We prize our time. People who practice collaborative innovation know they cannot monopolize the waking hours of their sponsors and communities. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores the three C’s of critical question, community, and commitment. Practitioners raise the odds that everyone involved in collaborative innovation will view their time as well spent when they help sponsors address the three C’s in authentic ways.

One sunny day last October found me in Manhattan, walking south on 5th Avenue towards Bryant Square Park. I could see the heads of the lions guarding the library when a young man approached me. He held a clutch of CDs. Each had a homemade vest.

Today’s economy is certainly lousy, but you might as well get used to it. Some financial experts think the de-leveraging process we’re now going through might last for another decade or two, with interest rates near zero for years to come. Ugh.

Commerce will still take place, however, and the most competitively successful companies can still prosper. But getting a prospective business customer to say “yes” when his own economic world has deteriorated so much requires a deft and nuanced sales effort. So if you sell to business customers, here are seven suggestions for improving your competitive chances:

The Federal Communications Commission will make $400 million available annually to healthcare providers to expand the development of broadband telehealth networks from a pilot to a permanent program. The pilot program has supported 50 provider healthcare networks in 38 states.

The telehealth networks will link urban medical centers to rural clinics or offer instant access to electronic health records (EHRs). The agency will begin accepting applications for the grants in late summer, according to the Jan. 7 announcement by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

1. "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi

2. "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Lewis Carroll

3. "The Wright brother flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility." - Charles Kettering

4. "In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd." - Miguel de Cervantes

5. "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do." - Henry Moore

Technology is reshaping our economic geography, but there’s disagreement as to how. Much of the media and pundits like Richard Florida assert that the tech revolution is bound to be centralized in the dense, often “hip” places where  “smart” people cluster. Some, like Slate’s David Talbot, even fear the new tech wave may erode whatever soul is left to increasingly family free, neo-gilded age San Francisco.

Such claims have been bolstered by the tech boom of the past few years — especially the explosion of social media firms in places like Manhattan and San Francisco. Yet longer-term trends in tech employment suggest such favored media memes will ultimately prove well off the mark. Indeed, according to an analysis by the Praxis Strategy Group, the fastest growth over the past decade in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics-related) employment has taken place not in the most fashionable cities but smaller, less dense metropolitan areas.

Here's my list of big events happening in Boston this year. Some are home-grown, and others are major national conventions — like the annual conclaves of the biotech and cable TV industries — that are coming to town. If I've missed an event you consider unmissable, feel free to post a comment.

- January 27: MITX's E-Commerce Summit

Boston's e-commerce community must finally be hitting an inflection point, since it now has its own one-day gathering. Agenda features speakers from Staples, Wayfair, Gemvara, and Shoebuy.com.

Encouraging and supporting new business creation has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years as an economic development strategy at the local and regional levels. After decades of “smokestack chasing” and, increasingly, office-park-chasing, leaders at all levels of government have realized that homegrown development through new businesses is better than lavishing tax incentives on existing companies. Some call this “economic gardening,” while others have called attention to “startup communities” and “entrepreneurial ecosystems.” Call it what you will – it is clear that entrepreneurship is the key to stronger local and regional economies.

For most policymakers, during the recession and recovery their attention has understandably focused on the contribution of entrepreneurs in terms of how many jobs they can create. With unemployment high, wages stagnant and large corporations sitting on mounting piles of cash, the answer to the question of where new jobs will come from is increasingly, “entrepreneurs.”

So you've built and launched your product. It is well received. You've acheived "product market fit" and it is time to get more users or customers. You've graduated from the "building product" stage and have entered the "building usage" phase. What does this mean for your team?

Well first and foremost, it means you are going to have start building your team. You will need more engineers because you will have to scale the product/service and you will need to continue to build it out, make it available on more devices, and listen to and adapt to the needs of the market. You will need to make sure your product team grows in lockstep with your engineering team and the demands of your users. You will need more customer support/community team members because more users means more users you must engage with and support. You will need to think about a marketing person because acquiring more users is called marketing. You will need to think about business development because you will want to talk with other companies for distribution and for product/service integration. And you may need to hire a sales team if your product has an enterprise/SAAS focus. Finally, you might think about staffing business operations/HR/finance/legal which is probably consuming a fair bit of your time.

U.S. approvals of new drugs hit a seven-year high last year as pharmaceutical companies responded to regulators’ demands for better safety data and avoided last- minute requests for more information.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared 30 new treatments in 2011 compared with 21 the year before, a Bloomberg review of agency records shows. Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithkline Plc each had three products approved after no company had more than one medicine cleared in 2010.

More frequent approvals may help drugmakers overcome a rash of patent expirations. At least 21 medicines will lose a combined $11.5 billion in revenue as a result of patent expirations in 2012, including Paris-based Sanofi and Bristol- Myers Squibb Co.’s anti-clotting treatment Plavix, projected to see $4.5 billion in lost sales, according to Bloomberg Industries. Drugmakers will generate more than $4 billion in 2012 from products that were introduced in 2010 and 2011.

Surrounded by next generation flexible displays and the next big tech toys at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show, former President Bill Clinton made this observation: South Korea is now number one in the world for computer download speeds, and the U.S. has fallen to number 15. “Our speeds are one-fourth of theirs, and we have fallen off the map,” Clinton said.

For the uninitiated, the former president is referring to the fact that there are few to no American communities that are hubs of the kind of world-leading bandwidth sufficient to drive next-generation innovation in our economy. He’s referring to the fact that, though international studies differ, the United States does not enjoy bandwidth that is nearly as fast as our peer countries. He’s referring to the fact that, for the first time since American ingenuity birthed the commercial Internet, we do not have a single national wireline provider with plans to deploy a better, faster and bigger network. For most Americans, five years from now, the best network available to them will be the same network they have today. As a result, the best networks — along with the innovations and economic power they enable — will live in other countries as well.

Can you really have a successful career and a successful family?

Maybe.

Can you have have both of those things when you work at a startup? That's much more difficult.

"There's nothing you can do at a startup to lessen the volume of work or smooth out the emotional cycles, and being a parent is completely consuming and erratic on top of that.  So it's basically a double startup!" says Hashable CMO and mother Emily Hickey.

We are on our way back to pre-recession levels of small business employment, the most recent Intuit Small Business Employment Index indicates. Intuit’s measure, which tracks employment at companies with 19 or fewer employees that use Intuit’s Online Payroll product, shows that small business employment has been growing since autumn of 2009.

However, the index indicates that small business employment still has not returned to pre-recession levels. Intuit’s estimates are that 700,000 fewer people worked at small businesses in December 2011 than did so in December 2007. Assuming we add the same number of small business jobs in 2012 as were added in 2011, we will first return to pre-recession levels of small business employment five years after the economic downturn began.

Higher education is heading for disruption. In the new book The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education From the Inside Out, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring explore why this is inevitable and what traditional universities and colleges can do about it. Professor Bill Fischer, himself an avid believer in disruption, reviews this book covering an extremely timely subject.

To be successful in radical business model innovation requires companies to go beyond the traditional modeling: ideas are only one part of the innovation equation. Business model implementation requires structural changes in your organization; otherwise, you will just get stuck with a beautiful model on paper.

As many will remember, the late 90s and early 00s were exciting times. With the internet booming (or bubbling as you may say), new business development and business model innovation were “in”, not only at start ups, but also at large corporations, such as Shell, where I worked at the time. Together with me, tens of people from different areas of the company, received the opportunity to work together with the Shell Gamechanger to develop new ideas for the internet. We went into sessions to learn about new business model innovation, so we could create great new ideas.

In this keynote address from the Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit, serial entrepreneur and LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman shares his views on the role of entrepreneurs in society and the impact they will play in the creating the future. Hoffman offers valuable rules of thumb for navigating the startup and entrepreneurial process, as well as answering questions on developing markets, customer experience and the reasons to take a company public.

Traditionally most people don’t like being called geeks or nerds, but the derogatory connotations associated with these words are being cast away like sand in the hourglass these days.

Like it or not, most people these days fall into one of two categories. Before Steve Jobs made mobile phones cool again, geeks and nerds were generally considered to be the same lifestyle choice.

Geeks are now considered to be those who have wrapped themselves around their specific lifestyle choice and are adamant that they are experts on it. Nerds fall into the category of socially inept geniuses who flock to their PCs to update their version of Fedora (if you think a Fedora is just a hat, clearly you don’t fall into any of the two categories).

There is no doubt that the U.S. government has shown greater interest in and support for entrepreneurship in recent years. Discussions of job growth now frequently address the importance of new business creation, and elected officials today regularly emphasize the need for innovation and entrepreneurship to revive our failing economy. More importantly, we are beginning to see real changes at the policy level. The White House Council of Economic Advisers, for example, now includes a Senior Economist who focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation, and in 2011, the Council of Economic Advisers' Economic Report of the President devoted an entire section to small businesses for the first time in recent history. The President held a Summit on Entrepreneurship in 2010, and at the end of 2011, two separate bills with the purpose of helping companies start and grow were introduced in the U.S. Senate.

Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer has granted a license for Artificial Immune nanotechnology to NexImmune, a startup company formed in part by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine faculty members who are also involved in the development of the technology. AIM, which involves engineering artificial cells to stimulate specific immune responses, represents a potentially important advance in the development of immunotherapies for a variety of cancers and other diseases.

It’s no secret we’re big fans of Kickstarter and all the projects that are becoming a reality thanks to the awesome power of crowd-funding. In fact, we just took a look at 7 of the best tech innovations on Kickstarter in 2011. Now Kickstarter has just announced its 2011 retrospective.

Kickstarter has gone through all of the projects that have been shared on the site in the past year, and picked out some of the most interesting stories. The main trends that we’ve seen on the site this year are DIY manufacturing, Civic Projects, Current Events, and most importantly, Dreaming Big.

In our society, the ability to solve problems is celebrated. In fact, most people would describe themselves as a good “problem solver” in order to get promoted or to land a new gig. But is problem solving overrated? In the world of entrepreneurship, Dr. Arlen Meyers thinks problem solving is a mistake. Instead, he suggests you should become a “problem seeker”.

Dr. Arlen Meyers is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE). In this interview, we learn more about this unique organization and its mission to accelerate physician-originated innovation within the biomedical and medical device arenas.