Anyone can innovate once. All it takes is a good idea, some hard work, sufficient resources, and a little bit of luck.

However, today’s business environment demands ongoing innovation to stay ahead of the pack. To make innovation a way of life for your company, get to work developing these five leadership skills:

1. Challenge your assumptions The biggest enemy of innovation is the unspoken attitudes and beliefs we cling to about our customers, markets and businesses. And the more success we achieve based on those assumptions, the more we tend to focus on protecting the status quo versus exploring what could be.

Leaders are looking for new ways to create jobs. Gallup's path to creating sustainable jobs focuses on identifying and fostering entrepreneurial talent, empowering small business owners to address barriers to growth, building entrepreneurial capacity in early stage enterprises, and tracking economic energy at the city and regional level.

Identifying and Engaging Entrepreneurial Talent

Gallup has identified 10 functional demands of entrepreneurship -- that is, what an individual needs to be a successful entrepreneur. Gallup's Functional Demands of Entrepreneurship (FDE) helps each existing or prospective entrepreneur understand their own ability to meet these demands and to identify those who are most likely to be successful in growing sustainable businesses. The FDE assessment also identifies entrepreneurial talent among youth in an effort to sustain long-term economic growth by developing of a talent pipeline.

Questions are the expressive, probing language for growing others; listening is the receptive, facilitating language for growing others. These two complementary approaches form a continuous growth conversation loop. The deeper the questions, the deeper the listening; the deeper the listening, the deeper the next question. As we dig together with each tool, we mutually excavate new discoveries. As a result, the learning is never one-sided; it is a co-created process that engenders empathy, trust, and collaboration.

Online education is now available for everyone. Parents can home school their children from the moment they start kindergarten until they graduate from high school. Online colleges and universities continue to gain legitimacy as more and more people pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees via the Internet. Schools such as the University of Phoenix no longer stand alone as the only credible online institutions of higher learning.

Another trend in online education is e-textbooks. E-textbooks like the iBooks editions offered in Apple’s Online Education center make it easier and more affordable for educators to provide students with relevant, up-to-date resources. Students can carry tablets instead of mountains of heavy textbooks. Teachers no longer have to wait for new editions to come out. E-textbooks can be updated in minutes whereas their printed counterparts can take months.

Lee Lin is the cofounder of RentHop, which helps apartment seekers cut through the clutter of real estate listings by assigning a “HopScore” to listings, helping to surface the highest quality listings. Previously focused on the New York market, RentHop has in the past few months expanded into Boston and Chicago. As Lin explains, the course his company took pivoted greatly when he and his cofounder decided to pound the pavement for a month as real estate brokers themselves.

Since 1986, I've asked 10,000 people where and when they get their best ideas. Less than 2% have said "the workplace."

Based on my 25 years of working with a ton of innovation-seeking organizations, here's my take on WHY:

1. Too much to do, not enough time.

2. Too many distractions and interruptions.

3. You work in a risk averse organization.

4. Sleep deprivation.

5. Mental clutter.

Just how expensive has Kendall Square office space become? So expensive that some startups are finding it easier and cheaper to rent a luxury apartment in the neighborhood than compete for commercial space alongside Amazon, Staples, Google, and a zillion small biotechs.

I went to visit Yesware last week at Archstone Kendall Square to see what it looks like when an eight-person company moves into a two-bedroom apartment. Yesware helps salespeople manage their e-mail communications with prospective customers; the company raised $1 million last year from Google Ventures and Foundry Group.

Australia has a higher start-up rate than any other developed country except the United States, new research shows, with one in ten of all Australians involved in an early stage enterprise.

The research was compiled by the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship (ACE), located at Queensland University of Technology, in partnership with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM).

Last year, GEM interviewed more than 140,000 adults in more than 50 countries. By surveying the adult population, GEM identifies entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of business creation.

ACE participated as the Australian GEM partner, surveying 2,000 Australian adults.

New York (CNN) -- Todd Park's job is to unleash the power of innovation inside the oh-so change-resistant walls of government, and he appears to love it.

"It's just awesome, awesome, awesome stuff," he told an audience composed primarily of tech geeks at the Social Good Summit being held here this weekend at the 92nd Street Y.

Henry Chesbrough published the first of his three books on Open Innovation (OI) in 2003. Since then, OI has steadily grown to become a widely accepted and much-lauded model of innovation management. At the highest level, the model was founded on the theory that companies could reinvigorate stagnating innovation processes by engaging beyond the four walls of the enterprise—trading their unused intellectual property and sourcing new ideas from third parties.

Early Inspiration

Chesbrough’s views on OI were formed, in part, by research he conducted during the mid-1980s at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.

The month has been big on innovation, from the “Titans of Innovation” series at Seattle Center to the Pacific Northwest Innovation Summit.

“Innovation” is the economic coinage of the moment in nearly every state and metro area outside of the prospering Oil Patch, as they struggle with the aftermath of the recession. The Puget Sound region is among the fortunate places where it’s more than a word or aspiration.

Innovation here extends far beyond the geeky precincts of software engineering and biomedical research, as critical as those are. It goes beyond Boeing and one of the world’s top aerospace clusters. It’s happening at Nordstrom and REI, Starbucks and Paccar. Amazon is moving beyond retail to reinvent fundamental business models as a technology company.

The other day I took part in an event at the spanking new Google headquarters in Covent Garden. Like the company’s other offices, this one caters for every need that fashionable young people allegedly have, with its dance studio, luminous orange shower rooms and allotments for growing vegetables.

“It’s simply awesome,” is the verdict of the designers, Penson. This seems a little immodest but at least it is accurate. The office is awesome – in much the same way as a vengeful god is. Within five minutes of gliding up in the lift, my heart was filled with wonder – and terror.

Creating a startup, or managing any business, is all about problem solving. Some people are good at it and some are not – independent of their IQ or their book smarts (there may even be an inverse relationship here). Yet I’m convinced that problem solving is a learnable trait, rather than just a birthright.

Entrepreneurs who are great problem solvers within any business are the best prepared to solve their customers’ needs effectively as well. In fact, every business is about solutions to customer problems – no problems, no business. Problems are an everyday part of every business and personal environment.

Successful businesses have one thing in common: They change, and they change well. But while change is necessary, volatility can make or break a company in today’s tumultuous business world. Progressing to the “next level” is a goal of many, but an outcome for few; old patterns simply don’t apply anymore.

Make sure your business faces a future of possibility by doing these five things:

1) Realize that good is the enemy of great. It’s easy to become complacent when things are going well; many firms see no reason to change if they’re maintaining the status quo. Then, they realize – too late – that the world has been changing, but they just didn’t care to see. Instead, anticipate change and embrace the potential it holds for your company. Regardless of the current level of your business, there is always room for growth.

The last two years has seen an explosion in the number of start-up incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces in Australia, such as Angel Cube, Startmate and PushStart, to name a few.  

The USA, however, remains the undisputed leader when it comes to start-up collectives that invest small amounts of money into new ventures and then ply them with expert knowledge and industry links in order to turn them into market-leading businesses.  

These hubs are no longer out of the reach of Australian start-ups, as demonstrated by Sydney-based tech start-up Peeractive, which recently became the first Australian company to be admitted into US accelerator program DreamIt Ventures.  

Has crowdfunding’s lustre already worn off?

There’s no doubt that crowdfunding has blown up. In 2009, crowdfunded projects raised $530 million worldwide; in 2012, research firm Massolution projects that they will raise $2.8 billion.

But as more people get in on this trend both on the project creation side and on the investing side, more problems are cropping up, demonstrating the pitfalls of crowdfunding both as a way to seek investment and as a way to invest.

If you sift through recent employment figures in the United States, you'll find an intriguing trend: a steady uptick in the number of people leaving their jobs to go to work with new companies. For several years workers held on to their positions thanks to the recession, but we're starting to see employees testing the waters, especially at the managerial level. This raises an important question. How will you respond when opportunity knocks — and how can you prepare for success once it does?

We all know of people who have jumped ship and found great success in a new company. Less visible are those who fail or flame out when they make the change. Although the figures are elusive, the majority of data I've seen suggests that 40 to 50 percent of new hires at the middle level of management and above have not succeeded in their new companies 24 months after hire. That means you have about a one out of two chance that things will work out when you join a new company in a managerial position. So, what can you do to shift the odds to your favor?

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (EU), has set out a strategy to increase the EU's international cooperation and capacity building in science and innovation, including boosting partnerships with emerging economies and developing countries.

Despite progress in the EU's international science activities, "critical mass is lacking in many cases and the strategy driving the development of the actions is not always clear", according to a report released by the Commission this week (17 September).

To change this — and to attract scientific talent, tackle global societal challenges and support the EU's external policies — the Commission sets out a strategic approach in its report, 'Enhancing and focusing EU international cooperation in research and innovation: A strategic approach'. This will include the use of science diplomacy as an "instrument of soft power and a mechanism for improving relations with key countries and regions".

Several venture firms globally have raised or are raising funds this year in the $200 million to $400 million range dedicated to life sciences, biotech, and medicine, while others have raised large, diversified funds with big chunks dedicated to those fields.

The fundraising builds off a rebound in life-sciences investing last year, when $367.6 million in venture money was invested in healthcare services, up 41 percent from 2010; $2.82 billion went to medical devices and equipment, up 17 percent from 2010; and $4.82 billion went into biotechnology, up 24 percent from 2010.