Last Thursday, CNET interviewed Connor Zamary, the creator of 99-cent iPhone app, Toaster Pop.  It's a game that allows users to put a variety of spreads on pieces of toast.

Zamary pitched his idea to investors with a self-made PowerPoint, hired an iOS developer, and filed for an LLC.

Oh, and he's seven years old -- which means he's in second grade.

“My dad was telling me about an old-fashion toaster since I never saw one before," says Zamary. "Then it just came to me to create an app, where toast would pop out of the toaster, land on a plate and you would have to butter it with butter,”

The world is changing very rapidly, while faced with many global challenges that require new approaches and solutions.

Increasing investment in science and innovation is a necessary element in the creation of these new solutions.

The possibility of highly innovative and cutting-edge research and support for all forms of innovation will grow rapidly in coming years.

These capabilities are the foundation for building competitive European universities, research organisations and business communities that can compete on the global stage.

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Peering through a microscope in Madison, Wisconsin, I watched my heart cells beat in a petri dish. Looking like glowing red shrimp without tails, they pulsated and moved very slowly toward one another. Left for several hours, I was told, these cardiomyocytes would coalesce into blobs trying to form a heart. Flanking me were scientists who had conducted experiments that they hoped would reveal whether my heart cells are healthy, whether they're unusually sensitive to drugs, and whether they get overly stressed when I'm bounding up a flight of stairs.

It was snowing outside the office-park windows of Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), where I was observing an intimate demonstration of how stem-cell technologies may one day combine with personal genomics and personal medicine. I was the first journalist to undergo experiments designed to see if the four-year-old process that creates induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can yield insight into the functioning and fate of a healthy individual's heart cells. Similar tests could be run on lab-grown brain and liver cells, or eventually on any of the more than 200 cell types found in humans. "This is the next step in personalized medicine: being able to test drugs and other factors on different cell types," said Chris Parker, CDI's chief commercial officer, looking over my shoulder.

In 1966, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist named Joshua Lederberg suggested, in an essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that because human evolution could now be directed by scientific means, we ought to seriously consider what kinds of changes we might like to see. A year later, in a provocative—and bizarre—essay for the July 1967 issue of Technology Review, a pair of MIT civil-engineering professors named Robert Hansen and Myle Holley considered one such change: making people smaller.

I usually write about the university innovation ecosystem from the perspective of the here-and-how. A recent experience, however, got me thinking about what lies ahead. Specifically, the health of the pipeline of future engineering students in U.S. universities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of technology-oriented jobs continues to increase, yet the number of trained and qualified engineers continues to decline. How can universities, parents and corporate employers convince teens, particularly girls and under-represented minorities, that technology-oriented careers are creative, good for humankind, and entrepreneurial?

One interesting solution may be to apply the rapid prototyping power of 3D printing to the engineering classroom. Teens need a reason to gravitate towards engineering. Rather than starting prospective engineering students off with abstract theory and math-based problem solving, why not expose them to the joys of product design by enabling them to experience, first-hand, an entire product design cycle in less than a week?

Over the years of being in the innovation space, I’ve discovered a set of laws by trial and error.  Needless to say, I have the scars from the school of hard knocks to validate that these are the set of laws that are critical for innovation success. If you violate any one of them, the consequences can be disastrous.  These laws apply to all sizes of organizations ranging from well-established multi-nationals, to early stage start-ups to governments.

So how do I use these rules?  No single organization has it all figured out.  By taking an honest audit of your innovation programs against the laws, you can identify the areas that work and those that don’t.

These days, stock prices today may be drastically different from those tomorrow. But what doesn't change is change itself. So says the Harvard Business Review. Change, the post says, is here to stay, and companies should be conditioned to keep innovating with such frequent change. So, when it comes to innovation, the post offers three things to keep in mind. Here's one:

Rebalance your innovation portfolio. Take a look at where you are spending your money. Ask how much of it is being spent on finding ways to compete more effectively in current markets. The answer probably exceeds 90%. Evaluate the historical returns you've earned on these investments. If they are low and shrinking, make sure you find ways to increase investment in efforts where you search for and create tomorrow's markets.

Every company talks about creativity. The idea is often an elusive aspect of business – “creative solutions to your business needs” or “driven by creativity” – but words mean nothing without proof to back them up. Very few companies actually know how to develop, retain, and unleash creativity to drive their business. Creative can no longer be an aspect of a company – it needs to be the company.

A few weeks ago, Fast Company posted the first article in a series they are compiling on effective corporate culture. The article details the success of MailChimp, an email marketing and newsletter company that focuses on a “non-corporate” culture that grants employees permission to unleash their inner creative and enjoy work. The company started off as a side project that was meant as an internal tool for another set of corporate clients; the company now has more than 825,000 subscribers worldwide, including organizations like TED, Gawker and The Economist, and is sending 1.75 billion emails per month (and not doing so bad in the talent retention department either according to company profits and employee satisfaction).

It's ballot designation time, when candidates get to polish their creative writing skills by putting together a three-word description of their current career that will show up on the November ballot to inform voters and help them get elected. And not necessarily in that order.

It's a game not everyone can play. Leland Yee, for example, is "State Senator," just as Jeff Adachi is "Public Defender" and John Avalos is "District 11 Supervisor." David Chiu can get a bit more creative, listing himself grandly as "President, Board of Supervisors," rather than the more prosaic "District 3 Supervisor," but elected officials generally are stuck with the job they have, even if they weren't actually elected to it. See Ed Lee: "Appointed Mayor."

We are coming to the end of the Financing Options series. This is the final post in the series. Today we are going to talk about working capital financing.

For those of you not steeped in finance and accounting matters, I suggest you go back and read the Balance Sheet post before reading on. Working Capital Financing relies on a company's balance sheet to support the loan so understanding how a balance sheet works is important to understanding working capital financing.

The basic principles of entrepreneurship have held up over the past decades. You come up with a great idea that hasn’t been done before, or you take something that has been done and make it better. You then take a risk and put yourself out there in hopes that people will buy your products and services or that a venture capital firm will fund you.

With the bad economy looming and emerging technologies changing the way we brand and market our businesses, there is a new face of modern entrepreneurship. Now people from across the world are starting businesses, regardless of age, and we aren’t forced to tap into third parties in order to reach potential customers.

BOSTON — In the world of environmental regulation, where the hope is to write rules that both industry and science can live with, few areas are as contentious as fishing. Especially on the East Coast, fishermen attack scientists as mired in bottomless ignorance about how fish are actually caught. Scientists sometimes describe fishermen as racing to catch the last fish, regardless of the harm to vanishing species. Multimedia

But new efforts to protect marine creatures have gained surprising support from researchers, regulators, engineers and fishermen.

On Friday someone linked me to a Facebook developers page about Social Design (I think it was Christian Hernandez, Head of International Business Development at Facebook).  Facebook’s purpose in putting the page together is pretty obvious – they want people to write better social apps on Facebook so they are giving out some helpful pointers.

Their advice to devs building social apps is:

• Use the existing community on Facebook rather than try and build your own community from scratch (surprise, surprise…)
• Encourage new conversations by building “tools and experiences that give people the power to connect and share, allowing them to effectively listen and learn from each other”
• Help individuals within the community build their own identity

Over the past year, the Russian government has been quietly constructing the Innograd project on roughly four square kilometers of land on the outskirts of Moscow which will soon house 30,000 scientists and engineers.

Innograd, a high-technology research hub in Skolkovo, is perhaps the largest state-directed effort to establish an innovation ecosystem for pioneering the next-generation technologies in the fields of telecommunications, life sciences and nuclear energy.

More investments are headed toward Grand Forks’ downtown, the area around the Grand Cities Mall and the area north of the Alerus Center, if the City Council gives its blessings to a group of investors.

The council’s Finance Committee recommended Monday that the full council agree to a “renaissance fund organization” being proposed by the Center for Innovation Foundation, affiliated with UND’s tech incubator.

The foundation is raising funds for a tech park near the Alerus Center.

Bruce Gjovig, the foundation’s CEO and the incubator’s director, said a private developer has plans for a new office building and a data center. That’s in addition to the North Dakota University System data center planned for the same area, he said.

I’m a professional blogger, like you. How do describe what you do?

I hate this question. Not your question, mind you, but the “What do you do?” one.

If I was a plumber, everyone would immediately understand what that means, even if they didn’t quite understand all of the various types of plumbing. Instead, no one has an frame of reference to understand what I do.

Starting a new business involves a seemingly endless line of important decisions, from company name, to logo, to even the product or service you’ll be offering. Among these decisions, one of the most important (and often overlooked) is business structure.

The business structure is the legal form of your company. The three most common structures in the U.S. are the C Corporation, S Corporation, and LLC. As an entrepreneur, you need to carefully consider which is right for you. Do you need to avoid personal liability if your company is sued? Will you have a partner and/or investors? Do you want the business to pay its own taxes or carry the profit/loss over to your personal returns? And lastly, are you planning on VC funding?

As a new model for raising capital, money raised through crowdfunding is making an impact across all of Europe. In German-speaking countries alone, more than a quarter-million Euros have been raised through crowdsourcing platforms to finance numerous start-ups, projects and good cause initiatives. This has attracted the attention of the European policy makers. At a conference in Poland this coming November, a European declaration on crowdfunding will be released. Naturally, the question of regulation has been raised;  given that both the model and rules of participation have yet to be defined and adopted in a consistent way, there remains much ambiguity.

Crowdfunding is used as a model for funding start-ups on platforms such as growvc.com, c-crowd.ch or seedmatch.com. For these type of platforms, it's much more likely that rules regarding investor protection, transparency issues and financial reporting could apply. Within the creative industry, where often funds are being raised for initiatives or to develop merchandise rather than to form legal entities, crowdfunding is much less likely to be regulated and the applicability of different rules across the European Union varies greatly from country to country. For instance, a lot of project initiators are not aware that the rewards given to the funders (for instance, when pre-selling CDs to crowdfund the production of a music album) are subject to sales tax and therefore should be incorporated in the financial planning of the crowdfunding project.

“The average time that a Venture Capitalist spends analysing a business plan is 22 seconds” – Speaker at the 26th Venture Capital Institute, Atlanta, 2000.

Since this realisation more than 10 years ago I’ve often wondered whether it was entirely fair towards entrepreneurs who spend significant time and resources to develop a comprehensive business plan. But top tier venture capitalists (VC’s) deal with hundreds of business plans a year, and a decision on whether to take the proposal to the next level or to reject it is often made in less than 30 seconds. This is how:

Consider the ‘Flight-Path’ of the Business Plan

With fear running amok on Wall Street and the future economic picture so uncertain, it can be hard to raise venture capital these days. Over the last 12 months, though, we’ve managed to secure $23 million from both institutions and friends and family.

Part of the trick, we found, was having a well-researched and clearly articulated business proposition that clearly demonstrated a very substantial upside for investors.  We cast our net wide, using our own personal networks as well as those of professional fundraisers.  And while we were prepared to be flexible on terms, we refused to entertain low-ball offers.