Which brainstorming techniques should you use to attack your next innovation challenge? Here are the "super seven" that innovation consultant Bryan Mattimore says have the advantages of being easy to learn, flexible to adapt to different types of creative challenges and are diverse enough to deliver different types of ideas. Bryan W. Mattimore, in his new book Idea Stormers: How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs, outlines seven ideation techniques that consistently deliver excellent results and can be used to address nearly any kind of creative challenge:

Over recent years we have been tracking how companies identified as leading innovators subsequently perform in terms of growth in shareholder value. Linking innovation efficiency to out-performance against all major indices has proven the relationship that many across industry believe in and hope for: innovation pays. The latest round of analysis has just been completed and shows even greater performance than before.

Since 2012 we have been undertaking annual research on the financial returns gained from investing in stocks of the companies previously identified by the Innovation Leaders project. As shared previously, in a back-test undertaken in partnership with Bloomberg, a cross-sector portfolio of 20 major companies whose shares were held for two years after identification of their innovation prowess showed an annual return over the decade from April 2002 to 2012 with a CAGR of 14.5%. By comparison, taking just one leading market, over the same period average return for the S&P500 was 5%.

This isn’t Brian Loew’s first run at Internet success.

During the thick of the dot-com mania 20 years ago, Loew and some friends built an online publishing company called Worldweb.net. It had 150 employees and $15 million in revenue but, like many start-ups from the era, it never posted a profit.

Worldweb.net created website software in the Internet’s early days for Elle, Car and Driver, the ill-fated George magazine and other publications.

Image: Inspire chief executive Brian Loew’s nine-year-old medical-website business, based in Arlington, has 1.1 million members, 33 employees, nearly $10 million in revenue and will turn its first profit this year. (J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post)

It’s less than two months before his company’s initial product launch, and CEO Ric Fulop is excitedly showing off rows of stripped-down 3-D printers, several bulky microwave furnaces, and assorted small metal objects on a table for display. Behind a closed door, a team of industrial designers sit around a shared work desk, each facing a large screen. The wall behind them is papered with various possible looks for the startup’s ambitious products: 3-D printers that can fabricate metal parts cheaply and quickly enough to make the technology practical for widespread use in product design and manufacturing.

Image: GRANT CORNETT - https://www.technologyreview.com

Few people may recognize the name Norman Heatley. Even the Nobel Committee overlooked him when, in 1945, it awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine jointly to Alexander Fleming of St. Mary’s Hospital and Ernst Chain and Howard Florey of Oxford University for discovering the lifesaving antibiotic penicillin. But it was Heatley, working side by side with Chain and Florey, who devised the first methods for growing enough penicillin to study its chemical structure and activity, purifying it, and measuring its potency. Sir Henry Harris, who succeeded Florey as head of  Oxford’s Dunn School of Pathology, once summed up Heatley’s role by saying, “Without Fleming, no Chain or Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin.”

Europe’s top tech hubs tend to radiate from massive capital cities like London, Berlin and Paris. But the heart of European innovation isn’t a major metropolis –it’s a small city in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. That’s the conclusion of Reuters’ second annual ranking of Europe’s Most Innovative Universities, a list that identifies and ranks the educational institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies, and help drive the global economy (Compare all 100 schools here).

SAN FRANCISCO — While on the campaign trail last year, Donald J. Trump lamented the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and set his sights on companies like Apple to help rectify the situation. “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China,” he said.

On Wednesday, Apple appeared to meet President Trump halfway.

While it did not announce a new manufacturing facility with thousands of manufacturing jobs, Apple, the world’s most valuable public company, said it planned to dedicate resources to American job creation with a $1 billion fund to invest in advanced manufacturing in the United States. The company said it would announce the first investment from its new fund later this month.

(Jackson, Miss.) – Innovate Mississippi announces the launch of the new Code Mississippi program (www.codems.net), a strategic initiative that was created to help organize coding resources and bring coding leaders together within the state. Through the program’s initiatives, key partnerships, innovation and creativity, Code Mississippi can lead to an unprecedented tech boom across the state.

Coding, which is problem-solving using and/or creating computer programming and instructions, is “the problem-solving methodology of the future,” said Tony Jeff, president and CEO of Innovate Mississippi. “We want to make sure that anyone interested in coding – or who is already coding – is connected to other coders, jobs and resources within our state.”

Many entrepreneurs I know are confused by definition and need for an Advisory Board versus a Board of Directors. Some view both of these as a waste of time and burden on the CEO, while other founders surround themselves with insiders and cronies in an attempt to expedite and add credibility to their own interests. I suggest a few simple considerations will clarify the alternatives.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

The House of Representatives passed the Supporting America’s Innovators Act in order to boost private investment in small and medium businesses. The legislation changes a provision in the Investment Company Act of 1940, which required venture capital funds with more than 100 individual investors to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the new legislation, venture funds will not have to register with the SEC until they have more than 250 individual investors. 

In today’s busy world, convenience seems to outweigh consequence, especially with how people use their mobile devices. Using free public Wi-Fi networks, for example, comes with any number of serious security risks, yet surveys show that the overwhelming majority of Americans do it anyway. In a study by privatewifi.com, a whopping three-quarters of people admitted to connecting to their personal email while on public Wi-Fi.

Colleges and universities in urban areas have long been a crucial part of higher education. Today they serve not only those who live in their cities, but many from elsewhere attracted to the idea of going to college in an urban environment.

But what of the relationship between the colleges and universities and their localities? That is the subject of Universities and Their Cities: Urban Higher Education in America (Johns Hopkins University Press). The author, Steven J. Diner, has experience with the topic as a university leader and a scholar. He was chancellor of Rutgers University at Newark from 2002 to 2011 and is currently a professor there. Among his previous books is A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (University of North Carolina Press).

Image: https://www.insidehighered.com

The question of the future of the NZ Venture Investment Fund is the trigger for one of the most important questions right now in New Zealand – how early stage venture capital in R&D, innovation and technology is funded and managed.

It goes beyond the question of NZVIF, which is a legacy institution and served a different purpose in the past. NZVIF is, in effect two institutions – an investor of the $50 million Seed Coinvestment Fund co-investing alongside angel investors to date in over 230 seed and VC stage companies and manager of 11 secondary stakes in established funds.

Image: https://www.nbr.co.nz 

A new report from the Urban Institute assesses how the synthetic control method can be used for economic development policy evaluation.

The synthetic control method (SCM) creates “a synthetic control region that simulates what the outcome path of a region would be if it did not undergo a particular policy intervention.” The method involves creating a “hypothetical counterfactual region” based on combined predictor variables from specified “donor regions” – such as other states – and comparing outcome variables.

By taking a comprehensive approach to digitization, healthcare companies can deliver products and services more quickly, boost innovation in the industry, and hold down costs.

Healthcare companies (device manufacturers, payors, and providers, among others) have long relied on technology as a core utility—for tracking R&D efforts and patient information, scheduling payments and services, launching new care options, and generally keeping the lights on.

Every boss and decision maker is convinced that he or she is able to look objectively at any problem, and make an unbiased decision. Some typically worry about biases in their team, but rarely think of themselves as a source of bias. In reality, everyone has biases, and needs to make sure they are researching objective data, and listening to alternatives, before making a decision.

Immigration advocates claim that about half of the most lucrative startups in America were founded by immigrants. But it's complicated for a foreigner to start a company in America — there's no such thing as a startup visa.

That's why some entrepreneurs are "hacking the system" through a workaround that started as an experiment in Massachusetts and has expanded to five other states.

Image: Paulo Melo is a global entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. This visa workaround allowed Melo, originally from Portugal, to legally stay in the United States and build his business in Massachusetts. Asma Khalid/Asma Khalid/WBUR

It seems these days anytime the subject of internships make the news, it’s usually for the wrong reasons, whether it’s billion-dollar companies settling lawsuits brought by unpaid interns, or companies thinking it’s okay to pay interns with food. Even major job boards are now banning companies from listing unpaid internships. Yet despite the bad press lately, studies show that college students who intern are more likely to find full-time employment—especially if those internships are paid.

STLVentureWorks at Wellston Site Administrator, Vanessa Greene, will celebrate 10 years of service at the Innovation Centers run by the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership (SLEDP) in May. The five centers located throughout St. Louis City and St. Louis County provide on-site support, connections to capital, networking, customized mentoring and below-market rent to start-up and early-stage small to mid-sized businesses. Businesses graduate from the centers when they’ve grown large enough and profitable enough to be independent.

Image: http://eqstl.com

The unpaid internship, and all the coffee-making, dry clean-fetching cliches that come with it, has fallen out of favor. In its place, a new summer job has emerged -- one with real responsibility, and a real paycheck. Job reviews site Glassdoor's released the 25 best-paying internships in the U.S. that are currently taking applications, and every opening is better compensated than the average American job.