Zhou Libo's show at the cavernous Shanghai International Gymnastics Center has been sold out for days, and after I finally get a ticket, I understand why. Sporting a tuxedo and a white bow tie, Zhou, 43, a stand-up comedian, delivers rapid-fire jokes, mostly about life in Shanghai. The theme is "I'm crazy about money," and Zhou riffs on soaring property prices, how much it costs to raise kids, even how much the U.S. owes China. The audience of some 3,700 roars its approval. People are clapping, slapping their thighs, stomping the floor. I manage a smile, but even though I am a Mandarin speaker, I don't really get the humor, and many of my Chinese friends would be almost as lost. While Zhou sets up his jokes in Mandarin, the punch lines are nearly always in the local Shanghai dialect. This much I do get, however: the performance is an unabashed celebration of all things Shanghai and Shanghainese.

For China's most dynamic, most cosmopolitan and sassiest city, this is a time to celebrate. After decades of hibernation following the founding of Mao Zedong's People's Republic in 1949, Shanghai is returning to its roost as a global center of commerce and culture. This year Shanghai, as host of Expo 2010, is squarely in the international spotlight. The fair opens May 1, and organizers expect more than 70 million visitors over six months.

Regular, petroleum-based plastic doesn't biodegrade. But this year's crop of Earth Day — inspired ads shows plant-based plastics doing just that: an empty SunChips bag fading into the soil, a Paper Mate pen dissolving underground. Although the visuals suggest that these items simply disintegrate (Goodbye, landfill!), the reality is more complicated. Take the SunChips bag. It needs to go in a compost bin; the packaging is clear about that. Likewise, Paper Mate notes that the pen's outer casing will break down if buried in a backyard but that its innards should go in the garbage. Forget to separate them, and the outer part won't biodegrade in a landfill.

Bioplastics could be really good for the environment — the manufacturing process produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than that for petroleum-based plastics, and these biomaterials don't contain an allegedly hormone-disrupting chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), that some regular plastics do. But is society green enough to use bioplastics? Many of us still don't recycle all our bottles and cans, and now companies are expecting us to start composting?

On occasion I get the hard word from the high school brass that my desk is a mess – it is never as bad as the math teacher who loves trains a little too much, but messy nonetheless. This picture places me in good company.

Social innovation: it’s not about the idea or the “aha” moment. It’s about creating a critical mass of stakeholder champions. Surprised? So was I, but UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship chair Andy Hargadon and Rockefeller President Judith Rodin presented compelling arguments and multiple examples to make the case at the Council on Foundation’s Annual Conference in Denver.

According to the discussion during the conference session, “Social Innovation: What it is and what it means for Philanthropy,” it turns out that after 4000-plus mousetrap patents, the most effective and bestselling mousetrap is one of the first traps designed, thereby destroying the adage that if you build a better mousetrap people will beat a path to your door!

According to Rodin and Hargadon, who’ve studied and spearheaded plenty of successful innovations, success requires a network of stakeholdershardwired to contribute, spread and continuously improve philanthropy’s work. It can be an old idea thought about in a new way, but it must engage. As Rodin said, “If you want impactful answers, ask everyone.”

BQF Innovation

Businessweek has collaborated with Boston Consulting Group to publish their 2010 list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world based on a survey of corporate executives.  Here is the full list.  It is an interactive table.  And here is a slide show commentary on the top 25.

There has been considerable movement in the list from previous years although Apple retains a firm grip on the top spot. China with 4 entries, India with 2 and South Korea with 3 have all increased their showing. Britain has 4 entrants – Virgin, BSkyB, Vodafone and HSBC. Germany has 3 companies in the list and France has none. Here is the list.

If you use LinkedIn correctly, it can be a marketing godsend.

You can form relationships with hundreds of potential customers and solidify your brand -- without spending an arm and a leg.

Do it, wrong, however, and you won’t just embarrass yourself. You might actually hurt your company’s reputation, and your own.

How to do it right?

Learn the most common mistakes small business owners make on LinkedIn -- and what to do about them.

Number 1. Special Offers

We live in a society that is as distracted as it is informed. People are making decisions on what to read, view, purchase, visit, and sample based on the information that filters through their attention dashboards. At best, even the most qualified information sourced from the most trusted contacts will receive only a cursory overview. The trick is to concisely introduce the value up front. If the offer is compelling and affiliated with their interests, the consumer will make the connection to personal value and benefits and click-through to redeem the special or coupon when ready or so inclined.

For example, @delloutlet uses Twitter and Facebook to send coupons to customers. In just one year, Dell recorded upward of $3 million in sales directly sourced from Twitter.

California Tortilla (@caltort), a chain of 39 casual Mexican restaurants based in Rockville, MD, sends coupon passwords via Twitter, which customers must say at checkout to redeem the offer.

Last year, our list of the Most Influential Women in Technology raised plenty of eyebrows, ire, and fist pumps of joy — depending on the reader. And we’ve no doubt this list will follow suit. But the overwhelming number of nominees and fresh names proved that, while women in tech may remain at a distinct disadvantage by almost any metric (average salary, top-management representation, etc), there is also plenty to celebrate and be inspired by.

We want to let you know about a recent activity and contribution NASVF has made in supporting amendments to the Financial Stability Act of 2010 proposed by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT).

There were two elements of the bill that would have been detrimental to entrepreneurs, public and private investors as well as organizations that support emerging innovation enterprises:

• Section 412 and 413, Adjusting the Accredited Investor Standard for Inflation. As currently written, this section could result in the elimination of as many as two-thirds of all accredited investors who invest directly in start-up and early-stage small businesses.
• Section 926, Authority of State Regulators Over Regulation D Offerings. This section could make it more difficult to raise angel capital from investors in different states, make it unclear what entities regulate angel investments, and introduce potential lengthy waiting periods for businesses to receive their capital, possibly resulting in the death of those businesses.

NASVF along with nine national associations supporting small business and innovation joined together in a letter to Senator Dodd to voice their concerns on the Senate Reform Bill (view the letter).

Cleantech Blog

First Sarah Palin, now Robert Bryce taking pot shots around things they barely understand: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042302220.html

1) Solar and Wind take up too much land: If you just focus on rooftop solar and buffer land at airports, brownfields, wastewater treatment facilities, and military bases you could power the US almost 2 times over with just solar power. Wind turbines on the top of light posts are being tested by Wal-mart and that market alone could power 10% of the country. Everyone wants to extrapolate from today's large scale projects instead of using their brain -- Bryce is no different: http://www.ef.org/documents/EF-Final-Final2.pdf

2) Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes: this is true that there are some elements from copper to rare earth metals that we will have to import. But the dirty secret Robert won't tell you is that business as usual also uses rare earth metals so we are not worse off than we would be otherwise. http://seekingalpha.com/article/103972-rare-earth-metals-not-so-rare-but-valuable
Plus we save gargantuan amounts of water, over 1 gallon per kWh of fossil fuels offset.

This afternoon, President Obama addressed the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship organized by the Department of State and the Department of Commerce following his promise in Cairo last June. The event is designed to promote entrepreneurship in Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central and Southeast Asia as a tool for economic and development policy and to fulfill the President’s commitment to broaden and deepen ties between the United States and Muslim communities around the world.

Entrepreneurship as a field in economic policy appears to have earned its credentials. A U.S. President convening over 200 leaders from more than 50 countries on five continents for a gathering entitled A New Beginning: Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship indicates that entrepreneurship is no longer viewed as a side ring to the circus but rather as a core priority for nations looking to build economies and expand human welfare.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is among the greatest innovators of our time. And yet his genius for understanding business is rarely explained in any public way. Rarer still is to hear the advice he would give to the CEO of another hugely successful company: Nike. But that's exactly what you'll learn from this video, in which Nike president and CEO Mark Parker tells about the advice that Jobs gave him shortly after the release of the Nike+ product line. It's a simple bit of wisdom that any entrepreneur can relate to: "Get rid of the crappy stuff."

Investors are opening their wallets again but their tolerance of risk has been dampened by the crisis, Jean-Bernard Guérrée, CEO of the World Investment Conference, told EurActiv in an interview.

Guérrée sees hope in the US, where Silicon Valley innovations are once again attracting investment as companies like Apple continue to post huge profits thanks to high-tech products.

"California has had a record high in the first quarter of 2010 – it's the highest ever level of private investment. It feels like 1999," said Guérrée, who has spent 20 years working as an entrepreneur in the US technology sector.

Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has started looking at energy innovation through politics. Gates, who has started speaking more frequently on the importance of developing the next generation of energy technology from a technologist and an investor’s perspective, co-wrote a column in the Washington Post on Friday that calls for the U.S. government to invest significantly more money into energy innovation.

Specifically Gates used the column (co-written with former CEO and Chairman of DuPont’s Chad Holliday) to announce a new group that he’s joined called the American Energy Innovation Council, which is a group of business leaders that support energy innovation. The group will announce specific recommendations to enhance energy innovation in the coming months, according to the column, but for now Gates and Holliday gave these three reasons why developing energy technology is different than creating electronics innovation, and why energy technology needs much more federal funding. (We put Gates on our list of 25 Who Ditched Information Technology for Greentech).

There are ideas and there are ideas. The venture industry, the ‘ecosystem’ and even other folks you meet will jump right into slotting the idea as fundable or not, scalable or not, or even feasible or not. Then there are these other tags and cliches you’ll hear – lifestyle business, capital intensive model, non-monetizable, feature-not-a-product.

But sometimes, the best way forward is to be Nike and just do it. Many an idea dies too early a death caught in analysis-paralysis, and killed by the negativity of thoughts even before its crystalized into a business. Most businesses figure out their exact packaging, revenue streams and the real costs and possible optimizations somewhere along their lifetimes, not as a solved problem upfront. How do you know you’re not going to discover scale as you go along ? How can you be sure there are no other market segments you may be able to address as you come across them ? Optimism and hope are an entrepreneurs currency, and surely many ideas can be made to work. Sure, they may probably not be very attractive VC businesses as they stand when you start out. But that’s about the lousiest reason to not do it!

Two reports released recently by the SBA and spotlighted in The Entrepreneurial Mind blog confirm what many small-business owners may already know:  Entrepreneurs and their employees aren’t saving enough for retirement.

Saving for Retirement: A Look at Small Business Owners (PDF), written by SBA economist Jules Lichtenstein, assesses how well entrepreneurs are preparing for their own retirement. Among the results:

• Just 36% of business owners have individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Of those, one-third contributed during the 2005 tax year (latest data available). Only 18% of business owners have a 401(k) plan, and less than 2% have a Keogh plan.

• The business owners most likely to have and contribute to retirement accounts are non-minority, older, have higher education levels, own more established and more profitable companies and are more likely to own multiple businesses.

• The overall asset ownership of entrepreneurs affects how they save for retirement. Those who own homes and have other retirement accounts are most likely to have IRA, Keogh or 401(k) participation (in other words, those who have one type of retirement account are likely to have more than one.)

• Business owners who own micro-businesses (less than 10 employees) are less likely to own or contribute to retirement accounts.

As president of the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1994 to 2008, G. Wayne Clough was often asked why he didn't attend meetings of the Association of American Universities.

Georgia Tech was not a member, but "people were always saying, 'We thought you were in,'" says Mr. Clough, who is now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

It was a reasonable assumption. The AAU represents universities with the most prestigious profiles in research and graduate education. Georgia Tech has long been strong on both counts. The university's share of federal research dollars topped the shares of almost all non-AAU, comprehensive universities, as well as those of quite a few members.

The brains of the VC’s are wired differently and startups should know how to deal with them.

A venture capitalist is a person who invests in a business , providing capital either for start-up or growth. Venture capitalists aim for a higher rate of return than would be given by more traditional investments. My years of interactions with VC’s have made me come to a conclusion that their brains are certainly wired differently. Just like entrepreneurs demonstrate certain common traits across the world VCs have certain traits. And when it comes to India I think the breed goes through another generation of transformation. To help entrepreneurs and startups better understand how to deal with the complex brains of the Indian VCs, I have put together my version of their brain map. Of course this is generic and there are many exceptions to the rule.

Ego
Being a VC in an emerging markets like India is like being a VIP. You are at a very high pay scale, constantly being pitched by smart entrepreneurs, called to give speeches at every
major conference. At business plan events they are almost mobbed and receive endless amounts of emails, phone calls, SMS most of them trying to desperately convince them into liking them. They meet CEOs of top companies, are in influential company boards, and get an ego massage from everyone who meets them, what a great tie! I like your hair style, i love that advice you gave me, that investment of yours is the next Facebook are very common compliments. Its but natural for any human who is living in an environment like this to develop a bit of an EGO. Its really complex dealing with such people and you too can easily get into the EGO massaging mode. However I think what really works with VC’s is being real and challenge them, question them and you dont have to agree with them on everything and deal with them like a real person.

One evening last month, the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, took to the podium at a downtown theater. The occasion was the state of the city address, and despite the mayor's best effort to project optimism, the truths facing America's 11th largest city are grim. The budget deficit is at least $85 million. The police department doesn't have the money to safeguard Detroit's vast, sparsely populated territory. The school system is a mess, and its emergency financial manager plans to shut nearly a quarter of the city's public schools by summer. Bing plans to shrink Detroit's government and shed thousands of jobs — an unpopular proposition in a city already boasting a 25% unemployment rate. Outside the theater, protesters waved signs that read, "FIRE THE MAYOR," and "SAVE OUR CITY." Inside, Bing spoke plainly: "We've been hit the hardest by what many call 'the Great Recession.'" We simply cannot afford to continue down this road." Days later, an independent report would suggest that Detroit's actual budget deficit might be $400 million, and that the best route for survival is possibly bankruptcy.

Emirates NBD Seed Capital loans are available up to a maximum of AED 2 million with easy qualification and repayment terms. The move by Emirates NBD comes at a time when self-employed nationals are increasingly recognised for their contribution to the UAE economy and the government plans to introduce a new law to help streamline and speed-up the process of setting up new businesses.

“Small businesses account for 46 per cent of the country’s GDP and new business start-ups make a significant contribution to this,” said Jamal Bin Ghalaita, Group Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Emirates NBD. “Our aim is to inspire more UAE nationals to develop their entrepreneurial ideas into fully fledged business enterprises, which are of vital importance to the growth and prosperity of our economy.