Many have written the Motor City off for dead. But three key figures from, of all things, the world of basketball give me hope that the city will reemerge as a powerhouse for innovation and new high-growth startups.

The airport is usually all I ever see of Detroit. I never spend any time there — I just connect. And, though the sleek and modern terminal is brimming with life, all one needs to do is look down at the ground on takeoff before one wonders if there really is life in this city. All you see is miles and miles of empty parking lots.The expansive freeways seem underutilized — a somewhat ironic twist for the city that invented automobile production. The airport is full of nothing but connectors like me — none of the locals are traveling.

What would you do with internet connectivity 100 times faster than you have right now in your home? How would access to an ultra high-speed broadband network fundamentally change the communities of which you are a member?

These questions were at the heart of live video-feed remarks by Matt Dunne, Manager of US Community Affairs for Google at the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce 2011 Innovation Conference as he discussed the Google Fiber build out in Kansas City Kansas and Missouri.

Whether you’re a leader in the public, private or nonprofit sector, you are undoubtedly facing the same challenge. It may be described as ‘the need to innovate’, ‘continuous improvement,’ ‘process reengineering’ or some other buzzword. Whatever the label, the definition is the same: Do more with less and do it better.

Last month, Forbes magazine published the results of a study examining the world’s most innovative companies. It should come as no surprise that companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google were among the top 10.

And the driver behind those innovative companies and results? Leadership.

It’s tough to get federal funds for anything these days, unless you’re the military.

The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy have teamed up with the Navy to spend up to $510 million over the next three years to advance drop-in biofuels for aviation and marine applications to power the military.

The agreement is no surprise. Just last week, the U.S. Army announced the creation of an Energy Initiatives Office to help the agency centrally plan and deploy renewable energy projects. The Army is looking to get 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025.

Some are expecting the cleantech graveyard of startups to start filling up, particularly in the second quarter of 2012. But how companies wind down, sell off their assets, or morph into new much slimmer versions of their former selves, is a personal choice for the companies and investors. Here’s 10 ways you can do it:

1. Make a firesale look like a lucrative acquisition: If you’re selling off your company for pennies to a competitor or larger firm, there’s no reason you have to let the world know. Make the terms of the deal undisclosed, so no one never knows you didn’t have the exit of your dreams. This doesn’t work so well if the acquirer is a public company, as the terms could come out in SEC filings.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had a surprise when he walked into Larry Page’s office in 2002. Page is the co-creator of Google and the man who gave his name to the idea at the company’s foundation: its PageRank search algorithm. But Page had something rather different to show Schmidt: a machine he’d built himself which cut off the bindings of books and then scanned their pages into a digital format. Page had been trying to figure out whether it might be possible for Google to scan the world’s books into searchable form. Rather than instructing an intern to rig something up, or commissioning analysis from a consulting firm, he teamed up with Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, to see how fast two people could produce an image of a 300-page book. Armed with a plywood frame, a pair of clamps, a metronome, and a digital camera, two of Google’s most senior staff tried out the project themselves. (The book went from paper to pixels in forty minutes.)

In North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park (RTP), drug developer Ascletis, a joint venture of Chinese and U.S. entrepreneurs, is preparing to establish a U.S. headquarters for R&D. It expects to bring some 20 of its scientists to the campus of The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences. Hamner and Ascletis signed a memorandum of understanding in July, two months after the company said it raised $100 million in Series A private equity financing.

Across the U.S., in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, CA, Epitomics signed a lease to expand its facilities by 10,000 square feet. Within its new space, Epitomics plans to build a GMP manufacturing lab for diagnostic products. This is part of a larger expansion by the company into that specialty both in the U.S. and China, Guo-Liang Yu, Ph.D., Epitomics’ president, CEO, and chairman of the board, told GEN.

Venture capital investment in Canada dipped 2 per cent in the second quarter of 2011 on sluggish fund-raising activity, data showed Tuesday.

According to the report released by Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA), VC invested across Canada totaled $328-million between April and June compared to $335-million invested the year before.

“After a period of steady, if moderate, expansion in VC invested, it is very concerning to see weaker dollar flows at this point”, said Gregory Smith, President of the CVCA and Managing Partner, Brookfield Financial. “Clearly there is demand coming from young, entrepreneurial businesses – a fact that is borne out by year-over-year growth in company financings – but this demand is not being met by an adequate supply of value-added risk capital.” added Mr. Smith.

Just because entrepreneurs have an idea or a business plan or even a product doesn’t necessarily mean they are worthy of receiving startup funding.

That need to create quality deal flow for angel investors as well as increase the success rate of entrepreneurs in fundraising has led to the creation of a new economic development effort in Minnesota. Called the Minnesota Angel Network, the group that launched Tuesday aims to screen worthy startups looking to raise between $50,000 and $4.5 million and put them through an educational program that will fill the holes in their business plans and get them ready to face the big, bad world of fundraising.

“We want to make sure wemeet the needs of the investor,” said Todd Leonard, executive director of MNAN. “Investors are saying, ‘We don’t want to look at every deal.’”

Historically manufacturing has been a bellwether of economic activity.  Unfortunately, The Economist says that manufacturing employment fell by 5,000 jobs in May after rising steadily in previous months.  Some good news is that just last month, President Obama recognized the importance of manufacturing when he was quoted as saying, “We… have always been a country that makes stuff.”  Also, Business Week recently claimed that “We… make more than twice as much stuff (in inflation-adjusted dollar terms) than we did 40 years ago.”

Despite recent setbacks and tectonic shifts in our economic landscape, manufacturing continues to be a major player in our economic fortunes.  According to Brookings Institution, a strong manufacturing sector is key to the future prosperity and long-term competitiveness of the United States. In a recently published paper “Building a Long-Term Strategy for Growth through Innovation,”  they proposed several recommendations to jump start manufacturing and put America back on the path towards healthy economic growth.

On August 16, at the White House Rural Economic Forum, President Obama will announce new jobs initiatives recommended by the White House Rural Council for growing the economy and creating jobs in rural America.  The Council’s recommendations focus on key areas of need in rural communities, including helping rural small businesses access capital, expanding rural job search and training services, and increasing rural access to health care workers and technology.

“These are tough times for a lot of Americans – including those who live in our rural communities,” said President Obama. “That’s why my administration has put a special focus on helping rural families find jobs, grow their businesses, and regain a sense of economic security.”

You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” With that being the case, a video must be worth even more. It seems like almost every marketing website we go to these days has a video on the front page, set to automatically play when a visitor hits the site. The reason for this is because videos are terrific attention grabbers and require less energy than having to read a lengthy business or service description.

YouTube has millions of registered users around the world, which makes it the leading website to market a video. But simply making a video and uploading it to YouTube is not likely to bring you the results you’re hoping for. Getting as many views as possible along with “likes” and positive comments are all good measurements of your video’s success. But what does it take to maximize these numbers?

50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of “10,000 hours.”

Anybody who has spent any time with me in person will be tired of this advice because I give it so frequently. It is a piece of actionable advice that if you put into practice starting next week will start paying dividends in the near future. There’s a direct correlation to your future success.

These days every new entrepreneur understands that an innovative product or service is necessary, but not sufficient, to start a business. You have to build a web presence with marketing content to get visibility above the 50 million other new websites created every year, and attract the customers you need. But most entrepreneurs don’t know where to start.

Of course, there is a plethora of “experts” emerging out there, who are anxious to lead you down that path, for a large price. So I’m always on the lookout for some real experts, and some pragmatic guidance on how to attack this issue. Recently I was reviewing a new book on content marketing, “Accelerate!” by an expert and friend in this space, Arnie Kuenn, which offers guidance and examples on new and modern approaches for the rest of us:

Build a blog. According to Hubspot, websites that have blogs get twice as many inbound links, 400 percent more indexed pages, and a more than 50 percent increase in traffic, compared to websites without blogs. Search engines and people love blogs these days.

There aren't many billionaires that own entire islands, while at the same time are cool enough that you'd want to hang out with them.

A dyslexic with poor academic credentials, Richard Branson started his first company at the age of 16, with a magazine called Student. He went on to start a record label, an airline, a mobile phone company, and a few hundred other companies in his vast Virgin empire. His latest pursuit is spaceflight.

With mobile devices invading the workplace and more workers telecommuting, many companies—and the design firms that serve them—are rapidly changing their thinking about conventional office space.

Cubicles are passé; flexible spaces that allow employees to log in, collaborate, and hit the road are all the rage. The goal is to support the mobile workforce, increase the opportunities to interact, and save money by using space more efficiently.

Do you find it concerning when you receive an e-mail from a client or colleague who can’t spell, construct sentences or articulate things in a professional manner? Perhaps the e-mails themselves are always late or sporadic?

The fact is that communication plays an immensely important role in the day-to-day business operations and the ability to express things clearly and without ambiguity is vital to ensure that people carry out their jobs effectively.

Google, in announcing a $12.5 billion deal for Motorola Mobility on Monday, saved its warmest words not for Motorola Mobility’s management or its products, but for one valuable asset: the company’s roughly 17,000 patents, as well as an additional 7,500 patents that are under government review.

That intellectual property portfolio is a treasure trove for Google because the battle in wireless is one that is increasingly being fought in court.

Corporate warfare over patents is not new. Companies historically preferred to reach truces, choosing to cross-license their intellectual property rather than risking bigger losses in court.

If you like a day at the beach — and who does not? — you can find lots of books that will enhance your experience by telling you about the birds, the fish, the plants and even the bugs you will encounter there.

But what about the beach itself?

What is it made of? (The answer is not always “sand.”) How did it form? How does it change? Can it be preserved? Unless you want to pack your beach bag with a geology text or a manual of coastal engineering, your options for answering these questions are not so good. Four coastal scientists, three from the United States and one from Northern Ireland, have come to the aid of the beach curious with “The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline,” a comprehensive, readable guide to the physical features of many kinds of beaches and some of the threats they face.

Today's post in the financing options series on MBA Mondays is about Bridge Loans. Bridge loans are so called because they are a "bridge" to something else. They are short term loans intended to fund a company to an anticipated event in the future.

Bridge loans exist in many sectors outside of the startup world. Big banks will often bridge companies to transactions they are putting together for them. Real estate transactions are often bridged to a closing. The concept of short term transaction driven loans is universal in business.