This week, I was invited to join the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Trade Ministerial in Big Sky, Montana. This regional bloc meeting remains one of the most important venues for discussing global economic policy. It is also one that has paid attention to the role of entrepreneurs in achieving its goals of trade and cooperation for growth.

For example, in order to promote entrepreneurial development within the region, APEC has developed initiatives and even case studies to foster an understanding of the attributes and needs of entrepreneurs. The first APEC symposium on venture business and innovations in entrepreneurship development was held in 2000. Since then, a continuous exchange of ideas and information has been taking place among the economic institutions and entrepreneurship organizations representing the 21 APEC member economies. For example, in July 2008, APEC held a Workshop on Embedding Entrepreneurship in University Curriculum in Ha Noi, Viet Nam, that focused on the growing demand for entrepreneurs and how to facilitate the development of entrepreneurship programs at universities. Last October, the United States and Japan co-hosted the APEC Women’s Entrepreneurship Summit (WES) in Gifu City, Japan, to help inform innovative strategies to strengthen women entrepreneurs’ participation and contributions to economic growth. I also encourage our readers to check out and send us updates on our reviews of the state of entrepreneurship in some of the APEC member countries (e.g., Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea), as well as on other APEC countries and beyond. Also, check out what is going on for Global Entrepreneurship Week in the region.

This Web-only article is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "7 Radical Energy Solutions," which appears in the May 2011 issue of Scientific American (subscribe here). The presentation was created by Zemi media.

A new MIT initiative, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) seeks to analyze the state of production in the United States and to propose new routes from innovation through manufacturing to jobs and growth in the United States. Developments emerging in laboratories like those at MIT in areas including energy, life sciences, transportation, environment, communication, and security have the potential for extraordinary contributions to human well-being. To transform these technologies into flows of new products, services, and processes, we need systems of production different from old-style manufacturing. Countries that can build powerful links between research in the laboratory and new manufacturing will emerge as the ones that benefit the most from their innovative capabilities. Manufacturing is on the critical path delivering innovation in science and technology to end-users, whether in new medicines, high-tech devices, or electric vehicles. Our question is: how can the United States create and sustain these new production systems?

For years the common belief was that the only place to start a tech company is in Silicon Valley. Startups outside of the Bay Area were largely overlooked or ignored. Lately, that myth has been exposed, and startup ecosystems have sprung up all across the United States. Cities not normally referred to as “tech hubs” have started to draw the attention of the media and the public.

In the tech world, my hometown of Los Angeles, California has long been considered the red-headed step child of its more successful northern counterpart. However, in recent years, a number of legitimate startups have set up shop around the city. In response, Los Angelenos have started to embrace, define and build a startup ecosystem. In the process, we’ve learned a few lessons.

Scholastic skepticism is contagious. Pundits and parents alike continue to second-guess the value of a college degree. After all, the recession has changed the way many Americans look at big-ticket purchases; plenty of families worry that today's expenses will not pay off tomorrow.

Not surprisingly, today's cost-conscious public views college price tags with a wary eye. According to the Pew Research Center survey of the American public, only 35 percent said colleges were doing a "good" job in terms of providing value to students and parents; 42 percent said "only fair," and 15 percent said "poor."

The latest MoneyTree study by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the NVCA have some in the Venture Capital universe encouraged. Several statistics seem to justify the optimism.

From data compiled by Thompson Reuters, the study finds the average Venture deal size reaching $8 million for the first time since 2007’s first quarter. Total dollar amounts for deals also rose to $5.9 billion. The numbers also reveal 14 companies receiving $50 million or more, the highest number since 2001. 4 of the 14 were for $100 million plus.

On the flip side, 736 total deals invested nationwide is the lowest since the 3rd quarter of 2009. With total deals down, the rise in average deal size accounts for the total combined deal volume increase to to $5.9 billion, but the study notes this increase is slight.

ALABAMA: BIRMINGHAM
Meagan and Darrius Peace | Magic City Black Expo
Three years ago, the Peaces, owners of a cosmetics company, decided that young black business owners like themselves needed a local showcase. Today, the Magic City Black Expo is a nexus of entrepreneurial camaraderie -- and so important locally that it's a regular stump stop for area politicos.

ALASKA: ANCHORAGE
Michael Sobocinski | Seeds of Change
Community gardens are not new. Nor are efforts to aid youth in the juvenile-justice system. But merge the two, as Sobocinski did, and add a social enterprise selling vegetables from the gardens -- then you have a program with the potential to change lives on multiple levels.

Everywhere you look this spring, there are signs of bubbly enthusiasm for technology. Microsoft just paid $8.5 billion for a company that isn’t profitable. Facebook has racked up more than 600 million members around the world. LinkedIn is teed up to go public this week at a valuation of more than $3 billion.

It may be hard to remember, but the history books say there was once a time when broad swaths of the American public got that fired up about biotechnology. I’ve now been writing about the industry for 10 years, and have never encountered that feeling myself. The only biotech industry I’ve ever known is populated by a small group of hard-core specialists. When I venture outside biotech circles and tell people I write about new biotech drugs, devices, and diagnostics, I usually get greeted with a blank look. I’ve learned the best option is either to pass the celery sticks, or change the subject to something popular, like Facebook, or something else I may have in common with the other person, like being a fan of the Green Bay Packers.

The federal government funds most academic life-sciences research in the United States. But prior to 1980, universities were prohibited from patenting inventions arising from federally funded research.

In 1980, however, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which assigned academic invention ownership rights to their corresponding universities. This gave birth to university technology transfer offices, which now exist in virtually all of the nation's research-intensive universities.

In part of the long piece that Fortune did on Apple (AAPL) — the article itself has become a story because Fortune has posted only small parts on the Web — Adam Lashinsky wrote of Apple’s start-up nature. In the process, though, he bought into an Apple-inspired mythos and missed an opportunity to explain one thing that really does make Apple different.

The lead sentence telegraphs the myth: “Apple doesn’t often fail, and when it does, it isn’t a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop.” But if you pay attention to the clues that people from Apple, including CEO Steve Jobs and senior vice president of industrial design Jonathan Ive, have dropped over the year, it’s clear that people at Apple make mistakes. They do so all the time, and it is those mistakes that make it possible for the company to come up with the products that it does. Where Apple differs from other companies is in how it makes mistakes.

African innovation won't flourish unless more attention is paid to creating and sustaining markets for it, argues Linda Nordling.

A little over two years ago, I wrote about how African countries can bring scientific innovations to the market, and argued that they should not wait for lumbering continental initiatives to start capitalising on their growing knowledge base.

Innovation, and its role in economic development, resurfaced this month at the second meeting of the Committee on Development Information, Science and Technology (CODIST-II), held on 2–5 May in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The four-day meeting brought scientists and policymakers together to discuss how to turn Africa's golden ideas into solid gold. But to do this, African innovation policy needs to set its sights on the market for these ideas.

In the past I’ve given some tips for handling meetings effectively, covering topics like:
- How not to let your meeting go down a rat hole;
- Dealing with the elephant in the room;
- Dealing with skeletons in your closet;
- How to make meetings discussions, not “pitches”
- A tale of two pitches (I eventually invested in the first company that pitched)

Today’s post is a subtle one about positioning yourself in a presentation. This might be a VC meeting but also might just be a sales or biz dev meeting. It’s any meeting where you are in a small room and are being called on to present on some form of overhead slides

It seems to be an accepted fact these days that big companies normally innovate by buying a startup with innovative products, rather than focusing on in-house innovations. This is a good thing for entrepreneurs and investors, who can win big, but it’s not a given. I see many startups who seem satisfied with a “me too” approach, building yet another social network or e-commerce site, rather than being truly innovative.

Much has been published on this subject, including a new book “Look at More: A Proven Approach to Innovation, Growth, and Change” by Andy Stefanovich, which is really a guide to established companies for unleashing creativity within their organizations. He asserts that the problem is lack of inspiration, and he supports this with twenty years of real case studies from his own experience.

His Ph.D advisor, David Cheriton, was one of the early investors in Google. “He wrote a cheque for $1 million and made billions in the bargain,” says Hemant Kanakia with a wide grin.

Maybe watching that smart angel investment move by his Stanford professor inspired Kanakia's own shift from being a successful entrepreneur to angel investing.

This IIT Bombay alumnus, who did stints with TCS and Bell Labs, says he started out on his own mainly to stop the long commute from Washington DC to New Jersey. “My wife took up a teaching job in DC and instead of doing the commute, I decided to start my own enterprise,” he says.

In 1996, he founded Torrent Networking Systems, a company that built a next generation of fast Internet Routers. Within three years, Ericsson acquired the company for $450 million. “The investors who had funded my company exited making 50 X on their investment,” says Kanakia.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone imparted lessons about opportunity, creativity, failure and empathy yesterday, as the two-time college dropout delivered a standing-ovation commencement speech at Babson College.

Wearing jeans under his gown and sporty sneakers, the social media innovator shared four stories that have colored the way he views business, happiness and his definition of success.

“Opportunity can be manufactured,” Stone, 37, said. “You don’t have to wait around for a certain set of circumstances to arrange themselves in just the right position.”

Entrepreneurship is usually a risky road — one wrong turn, and you could land in a ditch.

It helps if there are angels to fund the entrepreneurial journey and mentors to help navigate. But time is usually a big constraint both for the start up as well as the experienced CEO mentor — this is where e-mentoring over a virtual platform comes in.

Since last December, the Indian Angel Network has been offering online mentoring support to innovators.

Everybody wants a rock star programmer in their team, but very few actually need them. There is a huge difference between need vs. want, though many startups are in a constant cribbing mode for not being able to find rock star programmers.

To give you certain perspective, I have worked with quite a few rock star programmers in my career and here are my observations vis-à-vis rock star programmers.

In his excellent new book, Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible, Daniel Burrus makes a point of discussing the opportunity for entrepreneurial ventures aimed at Baby Boomers. There were 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Burrus says 80 percent of the nation's wealth is controlled by people over the age of 50. So what are entrepreneurs doing about it? Forward-looking ones are taking the "hard trend" of demographic certainty to innovate. Some ideas that are already on the market, or should be:

* Personal elevators retrofitted onto the outside of homes
Video games that place you at Woodstock, the 1968 Democratic Convention or the Chicago 7 trial and let you interact with friends

Draper Laboratory and MIT have developed a satellite the size of a loaf of bread that will undertake one of the biggest tasks in astronomy: finding Earthlike planets beyond our solar system—or exoplanets—that could support life. It is scheduled to launch in 2012.

The "nanosatellite," called ExoPlanetSat, packs powerful, high-performance optics and new control and stabilization technology in a small package.

While there have been many small satellites, these are typically used to perform simple communication or observation missions. "We are doing something that has not been done before," says Séamus Tuohy, director of space systems at Draper.