Since word of the company’s gourmet cafeterias and bring-your-puppy-to-work atmosphere first began circulating in the national media way back in 2006, becoming a Google employee has held a special place in the American imagination, somewhere between graduating from space explorer school and winning the Power Ball lottery. The result: a lot of speculation — and hyperbole — surrounding the company’s hiring process.

While we’ve all heard rumors of mandatory 3.7 GPAs and the ability to answer math questions over the phone with no calculator, the world might sadly never know just exactly how Google makes its hiring decisions. But perhaps former CEO Eric Schmidt has a little more insight into the process. Schmidt discussed the company’s personnel philosophy and corporate culture with McKinsey director James Manyika at a McKinsey conference in mid-March.

Despite a year of highly publicized legal investigations and privacy stumbles and a more or less flat stock price, Google has the best reputation of any company among Americans, according to a poll released by Harris Interactive this morning.

Last year, it finished in third place.

The poll asked more than 30,000 Americans to rate 60 prominent companies in six areas. Google topped two of them -- financial performance (despite a flat stock price for the last year) and workplace environment -- and finished in the top five in vision and leadership, social responsibility, and products and services.

That was enough to put it into the top spot, ahead of last year's winner, Berkshire Hathaway (which dropped to #4).

Why does one small business owner flourish while another one fails? In all my years of being in business, reading all I can about business, and surrounding myself with successful entrepreneurs (large and small), I have come to believe there are 7 essential principles that all successful small business owners have in common.

1. An entrepreneurial mindset
2. Strict fiscal discipline
3. A kitchen cabinet of advisors
4. A defined brand
5. A niche market
6. Excellent customer service
7. Cash position and a good banking relationship

How successful is Open Innovation as an innovation method? For leaders like Proctor and Gamble the answer is obvious but the same can’t be said for the vast majority of enterprises taking this route. Doug Berger takes the soundings.

Open Innovation has been an increasingly hot topic since 2003, and the publication of Henry Chesbrough’s book, Open Innovation.  Here we are 8 years later.  A top-of-mind question for innovation executives that are on this road is, “What does my company have to show for our innovation investment?”  This article delineates where Open Innovation has been valuable and where it has yet to deliver returns.  Chief Innovation Officers will find 6 specific action steps, which will significantly ramp up gains from their open innovation initiatives.

COLUMBIA, Md. - The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), announced today the establishment and availability of the Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI). Through this Congressionally-funded program, a total of $825,000 will be awarded to eleven small businesses developing technologies that meet the needs of DHS and/or USAMRMC, or to companies licensing and commercializing DHS and/or USAMRMC technologies. Each company will receive a maximum of $75,000 of funding during the two year program. Applications for the JTTI program are now being accepted for consideration and potential funding.

The SMART Conference is this Thursday!

Featuring keynote speaker Ira Blumenthal and morning speaker Rich Bendis, this year’s conference will also offer workshops on community improvement, website development, comprehensive marketing, regional cooperation, organizational management and more!

One of the educational panel discussions will focus on “Best Practices Through Regional Cooperation.” This session will examine the benefits and potential landmines of working as a true regional partnership.

Panel members include:
• Jim Gossett, CecD, Executive Director, Carroll Area Development Corporation
• John Monson, Vice President, AgStar Rural Capital Network, Ag Star Financial Services
• Greg Wathen, President and CEO, Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana

A whole new crop of eager college grads are about to hit the job market and they’re coming your way. If you’re one of the increasing numbers of small business owners who are hiring, you’ll want to make sure that you hire the crème de la crème, not just any smooth talker with a shiny new degree. I asked several entrepreneurs how they go about hiring new grads, and they shared these unusual techniques:

• Interview them again, and again (and again). Razor Suleman, CEO and founder of I Love Rewards, uses a four-step process to interview candidates at his Toronto- based company, which creates employee recognition programs. “The first step in our hiring process is an open house, which attracts upwards of 400 candidates,” he says. “It lets prospects get a feel for the company and allows us to personally meet every candidate.” A select few are invited to come back for a group interview, half of which is spent asking questions and half “half about selling the company, because you’ll always have to fight for an A-play,” says Suleman. A handful moves on to a skills interview, where prospects are asked to perform job-related tasks; and last, the company does “Topgrading” which Suleman says “takes the applicant back to high school and evaluates their ability to self-reflect, as well as the value of all their previous experiences.” The process, says Suleman, “may seem timely and excessive, but it has proven to work well and gives us the opportunity to gauge both personality and skill level.”

One of the key priorities of entrepreneurial success is to continuously invest in your own education. I have never met a truly great entrepreneur who doesn't read books to stay on top of the latest trends impacting their business and the global marketplace as a whole. Today, they may do it via their favorite E-reader or iPad, but make no mistake about—the best entrepreneurs read. It's in this spirit that I strongly recommend five books that I believe are must-reads for the current business environment. —Alfred Edmond, Jr.

Snakes are never going to be my best buddies. Ever since childhood I have had a deep-seated fear & loathing of the things. But whilst avoidance might keep me feeling safe, my lack of desire to do anything further serves to maintain an unimpressive level of ignorance about the subject.

Like snakes, hitch hiking should be handled with a degree of care. However, the true reality of roadside risks and perils are a fair distance from media headlines. Unfortunately, the tabloids would have us believe that mortal danger is around every bend in the road – and then readers respond accordingly.

After 5 hours stood by the roadside that hot summer’s day back in 1988 I was beginning to doubt my ability. Was I ever going to get out of Wales and reach home.

I was learning the hard way. Trying to hitch when everyone else was going away on holiday was proving to be a bad idea. The previous day, hitching had been dead easy but today cars were suddenly full of people and there was seemingly little appetite for picking up strangers – even though I was exactly the same person as the day before and I was smiling at every passing driver…

With no other help to draw on, I wasn’t going to give up. My luck had to change at some point. Or so I thought.

A slip of the tongue could be the downfall of months, or years, of research.

It could even result in the loss of intellectual property.

To prevent that from happening, Cagri Savran sometimes passes his material to the Purdue Research Foundation's Office of Technology Commercialization for a quick review before publishing a paper on research developments or having his students give a talk on their related work.

"These ideas didn't come easily. They come with a long time of thought and research," said Savran, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering who focuses on nanotechnology devices. "If you believe there is a potential for commercialization, you don't want to miss the opportunity."

As many universities that rank above it in research spending have been slashing budgets, the University of Utah has been rolling out a cushy welcome for new faculty members, who include an internationally known expert on medical-imaging analysis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brain researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities, and an engineering professor who develops nano-size sensors from Case Western Reserve University.

Companies that struggle with innovation often make up for it by adding features to existing products. They succumb to "feature creep" - the gradual and continuous addition of features and functions though nothing is truly new. While it may look improved, the added features make your product more complex, difficult to use, and more costly to produce. Over time, your core customers abandon you.

Here is an example - the Numi toilet by Kohler. At $6400, it is promoted as the top-of-the-line toilet with lots of high-tech bells and whistles:

* Custom bidet: User can control pressure, temperature and angle.
* Tankless design; dual flush
* Motion Sensor Lid: After 90 seconds of no movement, the toilet will close.
* Seat warmer
* Foot warmer: A vent beneath the bowl blows hot air to warm your feet and the cold tile beneath them.

Sometimes biotech really feels like an industry in danger of being left behind.

Take last Friday afternoon for example. I was at a networking reception at the University of Washington, chatting with undergraduates from all kinds of engineering fields about the job market. People were finding jobs, but nothing much to brag about, until I bumped into a couple of juniors majoring in computer science. They were marveling about their good luck, telling me stories that sounded like something out of 1999.

Campus legend has it that one computer science student at UW recently secured a $100,000 annual starting salary, a $40,000 signing bonus, and about $200,000 worth of stock from Google. The average computer science undergraduate is said to be getting about $85K to start. Word is that all computer science seniors have job offers, and some have multiple offers from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Zynga, Facebook, Salesforce.com, and others, says Pratik Prasad, a UW junior. This is consistent with the stories I hear from tech CEOs in Seattle, who say they are engaged in trench warfare with rivals to get the best young science and engineering talent.

M4 Engineering Inc., a small company in Long Beach, has figured out how to use tax dollars to prosper.

Not its tax dollars. The company — which provides structural analysis, consulting and software development for aerospace firms — has leveraged a string of federal research grants into products and services it sells to clients.

It has even spun off a small company, Modular Wind Energy Inc. of Huntington Beach, which uses M4's federally funded research to develop lighter and cheaper blades for wind turbines.

"What we have tried to do is take that money from the government and, sure, do good research for the problem the government is interested in, but also try to turn that into something much bigger, said Kevin Roughen, M4's vice president.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested Sunday that all immigrants come to Detroit as a way to repopulate the city — a concept that sparked sharply divided opinions.

Critics said it's an insane idea for a city battered longest by the recession and double-digit unemployment rates.

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"There are no jobs to be had here," said Mary Ann Robertson, a Utica resident. "There are no industries here."

Others pondered the possibility of Motown rivaling the Big Apple. "We can be just as much a melting pot for America as New York is," said Adrian Green, 41, a lifelong Detroiter. "Anything that could bolster our (population) and our tax base, I am certainly in favor of.

I've been thinking a lot about the differences between first time and serial entrepreneurs. We invest in both and do not have a preference betweeen the two. But there are significant differences.

The best first time entrepreneurs have been stewing on their idea for quite a while. It is a personal passion of theirs and they bring to it a fresh take, a stubborn insistence on their approach, and they obsess about the idea 24/7. They often get the right product into the market at the right time and they capture the user's attention and usage with that product/market fit.

Technology Review IT editor Erica Naone visits a Stop & Shop in Braintree, Massachusetts, to test Modiv Media’s new iPhone app. This lets consumers shop using a smart phone and serves up personalized offers when they do.

My New Year's resolution for 2011, which didn't last long, was to spend the year avoiding comparisons between Boston and other centers of innovation, especially Silicon Valley.

But this week, my wonderful editor at the Globe asked me to put together a few pieces on "the road to awesome," focusing on ways that Boston could do a better job of holding onto young, post-collegiate entrepreneurs. And it's hard to do that without comparing the Hub to two places with pretty powerful tractor beams right now: New York and the Bay area.

The Globe also asked a few young entrepreneurs to offer up their takes on what Boston could do better:

- MIT Sloan alum Amanda Peyton: "Offer more 'awesome' cash"

In the end, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln lost its bid to remain in the exclusive Association of American Universities by just two votes.

Nebraska’s chancellor, Harvey Perlman, learned the institution’s fate on April 26 after an angry, isolating month in which he had fought to keep it in the association. A two-thirds majority was needed to remove Nebraska, and 44 ended up voting against the institution during a balloting period that was extended to solicit votes from as many members as possible.

Three days later, on April 29, Mr. Perlman sent an e-mail to the Lincoln campus announcing the result: that after 102 years, the flagship university was out of the association that represents 62 of the most prestigious research universities in the United States and Canada.