Mark Skinner is Vice President of SSTI and director of the Regional Innovation Acceleration Network (RIAN) Project. He has participating in technology-based economic development for 27 years, working for Ohio's Thomas Edison Program, establishing Ohio's SBIR assistance program and consulting on several Battelle directed projects prior to joining SSTI in 1998. Q: What is RIAN and how does the website promote the initiatives?

A: The Regional Innovation Network (RIAN) is in part an economic development community response to the President’s call in his State of the Union address for the nation to “out innovate” the rest of the world. Within weeks of taking their positions with EDA, Assistant Secretary Fernandez and Deputy Assistant Secretary Brian McGowan posed a similar challenge to SSTI and some its members: how do we make our economic development strategies more innovative at the same time we’re helping high growth startup companies create jobs and wealth? RIAN evolved out of months of talks with EDA, SSTI staff and tech-based economic development practitioners.

High-speed rail does not exist in the U.S. And the fact that the new congressional budget deal completely eliminated high-speed rail funding for 2011 may lead many to believe it never will. Who can forget the headline-grabbing declarations by governors Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin that high-speed rail is a no-go in their states? Between their refusal of federal funds, the political posturing on Capitol Hill and the endless debates in the editorial pages of newspapers, it’s easy to get the sense that high-speed rail is dead.

But while the fast train indeed has been dealt a serious blow, the fact remains that it’s coming: Illinois will spend more than half a billion dollars this year on upgrading existing tracks to accommodate speeds of 110 mph, while California officials plan to break ground next year on the $42 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail link. Notwithstanding the congressional budget cuts, there was still $2 billion up for grabs this year -- thanks to Florida. Twenty-four governors -- 12 Democrats, 11 Republicans and one Independent -- applied for that money. The Federal Railroad Administration dedicated the $2 billion to 15 states and Amtrak in May.

Once a pest of the past, bedbugs now infest every state in the U.S.. Cimex lectularius—small, flattened insects that feed solely on mammalian and avian blood—have been living with humans since ancient times. Abundant in the U.S. prior to World War II, bedbugs all but vanished during the 1940s and '50s thanks to improvements in hygiene and the use of pesticides. In the past 10 years, however, the pests have staged a comeback worldwide—an outbreak after the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney was a harbinger of things to come. This revival may be the worst yet, experts say, due to densely populated urban areas, global travel and increasing pesticide resistance—something to consider as the summer travel season gets underway.

"By every metric that we use, it's getting worse and worse," says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Health authorities and pest control operators are regularly flooded with calls, and the epidemic may not have yet peaked. And because bedbugs are indoor pests, there are no high or low seasons throughout the year, he adds, only continual bombardment. "It's just the beginning of the problem in the U.S.," Schal says.

Last November biotech investors started to see a slew of news releases issued by firms who got $1 billion into biotech research and development in grants under the Therapeutic Discovery Tax Credit program which was enacted under President Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Now, two lawmakers are proposing to revive the "one-time grant program" announced last year.

We were quite critical of the fund initiative, which saw many biotechs (almost as many as are publicly traded) apply and given funds from. We weren't the only ones who thougth that these grants were spread too thin. Given the news that this might be in play again, we continue to hope that these tax credits and grants are available to a more select group of companies when the feds start to hand out chunks of cash.

Some have pointed to the fact that Novavax (Nasdaq:NVAX), for example, got just a small portion of the funds more than Sequoia Pharmaceuticals got. The problem, you see, is that Sequoia's offices are vacant and their employees were all laid off not long after they got the funds. Some wonder where the $733,437 in federal grants and discovery funds went. Just three years ago, Sequoia was had plenty of cash from venture funds from big-name investors, a pipeline of promising HIV drugs and was a hot IPO candidate, but few would argue now that the money might have been better spent on any number of other cach-starved early-stage biotechs... Or would it?

Summer is here, and even dire workaholics should take a few hours to relax. Read one of the following books and you'll become a better entrepreneur while you're at it.

We asked small business leaders and VCs to name books that anyone starting a business or even thinking about it should read.

Over the past two years, these were some of the best recommendations we heard.

The vast majority of companies want to be innovative, coming up with new products, business models and better ways of doing things. However, innovation is not so easy to achieve. A CEO cannot just order it, and so it will be. You have to carefully manage an organization so that, over time, innovations will emerge. And CEOs often make a number of common mistakes, which hamper rather than induce such processes.

Believe the numbers

One common mistake is to insist on “seeing the numbers” too much too soon. “What is the size of the market?”, “what is the Net Present Value calculation?”, “payback time?”, and so on. What they are forgetting is that, for a truly innovative product, for example, it is impossible to reliably produce any numbers. If a CEO insists on hard numbers before the project is even started, it will by sheer definition kill off any truly innovative ones, simply because you cannot compute the size of a market that does not exist yet.

The world’s leading brands continually innovate. While we often think of Google and Apple as innovation juggernauts (and they are), there is innovation afoot at older brands such as Pepsi, McDonald’s, and Mercedes. In the case of Pepsi and McDonald’s who have a portfolio of products caught in the obesity storm, they’ve had to evolve from their historical platforms to avoid extinction. Pepsi has developed a social responsibility platform. McDonald’s is now the #1 buyer of apples in the US. In the case of Mercedes, a new line of lower price tag cars is their response to the dangers of their aging wealthy consumer base. In some cases, the innovations are purchased. For example, Microsoft is known for its investment and acquisition of new products and technologies.

Whether created organically or purchased, whether incremental improvements or transformational, innovation is vital in today’s rapidly evolving, competitive global economy. At Sparxoo, our team of brand & innovation strategists has led many brand innovation workshops and expert worksessions with Fortune 500 companies. Our formula: start with creativity to spark new ideas and add in strategy to structure and focus ideas across identified goals. Great ideas can come from anywhere, so tap into your leaders, your Gen Y talent, your customers, and industry experts. Connect the ideas together and draw out an innovation roadmap for the medium-term and long-term. Below, we share 6 innovation exercises to help energize your thinking.

R&D, Marketing, Sales, Finance, IT – you’re familiar with the most common departments within a standard company, and have likely been involved with one or more. You know it can be a real challenge for unalike minds to understand where each other is coming from regarding any number of topics within a project. As an owner, you have to be the champion – the true driver of the process in order to create cross-divisional cohesion removing the silos.

First and foremost, never underestimate the importance of selecting associates who are passionate about your product (or service) and effort. Hiring employees who truly believe in your product and company possess an innate form of motivation, and are far less likely to derail your efforts if they aren’t being rewarded or recognized on a constant basis. Passionate associates always strive to give their top effort towards the cause. Choosing all employees this way will ensure that you’ve got a team that is ready and willing to cooperate.

1. "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." - Mahatma Gandhi

2. "Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

3. "How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?" - Vincent Van Gogh

4. "Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." - Martin Luther King Jr.

In most advanced economies of the world, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and inventors are important sources of innovation. Universities contribute to technological innovation too, playing a key role in the innovation system through knowledge production and knowledge transfer to the private sector. Inevitably, except for the largest of vertically integrated companies, an essential step in the innovation process – delivering value to a market –requires collaboration for the transfer of knowledge and creation of value.

It has been eight years since the Australian Institute for Commercialisation (AIC) first began its work as a collaboration facilitator and an innovation coach. One core activity has been assisting Australia’s smallest companies to benefit from publicly-funded knowledge and research, many for the first time. We have experienced a mixed reception from governments, with only a few visionary political leaders prepared to tackle the market and system failures that have prevented strong commercialisation outcomes from being achieved. Some governments have not even tried, or worse, actively discouraged such commercialisation through their “passive-aggressive” behaviour. Many have looked in the wrong places, lost interest, or have gone back to square one in a vain attempt to reinvent the wheel for themselves, so it is their wheel.

What’s happened to innovation over that period? Has commercialisation, the innovation step that results in new business activity, changed? This article looks at the new trends and changes we have observed, and one big myth that continues to persist.

A Travel through Time and the Major Italian Discoveries and Inventions that Changed the World.

Italy of beauty, unique design, rich cultural and historical heritage and the comprehensive genius of Leonardo is well-known. What may be less known is another typical Italian quality – inventiveness. Its roots lie in the ancient Roman Empire that gave the world the Roman law, the roads, the water-mains and much more.

An interesting fact is that the world 'speaks Italian' in music, banking, accounting and seafaring. Many of the significant technological breakthroughs and theories that changed the way of thinking and living are credited to the Italian inventors and scientists: Antonio Meucci's telephone; the wireless telegraph; the experimental helicopter designed by Enrico Forlanini; the first version of the gasoline engine; Volta's electrochemical pile and Marconi's radio, ranked by The Independent among the top 10 major discoveries in the world and many other.

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a critical role in modern military operations. The next generation of these aerial robotic systems needs to have enhanced takeoff and landing capabilities, better endurance, require less support equipment and be adaptable to mission needs in varying conditions. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic (SSC Atlantic) call on innovators of every kind — scientists, engineers, citizen scientists and dreamers — to collaborate on the UAVForge Challenge and win $100,000 USD. The UAVForge challenge uses crowdsourcing to build small UAVs through an exchange of ideas and design practices. The goal is to build and test a user-intuitive, backpack-portable UAV that can quietly fly in and out of critical environments to conduct sustained surveillance for up to three hours.

If a close friend has a cold, chances are you might catch it. A startup called Sickweather hopes to tap into the social side of sickness with a social networking service that tracks illnesses within a user's circle of friends, and to forecast outbreaks.

The startup mines publicly available data from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as from its users, to provide information on illness trends. Sickweather recently launched an early version of its site for closed beta testing, and plans to open to a broader audience in July.

While some people complain about the vast quantities of often mundane data uploaded to social networks every day, companies are increasingly interested in mining that information for commercial ends. Bluefin Labs, for example, uses social network data to determine users' reactions to television shows and advertisements. Specialized social networks are also springing up to collect more precise data.

This is the first in a series of posts about financing options for startups. By "financing" I mean obtaining cash to fund your business. There are all sorts of strategies to avoid needing funding, but this series is not about them.

Many entrepreneurs turn to friends and family for their first funding needs. In fact, it is common for non-tech startups to raise all the capital they need from friends and family. I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that friends and family make up the largest source of funding for entrepreneurs and startups.

Friends and family financing is popular because it is easy to get a hearing from the people who know you best and they are positively inclined to say yes. But there are some negatives as well. It's tough to know how to price and structure an investment where the investors are close friends or family. You don't want to take advantage of them and they may not be sophisticated enough to know what is a good deal and what is a bad deal.

It turns out $200,000 is the magic number. That's when you're considered affluent in America.

And what you make in your 20s is a huge predictor of whether you'll ever get there.

According to advertising agency Digitas, it's much more likely you'll hit $200K if you make at least $100K before age 35. That puts you into the emerging wealth category; anyone older and in that income bracket is considered aspiring.

Digitas pulled this research together after the economic downturn, after realizing that the core luxury consumers were the ones who made more money earlier. Those in the aspiring category no longer "felt rich" and identified with the middle class.

Should tenure be abolished? Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that it should. Her new book, The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For, is a Navy Seal Team Six-style assault on Fortress Tenure: quick, precise, and conducted with air of finality.

That is not to say that she overcomes all my ambivalence on the topic. The tenure system in American colleges and universities does have overwhelming faults. It forces tenure-track faculty members to concentrate disproportionate attention on publishing; it conduces to an attitude of indifference towards both teaching and research among a substantial number of those who achieve it; and it is part of an academic caste system that treats adjuncts (“contingent faculty”) very poorly. Even its faults have faults: The pressure for more and more scholarly publication leads to an ever-growing flood of trivial research, much of it gussied up in obscurantist jargon intended to limit access to like-minded “experts.”

Off the coast of Newfoundland is a place called Fogo Island. At the height of its economy, about 3,000 people were living on the island, mostly employed by the fishery. When the fish population declined in the 1960s, so did the human population, as many were forced to look elsewhere for work.

Recently, a brother and sister who were a part of that exodus have returned home. Both Zita and Tony Cobb left in search of opportunity and education. And both achieved success, going on to university educations and great careers in the tech industry. In fact, they’re so successful that they are now in a position to devote their time and effort fully toward philanthropic endeavors. They spent some time in small African villages, distributing radios as a way of exposing villagers to possibilities beyond their circumstances, just as they had been introduced to the world beyond Fogo Island in their youths. But at a certain point, they realized that their real passion was to renew the financial vitality through a kind of social entrepreneurship that had been lost on Fogo once the fishery waned.

As a result of globalizing trends, clusters are becoming more global as well. To stay competitive new strategies have to be utilized. One successful approach has been the use of openness between the various actors in the local systems.

This year’s conference of the Technopolicy Network will therefore be on Open Innovation for Regional Development to explore how this shift will impact your region and what you can do to profit from this change.

View the Program

If we want to create a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, what do we do? Langley Advance says it is time to give them the opportunity to learn how. The PowerPlay Young Entrepreneurs program is helping get kids started.

PowerPlay challenges students to start their own businesses. They each identify a need in the marketplace and create a business plan to effectively market their product.

Then, they’re given a chance to sell their products at a Young Entrepreneur Show attended by the school community.

The Government will launch a $40 million fund to encourage more medical technology start-ups as part of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2015 plan, Spring Singapore said on Tuesday.

The fund will be managed by SPRING SEEDS Capital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SPRING Singapore, under a new Biomedical Sciences Accelerator (BSA) programme.

SPRING Singapore said that the knowledge and capital-intensive nature of the biomedical industry made it difficult for start-ups with innovative ideas to succeed, adding that they hoped the BSA programme would help catalyse more start-ups.