Policy makers who want to stimulate innovation need to look at the new generation of people coming into the workforce. But are they properly prepared to play a role in invention and change? Rob Blaauboer looks at Dutch experience of teaching them how.

It is interesting that the country that we, in many cases look up to in innovation matters, the United States, is equally worried about its declining position. For decades the US was the world innovator, churning out innovations. Early 2010, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to the Washington Post with a warning: the US has an Innovation Deficit.

Creating more than 2,000 new jobs, unlocking millions if not billions of dollars in private capital and launching the next MedImmune in Maryland — these are the dreams behind Maryland's latest strategy for fostering high-tech businesses in the state.

For years, officials said, Maryland's early-stage businesses have faced what the industry calls "the valley of death," the difficulty in obtaining funding between the company's startup and when larger investors step in to help ramp up commercialization. Some give up after falling short of their entrepreneurial goals with the lack of funding, while others have sought better prospects in other states. But there are those that continue to fight to forge their futures in Maryland.

Few people are aware the San Francisco has had a tax provision in its municipal code since 2004 that requires companies to pay a payroll tax on gains from employee stock options. No one pays it, and San Francisco hasn’t enforced it to date, but companies are becoming increasingly agitated that the city may change that policy at any time. The number of high profile and high value startups based in San Francisco – like Twitter and Zynga – may be too big of a temptation for the city to ignore.

Recently, I heard San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on our local NPR station talking about how important it was to keep Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. To those worried that the recent talks between Twitter and the City were stalling, his words must have been reassuring. But if Lee really wants to keep Twitter– and thousands more tech jobs– in San Francisco he needs to defuse this much bigger ticking tax time-bomb now. This isn’t just about keeping Twitter in San Francisco– this has ramifications for San Francisco’s entire startup ecosystem.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of Facebook, is rarely seen without a T-shirt or a hoodie. But Zuckerberg brought out a suit for his dinner with President Obama on Thursday. That says a lot about what happens when you combine the world of politics with Silicon Valley. It’s a very formal affair.

The president visited the Bay Area to meet with some of the country’s most innovative technology leaders before zipping off to Portland, Ore. this morning for a tour of Intel’s manufacturing facility. Hopefully, they figured out a way to grease the wheels of innovation and create more jobs — or just had a nice dinner at the home of venture capitalist John Doerr.

A year ago I blogged about one of my most common mantras that applies to sales, biz dev & fund raising alike: “Time is the Enemy of all Deals.”

When times are really good for fund raising many teams delay to maximize their valuation. Sometimes this pays off, other times it doesn’t. So how should you decide what to do?

When you work for a really cool startup that manages to stay alive for a few years, it's a pretty cool thing.

You watch the company grow from nothing to something, and friends no longer stare blankly when you tell them where you work.

A common problem many startups have is retaining talent. Even Google struggles to keep employees from branching out on their own. Working at a growing company takes a lot of time and energy, and employees are doing it all for someone else. It's natural that they'd begin thinking of ways to do the same amount of work for themselves.

To increase your visibility and authority on the web, you need some knowledge of Google rankings. Learning how Google’s ranking system works can help you make important changes that can move your website up the ranking ladder.

What follows is a quick primer on need-to-know basics for improving your site's Google ranking.

When it comes to your web pages, two different Google rankings are at work: your search result ranking and your site’s PageRank. They are related, yet distinct measures of the value of the content on your site in the eyes of the search-engine giant.

It's something we're all looking for - the perfect solution that will minimize our work life while still getting the stuff done that we need to get done. Well, that one solution doesn't exist, but with a combination of strategies, you can get to where you want to be.

Now, none of these tips will turn your life around. But they can make a big difference, and when used together, your work life might just be enjoyable, productive, low-stress and high fun. And these tips won't work for everyone. They're not meant to be used as a step-by-step guide. It's a list of strategies that work -- choose your favorites and give them a try.

There is a writing project in front of you … and a blank piece of paper. In a cold sweat, you begin to think it might be easier to hire a copywriter (after all, you didn’t go into business to be writer). Think again. With five straightforward steps and some practice, you can be your own copywriter and reinvest the money you would have spent on external help for your business.

Last week, HP released several mobile devices running WebOS, an operating system that it acquired last summer when it bought Palm. HP's two new smart phones and tablet computer showed that the company is anxious to get a larger slice of the portable device market. But at the launch event, company executives mentioned that they plan to ship other devices, including PCs and printers, with WebOS installed. As the world's largest PC maker, HP may be in a unique position to promote personal cloud computing—whereby data and applications are accessible from whatever device a person is using.

Tonight, at the home of John Doerr, a principal at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the heavyweight VC firm on Sand Hill Road, President Obama will dine with a Who’s Who from the world of IT and venture capital.

I wasn’t invited and of course it hurts. The pain isn’t from the thought of missing a divine repast, but from not contributing to any of the President’s efforts to make good on his State of the Union promise to promote innovation. Since I do not foresee an invitation to dinner in the offing, I will use this forum to get my thoughts in front of the President.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the award of seven cooperative agreements to help a group of “Early Innovator” states design and implement the information technology (IT) infrastructure needed to operate Health Insurance Exchanges. These states are leading the way on building a better health insurance marketplace, one that allows individuals and small-business owners to pool their purchasing power to negotiate lower rates. Using these new funds, the Early Innovator states will develop Exchange IT models that can be adopted and tailored by other states.

Kansas, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Wisconsin, and a consortium of New England states will receive a total of approximately $241 million. Information on how much each state or consortium will receive and how each will use the grant funds is available at www.HealthCare.gov/news/factsheets/exchanges02162011a.html.

You have no idea how popular Justin Bieber is.

In the past twelve months, more people have searched for the 16-year-old wonder on Google than have searched for "china," "jesus," or "boobs."

Bieber also left other celebrities in the dust. The only person who came close was Lady Gaga.

Most business presentations suck.

They're boring.

They're confusing.

They're out of touch.

This gallery explains exactly why most presentations are so dreadful, and what to do make your own presentations better.

No matter what your artistic interests, whether photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, etc., the underlying force behind your work is creativity. It’s much easier to talk about technical aspects of photography as it’s a tangible skill, unlike the more mysterious intangible skill of creative thought. While every art form is unique unto its own, harnessing one’s creativity is a universal skill.

There are some that might say you either have it or you don’t in relation to creativity, but the truth is we’re all creative. Every child makes believe at some point and lets their imagination run wild, and if I’m correct you were once a child. Creativity is a thought process and one that can be strengthened with practice and exercise. Below are 6 ways I like to get my creative mind working. If you have techniques that work for you be sure to add them in the comments.

While many companies understand the importance of investing in innovation, they often fail to realize how managing intellectual property (IP) is essential to ensuring long-term success. To address this issue, Harvard Business School offers Intellectual Property and Business Strategy. Taught by world-renowned faculty from Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, this Executive Education program helps you maximize the value of your firm’s IP investment.

As a previous program participant shared, “My firm invests in energy-related technologies, so IP is important to every one of our investments. The strategy-focused case studies put the learning into perspective, demonstrating that sometimes the most obvious approach is not the best one. You have to think through the problem from many angles to come up with a good strategy. Where is the profit going to be made? Where might margins deteriorate? Cases from other industries exposed me to new issues and approaches I would not naturally have thought of.”

Recognizing that IP is driving today’s technology-based economy, savvy companies are leveraging their intellectual property to differentiate products, protect margins, create barriers to entry, sustain first-mover advantage, and drive innovation.

There are 4633 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. This weekend I had dinner with one of them—a friend who’s now the president of Philadelphia University. He’s working hard to reinvent the school into a model for 21st century professional education.

The Silo Career Track

One of the problems in business today is that college graduates trained in a single professional discipline (i.e. design, engineering or business) end up graduating as domain experts but with little experience working across multiple disciplines.

What we need for 21st century business development is entrepreneurial fusion, not entrepreneurial fission. This is the view of Martin Curley (Intel’s Global Director of Innovation), Piero Formica (Founder of the International Entrepreneurship Academy) and Vincenzo Nicolò (President of the Technical Board of the Italian Association of Machine Tool Builders). Writing in the February issue of Industry and Higher Education, Curley, Formica and Nicolò argue in favour of a new approach, which they characterize as the ‘experimental business laboratory’. They contend that established methods of business incubation attempt to produce entrepreneurial ‘energy’ through a process of fission, ‘creating a division between aspiring entrepreneurs’ demands for, and the supply of support and services’.  For Curley, Formica and Nicolò, this is the old world. ‘The concept of nuclear fusion,’ they say, ‘is useful as a metaphor for the type of businesses that must be launched in the future. As with fusion, in which there are high releases of energy with potentially less toxic waste produced than from nuclear fission, the world needs new kinds of businesses that optimize not only cost and market efficiency and effectiveness but also ecological and resource efficiency.’ For more details, see http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ip/ihe/2011/00000025/00000001/art00002.

Rich Bendis is proud to serve on the International Advisory  Board of industry & Higher Education

Back in the early 1990s, while most of us were still trying to wrap our heads around this new thing called the internet (don’t miss this amusing bit), NPR’s Science Friday started pushing the envelope and hosting the first internet-based radio talk show. This marked the first time that listeners could “phone into” a program via the web and talk together – in this case about the creative uses of this emerging technology. The broadcast, which singlehandedly brought the internet to a crawl, has now resurfaced online. You can listen below (or here).

Cotton Gin

On March 14, 1794, Eli Whitney patented his invention, the cotton gin (“gin” being short for engine). The machine succeeded in making the growing of cotton profitable for farmers in the south by speeding up the separation of the cotton bolls (the fluffy part) from the seeds.

The unforeseen side effect of Whitney’s invention was that it made Southerners want to grow more cotton on larger plantations, and thus, bring more African slaves in to pick it. Between 1790 and 1808, when it became illegal to import African slaves, 80,000 slaves were brought to the American South.