While startups have played a crucial role in getting the green industry off the ground, the future will likely be dominated by the green giants, i.e., large, sprawling conglomerates with decades of experience under their belts.

Why? Green technology essentially involves revamping the physical infrastructure of the modern world: replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines, building homes from materials concocted in chemistry laboratories, and swapping out engines for electric motors. Established companies are simply in a far better position to muster the capital, technological depth, and factory capacity that will all be needed to make the transition.

Business models are blueprints. They force choices early in the developmental process. While necessary, they can also constrain (much like like construction blueprints). And ultimately, they’re a critical factor in determining future success.

The problem is: business models are backward facing (based on past experience). In other words, the last time a set of circumstances prevailed, a successful business followed a particular set of rules. However, when the circumstances are novel – and there is no past experience – you have to create a new model.

One of the keys to good leadership is to be consistent:

1. Consistent focus on the few critical issues.
2. Consistent mood, behavior, and decision-making so that your team knows where you are coming from.
3. Consistent delivery, brand image and presence with the customer.

Many venture capital investors I've spoken with are pleased with the news that the Securities and Exchange Commission may be loosening rules on capital raising by private companies.

But they should be careful. This change might wind up threatening the business model of venture capital firms.

The SEC is reportedly considering raising the 500-shareholder limit on private companies, which would mean that companies could allow more investors to contribute capital without being forced to adopt the burdensome regulatory and disclosure regime that applies to public companies.

In a down VC market, in the heart of flyover country, it is perhaps inevitable that the lure of free money – SBIR grants, stimulus funds, etc. – would be compelling for Wisconsin’s life sciences entrepreneurs. And if “free” meant, well, “free” I suppose that would be a good, as well as inevitable, thing. But, alas, “free” does not always mean “free.” In fact, from a strategic business building perspective “free” all too often means “a lot more costly than you think.” So, before you spend another dollop of time, energy and, yes, even money pursuing the next too-good-to-be-true free money from the good folks in Washington and Madison that dole out all those tax dollars, consider a few things.

Teaser video from surf trip to Indonesian river tidal bore that produces super clean breaking wave.

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Market Size
The angel investor market in 2010, following a considerable contraction in investment dollars in 2008 and 2009, exhibited a rise in investment dollars and in the number of investments. Total investments in 2010 were $20.1 billion, a robust increase of 14% over 2009, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 61,900 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2010, an increase of 8.2% over 2009 investments. The number of active investors in 2010 was 265,400 individuals, a small growth of 2.3% from 2009. The significant increase in total dollars, coupled with the rise in the number of investments resulted in a larger deal size for 2010 (an increase in deal size of 5.4% from 2009). These data indicate that angels have significantly increased their investment activity, and are committing more dollars resulting from higher valuations. It appears that a cautious optimism to investing is taking hold. Noteworthy changes did occur in the critical seed and start-up stage investment landscape.

Within the startup realm, there is a big difference between having an innovative product versus an innovative business. Some startups have a new technology, but stick to a tried-and-true business model. Others take an existing product, and give it new life with a creative business model. The most competitive startups do both, all the time and every time.

In today’s competitive world, with its accelerating rate of change, no competitive advantage lasts long. According to Josh Linkner, in his new book “Disciplined Dreaming,” we have entered the Age of Creativity, in which each incremental gain is zeroed out as global competitors quickly copy and adapt. The only sustainable competitive advantage is creativity.

Despite political moves that have been making foreign businesses and investors in Venezuela nervous in the past few years, entrepreneurship has managed to survive. For many Venezuelans, entrepreneurship is a way of facing the prolonged political and economic troubles in many sectors of the economy, as the Washington Post article “ With Chávez, Some Venezuelan Entrepreneurs See Opportunity” explained when the President won re-election.

Now at the end of his 2nd six-year term as President, Hugo Chavez has allowed some entrepreneurs to be his allies, such as the president of Entrepreneurs for Venezuela (Empreven). Many of these entrepreneurs are taking advantage of opportunities arising from the spending of government oil revenues. But even those who do not have the chance or do not feel the urgency to develop cordial relationships with the state, are finding smart approaches to leverage scarce resources.

When Whirlpool created its first line of front-loading washers, designers came up with a simple but ingenious idea: to put the appliance atop a 10- to 15-inch pedestal. Users would no longer have to bend so deeply to load their clothes or to fish out the last sock from the back of the drum. The change was ideal for older people and those with bad backs, but it also made the washer easier for everyone to use. That's a core principle of an approach known as "universal design."

"It's all about accommodating a range of abilities," says Doug Beaudet, global director for user experience and interaction design at Whirlpool. The company has employed the concept of universal design to create a number of features that make its appliances easier to use, such as adding both visual and audio cues to indicate wash choices or signal when a cycle is over.

I help out with an initiative called Club Kidpreneur. It’s a fantastic organisation that teaches basic business skills to school kids aged eight to 10. Founded by serial entrepreneur Creel Price, Club Kidpreneur’s goal is to empower young’uns to follow suit later in life.

At the conclusion of the eight-week Kidpreneur course, all the participants head to a public market to launch their businesses. Recent products have included: cookies, traditional lemonade, book marks, cards, buttons, glassware and paper airplanes.

Entrepreneur. Born Steven Paul Jobs on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father Abdulfattah Jandali was a Syrian political science professor and his mother Joanne Simpson worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California's Silicone Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Gov. Jay Nixon laid out a five-year plan Monday to improve the Missouri economy that identifies biosciences and financial services as among the more promising areas.

The Missouri Strategic Initiative is a result of an 11-month effort that kicked off last May at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. More than 600 business, labor, education and economic development officials participated.

The report identified seven target clusters:

•Advanced manufacturing.

•Energy solutions.

•Biosciences.

•Health sciences and services.

•Information technology.

•Financial and professional services.

•Transportation and logistics.

Before I became an innovation consultant I was an industrial designer. For 10 years of my career, I worked as a practising product designer at various agencies including my own. During these 10 years I started discovering a clear pattern in what made certain companies more successful at product innovation than others. This pattern can be summarized in these three points:

1. Companies that are successful innovators know what customers want. They have a very deep understanding of the lives of their customers, and the context in which their products are used.

My clients and I cover miles of ground as we get to the heart of what it means for the people in their organization to achieve leadership in innovation. Over time we visit and revisit, cast and recast, and frame and reframe the matters of…

* What is the critical question which, if we explored it fully with the community, would lead to breakthroughs relative to the challenge at hand?
* Who do we invite to engage with us on the question? What possibilities open when we convene the members in virtual and physical community?
* What commitment do we each choose to make in exploring the question?
* What level of ownership do we each choose to take in the practice of innovation?

My new book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services’ tries to unfuzz the front end of innovation in order to create great ideas: ideas with an X-factor!

Everybody knows the television show where a jury is looking for talent with the X factor: “something” that makes for star quality. As innovators we are also in search of ideas with an X factor. But when do our ideas have it? Which criteria should it meet in order to be of star quality?

Generally, an idea is in this early phase not more than a fleeting thought, a word or image whereby we experience a ‘we-have-to-do-something-with-this’ feeling. It is only a rough diamond, like a lot of candidates in the first round of the X factor. And it has still a long way to go. An important question is, will it survive the corporate stage-gate jury?

Investors and entrepreneurs often ask me to shed some light on how to value pre-revenue companies – an issue often raised when entrepreneurs are looking for external investment.

Teaching courses on entrepreneurship and innovation, which include raising finance, suggests that I have a level of expertise in this area, which enables me to provide a definitive answer. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The more I teach this issue and research different valuation techniques, the more I recognize that valuation of pre-revenue companies is more of an art than of science.

OTTAWA — It’s not just the demise of Nortel Networks that ails the region’s tech sector. Nearly half the city’s largest tech firms have either been swallowed up or have moved their headquarters in just the past two years.

This gem comes by way of the latest annual survey of the country’s tech industry by the Branham Group, the Ottawa-based consulting group.

The 2011 Branham survey, published Tuesday, also shows that four of the five Ottawa firms that made it into the top 40 — based on 2010 revenues — dropped in relative position compared to the year before.

The only exception was Telesat Canada, which did not feature in the previous Branham survey. The satellite services provider was first among Ottawa firms, with revenues last year of $821 million, up roughly four per cent from 2009. That was good enough for 13th spot among Canadian tech firms.

Twenty years ago Wellington was a sleepy backwater populated by grey-suited bureaucrats and seriously lacking in good coffee. Now New Zealand's capital city absolutely positively hums with life and is regarded as a rising barometer for the South Pacific island nation's emerging digital creative wealth.

Wellington's international reputation for creativity took a leap forward when Oscar winning director Peter Jackson established operations in the city over a decade ago. Jackson operates an enormous production facility two minutes drive from the city's downtown airfield, where he parks his corporate jet. Hits such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong came to life there and filming of The Hobbit is now underway. Jackson also has a stake in highly acclaimed studio Weta Digital that famously provided digital effects for science fiction blockbuster Avatar.