The most effective innovators don’t wait for problems to arise. They fix what isn’t broken and seek to improve on things that have no apparent deficit.

When I speak about the behaviors and choices that drive innovation, I mention things like preferring imagination to knowledge, choosing to explore rather than apply. I often get pushback from those who argue that we should do what we already know how to do, then shift to other strategies only when that fails to work for us. It sounds so practical and business like, and it’s how most of us operate. I agree that it’s good business to have such processes to follow, but it’s only the most minimal incremental form of innovation.

It’s sad but true, most great ideas never see the light of day. And it’s our fault.

We get overwhelmed with the constant flow of urgent little things and fail to focus enough on the big things – the long-term goals.

We feel burdened by the doldrums of project management and escape by coming up with a new idea – abandoning our creative pursuits in exchange for something new and exciting.

We crave distraction. Our mobile devices are always blinking and buzzing, and we have almost lost the sacred space required to think big picture and solve big problems.

I love when a client and I reach the place where we can contemplate, “What’s next?”

Exploring “What’s next?” means the client has achieved a level of confidence and a measure of success from having run one or more innovation challenges. They identified the critical questions successfully. They defined the nature of the invitation they were seeking in a way that resonated with the prospective members of their innovation community. They worked hard to create the virtual and physical forums that helped the community members engage in authentic ways with one another. They helped people to explore and realize their leadership potential, thereby sowing the seeds of real transformation.

From here, “What’s next?” can mean a number of things. It can mean reflecting on and framing new critical questions that the organization’s leaders want to engage the community with. Success breeds success. Let’s go again. “What’s next?” can mean pursuing further the possibilities of helping innovators who have already contributed to move their insights from idea to concept. Let’s honor our commitments to the community (I have explored a few of these possibilities in earlier columns).

I spoke at Stanford last year about starting a tech company. They really cleverly chopped the video up into small bite-sized segments.

So for anybody who reads my “This Week in VC” transcripts but doesn’t watch the video – this one’s for you! It’s only 3 minutes, 44 seconds.

The first online 3-D interactive search tool of the human body was released today. It allows a user to view and navigate the human anatomy, male or female, down to the finest detail—from the muscles and deep muscles to the nerves, arteries, vessels, and bones. This new tool, called BodyMaps, was developed by Healthline Networks, a company that provides medical information to consumers online, and GE Healthyimagination, a Web-based platform that shares and promotes projects that focus on consumer health, such as apps or healthy how-to videos.

BodyMaps is a consumer tool developed to educate the user on health conditions or medical ailments. At the center of the BodyMaps page is a 3-D image of the body; at left is textual information about the body section being shown. As a user mouses over the text, the section of the body in the image is highlighted, and vice versa if a user mouses over the image. At the bottom is a scrubber that lets the user rotate the body 360 degrees. The page also features videos, tips on staying healthy, information on symptoms and conditions, and a definition of the section in view.

Which is more important: art or science? Most people would say science. In answering this question I can’t help but think of the word Sputnik, and my grandfather James Killian.

In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, it extended the Cold War into space and altered the trajectory of my life. At that time my grandfather was the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and shortly after Sputnik was launched he was chosen by President Dwight Eisenhower to be the first full-time scientific adviser to the president. In my mind, my grandfather became “Mr. Sputnik.”

This afternoon in Boulder I'll be on a panel as part of the White House Startup America Roundtable. If you weren't invited to the event, there is a website called Reducing Barriers to Innovation that you can participate in.

When I was reviewing the agenda for the program, the goal was pretty clear:

"The Startup America: Reducing Barriers event is a regional platform that allows federal agencies to hear directly, from entrepreneurs and local leaders like you, how we can achieve our goal of reducing the barriers faced by America's entrepreneurs. Senior Obama administration officials need input on what changes are needed to build a more supportive environment for entrepreneurship. "

Big technology companies like Netflix and Facebook make clever use of the digital traces we leave online: their algorithms can make connections between data and then offer suggestions about movies to watch or people to get in touch with. Now much smaller companies—even ones that don't consider technology their specialty—might be able to do something similar. Several everyday business tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, are gaining analytic functions that make it easier for any company to crunch the data now found everywhere—not just in customer records but also on the open Web, in contexts like tweets and online help forums.

The promise of this idea became apparent in April, when Jive Software, a company that makes collaboration software, acquired Proximal Labs, a startup founded just a year earlier. Jive wanted Proximal's computer scientists, who had proved themselves in machine-learning projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Last week I was pleased to guest post on the Front End of Innovation blog about the relationship between innovation and change. My point in that post was that you can’t just inject creativity into people and expect them to go innovate; you first need to create some changes to how things have always been done. Give People a Reason to Become ExcitedAnother thing many firms do in the quest for innovation is set up innovation teams to lead efforts within a department or branch to produce better ideas, but these groups often don’t have the firepower to get the job done on their own. There needs to be a widely communicated opportunity that gets everyone in the organization or department or branch excited. Then you’ll start to see big change, and ultimately, greater innovation. The question now becomes, how do you identify that big opportunity and get employees to passionately support it? As I wrote in my guest post for FEI,

Leaders should shift the discussion about what the organization is trying to accomplish from “we want to create and sell product or service x” to “we want to create and sell products or services that actively revolutionize people’s lives.” Give people a reason to become excited and committed to changing in pursuit of a positive, shared objective.

One hundred years of banked future hydrocarbon revenues, massive investments in higher education and a common legal framework based on western law all offer this small nation—the size of Connecticut—tremendous potential to be a hub for startups in the GCC. I find it curious therefore that at Qatar’s famous “Doha Forum” I participated in today, entrepreneurship and startups were not on the agenda.

Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who has ruled Qatar since 1995, has made enormous progress in opening his nation to the world. Emir Hamad has not only been very open to global markets but his country has experienced a notable amount of political liberalization, including the enfranchisement of women, a new constitution, and the launch of the Al Jazeera news source.

Innovation is a serious matter. It is the key to American prosperity, security, better jobs, and better health, as well as responses to coming challenges like energy security and global warming. But it’s not as simple as the president’s State of the Union address, or his Strategy for American Innovation would suggest, according to a recent study of economic history. The authors argue there are historic patterns in innovation and industry that can inform science policy in the 21st century.

In As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution, a seminal work in cliometrics—the study of economic history—Chris Freeman and Francisco Louçã use historical data on technological advances, economic structure, salaries, and political unrest to derive a clear pattern linking innovation to the performance of the economy. These generational cycles of invention, expansion, and depression are called “Kondratiev waves” in honor of Nikolai Kondratiev, the Russian economist who first postulated their existence.

Startup companies are seeing business conditions improve, actively hiring, and highly concerned about the regulatory environment, according to Startup Outlook 2011, just released by Silicon Valley Bank.

Silicon Valley Bank released Startup Outlook 2011, a survey of startup company perceptions, in conjunction with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Annual CEO Business Climate survey of its member companies.

The Startup Outlook survey of 375 U.S.-based, private, venture capital-backed software, hardware, life science and cleantech companies revealed:

* Startups are optimistic about current business opportunities and generally believe business conditions have improved and are improving further

This much is known: The next round of economic recovery and growth in the U.S. will be led by new companies. The statistical evidence on that point is clear. While big, established firms employ the most people, it's the high-growth startups -- the new firms on their way to becoming big -- that create the lion's share of new jobs, and become the anchors for new industries. So it has been through every wave of growth in the country's history, from the days of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to the IT boom of the late twentieth century.

Now here is the lesser known fact: If we want a real recovery, the next cohort of high-growth entrepreneurs cannot just be people with names like Thomas and Henry, or Bill and Steve. We need the women to get involved. The American growth engine can no longer afford to run on half of its cylinders.

VC firms invested $215 million in 27 Michigan companies during 2010, according to a report released last week by the Ann Arbor-based Michigan Venture Capital Association.

But, as the industry participates in the 30th annual Michigan Growth Capital Symposium yesterday and today in Ypsilanti, the venture capital industry still has plenty of room to grow. No, the VC community in Michigan will never be as large as it is in Silicon Valley or Boston.

But, after talking with MGCS founder David Brophy, University of Michigan Ross School of Business professor and director of the Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity Finance, I came up with a wish list for the Michigan venture capital community.

The good news about Schumpeter's creative destruction is that, thanks to the Internet and digital tools, it has never been easier to start a company. One study found that the availability of open source software, cloud computing, and the rise of virtual office infrastructure has driven the cost of launching an internet venture down from $5,000,000 in 1997, to $500,000 in 2002, to only $50,000 in 2008.

According to Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, in the past 13 years, start-ups created more than 40 million jobs. One study revealed that over the last 30 years nearly all net job creation in the United States occurred in firms less than five years old.

MOBILE, Ala. -- Inventors and entrepreneurs in the coastal region have a new funding source with the launch of the Gulf Coast Angel Network.

The group, based in Mobile, targets investment opportunities in coastal Alabama and Mississippi, and in the Florida Panhandle, said Michael Chambers of Swift Biotech, its executive director.

It is also part of a larger network of angel organizations in Alabama and across the U.S., Chambers said.

What can happen when an angel network works well? Chambers offers up the example of a similar group in Huntsville.

Big changes are coming to the US Patent System! The America Invents act, formerly the Patent Reform Act of 2011 (pdf), has gripped the attention of the attention of the business world since it passed through the U.S. Senate in April. The bill originated as the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (under Bush) and returned to Congress in 2009, however, neither attempt to pass the legislation proved successful. The Patent Reform Act of 2011 will be the first REAL overhaul of the US patent system since 1952.

While beyond the scope of my blog to review all of the changes to the patent system that the AIA may bring, I want to address the most controversial change, which will be the switch from “first to invent” to a “first to file” system of awarding patent priority.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is forming a small-business committee to review fundraising rules for small private firms that critics say hinder access to capital and are stunting economic growth.

Testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday, SEC Chair Mary Schapiro said the new division will focus on “regulatory questions posed by new capital-raising strategies,” among other issues.

“Cost-effective access to capital for companies of all sizes plays a critical role in our national economy, and companies seeking access to capital should not be burdened by unnecessary or superfluous regulations,” Schapiro said.

They’ve been around longer. $138m revenue, 55 startups and you’ve never even heard of them.

Call it a startup collective, a peer mentoring group, or a DIY accelerator, but it works. It’s at least as effective as the big two, and it looks much more suited to replication. It doesn’t even need rock star mentors and investors.

The problem with rapidly replicating and propagating the models of the big two accelerators everywhere, is mentors. You need large numbers of exceptionally competent, enthusiastic, relevant, continuously available and disproportionately inexpensive mentors. And the words in that last sentence just don’t sound to me like they add up, unless you are happy to proliferate scalable startups a lot more slowly than any job-starved economy deserves.

Compare these different accelerator models by the survival rates, successful exits and valuations of their startups and it’s probably a level playing field. But Starve Ups has being going significantly longer. It was formed by cash-poor founders. It makes the resources of its two big rivals look anything but lean.