Position: CEO of a breakthrough idea/company

Hours: 60-90 hours per week

Reports to: Board of Directors: 3-5 people who are great and supportive but will also drive you nuts because the whole reason you quit your job to start a company was to not have a boss and now you have 3-5 bosses. Technically speaking, they also could possibly hire in your replacement. (Hey, they’re not your friends; nor are they even the shareholders’ friends; their legal obligation is to consider the best interests of the company as a whole). For the high growth route, a Board is totally worth it because the right Board of Directors extends your reach and knowledge immeasurably.

Company Description: Acme Startup is a totally new, breakthrough idea that will grow to $50 million or more in revenues and will fundamentally change the industry in question. It will be in its industry what Southwest was to airlines, Starbucks was to coffee, Facebook was to social networking, and Amgen is to therapeutics.

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Dow Chemical says it is ready for its thin-film solar roofing shingles to go on sale next year — one of the first technologies to make solar panels and roofs one and the same, and a step toward increasing the affordability and physical appeal of going solar for residential consumers.

Dubbed the “Powerhouse” line, the shingles do for rooftop solar what Apple has done for mobile phones: make functional look sexy.

But not so fast. The shingles are still being put through rigorous tests. Dow wants to ensure that the shingles it churns out can live up to the 25-year warranty it plans to offer (standard for the roofing industry). The shingles themselves are pretty pricey, covering 4 square feet and carrying a price tag of $40 each after government subsidies.

I just watched a video from one of the TED conferences that left me stunned in amazement. The subject was the architecture of a theater, and the video illustrated a different way for designers work with clients. The video suggested something to me that high tech could badly use: meaningful, solution-oriented innovation, and not just better technology. What the industry needs is a manifesto — a call to action for people to work together as designers, coders, and customers.

Joshua Prince-Ramus, principal of the architectural firm REX, believes that his profession essentially went off the rails over the last five decades. Design and construction became far more complex and, as in all areas of life, litigation increased. Architects faced potential liability, and so they stepped back from execution and redefined their roles as pure creation, “as if you could actually create without knowing how to execute, and as if you could actually execute without knowing how to create.” Architecture became the process of “genius” and its product was the sketch, with execution — bringing the concept to life — an activity unworthy of the designer.

Australia’s $31 billion creative economy is powering ahead, making a real contribution to the nation’s economic performance and flexibility, according to a new report.

The Creative Economy Report Card was released today by the ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) and is the first in a regular series analyzing the dynamics and contribution of the creative sector – one of the fastest growing elements in the overall economy over the past two decades.

“The creative sector is one of the driving forces of post-industrial society. It is now recognized around the world as a key element in national economic performance, employment, education and creativity. It has come into even greater prominence in the UK, for example, as the financial sector has suffered such a huge downturn” says CCI director Professor Stuart Cunningham.

I like talking about failure because I do it a lot. I also like talking about failure because it helps me understand what needs to change in order to succeed. As Thomas Alvin Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." As a region we don't talk about failure enough – it's like our crazy aunt kept hidden in the attic. Sometimes we are too quick to pounce on failure, giving it a bad rap. But we have to keep in mind that most successes are born of early failures. As any successful entrepreneur or innovator will tell you, failing, especially forward, is a great, healthy and necessary thing (at least that's what I keep telling myself every time I fail).

So here is my list of Pittsburgh's five biggest regional failures – all of which have led, in one form or another, to success!

April 14, 2010 —
The America COMPETES Act is up for reauthorization, and that's a good thing. Or at least, it’s a good thing if Congress seizes the opportunity to both invest and innovate as it extends one of the nation's most critical vehicles for keeping the nation competitive.

Passed in 2007, in part in response to the National Academies' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, the act remains a signal authorization of critical programs and funding focused on science, technology, science education, and research and development (R&D).

Through its first authorization the act has sustained important initiatives in the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Among those needed initiatives have been major efforts to increase the nation's research investments; strengthen science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education from grade school to grad school; and construct a true technology innovation and commercialization infrastructure.

This time around, Gates will be conducting the college tour not for Microsoft but for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and speaking not just about technology but about the broader issues facing the globe.

Writing about this Morgan Stanley chart on his blog, mega-VC Fred Wilson writes:

"Even though I've been saying for years that social networking will one day usurp email, it's a bit shocking to see that it has.

There are some caveats. My kids use Facebook as their primary inbox (they also use gmail). So some of what they do on Facebook is actually email.

But even so, it looks like email's reign as the king of communication is ending and social networking is now supreme."

Tyler Jordan Pluhacek--but he goes by the name of TJ--is a 16-year-old high-school student from Lake Oswego, just south of Portland, Oregon. His favorite subjects are Math and Spanish, and he's an accomplished guitarist and harmonica player with a passion for Blues and Ragtime from the '20s and '30s. He lives at home with his Mom and younger sister. Oh, and he's designed a $.99 app for the iPad.

You might expect a teen developer to come up with a frivolous app--a game, perhaps, or something more throwaway. Not TJ. NoteLook is a pretty serious tool aimed at both students and business people, and it helps you organize your note-taking. But then, TJ is not your average teen. He's extraordinarily focused--when asked what he wanted to do after school, this was his response. "I've spent more time than most people looking at my options. When I go to college, I want to obtain degrees in both computer science and business management, and my plan is to become an entrepreneur and start up my own software development business."

CHICAGO (Reuters.com) - Longstanding stereotypes of Appalachia conjure images of a backwater region blighted by poverty. Now the state of Ohio is working to change that perception by promoting the region as an emerging hotbed for startups in industries such as high tech and alternative energy.

Entrepreneurs like Craig Newbold, a software developer who grew up locally in the town of East Liverpool along the Ohio River between Youngstown and Pittsburgh, are betting on the area's future. Newbold returned home after retiring from an information technology career in Seattle to found software development firm Newbold Technologies in 2003, with the aim of creating local opportunities.

"To me, areas like this have a lot of diamonds in the rough," said Newbold, whose father made his living running a local filling station in the area once known as the ‘pottery capital of the world.' "People that want to live here have the aptitude and the ability, but need to be developed."

This article is so important, that I [author] am providing it in its entirety to you from upstartadvisors:

I attended a New York Entrepreneur Week panel today about raising seed and angel capital. The panel of seasoned investor consisted of: Brian Cohen and Geoff Judge from NY Angels, Owen Davis from NYC Seed, Jay Levy from Zelkova Ventures, and Dave McClure from Founders Fund.

One of my favorite questions was “What are your biggest pet peeves about how startups make their pitches?” Here are the top four:

1) Pitching your idea, not the problem you are solving

2) Ignoring the environment, including market size, trends and competition

3) Lack of deep knowledge about the customer – often as the result of developing products in a library instead of out amongst customers

4) Failing to explain founders’ professional accomplishments in quantitative terms (e.g. Instead of just “john ran marketing at xyz co”, think “as VP marketing at xyz co, John reduced customer acquisition costs by 25% and attracted 250K unique visitors in two years.”

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm recently reminded everyone about Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker's thesis that mobile is the next major wave of computing innovation.

Happily, each wave has been vastly larger than the one the came before it, so there's good stuff in store.

Mary spoke in detail about the mobile explosion at Web 2.0 last year.

Her entire presentation is embedded below (courtesy of Morgan Stanley). The section on Mobile starts on page 28. We have also put together the key Mobile highlights with our commentary below.

It’s said that on Twitter it’s not the number of followers you have that counts, it’s how many times you’ve been retweeted. And there’s some truth to that. While follower counts can be tricked, inflated or simply represent the number of people actively ignoring you, retweets show people actually engaging with what you’re putting out there. Having your content retweeted by your network means adding exposure, additional authority, and, more importantly, that people like what your brand is doing or saying. And that’s a pretty big metric to keep an eye on while participating in social media.

Last month I wrote about 5 ways to track Twitter sentiment. After that post, SmallBizTrends reader Mark Harbeke emailed me looking for tools to help him track retweets. I was able to offer him couple early recommendations, but it made me want to dig deeper to see what was available for SMB owners looking to track retweets.

Here are some of the most valuable tools I stumbled across to help SMB owners measure influence.

Europe could meet at least 80% of its energy needs from renewables by 2050 without paying more for electricity than it would by continuing with current fossil-fuel based infrastructure, according to a new report by the European Climate Foundation (ECF).

The 'Roadmap 2050' report, published on 13 April, lays down pathways for decarbonising the EU's power sector in order to cut greenhouse gases by at least 80% by 2050.

It assessed the implications of scenarios where 40%, 60% and 80% of Europe's energy comes from renewable sources, complemented with nuclear and conventional power plants equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities.

At the University of Miami a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an entrepreneurship class with roughly 40 students. Most of them were juniors and seniors, joined by a small number of law students. The course had so far covered the theoretical literature on entrepreneurship, but on this particular day all the students wanted to talk about was their own futures.

Studying entrepreneurship in the midst of a severe recession and stumbling recovery, and in the months leading up to graduation, has made these students acutely aware that their own economic futures may not be entirely secure. Make no mistake: jobs are front and center in students’ minds. Both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve expect the unemployment rate to remain at relatively high levels for the next few years, falling from the present 9.7 percent to around 8 percent by the end of 2012.

Today at its Mountain View headquarters, Google is holding a special event for CIOs called Atmosphere. The event revolves around cloud-based services like Google Apps and Docs, and Google has an impressive roster of speakers lined up. In a panel called “Google’s Innovators”, some of Google’s most prominent engineers took the stage to talk about the future of the Cloud and a variety of other topics, including HTMl5 vs native applications, net neutrality, and more. My live notes are below.

Panelists:
Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist
Alan Eustace, SVP, Engineering & Research
Jeff Huber, SVP, Engineering
Moderator: Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise.

Q: What are you most proud of seeing during your time at Google?
Alan: Search, Universal search, bringing together images, huge web. Doing that all in one place has been very important to me. And also recency. Our advertising and our publishers — the partnerships we have with them is huge.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the commercialization route chosen by university scientists funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the NIH and how their chosen commercialization path is influenced by whether or not the university technology transfer office is involved. In particular, the paper identifies two routes for scientific commercialization. Scientists who select the TTO route by commercializing their research through assigning all patents to their university TTO account for 70% of NCI patenting scientists. Scientists who choose the backdoor route to commercialize their research, in that they do not assign patents to their university TTO, comprise 30% of patenting NCI scientists. The findings show a clear link between the commercialization mode and the commercialization route. Scientists choosing the backdoor route for commercialization, by not assigning patents to their university to commercialize research, tend to rely on the commercialization mode of starting a new firm. By contrast, scientists who select the TTO route by assigning their patents to the university tend to rely on the commercialization mode of licensing.

Facebook runs a website that gets a quarter of a trillion page views per month. The culture around Facebook has led to many popular videos. Some of the most viewed videos about Facebook are simply music videos and many of those didn't make our list.

While we did consider the number of views in our selection, we primarily focused on videos that illustrate all the ways Facebook has changed our lives. From Farmville, to warnings about losing privacy to what people don't like about Facebook, this list of videos shows society's reaction to Facebook's sudden rise in popularity. Also included are two 60 Minutes interviews with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They're from 2008, back when Facebook only had 10% of the users they have today.

Recently, the blog Grasshopper conducted a survey, "The Entrepreneur State of Mind," and the results have now been summarized in an infographic by Jason Lankow of Column Five Media.

The picture it paints adds some demographics to a fairly amorphous set of people. As you'd expect, entrepreneurs are largely youngish, broke, hungry--and probably far more optimistic than your average bear. The weirdest thing was that 70% are male. Which sounds like a sampling error, but looking around at today's businesses, it does seem like almost all were started by men:

Innovation is the key to developing new revenue streams, staying competitive and creating jobs. Adam Richardson, creative director at global innovation firm frog design, inc., where he has worked with companies such as HP, Intel, Motorola, Logitech, and Yahoo!, has come out with a new book entitled Innovation X, published by Jossey Boss.

Mr. Richardson writes regularly on design and business, and speaks at conferences worldwide. In addition to teaching design and user research, he is a guest lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris and at the IESE University of Navarra in Barcelona. Mr. Richardson earned his BFA in Industrial Design from the California College of the Arts, and a multi-disciplinary MA from the University of Chicago.