Besides possessing creativity and resilience, the best innovators are the ones who can effectively communicate and "sell" their ideas to upper management. Innovators often have to get executive approval for support on a new product or venture. No matter how good an idea is, it will not sell itself. The most important aspect of communication is to know your audience. In the case of an organization, know the structure, who the decision maker is, and who their influencers are. An innovator must speak the "executive language" to effectively communicate with the high-ups. This entails knowing and understanding what is important to them -- what is the ROI (Return on Investment) and the goal to be achieved? By highlighting how your goals are aligned with that of the organization's, you are much more likely to receive favorable results.

Every startup and every big business wishes that all their employees were star performers, but wishing doesn’t make it happen. Some coaches and leaders seem to have the magic for bringing out the best in everyone. Research has shown that it isn’t magic, but a focus on engaging people in their work, so that their work triggers the same emotions as play does for you.

Some of you cynics may think that such a thing isn’t possible, but Shawn Kent Hayashi, who has worked for years with entrepreneurs, as well as Fortune 500 giants, argues otherwise. In her new book, “Conversations for Creating Star Performers,” she offers examples and ten strategies to leverage conversations into game-changing moments for team members and your company:

Build awareness of expectations. Conversations about what effective performance looks and sounds like are an obvious strategy, but too often found missing. No team member knows what they don’t know, so regular communication from leaders is key.

Connecticut is ready to select consultants to help it create an “innovation ecosystem,” looking both to poach ideas already implemented in New York and Massachusetts as well as inviting consultants to “choose their own adventure” in creating unique programs to be found nowhere else.

The effort comes even as the Stamford Innovation Center readied to formally launch a business incubator, with a focus on digital media startups that has drawn plaudits from the Connecticut Innovations Inc. venture capital fund and members of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration.

“I view it not as an engine of itself, but coupled to multiple (efforts),” said Eric Dale, an attorney in the Stamford office of Robinson & Cole L.L.P. who has been working to pair entrepreneurs with investors. “I’m really excited about Stamford … There are a lot of incubators popping up around the national landscape. That is something Stamford hasn’t had, there’s not really a hub … where people can collaborate.”

I get asked this question many times in many different ways. Sometimes people are coy about it (“someone is expressing strategic interest – what should I do?”) other times people are clear and direct (“someone wants to acquire my company – help!”).

David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars, has encountered this many times. Before starting TechStars, he was an entrepreneur who sold his company to a public company after running it with a partner for a decade. He then started a few more companies, including one that failed and one that was acquired. Finally, he started TechStars and of the 28 companies from the first three programs (there have now been 126 companies that have gone through the program to date) 8 have been acquired. He’s also invested in a number of companies as an angel investor and I know of at least a half dozen that have been acquired.

According to a job posting on ReadyForce.com First Round Capital is openly considering a move to Philadelphia. The job post is searching for an executive assistant and notifies the applicant that “the firm is contemplating a move to the city of Philadelphia in the next year.”

The Conshohocken-based venture capital firm is one of the most respected and active early stage investors in the nation and occasionally invests in local businesses. Philly-born portfolio companies past and present include Invite Media, Solve Media, ClickEquations, Monetate and Packlate. Currently the firm also has offices in San Francisco and New York City.

Various sources have approached Technically Philly suspecting a First Round move. However, in an email to Technically Philly in October, Managing Partner Josh Kopleman would only confirm that the firm’s current lease is up in late 2012.

Working with hundreds of speakers as an event producer, I’ve learned a lot about what makes a speaker truly great. Below, four nationally recognized speakers — all of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with — share their insights on how to give a stellar presentation that resonates with any audience and gets them invited to speak again.

Know Your Audience

Whether you’ve been asked to speak or you’re pitching a session, the first step is to research your potential audience. Knowing the audience provides speakers with information necessary to craft an on-point, well received presentation. You will want to know several things about the audience including, their level of sophistication in the area you’re presenting, learning objectives and topics of interest.

How important are “creative” jobs to a state’s economy and to rural communities?

About two years ago the Mississippi Arts Commission entered into a unique partnership with the Mississippi Development Authority to find out.  Realizing they had an overlapping interest in how arts, culture, and design benefit the state’s economy and its people, they ordered a study to examine Mississippi’s creative industries.

The notion was to look at these businesses not just as a cultural and social good but on economic terms. The state examined the creative economy as a source of jobs and wealth, as a competitive advantage for products and services, a magnet for talent and tourists, as a stimulus for innovation in science and technology, and in terms of its contributions to academic performance.

The Honourable Rona Ambrose, Minister of Public Works and Government Services and Minister for Status of Women, and Jacques Gourde, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, for Official Languages and for the Economic Development Agency for the Regions of Quebec, are pleased to announce that the Government of Canada has pre-qualified 36 innovations that it may buy and test as part of the second round of the Kickstart program, also known as the Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program.

"Our Government is focused on creating conditions to promote jobs and economic growth," said Minister Ambrose. "That is why we're committed to supporting Canadian entrepreneurs who help to keep the Canadian economy moving."

Leadership guru Warren Bennis asked whether leaders are born or made. When asked if Wall Street would accept a young Mark Zuckerberg in his early 20s as CEO, Facebook investor Peter Thiel said: “Well, we’ll wait until he’s over 25 to file”.  Wise move, considering that Mark’s title on his business cards read “I’m CEO, bitch”.

This week Facebook filed its S-1 to go public.  Mark is 27.  How Mark managed to launch a social networking site after Friendster had crashed during MySpace’s zenith has been widely chronicled.  What’s been less discussed is how Mark mastered the six requirements to succeed, namely Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing.

California entrepreneur Mark Comiso has started nine businesses in Silicon Valley, but he's coming to St. Louis to get his tenth off the ground.

Two of his co-founders live here and, just as importantly, Comiso has found a supportive environment here. In fact, he says, his venture -- Click With Me Now -- might be just an idea if not for Capital Innovators, an accelerator fund in downtown St. Louis.

The accelerator model means that when Capital Innovators invests in companies, it moves them into a shared office space for three months of intensive mentoring. On Thursday, after a competition that drew 100 applicants, the fund announced that it is investing $50,000 in each of six companies, including Click With Me Now.

SEVENTY-TWO hours before Facebook’s big moment, Sheryl K. Sandberg was half a world away, hobnobbing with the likes of Bill Gates and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Yes, Ms. Sandberg is Mark Zuckerberg’s No. 2. And, yes, if all goes well, she will soon become the $1.6 billion woman. On Wednesday, Facebook filed to go public in a deal that, in all likelihood, will instantly make it one of the most valuable corporations on the planet.

But Ms. Sandberg, who has helped steer this social network to this once-unimaginable height, had more on her mind than securities filings and ad metrics. She was attending the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, where her subject wasn’t Facebook — but women. Specifically, how women, in her view, must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.

After you have successfully attracted angels or venture capital with your business case, your million dollar product idea, and you have a signed term sheet, there is still one more hurdle to overcome before investors write the check. This is the dreaded “due diligence” process.

For no good reason, this process seems shrouded in mystery, when in fact it is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan. In my view, understanding due diligence can only improve information flow, and leads to a better long-term partnership with your investor.

Remember that up to this point, the investor has primarily seen and talked to the founder and CEO, and studied written documents. Before smart investors write a check, they, or a trusted consultant, will want to meet and talk with your key team members, several customers, and evaluate the real product. If results don’t match what they have been told, all bets are off.

After I sold my company last year, I was swarmed with folks looking for me to jump to the next thing. I was amazed at the doors that opened thanks to the small victory of having my first startup acquired. I thought back to two months earlier, when I was just another dreamer with a huge credit card bill. I was the same person, with the same probability of success, but nobody wanted to chat with me about opportunities then.

The world of venture capital is obsessed with winners. Former CEOs are recycled into new positions at new companies. Profitable VC groups raise new and bigger funds. The successful CEOs hobnob with the successful VCs, and the cycle continues. But should it? I didn't acquire many new skills in the two months between being completely broke and decently flush; someone just bought my company. In truth, luck and timing had a lot to do with it.

Arizona State University’s Venture Catalyst in collaboration with ASU’s technology transfer arm, Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), is launching a new program aimed at creating startup activity among postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.

As opposed to standard academic modules and programs, this part-time program applies a very ‘pracademic’ approach to developing an entrepreneurial mindset and real new venture creation. The program modules are taught by pracademic adjunct faculty from leading external organizations, supplemented by online modules from the ASU Venture Catalyst.

PIPELINE SEEKS AN ENERGETIC EXECUTIVE TO WORK WITH PRESIDENT TO HELP BUILD AND SUSTAIN THE PIPELINE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM AND RELATED ENTREPRENEURIAL PROGRAMMING. THE POSITION ASSISTS THE PRESIDENT IN MANY AREAS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, CIRRICULUM DEVELOPMENT, FINANICIAL ORGANIZATION AND REMPORTING, FUNDRAISING EFFORTS, EVENTS, PUBLICATIONS, ALUMINI PROGRAMMING AND OUTREACH, MENTOR PROGRAMMING, AND PRESENTER/SPEAKER/PARTICIPANT.

For more information, download the PDF

There’s no question that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm headed up by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a major force since it was founded back in 2009. The young VC firm has funded some of the best and brightest companies in the tech industry: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Airbnb, Box, Fab.com and Pinterest, to name just a few. And this is just the beginning — Andreessen Horowitz just announced it has raised $1.5 billion in fresh funding to invest in even more startups.

I talked to Marc Andreessen this week to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley, the startup ecosystem, and where the larger tech world is headed in 2012.

Though Silicon Valley has lured away plenty of start-ups, (cough: Facebook), New York is becoming a magnet of its own, attracting companies that want to build their businesses amid the bright lights of the big city. In the last couple months, New York has drawn former San Francisco start-up Qwiki, PlaceIQ from Colorado and recent 500 Startups graduate Snapette, which started in Boston before spending the last half year in Silicon Valley.

These are just a few recent transplants but they show how New York increasingly makes sense as a headquarters for certain start-ups, especially those with ties to finance, fashion, media, retail, advertising and increasingly big data and location-based services. ConsumerBell relocated to New York from the Bay Area in May and Take The Interview, which started in Boston, is moving as well. The relocations fuel the continuing momentum behind New York, which has eclipsed Boston in the number of VC deals and is now becoming a destination for big companies like Facebook, which announced an engineering campus here and eBay, which bought Hunch and plans to build out a New York office.

When well-performing venture capital-backed start-ups raise an additional round of capital, the valuation of the business is usually higher than it was at the previous fund raising round.  The portion of VC-financed start-ups that experiences “up rounds” – as new fund raising at a higher valuation is called - is an indication of how well venture capital-backed companies are doing.  If most of the companies obtaining additional capital experience an up round, then start-ups are generally doing well.  But if the majority of companies face down rounds, then venture capital-backed companies in general are having trouble.

Data collected by the law firm Cooley LLP and presented in their publication Venture Capital Report provides a picture of the kind of fund raising rounds venture-capital backed companies are experiencing.  As the figure below shows, the situation has returned to normal, after having been upended during the financial crisis and recession.  As the Cooley data indicate, in normal times, around 70 percent of VC-financed start-ups experience up rounds.  Back in 2007 before the financial crisis and recession hit, that’s what was happening.

As an investor, I’ve seen hundreds of mobile application pitches. And as a consumer, I’ve downloaded hundreds more – some out of curiosity and others in the hope that I’ll find something so useful and exciting that I’ll make room for it on my iPhone’s home screen.

From both perspectives, I am rarely excited by download numbers. What gets my attention is engagement: how frequently an application is used and how engaged those users are. This ultimately is the barometer for an application’s utility and/or strength of community. And if either of those two factors are strong, growth will certainly come. Just ask Instagram, Evernote, LogMeIn and others.

A revamp of Denver's economic development office is designed to change the culture of the city agency from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial.

"We've never really had a sound economic development plan," said Mayor Michael Hancock. "We want a laser-like focus on really building a true economic development program."

Hancock last week announced a restructuring of the Denver Office of Economic Development that creates an emphasis on business development and retention.

A focal point of the JumpStart 2012 plan is creation of a $20 million public-private fund to finance small-business startups and expansions.