Most companies have embraced open innovation today, but their efforts are still very different. Some get it, some don’t and some are still trying.

I would guesstimate that about 20% of the bigger companies (more than 500 employees) understand open or external innovation in the sense that this is no longer a novelty within the company, but an approach that is now a key element in their innovation efforts. They are still experimenting with the right approach and the mix of internal and external resources, but they are on track to make this work.

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Everyone has great ideas. But it takes certain skills and temperament to turn those ideas into reality.

More Baby Boomers are discovering a way to do so. According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, a rising share of Boomers is turning to entrepreneurship. In 2003, 18.7 percent of new entrepreneurs were 55 to 64. In 2013, the latest data available, they accounted for 23.4 percent of new entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs have a lot of responsibility on their hands. While trying to launch a startup, they also must manage a team and maybe figure out how make the perfect pitch to investors. Unfortunately, there are only so many pots of coffee to consume before the eager new business owner hits a wall.

Believe it or not, successful people have bad days, too. The difference is they don’t let their feelings dictate their actions. Remembering that emotions are temporary, they have a singular focus -- to serve a larger vision.  

In order to keep my eye on the prize, even when huge setbacks occur, I always come back to the inspiration of my vision as the key to unlocking my motivation. These are some of my favorite quotes for one of those days.

I sometimes troll popular business websites. Don’t ask me why I do it to myself. It drives me nuts to see all the mind-numbingly generic fluff that passes for business advice these days.

It’s as if some evil genius sat down at the drawing board and said, “How do I get half the population to think they’re experts and the other half to read everything they write?” So he made cheap computers, smartphones, Web 2.0, WordPress, blogs and social media. Voila. Here we are.

Prof Piero Formica, senior research fellow at the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) in NUI Maynooth, explains ‘experimental entrepreneurship’ and the role of ignorance in creativity ahead of his appearance at the Open Innovation 2.0 conference in the Convention Centre Dublin.

Formica leads an international team of researchers on experimentation and simulation of high-expectation start-ups. He describes this as a ‘supercollider of ideas’, hoping to create a Big Bang of entrepreneurial energy from which new ideas and new ventures will emerge.

Image: OI2Conf: How the IVI at NUI Maynooth is creating a ‘supercollider of ideas’Prof Piero Formica, senior research fellow, Innovation Value Institute, NUI Maynooth, at Open Innovation 2.0 at the Convention Centre Dublin. Photo by Conor McCabe Photography 

You would think the sheer number of diseases and medical should yield plenty of opportunities to come up with new treatments. Yet there is a worrying lack of new billion-dollar "blockbuster" medicines in the pharma sector.

The recent tragic outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which showed that there were only a few experimental treatments available for a condition first diagnosed decades before, has shone a light on some of the reasons the pace of innovation in the industry may be slowing.

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Owning a business can be challenging and stressful, and most certainly can take its toll. Here are a few tips for remaining happy in the workplace, inspired by Purpose Fairy’s guide to happiness:

1. Embrace Change

Change is good and sometimes necessary. Being cemented in place while the rest of the world continues to zoom by could cost you dearly in the business world. With half of the working adults in the US doubling as business owners, the ability to adapt can help your business grow and stand out.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.

The robot applies fertilizer while the plant is rapidly growing and needs it most. This eliminates the need for using tractors, which can damage the  high stalks, and reduces the amount of fertilizer needed earlier in the season, says Kent Cavender-Bares, CEO of the company, Rowbot. Further, by reducing the fertilizer, the robot reduces the amount of nitrogen that can end up polluting waterways after rainstorms.

Image: Farm bot: This robot rolls between corn rows, applying nitrogen fertilizer to mature plants, and using laser-scanning to avoid hitting stalks.

It’s no surprise that social-media campaigns can raise awareness of an issue, but the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge may be unprecedented in its impact on a relatively rare disease. The campaign, in which participants must donate to an ALS cause or take videos of themselves being doused in ice, has gone viral since it began in late June. But it has also generated controversy, with some questioning the attention and flood of cash for a disease that affects a small number of people.

Image: Challenge accepted: Pete Frates, who suffers from ALS, and who helped popularize the ice bucket challenge, gets doused at Fenway in Boston.

Please join the Science and National Laboratory Caucus and the Center for Clean Energy Innovation for a breakfast briefing on the value of the Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratory system in driving innovation and economic growth.

Since the 1940’s, the DOE National Laboratory system has been in the vanguard of America’s global innovation leadership. While their initial mission centered around the Manhattan Project, the Labs now conduct more than $12.5 billion in publicly funded research and development (R&D) on a wide range of national issues, including scientific discovery, high performance computing, energy innovation, manufacturing, and national security. In addition, the Labs collaborate with industry and universities, bringing its world-class capabilities to solve private sector and academic problems.

With a recent boom in healthcare IPOs, who are healthcare’s top institutional investors? Using our Investor Mosaic predictive algorithms, which consider factors such as past performance, network strength (who they know), selection aptitude and brand among other factors, we wanted to offer a statistical assessment.

For this analysis, we looked at all VC and PE investors with investments in at least 10 healthcare companies since 2008 and where the firm made more than 50% of their investments in the healthcare sector.

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A new report published by PitchBook Data and titled Top Universities for VC-backed Entrepreneurs has placed Stanford University and Harvard University at the top spots globally.

A total 378 undergrad entrepreneurs at Stanford, spread out over 309 companies, managed to attract a combined sum of nearly $3.52bn in venture capital between August 2009 and August 2014. Harvard’s 352 postgrad entrepreneurs, from 312 companies, secured almost $4.24bn in the same period.

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Any mention of the Sixties elicits an immediate response: hippies, Vietnam protests, Woodstock, sexual freedom, and psychedelic drugs. But along with all of that something quite dramatic happened to corporate America as well, and it started showing up in the data in 1960. It was the first salvo in an economic revolution, one that was largely in keeping with the above phenomena: the rise of talent.

As I describe in my article in this month’s HBR, up to 1960, the U.S. economy had evolved at a glacial pace and had exhibited remarkably narrow and limited creative intensity.  

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All of our companies are digital now – or quickly becoming that way. Almost any enterprise you can think of, no matter the industry or sector, is trying (or being pressured by competitors) to use new technology to harness the vast new oceans of data being generated by smartphones, sensors, digital cameras, GPS devices, and myriad other sources of information originating from customers and markets.

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(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) Sept. 10, 2014 ­– Entrepreneurial hubs ­– vital to the U.S. economy and individual communities ­– spring up and thrive when they are buoyed by support networks. Yet, little study has been dedicated to understanding what it takes to establish these favorable local ecosystems.

"Examining the Connections within the Startup Ecosystem: A Case Study of St. Louis," released today by the Kauffman Foundation, reports on the elements necessary for creating a nurturing entrepreneurial environment. Most important, it found, are the connections and relationships that pull support organizations, new entrepreneurs and experienced entrepreneurs together in a way that helps founders get the mentoring and information that most benefits the company at its particular stage of development.

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Cameron Teitelman, founder and CEO of StartX, describes how the nonprofit organization's metric for success is more than the market value that startups achieve. Besides counting up acquisitions and the dollar amounts invested in the companies, Teitelman says StartX, in keeping with its educational mission, measures the skills that founders gain in the accelerator program and the impact of those skills on their startup.

Leah Busque, founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, discusses how performance metrics and customer traction were measured during seed-round fundraising. She says the key then was identifying the right metrics and figuring out how fast goals could be reached.

According to a report (PDF) from the National Employment Law Project, the number of U.S. workers working in temporary jobs has reached an all-time high of 2.8 million people.

As the holiday shopping season approaches, your small business might be planning on hiring some temporary workers. But while you’re relying heavily on those temps, they may not feel so passionately about your business. In fact, since temporary workers are often lower-paid than other employees, they might be quite disengaged.

The words entrepreneur and entrepreneurship are holding us hostage; they are even stimulating inaction because the words conjure images of heroes and empire builders. I want to move away from the simple view of entrepreneurship as a static and finite act of starting a business and shift our focus to entrepreneuring – creating something new (or at least better than what already exists). Yes, this is a somewhat Schumpeterian “creative destruction” view, but I also want to draw attention to the part of speech and my intentional use of a verb. Verbs are words that show action or doing. Entrepreneuring – creating new businesses, new processes, new ways of doing things, new markets, new products, new services.