During the past century, innovation in mechanics, computing technology, medicine, and business practices has driven economic growth, raised wages, and helped Americans lead longer and healthier lives. The development of assembly line production, for example, and its application to the mass production of automobiles reduced the time to produce the Model T Ford by 68 percent over six years and reduced its cost by 62 percent, allowing middle-class families to afford what had once been a luxury (Williams, Haslam, and William 1992). The rapid pace of innovation and increases in productivity continued for most of the century, expanding the efficiency of American workers and providing more valuable goods and services at lower prices.

Since the 1970s, however, the pace of innovation has slowed, leading to lower overall wage growth for American workers. Moreover, those gains that have been made have not been shared equally across society. Although average wages have risen, buoyed by strong gains at the top of the distribution, the wages of many Americans have stagnated or fallen after adjusting for the cost of living over the past forty years. Reinvigorating the momentum of innovation that benefits all Americans is imperative to create broad-based economic growth and higher living standards.

To take on this challenge, The Hamilton Project held a forum, “PhDs, Policies, and Patents: Innovation and America’s Future,” on June 28, 2011. The discussion explored the evolving role of innovation in driving broad-based economic growth in the United States and the policy environment necessary to foster new ideas in science, technology, and business. From that conference The Hamilton Project pulled from the statements of each of our panelists to identify a dozen facts about innovation. These dozen facts encapsulate three themes: First, innovation has historically improved America’s overall standard of living through higher wages, lower prices, and health advancements. Second, the pace of innovation has slowed more recently and the gains from innovation have not benefitted all Americans. Third, in today’s increasingly competitive global economy, current U.S. policies are not doing enough to promote innovation. Without purposeful policies and necessary investments to spur innovation, the United States may not experience the same sort of economic and technological advances in the current century that we enjoyed in the past.

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Is it time for a new twist on the TED model? The esteemed Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference, soon to be pushing 30, has become a juggernaut--what with sellout events, the viral success of online TED Talks, and the spin-off of smaller TED-X conferences. But the conference’s original founder, Richard Saul Wurman, is working on a new creation that radically overhauls the formula used by TED--much as TED itself reinvented the standard business conference model when Wurman launched it in 1984.

Wurman, who is no longer affiliated with TED (he sold most of the rights to Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation back in 2002 and broke off his remaining ties with the spin-off TEDMED Conference earlier this year), recently announced plans for his new WWW.WWW conference, slated to debut in Fall of 2012. So far, he has lined up some heavyweight collaborators—R/GA’s Bob Greenberg and @radical.media’s Jon Kamen are on board, GE is an early sponsor, and Yo-Yo Ma and Herbie Hancock will see to the music. Featured guests are still to be determined, though Wurman promises that the conference will be “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time.”

Our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is crucial to America’s innovative capacity and global competitiveness. Yet women are vastly underrepresented in STEM jobs and among STEM degree holders despite making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce. That leaves an untapped opportunity to expand STEM employment in the United States, even as there is wide agreement that the nation must do more to improve its competitiveness.

• Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs. This has been the case throughout the past decade, even as college-educated women have increased their share of the overall workforce.

By now it is a common axiom in Silicon Valley small talk that good engineers are, at the moment, murder to come by. While the most prominent talent battles have thus far been between Facebook and Google, I was curious whether there was a specific smaller startup that everyone wanted to work at.

So I set up a GoPollGo poll asking, “If you could work for a startup, any startup, which one would it be?” and included the Valley’s most prominent startups, adding new ones as they were suggested by you guys.

The poll, which was tweeted out by the TechCrunch account and posted to our Facebook, got over 36K views and over 5K votes over two days.

ZocDoc just announced a $50M round from DST. Where many have failed, ZocDoc has shown that a disruptive new model executed properly can actually work in healthcare. Healthtech startups can take several lessons away from the ZocDoc experience observing from the outside what they have accomplished.

Scrappiness matters. ZocDoc’s CEO & Co-founder, Cyrus Massoumi was tenacious in getting close to his first customers and doing whatever it took to close his first customers. He has shared that he waited in a doctor’s waiting room for 5 hours to speak with one doctor he wanted. In another case, he was escorted out of the building by security due to his persistence.

Last weekend I decided to get serious about the fact that I live in an earthquake zone, and started putting together a kit with all the food, water, and equipment I’d need to survive for a few days if local services broke down. One of the items that turns up on all of the standard readiness checklists is a battery-powered radio. So I dutifully added “radio” too my shopping list. But then I realized that in an actual emergency, I wouldn’t know what to do with a radio. I know the name of only one local station, KQED, and I don’t think I could even tell you where it’s located on the dial.

It’s not that I don’t listen to lots of radio programming—I do. I’m a huge fan of public radio shows like Fresh Air, Marketplace, and All Things Considered. I just don’t listen to any of this content on radios (except in my car, where I never change the station anyway). Instead, I get my “radio” via Internet streaming and podcasts. So when the big quake hits, I’ll be reduced to surfing the radio dial at random; I’ll feel like the doofus who has to ask where Google is on the computer.

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, envisions his city wresting the title of “technology capital” of the U.S. from Silicon Valley and has embarked on an ambitious plan to build or expand a science and engineering campus in New York. But in hearing the talk, it sounds like Bloomberg believes he can build his way to Silicon Valley success, which I don’t think is possible. And as others are pointing out, it shouldn’t be the goal, either.

A discussion in the New York Times‘ Room for Debate roundtable explores the question of whether New York can rival Silicon Valley, and most of the participants come away saying no. But what many point to is the fact that New York doesn’t have to rival or emulate Silicon Valley; it can be its own success story, with its own unique culture. And that is what the region should be looking at first, rather than trying to gain some bragging-rights parity with the San Francisco Bay Area.

The mission of Innovate Washington is to make Washington the best place to develop, build, and deploy innovative products, services and solutions to serve the world so that ideas developed in Washington lead to quality jobs in Washington. It is to be the primary agency focused on growing our innovation-based economy, and responding to the technology transfer needs of existing businesses in Washington.

Innovate Washington will implement Washington’s sector focused economic development strategy. Starting with the clean energy sector and building on the recommendations of the Clean Energy Leadership Council (CELC), it provides a single point of accountability and leverage for combined public and private sector investments. In implementing the recommendations of the CELC, Innovate Washington will leverage existing strengths in the State’s clean energy sector to deliver measureable results in collaboration with industry and higher education to achieve quality, technology-based job creation throughout Washington.

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Everyone is  learning or trying to learn how to manage all this social stuff. As soon as they think they have the management process down the tools and dynamics change. Subsequently people and organizations find themselves stuck in managing irrelevant processes and messages which means they lose productivity and worse yet any chance for making progress.

Social Burn Out

A large percent of those who engage in all things social quickly burn out for numerous reasons including:

They get lost in applications, options and irrelevant conversations All the time spent using social tools doesn’t produce a return that justifies the time Each new social tool introduced into the eco-system grabs our attention and steals our productivity Initially intrigued by the possibilities of all these tools, communities, platforms and people many soon are overwhelmed and fatigued with simply trying to keep up

Washington, DC –(ENEWSPF)—August 5, 2011.  U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu yesterday announced that an Iowa based start-up company has been selected to participate in the Department of Energy’s “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” challenge. Iowa Powder Atomization Technologies (IPAT) has signed a technology license agreement to use technologies developed by Ames Laboratory to produce fine titanium powder that can be used to improve military, biomedical and aerospace components, and can possibly be used in artificial limbs like those used by wounded veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan less expensive.  The “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” challenge is part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to jump start entrepreneurship and innovation and allows start-up companies streamlined access to technologies developed at America’s 17 national laboratories for a reduced upfront fee of just $1,000.

“This is a great example of what can happen when we unleash the American innovation machine and allow entrepreneurs to turn a great idea into a business opportunity,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “By making it easier, faster and cheaper for start-ups to license groundbreaking technologies we can move innovative ideas to the marketplace – creating jobs and growing our economy.”

The man who coined "disruptive innovation" more than a decade ago is still transforming the way we think about the powerful ideas. In his new book, Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Clayton Christensen, along with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, moves beyond analysing the process of disrupting an industry, delving into the very roots of creativity. Its timing is apt: a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 "leadership competency" of the future. In their follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen, Dyer, and Gregersen analyze an eight-year study of the origins of innovative business ideas. The research is augmented by interviews with people such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, and Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff—through which the authors examine traits these innovators share, and, subtly raise the question: can anyone emulate these traits in order to innovate? Christensen, a Harvard business professor, seems to think it's possible. He spoke with Inc.com's Christine Lagorio about the need for innovators need to ditch their troves of data, the counterintuitive significance of networking, and his favorite innovation that comes out of business school (spoiler alert: it's his own).

When BlogHer was launched in 2005, its goal was to unite women bloggers all over the world to share their voices, advice and experiences. Today, the site has more than 25 million members who are doing more than just writing: they are innovators, nonprofit leaders and entrepreneurs.

Many of its members are not only women, but also men sharing tips, opinions and insight on everything from recipes, to family advice and career advancement, and more.

Whenever the White House starts rattling off ideas for goosing the economy and creating jobs, “patent reform” always ranks high on the list. Here was Barack Obama on June 29: “Right now, Congress can send me a bill that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to patent a new product or idea, because we can’t give innovators in other countries a big leg up.”

In the abstract, Obama is onto something. There’s been no shortage of reporting over the years about how the U.S. patent system has become outmoded and can throttle innovation. “This American Life,” for example, recently aired an in-depth segment on patent trolls: firms that exist solely to stockpile patents — often vague patents on basic business methods — and then lob infringement suits at companies trying to market new products. Start-up firms are at risk of being throttled by lawsuits, while many established tech firms spend their time gobbling up patents as a defensive measure, so that they can countersue if the need arises. That’s why Apple, Microsoft and Google have been wrestling one another for the 6,000 patents that went on auction after telecom equipment maker Nortel went bankrupt.

Clearbridge Accelerator, a Singapore-based technology incubator that focuses on biomedical devices, nanotech, advanced material sciences and computational algorithms, has received an investment from Tim Draper, founder and managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to a press release.

The funding will go towards strengthening Clearbridge Accelerator’s incubation platform and expanding its incubation team and support infrastructure. Currently, the incubator is involved with four companies: Clearbridge BioMedics, Clearbridge BioLoc, Clearbridge Nanomedics, and Clearbridge VitalSigns, according to a report in sgentrepreneurs.

If the vertiginious dive of the Dow Jones has left you feeling gloomy this week, your biggest problem might be that you’re paying too careful watch over the erratic EKG of a dying system, the one the International Energy Agency described a few years ago as “patently unsustainable.” Look intead at the numbers that matter to a truly sustainable system, and the future looks bright even after this wild week.

Herewith, a rosy forecast from the MNN weather desk and a bullish report on the green economy. Let’s call it the MNN Innovation Index.

24kwh:

This is the amount of energy a Nissan Leaf’s battery can store, enough to power the average Japanese home for two days, IT World reports. This is also the dawning of a promised smart-grid revolution in which EV owners power up on the cheap overnight and then sell power back to the grid when demand peaks during the day - about as win-win as a scenario can get.

Through a revived public-private partnership, Detroit is positioning itself for an economic recovery and the federal government is more than willing to help.

That -- in short -- is what U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development John Fernandez told a handful of media today as he took a break from touring high-tech businesses and speaking with officials from companies such as Compuware Corp., Quicken Loans Inc. and GalaxE.Solutions.

“We wanted to come and actually get on the ground and meet some of the leadership,” said Fernandez, who is the point man for President Barack Obama on economic development. “We wanted to learn more about what was happening here; look for opportunities where we can be a better federal partner to accelerate this growth.”

Yesterday, we asked “Where Do You Get New Ideas?” There weren’t many comments on the post, but I received tons of emails with your answers. The number one response? In the shower!

You can see the other responses in the infographic below.

I still get business plans, looking for an investor, that say all too clearly that the first goal of the new business is to do research and development (R&D) on some promising new technology, like superconductivity or cancer research. Investors are looking for commercial products to make money, rather than R&D sunk costs, so your investment hopes are sunk as well.

In fact, the term ‘research and development’ covers a continuum of activities, so you need to use a more precise term to optimize your funding considerations. There are opportunities all along the continuum, and they need to be mapped to the right academic environments and public- and private-sector development organizations before a funding source can be determined.

Good news: LinkedIn and LinkedIn Today can drive huge amounts of traffic to a website. The bad news? Generating traffic via LinkedIn — just like generating traffic via any strategy — is not easy.

But it can be done.

First some background. LinkedIn Today is a social news platform that gathers stories, articles, etc. based on what LinkedIn users share with each other. If you like an article and “share” it (like by using the “share” button above the first paragraph of this post) your connections — and their connections — may notice and check it out.

Nice — but it gets better.

We've won the war on boredom! If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay!

But wait—we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they're right. I've noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.

I make my living being creative and have always assumed that my potential was inherited from my parents. But for allowing my creativity to flourish, I have to credit the soul-crushing boredom of my childhood.