Calgary has the most entrepreneurs per capita, Regina has the greatest business optimism and Saskatoon tops the list of entrepreneurial cities that have the most effective local and provincial government policy on business, according to the 2011 FP/Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) rankings of Canada’s Entrepreneurial Urban Centres.

That data puts Western Canadian cities in the top of the rankings for the second year running. However, this year smaller cities have also fared well, outranking the country’s major urban centres such as Toronto and Vancouver when it comes to optimism and policy. Financial Post asked some young entrepreneurs for their thoughts on the results and what they look for in a business community.

At long last: entrepreneurship support in Maine at a sustainable scale. The Blackstone Charitable Foundation announcement on Oct. 7 of a $3 million grant to Maine to support existing entrepreneurship programs has been a long time coming. But this support enables Maine to support its entrepreneurs at a level commensurate with our long-standing investment in research and development. And, since R&D without commercialization, without entrepreneurship, does not by itself create economic growth, Mainers who have been advocating the importance of entrepreneurship to the state’s growth are welcoming Blackstone with open arms.

A bit of history will help put this announcement in context. In the late 1990s, the Maine state legislature inaugurated several programs to promote economic growth in the state through investments in innovation. These included the Maine Technology Institute, a funding source for emerging technology-based companies, the Patent Program to assist inventors with intellectual property, the Maine Economic Improvement Fund and the Maine Biomedical Fund to support research and development, and the Applied Technology Development Centers to start seven technology incubators around the state.

The cotton gin. The Model T. The iPad. Three game-changing inventions conceived, developed, and sold in America first.

Over the past 50 years, the US has provided an ideal innovation ecosystem that has fostered significant advances in medical technology, among other fields.

US companies dominate the $350 billion global device industry for example, with 32 of the 46 medical technology companies with more than more than $1 billion dollars in annual revenue based in the US.

Innovation is all about creating “the new”, but if you hang around innovators long enough you begin to get the feeling that while lots of “new” things are being brought to market, innovators continue to use “old” approaches to do this! Recently, however, Arthur D. Little published a study on The New Face of Innovation designed to reassure us that new innovation approaches were indeed being developed as well!

After speaking with nearly 100 Chief Technology & Chief Innovation Officers, ADL has concluded that the new face of innovation has five principle new dimensions:

Ningbo is a port city on the eastern Chinese coast which has dedicated itself over the years to economic experiments; the city map includes an Economic and Technological Development Zone not far from a National Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone. After the Chinese outpouring of admiration for Steve Jobs, the Ningbo press heralded another local initiative: a program to cultivate “an army of Steve Jobs-style leaders.”

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

JobsOhio honcho Mark Kvamme thinks the decision by the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds    to move to Ohio will lift the state’s profile in the venture capital world.

The association said Monday it will move its offices from Philadelphia to Lorain in northeast Ohio and hold its annual conference in Cleveland next year. The nonprofit group uses the conference as a schmoozing ground for the sort of movers and shakers in the venture capital world that Kvamme, chief investment officer at JobsOhio, and his boss, Gov. John Kasich, have been trying to attract since taking office in January.

Through a crowd funding platform it is now possible to invest as an individual in Enviu in exchange for profit certificates for existing and new start-ups. Enviu is one of the first businesses in the world where small investors become shareholder of start-ups that have massive social, environmental and positive impact on the world.

In a bid to foster life sciences startups, Johnson & Johnson is refurbishing part of its pharmaceutical research and development facility in San Diego to create an “innovation center” for new biotech and health IT companies.

The New Jersey pharmaceutical and healthcare giant anticipates housing from 18 to 20 life sciences startups in the new center, to be called “Janssen Labs at San Diego.” (The name anticipates an internal reorganization that has been consolidating Ortho-McNeil and other J&J pharmaceutical businesses for much of the past year under the Janssen brand.) J&J’s pharmaceutical R&D center, which employs about 300 in San Diego, is slated  to officially become part of the Janssen group later this year.

The Japanese casual wear designer replaced designer Jil Sander, who helped drive the brand to prominence, with experimental Japanese designer Jun Takahashi, just as the company invests heavily in the U.S. market. Takahashi's first collection with Uniqlo will debut in the spring, while Sander's wildly popular +J brand collection this fall will be her last.

Twyla Tharp’s revamp of Movin' Out was widely acknowledged to be the most rapid and total transformation of a Broadway show in many years. Michael Phillips, the Chicago Tribune reviewer whose stern review had been so controversially picked up by Newsday, also applauded, but added a question whose answer should interest us all: "How did this happen?"

Part of the answer lies is the very institution of the out-of-town tryout, the show business equivalent of the corporate “skunk works” idea: creating a space to experiment in which failures can be instructive and recoverable. As Tharp writes in her book The Creative Habit, “The best failures are the private ones you commit in the confines of your room, alone, with no strangers watching. Private failures are great.” Quite so: you can learn from them without embarrassing yourself. But the next-best kind is in front of a limited audience. If your new show is going to fail, better that it does so away from Broadway, giving you a shot at recovering before it hits the big stage.

While traveling in the Valley I had a chance to catch up with a few local entrepreneurs and accelerators. Many of them are doing interesting work, but I noticed a disturbing trend: entrepreneurship has become “cool” for a whole generation.

As a an entrepreneur who had gone through several popular accelerators told me, “It used to be that if you didn’t know what to do at the end of college you would go to grad school. Now the same people go to accelerators instead.” And they bring with them their culture: beer games, lawn chairs, geek gadgets, and “bro culture” galore. Everybody is a ‘rebel,’ but in exactly the same way.

When Newsweek ran its first Green Rankings two years ago, climate change was high on the agenda. The U.S. House had passed a cap-and-trade bill to put a price on carbon, and the world’s biggest economies were about to make history with an agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Since then, green momentum has seriously stalled, at least in the public sector. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 ended without an agreement, and climate science in the U.S. has been politicized by Tea Partiers and others. A skeptical Congress, plus the on-going economic downturn, have made environmental regulations a tough sell. Elsewhere in the world, there is some movement—such as in Australia, where the lower house has just passed a carbon tax—but it’s slow.

Intel executive Kirk Skaugen said today that his company expects 15 billion devices will be connected to the internet in the coming years. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Skaugen said that the growth of data on the internet is racing ahead and data center computing is being pulled along with it.

Skaugen spoke because his boss Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, was sick. He said that Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore back in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, is expected to hold up in the next few years.

You may hear about the dearth of "green jobs," but statistics show that solar jobs are rising, even as the overall economy lags.

As of August, there are 100,237 solar jobs across all 50 states in over 5000 companies.

Despite the hoopa around Solyndra, the US solar industry  is gaining a greater share of the global market and is an economic bright spot in an otherwise sour economy.

The US is poised to install 1,750 megawatts of solar PV in 2011, double last year's total and enough to power 350,000 homes.

100,237 jobs as of August 2011, according to The Solar Foundation's "National Solar Jobs Census 2011: A Review of the U.S. Solar Workforce." The survey examines employment along the solar value chain and includes data from more than 2,100 solar companies.

Even though Mayor Bloomberg disagrees, Boston’s doing some amazing things in the innovation space. Despite being one of the oldest cities in the country, Boston is consistently on the cutting edge of finding, inventing and capitalizing on everything hot and new. From TechStars to MassChallenge, startups are popping up left and right around the Hub. For innovators, there’s no better place to be, in our opinion.

Now, 2thinknow has proven Boston is indeed the innovation center of the world. 2thinknow has released their 2011 Innovation Cities Index, which looks at cities across the globe and analyzes just how innovative they are. Out of 331 international cities, Boston ranked number one. According to a press release from 2thinnow:

Challenge Driven Innovation enables companies to tap into diverse perspectives and talent to solve problems faster, more cost-effectively and with less risk, ultimately resulting in accelerated innovation outcomes and improved business performance. In this article Steve Bonadio introduces the concept of “Challenges” and their role in the emerging innovation management framework called Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI).

Using images throughout your business' web presence—in blog posts, on Facebook, in online presentations, etc.—presents a great marketing opportunity to capture people's attention and create brand awareness. But how do you choose the right images?

If you've spent more than 10 minutes on the web, you've probably seen photos of multicultural people pointing at a computer and laughing together. Or after clicking on a company’s Contact Us link, you must have seen some stock photo model with a headset on, representing the customer services department. These practices are widely used and, frankly, a little bit absurd.

In today’s episode of the Weekly Marketing Cast, we discuss how to choose the right images to include throughout your web presence.

As banks have tightened terms over the last few years, alternative loans are quickly gaining in popularity. So much so that banks are noticing the competition, and starting to loosen their belts. Crowdfunding is one of the newest alternative loans, which are very similar to peer to peer loans. Our friends at Intuit have designed a great graphic detailing everything you’d want to know about Crowdfunding:

We've polled everyone from First Round Capital's Charlie O'Donnell to Steve Blank and Brad Feld in the past few years, and they told us what books have shaped their careers.

From Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" to Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," these books will teach you how to think -- no matter if you're a serial entrepreneur or are just starting a business.