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.

If cleantech is the innovation focus du jour, where should forward-thinking investors look for the next most interesting investment opportunity?

Think ‘integration,’ specifically IT and cleantech, says Kef Kasdin, general partner with Battelle Ventures and Innovation Valley Partners. “Smart-grid technologies – deploying networking technologies to enable better energy utilization and to obviate the need to build more fossil fuel power plants – offer significantly differentiated, breakthrough technologies,” she says.

SENATE PASSES SBIR EXTENSION (CR) BILL

The Senate has passed a bill to extend the SBIR/STTR and some other SBA programs through July 31, 2010.  (This does not affect the DoD's SBIR/STTR program that is good through September 30, 2010.) 

This 3 month extender, S. 3253 was led by Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and ranking member Olympia Snowe (R-ME). 

Most of you that follow the SBIR Insider know that the Senate wanted a longer leash, perhaps as long as a one year extension, but true to form and typical of the House Small Minded (oops) I meant House Small Business Committee, three months was the maximum Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) was willing to give. 

This now marks the 7th in a series of short term CRs since 2008 to extend the SBIR/STTR program. 

Chicago (PRWEB) April 23, 2010 -- Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP partner and chair of the firm's Cleantech and Renewables group Richard B. Hoffman provides a detailed and cautionary tale for innovators in the renewable energy and clean technology fields who regularly share information on their inventions with the external sources and vendors they work with. Hoffman summarized these issues in an article which appeared in the April 2010 issue of Biomass Magazine (http://www.biomassmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=3622).

"Often in working with people outside of one's company when dealing with research and development problems, innovators need to share information to work towards a solution," said Hoffman. "But if not navigated cautiously, these third-party inquiries can have serious consequences for innovators and the intellectual property rights of their inventions."

Interactions with third-parties frequently arise when an innovator's organization simply is unable to supply all the technical requirements for an invention internally. Innovators reach out to academics, outside experts and consultants, equipment builders and subcontractors, prospective business partners, testing companies, repair technicians, software developers, and sales representatives throughout various stages of developing and testing the invention. Problems can arise when information is exchanged and there is no clear indication of who retains control of it.

From guest panels about the challenges women face in the technology sector, to interviews about the challenges they face in a male dominated work environment, this collection of videos shines a light on women in tech.

The list includes Caterina Fake explaining how she became co-founder of Hunch and Flickr, as well as Dianne Marsh speaking about the under representation of women in computer sciences. Also included is a video about a data center a women built, and an interview with a college student majoring in computer science. Best of all is the top video She's Geeky, which is about an all-female unconference facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin. (ReadWriteWeb's Mobile Summit on May 7 is going to be facilitated by Hamlin.)

On a recent morning, a half-dozen young software engineers hunched over laptops at The Cup, a café on bustling Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. They were holding an informal meeting about a social networking app they're developing and seemed to be on a first-name basis with the parade of techies walking through the door.

An influx of entrepreneurs like these has changed the face of this Colorado city of 98,000, making it a destination for Internet startups. With the University of Colorado as an anchor and a backyard full of mountains as lifestyle bait, Boulder now has the highest concentration of software engineers per capita in the nation. It's second only to Silicon Valley in percentage of workers employed in tech, according to the American Electronics Assn. Best-selling author and urban development expert Richard Florida says it has the greatest concentration of the "creative class"—scientists, artists, engineers, and the like—in the U.S.

The university and prestigious research labs such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Institute of Standards & Technology have long attracted well-educated folks to Boulder. In the 1970s, Celestial Seasonings and StorageTek helped foster a robust natural foods industry and a thriving tech community. Over the years, software, data services, and biotech blossomed as employees of those companies branched out to pursue other interests. The combination of entrepreneurship, engineering talent, and a counterculture vibe gave rise to many pre-bubble Net startups.

Dan Rosen, Joe Wallin and William Carleton: As we have previously blogged, Senator Dodd's financial reform bill has posed a grave threat to angel investment and startup communities nationwide by virtue of two provisions in the bill that would have upended Regulation D.

These "reforms" were ostensibly to address the problem of unscrupulous brokers, dealers, and promoters who have abused Reg D to defraud investors. The problem was, the provisions in Sen. Dodd's bill were unnecessarily broad.

Fraud is uncommon in angel investment transactions, and there were other ways to reform Reg D without gutting the rule that is working well to make startup and angel financing safe and efficient. Here's a quick refresher on the two problematic provisions in Sen. Dodd's bill, problematic for startups and angels.

This week, the American of Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment announced the 10 best green buildings completed in the past year. It's filled with all manner of green technologies--from passive heating and cooling using heat pumps, to man-made wetlands, to reclaimed materials. Here's a slideshow of all ten.

355 11th Street by Aidlin Darling Design. It's hard to tell, but the building was once a 100-year-old, derelict industrial warehouse. But the site happened to sit on the National Register of Historical Places--meaning the architects had to replicate the area of metal cladding and windows on the former building, in new materials.

For 30 years John Margolies has been documenting the diners, drive-ins and motor lodges that remain along our highways as box stores and strip malls slowly erase the quirk and character of consumerism. His book Roadside America collects nearly 400 photographs of this vanishing vision of over-the-top architecture, automotive freedom and the American dream.

This country runs on innovation. The American success story -- from Ben Franklin's bifocals to Thomas Edison's light bulb to Henry Ford's assembly line to today's advanced microprocessors -- is all about inventing our future. The companies we ran, Microsoft and DuPont, were successful because they invested deeply in new technologies and new ideas.

But our country is neglecting a field central to our national prospect and security: energy. Although the information technology and pharmaceutical industries spend 5 to 15 percent of their revenue on research and development each year, U.S. companies' spending on energy R&D has averaged only about one-quarter of 1 percent of revenue over the past 15 years.

And despite talk about the need for "21st-century" energy sources, federal spending on clean energy research -- less than $3 billion -- is also relatively small. Compare that with roughly $30 billion that the U.S. government annually spends on health research and $80 billion on defense research and development.

How many social media channels do you actively participate in?

If you’re one of the millions who have caught the social media wave in the past few years, there is a decent chance that you or someone you know felt pressured to climb aboard for fear of being left behind or mocked by the cool kids as being out of touch.

It’s a reasonable concern, especially for business people who have enough on their plate without feeling compelled to microupdate and engage at all hours of the day and night with whomever is up for a chinwag on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Skype, blog comments, instant message, email and so on.

The truth is, depending on how efficiently you manage your time and how much of it others demand of you, the number of online platforms in which you can actively participate is quite limited. “Actively participate” does not mean merely broadcasting your blog’s RSS feed. It means taking the time to make connections, to discuss ideas, to help others – to share the love.

In discussing employee-driven innovation, having a technology platform to deliver on objectives is a key part of a company’s strategy. Hard to get everyone tuned in when you rely only on email and conversations with your cubicle mates. But that’s just one factor. There are many other considerations for companies seeking to vault to the top of their industries through greater innovation.

One set of characteristics are what I term factors of “emergent” innovation. I use emergent here in the sense of conditions which let good ideas find their level inside a company, regardless of source. Think of this as an alternative to R&D-led innovation, or innovations decided solely in the executive suite and cast down for implementation by the troops.

Of course, there are more than six factors to emergent innovation. For instance, the actual process of turning someone’s idea into an innovation project has several factors of its own. But these six are a good start.

This post is long. The links below will take you directly to a specific section.

1. Healthy use of doubt
   
2. Rough alternatives
   
3. Experiments
   
4. Resource margin
   
5. Positive deviants
   
6. Diversity of viewpoints
   

The heads of the worlds five largest intellectual property offices agreed to move ahead on ten Foundation Projects, to provide a framework to support work-sharing, at a meeting in Guilin, China last week.

The five IP offices, or IP5, are the European Patent Office (EPO); the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The meeting was also attended by the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, Francis Gurry, as an observer.

The heads agreed the ten Foundation Projects are crucial in building a work-sharing environment and expressed their willingness to explore appropriate ways to speed up the process.

The importance of transparency in the IP5 process was agreed, as was the need for effective communication among the five offices, particularly with and between examiners, and with stakeholders.

Underlining the importance of the WIPO-administered Patent Cooperation Treaty in work-sharing, the five heads reaffirmed their commitment to collaborating with WIPO to improve the system, so its role can be further strengthened, as the vehicle for efficient work-sharing.