The Copenhagen Accord, the closest thing to a deal to emerge from the climate change summit, represents a step forward in dealing with the planet’s most pressing issue but stronger action is still needed. While many of the challenges negotiators faced in Copenhagen were inevitable and expected, two problems at the heart of the disappointing outcome--the insistence on binding, internationally-agreed-upon targets, for which countries are still obviously unprepared, and the conflation of the mitigation and aid agendas, which makes reaching a binding agreement on either impractical—could have been avoided. If the global community learns from Copenhagen’s mistakes, much greater progress can be made on both of these objectives.

Innovation systems in developing countries differ largely from those in developed countries. A typical difference is that less developed countries have weaker institutional frameworks and low levels of interaction among the different actors in the innovation system. Scholars in innovation system research agree on the importance of understanding innovation systems in developing countries as systems in construction. Thus, while the most important organisations often exist, the critical linkages between e.g. user-producer and university- industry are still ill developed. The literature hitherto has been rather vague on how these systems can be built. We contribute to the literature by discussing the role of intermediate organisations in supporting different forms of interactive learning and linking relevant actors to each other in emerging innovation systems in developing countries, using data from Tanzania and El Salvador.

I [Adam Lashinsky] had a small, Twitter-hosted dustup recently with Trevor Loy, a pleasant fellow who, when he is not Twittering, brings truth and justice to the world via the agency of venture capital. Loy was hot and bothered over some turn of events in Congress having to do with immigration policy. Many entrepreneurs are immigrants, you see. And because venture capital equals entrepreneurialism, the proposed congressional action might harm VCs, which, in turn, would grievously harm the U.S. economy. This, Loy, explained, is because fully 21% of the U.S. economy is attributed to revenue earned by "venture-backed" companies.

Where, I wondered, did this startlingly encouraging statistic come from? Loy was kind enough to supply me the link to a report paid for by the National Venture Capital Association. Thank goodness for the hard work the NVCA does to help us understand the good VCs spread throughout the land. NVCA President Mark Heesen, a savvy Washington hand I've been privileged to chat with over the years, prefaced the report with a few nice words about the industry that employs him. "The data," he wrote, "continues to confirm that venture capital matters deeply, not only to our economy but to everyday lives of Americans, who use venture-backed innovations, work at venture-backed companies and dare to bring new ideas to the market."

IN Silicon Valley we have a saying: launch early, launch often. It’s an acknowledgment that successful, innovative companies are the ones that rapidly try new ideas, see what works, improve their products and repeat. Businesses that launch frequently are also able to take advantage of economies of scale to make launchings faster and easier. In many ways, the key to innovation is speed of execution.

NASA, an agency that depends on innovation, could benefit from the same mindset. To meet its new goals for human spaceflight, NASA must be able to be creative and take risks, or else it will be unable to adapt to new technology and changing political realities. Grand plans stretching over decades will become irrelevant and eventually collapse.

The Rudd Government today released draft legislation for the new R&D Tax Credit — the biggest reform to business innovation policy in over a decade.

The draft legislation follows through on the Government’s commitment to deliver a more generous, more predictable, and less complex tax incentive by replacing the outdated and complicated R&D Tax Concession.

This important microeconomic reform is part of the Government’s broad productivity agenda. It will cut red tape and provide better incentives to help boost the competitiveness of the Australian economy.

The R&D Tax Credit is also a central element of the Rudd Government’s long-term agenda to lift Australia’s innovation capacity and performance, Powering Ideas.

Innovation is driven by people and their ideas. Through the work of the Innovation Think Tank, greater south Wood County stands to create a culture of innovation that will keep the area sustainable in the future.

A recent meeting, facilitated by Jack Ricchiuto, gave participants the opportunity to share their thoughts regarding what they want to see possible in this community in 20 years. Answers included diversified industry, an innovative workforce, capitalization on the knowledge and resources available in the area, inventions from this area featured in Time Magazine's Top 50 of the Year, innovative schools producing employees that have gained skills through project-based learning, world-class infrastructure, risk-taking culture, financial resources for product development, a process for innovation, green energy production and a system of connections for people and resources. All suggestions would position greater south Wood County as a hub of commerce in the future.

Traditionally, we have tended to think of businesses (or individuals who then start businesses) as the principal source of innovative new products or services in a market economy. But, in a thought-provoking new working paper, Carliss Y. Baldwin of Harvard Business School and Eric von Hippel of the MIT Sloan School of Management argue that sources of innovation are changing in today’s economy.

In particular, the professors make the case that, as a result of declining design and communication costs and increasing use of modular design architectures, two other types of innovation are competitive in more and more situations. Those two types? Innovation by users and open collaborative innovation projects (like open source software projects, for example).

It’s that time of the year when we actually review what has gone past a turbulent year 2009 and probably a year after the financial crisis that rocked the world after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in Sep 2008. Of course, one of the key after effects is that fundraising for start-ups in the technology space become increasingly difficult this year. While we are beginning to see more and more acquisitions in the US tech space, the SG tech start-ups are still working towards a tough environment. In the technology entrepreneurship scene, significant incidents have shaped and brought forward new perspectives in Singapore. While we are about to start the new road ahead in 2010. Here are the top 5 tech entrepreneurship events that rocked SG in 2009 (in no order of preference):

Analysts say the Google-Microsoft war has already yielded a slew of search upgrades.

Computerworld - This month's flurry of upgrades to Google Inc.'s eponymous search engine, coupled with Microsoft Corp.'s renewed charge into the search business, could soon lead to radical changes in one of the Internet's most popular applications.

Analysts say the increasingly heated battle between Microsoft's new Bing search tool and Google is already bringing users an avalanche of innovations that should continue for a year or two.

"Google and Microsoft sparring is fueling this," said Hadley Reynolds, an analyst at IDC. "Microsoft's willingness to invest in search and not just let Google walk away with it is driving a new level of competition."

[Portugal] There are four types of crops (bear with me on this) for companies; seeding (seed capital); harvesting (venture capital), selling (acquisition) and consuming (IPO).

In Portugal, each one has their own expression. We have VC’s, we have acquisitions and some IPO’s, but not that many seeders. So, it seems natural that the actual business angels in Portugal should be doing seed capital, but they’re more interested on being just the middle man between the ideia/startup and the venture capital noney. For that they’ll crop up to 10%. So, what history tells us ? Everyone’s killing the middle man and it will be shot at plain sight!

Wait no more, hope is here and we’re starting to see the rise of the newborns, the seeders! The guys that support your startup/idea/project, without the business spreadsheet or the fancy 20 page business plan full of charts. They’re the ones who leverage most of the startup risk, but also the ones who can profit from your business. The best seats of the train are always those upfront, that’s what seed capital hopes and prays for!

How the Copenhagen Climate Accord measures up.

Global warming: The Accord agrees that global temperature rise should stay below 2C (3.6F). A tangible acheivement but less ambitious than some would have hoped. 5/10

Reducing greenhouse gases: The treaty did not include any numerical targets for cutting pollution. 0/10

[Much more on the original article - Ed.]

Scotland’s business angels should play a bigger role in advising start-up firms, a new report from researchers at the University of the West of Scotland has recommended.

The report, Business Angel Syndicates in Scotland, recommends that government should tap into private-sector expertise to help new companies become investment-ready.

The report, subtitled an Exploratory Study of Gatekeepers, looks at the role of angel syndicate managers and how they might be further enhanced to benefit the Scottish economy. One of its key recommendations is that emerging entrepreneurs should have greater access to the expertise of angel gatekeepers in the early stages to help make their business investment-ready.

What the tension between what Christmas is and what some think it should be says about America.

If there's one thing I dislike more than the rampant commercialization of Christmas, it's everybody complaining about the rampant commercialization of Christmas.

Yes, I realize you may have seen Christmas decorations at your local Walgreens well before Halloween this year. And yes, the cheesy Christmas music playing in Starbucks and my barbershop and everywhere else annoys me too. (Frankly, that Mommy-kissing-Santa-Claus song gives me the creeps.) But please spare me the gauzy romanticization of some pure, pre-commercial American Christmas past.

A major new study has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. According to Hal Gregersen, an INSEAD professor and co-author of a six-year-long study into disruptive innovation involving some 3,500 executives, there are five ‘discovery’ skills you need but, he says, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’

Some well-known business leaders such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rely on their own particular strengths since innovative entrepreneurs rarely excel at all five discovery skills. For example, Scott Cook of Intuit is strong in observational skills. Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, does a lot of networking, he says. As for Bezos, “experimentation was his forte,” while Jobs is “incredibly strong at associating.”

Driving from Delhi to Jaipur on the Delhi-Jaipur highway, December 17, 2009—The new 10-lane Gurgaon highway, opened a year back, is already at capacity. The first 30 miles. through the industrial suburbs of Delhi, are stop-and-go traffic. The Maruti-Suzuki car factories and Hero-Honda motorcycle factories and their parasitic ecosystem for auto parts manufactures ring the highway. Commercial trucks, many of them dilapidated and overloaded and lumbering along at 15-20 mph, make up two-thirds of the vehicles on the road. There is a murky haze over the highway, and the industries we are passing by and the winter sun feel distant. The trucks have grizzled, unkempt drivers, many with a navigator/helper riding shotgun with his arm hanging out waving on overtaking vehicles, who blast their horns for added caution. Like in America, these trucks are the blood, and the roads the arteries, of the economy. Unlike America, but like many other things in India, they are inefficient, but supported by abundant, therefore low-cost, labor.

WASHINGTON, Dec 21, 2009 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ ----TechNet, the bipartisan political network of CEOs that promotes the growth of the innovation economy, today released a new poll that found that wide majorities of the American people support their utilities offering more technologies for home energy management and smart metering which are key parts of creating a national energy Smart Grid.

"The American people strongly support cutting-edge innovations to help them save money on their energy bills and change their electricity consumption," said Jim Hawley, Acting CEO of TechNet. "As the world gathered in Copenhagen over the past few weeks to discuss better ways to manage our energy resources, this data proves that our citizens are willing to embrace technology to become more efficient and on save on energy costs. Technology solutions are critical to a robust deployment of a national Smart Grid and helping us be smarter about the way we use energy and our natural resources."

It looks like everyone is buffing up their predictions for another year of astonishing growth by social media. The last several years have brought so many surprises that the next several are promising to yield a bumper crop of “I told you so” fodder for “Pithier than thou” crowd.

My [Dan Robles] prediction for 2010 is that nothing is sacred, including the onslaught 2010 predictions. Therefore, I’ll will go way out on a limb and make my 2011 predictions in 2009.

Entrepreneurship, Jobs and Recovery Top the List

Kauffman's most popular research in 2009 explored past recession trends and
entrepreneurs' roles in economic recoveries

The most popular studies emanating from the nation's largest funder of entrepreneurial research are largely related to the top story of the year: the economy. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has compiled its most in-demand research for 2009--research that was mentioned in news stories generating more than 5 billion media impressions. Data on economic recovery trends, job creation and the role of entrepreneurs are among the Foundation's most quoted, requested, viewed and downloaded studies in 2009.

Figuring out a game of the decade is a tough task because each year the quality improves. And in the past 10 years, video games exploded. Gamers saw developers make good on the promise shown in the 1990s as releases began to look more like playable Pixar cartoons and studios harnessed the power of the technology to invent new types of gameplay. In this decade alone, we saw the introduction of the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

With video games advancing by leaps and bounds, where do we begin to judge? Is it the quality, artistry or innovation? Or maybe it's the storytelling. When putting this list together, we looked at a combination of these traits with an eye toward impact. The following games set the tone for the decade:

Entrepreneurs seeking venture funding in 2010 should be aware of the conditions currently facing venture capital firms, and adjust their strategies and pitches to align with these conditions.

Given the global financial crisis of the past 15 months, VC firms now seeking their own new funds from institutional investors are facing challenges. Institutional portfolio gains are down overall, credit is still tight and risk-adverse everywhere, and the VCs’ restrictions on their own new investments in the last three to four quarters has reduced their ROI, which is the basis of their attracting new capital to deploy in their VC Funds.

So, entrepreneurs, you need to understand the market in which you are pitching, and the pressures on that market. And you must do your homework: