I would argue, and often have, that while money, technology and innovation (I'll come back to this) are considered more glamorous and therefore more important, communication is the single most critical factor in the success of any endeavor.

Communication is what transforms an idea into a vision, defines how it's different, explains why it will work, and engages people in helping make it a reality. Communication is what keeps your vision alive, whether you are in the room explaining it to someone, or they are thinking about it in places far from where you've ever been or will ever go.

For millennia, the human race has relied on one powerful skill to build the world we now see around us - the ability to innovate.

From the discovery of fire to the invention of the spacecraft, innovation has driven us to achieve the unachievable.

Whether you call it ibtikar, as it is known in the Arab world, or "innovation", it all begins with a passion for excellence and an ability to bring together the collective experience and insight of the brightest minds.

Innovation thrives in an environment in which problems are perceived as opportunities and non-linear thinking is encouraged. It needs to be driven not merely by ambition, but by a vision and a culture of openness to sharing ideas and best practice.

With concerns about the global economy dominating the headlines, worries about the strength of our local economy are understandable. Fortunately, the Knoxville–Oak Ridge region is rich in opportunities for business and job growth.

Innovation Valley Inc. is capitalizing on these opportunities through a coordinated effort to move our region's economy forward. IVI is a partnership of six regional economic development agencies, supported by regional business and government partners, that was created to implement a five-year blueprint for business growth in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge region. This blueprint focuses on six program areas: technology and entrepreneurship, education and work-force development, global marketing, business retention and expansion, public policy, and resources for living. It is available online at http://www.innovationvalleyinc.org/strategic-blueprint.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans in Hawaii continued to set the national standard in wellbeing in the first half of 2011, followed closely by North Dakota. West Virginia and Kentucky maintained their status as the states with the lowest wellbeing. Nebraska, which showed the biggest gains in wellbeing rank from 2009 (25th) to 2010 (10th), continued to move up, landing in the top five.

These state-level data, from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, are meant to provide a preliminary reading on the wellbeing of U.S. states in anticipation of the complete 2011 rankings, to be released early next year.

Facebook's new Messenger app for Android phones and iPhones is designed to let groups of people communicate with one another in real time no matter where they are. It's the first instance in which Facebook has split a core part of its social network from the main product—a move that reflects a shift in how people are using social-media tools.

Messenger lets groups of Facebook users communicate with one another in the moment even if they're using different communication technologies—for example, with one person using instant messaging, another text, and a third e-mail. Messenger taps into Facebook's vast supply of data about contacts and connections, including users' e-mail addresses, instant-message handles, and phone numbers.

David Lauren was racked with anxiety. It was 2 a.m. in London and a small crowd of Ralph Lauren employees huddled outside the company's U.K. flagship on New Bond Street, trying desperately to make a technology come to life in an unprecedented way. David, the 39-year-old son of Ralph and the company's executive vice president, was planning to debut a novel 4-D light show in less than 24 hours, to celebrate the launch of Ralph Lauren e-commerce in the U.K. The 4-D project had been months in the making, relying on architectural light-mapping techniques to create an eight-minute holographic video that would be projected onto the storefront. If everything went right, the building would seemingly disappear, replaced by 3-D images of 15-foot-tall models walking down runways and giant polo players galloping across fields. A rendering of Ralph himself would wave to the throng of fans. The exorbitant fourth dimension: the scent of Big Pony cologne, which would be spritzed onto the crowd below.

When I first got into VC I decided I better have some investment themes. My macro theme was “great entrepreneurs” who mapped to my belief system about the kind of entrepreneurs I wanted to work with.

My background was 8 years of telecoms & mobile and 8 years of cloud computing & SaaS – so these two themes were a given.

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Electronic devices with muscles-like stretchability have long been pursued, but not achieved due to the requirement that all materials in the devices – electrodes, semiconductor, and dielectric – are stretchable. In their pursuit of fully flexible and stretchable electronic devices, researchers have already reported stretchable solar cells and transistors as well as stretchable active-matrix displays. The nanomaterials used for these purposes range from coiled nanowires to graphene ("Foaming for stretchable electronics").

Recently, researchers at UCLA have successfully demonstrated a stretchable polymer composite that is highly transparent and highly conductive, and applied this nanocomposite material to fabricating stretchable devices.

Each week in Business Rx, we typically feature entrepreneurs growing their businesses. But what if you just have an inkling of an idea … or the dream of working for yourself? You have to start somewhere, and knowing where to begin can be daunting.

The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business focuses on this early-stage innovation process from the back of the napkin to the first million dollars. Beginning today, 40 University of Maryland students hope off on the right foot during Dingman’s “Jumpstart” program. Successful Washington-region entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers and business leaders plan to give participants a realistic look at the startup environment and walk them through critical first steps to building a new venture, including how to brainstorm ideas, build a strong team, test the waters and roll out a marketing plan.

A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship in among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school. I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating to the Midwest– didn’t necessarily agree. “That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they’ve all gone overseas,” he said.

It was then that the great American panic of a few years came rushing back to me. Somehow I’d forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn’t just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China.

If you don't believe that the Arctic ice cap is melting, ask the Russians about it.

In 2007, while many of us were busy arguing about whether or not climate change is real, a Russian mini-sub planted a titanium flag on the sea floor far beneath the floating ice lid, claiming the North Pole for the Motherland. Not surprisingly, that claim didn't go over well with the representatives of the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, all of whom also have strong territorial interests--and military presences--in the Arctic.

Until recently, nobody seemed to care much about who owned what up there among the polar bears, but things have changed. This summer saw the second largest meltback of sea ice on record. What was once considered a useless, frozen wasteland is now a booming frontier, and national tempers are heating up along with the local climate.

David McRaney spends a lot of time thinking about all the ways thinking doesn't work. He catalogues delusions, fallacies of thinking, and the psychological short-circuits that cause procrastination, groupthink, and poor decisions. But McRaney swears his index of common mental shortcomings actually inspires him--and could inspire you to know thy working self.

You Are Not So Smart, McRaney's blog and forthcoming book, is intentionally labeled as a "Celebration of Self-Delusion." Sure, topics like the bystander effect, showing how bigger crowds encourage less help for people in trouble, and the backfire effect, where people learn to reject science when it questions their beliefs, are likely to get under anyone's skin after some reflection. But McRaney says that understanding our mental malfuctions should inspire us.

Color me cynical, but for a long time, I assumed that all the political blather about green jobs meant only one thing: They were fake. But according to this infographic by Column Five for solar-power company 1Bog, green jobs are very much real--and in fact might be one of the only places in this awful economy where a person can hope to get a decent manufacturing job.

Granted, we're not experiencing the hockey-stick growth you might expect from such a burgeoning field. As the topmost chart shows, the green economy expanded three times faster than the economy as a whole, in the decade ended in 2007. (Who knows exactly what that ratio looks like now, but we're betting that it's larger.)

The developing world has, for the first time, outstripped richer economies in providing new investment in the renewable energy sector, according to a report.

And research and development (R&D) funding from government sources, at US$5 billion in 2010, for the first time overtook corporate R&D investment, according to 'Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2011', published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) last month (7 July).

"The increase in government R&D funding is a global phenomenon and reflects, partly, the spending of money from the 'green stimulus' packages that were introduced [by some countries] in 2008–9 after the financial crisis," said Angus McCrone, chief editor of the research and analysis provider Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which prepared the report.

Just like the word innovation, or even ‘the precursor to acceleration’ (‘startup incubation’) this particular use of the word acceleration (probably originating in this context with leading startup accelerators Y Combinator and TechStars) is being used to mean just about anything that those involved want it to, but here at the iij we’re getting a strange sense of déjà vu.

Readers of the iij are probably more than familiar with our efforts to define the word startup: ‘Why startup is a crazy term‘, Innovation Investment Journal, April 2011.

It’s not at all uncommon that when something is successful, other companies attempt to mirror that success by following some of the same methods. From the first cars to the recent deluge of daily deals sites, the behavior is far from surprising.

It stands to reason then that we’d start seeing a number of startup incubators and accelerators popping up across the world, given the success of some of the bigger names within this vein. While the track records of accelerators such as Y Combinator and TechStars are subject to your definition of success, the fact that these companies have spawned some of the names that are now huge within the technology industry will continue to lead more people down a similar path.

We rely on innovation to address challenges and to make our lives more enjoyable. But innovation decreases and is altogether curbed when change agents (that’s you):

• Become bystanders
• Decide to hoard their ideas

The world is in need of anxious thinkers (not onlookers) who stimulate ideas through providing and sharing ideas. When a person relieves themselves of this duty, everyone loses. Innovators become needy spectators and selfish pacifiers, stunting beneficial change. Let’s ensure this doesn’t happen.

When Google deploys a fiber-to-the-home network in Kansas City, Kan. (and later in Kansas City, Missouri) its success for the project will not be measured in dollars but in users. And in promoting this view of broadband Google shows a keen understanding of how broadband has the potential to disrupt everything — the value isn’t in delivering broadband — it’s in delivering services over broadband.

That doesn’t mean that broadband isn’t valuable, but it’s also not the highest value — much like electricity is valuable, but it’s the air conditioning or refrigeration that it enables that people spend more money on. Which runs somewhat counter to the argument put forth by ISPs, especially those keen to meter broadband — that the value is in the access itself. Instead of viewing broadband as a gateway to the web, and trying to capitalize on that by offering faster speeds that people will eventually pay more for as Verizon is doing with FiOS, many ISPs view broadband as something that’s valuable in and of itself– and as such it might make sense to charge people by the byte.

You want to make certain your collaborative system for the front end of innovation encourages team members to contribute to the ideation process. Practical experience tells us we can lend the following practical guidance.

1. Your collaborative system should employ “persuasive design”. It may sound superficial, but the graphical user interface is an important part of the collaborative system. The users’ eyes and their clicking fingers should be led toward the parts of the screen that yield collaborative contribution. Choice architecture leads people to make decisions based on evaluating choices. You can help encourage people to make their choices with a well presented user interface design.

It's a lesson that's all too easy to forget in a world driven by mobile devices, cloud computing and home offices. There are big benefits to setting up shop in the right spot—especially among lots of peers in the same field.

Just ask sports-gear makers in Ogden, Utah. Or health-care companies in Nashville. Or nanotechnology researchers in Albany, N.Y.

These cities, and others like them across the country, have become hubs for specific industries. Entrepreneurs are moving there and flourishing in the teeth of a bleak economy. The cities, in turn, are nurturing the entrepreneurs by giving them access to funding, mentors and facilities.