While the economic storm of the last two years has left virtually no nation untouched, few countries have felt its wrath like Ireland. Once dubbed the "Celtic Tiger" for its transformation from a laggard to a growth powerhouse, Ireland is now suffering from a stunning reversal of fortune.

From 2008 to the end of this year, the Irish economy is expected to contract 11.6%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). "Ireland is a disaster," says Desmond Lachman, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "To call this a recession [in Ireland] is a gross understatement. It is halfway between a recession and a depression."

The bust, and the electrifying boom that preceded it, were caused by a confluence of factors. One contributor: Ireland's entry into the euro zone in 1999. Low interest rates set by the European Central Bank (ECB) fueled a real estate bonanza in the country, which the Irish government was all too happy to sustain. "The government wanted the residential and commercial boom in property to continue because it was so important to employment and consumption and other economic indicators," notes Mary O'Sullivan, a management professor at Wharton. "At some point, the government got locked into the cycle and attacked anyone who worried that [the boom] was unsustainable." When the real estate market overheated and collapsed, it brought the Irish economy down with it.

This video is from Apple Fellow and entreprenuer Guy Kawasaki. "The Art of Innovation", which contains a number of useful steps that are spot on and worth thinking about for any business regardless of size.

In TheGivingMachine, we are constantly trying out new things. Some of them work well and some don't. However, the ability to get even a "beta" version out the door is important becuase it is not until your community tries your product or service, that meaningful input comes back your way. What you want to give/sell and what people want to receive/buy are always different.

Is China really the new emerging Asian innovation leader? No, not yet! For one simple reason: Japan – the former, and still reigning, Asian innovative champion!

In the midst of a veritable media blizzard regarding China’s newly-found innovative prowess (especially with respect to green technologies), and Japan’s -- Toyota’s -- recent embarrassing technical gaffes, it is important not to lose one’s perspective about what innovation really is, and why Japan, despite it’s stalled economy, is still the innovative powerhouse of Asia.

Thomas Friedman has made it fashionable to speak about the world becoming “flat”, and this might actually be happening – to some small extent – when we speak about invention; in other words a lot of people doing research. But, innovation is the ability to produce, apply and distribute these inventions. It is the ability to create positive change by turning new ideas into application. Richard Florida pointed out that “The world is spikey”; and the spikes are centered on the location of powerful multinational corporations with global reach and global brands. These MNCs can take products, processes or business model improvements and turn them into new practices that change the way an entire industry works, on a global scale. New ideas (a commitment to research) are simply not enough. Innovation requires this, for sure, but also the ability to apply these new ideas, and this is where the Sonys, Matsushitas and Nintendos of the world provide a Japanese advantage that China simply does not yet have.

Over the next few weeks, a consortium of municipal utilities in California will begin retrofitting government offices and commercial properties with systems that use ice made at night to replace air-conditioning during the day. It's part of a pilot program for the devices, which are built by Windsor, CO-based Ice Energy. If widely deployed, they could reduce fuel consumption by utilities by up to 30 percent and put off the need for new power plants.

The first devices will be installed on about two dozen city-owned buildings in Glendale, CA, under the plan being coordinated by the Southern California Public Power Authority. Over the next two years, the 11 participating utilities will install 1,500 of the devices, providing a total of 53 megawatts of energy storage to relieve strain on the region's electrical grid. The project is the first large-scale implementation of Ice Energy's technology.

Each Ice Energy device is designed to make ice overnight, when demand for electricity is low, using a high-efficiency compressor to freeze 450 gallons of water. Around midday, the cooling mode kicks in, and the device shuts off the building's regular air conditioner for a six-hour cycle. It pipes a stream of coolant from the slowly melting block of ice to an evaporator coil installed within the building's heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning blower system. Once the ice is melted, the air conditioner returns to normal operation. Brian Parsonnet, Ice Energy's chief technology officer, says the technology can cut a building's power consumption by 95 percent during peak hours on the hottest days.

In recent years, the idea that development is solely a matter for governments has been replaced by a clear recognition of the role of both the private sector and civil society. The UN Global Compact has played a pioneering role in encouraging PPPs. From UNESCO’s perspective, this new vision applies particularly to the cultural and creative industries, which, with a global value of US$ 1.3 trillion, constitute one of the fastest-growing sectors in the world economy today. The promotion of viable, creative industries in developing countries is indispensable to developing the full human development and economic growth potential of artistic creativity and talent, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. The key challenge facing policy-makers is to create enabling environments for effective local and national initiatives, many of which must be based on new forms of PPPs.

UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions enshrines the principle of PPPs in the cultural sector. In addition, through its Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity launched in 2001, UNESCO has explored many different facets of PPPs in support of cultural industry projects in developing countries. This alliance is evolving into a more ambitious electronic platform focused on fostering tri-sectoral partnership agreements in the cultural sector, by providing actors from the public, private and civil society sectors a wealth of knowledge and contact information.

Focusing on growing the business and maximising profitability should always be top priorities for small businesses. However, concentrating on these areas alone can mean neglecting crucial cashflow practices that can lead to the demise of your business. Sue Hirst explains.

Now that we seem to have come through the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ and the ‘Downturn’ in Australia, it’s time to gear up for growth again.

A question that often arises in growing businesses is, “How come I’ve made more profit, but I still have cashflow problems?”

Flagship Ventures managing partner Noubar Afeyan says his Cambridge firm is expanding its summer program for scientists with an entrepreneurial inclination; piloted in 2009 with just two Flagship "entrepreneurial fellows," this year it will grow to about 15 graduate students and recent alums. The firm doesn't exactly put out an open call for applicants — there's no information about it on Flagship's Web site, for instance — but rather circulates a call for applicants selectively, in places like MIT's chemical engineering department (where this job description appeared earlier in 2010.) "It's not something that's open for all comers," Afeyan says. "But we've reached out broadly across the U.S. We broadcast it across many different universities."

Last week we published a press release about a study put together by Forbes Insight and KeyBank’s Key4Women that looked at how women-owned businesses were coming out of the recession and their attitudes regarding customer service. The survey collected responses from 320 female small business owners and found that while they’re taking a very customer-centric approach to business, most are sticking with the “tried and true” (read: old) methods of customer service and aren’t putting actual customer service strategies in place. Scary.

As a woman small business owner, I was pretty surprised by many of the findings. The study found that post-recession, women business owners are focused on customer service. Eighty-four percent of respondents said that customer relationships were the core of their business, putting faith in the old adage that it costs more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an old one. You would think, then, that we’d find women small business owners all over social media. That they’d be using tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook to increase engagement and stay abreast of customer issues, their wants, needs, etc.

However, that’s not the case.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs owns about $2.5 billion worth of Apple stock. But he would own about $13 billion worth of Apple stock if it weren't for a huge mistake he made back in 2003, MarketWatch's Brett Arends reports.

In 2003, Apple (AAPL) stock had declined from a peak $36 per share during the tech boom to about $7.

This put options granted to employees near the peak deeply underwater.

Yes, according to a recently released study by David A. Hirshleifer (University of California, Irvine – Paul Merage School of Business), Siew Hong (University of California, Irvine – Paul Merage School of Business) Teoh and Angie Low (Nanyang Technological University – Division of Banking & Finance).

Using options- and press-based proxies for CEO overconfidence (Malmendier and Tate 2005a, 2005b, 2008), we find that over the 1993-2003 period, firms with overconfident CEOs have greater return volatility, invest more in innovation, obtain more patents and patent citations, and achieve greater innovative success for given research and development (R&D) expenditure. Overconfident managers only achieve greater innovation than non-overconfident managers in innovative industries. Overconfidence is not associated with lower sales, ROA, or Q.

Readers of this blog (there are some out there, right?) have probably figured out by now that I am a sucker for pithy sayings. Yes, I am shallow enough to find meaning in short statements that appear to capture something truthful–others might say short statements that capture something obvious. I’ve organized many of them in my Lessons from a CIA Manager page. But yesterday, while talking to someone preparing material for the Business Innovation Factory, where I am scheduled to tell my story at their Collaboration Innovation Summit in September, I was led to recall one of the most meaningful guiding principles/obvious statements I’ve encountered: There is nothing so weak as an idea whose time has not yet come. This guidance has such wide applicability that it can’t be restricted to the management lessons category.

The world’s oceans may be completely depleted of fish in 40 years if action is not taken to replenish stocks, the United Nations is warning in a new report.

In a preview of its upcoming report entitled the Green Economy, the United Nations Environment Programme states that “mismanagement, lack of enforcement and subsidies totaling over $27 billion annually have left close to 30 percent of fish stocks "collapsed.”

“If the various estimates we have received ... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” Pavan Sukhdev, head of UNEP’s Green Economy plan, told Agence France Presse on Monday.

On May 19-21, the leaders of ICF's Top Seven Intelligent Communities will share success stories from around the world in creating and retaining the talent that powers an innovation economy.  In 2010, the Building the Broadband Economy Summit theme is about talent and how to keep it. BBE 2010 will offer case studies from Smart21 and Top Seven Intelligent Community leaders who have grappled with this challenge and developed innovative strategies to close the education "last mile."  Confirmed speakers include:

• Premier Shawn Graham of New Brunswick, Canada, ICF's Visionary of the Year
• Vice Chairman Christopher Zimmerman, Arlington County, Virginia, USA
• Mayor Larry O'Brien of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Mike Galloway, Director of City Development, Dundee, Scotland, UK
• Professor Cheol-Soo Park, SungKyunKwan University, Suwon, South Korea
• Toomas Sepp, City Secretary, Tallinn, Estonia
• Dave Carter, Head, Manchester Digital Development Agency, Manchester UK
• Deputy City Manager Dana McDaniel, City of Dublin, Ohio, USA
• Mayor J.M.L.N. Mikkers, City of Veldhoven in the Eindhoven Region of the Netherlands
• Anette Scheibe, CEO, Electrum Foundation & Kista Science City AB, Stockholm Sweden

Jeff Hunter, 48, of Troy, Ohio, grew up in a family business, waiting on customers and sharpening saws at his father's industrial supply store. Now a partner in consulting firm Arete Management Solutions, he says: "I see entrepreneurs who are often underresourced and underexperienced. I have a strong passion for helping out any way I can."

Ken Keegan, 45, is a finance expert and strategic planner based in St. Louis. After 20 years as a management executive and an entrepreneur, he wants to help business owners identify alternate solutions to common problems.

Hunter and Keegan are examples of the many successful individuals who would like to become advisors—formal or informal—to small business owners. Some hope to turn an advisory board position into a full-time job. Others are scouting for promising business investment opportunities. Still others have struggled through the early years of their own entrepreneurial ventures and simply want to give back.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Fenwick & West LLP, one of the nation's premier law firms providing comprehensive legal services to high technology and life science clients, today announced the results of its First Quarter 2010 Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey.

The First Quarter 2010 survey analyzed the valuations and terms of venture financings for 104 technology and life science companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley which reported raising capital in the first quarter of 2010.

"During the first quarter of 2010, up rounds exceeded down rounds 49 percent to 32 percent with 19 percent flat. This was similar to the fourth quarter of 2009, where up rounds exceeded down rounds 47 percent to 30 percent, with 23 percent flat, and the third consecutive quarter in which up rounds exceeded down rounds," said Barry Kramer, a partner in the firm and co-author of the survey.

Despite a 34-per-cent drop in this quarter, venture capital activity in Quebec is growing at a healthy pace, an association of investors says.

Réseau Capital, which represents private equity and venture capital firms in the province, yesterday unveiled its quarterly report, which revealed $101 million was invested by venture firms into emerging or growth companies in the first three months of 2010, down from $153 million over the same period last year.

The association noted, however, last year's first-quarter results were higher than normal, and this quarter's figures better reflect the quarterly average over the last two years.

YouTern, an online community to link interns with startups, has launched their pilot program in California, with plans to expand nationwide.

While there are many programs that assist students with finding internships with large, established companies, until the launch of YouTern, there was no similar service helping entrepreneurial-minded students find a position with a startup. And now in turn, startups will have a resource to identify and recruit talented students for internship positions, a move that may help build a "startup culture" so college graduates don't feel as compelled to only seek employment with major corporations.

It may look like a floor lamp mounted on a vacuum cleaner, but Anybots, Inc.'s new QB is actually the latest in surrogate robotics. QB is designed to serve as your eyes, ears and voice when you can't be there in person. Even better, it's mobile, rolls around on two wheels like Rosie (from The Jetsons) and can be navigated remotely via the Web and a Wi-Fi connection.

Telecommuting workers and traveling executives alike could use QB (so named because it is the next in line after the company's prototype QA bot) as a virtual extension of themselves, allowing them to attend meetings, tour facilities or perform walk-throughs of real estate properties, all while controlling the robot from a computer keyboard.

Entrepreneur and professor Steve Blank authored a blog this morning that expressed his opinion that business plan competitions are useless to startup culture and should be scrapped for business model competitions. Business plan competitions are just what they sound like: students are encouraged to submit a business plan and a winner is selected by a panel of judges, often resulting in some monetary reward for the triumphant student. Blank argues that models, not plans, are much more applicable to the iterative startup atmosphere, but not everyone agrees that business plans are entirely irrelevant.

Looking at the opposing viewpoints, it seems that those against business plans use an alternative approach to their argument than those in support of them. In his points against business plans, Blank takes aim at the plans themselves, dissecting them as unrepresentative of the startup ecosystem and its needs.

For over a decade, the topic of foreign technical professionals working in the U.S. under H-1B visas has been contentious. Many Americans claim that corporations use H-1Bs to displace domestic workers and depress wages. Companies say that colleges don’t graduate enough technical professionals. Both might be wrong.

A recent university study in the journal Management Science suggests that H-1B workers make more money than domestic counterparts. Another study last fall said schools graduate the same number of technical workers, but the top ones go into other fields, probably for better opportunities. The combination of factors means that many corporations may need to reassess their staffing strategies.