There is a lot of innovation happening outside of Silicon Valley.

We drew startups from TechCrunch and Gigaom articles, as well as Business Insider's own sources and found some massive startups being built abroad. Five or ten already have billion-dollar valuations. Others will soon follow.

Here's who's behind the biggest startups in Europe, how much venture capital they've raised, and why these startups have such high valuations.

Over the last two months, the U.S. government has been running one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II.

They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. This week we saw the results.

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in eight weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. Nineteen of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology.

It was an extraordinary effort.

Today’s university technology transfer model is built on the assumption that inventing faculty will remain employed by a single university for the long term, if not for life. In the face of harsh economic realities, if universities eventually buckle to public pressure and hire faculty ac- cording to renewable, short-term contracts, re- search administrators would need to revise – perhaps dramatically re-vamp – their university intellectual property strategies. Outside acade- mia, the switch to a mobile faculty workforce could introduce unintended negative conse- quences to our nation’s university technology transfer capabilities.

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Members of a Flickr group formed by The Guardian have recreated the greatest moments of 2011 in Lego, including the Royal Wedding (pictured), the death of Bin Laden, Occupy Wall Street and Rupert Murdoch's near-miss with a custard pie.

Previous Lego efforts by the same bunch have included this World Cup project. And, Lego fans, there's still time to submit your entry. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or join the Guardian's Flickr group.

On the night last spring when Osama bin Laden was killed, the chief of staff to a former U.S. secretary of defense broke the news to the world—more than an hour before President Barack Obama's announcement. Keith Urbahn (aka ­
@keithurbahn) wrote to his 1,016 Twitter followers that he'd heard the news from a "reputable person." Within a minute, 80 people had reposted the message. One of them was New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, whose retweet led to another large burst of responses. Urbahn's tweet was on its way to going viral.

Investments projected to create more than 6,850 jobs statewide

Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) Secretary C. Alan Walker announced today the allocation of $29.2 million of funding from the U.S. Department of the Treasury's State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) to economic, community and technology development partners throughout Pennsylvania.

"The Corbett administration is committed to supporting our small businesses, and the best way to do that is by partnering with the private sector to maximize resources," said Walker. "I am proud to say that Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation that requested proposals from our local partners with a goal of maximizing investment and supporting the best projects. This initiative will result in significant small-business job creation across the state."

Today, a new startup accelerator for women, the Women Innovate Mobile (WIM) Accelerator, is opening its doors for applications. The program will start off small, offering two to five companies seed funding of $18,000, plus mentoring, support, and free office space in New York during the course of its three-month program.

The company was founded by Veronika Sonsev, the co-founder of inSparq and the non-profit Women in Wireless, Deborah Jackson, founder of JumpThru, and business strategist Kelly Hoey.

“Accelerators are dominated by men and Women Innovate Mobile is the first dedicated to cultivating female founders,” said Kelly Hoey, WIM’s Managing Director. “No one disputes the talent and capabilities of female entrepreneurs, yet they remain severely underrepresented among mentor-driven accelerator programs. That’s why we developed an accelerator program just for women-led mobile ventures.”

To support a from Intel aimed at uncovering and supporting young Innovators, PSFK has tapped some of the world’s established innovators to share some insights into what young entrepreneurs should be on the lookout for in 2012. Below is a summary of their thoughts.

JAMES GROSS, PERCOLATE

It seems to be celebrated in our tech and startup culture that in order to win you need to be as busy as possible. Doing a million little things and running fast is what will get your startup on a Bloomberg show and praised on VC blogs. I’m not sure this model is sustainable. We all have dreams of creating companies that last and aren’t built to be a plugin for Google or a talent acquisition for Facebook. To build a long lasting company requires a tremendous amount of thought. We all know this, but we don’t practice it if we spend our day optimizing for being frantic.

In 2011, entrepreneurs and startup activity sprouted up everywhere. Not coincidentally, the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, Portland and every college town from Abilene to Gainesville is fostering young, eager minds. The millennial generation is proving it can create companies — and thus, jobs — that solve real problems.

Trends like these are quickly impacting how young people relate to and absorb education. These days, higher education is a dynamic and increasingly digital environment — and some are questioning the relevance of the traditional educational institution at all. Here’s a look at some of the big changes in tech and funding that have shaped education in 2011.

Government observers surely noticed that this year, even as the pages of the calendar turned, the political debates always stay the same. Every few months, the federal government nearly shut down (it never actually did). Every few months, the threat of widespread municipal bankruptcy reared its heard (that never happened either). Meanwhile, state and local governments spent the year dealing -- almost universally -- with the same set of challenges: decreased revenue, exploding pension obligations, and crumbling infrastructure, to name a few. It's a year most will be happy to forget.

As they slogged through 2011, some elected officials (and the reporters who cover them) got a bit lazy and began repeating the same old platitudes to describe the mess facing government. Here's Governing's list of political cliches that need to retire in 2012.

When you think of research hotbeds that will be the launch pad for the next generation of gee-whiz tech names—and founders' fortunes—institutions such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Cal Tech usually come to mind. The University of Utah (U of U) would not be considered a short-list candidate. That's a gross underestimation of what has become a dynamo in academia's startup derby—this year the U of U spun off 18 tech newbies.

This is the second year in a row that the University of Utah has taken the laurels as the U.S. leader in creating startup companies, in an annual survey conducted by the Association of University Technology Managers on commercialization success based on university research. Once again, the Salt Lake City university defeated rival MIT (17 startups) and a host of other institutions such Carnegie Mellon (10) and Cal tech (10).

The founders of an ASU student startup, called G3Box, have been named "College Entrepreneurs of the Year for 2011" by Entrepreneur Magazine.

"The College Entrepreneur of the Year" award is one of three awards bestowed by the magazine on the nation’s top entrepreneurs of the last year. The magazine received thousands of entries for the competition and then selected the top five entries in each award category as finalists. The finalists were then announced to the general public who voted for their top picks for each award. G3Box received votes from all over the world, including Ireland and Russia. A judging panel made the final decision.

Firms who want to revitalise their businesses to be ripe for export opportunities are being urged to make proposals for the €22m second phase of the Technology Transfer Strengthening Initiative.

The Minister for Research and Innovation Sean Sherlock, TD, today opened a call for applications for the €22m scheme which supports new company creation and the transfer of intellectual property between higher education institutions and industry.

Will the next Mark Zuckerberg please stand up?

What are the odds that another young student at a prestigious university will develop an Internet social platform to solve a campus problem, which will ultimately scale to become a national phenomenon? Ari Winkleman may have done exactly that. The Drexel University senior is the Founder and CEO of Involvio, a new social management platform that empowers students to know what's going on across campus anytime, anywhere.

Winkleman is just one of thousands of new high-growth entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to angel investors and venture capitalists at events across America designed to connect entrepreneurs and investors. Winkleman's pitch impressed judges at the Early Stage East pitch competition in Baltimore, Md., on Dec. 14, where Daymond John (ABC's "Shark Tank" and founder of FUBU) served as moderator. Nearly 30 entrepreneurs were given an opportunity to make their pitch for seed and early stage capital ranging from a couple hundred thousand dollars up to $2.5 million.

The last 12 months of scientific achievement are reflected in the researchers that made significant contributions to their fields. Here, The Scientist reviews some of the most popular scientists in this year’s headlines, recognized with prestigious scientific awards or remembered upon their passing.

Top Science Awards of 2011:

Nobel Drama

Three immunologist shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—Jules Hoffmann of the University of Strasbourg in France, Bruce Beutler of Scripps Research Institute in California, and Ralph Steinman of The Rockefeller University in New York. Hoffmann and Beutler shared half of the award for their discovery that the Drosophila Toll gene regulates the fly’s immune response against bacteria and fungi, while Steinman took the other half of the award for first describing the immune system’s dendritic cells and their role in activating and regulating adaptive immunity.

It’s clear that millennials will be a powerful generation of workers and that those with the right skills will be in high demand. They may be able to command not only creative reward packages by today’s standards, but also influence the way they work and where and how they operate in the workplace. They may also be one of the biggest challenges that many organisations will face.

An infographic from VentureBeat has been circulating around the web that cites the U.S. as atop the rest of the world in terms of innovative countries. This is shining hope for Americans looking for an end in sight to the recession. According to the Census Bureau, young businesses are some of the biggest drivers for job growth.

But, trouble arises when you consider that the bulk of innovative entrepreneurial ventures are in high-tech industries. Success in these industries is highly dependent on the scientific and mathematical aptitude of the available workforce. However, in comparison with their Asian and European counterparts, the U.S. commonly ranks poorly in these fields, according to The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This is a problem.

Yesterday was a busy day. Google announced at 3am EST their "GoogleGiveBack" program, listing grants they've made to support education, technology innovation, and the fight against modern-day slavery. Shona Brown, SVP of Google.org, posted on the company's official blog that "science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young people, so we've decided to fund 16 great programs in this area...providing enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students." We are included and are deeply grateful to receive a $250,000 Google grant to support the growth of the Globaloria learning network in San Jose/Silicon Valley. We've been working nationally and globally in the past five years, but the aim in Silicon Valley is to grow local talent by teaching kids game design and computer programming to cultivate a broad array of STEM knowledge and digital skills, improve community-wide civic engagement and regional innovation, and help ease Silicon Valley's talent crunch.

Why do some nations prosper while others struggle? Businesspeople, policymakers, and social scientists have sought to answer that question for centuries, starting as early as 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. A closely related question is, Why are some nations more innovative than others? Innovation is increasingly seen as the key to unlocking competitive advantage, as much for countries as for companies.

Comparing innovation on a nation-by-nation basis, however, is fraught with difficulty, given the diversity of national business practices, economic structures, and financial and economic reporting conventions. Resolving these difficulties is the main objective of the Global Innovation Index (GII), a research project conducted by INSEAD in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Company, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (a specialized agency of the United Nations). The research measures innovativeness for 125 economies. This year’s GII report (available at www.globalinnovationindex.org) ranked Switzerland as the world’s most innovative nation, followed, in order, by Sweden, Singapore, China, Finland, and Denmark — and the U.S., in seventh place.

Whenever I ask managers and business leaders about their most pressing problems at work, I’ve been a bit surprised to hear from so many who say they are struggling with a “bad boss” or a hopelessly toxic work environment.

A bad boss is a big problem, and not easily fixed. In fact, front-line leaders are the primary drivers of employee engagement (or lack thereof) and apparently there are a lot more of them out there than I realized. If you are working for a bad boss I suggest you try these tactics over a three- to six-month period.