A Microsoft higher-up used a Seattle rock band reference Thursday while plugging a regional entrepreneurial program now looking for cash.

“I’m unbelievably impressed. I feel like one of the only guys from out of town who got to see Pearl Jam — they’re going to be big,” Cliff Reeves said of Kansas’ Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship program.

A few years back, I knew a guy who always had a great idea up his sleeve.

He’d share these ideas with anyone that was in his company, and tell of his grand plans for when his ideas made him rich. They would invariably involve Salma Hayek, a yacht and six months at sea…

Everyone smiled and asked him not to forget us when he was rich and famous. After all, we were the sounding boards for his ideas and we’d say which ones sounded good, and which ones wouldn’t get him Salma.

Jump forward a few years, and needless to say he’s not dating Salma Hayek for six months of the year. Nor does he have his yacht, or his millions in the bank. The last I heard, he was a baker in a small village just outside of London in the U.K.

NCBIO, a Durham, North Carolina-based trade group, presented the figures to state legislators at a briefing for North Carolina lawmakers. The group conducts the survey of investments each year to coincide with the annual briefing.

he report covering the 12 months ending April 25 includes equity investments, licensing payments, grants and investments for buildings and equipment. NCBIO compiles the report by tracking news stories of funding and investments. The $1.1 billion figure represents a 25 percent increase over the $924.5 million of similar announcements in the 12-month period ending April 25, 2010.

In a letter to lawmakers, NCBIO President Sam Taylor said that the figures reaffirm the economic impact of North Carolina’s life science cluster. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center estimates that life sciences generate $64.6 billion in economic activity annually and supports more than 226,000 jobs.

Vanderbilt University has hired an executive with Cleveland Clinic Innovations to lead its technology transfer efforts.

Alan Bentley will start with Vanderbilt on June 1 and hold the new (and long) title of assistant vice chancellor of technology transfer and intellectual property development, according to a statement from Vanderbilt, located in Nashville, Tennessee.

At Cleveland Clinic Innovations — the hospital’s technology transfer and commercialization arm — Bentley’s title was director of commercialization. In that role, he focused on commercializing cardiovascular medical devices developed by Cleveland Clinic doctors.

Germany's Speigel Online reports that Berlin may soon become the place to be for tech entrepreneurs. Berlin is home to an ever increasing number of innovative new technology start-up companies -- to the point that even Silicon Valley venture capitalists are taking notice. With a new focus on the country, many companies are beginning to innovate rather than simply clone successful American ideas.

The article notes that under-employed hipsters, exiled artists and wannabe punks -- Berlin's image has never been that of a capital of entrepreneurial innovation.

That, though, may soon change. While tourists still flock to the city to dance in Berlin's renowned nightclubs, computer programmers are also coming to the city in droves -- to work in the rapidly increasing number of high-tech startups that are now calling the German capital home.

I’ve long been an advocate of allowing employees to work remotely if at all possible. As a manger, I’ve found that enabling remote work at least part of the time boosts employee morale, loyalty and productivity.

The results of an experiment conducted this year bear me out. Telework Exchange, a public-private partnership that promotes telework, partnered with Cisco to establish 2011 National Telework Week, which encouraged organizations and individuals to pledge to telework for one week in February. Some 39,694 employees participated, and here’s what they and their employers learned, according to Telework Exchange’s recently released report:

* More Productive: Both organizations and employees reported increased employee productivity during Telework Week.

BY WILLIAM J. MCLAUGHLIN – Our nation is facing serious problems ranging from rebuilding the economy to multiple wars to potential environmental catastrophes and a financial crisis, mainly in the public sector. No one appears to be addressing them as a package, yet we live with them as a package. Where is the vision? Where is the leadership? Certainly we do not lack for commentators with 24/7 news and talk shows.

The economy cannot get rebuilt without investment and there is no investment without money—private money. It also does not get rebuilt without investor confidence. The federal deficit doubled during the presidency of George W. Bush. During his eight years in office, our national debt exceeded that of the first 42 presidents combined. During the first year of the Obama presidency, it doubled again and is now projected to skyrocket. Absolutely horrible! It is no wonder there is a Tea Party, the people are rebelling. President Obama campaigned for office as a political moderate, but once elected, he made a sharp left turn.

They’ve got the same big smiles, shining eyes, and passion to work and represent your service just as much as you do. Think of the intern as mini-me. Whether you’re an established start-up or a fledging small business on the rise, you will eventually begin to think about creating a team of professionals to work alongside you. While you will want to work with individuals that boast a healthy resume of experience, don’t discredit the intern. Today, they’re pulling their weight in unimaginable ways for small businesses and companies.

Interns, for those unfamiliar with what the term means, are generally college-age students who work an entry-level position within a company referred to as an internship for a specified amount of time. Internships range from a wide variety of duties and responsibilities and are generally unpaid, part-time positions.

Sadly, one of the world’s last remaining typewriter factories, Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai, India, is closing down its typewriter production line, survived only by Moonachie, N.J.-based Swintec.

We may not know what we’ve lost. Despite its limitations, with a typewriter, you are pressed to think out the entirety of what you are trying to say in your head to avoid endless retyping (or using White-Out). And you have to seriously focus to avoid typos. This is powerful mental training.

If you thought your lazy, sullen teenager slept a lot, they've got nothing on your typical pro athlete, who routinely gets between 10-12 hours a night. Compare that to the average of 6.44 hours, and you've got to wonder why guys like Steve Nash or Roger Federer aren't endorsing a high-performance line of blankies instead of shoes.

But it's not simply because they're lazy, rich, and bored (though that probably contributes as well). Rather, it's that to perform at your physical peak, you basically have to sleep constantly -- after workouts, before games, before felonies, after felonies, and before hitting the clubs. That's all laid out in this cutesy but informative infographic by Ffunction and Zeo, a company that makes a high-tech personal sleep coach.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a summary report on technology transfer activities of the federal laboratories for fiscal year 2009. The report summarizes the technology transfer activities and achievements of scientific research agencies across the federal government.

In January 2011 President Obama identified innovation as one of the key factors underpinning America’s continued scientific and technical leadership. Technology transfer is an essential mission of federal laboratories that leverages the creative the innovation and intellectual capital of government scientists and the nation’s investments in science and technology to strengthen the American economy and the nation’s ability to compete in world markets.

Your Website is supposed to be a convenience for your customers, right? So why do so many companies insist on baking in ludicrous or tone-deaf elements that frustrate and alienate those very same customers?

You can see examples of bad Web design everywhere, and you don’t have to be a Web designer to recognize them. The trick is being observant or savvy enough to point these glitches out to your Web designer so you don’t foist these problems on your own customers. Keir Thomas at PC World recently rounded up his take on the 5 worst Web design blunders, and I think he’s spot on:

If your startup is looking for an angel investor, does it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up? In reality, hitting large numbers of angels in multiple locations with a generic pitch is one of the least productive approaches.

Here are five key things you need to know to quickly find the right angel for your startup:

1.  Angels invest in people, more often than they invest in ideas. That means they need to know you, or someone they trust who does know you (warm introduction). For maximum credibility, start networking for potential investors to build relationships a few months before you start asking for money.

Businesses always ask for examples of either your work in social media or others. When they ask for examples it tells you they haven’t been paying attention to the market nor do they have any familiarity with the market. Yet they always want something to point to or examples of what you have done as a reference to credibility.

When you respond they have no reference point to put other examples or your own experience into context with their needs. Instead most businesses want to know who you’ve helped create a success with social media and what did those people do so they can copy it.

This week IM caught up with Debra Amidon to ask her views on the evolution of innovation management as a profession. Debrah first wrote about intellectual capital in 1987 and became a practitioner as ‘global innovation strategist’ long before it was in vogue. As founder of ENTOVATION International Ltd, she has managed a global network of innovation experts across 67 countries for over 2 decades. She provides us with some perspective and counsel for the future.

What is innovation management to you?

Our profession has evolved beyond a focus on the flow of technology or finances. Knowledge, in the form of ’intellectual capital’, is now the strategic resource to be leveraged at all economic levels. Indeed, the flow of knowledge must be visualized and incentivized from the point of origin to the point of optimal need or opportunity; and the process now operates more as innovation value-system ecology than the traditional, linear value-chain.

All of us have been enabled to use social media as the means to build relationship capital that enhances the value of a our individual and our collective economy.

Each of our benefits can be significantly enhanced if the “system” of social media is continuously improved. Improvement will only come if we all learn and use appropriate and relevant knowledge to improve the value social media affords us.

The word directions means several things including: guidance or supervision of action or conduct : an explicit instruction : the line or course on which something is moving or is aimed to move or along which something is pointing or facing : a channel or direct course of thought or action : the art and technique of directing a group of people to accomplish an aim.

The marketplace is filled with thousands and thousands of individuals, organizations, products and services all claiming to help other people and organizations with directions on how to use social media. The problem is that not all directions will take you to the place you want to go.

Everyone wants to be smart. The opposite of smart is dum. No one wants to be known as dum. Yet smart and dum are transparent because of social media. What you say and do can be labeled as either smart or dum and at the click of a mouse millions will know what millions of other think about what you said or did.

The irony of social media is its transparency and each word and action is logged into the world wide library which stores everything, everyone and all things said and done. This world wide library is search-able by anyone, everyone and everybody is creating an index of content that can be found forever.

Facebook, Google, Apple: all companies that were started by hackers of one kind or another, grew fast, and changed the world. It's a model that still motivates computer scientists and engineers who bet everything on their own tech startups. But the next company to join that list of successes may be founded by a designer, not a hacker, if the backers of a new Silicon Valley investment fund are right. The Designer Fund will focus on companies led by Web and product designers rather than solely engineers, in hopes of creating more tech startups that specialize in compelling user experiences.

The fund is being put together by 500 Startups, a company that acts as an incubator for early-stage tech companies, trading seed funding and mentoring for a stake in a venture.

No simple checklist could ever fully define what we mean by good design, but when we look at examples of it, we see that some essential elements tend to show up consistently.

By exploring these elements individually—and by thinking about design as not just a noun (the design) but also a verb (to design)—we can approach the abstract question of "What is design?" in a productive way. Drawing on what design is actually like in the real world helps us talk about what it could, and should, become.

Here are 10 essential elements or aspects of good design that transcend context, industry, and geography.