Research Triangle Park is one of the oldest and largest research parks in the United States. Created in the 1950s, the RTP development now spans over 7000 acres and is home to over 170 companies and some 42,000 full-time employees. But the concentration of tech research and development extends beyond the bounds of just the research park itself, and the surrounding Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Cary, North Carolina metro areas are commonly labeled together as the Research Triangle, or "The Triangle."

Like many of the cities, we write about in the Never Mind the Valley series, Research Triangle boasts a strong university and a strong business climate, making the area, in the words of Chris Heivly, "frothy for entrepreneurship."

After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2010:

1. Mitch Ditkoff
   Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of “Awake at the Wheel”, as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.

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2. Jeffrey Phillips
   Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of “Make us more Innovative”, and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

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3. Idris Mootee

   Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

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4. Rich Bendis
   Rich Bendis currently serves as the founding President and CEO of Innovation America (IA), a Global not for profit, private/public partnership focused on accelerating the growth of the entrepreneurial innovation economy in America. IA has a fivefold mission:

By Dan Gundersen

What kinds of businesses create the most new jobs? Most likely you will answer that small businesses create the most new jobs. Yes they do but historically they also lose the most jobs. If during the Great Recession you are treading water—creating as many jobs as are lost—then you deserve kudos from your boss. But let’s be frank, that’s not what the boss wants.

The most important and overlooked concept is net new jobs—those new jobs that remain once we subtract all the jobs lost when firms contract, migrate, and close. These net new jobs are overwhelmingly generated through the sustained profitable expansion of existing companies, also known as ‘high-growth’ firms.

Berkeley — Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a pressure-sensitive electronic material from semiconductor nanowires that could one day give new meaning to the term “thin-skinned.”

“The idea is to have a material that functions like the human skin, which means incorporating the ability to feel and touch objects,” said Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the UC Berkeley research team developing the artificial skin.

The artificial skin, dubbed “e-skin” by the UC Berkeley researchers, is described in a Sept. 12 paper in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature Materials. It is the first such material made out of inorganic single crystalline semiconductors.

An area which a number of countries have been focusing on recently in order to improve their productivity levels is that of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Let us examine entrepreneurship and innovation.

Entrepreneurs make things happen. They are individuals who take a concept and convert it into a reality, a product, policy, or an institution. They become the champions of a new process and are engines of change. Openness to new ideas, freedom from investigation of operation, promotion, and pay based on merit encourage entrepreneurship. On the other hand, excessive regulation, a rigid hierarchy, a lack of freedom, and excessive control discourage entrepreneurship.

Have a gander at this mind-boggling chart put together by Mike Mandel.

It shows the share of real growth of private fixed assets – stuff like machinery, factories, technological equipment, and, yep, housing. Or, as Mandel puts it: “All the privately owned productive assets of the country – for the decade spanning 1999 to 2009.”

That decade, Mandel points out, saw the slowest growth of any decade of the post-war period. What’s worse, more than half of it was made up of housing. Technology broadly accounted for just 14 percent of the increase. ”[T]he net real increase in housing fixed assets was more than triple the net real increase in IT fixed assets,” Mandel concludes. “That may help explain why we are in such dire straits now — plenty of new homes, not enough investment in IT.”

VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.

But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.

College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.

But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.

The Contract for Economy and Employment (in 2005) and the Regional Plan for Innovation (in 2006) are at the root of the Brussels-Capital Region's ambitions in terms of research and technological innovation:

• Strengthen scientific centres of excellence and stimulate activity in three leading edge economic sectors: information & communication technologies, life sciences and the environment.

• Develop a platform for all research stakeholders: businesses, investors, organisations, researchers ... whether from Brussels, Belgium or abroad.

• Encourage scientific study amongst young people in order to renew the pool of researchers in the future.

To achieve these multiple ambitions faster, the Brussels-Capital Region created Research in Brussels in 2008.

The overwhelming majority of innovation experts want EU structural funds to be used to get innovative products and services to the market, according to a new survey. As the European Commission readies its new innovation plan, a consensus is also forming around the need to slash bureaucratic procedures and boost venture capital funding.

The European Commission is working on a new strategy to help industry tap into the so-called 'bio-economy' – a fast-growing business that already provides 22 million jobs.

The two trillion euro sector, which covers everything from agriculture, forestry and fisheries to food, chemicals and biofuels, is an area where Europe must invest, according to Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn.

The main journalist trade union in Europe and the UK wants citizens to be given 'European Democracy Vouchers', funded by internet service providers, which can be used to buy newspapers and pay for online media subscriptions.

The vouchers, which would work in the same way as restaurant vouchers currently used in several countries, would be funded through a levy on internet service providers (ISPs), according to the National Union of Journalists in the UK (NUJ).

Setting up a website should be exciting, not an exercise in frustration.

But I hear from readers like you that having a website built for you or overhauling your existing website often becomes just that — frustrating.

I know the feeling. I’ve been through it numerous times.

The process can be enough to drive you to drink! Why? Because creating a website requires you to learn a little about technology, some complex marketing techniques, and a whole new set of lingo. Sometimes it feels like the Web professionals you hire are babbling in tongues.

The winners of the global Calling All Innovators contest were announced on 15 September 2010 at the 2010 Nokia Developer Summit in London. Congrats to

Eco/Being Green category

• Winner: TripSketch Green Traveler by TripSketch Corp. (United States)
• First Runner-up: RecycleME by John Paul Lozano (Singapore)
• Second Runner-up: Green Plaza by Webdunia.com Pvt. Ltd. (India)

Entertainment category

• Winner:Comics Creator by Nextwave Multimedia Pvt. Ltd. (India)
• First Runner-up: Morpho QuickPanorama by Morpho, Inc. (Japan/United States)
• Second Runner-up: Tudou Mobile by Tudou.com (China)
• Third Runner-up: Angry Birds by Rovio, Ltd. (Finland)

Productivity category

• Winner: BlogRadio by BlogRadio (United States)
• First Runner-up: Ansel-A by Kristopher Kantor (United States)
• Second Runner-up: PlanEasy2D by InfiMatra Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (India)
• Third Runner-up: WakeUp by Roland Michelberger (Hungary)

Life Improvement category

• Winner: eLiteracy by AppCRAFT (South Africa)
• First Runner-up: Car Black Box by Neusoft Mobile Solutions S.R.L. (Romania)
• Second Runner-up: Mobile Babycare by Shenzhen LEG (China)
• Third Runner-up: Medica by IRWAA, LLC (Egypt)

The advice that assistant professors receive about promotion and tenure can vary a great deal, depending on whether you teach at a community college or a research university, and on whether you study fruit-fly genetics or constructions of identity in the works of French playwright Jean Racine.

But there are certain consistent counsels that apply to all disciplines, institutions, and situations that probationary faculty members might face. One bit of advice that I have both received and offered seems universal: Pick your battles. There is considerable confusion, however, about how, when, and why to put that principle into practice.

This is the fifth & final (I promise!) article in a series on what it takes to be a great angel investor (and why this should matter to entrepreneurs).  Part 1 – Access to Great Deal Flow – is here.  After that it’s domain experience, access to VCs and deep pockets.

5. Access to buyers – I saved the least obvious for last.  Most people think that being a successful investor is about finding the right deals and nurturing the teams through the difficult times to come out with a great company.  That’s certainly the most important part of the success.

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

The San Francisco Bay Area hardly needs any dressing up. Its natural beauty speaks for itself. But this short HD film by Simon Christen, a professional animator and aspiring photographer, certainly gives artistic expression to the alluring landscape of this coastal region. Clouds take on the appearance of waves, and lights look like lava, as the collection of time lapses roll by. The film (which you can catch in a striking large format here) comes to us via @AndrewHazlett. Nick Cave provides the accompanying music – “Mary’s Song” from the soundtrack of Assassination of Jesse James.