Good ideas just happen. We just need to be aware. The ideas are all around us. They just pop up out of nowhere. Everyone has the potential to be creative. It is not connected to the innate intelligence we all possess . It is in the way we live, work and enjoy.

What is creativity? Then…

Creativity is a random act of awareness, which pops out of nowhere and usually and always turns a raw or an unrefined thing into something beautiful, real and of great value.

Creativity is Ubiquitous. The “Creativity at work” blog says Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Wikipedia on Creativity says that Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new or somehow valuable is formed. The created item is usually intangible.

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The people who started Central Oregon’s first two bioscience companies were drawn by the outdoors, rather than the presence of a research institution.

And perhaps because of that, Bend Research Inc. and Grace Bio-Labs lacked nearby industry peers in their early years.

Bend Research founders Harry Lonsdale and Richard Baker arrived in Tumalo in the mid-1970s.

When Grace Bio-Labs co-founders Chuck McGrath and Jennipher Grudzien came from the Detroit area in the mid-1990s, Bend Research was well-established, but it was the only major player in town, Grudzien said.

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The best part of being an entrepreneur is having the independence to make your own decisions, the flexibility for a better work/life balance, and personal satisfaction from driving change. But nobody said it would be easy. The road to business success is filled with challenges and frustrations that most aspiring entrepreneurs never even imagined.

Back in the day, everyone could come up with good ideas. It didn’t matter what your title was. If you had a good idea, you raised your hand, offered the idea and then it was implemented.

Then companies grew larger and larger, with leadership titles that got bigger and presumably more important, and profits that became critical to the all-powerful board members who were responsible to the granddaddy of them all, the shareholders.

In a surprise move, India's Bengaluru beat Tokyo to enter the top five global locations for innovation hubs, according to a report released by Capgemini. Silicon Valley maintained its top spot, but it is no longer the capital of corporate innovation as enterprises worldwide are looking for talent pools beyond established hubs, the report said.

In a report titled 'Digital Dynasties:The Rise of Innovation Empires Worldwide' Capgemini stated that London, Paris and Singapore maintained their second, third and fourth spots, respectively.

Sixty years ago, Akron, Ohio’s rubber industry employed more than 50,000 people. But in the 1980s, as three of the four major tire companies left the city, most of those jobs disappeared. Times were dire for a long while, but gradually the region began to capitalize on its existing strengths—the material science expertise of its research universities, its workforce of engineers, scientists and tradespeople—and reinvent itself as the center of the polymer industry. According to statistics from the city’s website, upwards of 35,000 people in the Akron area are now employed in approximately 400 polymer-related companies.

GRAND RAPIDS — A new venture capital fund in Grand Rapids that will do tack-on deals for existing portfolio companies of Michigan Accelerator Fund I closed this week after raising $5 million from investors.

MAF Opportunity Fund was oversubscribed and secured commitments from backers that include institutional and individual investors as well as family offices. The fund will make follow-on investments to support companies that are already backed by Michigan Accelerator Fund I and need later-stage funding, as MiBiz exclusively reported last month.

As an entrepreneur, nothing gives me more gratification than speaking to colleges and business schools about pursuing a career in entrepreneurship, where innovation is the coin of the realm.

I have built several businesses, so I must have some kind of an entrepreneurial gene that spurs my dedication to creating new opportunities and the American jobs that go with them. 

Shining a spotlight on Startup City USA, Ann Arbor SPARK is a regional private-public economic development partnership that has created one of the most successful areas of innovation in the United States over the last eleven years. One aspect of SPARK’s strategic plan is to help technology entrepreneurs gain access to the resources that they need to grow in to successful ventures. The organization encourages and supports business acceleration, attraction, and retention. Beyond just startups, Ann Arbor SPARK proactively identifies and meets the needs of business at every stage, including leading global companies.

For the very earliest stage businesses, SPARK offers networking events, educational events, boot camp, and accelerator services. The organization manages two business accelerators in the region with room for startups as well as second stage businesses.

He entered the hotel late one evening and found me in the lobby with some team members discussing a project he and I were overseeing. He flew into a rage. Right there in the lobby he launched an extended verbal attack on me about some things I had allowed our team to do. It was not a pretty sight.

It was the latest episode in a rocky relationship between him—the relationship leader for his company—and the company I represented. The problems had been going on for some years before I got involved.

Others had tried to deal with this character in the past, to no avail. I was brought in to be “the fixer”. Aware of his reputation, I did my best to turn down the job, but when I was told I was the last resort I finally agreed to step in.

Apple fuses technology with design. IBM invests in research that is often a decade ahead of its time. Facebook “moves fast and maintains a stable infrastructure” (but apparently doesn’t break things anymore).

Each of these companies, in its own way, is a superior innovator. But what makes Google (now officially known as Alphabet) different is that it doesn’t rely on any one innovation strategy, but deploys a number of them to create an intricate — but powerful — innovation ecosystem that seems to roll out innovations by the dozens.

Knowledge@Wharton: Can you tell us about your research?

Ron Berman: What our paper looks at is how the burn rate of startups influences the chances of a startup to go bankrupt. The burn rate, which is more of an industry term, is how much money does a startup spend every month per employee. For example, if a company spends $300,000 every month and they have five employees, the burn rate would be $60,000 per employee. It’s a number typically the industry uses to compare different companies and see which ones are burning too much or too little money.

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A lot goes into being a strong hire, but a new study by Indeed reveals that many managers put a lot of stock in the name of a candidate's alma mater. The study showed that 43% of C-suite executives believe that the best performers graduated from highly reputable institutions, and as many as 35% of managers and 34% of senior managers agreed.

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As companies become flatter with blurred boundaries, there is a greater push toward authentic leadership. As a result, a lot of unconventional leadership styles are emerging.

This is different than when large, bureaucratic organizations ruled and leadership styles were pretty conventional across the board. Today, we expect leadership at multiple levels.

Image: Flickr user Campaign Bootcamp - http://www.fastcompany.com

The Unicode Consortium gods have spoken, and we will soon enjoy 72 new emojis, including facepalm, dying rose, and avocado.

The emojis run the gamut of 21st-century relevance, from brunch-y clinking champagne glasses to a black heart, if you're feeling as goth as Taylor Swift has been lately. Worried that red dress dancing woman was getting lonely? Enter blue suit disco man.

The 2015 Tom Tom Traffic Index shows that Dallas-Fort Worth has the least overall congestion among world (urban areas) with more than 5,000,000 population. The Tom Tom Traffic Index for Dallas-Fort Worth is 17, which means that, on average, it takes 17 percent longer to travel in the urban area because of traffic congestion.

The Tom Tom Traffic Index rates traffic congestion in nearly 300 world cities. This article examines overall traffic congestion levels in two categories of cities, those with more than 5,000,000 population and those with between 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 population.

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Mary Meeker’s annual Internet trend report has become something of a rite of summer.  Every year, Meeker, a leading venture capital analyst, comes up with an extraordinary collection of data on a wide range of topics in the innovation economy, revealing in broad and specific terms where the Internet and related technologies are and where they are going.  

The full 200+ page slide deck and our quick take on the biggest trends can be found here.  But for those who just want the highlights, these are my picks for the top 15 most important charts.  

Image: https://www.washingtonpost.com

When you’re hiring a new manager, the stakes are high. You need someone who can effectively lead people, manage a budget, liaise with upper management — and, usually, do it all from day one. But what if a potential hire doesn’t yet have a track record in doing all of the above? Would you hire or promote a star player into a management role if they’ve never managed anyone? To gain some perspective on how to handle this kind of challenge, I reached out to some management experts for their point of view on the skills and personalities to look for.

Over the last 20 years, digital design and collaboration tools have fundamentally altered how firms approach innovation. In the pre-digital era, product and service development was usually conducted by experts working inside firms or through expert vendors hired by those firms.

Today, aided by digital design and  fabrication tools on the one hand and social networking communities and collaboration/sharing  tools on the other, an expanded “innovation landscape” is marked by new forms of participation and ownership, with new participants entering new markets and new arrangements of collective innovation.

Dreamit Ventures has added several corporate partners who will work with its accelerator startups. Although it has worked with Penn Medicine and Independence Blue Cross ever since it launched a health tech accelerator, it has taken a more low key approach to other healthcare partners and now several have become partners of record. They include Xerox Healthcare, Becton-Dickinson, Merck, Pfizer, Thomas Jefferson University, Temple Health, Universal Health Services, Digitas Health and Zimmer Biomet.

Image: http://medcitynews.com