 predictions. Therefore, I’ll will go way out on a limb and make my 2011 predictions in 2009.

Entrepreneurship, Jobs and Recovery Top the List

Kauffman's most popular research in 2009 explored past recession trends and
entrepreneurs' roles in economic recoveries

The most popular studies emanating from the nation's largest funder of entrepreneurial research are largely related to the top story of the year: the economy. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has compiled its most in-demand research for 2009--research that was mentioned in news stories generating more than 5 billion media impressions. Data on economic recovery trends, job creation and the role of entrepreneurs are among the Foundation's most quoted, requested, viewed and downloaded studies in 2009.

Figuring out a game of the decade is a tough task because each year the quality improves. And in the past 10 years, video games exploded. Gamers saw developers make good on the promise shown in the 1990s as releases began to look more like playable Pixar cartoons and studios harnessed the power of the technology to invent new types of gameplay. In this decade alone, we saw the introduction of the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

With video games advancing by leaps and bounds, where do we begin to judge? Is it the quality, artistry or innovation? Or maybe it's the storytelling. When putting this list together, we looked at a combination of these traits with an eye toward impact. The following games set the tone for the decade:

Entrepreneurs seeking venture funding in 2010 should be aware of the conditions currently facing venture capital firms, and adjust their strategies and pitches to align with these conditions.

Given the global financial crisis of the past 15 months, VC firms now seeking their own new funds from institutional investors are facing challenges. Institutional portfolio gains are down overall, credit is still tight and risk-adverse everywhere, and the VCs’ restrictions on their own new investments in the last three to four quarters has reduced their ROI, which is the basis of their attracting new capital to deploy in their VC Funds.

So, entrepreneurs, you need to understand the market in which you are pitching, and the pressures on that market. And you must do your homework:

There are some webinars and workshops for entrepreneurs and growing companies coming up in the next few weeks. Check out our latest listing of seminars, conferences, webinars and events for small businesses, brought to you twice a month as a community service by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com.

The opening remarks of this report contains the following brilliant observation:

With financial institutions tightening lending standards in this recent economic crisis, the small businesses that depend on them for credit have been hit particularly hard.

Ya think? Without the ability to sell stock or bonds to raise capital, small businesses have to turn to banks. Banks are required to meet tough new standards and for the most part, keep the loans they write on their balance sheets. To maintain their required ratios, most banks have withdrawn credit from those least able to survive it, small business. A perfect storm.

Several Innovation America and NASVF recommendations have been included in Small Business Financing Forum's Report to the President. What happens next and how can we help with the implementation of the best recommendations for new programs for Innovative Small Businesses? - Bendis

Internet users everywhere have been stumbling across a new internet file transfer service that seems to offer some of the biggest innovations in the world of file sharing services since the invention of file sharing.

A unique and refreshing idea has appeared in the online world. A company by the name of Swap it! Encrypt it! has recently entered the race to provide computer internet users with the latest alternative to sending large email attachments that would otherwise require an FTP, P2P, CDS, DVDS, USB flash drive or expensive courier.

The most difficult challenge facing the modern creative entrepreneur is the funding of innovation. Likewise, the greatest constraint on an innovation economy is the funding of innovation. Having great new ideas is the easy part; actually building something around those ideas is hard work.

As such, the funding all of that hard work is the constraint on innovation economy. Traditionally, the “corporation” served as the legal entity within which all the hard work would be contained and the accounting system through which it would be financed. But even that arrangement does not work well enough to support a new economic paradigm for an innovation economy.

The Task Force on Diversifying the New York State Economy through Industry-Higher Education Partnerships issued its final report last week. Governor David Paterson created the Task Force in May to examine how the State can better utilise its university-based research and development resources to drive economic growth. David Skorton, task force chair and President of Cornell University, joined fellow members to present their findings at the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan, reports EmpireStateNews.net.

Skorton said: "We know that New York has all the right ingredients to get our state moving to where we should be - as a national leader in innovation. But there are challenges we need to meet. Our task force has identified areas in which we can improve our practices and target investments so that we can foster an 'innovation ecosystem' to achieve sustainable economic growth in New York for the future." Key recommendations to create this 'innovation ecosystem, EmpireStateNews.net reports, include:

Follow this link for innovation contests.

What does the Copenhagen Communique mean to an entrepreneur? Am I being too blunt to suggest the answer is “nothing?”

Entrepreneurs are focused on their customers as the source of inspiration and profits. Laws passed by politicians receive entrepreneurial attention only when they impact their customers’ ability to buy or their cost of operations. The Copenhagen Communique is a non-event to entrepreneurs except that it creates uncertainty on what rules governments might change in the future.

But I hope that our future environment and economy will become more sustainable as a nexus grows between pioneering entrepreneurs launching price competitive and sustainable solutions and consumers’ search for cost less, mean more goods and services.

In a major departure from conventional climate wisdom, Thomas Friedman argues in today’s New York Times that the UNFCCC framework is broken and should be replaced by a global competition in the clean-tech industry, which he says the United States can and should lead. “Let the Earth Race begin,” he declares, contrasting this with the long-dominant “Earth Day” strategy:

“This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need…

Developed nations are trying to water down their emission commitments – no wonder the rest of the world is angry

Entering its second week, just days before the arrival of the political leaders, the Copenhagen climate conference is in the grip of a serious deadlock.

Developing countries, led by the Africans, on Monday insisted that the conference place top priority on the developed countries' emission reduction commitments, and on the continuation of the Kyoto protocol (KP), which is the legally binding treaty under which the commitments are to be made.

For a whole morning, the work in several "contact groups" stopped while the developing countries' leaders met with the Danish climate change minister Connie Hedegaard, who apparently agreed that the KP track of the Copenhagen talks would be given due attention. She also tried to allay fears that the Danes would throw in their own new draft for the heads of governments to consider and adopt on 18 December.

When you invest in private companies, Scott Shane says you shouldn't rely on what the majority thinks

Myth: Most angel investors can predict what's going to happen with angel investing.

Reality: Every year, the Angel Capital Assn., the industry trade group, conducts a survey of the leaders of its nearly 200 member groups. Part of this survey asks about the current year's investments, and part of it asks for predictions about the next year.

Because one can compare the predictions made for 2008 (as shown in the 2008 report with the actual outcomes for 2008 (as shown in the 2009 report, I was able to examine how accurate the angel group leaders are in predicting what will happen in the market for angel capital.

Wiley (owner of Blackwell) has published a list of the most popular articles in their journals in 2009. It’s hard to know what the definition means, since the criteria are not explicit (e.g. it includes articles published before 2009), and no rankings or numerical scores given.

However, scanning through the list is one article on open innovation — the Enkel, Gassmann and Chesbrough introductory article to September special issue on open innovation. The article — “Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon” — is available for free download.

“Save your receipts” may be the rule in the workplace for getting reimbursed for expenses, but those slips of paper are just so much trash to a college student.

That’s what Drexel University student Bradley Ericson pondered as he observed transactions at the checkout counter at campus dining halls.

Students have a meal plan and tap it electronically by using their student identification card. But the cashier still hands over a printed piece of thermal paper. Soon after, that receipt winds up on the floor or counter.