The search is on for the world's best clean technology start-ups, and the goal is to bring them to Nova Scotia.

The province, through Innovacorp, launched the Nova Scotia CleanTech Open today, Sept. 21. The international competition is designed to find and fund high-potential, early-stage clean technology companies. It will also put a spotlight on Nova Scotia as an ideal location for these companies to grow.

"Clean technology is one of the world's fastest growing industries. Knowledge-based companies like those in the clean technology sectors create good jobs and are vital to Nova Scotia's future prosperity," said Percy Paris, Minister of Economic and Rural Development and Tourism. "This competition supports the innovation and competitiveness priorities of jobsHere, our plan to grow the economy."

Are biotech and pharma companies doing well, or falling apart at the seams? People will have differences of opinion on this, but one thing is clear: it’s all relative.

At a speech to a trade group in Philadelphia last month, James Greenwood, president of the biotechnology trade group BIO, asked the government to stop picking on the pharma industry. “The drug industry has laid off more workers than the auto industry, but they get bailed out while we’ve continued to get picked on,” he declared. Unfortunately, Greenwood’s comparison of the auto and BioPharma industries was well meaning but seriously misguided. I looked up the profitability of the Big Three auto companies and compared it to three of the largest, US-based pharma companies over a five-year period.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Students, faculty and staff at four Northeast Ohio colleges and universities will have an opportunity to launch new companies as part of an innovative on-campus program to help entrepreneurs.

Case Western Reserve University, Baldwin-Wallace College, Kent State University and Lorain County Community College will offer advice and support, including guidance from volunteer "venture coaches," to turn ideas into reality. On some campuses, alumni are also eligible to participate.

One of my favorite parables is about a man who arrives in a village with what he claims is a magic stone. Put the stone into a pot of water over a fire, he says, add a just few ingredients—some vegetables, some old ham bones, a few spices—and soon you will have a delicious, life-giving soup with magical healing properties.

In this folk tale, the man is a trickster: The point of the story is that his magic stone is just a plain old rock. To modern eyes, however, this man is an entrepreneur. His “magic stone” is perhaps the germ of an idea, a product concept, or a marketing innovation. The entrepreneur takes the stone and adds ingredients (commodities or software), attracts people, gets them to work together, and perhaps tosses in a pinch of branding. The result is value where before there were only unexploited resources.

Ahhh, the EIR. It’s one of those amazingly vague and flexible positions that only exist in the tech industry. Part liaison, part networking hub, part founder, part investor (typically). As Mayor Bloomberg continues his quest to cuddle up to Silicon Alley, the New York City Economic Development Corporation has announced its first ever entrepreneur in residence, or in the EDC’s case “entrepreneur at large” Steven Rosenbaum, the founder and CEO of Magnify.net and creator of the recent 9/11 memorial app.

Mr. Rosenbaum is a born communicator. “I was a magician in high school, and I always loved the back and forth with the audience. The feedback. When I started working in the media, I found the whole ‘one way’ thing kind of hollow. I wanted applause if we did well and I wanted rotten fruit if the audience didn’t like a documentary or program we produced.”

With the continued weak economy and little hope of recovery anytime soon, we can expect to see even more “accidental entrepreneurs” emerge. These are unemployed people whose best hope of generating income is to become self-employed or to start a business.

Ami Kassar is a typical accidental entrepreneur. Kassar had spent a decade in senior management with a large, national credit card company based in Philadelphia. When the recession hit in 2008, he suddenly found himself unemployed. His employer did not survive the recession-induced shakeout in the financial industry.

We’d need another book, of course, to do this justice. And where would one start?

Fonts are like cars on the street--we notice only the most beautiful or ugly, the funniest or the flashiest. The vast majority roll on regardless. There may be many reasons why we dislike or distrust certain fonts, and overuse and misuse are only starting points. Fonts may trigger memory as pungently as perfume: Gill Sans can summon up exam papers. Trajan may remind us of lousy choices at the cinema (you’ll see it on the posters of more bad films than any other font) and grueling evenings with Russell Crowe. There was a time when it looked as though he would only appear in films--A Beautiful Mind; Master and Commander; Mystery, Alaska--if the marketing team promised to use Trajan in its pseudo-Roman glory on all its promotional material (There is a funny and rather alarming YouTube clip about this.)

The Prime Minister David Cameron launched the National Virtual Incubator (NVI), a part of networking giant Cisco’s £500 Million investment, which aims to be a “a public technology network which promises to stimulate entrepreneurship by connecting physical sites through IT infrastructure”.

Using the academic JANET network, the NVI would interconnect universities, science parks as well as research centres of excellence and there would be over 100 nodes by 2016, the US networking company believes.

I firmly believe that getting support, advice and encouragement from other entrepreneurs—live, not just online in social networking venues—is crucial to a small business owner’s success (and sanity). So when I read a recent Wall Street Journal article about the concept of industry hubs, I was intrigued.

Industry hubs are cities or regions where specific types of businesses are clustered. The concept isn’t new—Silicon Valley is probably the best-known industry hub and the Motor City (Detroit) was one of the first. But, the Journal reports that despite the lingering recession, new industry hubs are springing up ranging from sporting-goods makers in Ogden, Utah, to nanotechnology firms in Albany, New York.

The study takes a closer look into innovations in high- and low-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Europe, and proves that low-tech and innovation is not as far apart, as you might think.

Low-tech companies invest on average 10 percent of their total income in innovation. In comparison the average high-tech company puts 16 percent aside for their innovations. Expenditures for innovation include all efforts from idea generation to development, launch and successful continuous improvement of the innovation.  Hence, innovation expenditures cover far more than just R&D spending.

The IMP³rove results from more than 700 companies show how ambitious low-tech companies are for innovation and how innovation expenditures contribute to their business performance.

Next year's Rio+20 meeting must put science-based innovation at the heart of the development agenda. But the real battle will be political.

In an ominous sign of things to come, last week's G20 meeting of the world's leading economies in Cannes, France was dominated by discussion of the financial turmoil in Europe — overshadowing a debate, for which many had hoped, on the future of global development.

The main speaker on the latter topic was Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who used the occasion to remind participants that, whatever the difficulties of the world's industrialised nations, the biggest problem facing the planet as a whole remains the gap between the rich and the poor.

Mumbai: India’s rating on the Global Innovation Index (GII) slipped to 62 in 2011—a sign that recent reforms in economic policy, education and intellectual property protection aren’t helping boost innovation, say experts.

India stood at 56 on the index in 2010 and at 45 in the year before.

Key reasons for the fall, the experts point out, include a lack of transparency in policy implementation, political instability and, importantly, the absence of a connecting link in the innovation ecosystem.

THE spirit of enterprise is infectious on the 14th floor of One Marina Park Drive. People from more than 100 start-up companies squeeze inside, working cheek by jowl to turn their ideas into successful businesses. There is no time to admire the magnificent views of Boston harbour.

They are an eclectic bunch: Locately scours credit card data to provide retailers with information about what else their customers are buying. Two cubicles away is Casa Couture, which makes expandable shoes which it says are ideal for pregnant women and fast-growing children. Nearby is Invup, which runs an online service helping big companies manage their do-gooding. Then there is Abroad101, which assists Americans wanting to study overseas; Her Campus, a newspaper and marketing firm targeting female students; ArtVenue, which matches artists with empty display space; OsmoPure, which makes water filters for poor countries, and so on.

In a 2007 Vanity Fair article Christopher Hitchens asked: Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?

Well a recent study finds that men might have a tiny edge over women in producing humor but the gap is too small to account for the stereotype.

Scientists had 16 male and 16 female subjects write funny captions for 20 New Yorker magazine cartoons in 45 minutes. Then the captions were rated by a different group of 34 male and 47 female subjects.

One thing savvy leaders learn pretty early in their careers is that leadership is not about self-aggrandizement. It is more about enabling those around them and putting them into positions from which they can succeed.

Key to that mindset is the ability to make others around them better. Two basketball legends mastered this better than most: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. As a point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, Johnson was the master of dishing the ball to an open man to make a basket. Larry Bird as a forward for the rival Boston Celtics was similarly team oriented.

You don’t have to look to the NBA for similar stories. The team leader in the seafood department of my local Whole Foods embodies this ethos. The other day I asked him about a power failure that had swept through out neighborhood and he replied, “The team really did a great job. They got all of the fish off the counter and into the cooler. We didn’t lose anything.” He said nothing about himself; only the team’s timely response. Knowing this manager as I do, it is clear that he has made his fish-mates better.

Rome, as the old saying goes, wasn't built in a day. Likewise, open innovation is not something you can achieve overnight. It is not a single event, but a process and a culture that must grow over time.

Rome did not build itself, either, and similarly, open innovation won't just happen. It takes work, commitment and patience to cultivate an effective program. It is a major initiative requiring focus, investment and time.

But the rewards are great. Open innovation takes a company beyond its own R&D capabilities. Through this strategy, a company reaches out to access innovation resources that expand internal capabilities and become an asset for the company.

Reporting from my first stop this year in Germany, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology has launched GEW / Germany (Gründerwoche Deutschland) with a balloon contest. The sky full of balloons all over Germany speaks for the many members of the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

GEW / Germany 2011 casted its shadow even before November arrived. Over 200 business start-up consulting and development stakeholders met for an exchange of views at the first nationwide Networking Congress in Berlin, hosted by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. At the event, participants attended various expert forums to discuss issues such as the role of social media in supporting start-ups or how a sense of entrepreneurship can be nurtured in school children. Ernst Burgbacher, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and Commissioner for SMEs and Tourism, stated at the opening of the Networking Congress that Global Entrepreneurship Week in Germany is a key measure of the Federal Economics Ministry’s start-up initiative.

How should the U.S. educate future entrepreneurs and create exceptional educational programs? Answering this question will give us far more than improved educational tools.  It could help make us again the preeminent world economy—and as a byproduct, solve our unemployment problems.

Roger Schank, a retired university professor and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, wrote an allegory for what he called a “story-centered curriculum,” featuring a delightful, if somewhat irreverent, tale of a town plagued by a dragon. In it, the prestigious local university quickly puts together a graduate curriculum on dragon slaying, producing 20 graduates in the first class. Various distractions derail many of the graduates, but one team eventually encounters the dragon.

The news, I’m afraid, is dire. The Internet is about to be destroyed by big media. It is about be killed by two Congressional bills – The ProtectIP and The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – that all-powerful big media lobbyists are now pushing through Congress. These bills will censor the Internet, turn it into China, censor it, destroy its innovation and value.

“Big media is going nuclear against the DMCA,” thus writes the author and serial entrepreneur Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, arguing that ProtectIP and COPA will “spell the end of the Internet as we know it.” Techcrunch’s Devin Coldeway, describing SOPA as “possibly unconstitutional” and as a “kill switch”, says it is a “desperate power grab by a diminishing elite”. CNET columnist Molly Wood chimes in that SOPA is “brazen” and “nightmarish” and warns that it will result in a “copyright police state”.  The Obama administration is “busy in bed with Hollywood,” she warns, “cheerfully ceding your rights to the MPAA and RIAA.”

Time and time again we've seen the same story play out: An established industry player ignores digital and ends up in a fight for survival against a brash startup, empowered by a little user focus and unencumbered by the burdens of maintaining the status quo.

But this week Barnes & Noble did something to turn the tables. With the launch of the Nook Tablet and the announcement that it expects to generate $1.8 billion from the Nook line this year, Barnes & Noble did something that anyone who cares about technology and business should find inspiring: It became a technology company.