Google (GOOG) invested $38.8 million in two wind power farms in North Dakota on Friday, the company announced today

Google has been dabbling in alternative energy for years now, mostly through investments in early stage green tech companies.

This represents Google's first investment in an actual, utility-scale project. The two farms generate 169.5 megawatts of power, "enough to power more than 55,000 homes".

Last year, Google applied for a license to trade energy and renewable credits, ostensibly just to move surplus power from its campus and servers.

The Apple founder birthed the personal computer, was banished from his empire and then saved it from ruin. Along the way, he changed the way we work, play and communicate. And he's not done yet.

On a foggy, cool day in January, Steve Jobs and Apple are bidding to change the world again. Jobs sits comfortably in a leather chair in front of a rapt San Francisco auditorium crowd, a large video screen tracking his hand movements on a thin, slate-looking object resting comfortably in his hands. Dressed in his trademark blue jeans, dark turtleneck, and New Balance shoes, the wire-framed Apple co-founder and culture-shaper peppers his speech with “remarkable, awesome” and “amazing” references to his company’s latest new wave—a notebook device called the iPad. This “truly magical and revolutionary product” fills a category need between his company’s successful laptop and iPhone and iPod business lines, Jobs says.

Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Esquire Magazine recently named him one of the ‘Best and Brightest’. He is author of the best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which was cited as a major breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review. His ideas have been featured in major ad campaigns, such as BMW, and are being used globally to change the way regions, nations, and companies compete. He is founder of the Creative Class Group and has also been recently named European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation. He is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

• Every single human being is creative.
• The real challenge of our time is figuring out how to harness that creative energy so that creative furnace inside of each human being is growing.
• The social categories we impose on ourselves [race, religion, gender ,etc] undermine creativity.

As we are finalizing our year at HBS and thinking about jobs, it is important to stop, relax, take a deep breath and take another look at the LEAD essay we wrote on "our 10-year reunion". Ten years seems like such a long time, but just as we are finalizing our last cases at HBS, it might come sooner than you think. Aided by Professor Youngme Moon's words to dare to be different, this article is about finding your way to those non-traditional careers that are harder to find. This week, 3 alumni give advice on what it takes to get into VC portfolio companies & startups. For all you entrepreneurs out there, this is a call to action.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Rock Center reported a record year for the number of teams that applied for the business plan contest. It could be that desperate times require desperate measures, or that the crisis inspired creativity and maybe a bit of courage in people. You often hear that only when things hit rock bottom do we fully utilize our capabilities. So perhaps that is what happened, or maybe not, but the drive to go into entrepreneurship certainly seems to be there among current students.

Lots of out-of-work folks are starting their own businesses. And many of them are not spring chickens. But, it’s still not clear whether these businesses have staying power. Or these people are cut out for entrepreneurship.

First, about the general trend for laid-off workers to launch a business, a phenomenon termed “accidental entrepreneurship”. There have been a number of studies showing it’s on the rise. Most recently, a survey of 900 workers by CareerBuilder.com found that 32% of those who were laid off in the last six months and have not found jobs are considering starting their own businesses.

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It's become a classic business mantra: you learn more from your failures than from your successes. But what if that idea is all wrong? Alex Bogusky, co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, believes it is--and recent MIT research showing that we learn more from success backs him up. "You create a fearful culture where you spend a lot of time looking at where you screwed up," he says. Instead, his company has bred a culture in which success is celebrated, and failure is forgotten.

While many cleantech companies require very large amounts of capital in order to get to market, there is a quiet group of cleantech companies bucking that trend. 

Companies including Heartland Biocomposites (green building materials), RealTech (water testing) and TerraLUX  (LED lighting) all built significant and growing businesses with compelling intellectual property and did so initially without multi-millions in capital from venture funds (let alone tens or hundreds of millions). Because TerraLUX is one of our portfolio companies and I therefore know them best, their story is one I am able to share.

TerraLUX boasts customers including Cooper Lighting, Phillips, GE Healthcare, Snap-On Tools and many others. It has six awarded patents and eight more filed. Dr. Anthony Catalano founded the company in 2003 and, with exceptional technology smarts, creative boot-strapping and some of his own capital, he built a business with significant revenue, exciting gross margins and deep intellectual property – all without a penny of outside investment capital. And now, only after all those accomplishments, has TerraLUX closed a $5.6 million financing from Emerald Technology Ventures and Access Venture Partners.

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Georgia Bio, the Georgia Research Alliance, the State of Georgia, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the Innovation Crescent business community have formed a partnership to create the Georgia Bioscience Commercialization Center (GBCC), which will act as a start-up catalyst and resource center for bioscience entrepreneurs in Georgia.

Seed funding for the GBCC was provided by Georgia Bio (GaBio) and the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). The GBCC will be headquartered in the GaBio offices at 1180 Peachtree Street NE, Suite 4150, Atlanta, Ga, 30308.

Laurence Downey, M.D., former President and CEO of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, and Robert Derricotte, Medical Marketing Insights LLC, led development of the GBCC and will serve as the primary contacts for the commercialization center.

It’s a rough time for start-ups seeking financing. Venture capital firms may have loosened the purse strings somewhat, but finding that magic formula to catch an investor’s eye is harder than ever.

This presentation (the first of two parts – the second of which will be posted here next week) is meant to assist both Limited Partners and entrepreneurs alike and has been wrought from a life in startups and studying the business of innovation.

It’s an overview of forces at work, driving sub-par returns in the Venture Capital asset class, and identifies the attributes of VC which will yield viable startups and stronger returns to LPs.
Currently, the internal rate of return across the VC industry is dismal, and will continue to be so, except for those innovative firms who adapt and pioneer the necessary new model.

Last year the U.S. government doled out $6 billion to ailing carmakers promising to crank out hybrid or electric models. Even foreign competitors, such as Nissan, were able to cash in.

Lard on an anemic federal small-business stimulus package (see "They Call This A Stimulus For Small Biz? Pshwaw!" and "A Funding Fix For New Businesses") and a lingering credit crisis and it's all enough to make small business owners think the game is rigged against them.

Things are a bit rosier at the state level. Many states offer incentives for entrepreneurs to put roots down and create jobs. Grants, loans, equity capital: It's all out there if you know where to look. Some of the best programs have been operating for more than two decades and, collectively, have doled out billions of dollars.

Earlier today we ran a post from Mark Cuban arguing that the future of TV is TV, not the Internet as some people like to say.

Mark's reasoning is simple: "follow the money," he says. People are buying brand new HDTVs left and right. Peter Kafka at All Things D picked up on Mark's post and published the chart below.

Goldman Sachs and derivatives will likely be hot topics of conversation this weekend when Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger field questions at the love-fest that is the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) annual shareholder meeting. There is always some good learning and good chuckles at the Q&A session. But if you’re looking for an investing lesson, diving into Buffett’s personal portfolio can be even more illuminating.

Thanks to a terrific post at Morningstar you can now delve even closer into the investing mind of the Oracle of Omaha. Robert Miles spent some quality time poring through recent SEC filings and has created a profile of Buffett’s personal portfolio. It’s a who’s who of dividend paying stocks.  Retirees (and pre-retirees) looking to generate income outside of the increasingly risky bond market can get some great ideas from Buffett’s personal dividend-paying stock portfolio. For that matter, anyone looking for strong returns should take note. According to Ned Davis Research, dividend-growth stocks within the S&P 500 have grown at an annualized 9.4% since 1972. The non-dividend payers within the S&P 500 muddled along at a 1.5% annualized pace over that stretch.

The world's most innovative communities share their secrets at at Building the Broadband Economy 2010, New York City, 19-21 May

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.  At the annual Building the Broadband Economy summit in New York City, you will hear from speakers including:

• Premier Shawn Graham of New Brunswick, Canada
• Christopher Zimmerman, Vice Chairman of the Board, 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
• Dave Carter, Head, Manchester Digital Development Agency, Manchester UK
• Dana McDaniel, Deputy City Manager, Dublin, Ohio, USA
• J.M.L.N. Mikkers, Mayor of Veldhoven in the Eindhoven Region of the Netherlands
• Anette Scheibe, CEO, Electrum Foundation & Kista Science City AB, Stockholm Sweden

In 2010, the BBE summit theme is about talent and how to keep it.  In today's Broadband Economy, communities must continually raise the skill levels of citizens at all ages and in all walks of life.  But investments in education pay no dividends to the community if the people with new skills cannot find desirable and challenging work in the local economy.  You will hear from Smart21 and Top Seven Intelligent Community leaders who have grappled with this challenge and developed innovative strategies to close the education "last mile."

An exclusive, invitational event produced by the Intelligent Community Forum and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the summit attracts attendees from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.  It is a unique opportunity to learn from the world’s most dynamic communities how to use information and communications technology to build prosperous, inclusive and sustainable communities.  

The audience for BBE 2009 is limited to 300 attendees in order to provide the right environment to share knowledge and build relationships.  Attendance is principally by invitation but a limited number of paid registrations are also available for Innovation America readers at a 20% discount. (Register under VIP Registration at www.icfsummit.com using VIP Code PTR2010.) Registration is now open.  . 

Intelligent Community Forum
www.intelligentcommunity.org    

Health-care reform was a tale of two Presidents.

The first, President Barack Obama (circa 2009), had the expectation that health-care reform could be driven through Congress and straight to his desk with little more than his mandate that it get done. Last summer, he demanded a bill on his desk by Labor Day.

Washington laughed.

His leadership was in question. The innovation that got this little-known senator from Illinois elected was nowhere to be seen.

Facing failure, President Obama (circa 2010) remembered the skills required to cajole a team into working together. He recalled the leadership and creative innovation necessary to craft a workable bill. In February, he held a televised address with GOP leaders at a Conservative conference. He crossed the country to attend Town Hall meetings and other public forums. He took an Ohio woman who lost her health insurance before being diagnosed with cancer and made her the face of reform.

On Mar. 21, Congress passed the Health-Care Reform Bill.

IBM researchers used a new nanopatterning technique to create the "world' smallest" 3D map of the Earth. Approximately 1000 of them would fit on a single grain of salt. Separately, they also carved out a 25-nanometer tall model of the Matterhorn. A nanometer, of course, is one-billionth of a meter, so that's a 1:5 billion scale nano-mountain.

(Reuters) - Index Ventures, a leading European technology venture capital firm, is stepping up the pace of its early-stage investments as the plummeting costs of starting up a business make smaller investments more meaningful.

Index -- which has backed Skype, Net-a-Porter and MySQL -- is strengthening its team and allocating a dedicated pool of capital with the aim of closing about 20 deals in the next two years, compared with about 30 such deals in the last five.

Partner Saul Klein, one of the five-strong team leading the new drive, said on Monday venture capital firms needed to get involved earlier with sums as small as $50,000, or risk being too late to help entrepreneurs shape their strategy.

For much of the past two years, China watchers have been increasingly vocal about the need for the country and its businesses to move from captive manufacturing towards creating entirely new products based on innovation.

As the United States economy has deteriorated, many of these voices have been motivated by the prevailing wisdom that once Chinese businesses make the adjustment towards innovation, price pressure on US manufacturers will decrease, and entirely new industries based on new products coming out of China will become possible.

Among the rationales that have so excited Western businessmen since China's opening are not only the sheer size of China's

The title of this week’s post is a deliberate play on the old showbiz quote that it takes twenty years to become an overnight success. The recent attention given to entrepreneurship initiatives at the University might give an outsider the impression we’ve just leaped onto the stage, but the real story of innovation and business creation at UT Austin is one of legacy, perseverance, and unseen toil.

The vibrancy we see in the system today is due to pioneering effort going back to the days of Dean George Kozmetsky and even before, which blossomed into initiatives across campus supporting innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship and commercialization.

BANGALORE: India is set to be the next big market for global risk capital, according to data collated by early stage venture capital firm IDG Ventures.

The firm estimates that $75 billion of private equity and venture capital will flow into India over the next five years, nearly double the $40 billion capital that came into the country between 2004-2009.

Over half this capital inflow will go to new businesses in sectors such as information technology services, manufacturing, healthcare, engineering and construction, while nearly a tenth of the money is expected to fund early stage, high-risk ventures in the technology segment.

India is now an attractive market for global risk capital, as the economy expands at an average of 7% and the appetite for such capital shrinks in the US, the world’s largest market for private equity and venture capital, following the global economic slowdown.

The face of the typical startup entrepreneur these days is a bit wrinkly, sporting some gray hair, and having the wisdom that comes with age. But is it a good financial move to start a business late in life?

According to recent research, these days those 55 and over are more likely than young people to be starting businesses, says Professor Scott Shane, writing in BusinessWeek.

He cites research by Dane Stangler of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that showed in every year from 1996 to 2007, Americans aged 55 to 64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20 to 34.