Innovation means anything new that helps us be more productive. It means new products, new processes, new marketing approaches, even new business models. It implies that the new thing is used by the enterprise or individual, not just an invention that never sees the light of day.

Innovation does not require science or technology, but it is often enabled by new discoveries or new ways of thinking or doing things. Innovation is by its nature creative, but this doesn’t mean that all creative things are innovative.

We care about innovation for the simple reason that up to 80 percent of economic growth and development is enabled by innovation. (The other 20 percent is from increases in labor and capital.) For rural areas where population is either stable or falling, productivity gains that come from innovative ideas are the best opportunity for economic growth.

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Airbus visionaries have conceived the plane of the year 2050, with a transparent ceiling and morphing seats that maximize passenger comfort. Airbus is releasing images of its vision of the future in preparation for the upcoming Paris Air Show June 20.

The aircraft’s bionic structure mimics the efficiency of bird bone, which is optimized to provide strength where needed, and allows for an intelligent cabin wall membrane that controls air temperature and can become transparent to give passengers open panoramic views.

The Concept Cabin has an integrated “neural network,” creating an intelligent interface between passenger and plane. It can identify and respond to passenger needs and enables features such as morphing seats that change to your body shape.

Researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington and Imperial College London conducted a large new study of lifespans worldwide.

They found that 80% of countries fell in their life-expectancy rankings measured against the average of the world’s 10 leading countries, a number known as the “international frontier.”

“When compared to the international frontier for life expectancy, U.S. counties range from being 16 calendar years ahead to more than 50 behind for women. For men, the range is from 15 calendar years ahead to more than 50 calendar years behind. This means that some counties have a life expectancy today that nations with the best health outcomes had in 1957,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME Director and one of the paper’s co-authors.

The founders of Microventure Marketplace Inc. are launching a new business — MicroAngel Capital Partners — designed to enable investors to pool their capital for larger investments such as pre-initial public offerings and limited partnerships in venture capital funds.

The Austin-based venture is the latest in a series of hybrid models founded in Austin to give investors alternatives to the conventional investing models.

MicroAngel is being established for investors looking to put $3,000 to $10,000 into deals that typically require at least $100,000, said William Clark, founder of Microventure Marketplace, which he launched in 2009.

Venture capitalists love to talk about their pattern mapping abilities. "We add more value because we've seen so many companies go through all sorts of situations before and we can quickly map whatever's happening at your business to what we've seen in the past and leverage this experience."

But what's going on right now with early-stage company valuations suggests that VCs may be poor judges of at least some of these patterns. Or at least that they're incredibly human when it comes to estimating the likelihood of certain events actually happening.

The commercialization of microfinance has been blamed for a lot of troubling trends, from prompting the clampdown in Andhra Pradesh to muddying the industry’s benign image as a development tool to help the poor. But one impact that has been largely overlooked is its impact on women.

One of the hallowed truths about microlending has been that it works best when loans are made to women, as the keepers of household finances, and particularly to groups of them, so they feel a joint responsibility to repay. The payoff, as it were, was the empowerment of poor women, who could use the cash flow to help climb out of poverty. This was at the heart of the drive among socially-oriented non-profits to spread small-loan programs across much of the developing world.

The healthcare field has a problem of stark omission: it provides no meaningful incentive programs for promising young healthcare entrepreneurs.

It’s certainly not a problem in other industries. In myriad cases, philanthropists use cold, hard cash to lure smart, new entrepreneurs into the field. Consider these incentives:

• The Google Lunar X Prize offers $30 million to the first privately funded team to land a robot on the moon.
• The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge offers $1 million to the team that is most successful at cleaning up oil spills.
• The Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize awarded $10 million to three teams that built cars achieving 100 miles per gallon in real world driving.

So you’ve decided to spread your entrepreneurial wings. Good choice. Hard choice. Get ready for an adrenaline rush – and the need for a ton of inspiration.

Sometimes that inspiration will come from obvious sources: you, your team or your sphere of influence. Other times it may come from less obvious places like customers, your children or a schlocky sports movie.

Occasionally, however… on those days where your conversion to a morning person just isn’t working out, or when Angry Birds just isn’t getting the creative juices flowing… where do you go to deliberately find inspiration? No, not the “life affirmations” nonsense like “Today is a new day!” and “Never give up!” – or the centuries old-quote from some guy in a powdered wig who never blogged a day in his life.

Harvard Business School (HBS) accepts about one out of nine people who apply. Its admissions office picks the ones who demonstrated leadership. How does it know someone is a leader? How does HBS turn those leaders into entrepreneurs?

William Sahlman, Dimitri V. D’Arbeloff – Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration, provided answers in a June 15 interview. Sahlman told me that beyond high grades and test scores, the HBS admissions department looks for evidence of leadership. Examples include being chosen to lead a Boy Scout Troop or a sports team or developing a new course to train freshly hired employees to do jobs. Of course, anyone who is accepted into HBS is likely to have a leg up on becoming an entrepreneur.

Image via Wikipedia Where’s Silicon Valley when we need it?  The inexorable rise of healthcare costs has created not only a crisis waiting to happen, but also an urgent need for innovation – exactly the sort of thing for which Silicon Valley is justly famous.  So where is it?

While entrepreneurs in the Valley and elsewhere have achieved remarkable success (at least historically) developing new drugs and devices , more fundamental innovation in healthcare delivery – particularly the sort designed to take costs out of the system — has proved far more elusive.

The (CSE) today announced that it will develop a sustainable energy research and building innovation center at 5 Channel Center in Boston’s Innovation District. The 50,000-square-foot applied research facility and building technology showcase will serve as a unique factory of innovation in support of established and start-up companies that are developing and demonstrating the next generation of energy efficiency technologies. It will also house Fraunhofer’s technical R&D labs and the TechBridge start-up accelerator group to support clean energy businesses in the Innovation District.

“The new building for the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) will literally be a living laboratory, attracting building technology pace-setters from around the nation and the international business community to demonstrate the future of sustainable buildings,” said Dr. Roland Schindler, executive director of the Fraunhofer CSE. “The CSE facility will help develop the City of Boston’s Innovation District and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a hub of sustainable energy technology and research.”

Innovation in the life sciences must be a government priority, including requiring an innovation impact statement for significant new regulations that affect the health sector, group says.

The answer to that depends on the level of competitiveness. "America is the acknowledged world leader in medical technology, but that leadership is being challenged," said Stephen J. Ubl, CEO of Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed). "We know medical technology has a bright future. The question is: will that future be made in America -- or somewhere else? Without the right public policies in place to provide a level playing field between the U.S. and foreign competitors, America's leadership will be lost."

Startups presenting business plans to VCs have a much better chance of getting a meeting and maybe an investment if they know the VC already, so the first answer to the question “what is the best way to approach a VC?” is to get to know them before you want to pitch them for money. My co-author in this series Nicholas Lovell likes to say, ‘VCs invest in lines not dots” by which he means that if when you come to ask for money a VC can see how the story you have told her over the last 6-12-24 months has unfolded more or less according to plan (i.e. a line), or that if the plan has changed the changes have been sensible, then your credibility will be much greater than if the assessment is solely based on a plan received at a point in time (i.e. a dot). UPDATE: Nicholas rightly tells me I should credit Mark Suster with the ‘lines not dots’ analogy, see here for his post on the subject.

Being an angel investor can be difficult. Even if the companies you have invested in are successful, you work constantly to protect your stake from being diluted, says David Pakman, a partner at Venrock.

After years of working in tech -- most recently as the CEO of eMusic -- Pakman knows both sides of the startup life: that of an entrepreneur and that of an investor.

One reason, perhaps, is that despite its size London has relatively little in the way of business incubators for start-up companies. The main incubators number just three: the London BioScience Innovation Centre (LBIC) at the Royal Veterinary College, the Imperial Incubator at Imperial College, and the new incubator at Queen Mary BioEnterprises (QMB) in east London. There are also smaller, internal, incubating clusters at the National Institute of Medical Research in northwest London and at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London.

“There’s not much choice,” says Ramsay Richmond, executive manager at QMB. “Across the Atlantic, San Diego has millions of square feet available,” he says. “Here there are just two providers with between them only some 100,000 square feet of space.”

Science|Business's Richard Hudson speaks about open innovation with Prof. Henry Chesbrough - author of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology - and BP's Group Head for Research and Technology, David Eyton.

The UK managing director at IBM has said the company changed itself dramatically in the last decade after somewhat losing its way, but insisted it has retained its essence and returned to being an “innovator”.

Stephen Leonard told Computerworld UK that IBM had rapidly changed from being a hardware vendor with plummeting profits in the early 2000s, to becoming a software and service-led company that had in effect saved its future. Also in this channel

IBM is celebrating its 100th birthday on Thursday. Throughout its life, IBM had been an inventor of major technology, Leonard said. Historic IBM inventions include cash machine software, the original travel reservations system, and the magnetic strip on credit cards.

Since the start of the Great Recession in late 2007, the U.S. economy has suffered a prolonged and crippling bout of unemployment — accompanied by a tide of pessimism about our economic future and an ideologically charged debate over what to do about it.

In Washington the argument is all about fiscal and monetary policies: Should we spend more on public programs to stimulate demand? Do we need to cut the deficit to restore investor confidence? Or should we cut taxes to strengthen incentives for Americans to work and invest?

A new study by researchers at NYU Langone Medi

cal Center has shown that, for the first time, Wnt signaling, already known to control many biological processes, between hair follicles and melanocyte stem cells can dictate hair pigmentation. The study was published in the June 11, 2011 issue of the journal Cell.The research was led by Mayumi Ito, PhD, assistant professor in the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at NYU Langone. “We have known for decades that hair follicle stem cells and pigment-producing melanocycte cells collaborate to produce colored hair, but the underlying reasons were unknown,” said Dr. Ito. “We discovered Wnt signaling is essential for coordinated actions of these two stem cell lineages and critical for hair pigmentation.” The study suggests the manipulation of Wnt signaling may be a novel strategy for targeting pigmentation such as graying hair. The research study also illustrates a model for tissue regeneration.

“The human body has many types of stem cells that have the potential to regenerate other organs,” said Dr. Ito. “The methods behind communication between stem cells of hair and color during hair replacement may give us important clues to regenerate complex organs containing many different types of cells.”