Talk, talk, talk—but the White House is pushing appliance makers and technology companies for a Kumbaya moment

It takes time to hammer out an agreement, but progress is occurring.

That's the word from John McDonald, the general manager of the transmission and distribution business at General Electric and the chair of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel Governing Board at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Last September, NIST announced plans to establish 77 smart grid standards over the next few years and finalize 14 priority standards in 2010 alone. A few months later, the number of standards to be set for 2010 jumped to 16, including a standard for communication protocols for household appliances. Setting that many standards in a relatively short time is unprecedented in the technology world: often it can take several years -- and the opinion of the marketplace -- to achieve even one standard.

Everybody knows that men and women think differently in a lot of ways. But do those differences matter when it comes to working remotely and managing remote teams? According to Sally Helgesen, it matters a lot. Managers who don’t appreciate those distances can do themselves, their companies and those employees a great disservice.

Sally is the author of “The Female-Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work”. She cites scientific studies that show how a woman’s brain functions in different ways than a man’s.  How they differ is important, particularly for managers who might not be aware of these conflicting world views or assign value to behaviors that don’t get the desired results.

According to Helgesen, one major difference is that women tend to be highly skilled multitaskers, while men are able to concentrate on one thing for more concentrated periods. Neuroscientific research confirms this, and women often take pride in their ability to handle a ton of things at once. This is a plus and a minus, for women and for those who manage them.

Are any good products still made in America?

Conventional wisdom says U.S. companies have shuttered their factories and moved manufacturing abroad for cheap labor. During the recession, 2 million manufacturing jobs vanished. Here’s the story you don’t hear: The United States is still the world’s largest manufacturing economy, producing $1.6 trillion of goods each year, or 21 percent of global production. That’s nearly as much as Japan (13 percent) and China (12 percent) combined.

In addition to U.S.-based industrial giants such as Boeing, Intel and United Technologies, which build some products here, thousands of smaller companies are churning out best-in-class products around the country. In honor of the Fourth of July, we’re celebrating 10 American companies that still make signature consumer products with American ingenuity — and leaving foreign-made competitors in the dust.

Mercer's annual cost of living survey is designed to help corporations set salaries for international employees. For the rest of us, it provides a fascinating comparison.

Who knew a hamburger cost $7 in Honolulu?

New York rent is expensive, but who knew it was THAT much more than the rest of America?

Residents of these cities can take heart in one fact, however: these eight cities rank nowhere near the top of Mercer's international list.

Early-stage investing has long been the problem child of European venture capital, with too few investors willing to finance untried technologies. Without government intervention, not much would get done in this area.

Now German serial entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs - founder of the business social networking site Xing, who sold his company to Burda Media last year for an estimated €48.3 million - is stepping into the gap with his own twist on the incubator concept. He recently launched Hamburg-based Hackfwd, a pre-seed investment company that will target European software entrepreneurs.

Although many of the ideas put forward by Hinrichs are not unlike those of a standard incubator - equity in exchange for advice and coaching to help speed the process of starting a company - Hackfwd does have a new take on finding people to back. Its tenet is to, “put geeks first”. It does this by seeking out software coders who perhaps aren’t even looking to start a company. Using the extensive network Hinrichs built up while at Xing, the company will track down entrepreneurs before they have even have a business plan or a prototype.

There are several stages of grief and they are well documented. It comes down to this: someone gives you some bad news. Depending on how bad it is you go through the following stages pretty quickly, or over a period of a few months:

1. Denial and Isolation.
2. Anger.
3. Bargaining.
4. Depression.
5. Acceptance.

I’m noticing a similar set of stages when it comes to innovative ideas. Nobody just accepts them. Most people actually start with rejecting anything thats new. That isn’t unreasonable either: most ‘new’ stuff fails. Hundreds of thousands of new things are tried out all the time and most don’t go anywhere. If you just react negative to most of it and declare “That won’t work” you will be right most of the time.

Abdullah Muhaseen has an academic pedigree that would be the envy of many. He graduated from one of Canada's top universities, earning bachelor's degrees in both neuroscience and psychology.

A professional career in medical research or graduate studies seemed to be in his future, but Mr. Muhaseen choose a different path: He enrolled in a public college to become a paramedic.

The University of Toronto graduate is part of a growing trend in Canadian higher education. Driven in part by the slouching job market, the country's colleges are seeing a rise in applications from people who have already received degrees from leading universities.

A coalition of San Diego County business organizations is forging a new business cluster, focused on robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, interoperability and cyber technologies.

The nascent Southwest Regional Innovation Cluster will compete for a total of $300 million in FY 2011 federal funding to be divvied up among 15 regional innovation clusters, said Gary Knight, CEO of the San Diego North Regional Economic Development Council. The first step, though, is to submit a funding proposal to the Small Business Administration, to get up to $600,000 to design the RIC.

The council and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International–San Diego, is helping the group to get organized, and recruit leaders.

I’ve noticed something surprising in working with executives who possess both exceptional business acumen and a desire to be great corporate citizens: They generally think and act like entrepreneurs.

Consider Robert Chatwani as a case in point. Chatwani is co-founder of eBay’s WorldofGood.com, a marketplace for socially and environmentally responsible shopping. Last fall, Chatwani was appointed director of global citizenship at eBay, which put him in charge of the five signature programs in eBay’s global citizenship portfolio:

• World of Good.com by eBay
• eBay Giving Works, a cause-related marketing platform where sellers and buyers can use their transactions on eBay to benefit charities. There are 21,000 nonprofits in this program, and in 2009 more than $55 million was raised for nonprofits.
• MicroPlace, a micro-finance platform. MicroPlace helps alleviate global poverty by enabling everyday people to make investments in the world’s working poor, with as little as $20.
• eBay Green Team, an online community of hundreds of thousands of members who are engaged on topics of buying, selling, and thinking about green and sustainability.
• eBay Foundation, the first corporate foundation started with pre-IPO eBay stock.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New public health research by a Purdue University professor could help shed light on how the environment can influence physical activity, especially when it comes to where people live.

“We are not just measuring physical activity, but we are linking it to a location using small activity monitors and global positioning system devices,” said Philip J. Troped, an assistant professor of health and kinesiology. “A better understanding of how neighborhood environments influence people’s behaviors could help us to get more people to be physically active and healthy.”

For example, a better understanding of where physical activity occurs and the characteristics of those areas could be used to develop more tailored intervention programs or messages to encourage physical activity at those locations, as well as to shape policy for urban planning and transportation systems.

I’ve learned quite a bit in my dealings with large and small companies in social media. Mostly that there are still some pretty dangerous misconceptions about the best way to build a community. While companies may understand the importance of getting involved, they’re still not getting what it means to fully become a “social” company. Below are five common misconceptions I see businesses making in regard to social media and community building, and how you can beat them.

“We can give it to the intern.”

If you have a wee one with an interest in science (face it, you’re reading CG and TC, your procreative material is pre-disposed to nerdity) then check out Allen Kurzweil’s latest project, a science kit in a potato chip bag.

Potato Chip Science, available now for pre-order and shipping in September, lets you learn science through the magic of bag chips, tubes, and even actual potato products. You can study acoustics, aeronautics, forensics, and as well as the psychology of shame when you realize that you’ve eaten far too many potato chips in your life.

Hard data on startup and venture capital activity is hard to come by.

Matt Shapiro, a second-year MBA student at Yale, led an effort to change this, conducting the "Entrepreneur's Census."

He surveyed startups across the country about everything from how much money they have raised, to how much they spend on rent.

Innovative companies could see a dramatic reduction in the cost of patenting new inventions, if a controversial European Commission plan is adopted by EU governments. The new rules could pave the way for a single European patent to be issued in one of just three languages – English, French or German.

The move is designed to make translation costs 20 times cheaper and promises to bring to a close a long-running language dispute which has scuppered efforts to streamline Europe's expensive patent system.

However, the decision to examine and grant patents in the three languages currently used by the European Patent Office (EPO) could cause friction with Spain and Italy who are unhappy with the preferential treatment given to English, French and German.

The EU's approach to innovation policy is too focused on science and research, with too little attention paid to business, according to entrepreneurs.

The 'Europe 2020' strategy put innovation at the heart of the EU's blueprint for competitiveness, but plans to publish a 'research and innovation' strategy this autumn are under fire.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels, former Belgian Entrepreneur of the Year Bart Van Coppenolle described the European Commission's approach to innovation as "totally wrong".

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I own a huge library of books on innovation. Mostly hardcover. The $27.95 variety with big indexes and forwards by people who make more money than I do.

Some of these books are actually good. Most of them bore me. (I must confess I have a secret desire, whenever I enter a bookstore, to put glue between pages 187 & 188 in all of the new releases just to see if the publishers get any complaints).

The books attempt to describe the origins of innovation. You know, stuff like “the innate human impulse to find a better way” and “the imperative to find a competitive edge.” That sort of thing.

Corporate-speak, in other words.

I have always thought of July 4th in terms of small business. Historically of course, it is when our country declared its independence from Great Britain.

But, more and more, business people are forced to declare there independence from working for someone else simply because there are no jobs. The unemployment figures released this past week show that job creation is not growing beyond the government sector. Many fear a double dip recession.

This is the year for many of you to declare you independence and start your own business. But it is not for everyone. Take my entrepreneurship test and see how you score!

This vintage clip brings you the first recorded video (with sound) of Mahatma Gandhi, who led India’s nonviolent resistance movement against British colonial rule. Shot some time before 1947 (when independence finally came), the video runs a mere four minutes. But it’s enough to show you the serene and fearless determination that made Gandhi such a forceful figure, and inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation in America a few years later. Great find by @Hudsonette

How can you start your social enterprise for a small amount of capital or even no capital at all?

One key way you can get in the business of social enterprises -- the business of changing the world -- is through bootstrapping.

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