The worst of the Great Recession is apparently over. The economy is growing again, and the unemployment rate is down to 8.8 percent from its peak of 10.1 percent.

Yet even if the acute crisis is abating, the grim fact is that the U.S. economy still faces chronic health problems. Even before the recession hit, back in 2007, real income for the median American household was lower than it had been in 2000. So too was total employment as a percentage of the population.

Here's the fundamental problem. Economic growth is harder than it used to be. This is the argument made by the economist Tyler Cowen in his provocative new e-book The Great Stagnation. Even if you don't buy all his analysis (and I don't), he's right that the American economy will have to contend with some pretty st

The Varick Street incubator operated by the Polytechnic Institute of New York University fairly bustles as the young businesses that rent space for $300 a month per seat cram as many bodies as they can into each cubicle. CB Insights, a technology research company, one summer shoehorned nine people into a space set up for four.

The NYU-Poly site, established in partnership with the city, is one prong in an effort by local universities to become national, if not international, technology players. They are pouring billions of dollars into engineering and applied science programs—hiring faculty, building new facilities and launching initiatives that promise to sharpen their entrepreneurial chops.

“(We are trying) to bring New York City to the point where it competes with Silicon Valley and Boston,” said Jerry Hultin, president of NYU-Poly.

A couple weeks ago, in a comment to an MBA Mondays post, Dan Lewis wrote "LTV has to be higher than your CPA or you're not going to make it." I asked Dan to elaborate in a MBA Mondays guest blog post on this topic and he agreed. Here's Dan's post:

LTV stands for “lifetime value” of a customer. CPA stands for “cost per acquisition” of a customer/subscriber. LTV has to be greater than CPA or you won’t be able to scale – or, for that matter, survive. To demonstrate, let’s go to the video tape:

Monday through Friday, I publish a free daily email newsletter (which you can, and should, sign up for), putting to words the notion that you should – and can – learn something new every day. Oddities, like the fact that Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service the day he was shot, carrots used to be purple, there is only one Jewish person in all of Afghanistan, etc. It has about 4,000 subscribers. It’s basically a blog, sure, but I send it as an email newsletter. Long story; one for another day.

Social media marketing, blogging, conference tweeting, virtual events, mobile apps, unconferences: the list of latest innovations for events today is truly mind-boggling. No wonder event professionals, let alone their clients and attendees are having a tough time keeping up. As event organizers, even when we ourselves, are up on the latest technology and techniques, we often have trouble conveying the value of these things to others.

It can be truly overwhelming. That’s why, as I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “What the Dog Saw”, I was struck by a story about Ron Popeil and his ability to convince people to understand and adopt innovative gadgets.

Lately, I've been receiving a lot of questions from people selling a service--or thinking about selling a service--over the web, asking what you need to do differently than those people marketing a physical product.

It's a good question. Because while almost all the selling and traffic generation techniques I teach work equally well for both product- and service-based business models, there are a few unique challenges faced by those selling services that warrant special discussion.

What exactly is new product development? Does the “product” actually have to be a product? Or can it be a process? Does the idea have to come from the C Suite? Or can it be a suggestion from the factory floor, the retail showroom, the Idea Box or a customer tip?

How do you treat ideas once they land in your organization’s “idea hopper”, and how wide is your idea funnel?

Answer these questions, and you’ve placed your finger on the pulse of how your organization embraces new product development.

NPD best blossoms in that place where creativity commingles with structure – where fresh thinking is fostered in a nursery of structured liberation. Think of ideas as if they were offspring: They should be free to roam and explore, but they need fences – structure – in their lives to ensure safe maturation in a controlled environment.

HP recently released a news advisory highlighting the results of a fascinating innovation survey that the company commissioned. (The global survey included interviews with 312 executives in both commercial enterprises and the public sector during February and March 2011).

Some of the report highlights include:

1. Ninety-eight (98) percent of the executives surveyed believe that innovation will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years.

2. The most important reason to innovate is to facilitate future organizational growth (79% of respondents). For commercial enterprises, the second most important reason to innovate is to support profitability (74% of respondents); for the public sector, reputation is the second most important reason to innovate (59% of respondents). InnoCentive’s work with public sector organizations (e.g., Air Force Research Labs, NASA, In-Q-Tel and the intelligence community) in particular reveals that they are serious about finding solutions to problems that matter most to their missions, advocating public-private partnerships, and promoting transparency, openness, and collaboration across agencies.

We’re constantly debating the hallmarks of an innovative company at Fast Company. Does innovation stem from the culture or DNA of a place—the tone set by its leader? Or, is it a tangible product built by a team of engineers, software developers, and designers? And, how do long-standing companies keep innovation alive as they mature?

For the last few years, we’ve tried to answer these questions in our March issue that features the 50 Most Innovative Companies. In 2011, some of those businesses included Google, Univision, FourSquare, Twitter, Netflix, Nissan, Intel, and Zynga. Whenever we compile the list (arguing and debating the myriad of choices from our New York City office), we glean lessons from the process. Here are the top headlines we took away:

• Innovation clusters around platforms.

Apple is No. 1 on our list not just for the iPad. It’s also the way the App Store, iPad and iPhone have collectively encouraged and allowed other businesses to innovate. We chose 100 as examples—from Angry Birds maker Rovio to Square, which turns an iPhone into a credit card reader—but there are thousands of Apple-assisted achievers.

Two partners in Advance Northeast Ohio -- NorTech and the University of Akron -- are hosting a two-day session with the National Academies on "Building the Ohio Innovation Economy."

Here is a link to Plain Dealer reporter Robert Schoenberger's story on the first day of the session. A few of my key takeaways were:

Ross DeVol, executive director of economic research at the Milken Institute, said Ohio has to strengthen its universities' ability to assist in the commercialization of innovations, prepare and attract more highly educated talent and find ways to turn its most promising start-up companies into high-growth ventures if it is to become a "top tier state" in terms of innovation and economic prosperity.

I just read the Q1 2011 report from CB Insights, which shows venture capital is back. Overall, investors put $7.5 billion to work across 738 financing deals with U.S. startups. That represents a $1.5 billion jump in funding over the same quarter of 2010 with a similar number of deals, so it clearly shows a trend to larger deal sizes for fewer startups.

To me, this indicates that venture capitalists (VCs) are looking for business, but not from first-time startups. Sure, there is always some seed funding (10% of overall deal flow), but you can bet that this money goes to entrepreneurs who have been there before and won. Angels are also moving up-stage, leaving a bigger and bigger black hole for new startups. Your friends and family are really the only answer until you have a significant revenue stream.

Back to VCs, Silicon Valley venture capital firms are still the most active. In fact, most of the most active investment firms are located there, although NY now has moved solidly into second place (ahead of Boston). That doesn’t mean that you have to live in one of these places to be considered, but it helps.

VAN WERT, Ohio — The farmland is flat. The houses are few. The property owners have agreed to sell.

All that’s missing is a manufacturer who wants to build a giant factory on 1,600 acres of farmland in northwest Ohio. As the town’s website says: “whyvanwert.org.”

Van Wert’s speculative industrial site — complete with a rail line, gas lines, land-acquisition options and anything else a manufacturer would need — is just one $10 million slice of an extraordinary government experiment to revive this state’s declining economy.

Running on fumes, the homeless, single teen mother arrived at the office of a social-service agency hungry, tired, broke, and pregnant again. She needed help. Clipboard in hand, toddler in tow, she and the receptionist sat in a small waiting room and went over her situation. The story that emerged was horrific. She had been abused—in every way—by parents and foster parents; she spent years on the street selling first drugs, then her body; she had dated a number of men who had eventually tossed her and her baby aside. The receptionist sat with the damp 2-year-old on her lap, swallowed a big lump in her throat, put her pencil down, and said a counselor would be in to see the young woman shortly. The receptionist then excused herself, and closed the door behind her.

That receptionist was not just a receptionist, however—she was also a college student studying sociology. In addition to hundreds of pages of reading, as well as hours of theoretical discussions and lectures over the course of the semester, she worked as an unpaid intern and received perhaps the best education of her life.

The people over at recommendations engine Hunch.com analyzed data from 700,000 users to break down the differences between Mac people and PC people.

52% of respondents were PC people, 25% Mac people, 23% were neither.

Like a good movie, the results are both surprising and reassuring of your expectations – all at the same time!

For example, if you know what show the girl pictured on the right is in, you're probably a Mac person.

Sixty percent (60%) of small business owners admit that they spend more time holding their mobile devices than the hand of their significant others. If that doesn’t tell us something about the pervasiveness of mobile communications, and our priorities, I’m not sure what does.

That finding comes to us from the Staples 5th Annual Small Business Survey (PDF), based on 300 U.S. small businesses having no more than 20 employees.

I was struck by several of the points made in the survey about mobile communications, suggesting how profoundly mobile devices have not only changed our business lives, but our personal lives, too. Depending on how you look at it, the results could be good, bad or a mix of both.

An iPhone app launching today provides a glimpse into the future of shopping. Created by Modiv Media, the app lets customers scan items while they shop, presents them with personalized offers as they go, and speeds up their checkout. One of the first companies to deploy the app is Stop & Shop, which operates more than 375 supermarkets in the eastern United States.

Stop & Shop's version of the app, called Scan It!, relies heavily on loyalty-card numbers for its smarts. Users install the app, load in their loyalty card by capturing it with the phone's camera, and then take the phone to the store. The phone's camera captures the bar codes of items the person puts in a shopping cart and adds their prices to a running total. The user bags items while shopping, thus avoiding having to unload and reload the cart at the register. A store might sometimes have employees perform checks to make sure users are paying for everything in their carts, but for the most part it's an honor system.

As the U.S. economy slowly moves out of the recession, it's a good bet that businesses started or led by immigrants will play a substantial role in creating jobs and driving growth. In high tech, for instance, 52 percent of startups launched between 1995 and 2005 were founded by immigrants, and foreign nationals have filed for a quarter of patents in recent years. So why are we so eager to send talented immigrants back to their home countries, instead of keeping them here so they can continue to innovate?

Our unwillingness to champion entrepreneurs, no matter where they come from, is part of a larger attitude problem around entrepreneurship: We don't celebrate their achievements as much as we should, and our government support of entrepreneurs is weak. The end result is that talent is attracted here to attend our finest educational institutions, but may not be so welcomed if it wants to stick around and start a business.

It started with the plate down the pews or the hat passed around by street performers. Speak to a crowd, impress them with your passion, convince them of your motives, persuade them of a likely windfall, and the money clinks into your piggybank. With technology multiplying the crowds ad infinitum, shouldn’t raising money from so many become easier? Welcome to the world of crowdfunding, which uses the time-tested principles of fund-raising, enhanced by the internet.

Filmmaker Onir most recently reaped the benefits of crowdfunding. He used social networking sites to raise a third of the money for his Rs 3-crore budget film I Am, releasing this Friday. He says, “As a filmmaker, you are told by studios that people aren’t interested in your themes. I hate to sulk that no one is helping to make my film. I can’t panic. I need to find ways.” This “Dreamseller” (as he calls himself on Facebook) put up a pitch on Twitter and Facebook explaining the movie in May 2009, and within a month and a half he’d raised enough money, from 400 individuals in 35 cities — from Mumbai to Boston, Chennai to Nigeria — to start shooting. The amount varied from Rs 1,000 to more than Rs 1 lakh. The list of co-producers and co-owners of I Am scrolls long, as every contributor is recognised. People also donated their talent and time — from cooking lunches to driving cars to setting up shots. Onir says, “For many, it was the first time on the sets, it wasn’t always easy for us, but their energy brought something to the film.”

There I stood, having just been given permission to see an area of a building that few were allowed to enter. As I opened the door to the first room, the unmistakable smell of freshly cut grass pervaded my senses. The air was misty, the colors were light green, and the Mandarin name of the room I'd just entered, translated, meant "The people from the Nordic countries." With my Danish background, it was comfortably familiar--the colors seemed lifted directly from the designer Arne Jacobsen's catalogue, the smell took me right back to my parents' garden, and the air was full of spring sounds Scandinavian birds make at dusk.

The building I found myself in was huge--about the size of a football stadium--and it was located some 200 miles outside of Beijing. With the same level of zeal its country used in preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this business was fully detailing each sensory impression its products will have on potential consumers. For this business, the objective is to become a global leader in car manufacturing. Here, thousands of cars were lined up to leave an ultra-modern production facility, which, until recently, featured all the familiar global brands. Now, there was a new take on it. The cars that stretched, row upon row, were all Chinese brands designed specifically to appeal to foreign markets.

“How did you get into venture capital?”

I kind of hate that question. Not because I have any particular point of view on how I became a venture capitalist. No, I just don’t like it because like so many other people in the business I arrived here following a fairly unique path. Inevitably the person asking is trying to find a pattern that they can use to get into the business and my story isn’t helpful for them.

As I gear up to hire a new associate for the San Francisco office of First Round Capital I know there is no standard way to find the next person to join our team. Our current experience mix includes entrepreneurship, academia, banking, government, crime fighting, and some very poor scooter riding. No one here burst from the womb wanting to do venture capital yet here we all are having the time of our lives while we strive to make our portfolio companies successful.