We have a proud record of innovation to build on: launching the field of public health; funding the scientists who would develop the yellow fever vaccine; supporting the conference that would launch the field of artificial intelligence; and breeding the crops that would spark the Green Revolution and feed a billion people in Latin America and South Asia. The list goes on.

The Maas river runs through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and empties into the North Sea. It also carries huge amounts of Europe's trash from its cities into the ocean. Inspired by what's floating by, Dutch architect Ramon Knoester and his firm WHIM have spent the last four years dreaming up ways to turn one of our greatest environmental ills into built utopias on water. Knoester’s latest vision: Floating parks and villas.

At press time, about 60 percent of The United Inventors Association of America members were 50 or older, estimates executive director Mark Reyland, and overall membership had grown 243 percent in a little over a year. “Older adults have more experience, plus the insight and persistence to get a product to market,” says Jeffrey Dobkin, president of Philadelphia’s American Society of Inventors and author of How to Market a Product for Under $500! You can make money, but don’t expect to get rich.

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One of the true joys of life is kicking back with a cold beer and letting the worries of life melt away.

But before you drift off into the bliss of a brewsky-induced buzz, take a minute to ponder what your happy hour go-to really says about who you are.

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Twelve small companies stand to receive $250,000 each in grants as part of  a small business competition, The Main Street Grants Program. They’ll also win a two day trip to Google headquarters for an intensive small business marketing workshop.

Small business lender Chase announced its Mission Main Street Grants Program (#MissionMainSt) this week. Owners of small businesses meeting the criteria should visit the Mission Main Street Grants site and fill in a business profile and grant questionnaire to enter.

Gary Spirer is an entrepreneur, a crowdfunding expert, and the author of “Crowdfunding: The Next Big Thing.” He is also the founder of Questionmine.com, a dynamic interactive marketing- solution firm that rapidly produces and deploys video surveys, quizzes, and automated webinars that enable marketers to discover customer intentions and reactions in real time and provide relevant content and offers.

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You have heard it a thousand times – the millennial generation is lazy, entitled, relies predominantly on technology for social interaction and likes their information in small, digestible bites. But, this can’t be an accurate representation of the entire generation, as millennials are also behind some of the most interesting and innovative startups and technologies today.

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As customers gain more access to general company information via the Internet, they also develop a greater demand for details about a business's founder. That's why you need to take the time to craft your reputation in order to create a personal brand parallel to your company's brand.

Your personal brand will help you plan for the future Even if you own your own firm outright, in an uncertain economy, businesses can and do take major hits when economic, political and world security shifts occur. Having a strong brand as founder of the company helps ensure your options and positions you for possibilities, should you need them in the future.

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Exclusive to Innovation America by Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute 

John Marshall once served on the board of a start-up organization with me and since he was the only person with CFO credentials on tap, I asked him to do the budget. That didn't make much sense, he quickly pointed out, saying “Janice, there’s no income to budget.” Never one to waste talent, I said, “Well, John, go figure out where to get some.” Whereupon he enlightened me thusly:

It looks like an opportune moment for education technology entrepreneurs in Seattle. A trio of local startups has raised a combined $6 million in recent weeks to work on various aspects of e-learning.

Kairos 4, headed by Kristen Hamilton, most recently entrepreneur-in-residence at Seattle venture capital firm Maveron, has raised more than $4.3 million, according to an SEC filing.

Life just got more complicated in startup land. While the U.S. Congress last year voted in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act to ease New Deal-era regulations on startups, the SEC has since loaded up the Act with even more regulations.

While these changes are unlikely to prevent the next great startup from getting funded, they may well ensure it's reasonably likely to get sued. Several of the industry's most prominent investors, from Mitch Kapor to Fred Wilson, are crying foul.

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Twitter's initial public offering filing went public today, detailing its plans to raise $1 billion and trade its shares under the symble TWTR. But it also laid out a bunch of details we hadn't come across previously—at least not in such, well, detail.

Twitter To Wall Street: Screw You

Twitter isn't currently profitable—it posted a $69.3 million net loss in the first six months of this year—and from the look of things, it plans to stay in the red for a while. Twitter forthrightly declares that it will continue to focus on innovation and ways to get users to stick around rather than on "rather than short-term operating results."

Professionals today are as diverse and unique as their fingerprints. They are out in the world learning, creating and building with limited ways to show these achievements and aspirations.  As a professional whose work is represented through visuals, not just words, it’s a challenge I’ve been all too familiar with. For the first time, LinkedIn is giving creative “right brained” professionals like myself a new way to showcase our best and brightest achievements through pictures, videos, documents and more.

The European Commission said on Thursday it is examining whether to regulate crowdfunding, an alternative source of financing via the Internet, and has started to gather views from industry and citizens.

Although any legislation would be unlikely to come before 2015, after the changeover of commissioners in charge of the EU's executive, the launch of the consultation signals a continued desire to extend EU rules in finance.

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Scarcity leads to creativity out of necessity. That’s the pop culture meme at least. Think “starving artist,” or the survivors in Survivor. The thinking has penetrated the business culture as well. For example, in the shadow of the 2008 recession, Google founder Sergey Brin, in a letter to his shareholders, writes: “I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge.”

When we think of the growth of cities and metros, we often think in terms of population growth. But this growth bears little relation to economic growth, and it's a terribly misleading indicator of it.

As I wrote in my feature on economic recovery for The Atlantic, while many people use population as a way to gauge regional growth or decline, it actually tells us little about economic growth. To shed light on the connection — or, really, lack of  one — between population growth and economic growth, my team and I tracked not just the recovery period but also for the entire decade of the 2000s.

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This week I spoke with a serial entrepreneur in Chicago. Now the co-founder of Evolution Capital Partners, Brendan Anderson cut his entrepreneurial teeth in 1995 at age 28 when he purchased a manufacturing business with a small set of customers. His first observation: running a business is not as easy as it seems. But he learned more than he’d bargained for from his customers: He began to delight in watching these individuals–a set of Polish tradesmen–come together over drinks of warm vodka to put together new deals. They’d take the facility of one contact, the resources of another, blend them, put in some additional capital and—voila—successful businesses were born.

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As the convergence of digital technologies drives unprecedented levels of change in global marketplaces, it is very much a reality that a company must, as Bill Gates put it, “innovate or die!” In the race for relevance to future customers, the greater a company’s innovation capacity, the greater its chance of success.

So how does a firm build its power and agility in innovation? The answer is simple and, to my mind, obvious – yet, it is not the direction in which most innovation-seeking firms seem to be channeling their efforts. Having designed and managed innovation programs in a variety of settings, I know that a company’s innovation capacity comes down to its talent pool, and its commitment to building knowledge and competencies one individual at a time.

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Albert Einstein had it right: “We cannot solve our problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Translation: If you don’t evolve your thinking, you’re not going to grow, let alone survive.

Be it disruptive or iterative, innovation comes from a variety of sources — your employees, peers, consumers and networks. Here are some key approaches to tapping into innovation.

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The evolution of KM has been slow, yet steady.  As we in the KM community continue to mature its existence such that is recognized and implemented as a key factor in improving today's society, business, academe and community, George Washington University has joined forces with Knowledge Management, Intellectual Capital and Organizational Learning to continue our journey towards KM maturity by hosting the 10th ICICKM-2013 Conference.

The contributions from experts around the world allow the KM community to advance the research and experiences in the field, both in the government sector, in the corporate sector and in education.

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