LET the rest of the country worry about a double-dip recession. Tech land, stretching from San Jose to San Francisco, is in a time warp, and times here are still flush.

Even now, technology types in their 20s and 30s are dropping a million-plus each on modest ranch houses in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley and Victorian duplexes in San Francisco, and home prices in some parts have jumped nearly 50 percent in the last six months.

Jobs — good, six-figure jobs, with perks like free haircuts and lessons on how to create the next start-up company — are here for the taking, at least for software engineers.

Hot chili peppers are known to make people “tear up,” but a new study led by University of Cincinnati allergy researcher Jonathan Bernstein, MD, found that a nasal spray containing an ingredient derived from hot chili peppers (Capsicum annum) may help people “clear up” certain types of sinus inflammation.

The study, which appears in the August 2011 edition of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, compares the use of the Capsicum annum nasal spray to a placebo nasal spray in 44 subjects with a significant component of nonallergic rhinitis (i.e., nasal congestion, sinus pain, sinus pressure) for a period of two weeks.

An engineering researcher and a global health expert from Michigan State University are working on bringing a low-cost, hand-held device to nations with limited resources to help physicians detect and diagnose cancer.

Syed Hashsham, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MSU, is developing the Gene-Z device, which is operated using an iPod Touch or Android-based tablet and performs genetic analysis on microRNAs and other genetic markers. MicroRNAs are single-stranded molecules that regulate genes; changes in certain microRNAs have been linked to cancer and other health-related issues.

What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common?

Well, lots of things. The three are some of history’s greatest innovators and they’re super-rich, super-successful entrepreneurs. But perhaps most intriguing is the absence of a university degree on their impressive resumes.

All three enrolled in college (Jobs at Reed, Zuckerberg and Gates at Harvard) but ultimately chose business over books. Add Michael Dell, Paul Allen and the Twitter cofounders to the list, and it almost looks like entrepreneurial success is the norm for college dropouts.

Too many entrepreneurs confuse motion with momentum and results. We all know someone who repeatedly tells us how “busy” they are, when it’s hard to see what they get done. Momentum is moving things forward (mass x velocity). Founders or employees in constant motion, but with no momentum, will kill any startup.

It is true that motion in any direction is often better than no motion at all. But motion without momentum is even less productive than no motion at all. For a more thorough discussion of this phenomenon, see the book entitled “Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less”, by Brent Petersen and Gaylan Neilson.

If it’s Friday, that means it’s time to vote for the innovator of the week. This week we had to dig way back to find a fair fight. And we had to stretch the rules a little, since one of our innovators hasn’t done any hands-on innovating for some time. But when it comes to innovation — to say nothing of non-scientific polls — rules are made to be broken.

This week’s competition is between two titans of innovation and design: Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and incandescent light bulb inventor (among other things) Thomas Alva Edison. While Edison didn’t move the needle this week, Jobs’s stepping down from the CEO spot at Apple brought back many a reference to the long-dead inventor. So, here goes.

Steve Job’s tenure at Apple has been little short of amazing.  We are all familiar with the run of fantastic products they have released from the iPod through to the iPad (and the as usual the world is desperate for the new iPhone to arrive as soon as possible), but the progression of the business is perhaps the most amazing thing of all.  A lot has been said about Job’s recent resignation as CEO of Apple and until I saw the chart below on Business Insider I wasn’t going to add to it, but 115x value progression in 17 years to briefly become the worlds largest company by market capitalisation is an achievement of breath taking proportions, and I want to call that out.

So far I’ve tried to lay the foundations for what I call the new entrepreneurial process—an approach to entrepreneurship with roots in design thinking, strategy in dynamic environments, and experimental processes that has been evangelized in a number of movements like Customer Development and Lean Startup. I thought I would try something different this time: give a concrete case study of the process in action. Then we can drill down and more concretely identify traps that catch entrepreneurs and how they escape them. Let me know how you like this approach.

The Crime Reports Case Study

It was the process. Doing everything right was killing his business. It all started several years earlier when Greg’s apartment building had been robbed. Frustrated and feeling a need to do something about it, he joined a neighborhood watch group and offered to map crimes that were happening in the area. As Greg continued, he came to believe that mapping the locations of crimes would align and empower the efforts of citizens and police to reduce crimes in each neighborhood.

Here’s what I’d do in the beginning: Incorporation

(1) Entity Choice: Corporation or Corporation

(2) State of Incorporation: Delaware

(3) Authorized Shares in Charter: 10,000,000 Shares

(4) Type of Shares: Common Stock

(5) Par Value of Common: $0.0001

As we await President Obama’s post-Labor Day jobs speech, one can only hope his plan puts adequate and effective emphasis on growing the innovation economy. We have all heard small businesses create a disproportionate share of new jobs. Yet, not enough has been done on a federal level to catalyze growth in this sector. As venture capitalists know well, there is no lack of entrepreneurial spirit or exciting young businesses looking for money. The problem is a lack of equity capital to fund growth, enable R&D, create new products and of course, hire new employees.

This lack of capital can be traced to a shift away from venture capital as an asset class by the traditional L.P. investor base. As a result, many venture firms now struggle to raise new funds thus leaving our innovation economy short of cash. In response, maybe the U.S. should adopt a model which has successfully spurred venture investment in the United Kingdom and elsewhere—venture capital trusts (VCTs).

Does HP’s (HPQ) recent move to spin off its PC business underscore the end of the PC era? Not if you ask Microsoft (MSFT), or at least its vice president of corporate communications Frank Shaw. To Redmond, the PC is the hub of technical existence, with e-readers, tablets, set top boxes, and smartphones anything but PC-killers. Instead, Shaw argues on his corporate blog, PCs do a lot more and will remain vital and necessary in the future.

In one sense, he’s right. The PC isn’t going away completely, because there are important things it can do more easily than the other devices. But a PC-centric world? Oh, no, sorry, those days are done. Furthermore, if you look at Microsoft’s strategy, management already knows it. The company just doesn’t want to let on, because it would spook investors — and tank stock prices.

China, India and other developing countries need to create incentives for innovation if they want to achieve robust economic growth during the next decade, a Harvard University economist said.

“Continued rapid growth in the developing world will require pro-active policies that foster structural transformation and spawn new industries,” Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at Harvard, said in a paper released today at a conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Industrialized economies, including the U.S., used innovation incentives “on the way to becoming rich,” Rodrik said. “Such policies have never been easy to administer.”

HOLD onto your hats and your wallets. Since the end of the cold war, the global system has been held together to a large degree by four critical ruling bargains. Today all four are coming unstuck at once and will need to be rebuilt. Whether and how that rebuilding happens — beginning in the U.S. — will determine a lot about what’s in your wallet and whether your hat flies off.

Now let me say that in English: the European Union is cracking up. The Arab world is cracking up. China’s growth model is under pressure and America’s credit-driven capitalist model has suffered a warning heart attack and needs a total rethink. Recasting any one of these alone would be huge. Doing all four at once — when the world has never been more interconnected — is mind-boggling. We are again “present at the creation” — but of what?

Even as Ohio bled jobs over the last decade, employment in its bioscience industry grew 20 percent.

Now, with a new analysis showing the state ranked an impressive fourth (seriously?) in the nation in job creation over the last year, hiring for biotechnology and medical jobs seems likely to pick up even more.

Marc Wolbert, a recruiter in the Cleveland area with Kelly Scientific Resources, said he’s noticed an uptick in hiring recently. (Kelly markets itself as the world’s largest scientific staffing firm and helps scientific professionals from entry level to senior directors with career development.)

If you haven't read my colleague Scott Fulton's post on "The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works" go read it right now! It's a very insightful piece written by an expert who literally watched Apple grow up, and there are plenty of lessons for all entrepreneurs in the Steve Jobs formula he spells out. However, to be "fair and balanced" here at ReadWriteWeb I think it's also important to point out some things that as an entrepreneur you'd be well served to disregard. What follows are four factors of the Apple formula to ignore. I'd love to hear what you agree and disagree with in the comments below as well as other factors that should have been included.

A new report released today by Ernst & Young, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and Endeavor, entitled 2011 High-impact entrepreneurship global report, provides insights into the characteristics of high-growth, high-impact entrepreneurs. The report is based on a survey of more than 800,000 people in 60 countries worldwide of whom over 70,000 were entrepreneurs.

The survey found that these high-impact entrepreneurs (estimated growth of >20% per annum) 1 usually start their companies when they are between 26 and 45 years old. They are more likely than entrepreneurs from lower-growth companies and the general population to have college or graduate degrees and they are likely to work in partnerships. Also, high-impact entrepreneurs are most likely to conduct a significant portion of their business internationally.

If you want people to invest in your idea, then my best advice is first write a business plan, and keep it simple. Don't confuse your business plan with a doctoral thesis or the back of a napkin. Keep the wording and formatting straightforward, and keep the plan short. For minimum content, see my article “Investors Expect Ten Essentials in a Business Plan.”

The overriding principle is that your business plan must be easy to read. This means writing at the level of an average newspaper story (about eighth-grade level). Understand that people will skim your plan, and even try to read it while talking on the phone or going through their e-mail.

SINCE Steven P. Jobs resigned as chief executive of Apple last Wednesday, much has been said about him as a peerless corporate leader who has created immense wealth for shareholders, and guided the design of hit products that are transforming entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

All true, but let’s think different, to borrow the Apple marketing slogan of years back. Let’s look at Mr. Jobs as a role model.

Above all, he is an innovator. His creative force is seen in products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and in new business models for pricing and distributing music and mobile software online. Studies of innovation come to the same conclusion: you can’t engineer innovation, but you can increase the odds of it occurring. And Mr. Jobs’s career can be viewed as a consistent pursuit of improving those odds, both for himself and the companies he has led.Mr. Jobs, of course, has enjoyed singular success. But innovation, broadly defined, is the crucial ingredient in all economic progress — higher growth for nations, more competitive products for companies, and more prosperous careers for individuals. And Mr. Jobs, experts say, personifies what works in the innovation game.

Oh Canada, why aren’t your venture capitalists throwing around the cash like VCs in the States? That’s the question marketing consultant Mark Evans, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, asks.

Earlier this month, we reported that Canada’s venture community was getting less money from investors, and therefore were sending less money out the door to entrepreneurs. A report by the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association and Thomson Reuters showed C$328 million (or $334.7 million in U.S. dollars) invested from April to June 2011, down from C$335 million in the same period a year ago.

MADISON – Toni Sikes delivered more than 100 investment pitches on behalf of early stage companies – including her own – to venture capitalists over the course of a dozen years. During that time, Sikes recalled, she met two women venture capitalists, one in New York and the other in Seattle.

“All the others were men,” said the Madison-based entrepreneur. Today, Sikes is just another one of the boys.

Well, not exactly, but Sikes is a venture capitalist in a woman-led firm – still an uncommon sight in a world dominated by the most alpha of alpha males.