Everyone has a creative side, whether they can paint great masterpieces, write classic novels, make effective decisions or solve problems. In some people the creative side is supressed, but in others it is closer to the surface.

Whatever you want to have more creativity for, you can develop your creativity through hypnosis and reaching inside yourself for your hidden talents.

The following eleven steps will help you to develop your creativity.

* Do crosswords and other puzzles that exercise your brain. The more these require you to access your creative side, the more you will develop that side of your brain.

The Innovation Union is key to achieving the goals of the Europe 2020 Strategy for a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. It aims to improve conditions and access to finance for research and innovation in Europe, to ensure that innovative ideas can be turned into products and services that create growth and jobs.

As the state and U.S. economies sank, Michigan’s University Research Corridor grew in areas critical to the state’s resurgence: Educating more students and boosting research and technology gains, according to a new benchmark study.

The 2010 Empowering Michigan report shows URC partners Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University have improved in several key benchmarks since the first study in 2007. The study, comparing Michigan's URC with leading innovation clusters around the world, was conducted by Anderson Economic Group, building on data collected over the past three years.

After last month’s TechCrunch Disrupt, and to provide a business companion to the popular “Lean Startup” customer development methodology, this TC Teardown focuses not on how one specific company makes money but rather seeks to provide a breakdown of the main general ways consumer Internet startups try to make money. Consider it a guide to Internet business models. If you are currently thinking about or are in the process of developing your own consumer startup idea, these key business models will help give you a working knowledge of what it takes to get to $10 million in revenues (assuming you have a good product that the market wants).

(Before you post in the comments about how unique your startup is, this list is not meant to capture every consumer business permutation. There are always going to be exceptions. And the breakaway companies like Zynga, Groupon, Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, to name just a few, inevitably introduce nuances to pre-existing models.)

In November 2009, Ben Tseitlin was driving along on the 280 highway between San Francisco and Palo Alto when he noticed something weird. There was a Toyota Prius next to him with a weird spolier-like thing on the roof. And on top of that was some sort of spinning contraption. It was weird enough that Tseitlin decided to take a video of it and posted it to his Facebook page, guessing it was sort of test wind-powered Prius. Little did Ben know at the time, it was actually something much more.

What Tseitlin captured, of course, was the Google self-driving car. The secret project, which Google revealed for the first time today, is a combination of different technologies developed by Google that will allow a car to drive itself — yes, even on the highway. Google has disclosed that they’ve been testing these cars “recently“, but they’ve clearly been testing them for longer than that, as Tseitlin’s video proves. The fact that these specially-equipped Priuses (and one Audi TT) have racked up over 140,000 miles (1,000 of while have been completely human-free) on the road, suggests a longer cycle of testing as well.

This is the easiest way to get money from investors for your business idea: Be a person who has made millions of dollars for investors in the past.

But if you are unfortunately not that kind of person yet, what else can you do to tilt the odds in your favor? I’ve been asking local investors and entrepreneurs for their best advice about how to raise money for a new venture, especially for a first-time founder.

Israel may have transformed itself over the past decade into one of the world's vibrant economies, but innovation training is nonetheless sorely lacking in the nation's universities, according to Dr Milly Perry, director of the research authority at the Open University of Israel and CEO of OPMOP Ltd Technology Transfer Company.

She was speaking on 14 September at the OECD's Institutional Management in Higher Education general conference in Paris, titled Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing more with less.

"Israel has become known for its entrepreneurial activity, but the 'start-up nation' culture has actually not encouraged innovation in higher education," Perry said. "Innovation is seen as something nice to have, rather than a necessity, across the higher education system."

Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. in 1984 with $1,000 and an idea to build relationships directly with computer buyers. In 2010 his company earned $52.9 billion in fiscal net revenue, in a market that is more competitive than ever before.

Dell’s first rule to keeping an edge: failing.

“When you get a business that changes very quickly, you get some of that naturally,” he says. “You just have to change. To be successful, what you have to do is have an acceptance of risk and you have to be pretty explicit about that, because if you don’t accept risk, you don’t get any innovation. And that means part of risk is you have to accept failure because not everything works.”

The fog of diplomacy at Wednesday's EU-China Summit distracted onlookers from the critical issue facing Europe's future competitiveness: its ability to remain a global power in innovation.

With the event heavily over-shadowed by tension over Chinese currency policy and bilateral trade imbalances, there were no breakthroughs. Moreover, key issues on the agenda such as Beijing's reticence to open Chinese state purchasing procedures to European companies; and the EU's reluctance to recognize China as a "market economy" will not determine the destiny of the European continent anyway—the harnessing and application of knowledge will.

Europe's future as a world-leading innovation hub is already challenged by the rise of China, and the summit took scant measures to address this and seize what should be a very meaningful partnership. If Europe is to retain its economic pre-eminence, it must act urgently now to "lock-in" much greater science and technology-led business collaboration with China.

Before all of the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) lovers argue innovation never left Google, let me explain my understanding of the difference between innovation and invention. In my days as a researcher at 3M (NYSE: MMM), I learned invention is taking money and turning it into ideas while innovation is taking ideas and turning them into money. Having the coolest ideas at the end of the day doesn't make you an innovative company. It makes you inventive.

Under that lens, I have wondered for years how Google could spend so much time inventing great ideas without turning those inventions into profitable innovations. Google has all kinds of great gadgets such as Google Earth, Picasa, Translate, and even YouTube, but nothing beyond search has driven results to the bottom line yet. Advertising is still 97% of revenue, and search accounts for the vast majority of that revenue.

Cape Town - The City of Cape Town has partnered with Barcelona to develop a long-term strategy to increase the number of entrepreneurs.

Cape Town's economic director Mansoor Mohamed said on Thursday that the aim was to set up an “entrepreneurship ecosystem” in the city to make life easier for those starting small businesses.

“Everyone in Africa who has a business idea and needs access to entrepreneurship and innovation will know they can come to Cape Town, because we will have the best developed entrepreneurship ecosystem,” Mohamed said.

Thiruvananthapuram: Coconut palm still remains a tough tree to be conquered by machines even as the land of coconut is in desperate search for one due to the grim shortage of manual climbers.

Various devices developed by innovators to scale the tall tree proved far from successful during a competition-cum demonstration organised by Kerala Industries Department at a palm garden near here yesterday.

Of the 12 gadgets shortlisted for the contest, just a single one could progress beyond the half-way height of the tree but still failed to reach the summit and pluck the nuts.

Here’s some good news for entrepreneurs seeking financing: Big banks are starting to look more favorably on small business loans again. A growing number of large banks are taking a second look at small business loan applications that had previously been rejected, The Wall Street Journal reports.

In these “second look” programs, banks review rejected loan applications. Some banks are giving rejected applications a second look automatically; others will do so if the loan applicant requests it. Some banks focus on looking for credit report errors that may have hindered the applicant; others do a full review of the entire application package.

A lot of us are uncomfortable with the idea of self-promotion. We’ve been told that it’s “bad” and that if our product is worth it, other people will do our promoting for us. And that’s true, if you’re a mega brand. But people can’t promote what they don’t know about and, as a small business owner, the burden falls on you to make sure that people know you exist and what you’re up to. You do that by putting yourself out there and alerting people when your company does something great. If you won’t sing your own praises, then why would anyone else do it for you?

Unfortunately, the first step of self-promoting is convincing yourself that it’s OK. How do you do that? Here are some rules to live by.

Universities that grant doctoral degrees often have significantly faster Internet connections than other colleges and universities, and the bandwidth gap is expanding, according to a recent National Science Foundation survey.

The survey found that in 2008, the most recent year that data is available, nearly half of doctorate-granting institutions in the United States had bandwidth speeds of 1 gigabit per second or faster, compared with 25 percent of nondoctorate-granting institutions. A year earlier, 39 percent of doctoral institutions offered at least a 1 gigabit-per-second connection, compared with 20 percent of other universities.

How have cleantech investment theses’ changed in the past decade?

At Renewable Energy Finance Forum (REFF) West, veteran investors spoke about what they’ve learned.

“We went into [cleantech] with the notion that we have taken a lot of companies public [and] know what IPO management teams looks like,” said Stephan Dolezalek, Managing Director of VantagePoint Venture Partners. “Problem was, we were taking companies public at $90 million valuations that were still relative startups. Now we are taking companies public at $2-4 billion. You need a completely different management team. We have had to work much, much harder on getting management teams into these companies that can run multi-billion dollar global enterprises.”

We at ProfHacker are quite aware of the onset of the academic job market. That's why you've seen recent posts from Erin about the five things that helped her survive the job market and one from Heather about  keeping track of job postings. (Don't miss Heather's call yesterday for your tips on managing the job application process.) If you dig a bit deeper into the ProfHacker archives, you will be able to find posts from Nels offering ways to stand out on the job search; from Erin on using an NFL analogy to explain the academic job market; and from me last May advising you to get started new (then?) on preparing for the job market.

If I had to pick just one tool that helped me survive the three runs at the academic job market that I've had, it would be Interfolio. As Julie wrote previously, using Interfolio to manage your professional documents takes a lot of aches away from what will no doubt be a stressful period of your life. My favorite thing about Interfolio was that I was able to finish a cover letter to a school, upload it to Interfolio, and have the whole dossier package processing within 5 minutes.