2011 was full of good news for social entrepreneurs. And 2012 promises to be even more exciting. Here is what I think social innovators will build upon in the New Year!

Co-operatives Are Making it Easy All the Way

One of the positive things that 2011 stood for was collaboration. Co-operatives, sharing models cropped up in all business areas whether it was cars or workspace, people found that working together made all the difference. It was fun, profitable and lowered costs and environmental impact. Successful collaborative design and crowd funding projects have laid the foundation for cool ventures that think outside the box. Several successful social enterprises were founded on this ideology and everything points to the direction that the sharing model will bring in a new wave of business possibilities in 2012.

innovationDAILY had a significant increase in readership in 2011 and I would like to share the stats with you comparing them to 2010:

I would like to thank all who continue to read innovationDAILY as well as introducing new readers to the publication. We receive many favorable comments related to its content and hope you will continue to send your original articles and news to us to keep it up to date on current innovation, entrepreneurship, technology and investing trends.

Additionally, I would like to thank the team at The Delmarva Group, LLC for producing and distributing the Innovation America website and newsletters.

Rich Bendis has been nominated as a "Top5 Speaker" for 2012 in the Innovation/Creativity category by Speakers Platform. Recognition is based on: expertise. professionalism, innovation within the topic area, testimonials and references, presentation skills and online votes. Rich has spoken over 30 times this year in many Countries, Provinces, States, Regions and Cities around the world on Building Innovative Economies and other Innovation topics. ALL VOTES MUST BE CAST BEFORE JANUARY 14TH, 2012.

Rich would appreciate your vote and asks that you please go to the voting page at: http://speaking.com/top5/ to cast your vote.

Thank You,

Rich Bendis

Fast Company wants you to have a banner year in 2012. As our gift to you, we present our very best advice and tips on how to work smarter, manage your career, and lead a more meaningful life. Click through below for more.

Work Smarter

Do sweat the small stuff. The combination of an insane attention to details and neurotic focus on customer experience is what sets the great companies apart from the good, Box CEO Aaron Levie reminds us. Organizations that adopt this level of intensity will always have superior offerings, an instant differentiator from the indistinguishable competition.

If I had to characterize the year 2011 in the world of university technology transfer, I would describe it as a year of “wait and see.”  Of course several notable events happened — for example, patent reform and a Supreme Court case that clarified limitations on university patent ownership.  But my sense was that this year’s big events will make their true impact felt over the longer term.

With no further ado, here’s the short list.

• American Invents Act
• Stanford vs. Roche
• Drug companies begin to invest in Chinese R&D labs
• More proof that entrepreneurship is not a level playing field
• Who took New York?  Cornell vs. Stanford

People the world over are getting fatter. Today more than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, and the rates in other industrialized countries are catching up. Obesity is no longer considered a condition particular to affluent societies—it has now spread to developing nations such as China and India, resulting in a global health crisis. According to the World Health Organization, 500 million adults worldwide are now obese, and this number is expected to climb well into the foreseeable future. Obesity is so problematic because it poses serious threats to personal health and well-being. Obese people are at an increased risk of chronic and potentially debilitating diseases such as cardiovascular disease and stroke, certain forms of cancer, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and asthma, among others. And the impact of obesity on an individual’s work and family life can be far-reaching, affecting a person’s employability, work productivity, and ability to pursue interests and activities of daily life.

I loved talking to the skankiest prostitutes at three in the morning with a camera crew around me, fires burning in the street, sad, abused people clinging to scraps of life for their pleasures, bailed out prisoners and the drug dealers waiting for them to be released, homeless addicts with nowhere to go and they only weren’t freaks if you saw them at three in the morning .

In short,  I loved my job.

Entrepreneurship ruined it. I’m not like how Mark Zuckerberg describes himself: “a builder”. My guess is, I’m not like most of the smart people who read this blog who go out there and build things to improve the lives of others. And yet, I kept doing it to myself over and over again. Once you enter the world of “eat what you kill” you can’t go back to being spoon-fed by the pencil factory anymore. Sadly. I write about my first job here (and the prostitutes).

Asia is moving towards the remaking of the innovation landscape, I have no doubt about that. Over the next ten years or so, along with a number of other wealth generating activities, the centre of gravity for innovation will shift increasingly towards the East.

I have been lucky to see part of this taking shape in my 15 odd years being based in Asia until recently. For twelve years I was based in Singapore and it is still, like all of Asia, on my advisory radar. Innovation in Asia is quite different; here are some of the dynamics. Others will follow.

The combinations abound are ‘rich and heady’

With the attraction of fast growing markets, rapidly growing middle classes, rising education standards with millions of graduates emerging across Asia and plentiful state funding you have a powerful cocktail to ‘kick start’ innovation. For many countries in Asia they are well passed the ‘kick start’ and more into the establishing and maturing of their specific ‘brand’ of innovation.

Jobs and Woz. Larry and Sergey. Jack, Biz and Evan. Mark and Eduardo.

Many of today’s most notable and successful tech companies were born not out of one, but two (and sometimes three) noggins. Entrepreneurship can be a long, lonely and hard road, so it help to have a co-founder — he serves as a sounding board, a different point of view, a yin to your yang. He’s a beer buddy when the going gets tough, and another flute to clink when the long-awaited funding comes through. The co-founding trend is going strong, with many of today’s up-and-coming startups led by two (or more) complementary individuals. After all, if you’re going to go through the startup rollercoaster, why not share the ride with someone?

But how are you supposed to find the person with whom you’ll hunker down to build the company you’re so passionate about? Well, there’s TechCoFounder, FounderDating and Founder2Be, for the Match.com types. Then there are hackathons and startup weekends, a great source for CTOs. And there’s business school, where you have access to a large pool of bright minds. But you might not even have to go that far or spend that much money — you could find the person on Craigslist. Or maybe you’re already dating him. Or best friends with her. Or maybe you just need to meet your future co-founder in a random twist of fate.

On another topic, I wanted to share the good news that in the coming months, my attention will be focused on writing a book. I’m very close to signing a book contract with a major publisher.  I will strive to continue to blog with the same intensity and enthusiasm of the past year. I’m considering a new format, of featuring guest-bloggers who’d like to offer original thought and analysis about various aspects of university technology commercialization. Please contact me privately if you’re interested so I can get a sense of whether this could become a real possibility.

Some other good news is that this month I have two published articles coming out. One has appeared in the December, 2011 edition of NCURA magazine. This article makes an argument in favor of preserving faculty tenure as a critical component of maintaining our high-performing, U.S. university research environment. Email me directly if you’d like me to share a copy with you. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The U.S. Small Business Administration is seeking nominations for its awards program recognizing small business' role in federally funded research and development.

Three types of awards will be presented in Washington, D.C., in April. The Tibbetts Awards are chosen from among companies that participated in the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs; and another award is for individuals who advocate on behalf of those programs. A third Hall of Fame award is given to companies that have had an extended period of success with the SBIR and STTR programs.

Innovation can happen anywhere. It shouldn’t be solely entrusted to Cupertino or Mountain View nor should it be limited to self-styled visionaries in New Balance sneakers. But it does seem to happen in clusters. Why Silicon Valley? Why Waterloo? Because creativity is cultural. For the better part of a decade, the Martin Prosperity Institute at U of T’s Rotman School of Management has been studying the complex web of factors that encourage and sustain innovation in regions around the world. First published in 2004, the institute’s Global Creativity Index measures a nation’s innovation potential, focusing on what it calls the Three Ts: technology, talent and tolerance. We used this index, but also dove deeper, to choose cities that are best positioned to nurture their creative edge into the future. "The GCI is really trying to help regions understand where they are," explains Kevin Stolarick, research director of the Martin Prosperity Institute. "Even when times are good, you have to worry about what comes next." Here are five cities —and some of their start-ups—that we think have very bright futures.

Here’s a scenario we’ve all been in far too many times to count: it’s late, you’ve been asked by a superior to come up with some ideas to help kick start product sales. How do you pull it off?

We’ve all suffered from creativity barriers. Today, I’d like offer up three of the largest creativity barriers and how to smash them courtesy of Luke Williams’ post from Fast Co Design.

Now you can finally learn how to land a job at Google. One of the company's top recruiters, Micheal Junge, is publishing a book, Purple Squirrel — a term used by employers to describe hard-to-find talent — in a few weeks. He spoke with Connie Loizos at PeHub about what recruiters are looking for in job candidates. A few interesting takeaways:

It is a fact of life that education contributes to financial literacy. But such literacy can take different forms. Research by Sumit Agarwal, senior financial economist in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and a visiting professor at the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB), shows that while Indians know more about saving, Americans know more about investing. Overall, Agarwal finds that Internet-savvy Indians are 20% more financially literate than Americans. This puts them at the same level as Europeans.

The research paper -- Financial Counseling, Financial Literacy, and Household Decision Making -- was presented during an economics conference at Wharton last year. The survey of 2,500 individuals or families was conducted by financial website InvestmentYogi.com. Financial literacy was assessed by asking respondents to answer simple questions related to interest rates, savings and the growth of money.

Flying windmill: Multiple exposures show the flight pattern of the Makani Airborne Wind Turbine, built by Makani Power. The electricity-generating glider is attached to the ground by a carbon-fiber tether. The craft flies “crosswind,” or perpendicular to the direction of the wind, as a kite does. In early tests, prototypes have generated five kilowatts of electric power. Larger versions with 88-foot wingspans able to generate 600 kilowatts of power are planned.

It’s the big mistake that we have the power to fix.  But it’s also the kind of thing that we could spend a lifetime getting wrong—without intervention.  When should you do it yourself (DIY) and when should you pay the experts (PTE) to do it for you?

Small business owners are the kings and queens of creating something out of nothing, of learning every skill that they have to learn in order to move their businesses forward.  Cash-strapped individuals with great ideas have been known to be highly innovative—but that doesn’t have tp mean doing it all by yourself.

For most new high-tech products, the first customers are always “early adopters.” The conventional wisdom is that early adopters are the ideal target for new products, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, and secondly, their feedback may lead you directly away from your real target market of mainstream customers.

The term “early adopters” relates to the people who are eager to try almost any new technology products, and originates from Everett M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations book. Early adopters are usually no more than 10%-15% of the ultimate market potential, and marketing to them may be necessary, but not sufficient in marketing to the mainstream. Witness the market struggle for 3DTV acceptance over the past couple of years.

Are so-called ‘clone startups’ (those hoping to be acquired by the mothership after creating a successful ‘local language lookalike’) too easily dismissed as ‘non-innovators’?

If they are essential to kick-starting their local innovation ecosystem, doesn’t this make them ‘innovation facilitators’ which are just as important as ‘genuinely innovative startups’?

We ‘innovation investment journalists’ often succumb to a powerful tendency to get swept away with our own innovation-fixated rhetoric, which results in a sentiment like this:

“There just doesn’t seem to be anything important enough to write about on the startup scene in that country because they’re mostly just clones making copycat versions of existing blockbusters: calling it ‘vibrant’ or even ‘innovative’ would be an insult to my readers’ intelligence”.