Ann Arbor is getting a fresh infusion of Silicon Valley.

Ann Arbor SPARK, one of four business accelerators in Southeast Michigan, said Tuesday that it named Paul Krutko president and CEO.

Krutko, previously the chief development officer for San Jose, CA., will replace Mike Finney, who’s now CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Krutko brings an impressive resume. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he led economic development efforts in Cleveland, OH, and Jacksonville, FL, before moving to San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley.

What do the founders of Netflix , Zappos, Whole Foods, and Alibaba.com have in common?

They were all started by entrepreneurs in their second (or third) act:

* Before Reed Hastings founded Netflix, he founded Pure Atria Software, which was eventually acquired by Rational Software. Soon after the acquisition, Hastings took a couple of years off to think about his next business, which would be Netflix.
* Before Zappos, Tony Hsieh founded LinkExchange, which was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1999.
* John Mackey started a health food store called “Safer Way” in a garage years before he founded Whole Foods.
* Jack Ma founded China Pages four years before he launched Alibaba.com in 1999.

Startup incubator TechStars has raised $8 million in new funding for its programs in Boston, Boulder, New York, and Seattle. The new funding comes from more than fifty venture funds and over 25 individual angel investors. This brings the incubator’s total funding to nearly $11.5 million.

TechStars, which launched in 2007, is a “startup boot camp” for tech entrepreneurs in which selected startup receive up to $18,000 in seed funding (or $6,000 per founder up to three founders in exchange for 5 percent of the company), three months of mentorship from successful entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.

What defines successful Innovation? Innovation is the process of using intellectual capital to create new products or services that generate positive business results in the form of financial returns. Discovering new findings then spurs more innovation which leads to further financial returns, and so on.

Innovation is successful when positive outcomes result in return on investment (ROI). That is why Value Creation is so important. Adding perceived value to a new product or service will drive ROI. The value proposition is the key to successful innovation. Develop an innovation with high perceived value to your customer, and strong sales will follow.

(New York City, 4 April 2011) – The Intelligent Community Forum, a New York-based think tank dedicated to studying the use of information and communications technology to create the community of the 21st Century, today named Finland’s Minister of Communications Suvi Linden as its Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year for 2011. ICF selected Minister Linden for her commitment to ensuring affordable broadband access to every citizen in Finland and her involvement with national and international groups, including her work as a member of the United Nation’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development.

Minister Linden will deliver the Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year address at the conclusion of ICF's annual Building the Broadband Economy summit. She will be the featured speaker of ICF’s annual awards luncheon at New York City’s Steiner Film Studios, beginning at Noon on 3 June. Admission is by invitation only or by sending an email request to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

There are as many management theories as there are management gurus, academics, and bloggers. And since theories - true or not - have a tendency to stick around, well, that means there are lots of myths.

Management isn’t a science; it’s an art. It involves millions of people in thousands of organizations, each of which is unique. That’s what makes it so subjective, by definition. Sure, certain innovative management concepts become the rule, but they’re rare, that’s for sure.

I’ll forgive anyone for almost anything if I get a heartfelt mea culpa — an apology with no strings attached — but, unfortunately, that’s hard to find these days. Our culture is inundated with victims who like to scapegoat:

* “It wasn’t because of the steroids I was injecting — it must have been my trainer’s fault.”
* “We didn’t misjudge the severity of the recession — it was those greedy Wall Street financiers who made it this bad.”
* “It wasn’t because we ignored the safety warnings for years — it was a natural disaster.”
* “It wasn’t that I have been stealing my country’s natural resources for years and stuffing the money into my Swiss bank account — it was Twitter that caused my people to revolt.”
* “It wasn’t the third line of coke that I snorted — it was that my parents didn’t pay enough attention to me as a child.”

Gayle Laakmaan McDowell has worked at Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

After interviewing more than 120 people during her spat at Google, she wrote a book, The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Any Top Tech Company.

In it, she lists four ways to standout to Google besides your GPA (which she claims doesn't matter all that much):

Show you're passionate about technology. Read tech blogs and news, talk about recent innovations, and tell your interviewer all about it.

Baruch "Barry" Blumberg, a multifaceted researcher who shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his work on infectious viral diseases, died on Tuesday (April 5) of an apparent heart attack while attending a conference on astrobiology in California. He was 85 years old.

Blumberg identified the hepatitis B virus (HBV) in the 1960s -- long before the advent of genomic sequencing and DNA sequencing technology -- travelling for years to collect blood samples from different ethnic groups around the globe. His journeys led him to Australia where, in the blood of an aborigine, he found what he'd later identify as the surface antigen of the virus. Blumberg would go on to help develop diagnostic tests and a vaccine that would drastically reduce the spread of hepatitis B, a debilitating liver disease. Chronic hepatitis B infection is also known to cause liver cancer.

Over the course of my career I have done the bootstrap venture, the venture with significant VC dollars and the capital efficient venture (sub $5 million). Through all of these experiences I’ve learned lessons about capital raising, and more specifically, the cost of doing a large VC round. I’m not about to claim that VC money is always a bad idea, but before you take your startup on a tour of Sandhill Road, here are five reasons NOT to accept the big paycheck.

You’re the rule – Let’s acknowledge this and get it out of the way: Occasionally there’s an exception as to when it’s smart to raise a large VC round. Most startups that go after this kind of capital are not in that camp.

A great example of this is when a company is perfectly positioned, has a proven model and by “throwing gas on the fire” it can move to dominate a position in a marketplace. These are the stories we read about when the big hit occurs. These deals are the exception, not the rule, but they’re the ones that get the majority of press and attention.

Google has just announced its very first clean energy project investment in Europe, and hopefully not its last. The Internet giant is pumping 3.5 million euros (roughly $5 million) in a solar photovoltaic power plant in a town near Berlin, Germany.

Google isn’t investing in the plant on its own – it has sided with German private equity company Capital Stage.

The company is quick to point that the transaction still requires the formal approval of the German competition authorities, and is subject to other customary closing conditions.

What is happening in the innovation community right now? In this post, I give a quick overview of the top trends and issues based on the interactions and inspirations I have had over the last month or so.

1. User-driven innovation – does it work?

How valuable is user input for innovation? This is a classic discussion that picked up more steam with this article, User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and IKEA, by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen who states that companies should lead their users, not the other way around.

This is the first of a series on Stylish Entrepreneurs (sponsored by Gillette, yeah!). I’m going to take a closer look at the personal branding of some famous technology entrepreneurs. Who exactly? Well, Kevin Rose, Ryan Carson and some other names you should be familiar with.

I’m starting with one of the most respected and recognizable entrepreneurs in the world: Steve Jobs.

Steve is interesting for this series for several reasons; he is a geek, an icon and he clearly has style.

Is Steve hip? Fashionable? Hmm, not really. But you can give almost anybody in the world the following description and they will know who you are talking about: New Balance Sneakers 993, Levi’s 501, Cashmere & Silk black mock turtleneck.

As part of its ongoing attempts to make its business-oriented network more social, LinkedIn launched an open plugin platform on Wednesday that looks and sounds very much like the “open graph” platform Facebook launched last year with much fanfare. Like Facebook’s offering, LinkedIn now allows developers and website publishers to add various features from the network as widgets or plugins on their pages, so that users can connect their activity to the LinkedIn network. More than any of its previous moves, this one throws LinkedIn into head-to-head competition with Facebook for the clicks and identities of web users.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (CNN) - A website offers a creative way to make money. It turns your designs into sellable creations.

Naidhi Chanani was in a rut. Her 9-5 administrative job wasn't stimulating or lucrative. Like a lot of people, she just needed a change. She says, "And I had heard through a friend that they had started this t-shirt store online and I thought, hmm, maybe I could try that."

Designing a t-shirt may not sound like a calling, but it changed Naidhi's life. It's called Zazzle. To call it a t-shirt store doesn't quite do it justice. It's a business that allows anyone to customize dozens of different products. From posters to iPad cases to shoes, users then have the option of ordering someone else's design.

Allow me to make a wild guess. You have participated in more than a few brainstorm sessions in your life. Yes?

And allow me to make another wild guess. Many of those sessions left you feeling underwhelmed, over-caffeinated, disappointed, disengaged, and doubtful that much of ANYTHING was ever going to happen as a result of your participation.

Yes, again? I thought so.

At the end of the fall semester my wife and I went out to our favorite restaurant, where we found ourselves in a polite scrum with a man and his teenage son for the one seat available at the crowded bar. Although they probably had arrived at the seat just before us, the man generously ceded it to my wife, and we struck up a conversation.

It turned out that they were visiting from Florida, and were in New England for a tour of a nearby university, a larger and more research-oriented institution than the liberal-arts college where I teach. Since I direct the honors program at my college, I told them about it and encouraged the son to consider applying. The father and son both seemed interested, so I gave them my business card, and then a table opened up for them and we parted company.

In today’s social media-focused economy, it’s become increasingly common to have long, complex and lasting business relationships with other people without ever speaking to them in person—or even on the phone. More of the average business’s sales support, customer service and other customer-facing functions are moving to the Web instead of being handled in person. And with cost-cutting foremost on everyone’s mind, conventions, conferences and meetings are all going virtual, too.

In this environment, you might suppose that there’s no longer much need to meet face to face. Well, you’d be wrong. The white paper from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration and sales and marketing services company Maritz analyzed scientific research and found in-person events are better than virtual events at capturing attendees’ attention, creating positive emotions and building relationships and networks.

We turned off the lights and switched to the biggest monitor in the house, to get the full planetarium effect of this wonderful website. It’s called the Solar System Scope, and gives you a chance to observe space from within it, rather than dutifully studying it in a textbook or on a screen.

Clicking on the telescope icon to the left lets you toggle between three different perspectives: The heliocentric view, with the planets and stars spinning around you; the panoramic view, which replicates the feeling of watching the skies from the Greenwich observatory; and, since after all we are the center of the universe, the geocentric view, which puts the rest of the cosmos firmly in their place, orbiting the earth.

ANNAPOLIS - The House of Delegates gave the initial green light Thursday to a modified version of Gov. Martin O'Malley's plan to fuel innovation and high-tech jobs by pumping tens of millions of dollars into a fund aimed at promoting startups.

The House is expected to cast a final vote Friday on O'Malley's marquee economic proposal for the session. The plan, dubbed "Invest Maryland," would allow the state to auction tax credits to insurance companies over a five-year period to fund early-stage companies specializing in fields such as biotechnology, cybersecurity and life sciences.