In 2009 the LSU College of Engineering had a panel of Deans from the Universities of Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, Princeton University, Purdue University, and MIT analyze the LSU College of Engineering. In that analysis, it was suggested that the College develop an ecosystem for innovation and technology transfer to lead to improvement and diversification of Louisiana’s Economy. Recognizing that engineering in Louisiana is critical to the current industrial base and key to enhancing and diversifying the economy, the College has designated two of its eight strategies embodied in its strategic plan to enhance and cultivate the strengths of the research of the College and provide opportunities for industrial economic development. Those strategies are as follows:

Strategy 2: “Conducting Research to Improve Quality of Life”

The concept behind Strategy 2 is that use-inspired research and the development of intellectual property not only improves the quality of life for people on a global scale, but can also make an impact on our state and university. Within the Flagship University for Louisiana, the LSU College of Engineering must become more entrepreneurial to develop solutions that lead to improved quality of life and economic development. Our geographic location provides a natural environment for research. The College intends to utilize existing expertise to address the following two strategic, broad, interdisciplinary thrust areas, which will have significant impact in the state and beyond:

Today's narrow range of so-called top-level domains (such as .com and .org) are about to be joined by an unlimited range of new ones. These could be used as corporate branding (.coke or .pepsi, for example), to organize multiple sites into categories (think .food, .bank, and anything else). But, while they could open new commercial opportunities and have some security benefits, the domains could also confuse some users, creating new opportunities for fraud artists.

For decades, the Internet has operated with just 21 top-level domains—the most common one being .com (which has about 200 million registered domain names)—plus country names like .jp for Japan and .de for Germany. But last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit body that governs the naming system, decided after years of discussion to allow the new custom top-level domains. The organization is about to launch a campaign to raise awareness about their availability, and will accept applications starting January 12, 2012.

A set of tools for building cell-phone apps that collect health-related information aims to change the way health information is stored, shared, and used.

The Open mHealth project, developed at UCLA and UCSF, provides technology for  health apps that transmit a variety of data to the project's central data warehouse. This data can include information entered by users and also such things as smart-phone GPS- and accelerometer-tracking information. One pilot project, for instance, is studying the diet, stress, movement, and exercise patterns of overweight new mothers. Users have control over what data is captured and get to choose with whom it is shared. Hospitals, health-care providers, and startup companies could design additional apps to draw on the data.

Last week's financing options post was about getting your customers to finance your business. This week's post is about getting your suppliers to finance your business.

Truth be told, this is not very common in the startups I work with. The more capital intensive your startup is, the more you can and should think about this approach.

Two reasonably common examples of vendor financing in the world of tech startups are equipment financing and development for equity.

More than ever, the capacity to innovate is a fundamental resource of organizations as well as the true wealth of a society. To contribute fully to the prosperity of an organization, region or country, the innovation process requires the implementation of knowledge dynamics between domains that are often treated in isolation.

This dynamic is based on a synergy between humans and intelligent machines. More broadly, ‘knowledge innovation’ is a combination of knowledge, imagination and experience, the ability to transcend the boundaries between domains, to make linkages and operate as interdependent parts.

Ecosystems of innovation include diverse facets. They bring out the concept of “e-co-innovation”, which – far from being a fad – brings a better understanding of the successful transition from idea to reality and ultimate value. Among some aspects of e-co-innovation: e- as economic, educative, environmental, electronic and ethics; co- as collaborative, co-design, common values, collective intelligence, knowledge and experience, convergence of intelligences – human and artificial; eco- as ecosystems – those of enterprise, regions and countries.

The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. In my new book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services’ I try to solve them with the FORTH innovation method.

Every one of us has experienced failed brainstorms. Because 300 ideas hung on a wall and nobody knew how to go on. Or one of your vice-presidents disapproved of every idea so after a short while everybody kept his mouth shut. Or because at the end of a long day at the office you could only recycle old ideas and there was nothing new under the sun. But do not get discouraged. The perfect brainstorm exists. I have experienced several in practice. And was in the position of facilitating some of them.

Do we need some kind of permission to be creative? To live and do business outside the box? I mean, it’s not that small business creativity has to be so wild and far out—it just has to be.  I meet a lot of small business owners who deal with creativity as an afterthought.  Well, just because our companies are small doesn’t mean our ideas and our solutions have to be tiny, too. Of course, creativity and innovation don’t have to be over the top, either.

Fast Company just came out with their 2011 100 Most Creative People in Business. It’s a diverse list with dynamic stories that inspire me (and hopefully you, too).  Whether you are designing a physical product, redefining a company, writing stories and jokes, or figuring out a new way to communicate your political or corporate message, it’s the creativity that makes a company, a brand, an idea stand out.

And creativity works for small businesses too.  In the beginning every business was a small business, so why should we act like creativity is something for the big boys? From some of my favorites on the list, I learned a few things that we can use in our businesses.

A large portion of the workforce face significant barriers to being autonomous learners on the job. From early on we are told to look to authority and direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer, or an expert with the right answer, begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. In much of the industrial/service/information workplace you’re not paid to think, but to do the bidding of someone else. I know this is changing in many places, but a job is still a JOB.

All true entrepreneurs operate off a set of tenets that are built into their psyche, or drilled into them from training and mentors. These are represented by sayings like “You never get anywhere unless you take a chance” and “Passion and persistence are the keys to success,” Unfortunately, there are still other old, reliable tenets that don’t work anymore.

In a recent book by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie from the Columbia Business School, “Designing for Growth,” the authors encourage managers to think more like designers. I assert that designers have a lot in common with entrepreneurs, since both must innovate and start a deep understanding of what their customer really wants (“customer-centered”).

In most other respects, design thinking is the opposite of business thinking. For example, businesses must deal with reality as fixed and quantifiable, whereas design deals with subjective experience and a social constructs. Entrepreneurs need to bridge both these worlds, and the authors outline key business management myths that usually limit startup thinking:

• Myth: Think big. There are always pressures to be sure an opportunity is big enough, but most really big solutions began small and built momentum. To seize really new opportunities, it is better to start small and find a deep, underlying human need to connect with. A better maxim for entrepreneurs is: Focus on meeting genuine human needs.

In the constant battle to lose inches or at least stay the same, we reach for the diet soda. Two studies presented Saturday [June 25] at the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions suggest this might be self-defeating behavior.

Epidemiologists from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio reported data showing that diet soft drink consumption is associated with increased waist circumference in humans, and a second study that found aspartame raised fasting glucose (blood sugar) in diabetes-prone mice.

“Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised,” said Helen P. Hazuda, Ph.D., professor and chief of the Division of Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine. “They may be free of calories but not of consequences.”

I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error.

If I can help you avoid some of my first-time mistakes it would be a victory. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.).

1. Where Stealth is Good – There’s a lot of discussions on the web about whether startups should be stealthy before they launch or not. The truth is – there isn’t a “right” answer so for your company.  You need some guidelines to make decisions. My general rule is that it’s good to be stealth in the early days while you’re building your product and testing your market. Stealth does not mean constipated, paranoid and totally untrusting of others. It does mean not telling more people your future plans than is necessary. It means avoiding drinking too much at cocktail parties with other tech people and bragging about your plans. It means not over-sharing your deal with VCs or other investors.

Remarkable data in U.S. Census projected country populations through 2050. Check the rise of Nigeria, versus the collapse of Russia and disappearance from the list.

Fail early and fail often. I use that phrase over and over again in teaching the design process. Borrowed from the world of computer programming, it expresses the urgency of getting iterations out into the world early in the process so that they can be tested, debugged, redesigned, and refined. The sooner in the process one does it, the more likely one can bake meaningful adjustments into the final product. To me, this is a golden rule of design.

But I’m puzzled of late by how effortlessly the word “failure” has slipped into the design lexicon, and I’ve been wondering what the unintended effects of this warm, welcoming embrace of failure might portend. Over and over, I hear designers and design educators gleefully bandy the word around. Failfaires are even popping up in cities across the country to provide a forum for failures. Recently, at a United Nations gathering to announce a report titled “Disaster Relief 2.0,” a political activist championed the importance of failure - -- and the admission of failure -- in reckoning with the development of new global systems of information sharing. Here again, failure seems to play a positive role akin to its conceptual cousin, “transparency.” In other words, the more honest and candid we can be about what works and what doesn’t work, the sooner we’ll be able to fix what doesn’t and make it better.

Having placed big bets on capital-intensive industries like solar and ethanol just as the financial crisis quashed interest in risky new technologies, early-stage investors these days have a limited appetite for start-ups that need large amounts of cash to bring their products to market.

Biofuels maker KiOR raised $150 million (94 million pounds) in its initial public offering on Friday, the latest in a number of alternative fuels companies to tap public markets, but it took $182 million in venture backing over four years to get there. The company has no revenue and needs $350 million to build each of its planned commercial scale production facilities. A loan guarantee from the federal government will help cover those costs.

But despite the success of KiOR and other biofuels makers' IPOs, most venture investors are now shying away from clean-tech companies that require so much capital.

On May 16, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before Congress that "a reasonable strategy [for government R&D] may be to continue to use a mix of policies to support R&D, while taking pains to encourage diverse and even competing approaches by the scientists and engineers receiving support." Earlier in the month, the U.S. Senate, in a failed cloture vote resulting from political wrangling on both sides of the aisle, basically let funding lapse for the Small Business Investment Research (SBIR), which was scheduled to expire at the end of May. On the same day that the Senate bill failed, the House introduced its own version of SBIR support; however, the House version contains terminology that a similar 2003 bill had that eliminates some firms (i.e., biotech) from participating in the program. The Senate doesn’t support the House version and the House doesn’t support the Senate version.

The SBIR program requires federal agencies to set aside 2.5 percent (or about $2 billion) of their research grants to outside researchers in small companies. SBIR-funded research is very cost-effective, efficient and beneficial for U.S. industries, creating technologies that are often ignored by large companies as being too trivial for them to be concerned with. SBIR recipients have been awarded more than 50,000 patents since the program started in 1982.

Q: I heard your webinar about creative ways to finance a business, though I only came in at the end. I have been out of work for a year and my unemployment is about to run out. What options do I have? Thanks for your time. -- Mary

A: Funding a business - whether it is a full-time or part-time venture, a startup or for growth - has been challenging the past few years. For one, home equity dried up, and two, the general downturn in the economy has made money harder to get.

But the good news is that money is out there. No matter the economy, funding a business is always an issue entrepreneurs face. To help with this, I have a book coming out this week called Get Your Business Funded: Creative Methods for Getting the Money You Need. In it, I share more than two dozen ways to fund a business.

Constant Contact is a digital marketing company led by babes. I don’t mean women, though that is true, actually. And I don’t mean babies in the crying, needy, or naïve sense, but rather the youngest-in-the-family sense.

Let me start over. As it turns out, many of the senior management team of Waltham, MA-based Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT) grew up as the baby of their family, and they had older siblings who influenced their worldview. And that has impacted the culture of the company in an important way.

Public companies are sitting on record amounts of cash — and they’re spending more of it on mergers and acquisitions — but money isn’t the only thing controlling these deals.

Five Silicon Valley technology executives, four of them at public companies that are buying, spoke in San Francisco last week at a conference sponsored by the technology blog GigaOM on the multitude of factors that go into making a deal — including emotion.

“The whole process hurts –- it’s painful for the acquirer and the acquired,” said Lorenzo De La Vega, a vice president at International Business Machines Corp.’s software group who’s been involved in mergers and acquisitions for 19 years. “You keep an eye on the prize and rally the team around fulfilling that vision…so you have something to show for it.”

If you're an entrepreneur, "desk job" is likely not in your vocabulary.

Chances are, you're constantly on the move, servicing clients, meeting with vendors and keeping tabs on the competition. Whether you use a smartphone, tablet or laptop (or all three), you want to get work done wherever you go, from storing data and making payroll to tracking auto mileage and accepting credit-card payments.

The good news is there are now software applications for—you guessed it—just about all of that. Increasingly, the development community has fashioned mobile programs for small-business owners, recognizing that on-the-go is simply part of running a modern enterprise, according to Ramon Ray, editor of Smallbiztechnology.com, a tech website. "They're all about speed, efficiency and serving customers better," he says. "They enable small businesses to do big things."