Being smart is the most expensive thing we do. Not in terms of money, but in a currency that is vital to all living things: energy.  One study found that newborn humans spend close to 90 percent of their calories on building and running their brains. (Even as adults, our brains consume as much as a quarter of our energy.) If, during childhood, when the brain is being built, some unexpected energy cost comes along, the brain will suffer. Infectious disease is a factor that may rob large amounts of energy away from a developing brain. This was our hypothesis, anyway, when my colleagues, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill, and I published a paper on the global diversity of human intelligence.

Over 80% of the respondents to the online survey run by Innovation America voted positively that the proposed American Innovation Corps Jobs program should receive serious consideration by the Obama Administration. There were over 450 unique viewers of the proposed plan and 110 of you voted for or against the plan as illustrated (1):

For humans to thrive, we often need to come up with unexpected solutions to tricky problems. Yet people are often skeptical and dismissive of creative ideas...and the reason for that is found deep inside our minds.

Anyone who considers him or herself a misunderstood genius - and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that includes roughly 98% of those reading this - knows the experience of having a brilliant idea rejected. The narrow-minded audience is incapable of grasping the visionary concept being put forward, greeting the proposal with dismissive shrugs and petty objections when they should be showering praise and adulation. Creativity is almost universally considered a positive trait in theory, but in practice it seems to make people distinctly uncomfortable.

Many people struggle to remember scores of passwords for different websites. They often have to reset an account or dig through years of e-mail to find stored log-in information. A common trick is to use the same password for lots of accounts, but this can be a security risk, potentially allowing many accounts to be hijacked at once.

Even as identity becomes increasingly important online, it is becoming more fragmented, with users signing up for ever more websites and services. Account Chooser, a new service launched by the OpenID Foundation, an organization that includes the major websites Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo, is the latest effort to solve this problem. Instead of having to create yet another account, Account Chooser lets users choose one account—their Gmail or Facebook log-in, for example—and then use it to log in to many other sites. The technology was developed by Eric Sachs, a Google project manager and OpenID Foundation board member. Google is backing the project by hosting the code.

In a landmark government effort to drive American health care into the information age, the February 2009 stimulus bill earmarked about $30 billion in incentives for doctors and hospitals who install electronic medical records—paying up to $63,750 to individual physicians and millions to hospitals.

Now comes the tough part: implementing "EMRs" and proving they really can reduce medical errors or get doctors to keep better track of chronically ill people. As National Coordinator for Health IT, Farzad Mostashari oversees federal efforts to promote adoption of EMRs and to prod reluctant hospitals to share patient data.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago, they devised a unique way to keep their young nation on the cutting edge of scientific progress. They agreed "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." In other words, people producing new ideas were assured that they would benefit from them, through a patent system that was created soon after.

More often than not, Westerners dismiss the idea of Chinese innovation as a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the Chinese practice of “copying and improving” can blur the lines between innovation and piracy. In response to these accusations from the West, the Chinese assert – albeit tongue-in-cheek – that students must first learn to copy the master’s work before they are able to develop their own style. After all, if you are not very good at something, you’ve got to start somewhere.

The rapid increase in China’s competitiveness in the high-speed rail, ship-building and even aviation and automotive industries caught some Western observers by surprise. Less than a decade ago, for example, China’s rail system was woefully inadequate. Today it boasts more kilometers of high-speed rail lines than Europe, as well as the world’s fastest trains (350 km/hour) in regular commercial service.

The concept of the burning platform is based on the story of an oil worker in the North Sea who wakes up to find his rig on fire. As it burns he realizes that he has only two options; stay on the rig and perish in the fire or jump into the icy waters below where death is highly probable. He chooses the latter, is rescued and survives. The lesson from this parable: taking any action is better than waiting to be engulfed by the flames.

This is the position Apple found itself in back in the late 1990s. The corporation was hemorrhaging cash trying to compete with Microsoft and Dell. Their products were unremarkable. Their strategy was not differentiating.

More and more firms are taking the route towards Open Innovation, i.e. applying more rigor to find relevant but yet-unknown innovation partners and co-innovating with them. To achieve this, they define where they want to be open and where not and apply one or the other approach to find new partners (e.g. technology scouts, proprietary innovation networks and entering a R&D cluster). Additionally, In order to increase the absorptive capacity of their organizations, they re-align structures and processes and embark on culture change programs that develop a “Not Invented Here” mind-set into a “Proudly found And Commercialized Here” one.

However, many firms discover along in their search for unknown co-innovators that in different countries potential innovation partners react differently when they are approached by an Open Innovator. There seem to be some cultural differences at work. A recent study provides three key insights.

The work of the Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU has come to a fruitful conclusion. In four intensive workshops during 2010, the 20 experts worked together to deliver an inspiring case that would illustrate how service innovation could help Europe to get back on track and deliver smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The Expert Panel was established by DG Enterprise and Industry with a clear mandate to tie its work directly to the Europe 2020 Strategy. It was also expected to address how service innovation could provide solutions to wider societal challenges such as sustainable growth, the ageing population and the pressure on welfare services.

I write quite frequently about sales and how important it is for everyone to be able to articulate what they do and sell.  Isn’t it unfortunate that the  image of a hyped-up, intrusive, snarky, used car salesman still permeates our perceptions? Why is this image still so prevalent? Because of that “predatory” salesperson, the one who just sells something to someone for the sport of it, many people lack adequate respect for the sales profession.

If you really want to impress a startup founder as a potential employee, or you want to be a smart investor, you need to know the right questions to ask. These are the questions that get past the hype of a founder “vision to change the world,” and into the realm of real business strengths, weaknesses, and current health.

Some founders try to deflect these questions by talking incessantly, so you often need to be calm, patient, and persistent to get the answers. My advice to founders out there is to not volunteer too much, but be open and honest in the face of direct questions like the following:

The news that, after what seems like forever, new Internet domain names will be allowed has sparked conversations among college CIO’s and communication specialists about the limits of the “.edu” domain. The news has also provoked serious talk about what might be gained by trading in those three letters strongly linked to higher education for Web addresses like “yourgreatuniveristyhere.com” or even something that ends in “.weberstate” or “.brownuniversity.”

Some observers worry, though, that an influx of new names might dilute the power of “.edu,” which has been the online way to say “a legitimately accredited institution of higher education in the United States.”

There are no rules to naming a startup. And most entrepreneurs do assume that the name they choose will change before their businesses really start to gain momentum.

Consequently, it doesn’t shock us that some of our favorite startups were sired by picking names out of hats, by throwing out odd proper nouns that might be cheap domain names and by haphazardly removing vowels.

Ever wonder what a “Twitter” is, or who the “Hipmunk” is? We’ve asked nine startups to share the story behind their names.

The startup scene in Barcelona, Spain isn’t something we hear a lot about. Athena is an incubator programme looking to change that.

“The investment scene in startups in the Barcelona are is still in an early period,” explains General Partner, Victor Zabrockis. “Most funds or accelerators here are still very conservative and with some successes on the Spanish Internet scene we see a growing interest in helping entrepreneurs getting startups off the ground.”

It’s hard to believe that summer is just about over. It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur, with the economy and technology offering plenty of new opportunities to earn money and strike out on your own. In August, hopefully you did a little review, checking into your options regarding additional tax savings for the rest of the year, as well as looking into your costs to make sure that you are on track.

For September, it’s all about getting ready for what’s next. Here are some items for your September entrepreneur to-do list:

With the economy stagnating and unemployment high, where are the jobs of the future going to come from? A few years ago, it seemed as though the Green Economy could be a big part of the answer.

New clean-energy sources could address environmental, economic and national security problems all at once. In his 2008 convention speech, Barack Obama promised to create five million green economy jobs. The U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated in April 2009 that green jobs could account for 10 percent of new job growth over the next 30 years.

Alas, it was not to be. The gigantic public investments in green energy may be stimulating innovation and helping the environment. But they are not evidence that the government knows how to create private-sector jobs.

The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices invites applications from U.S. states to participate in a Policy Academy on "Making" our Future: Encouraging Growth Opportunities in Manufacturing through Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Investment to Assist States in Developing and Implementing Economic Development Strategies aimed at spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in ways that encourage the growth of advanced manufacturing industries. The Policy Academy is designed to assist states in developing and implementing economic development strategies aimed at spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in ways that encourage the growth of advanced manufacturing industries.As part of the application process, states are expected to identify a core team of five to eight members who represent a cross-section of policymakers from relevant state agencies and stakeholder groups. Multiple awards are anticipated. Applications must be submitted to the NGA Center through the governor’s office by September 15, 2011 in order to be considered. For more information regarding eligibility and how to apply, contact Erin Sparks at the NGA Center for Best Practices. Funding for the Academy is provided by the U.S. Department of Commerce NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program and the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration.

"Where change is happening quickly, who best sees the openings, opportunity, and necessities of change? It's not always the CEO," Thomas Friedman tells Fast Company. Friedman, a New York Times columnist and best-selling author, co-wrote a new book, That Used To Be Us, which argues that empowering innovation from every worker must become a priority for employers, the military, schools, and policy makers, if America is to retain (regain?) its superior international standing. From the use of iPhones by bootcamp trainees to shopfloor innovation at DuPont, That Used To Be Us shows that the future of work is already upon us, presenting interviews with global influencers from every corner of society to paint a world blindsided by the need for creative production--and prescriptions on how to learn from those ahead of the curve.

The principle driving forces behind the need for a more inventive worker is "access to more automation, more software, more machines and more people, and more talent of an above average quality," says Friedman, noting that even "cheap genius," is a click away. The implication is that workers who just fulfill their job description are finding themselves left behind in the recession. "If I have to make tough compensation choices between lawyers, a significant factor now for me is their ability to invent," Nixon Peabody partner Jeff Lesk told Friedman, in his response to a question about which lawyers he was retaining at his law firm.