Small businesses are no longer cutting edge by calling themselves “green.” Big corporations like Wal-Mart and Nike down to the corner café are cultivating a greener image as consumer demand for environmentally responsible products and operations quickly goes mainstream.

What this means: Businesses genuinely trying to limit their environmental toll must now work harder to authenticate their green practices and convince consumers they’re for real – not just throwing around green lingo.

The next phase of green business evolution will focus on businesses being more earnest an all-encompassing about their environmental sustainability practices and marketing. Here, then, are some green trends to pay attention to in 2010.

In order to be part of the future world order India is working towards a knowledge economy. In keeping with its mission, the government has set a target to create a critical mass of people that would propel the knowledge economy. This critical mass is envisaged as the wealth of the nation and needless to say education will drive this wealth creation.

However, Kapil Sibal, union human resource development minister, pointed out that at the outset it is important to have a precise understanding of the concept of wealth in the context of knowledge economy. "The real success of the knowledge economy would depend on the quality of wealth and not the quantity. And quality can only be achieved by having people who have an orientation towards research and innovation," Sibal said while speaking at a session on ‘Changing face of Indian Education System’ organised by FICCI Ladies Organisation (FLO).

One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government.

These backgrounds give a clue that Senor and Singer aim beyond questions of how to be a successful entrepreneur or high-tech executive. In fact, their book is a serious investigation of the social, historical, and psychological traits that produce extraordinarily creative people--and significantly, creative people who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the potential to change the world.

The book has garnered a fair amount of news coverage, but still not as much as it deserves, in my opinion. It took me only about three hours to read, and I highly recommend it as a refreshing--but not necessarily reassuring--perspective on a country that is profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented by media outside its diminutive borders.

Everyone surely owns an innovative product that has its roots in a university lab, or knows someone that has benefited from the presence of start-ups that formed through the dissemination of knowledge and technologies from the university to the marketplace. Universities have been the lifeblood of many vibrant economies, such as Silicon Valley, whose engine is Stanford University. A key question, therefore, is whether we are maximizing the positive economy-wide impact of these engines for knowledge, innovation, jobs and competitiveness.

Several testimonies and studies suggest the answer to that question is negative. For example, Krisztina Holly, vice provost for innovation at the University of Southern California and former founding executive director of MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, recently wrote for CNN: “Currently, the federal government is investing nearly $50 billion a year on university research -- yet barely a dime on university programs to help translate the most promising ideas into new businesses and employment opportunities. That's like turning up the water pressure but never opening up the faucet.”

BEIJING, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- As China celebrates the arrival of the new lunar year, the Year of the Tiger, the world hopes China's economy will roar again in 2010, after it helped pull the global economy out of recession in 2009, the Year of the Ox.

The world's third largest economy will become a "real tiger" when the Chinese government successfully restructures the nation's economy, a task the authorities have made a priority, as evidenced by a string of recent comments by top leaders, analysts say.

In early January, President Hu Jintao called on the whole nation to strive to accelerate the adjustment of China's economic development pattern, to promote sound and fast economic and social development.

Workshop in Pisa, Italy, 15-16 May 2010,

Conference organisers: Mariana Mazzucato and Luigi Orsenigo

Organised by DIME, the Open University/IKD Centre (www.open.ac.uk/ikd) , and the EC FP7 FINNOV project on Finance, Innovation and Growth (www.finnov-fp7.eu)

The workshop will focus on the relationship between innovation and inequality - an old theme which had been long forgotten until recently. We plan to bring together innovation economists, labor economists, and health economists to bang heads about different dimensions of inequality that are possibly linked to innovation, beyond the usual indicators of income and wealth. One of the key sessions will focus on recent sectoral work on innovation in the pharmaceutical industry and its relationship to ‘access’ to health services (an important new indicator of inequality). Our aim is to consider this work in the context of its contribution to a more general discussion on innovation and inequality--different dimensions and indicators--as well as factors around the relationship between financial markets and inequality. We want the conference to be challenging and lively, keeping a high standard of quality--and to be focussed especially around discussion and policy implications.

Over the past eighteen months I’ve [Brad Feld] gotten to know Bill Warner through my work with the Boston program of TechStars. Bill was a well known entrepreneur when I lived in Boston between 1983 and 1995 – he’d founded Avid which is one of the famous MIT software companies to come out of the 1980’s and the subsequently founded Wildfire Communications with Rich Miner, now of Google Ventures and another great entrepreneur in Boston that I’ve gotten to know over the past year.

When I met Bill I was captivated by his deep desire to see the Boston entrepreneurial scene – especially around software and Internet – get re-energized. He was clear that the history of Boston was rich with entrepreneurial success and was sick of all of the anti-Boston bias coming from folks, especially on the west coast. I’ve watched Bill step up and take a huge leadership role in this effort and in one short year see it paying dividends already.

Yesterday, Bill wrote two great blog posts that should be required reading for anyone in the tech economy in Massachusetts and anyone in a city that aspires to have a long term growing innovation economy.

For many small business owners getting a write-up in Entrepreneur magazine is the holy grail of media coverage. A few lines in the magazine can make all those sleepless nights, hard work, and determination seem rewarded. No trophies or plaques required. So what does it take to secure this much coveted ink?

Aronado Placencia, host of the popular web show StartupLucky, sat down with Amy “Queen of the Twitch” Cosper, Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and asked just that.  Amy was incredibly generous with her time and schooled us all in the art of getting buzz from Entrepreneur Magazine.  Make sure you have your pad and pencil ready, there’s lots to learn.

I’ve [Darren Wesemann] been evangelizing a theme for the past several months at SunGard that describes where I believe software is going. I call it “shorten the distance”, referring to the gap between the identification of a need and the consumption of a delivered solution that meets that need with realized value to the end-user. The distance between needs and solutions in a software context shortens with each improvement in design, construction, testing, deployment and networking technologies, however the concept of software ecosystems is shortening this distance with tremendous speed.

Shortening the distance from a software perspective involves a fundamental shift in how development occurs. A software ecosystem leverages an open platform and a community of contributors including consumers, (such as the AppExchange, App Store, FaceBook Apps, Open Source repositories, etc). I think of the power of software ecosystems in terms of The Wisdom of Crowds (why the many are smarter than the few). When an environment exists where contributions can be contributed and can be consumed, the overall realized value is exponentially greater than the proprietary and closed approach. Look for software ecosystems in the vendors you depend upon, because active communities will continually drive shorter distances between needs and realized value.

You might be wondering what’s going on with Commercialisation Australia since the program was officially launched in December.

Last week, we received a tip-off that the job ads have been posted and the recruitment scouts have been dispatched to find a new CEO to replace interim boss Tricia Berman. If anyone is able to find a copy (or screengrab) of these advertisements, we’re keen to know what skills the suitable applicant is expected to possess.

This is because the CEO role for Commercialisation Australia is not a post that will be easy to fill.

Critics are likely to predict that the position will go to a ’seasoned’ bureaucrat or university academic, rather than a private sector ‘mover and shaper’ (please note my deliberate use of ‘p’ and not ‘k’). The expectation would hardly be unjustified given the raft of ‘panel’ and ‘board’ positions recently allocated to ‘wonks’ and ‘boffins’ in the commercialisation space, arguably at the expense of experienced private sector professionals.

Yet this CEO role is a complex one that straddles public policy, economic and commercial deliverables.

As in any budget there are winners and losers, but for the tech-based economic development community, there are far more winners than losers in the Obama Administration's FY11 budget proposal.

Percentages referenced in this summary reflect the change from FY10 appropriations.

Among the winners: The National Science Foundation, NIST laboratories, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science continue on the path to doubling their budgets. The Administration tries to move regional innovation and clusters forward with proposals in a number of agencies, including:

As a patent attorney specializing in high-tech companies, Dale B. Halling was used to working with start-ups trying to change the world.

In the 1990s, he says, entrepreneurs would come to his office with plans for businesses that held the potential to completely redefine a market. But with the technology downturn of 2000-2001, Halling saw a change. Business plans by start-up companies were less aggressive, less groundbreaking.

“Instead of trying to change a whole area of a technology and go public, these companies were looking to develop incremental changes in technology and be bought out by an existing company,” he said. And that remained the same through the decade.

HBO ran a program on preparations by four-time NASCAR Nextel Cup Champion Jimmie Johnson and his team for racing in the 2010 Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway.

At the first 2010 team meeting, Johnson's crew chief Chad Knaus called the team's attention to the bare walls in the meeting room. He highlighted the absence of all the awards and pictures celebrating the team's fourth NASCAR championship in 2009. Knaus let the team know it is on the hook to perform at a level in 2010 to allow them to fill the walls once again with racing successes.

Maybe a move like that is easier when you've won 4 NASCAR championships in a row!

But it's a great reminder for any of us:

• Don't rest on your laurels. Instead, get motivated for the successes that lie ahead of you.

Capital market vision is important as it tells us where we want our markets to head tomorrow.

At the recent 15 year anniversary of the SIBIU Futures Exchange, Romania, I [Mukul Pal] met Professor Gabriela Anghelache. She heads the Securities Market Commission for Romania and is a highly regarded woman for her efforts to develop the capital markets. Being well connected with capital market participants, she also queried me on my capital market vision and told me to ponder till we met the next time. On one side I was elated that my opinion mattered to her and on the other side it set me thinking. Capital market vision was more important than forecasting, trading, economic cycles, as it tells us where we want our markets (an embodiment of society) to head tomorrow.

The question took me back to the Bombay Stock Exchange training institute. My derivatives training started with the question, what is more risky a future or the spot. Being the basic program, I had to spend more than a few minutes explaining how a 20 per cent move on derivatives could wipe the trader out. The thoughts took me back to my early days with Nifty Futures. Many incidents flashed in front of me. Early 2000, I asked a senior colleague, Rajiv Handa from Indiabulls (brokerage house) early basement days.

Cisco CEO John Chambers’ optimism on tech’s rebound from the lagging economy was tempered this week by the findings of a group of Silicon Valley nonprofits.

A report by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Joint Venture concluded that The Valley will enter a “new phase of uncertainty” coming out of the recession due to high unemployment, global competition and curtailed investment.

Chambers said technology would be among the first industries to recover coming out of the downturn. Cisco even plans to hire 2,000 to 3,000 employees — perhaps more than the number recently cut loose from the router king.

At age 42, Dr. Jeffrey A. Cadeddu felt like a dinosaur in urologic surgery. He was trained to take out cancerous prostates the traditional laparoscopic way: making small incisions in the abdomen and inserting tools with his own hands to slice out the organ.

But now, patient after patient was walking away. They did not want that kind of surgery. They wanted surgery by a robot, controlled by a physician not necessarily even in the operating room, face buried in a console, working the robot’s arms with remote controls.

“Patients interview you,” said Dr. Cadeddu, a urologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “They say: ‘Do you use the robot? O.K., well, thank you.’ ” And they leave.

35 new “spin-out companies” came from Irish third-level colleges in 2009. This is according to new figures from the Irish Universities Association (IUA).

The companies were created directly from campus research, mostly in the information technology sector, and bioscience or food areas.

The data covers 10 Irish academic institutions:

University College Dublin, University College Cork, University of Limerick, Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway, NUI Maynooth, Dublin City University, Waterford Institute of Technology, Dublin Institute of Technology and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

CRUISE the blighted streets that shoot off in either direction from 8 Mile Road, and the scars of the automotive crisis abound. “For sale” signs adorn the front of long-shuttered metal, paint and tool-and-die shops. And at factories still in business, the small number of cars in the parking lots testify that the shops are working below capacity.

But pull into the bustling headquarters of W Industries, a compound of imposing black structures at 8 Mile and Hoover Street, and you’ll encounter a more hopeful vision of Detroit’s future. Once an exclusive supplier to the auto industry, this machine tool and parts company is rolling in new business.

In one section of the cavernous shop floor, machinists use powerful lasers to slice thick steel plates. They’re making parts for Humvees and Stryker combat vehicles destined for Afghanistan and Iraq.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio Third Frontier backers are pulling out the big names — and hoping for the big bucks — for a campaign aimed at getting voters to approve a $700 million bond issue to renew the state’s biggest economic development project during the May 4 primary election.

Jo Ann Davidson, the first woman speaker of the Ohio House in the mid-1990s and c0-chair of the National Republican Committee; and David Wilhelm, the Athens, Ohio, native best known for managing Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign who’s also a venture capitalist and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, will co-chair the still Third Frontier campaign, said Dorothy Baunach, special adviser on the program to the Ohio Business Roundtable (pdf).

Cleveland attorney (Tucker, Elllis & West) and political campaign veteran Matthew Cox will manage the campaign, which though not officially begun hopes to raise $3.5 million, starting with roundtable members, said Baunach, founding president of NorTech, the technology economic development organization in Northeast Ohio.

Instead of a utility patent, a provisional patent or a trademark could be a better first step.

Two great tools for inventors that won't break your bank account: provisional patent applications and trademarks.

Successfully licensing an invention or taking a product to market requires research and the ability to talk to people about your invention. It is impossible for a manufacturer or retail buyer to commit to a product without seeing it.

For good reason, many inventors are reluctant to share their invention with people they don't know. Further, once an invention is shared publicly, international patent rights can be lost, and the one-year timeline within which a U.S. patent application must be filed generally has begun to tick. For this reason, many inventors rush out and file a full-blown, utility patent application. That addresses the uncertainties and also enables inventors to alert people that their invention is "patent pending."