It’s a tale of two hires. Either Cleveland Clinic Innovations just landed the heavyweight leader of the Kansas Bioscience Authority, or that leader got out of Kansas just in time.

Cleveland Clinic Innovations will look to Tom Thornton, the former president and CEO of the Kansas Bioscience Authority, to manage and expand the Clinic’s promising research collaboration efforts. The job, formally called general manager of alliances for Cleveland Clinic Innovations, is a new position that will help find partnerships with other healthcare institutions to develop new medical technologies, Cleveland Clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil said.

But Kansas legislators are questioning everything from Thornton’s exit and the way he managed the Kansas organization to the relationship between Thornton and business partners in Ohio. In essence, they assert Thornton was fleeing an uncomfortable situation in Kansas with the help of alliances he made in Cleveland.

For some firms innovation is incredibly rewarding, for many others it remains at best an unfulfilled promise. Why does innovation present such a stark choice, often fraught with difficulties for many, yet so simple and successful for the few?

Is innovation such a mystery? We believe innovation can be demystified through a careful evaluation of innovation models and frameworks. This evaluation requires taking time to deconstruct the relationship between innovation efforts and corporate functions or capabilities such as corporate strategy, existing skills and knowledge and internal processes. Our goal is to create a common, collaborative innovation framework that any firm can adopt, in the process eliminating some of the mystique that surrounds innovation.

Suffering from the inability to generate higher levels of profitable growth? Find yourself repeatedly asking “Why aren’t we able to develop the ‘next new thing’?”

You’re not alone. Companies everywhere have been having difficulty driving higher levels of growth. And few have harnessed sufficient innovation wherewithal to introduce the “next new thing.”

The harsh reality is that traditional types of innovation won’t produce the “next new thing”. While conventional R&D organizations can provide incremental improvements to existing products and services, they are not structured or resourced to generate sustained, above-average growth.

The early success of seed-investment program Y Combinator has led to a wave of new incubators and accelerators, all hoping to capitalize on a Web investment boom and cheap-to-build technology that can quickly make fast, nimble start-ups attractive acquisition targets.

One of the latest incubators to emerge is in not in any of the traditional technology hubs, but in Portland, Ore., where a longtime venture capitalist is putting the finishing touches on a $3 million city-sponsored fund. The Portland Seed Fund will provide start-ups with mentoring and training, as well as an initial investment of $25,000 to $50,000 and possible follow-on funding, VentureWire reported Monday.

The so-called Y Combinator model, in which small amounts of money as well as mentoring and networking opportunities are sprinkled among a dozen or more promising businesses, is gaining more attention from investors.

A recently launched organization, Pipeline Fund Fellowship, will train women how to be angel investors, but its goals extend beyond increasing the number of women in the investor community. The project hopes to increase investments in social ventures and empower female entrepreneurs at the same time.

Ten women have already been selected to participate in the program. Some, like NY Tech Meetup co-founder Dawn Barber, are well acquainted with the startup world, and others come from fields ranging from finance to dentistry. At sign up, they each agreed to contribute $5,000 to the company that the group selects at the conclusion of five workshops on investing. Tuition is $1,000.

Pipeline Fund Fellowship founder Natalia Oberti Noguera hopes educating women investors will help balance a couple of ratios. The first is the visible gender imbalance in the investor community. Only about 13% of angel investments in 2010 were made by women, according to a report from the University of New Hampshire.

At the Perm Economic Forum on April 21-24, the Russia Innovation Collaborative (RIC) presented an overview of their “Perm Innovation Roadmap,” an extensive report that provides an in-depth analysis of the current innovation ecosystem of the Perm city in Russia and a methodology for building on its strengths and improving its weaknesses. RIC Founding Partner Cynthia Bouthot hosted a seminar that explained RIC’s methodology and six-phase model approach to stimulating innovation and introduced a framework design to build economic activity in the Perm Krai region.

RIC’s innovation ecosystem model is structured in these six phases:

1. Conduct an innovation assessment to determine Perm’s global market potential
2. Develop an ecosystem map to compare the current and prospective innovation environment
3. Design an innovation action plan to maximize Perm’s potential
4. Implement the action plan
5. Motivate stakeholders through training and education programs
6. Build Perm’s market awareness

What happens if you do not have enough room to bring your surfboard to the beach? C4 Waterman considered that problem when they launched a line of inflatable surfboards, paddleboards, and rescue equipment. Their inflatable line of gear makes it easy for people to transport it to the beach, where they can inflate it, and surf as usual.

The equipment can be deflated, rolled up, transported or stored in a bag or box. This option becomes particularly appealing when facing airline surfboard fees or having limited storage space. Inflatable equipment has been praised for it’s reduction in risk of personal injury or property damage compared to it’s fiberglass counterpart.

Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, but there is no market for ideas. I’m often approached by people with a “million dollar idea,” but I haven’t seen anyone pay that for one yet.

Equally often, I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven’t figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on eloquently for 20 pages about how great this product and technology is, but never gets around to defining the problem (investors call this the “solution looking for a problem” syndrome).

A related “red flag” in a business plan is a missing competitive analysis section, or a short paragraph that essentially says, “this product has no competition.” My reaction is, if there is no competition, then there is no market demand for your product, so why are you building it?

The worst of the Great Recession is apparently over. The economy is growing again, and the unemployment rate is down to 8.8 percent from its peak of 10.1 percent.

Yet even if the acute crisis is abating, the grim fact is that the U.S. economy still faces chronic health problems. Even before the recession hit, back in 2007, real income for the median American household was lower than it had been in 2000. So too was total employment as a percentage of the population.

Here's the fundamental problem. Economic growth is harder than it used to be. This is the argument made by the economist Tyler Cowen in his provocative new e-book The Great Stagnation. Even if you don't buy all his analysis (and I don't), he's right that the American economy will have to contend with some pretty st

The Varick Street incubator operated by the Polytechnic Institute of New York University fairly bustles as the young businesses that rent space for $300 a month per seat cram as many bodies as they can into each cubicle. CB Insights, a technology research company, one summer shoehorned nine people into a space set up for four.

The NYU-Poly site, established in partnership with the city, is one prong in an effort by local universities to become national, if not international, technology players. They are pouring billions of dollars into engineering and applied science programs—hiring faculty, building new facilities and launching initiatives that promise to sharpen their entrepreneurial chops.

“(We are trying) to bring New York City to the point where it competes with Silicon Valley and Boston,” said Jerry Hultin, president of NYU-Poly.

A couple weeks ago, in a comment to an MBA Mondays post, Dan Lewis wrote "LTV has to be higher than your CPA or you're not going to make it." I asked Dan to elaborate in a MBA Mondays guest blog post on this topic and he agreed. Here's Dan's post:

LTV stands for “lifetime value” of a customer. CPA stands for “cost per acquisition” of a customer/subscriber. LTV has to be greater than CPA or you won’t be able to scale – or, for that matter, survive. To demonstrate, let’s go to the video tape:

Monday through Friday, I publish a free daily email newsletter (which you can, and should, sign up for), putting to words the notion that you should – and can – learn something new every day. Oddities, like the fact that Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service the day he was shot, carrots used to be purple, there is only one Jewish person in all of Afghanistan, etc. It has about 4,000 subscribers. It’s basically a blog, sure, but I send it as an email newsletter. Long story; one for another day.

Social media marketing, blogging, conference tweeting, virtual events, mobile apps, unconferences: the list of latest innovations for events today is truly mind-boggling. No wonder event professionals, let alone their clients and attendees are having a tough time keeping up. As event organizers, even when we ourselves, are up on the latest technology and techniques, we often have trouble conveying the value of these things to others.

It can be truly overwhelming. That’s why, as I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “What the Dog Saw”, I was struck by a story about Ron Popeil and his ability to convince people to understand and adopt innovative gadgets.

Lately, I've been receiving a lot of questions from people selling a service--or thinking about selling a service--over the web, asking what you need to do differently than those people marketing a physical product.

It's a good question. Because while almost all the selling and traffic generation techniques I teach work equally well for both product- and service-based business models, there are a few unique challenges faced by those selling services that warrant special discussion.

What exactly is new product development? Does the “product” actually have to be a product? Or can it be a process? Does the idea have to come from the C Suite? Or can it be a suggestion from the factory floor, the retail showroom, the Idea Box or a customer tip?

How do you treat ideas once they land in your organization’s “idea hopper”, and how wide is your idea funnel?

Answer these questions, and you’ve placed your finger on the pulse of how your organization embraces new product development.

NPD best blossoms in that place where creativity commingles with structure – where fresh thinking is fostered in a nursery of structured liberation. Think of ideas as if they were offspring: They should be free to roam and explore, but they need fences – structure – in their lives to ensure safe maturation in a controlled environment.

HP recently released a news advisory highlighting the results of a fascinating innovation survey that the company commissioned. (The global survey included interviews with 312 executives in both commercial enterprises and the public sector during February and March 2011).

Some of the report highlights include:

1. Ninety-eight (98) percent of the executives surveyed believe that innovation will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years.

2. The most important reason to innovate is to facilitate future organizational growth (79% of respondents). For commercial enterprises, the second most important reason to innovate is to support profitability (74% of respondents); for the public sector, reputation is the second most important reason to innovate (59% of respondents). InnoCentive’s work with public sector organizations (e.g., Air Force Research Labs, NASA, In-Q-Tel and the intelligence community) in particular reveals that they are serious about finding solutions to problems that matter most to their missions, advocating public-private partnerships, and promoting transparency, openness, and collaboration across agencies.

We’re constantly debating the hallmarks of an innovative company at Fast Company. Does innovation stem from the culture or DNA of a place—the tone set by its leader? Or, is it a tangible product built by a team of engineers, software developers, and designers? And, how do long-standing companies keep innovation alive as they mature?

For the last few years, we’ve tried to answer these questions in our March issue that features the 50 Most Innovative Companies. In 2011, some of those businesses included Google, Univision, FourSquare, Twitter, Netflix, Nissan, Intel, and Zynga. Whenever we compile the list (arguing and debating the myriad of choices from our New York City office), we glean lessons from the process. Here are the top headlines we took away:

• Innovation clusters around platforms.

Apple is No. 1 on our list not just for the iPad. It’s also the way the App Store, iPad and iPhone have collectively encouraged and allowed other businesses to innovate. We chose 100 as examples—from Angry Birds maker Rovio to Square, which turns an iPhone into a credit card reader—but there are thousands of Apple-assisted achievers.

Two partners in Advance Northeast Ohio -- NorTech and the University of Akron -- are hosting a two-day session with the National Academies on "Building the Ohio Innovation Economy."

Here is a link to Plain Dealer reporter Robert Schoenberger's story on the first day of the session. A few of my key takeaways were:

Ross DeVol, executive director of economic research at the Milken Institute, said Ohio has to strengthen its universities' ability to assist in the commercialization of innovations, prepare and attract more highly educated talent and find ways to turn its most promising start-up companies into high-growth ventures if it is to become a "top tier state" in terms of innovation and economic prosperity.

I just read the Q1 2011 report from CB Insights, which shows venture capital is back. Overall, investors put $7.5 billion to work across 738 financing deals with U.S. startups. That represents a $1.5 billion jump in funding over the same quarter of 2010 with a similar number of deals, so it clearly shows a trend to larger deal sizes for fewer startups.

To me, this indicates that venture capitalists (VCs) are looking for business, but not from first-time startups. Sure, there is always some seed funding (10% of overall deal flow), but you can bet that this money goes to entrepreneurs who have been there before and won. Angels are also moving up-stage, leaving a bigger and bigger black hole for new startups. Your friends and family are really the only answer until you have a significant revenue stream.

Back to VCs, Silicon Valley venture capital firms are still the most active. In fact, most of the most active investment firms are located there, although NY now has moved solidly into second place (ahead of Boston). That doesn’t mean that you have to live in one of these places to be considered, but it helps.

VAN WERT, Ohio — The farmland is flat. The houses are few. The property owners have agreed to sell.

All that’s missing is a manufacturer who wants to build a giant factory on 1,600 acres of farmland in northwest Ohio. As the town’s website says: “whyvanwert.org.”

Van Wert’s speculative industrial site — complete with a rail line, gas lines, land-acquisition options and anything else a manufacturer would need — is just one $10 million slice of an extraordinary government experiment to revive this state’s declining economy.

Running on fumes, the homeless, single teen mother arrived at the office of a social-service agency hungry, tired, broke, and pregnant again. She needed help. Clipboard in hand, toddler in tow, she and the receptionist sat in a small waiting room and went over her situation. The story that emerged was horrific. She had been abused—in every way—by parents and foster parents; she spent years on the street selling first drugs, then her body; she had dated a number of men who had eventually tossed her and her baby aside. The receptionist sat with the damp 2-year-old on her lap, swallowed a big lump in her throat, put her pencil down, and said a counselor would be in to see the young woman shortly. The receptionist then excused herself, and closed the door behind her.

That receptionist was not just a receptionist, however—she was also a college student studying sociology. In addition to hundreds of pages of reading, as well as hours of theoretical discussions and lectures over the course of the semester, she worked as an unpaid intern and received perhaps the best education of her life.