MADISON – Somewhere along the evolutionary path from startups to mature businesses, many companies stop innovating.

That’s often unavoidable. Discovery and delivery can be incompatible concepts. As Maxwell Wessel wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review, “Big companies are really bad at innovation because they’re designed to be bad at innovation… When corporations reach maturity the measure of success is very different – it’s profit.”

There are exceptions to the rule, of course, especially in big companies that are learning how to strike a balance. Excellence in execution need not mean incompetence in innovation.

A ready example of a major company striving to remain innovative was on display in Madison last week when Jay Singer, a New York-based executive for MasterCard Worldwide, spoke to the Wisconsin Innovation Network. Singer’s presentation and his separate meetings with Madison-area startup companies demonstrated how some big companies aspire to walk the line.

Even though you may carry a bank-issued credit card from MasterCard, it’s not a financial institution. It’s essentially a technology company that provides networking, data storage, software, analytics, security and related services for financial institutions.

2013 could very well be the year of the startup IPO, but not if policymakers have anything to do with it.

National Venture Capital Association president Mark Heesen today cautioned that government's tight timeline for startups to have success, as well as tax policies that treat capital gains the same as ordinary income, could hinder promising new businesses from reaching their potential.

They could also impede an expansion of the venture capital industry that only seems natural with as much startup activity happening in cities throughout the nation. In fact, dozens of fast-growing companies are on the runway to go public or be acquired by a major corporation, Heesen said. It's only misguided government policy that could slow the exit process.

LEXINGTON, Ky. — The rivalry between Kentucky’s two best college basketball teams, which will face off in the N.C.A.A. semifinals on Saturday night, is nothing short of a state civil war. Team flags are flying from car windows, mayors have wagered, and a brawl between two fans, one of them hooked up to a dialysis machine, had to be stopped by the police.

But behind the competition on the court, there is a new collaboration in the economy. The mayors of the teams’ cities — Jim Gray in Lexington and Greg Fischer in Louisville — are using their positions to persuade their cities, long at odds, to cooperate.

Would you allocate more of society's resources to giving birth to more babies or to raising children well? Now, think about enterprise creation and the challenge of economic growth. Societies' leaders need to rebalance entrepreneurship policy towards scale, not start.

In recent years, we have been witnessing a significant global shift in attitudes towards entrepreneurship in countries around the globe. This is reflected in the dramatic proliferation of start-up programs: Start-up America, Start-up Chile, Start-up Russia, Start-up Britain, Start-up Weekend, and dozens of others. "Start-up" has replaced "Silicon" as the reigning entrepreneurship buzzword: There is hardly a country or city that is lacking a start-up program.

The Nutter administration is expected to announce Friday two initiatives, including a seed-capital fund aimed at supporting the city's growing entrepreneurial community.

Through the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., the city intends to invest up to $3 million in a new "Startup PHL Seed Fund," which would be managed by an outside professional investment firm. That money would need to be matched by private investors at least dollar for dollar, according to a request for proposals that the city intends to issue.

A handful of futurists, philosophers, and technophiles believe we are approaching what they call the “singularity”: a point in time when smart machines became much smarter, stronger, and faster than their creators, and then become self-conscious. If there’s any chance of this occurring, it’s worthwhile to ponder the consequences. But we do already, all the time—in existentially bleak scenarios like Blade Runner, the Terminator series, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (and its failed prequel Caprica).

The prospects are never pleasant. Robotic engineers in these worlds hardly seem to bother teaching their machines the kind of moral code that would keep them from turning and destroying us (that is, when they aren’t explicitly designed to do so). I wonder about this conceptual gap—convenient as it may be in narrative terms—given that Isaac Asimov, one of the forefathers of robot fiction invented just such a moral code. In the video above, he outlines it (with his odd pronunciation of “robot”). The code consists of three laws; in his fiction these are hardwired into each robot’s “positronic brain,” a fictional computer that gives robots something of a human-like consciousness.

It's not exactly news that Facebook continues its epic reign among social media sites - but it's still surprising just how much it dominates. According to data cobbled together in a new infographic from San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster's Socially Aware Blog, each month, visitors spend an average of 6.75 hours on Facebook. At first gloss, that may not sound like much, but that's almost double the amount of time users spend with Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ - combined. 

Beyond chipping away at work day productivity, Facebook is hugely popular as a multi-screen activity. Among TV viewers, 61% report cruising the Web while watching the tube and 29% report going on Facebook while watching TV. If you want more juicy data about how Americans are using the social web,

Holiday shopping is so awful, it’s no wonder so many of us suck at it.

It’s not just the crowds and the cold-weather germs and the screaming toddlers in all the stores. It’s the endless consternation and analysis paralysis that comes with all holiday gift-giving, whether brick-and-mortar or click-based. With all that pressure, how can anyone blame you for sending out a cheese grater and a pair of socks to your 9-year-old niece?

Lucky for you, we’ve got your back. Here’s the easy, painless way out: online stores that offer a limited, hand-picked selection of the best gifts for everyone on your list. No Amazonian breadth of options to confuse you; no SkyMall-esque tackiness; no toddlers; no pressure.

Entrepreneurs seeking protection for their ideas and inventions should understand the costs and risks involved--and first determine how a patent aligns with their business strategy.

After spending three years in law school, the complicated jargon in legal documents started to make sense and navigating a complex court system no longer seemed intimidating. But none of my training equipped me for the long and frustrating process of pursuing a U.S. patent as a young entrepreneur.

In 2004, I decided to pursue a patent for the adaptive technology behind the bar exam prep program I developed after my third year of law school. The software, which automatically adjusts to students’ strengths and weaknesses, is unlike any other program on the market--so I assumed the patent approval process would be fairly straightforward.

A confession: I don't know my Klout score.

A second confession: I don't want to know my Klout score.

A third confession: I'm a hypocrite. I'm almost always looking for ways to meaningfully assess how influential — positively and negatively — my colleagues, collaborators and co-workers are.

"Influence" increasingly is the coin of the organizational realm. Influence defies title, credential and seniority. Somebody may be smart, talented and hardworking but do they have influence? Are they perceived as people who can move collegial hearts and minds? Employees with influence — or with reputations for influence — enjoy understandable competitive advantages in the organizational marketplace. But who decides who has influence? And who decides how to measure it?

The universe may grow like a giant brain, according to a new computer simulation.

The results, published Nov.16 in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports, suggest that some undiscovered, fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small, from the electrical firing between brain cells and growth of social networks to the expansion of galaxies.

Entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. is up 60+ percent and at highest level since 2005, according to the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) U.S. Report

Entrepreneurship in the United States is soaring to new heights, according to the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) U.S. Report issued today by Babson College and Baruch College. With 12.3 percent of the U.S. adult population engaged in entrepreneurial activity, the U.S. experienced a 60+ percent increase in total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) from 2010 to 2011, matching the TEA level recorded in 2005. The dramatic increase follows significant drops reported in both 2009 and 2010. Further, the U.S. reported the highest TEA level among developed economies globally.

According to the Report, more than 29 million U.S. adults (18-64 years old) were starting or running new businesses in 2011. Moreover, nearly 40% of these entrepreneurs expected to create more than five new jobs in the next five years.

I’ve been advising and mentoring startups and growth companies for years, and find myself always pushing them to try something new, for the sake of growth and survival. When you try new things, you make mistakes, and I’ve seen many. Smart companies learn from their own mistakes, but some don’t pay enough attention to other people’s mistakes. In the spirit of saving you a few lifetimes of pain, here are some common mistakes that seem to happen routinely:

Wait until your company is up and growing before you formalize it. Some entrepreneurs can’t decide if they want to be a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) or a C-corporation, or they don’t have the money, so they put off doing anything until the first venture capital round, or until the first lawsuit occurs.

University-industry partnerships have never been more important in developing a knowledge-based economy. This makes it critical to understand the drivers and barriers to effective collaboration, says Tatiana Schofield

In today’s fast-moving business and commercial environment, university-industry collaborations are playing a critical role in helping countries, in particular the emerging economies, to develop and maintain a competitive advantage.

In recognition of this, national governments are formulating policies that foster university-industry partnerships, to encourage open innovation and accelerate technology commercialisation, stimulate national growth, improve competitiveness.

The life sciences industry has been challenged over the last several years with an economic environment that is not conducive to breeding new innovation. While things are slowly improving, reports abound of fewer investments in life science start-ups and fewer active investors in the sector. Many new ideas aren’t being developed—because the financial climate can’t support them. This could result in an innovation bottleneck in our industry pipeline as a whole, and one could argue that the next generation of new medicines, medical devices, and other healthcare products is at risk if we don’t do something to improve the environment in which they develop.

Research university administrators are understandably jittery about the fiscal cliff facing policy makers in Washington, given the prospect that federal budget cutbacks would shave -- if not savage -- government funds for academic research and development.

A report released Wednesday by the National Science Foundation provides a reminder about how painful the fall off the cliff might be. The agency's annual look at research spending by universities -- which is driven heavily by federal funds -- shows that R&D spending surged to its highest level ever in 2011, to $65.1 billion. That was up 6.3 percent from 2010's $61.2 billion, with both years' figures inflated by funds included in the economic stimulus law that Congress passed in 2009.

Troy Henikoff and I had lunch a month or so ago in Chicago and the conversation turned to convertible debt. I’d recently made an offer to invest in a company Troy was an investor in and the entrepreneur and I got tangled up in the definition of pre and post money in the context of existing convertible debt. In this case there were multiple traunches of convertible debt at different valuation caps. My offer was above the highest cap, but I interpreted the way the convertible debt, and pro-rata rights associated with it, worked differently than the entrepreneur did. Given the magnitude of the convertible debt, the way the debt was handled had a significant impact on the post money valuation dynamics. Ultimately, the entrepreneur and I couldn’t narrow the gap and we didn’t end up working together.

NEW YORK (AP) — The slow improvement in the economy gave a huge boost to entrepreneurship in the U.S. last year, according to a study released Thursday.

More than 29 million people were starting or running new businesses in 2011, the study by Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and Baruch College in New York shows. That was a 60 percent gain from 2010, when entrepreneurship was hurt by uncertainty about the economy.

The gain also matched the increase in entrepreneurship recorded in 2005, when the economy and small businesses were booming.

More than 100 startups applied by the Nov. 21 deadline to become part of the winter class of gener8tor, an accelerator program for young tech businesses, in Madison and Milwaukee.

Five to 10 companies will be chosen for the class, which will be held at the program’s Madison office, 1 E. Main St., and will run from Jan. 4 through March 28, co-founder Joe Kirgues said.

Henry Chesbrough, the father of open innovation, believes that in the future innovation communities will push the boundaries of open innovation. He cites GE as an early adopter of more open, customer-focused approaches that go beyond simply partnering with external suppliers to develop new products, but also to foster innovative new forms of community.

One unique strategy comes from GE’s energy business, which ran a crowdsourcing campaign that resulted in 70,000 ideas. The company made the unusual decision to appoint a community innovation manager, who has been working with community participants to keep them engaged and to find alternate uses for some of the promising ideas that didn’t make the short list of 23 ideas that were selected for funding and further development.