Israel, a global cleantech powerhouse, is now attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in cleantech investment every year.

The country gets more from its soil, water, air, and sunlight than most other nations on earth.

Why has such a small country been able to position itself a world leader in cleantech?

The answer, I believe, is a combination of many factors: its history, attitude of the people, ingenuity, and challenges to survival.

According to my research, the following are major highlights of Israel’s cleantech leadership to date in 2010:

1. Israel is the Silicon Valley of water. Relative to its small size, Israel has devoted more resources to the development of waste water treatment and reclamation than any other country in the world. Seventy percent of its waste water is recycled, three times the figure of number two: Spain. Israel is the birthplace and world leader in drip irrigation, which has literally turned deserts into farmlands. The Israeli firm Netafim, a $500 million high-tech drip-irrigation giant, is a world leader in smart irrigation technology and has been credited with starting the drip irrigation revolution. Israel Newtech, which promotes Israeli clean energy and water technologies, has identified hundreds of water companies. It's estimated that Israel's water industry was valued at $1.4 billion in 2008 and could reach $2.5 billion by 2011. The sector is supported by early stage private and government investment programs, such as the Kinrot incubator, 11 investments to date) and the Office of the Chief Scientist (several million dollars in early stage R&D grants), as well as large industrial players such as IDE Technologies, a global leader in water desalination and Mekorot, the country’s innovative technology-oriented water carrier.

Venture capitalist  Randy Komisar suggested today that Web startups may not actually need his money — at least, not right away.

Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, reached that conclusion in a roundabout way during a question-and-answer session at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco. His main point was a piece of common entrepreneurial advice: To paraphrase Komisar’s new book on the topic, startups need to “get to plan B.” They need to cycle through different ideas with as little time and money as possible to discover which of their assumptions are wrong. For startups in fields like biotech or cleantech or enterprise technology, that process may take months or years of work, and it probably requires sizable funding. But at a consumer Internet company, things should be much faster and cheaper.

“So why do we need venture capitalists?” Komisar asked. “They may not be as important.” That means he might tell an early-stage Web startup looking for funding, “You get my money later, at a higher valuation, when you need to accelerate a good idea to a great one.”

Another interesting — and quotable — part of the discussion covered Komisar’s idea of a startup’s “analog” and “antilog.” Every startup idea involves a few “leap of faith” assumptions. As entrepreneurs explore those assumptions, he said, they should look for companies that successfully built on those ideas (analogs), as well as companies that used those ideas and failed (antilogs).

In an interview yesterday with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bill Clinton highlighted the crucial role of American colleges and universities in a world that is, in his words, “unequal, unstable and unsustainable.” The back story to the President’s vision involves both good news and bad news. The bottom line is maximizing the impact of these great institutions is not simple but definitely worth the effort.

First, the good news. If you are looking for a long term bet on drivers of innovation in our society, universities are the place to start, because they are going to be around long after the newest “flavor of the week” has come and gone. Consider the following: Of the 85 institutions in existence since 1522, 70 are universities (two others are the British Parliament and the Catholic Church). As Dean Roger Martin recently told me, universities have long runways. Increasing their impact may take a while but you can be sure it is worth the effort.

Fresh from passing a landmark angel investor tax credit, Minnesota lawmakers are advancing a bill that would, in time, radically alter high-tech economic development in the state by concentrating authority in a single public-private entity.

The proposed Minnesota Science and Technology Authority, modeled after programs like Third Frontier in Ohio and The Ben Franklin Technology Partners in Pennsylvania, will craft a long-term science and technology strategy. More importantly, it would also oversee economic development efforts, including money to retain locally grown companies and attract out of state ones.

“People felt hope” after the angel credit passed, said Sen. Kathy Saltzman (D-Woodbury). “Now that we have your attention, this is the next step.”

Who is online? As the figure shows, the majority of adults from 18 to 50 are living some form of digital life. Even older adults 65 and older are growing in numbers with an estimated 38% online.

Now that they are online – what are they doing there? A recent Forrester study indicated that 60% of baby-boomers are avid social media users. Whereas many industry leaders consider boomers too old to embrace technology, in fact their presence in the various social media outlets is up 40% from last year.  Women over the age of 55 are in fact the fastest growing segment on Facebook. Nonetheless, boomers don’t seem to post status updates, check in at foursquare, or post twitter feeds as often as their younger social media predecessors. So, what are they doing with social media?

Consumers are trying to fulfill both rational and emotional needs. In addition, to finding basic information about drugs or specific health conditions, they are seeking reassurance, support and, at times, validation – digital healing. Reassurance that the behaviors they are pursuing are in the mainstream. Support that they are not alone as either patient or family caregiver. Validation that the medications, devices and health services they are adopting are correct.

ERIC RIES and Steven Blank think they have a better way to build a start-up, one that takes less time and money to try new ideas and find paying customers. They are leading proponents of the “lean start-up” — a fresh approach to creating companies that has attracted much attention in the last year or so among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technologists and investors.

The concept is gaining a following beyond the Valley as well. “If it works, it will reduce failure rates for entrepreneurial ventures and boost innovation,” says Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That’s a big deal for the economy.”

The term “lean start-up” was coined by Mr. Ries, 31, an engineer, entrepreneur and blogger. His inspiration, he says, was the lean manufacturing process, fine-tuned in Japanese factories decades ago and focused on eliminating any work or investment that doesn’t produce value for customers.

Silicon Valley. Boston. Singapore. Ireland. Scandinavia. Munich. When it comes to promoting entrepreneurial culture, some places just seem to 'get it right': serving as powerful magnets for talent, money, and ideas, and as powerful incubators for tomorrow's best companies.This book draws on extensive new research to pinpoint the key reasons why some locations succeed in the quest to become a technology centre, while others fail. The authors answer crucial questions about the world's entrepreneurial hotspots: What makes these locations so special? Which local characteristics are inherent? Which can be fostered? What are the best ways to promote local entrepreneurship? And what can budding centres of entrepreneurship do in order to enter the game?Creating Regional Wealth in the Global Economy analyses the key factors for developing regional success and wealth in the Networked Ecomomy. It identifies the best practices that business and government leaders need to consider to develop their area into a powerhouse of the future.

At the 99% Conference in New York last week, venture capitalist Fred Wilson gave a presentation entitled ‘Ten Ways To Be Your Boss’. He argued that there are many ways to be an entrepreneur but unfortunately the iconic image of the entrepreneur is so paramount that it causes a lot of people to doubt that they too can run a business. He told the audience:

“There are many, many ways to be an entrepreneur. We can all be our own boss – it’s energizing to work in a place that you imagined and created and where the culture comes from you and your partners.”

The U.S. economy hasn't officially emerged from recession, but some observers fear a new bubble is already inflating in the venture capital industry.

Companies with the word "social" in their mission statement - better still "social" and "mobile" - have sparked a frenzy among early-stage investors. The rush to plug cash into the hottest startups has propelled investments into nine figures and valuations into billion dollar territory, on math that often has more to do with promise than profits.

"The pricing just gets crazy," said Pete Bodine, managing director of Allegis Capital, a Palo Alto venture capital firm. "You're almost worth more before you've proven out your model. That's usually one of the early indicators of a bubble."

(Fortune) -- For most entrepreneurs-in-training, the best part of a business plan competition is the feedback from judges who pitch and scrutinize business ideas in the real world. But the judges also benefit: Events like these are ideal grounds for casing new ideas and networking with peers.

At the recent Rice University Business Plan Competition in Houston, two judges, both seasoned venture investors, riffed with Fortune on the state of today's venture capital market, and what they look for in a business pitch.

Ed Olkkola is managing director of Teakwood Capital, a private equity buyout fund. Olkkola built his career at Motorola and Compaq before creating the hardware and systems practice at Austin Ventures. He has served as a judge at the Rice contest for seven years.

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What is the memory capacity of the human brain? Is there a physical limit to the amount of information it can store?
—J. Hawes, Huntington Beach, Calif.

Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, replies:

“Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full,” a student with a particularly tiny head asks his classroom teacher in a classic Far Side comic by Gary Larson. The deadpan answer to this question would be, “No, your brain is almost certainly not full.” Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime.

The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Like most successful freelancers, Brett Slater of Slater's Garage Ads & Audio earns a majority of his income from clients who hire him outright, agree on a contract, and compensate him for all his work on their projects. But roughly 15 to 20 percent of the audio and video producer's income is generated from an unlikely source: crowdsourcing websites and contests.

"I started doing video as a hobby," says Slater, a longtime radio man who added video production to his freelance repertoire in 2007. "I got hooked on YouTube and started looking at the video contests for fun. And they started paying off."

We're not talking chump change. In 2008, Slater took the $20,000 grand prize in a contest sponsored by the Maine Association of Realtors (see video) and the $15,000 grand prize in a contest held by Honda (see video). The time he spent creating each short video? The better part of a weekend.

Who inspires your team?

Who develops the ideas, promotes an environment that fosters creative camaraderie, nourishes esprit de corps -- and steers the organization toward greatness?

In short, who is your Chief Innovation Officer?

Every organization that grows by creating new products or services or aspires to out-class the competition needs a Chief Innovation Officer, or CIO.

In Robert's Rules of Innovation, "Inspiration" is the first and most important of the 10 imperatives. Inspiration drives everything else -- from ideation to new product development to risk-taking itself.

Yet the selection of the CIO, and the definition of his or her tasks in seeing that these challenges are skillfully mastered, can make the difference between innovative success and failure.

Personalization is a key part of Internet search, providing more relevant results and gaining loyal customers in the process. But new research highlights the privacy risks that this kind of personalization can bring. A team of European researchers found that they were able to hijack Google's personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users' Web search histories.

Google has plugged most of the holes identified in the research, but the researchers say that other personalized services are likely to have similar vulnerabilities. "The goal of this project was to show that personalized services are very dangerous in terms of privacy because they can leak information," says Claude Castelluccia, a senior research scientist at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, who was involved with the work. The work will be presented this summer at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Berlin, Germany.

The researchers got hold of personal information by taking advantage of the fact that Google uses two different protocols to communicate with its users' browsers. Google protects sensitive information, such as passwords, by using a protocol called "https" that encrypts the data as it's communicated. Other times, when dealing with search queries for example, Google uses the ordinary "http" protocol, which sends information back and forth in the clear. The researchers say this mixed design can inadvertently reveal information.

Figuring out how to finance a company is easier for some founders than others. One situation that can make picking the right financing strategy very difficult is when founders have a business that could potentially make a great lifestyle business or a great venture-scale business. To clarify, this is a somewhat unique situation, as many startups are either not viable as small lifestyle businesses or do not have the potential to achieve venture scale. I call companies that could become either a viable lifestyle business or a viable venture scale business fringe companies.

To clarify, by lifestyle business I’m referring to smaller businesses (typically less than $10 million in annual sales at peak) that the founders don’t intend to sell; rather, they intend to extract profits from the business in perpetuity. A venture-scale business is one that grows to much more than $10 million in annual revenue and has real potential to ramp to $100 million or more.

Where do innovations come from? How do you generate an idea that is so radical yet so compelling that it fundamentally changes customer expectations or the cost structure of an industry or the basis for competition?

Many ascribe innovative ideas to a mysterious mix of happenstance, individual brilliance and the occasional bolt of lightning. Clearly those things are part of the equation, but there seems to be more at play in the minds of radical innovators like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos, who have come up with genuine breakthrough ideas.

Look at case after case of successful business innovation, and an interesting pattern begins to emerge. What you find, time and again, is that innovation comes not from some unique inspiration but from looking at the world in a different way. It comes from having a fresh perspective, an alternate way of seeing things, an angle of view that lets you see through the familiar and spot the unseen.

Business Xpansion Journal (Duran) - “The United States doesn't have an innovation plan, where the rest of the world has a plan and is working very hard on it,” says Paul Fowler, research director and editor of NACFAM Weekly for the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing. The countries are constructing their advantages the same way we did in certain areas of education and R&D, Fowler adds. “It is just that the rest of the world has a lot of growth potential because they were so far behind in us in education and the amount of R&D, not just as a percentage of GDP, but also overall investment. They are catching up because they are making the investments we have always had.”

“Our competitors from Britain and Finland to Japan and South Korea have created national innovation strategies designed specifically to link science, technology, and innovation with economic strength,” noted William B. Bonvillian, director, MIT's Washington office, during a presentation at “The Global Innovation Context for Manufacturing Advance,” hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in November. What's more, these countries have also formed new innovation institutions to coordinate these strategies.

“The United States is one of the only countries among the world's leading economies that lack a true national innovation strategy and the institutional focus to coordinate it — OSTP could play this role but must be empowered and staffed to do so,” Bonvillian told the conference's attendees.

Emergent Energy Group has received the Babson College Student Business of the Year Award (SBYA).

Emergent plans, designs, and facilitates the advancement of community-based alternative energy projects and sustainable ventures. Its services help public and private entities to assess their existing renewable energy resources, and to optimize their energy portfolios into the future. http://emergentgroup.com/

Runner-up business in the SBYA competition is ThinkLite LLC, a company created in an effort to help Americans go green without the green price tag. It is an energy efficiency firm dedicated to helping communities, businesses, and homes save money on monthly energy bills while saving the environment.  http://www.thinklite.net/

The Student Business of the Year Award, established in 1959, is presented by the Babson College Alumni Association in recognition of an undergraduate student’s outstanding commitment to launching and operating a successful enterprise while pursuing an education. Selection is based on initiative, character, originality, persistence and success, with emphasis on the learning experience. Winners exemplify Babson’s entrepreneurial tradition.  For more information, visit http://www3.babson.edu/Events/studentventuring/sbya.cfm

The Student Business of the Year Award presentation was among Babson’s Celebrating Student Venturing events this year.

The SBA said today $2 million in grants are available to governors of states and territories to support programs for innovative and technology-driven businesses.

Under the agency’s Federal and State Technology partnership program, the grant funds are used for outreach and technical assistance to science and technology-driven small businesses with an emphasis on helping socially and economically disadvantaged firms compete in the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs.