The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" in the late 1930s—long before Moore's law and the creative destruction that was unleashed by a doubling of computing power every 18 months. Compared with the events of recent decades, what Schumpeter saw was creative destruction in slow motion. And the pace of innovation has picked up markedly in the last five years, because the spread of smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices is letting us all take the incredible power of the Internet with us wherever we go.

To come out ahead, companies should follow four principles:

Think big, start small, fail quickly, scale fast.

Soaring. Sky rocketing. Surging. Call it what you want. The companies on our list of this year's fastest-growing franchises -- gleaned from Entrepreneur's 2011 Franchise 500® list -- have exploded in size despite a difficult economic climate.

The rankings are based on growth as measured by the number of open and operating units in the U.S. and Canada during the 12 months ending July 31, 2010. A majority of the franchises on our list of 10 are commercial cleaning companies.

Is success in social networking measured by the number of “Friends” you have on Facebook, or “Followers” you have on Twitter, or “Connections” you make on LinkedIn?

The jury is still out on how social media and social networking will ultimately play out, but new research shows real benefits are being realized from it.

A Harris Poll conducted December 6-10, 2010 found, “Social media has opened the door, or more accurately, many doors, to increasingly numerous ways for people to interact with others, customize their online experiences and receive positive, enriching benefits from their activity therein. In fact, two in five Americans say that they have received a good suggestion for something to try as a result of their use of social media (40%).”

NASVF is looking for speakers and topics for the 18th Annual Conference.  This year’s theme:  “Innovation Capital:  Leading America’s Recovery” and is being held October 17-19, 2011 in Arlington, Texas.

• Entrepreneurial Development
• Economic Development
• Innovation Capital Formation
• Tech Transfer Strategies for Commercialization

You have to love when someone “makes your case” – that is – says or supports something you believe in as well.

Today’s post by Seth Godin makes the case that space matters.

This supports what I call the 3Ps of brainstorming and strategy meetings: people, process, and place. The most successful and productive meetings are a result of pulling together the right people, using the right process, hosted in the right place.

While money doesn’t seem to grow on trees (yet), it’s easier today for the little company to get the funding they need to turn a dream into reality. With crowdfunding sites, you can begin to find investors who are interested in sending money to you to support your project. Whether you want to begin a new company or get a movie into a film festival, crowdfunding is a way to reach out to the larger community, to a community that wants to see the underdog win the race toward success.

Drexel University plans to boost its research and technology-transfer efforts and will look to the east to expand its campus, its president, John Fry, said in an interview with the Business Journal.

Fry, who began his tenure as Drexel’s 14th president on Aug. 1, said the university’s Office of Research will be adding at least eight people to its staff of nearly 50. The additions include four who will join the five at the Technology Commercialization Office, which is part of the Office of Research.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. plans to launch its first venture capital fund later this year.

Tedco’s goal is to create a pool of money — between $50 million and $100 million — to back early-stage Maryland companies, said Robert Rosenbaum, Tedco’s president and executive director. Rosenbaum expects to begin recruiting institutional investors and wealthy individuals for the fund starting in mid-2011. His goal is for the fund to make its first investment by January 2012.

Life certainly seems easier for startups that have financial backing, but there’s a hidden downside: Board meetings. Serial entrepreneur Brent Constantz, founder of Calera and other firms, says the time management issues that come with having a board can debilitate a company in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture given at Stanford University. That time can be better spent fulfilling the company’s vision, he says.

WASHINGTON – Today, the White House released “A Strategy for American Innovation: Securing Our Economic Growth and Prosperity,” an update to the administration’s innovation report from September 2009. The report outlines the importance of investing in innovation to grow our economy, create jobs and win the future.

In his State of the Union Address, the President discussed the importance of innovation to create the jobs and industries of the future. On Monday, the White House launched “Startup America,” an initiative to encourage investment in new startups and small business to create jobs. On Thursday, the President traveled to Pennsylvania to propose the “Better Buildings Initiative,” a new effort to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings across the country, and reiterated his call to expand the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) program and to double the number of Energy Innovation Hubs.

As an investor, how do you decide whether to fund a hot Web company that’s growing rapidly, but isn’t making money?

Just because Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have gotten away with adding users first and revenue later doesn’t mean that every start-up can do the same.

IVP General Partner Steve Harrick, whose firm invested in Twitter two years ago at a valuation that was reported to be between $200 million and $250 million, called Twitter “a notable exception” to the types of companies that IVP usually invests in – later-stage companies with revenue of over $20 million.

It's no secret that along with fast food and other trappings of convenience, unhealthy lifestyles—and their associated health problems—have been spreading across the globe at a rapid clip. A new analysis of more than nine million people in 199 countries and territories puts numbers on the widespread weight gain.

Nearly half a billion adults were obese as of 2008, according to the analysis, published online February 3 in The Lancet. That is nearly double the 1980 rate, with an average increase in body mass indexes (BMIs) of 0.4 (kilograms per meter of height squared) each decade, reaching 23.8 in 2008. Some countries, especially those in Oceana, saw BMIs balloon up by some 1.3. A BMI of 30 or above is considered obese, and those with BMIs of 25 to 29.9 are overweight. Excess body weight is blamed for almost three million deaths each year internationally.

Six years ago we gave our brewery a major, $25 million upgrade. Boulevard Brewing Company’s Unfiltered Wheat Beer and Pale Ale were already among the most popular craft beers in the Midwest, but we had outgrown our 1950s-era facility where we could only brew 35 barrels at a time. So, we expanded to a state-of-the-art brewhouse with a sky-lit-atrium, a glass skywalk, and the capacity to brew 150 barrels of beer in one batch. We extended our product line to 26 premium brews, which made us the largest craft brewery in the Midwest.

The problem was, we kept our old-school technology. At least once every couple of years, we’d lose power due to a storm or other weather problem. Every time that happened, our two workstations went down, and we’d lose all of our real-time brewing data. Sometimes the power was out only for a few minutes, but we’d still need to scrap all of the beer, because we had lost track of where the materials were in the brewing process. It was a huge waste -- thousands of dollars in ingredients lost.

President Obama has pointed to the peak the nation has to summit for a brighter cleaner energy future, but will venture capitalists join the trek?

That is a big question in the current climate where VCs seem, well, deflated about investing in cleantech. Bets on producing solar panels and biofuels are taking so much longer to get any returns. Smart meters are finding foes in some energy regulators and consumers. Electric cars are gaining public attention, but they won’t reach critical mass for a while – maybe 10 percent in the United States by 2020.

“We haven’t seen many new comers in the venture capital space in the last few years. This will have to change if we want things to move forward,” said Gil Forer, global director of cleantech at Ernst & Young, during a panel discussion at an energy conference in Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago. “If you look at exits for VCs, they took three to five years in the 90s; seven years in 2004-05. Now we are talking about nine years plus. Not a lot of VCs can sustain this time frame from investment to exits."

The University of Massachusetts President’s Office is pleased to announce the 2011 Creative Economy Initiatives Fund. Established in 2007, and created to complement the President’s Science and Technology Initiatives Fund, the Creative Economy Fund represents a continued commitment to maintaining the University’s central role in the social and economic development of the Commonwealth and directly supports the Trustees’ strategic priority of strengthening the University’s research enterprise and growing that portfolio substantially. Total funding available will be contingent on the University’s budget situation.

Last year, Sean Glass was ready to return to the United States after living in London to start an online gambling firm that ended up folding. After selling off the company’s assets, he wanted to settle in a city with vibrant entrepreneurial and venture capital communities and considered all the usual hubs: Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Austin, Tex., and Raleigh, N.C. But in July, Mr. Glass, 31, and his wife moved to Washington, D.C.

“There’s a phenomenal pool of engineers, and the quality of life is great,” Mr. Glass said. Now he is a venture partner at Novak Biddle, a venture capital firm based in Washington, and he recently started Employ Insight, a software company that helps employers with the hiring process.

Every year Fortune magazine releases its list of the country's best companies to work for. But it's pretty silly when you think about it: Do you really think that the culture and benefits of working at The Container Store can be directly compared to the perks associated with a Google job? Putting them all on a list makes it seems like they succeed along similar dimensions, when it really couldn't be further from the truth. Every company is different, and they treat their employees differently with regard to the culture, benefits, and job roles.

Synthetic blood vessels that can be made in advance and stored until surgery could help patients undergoing heart surgery, hemodialysis—cleansing of the blood in cases of kidney failure—and other procedures. Laura Niklason, an anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer at Yale University, and her collaborators have grown blood vessels using human cells and tested them in baboons, showing that they provoke no immune rejection and avoid common complications of synthetic vessels, such as clotting, bursting, or contracting over time. Researchers hope these studies will show that the vessels are safe enough to win permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials.

Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. This one had better grab their attention, or they won’t look further.

You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary. They all offer a list of requirements that might take 50 pages to address, but of course they ask you to write concisely. Take a look at my website for the Sample Executive Summary, which shows what can be done in one page (both sides).