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.

Just for fun, I thought I’d spend some time last night playing with Google Insights for Search to find out what parts of the country are most interested in technology — at least the buzzwords that fill my day — and when that interest hit its peak. It wasn’t surprising to see Silicon Valley rank at or near the top everywhere, but did you know Utah was so into next-generation programming?

As an introduction, it’s probably good to have an understanding of how Google Insights ranks search interest. Essentially, it normalizes data to give a picture of how likely people in each state are to search for a particular term, not necessarily what states had the most overall searches for any particular term.

The salary cap for National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded researchers working outside the agency was slashed by $20,000 by the new federal budget approved by Congress and President Obama last month. The cap, which limits the direct salary that a researcher may receive under an NIH grant, will now be $179,700—leaving universities to make up the thousand of dollars in difference to cover faculty salaries.

However, there may be some leeway in how cuts are applied that will alleviate the burden on universities, The Chronicle reports. For example, universities hope the new cap may only apply to new grants.

The most important issue facing Aastrom and many other companies in biotechnology is the lack of adequate funding to support innovative new companies, technologies and therapies. The challenges in drug development, especially in the early stages, are only compounded by the current regulatory environment with a primary focus on risk reduction.

Unfortunately, with this combination there isn’t one punch we can throw to rapidly improve the situation. But, the current situation has to change if the United States is going to remain the global leader in the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative new therapies in the next two decades. If we don’t improve the current conditions, we will continue on a path to increasing irrelevance in biomedical research and innovation, especially given the fact that other countries are rapidly recognizing the potential of our industry to improve human health and create jobs, and they are in many ways ahead of the U.S. in supporting these companies.

UsedEverywhere.com and its network of online classified sites is encouraging business minded people to consider becoming micro-entrepreneurs in 2012 to earn additional income. The trend of micro-entrepreneurship will be highlighted as a new model for global job creation later this month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

UsedEverywhere offers users quick, easy and free-of-charge access to its active and very social community of thousands of local and national buyers and sellers giving micro-entrepreneurs a head start. More than 90% of the listings on UsedEverywhere are from private users, with many of them having small home-based or micro-businesses.

DJ Patil pulls a 2-foot-long metal bar from his backpack. The contraption, which he calls a "double pendulum," is hinged in the middle, so it can fold in on itself. Another hinge on one end is attached to a clamp he secures to the edge of a table. "Now," he says, holding the bar vertically, at its top, "see if you can predict where this end will go." Then he releases it, and the bar begins to swing wildly, circling the spot where it is attached to the table, while also circling in on itself. There is no pattern, no way to predict where it will end up. While it spins and twists with surprising velocity, Patil talks to me about chaos theory. "The important insight," he notes, "is identifying when things are chaotic and when they're not."

In high school, Patil got kicked out of math class for being disruptive. He graduated only by persuading his school administrator to change his F grade in chemistry. He went to junior college because that's where his girlfriend was going, and signed up for calculus because she had too. He took so long to do his homework, his girlfriend would complain. "It's not like I'm going to become a mathematician," he would tell her.

The United States ranks 14th in the world in wages and compensation for manufacturing workers, according to new data released by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's on par with Ireland and Italy and far behind Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, among others. American manufacturing workers earn an average of $34.74 in total hourly compensation, just 60 percent of the $57.53 that workers in top-ranking Norway receive. The table below shows the total hourly compensation (including benefits) as well as pay for time worked for the top 20 countries in 2010.

Every other week another startup accelerator seems to pop up promising to help you grow your business by offering a mix of money and mentoring.

If you’re thinking of applying to you, you should ask yourself: Is an accelerator right for me and my business?

Vancouver-based GrowLab is looking for applications for their next cohort, so they have taken on the task of helping you answer that question.

A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn't counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.

Email has become unmanageable. For all of us. You hear it everywhere — people talking about their snowed in inboxes, the constant distraction, their deteriorating social lives. It’s all emails fault. For some, like cyberlaw professor Lawrence Lessig, the problem has become so surmountable that they have had to declare Email Bankruptcy — an especially tantalizing solution.

But you don’t have to throw up your hands and give up. It is possible to get the situation under control with simple, low-maintenance tips and tricks. Yes, whole seminars have been devised to make people believe they need elaborate labeling or folder systems to keep tabs on their lives, but that isn’t the case. Here’s a list of ten to-dos to keep your inbox sane and safe in 2012.

By now it is common knowledge that being severely overweight puts people at increased risk of suffering from heart disease, stroke and diabetes and that obesity—defined as weighing at least 20 percent more than the high side of normal—is on the rise. According to one estimate, the U.S. will be home to 65 million more obese people in 2030 than it is today, leading to an additional six million or more cases of heart disease and stroke and another eight million cases of type 2 diabetes. Many clinicians have already begun seeing families in which the grandparents are healthier and living longer than their children and grandchildren.

Chris Dixon had an excellent post yesterday titled Recruiting programmers to your startup. The post, and the comments, are full of super useful stuff that every entrepreneur should read carefully.

I sent the link for the post out to the Foundry Group CEO email list and it generated a great discussion thread, including one of the companies sharing their full day interview / evaluation process which includes a four hour coding exercise. Among the feedback was a great short list of four addition things that Niel Robertson, the CEO of Trada (and an amazing programmer in his own right) has learned over the years.

Be careful who you pick to do the interviewing. You want to showcase your best engineers in the

While it is true that this blog is the third most popular innovation blog in the world, and while it is also true that, last year, I was voted the #1 innovation blogger in the world, both of these factoids pale in comparison to what I am about to present to you in the next paragraph.

Today, I finally realized what all of my blogging has been about for the past four years. Not to monetize my efforts. Not to build the brand of my company. Not to win friends and influence people. No way.