Birmingham Science City (BSC) is not unique in thinking in terms of its local innovation ecosystem (much has been written about the concept for several years – try Googling the term for some examples) but our local ecosystem is unique.  Like biological ecosystems, different innovation ecosystems share some common features and needs,  but each will have a different set of conditions and mix of components and will therefore have particular combinations of requirements and interactions to enable it to thrive.  Supporting organisations need to be in tune with these local needs.  Furthermore, to thrive innovation ecosystems must be able to constantly adapt to challenges and opportunities presented by an ever changing environment, for example policy, fiscal or funding changes.   For this reason I take issue with some commentators talking about ‘building innovation ecosystems’.  The process is much more organic and interactive than this implies.  So BSC takes the approach that  the innovation ecosystem needs to be nurtured or enabled according to its unique requirements rather than built or managed.  BSC is, of course, only one local organisation supporting the innovation ecosystem, and the Technology Strategy Board as the national innovation lead is beginning to explore how it can support innovation ecosystems at a local level too.  BSC has the advantage of being a partnership across the public, private and research sectors, and is thus able to take a uniquely holistic and independent view.

Creative leadership is a priority in these increasingly complex and volatile times. To be a leader today you require a whole different set of tools and thinking. Unfortunately, our education system has not taught us how to think “outside the box”.

Due to the fact that creative thinking is generally not part of our education curriculum, often people lack confidence in their creative ability. We are all creative beings and if we can remove our self-limiting beliefs about our own creativity then we can develop this important capability. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It’s a process and it’s not random. Furthermore, it can be learnt. As Edward de Bono said: “Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learnt. It empowers people, adding strength to their natural abilities, which improves teamwork, productivity, and where appropriate, profits.” Creativity and innovation are a core competency for leaders and managers. We need to teach people how to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, to ask important questions and to generate solutions. Generating fresh solutions to problems, and the ability to create new products, processes or services for a changing market and new world are part of the intellectual capital that gives a company its competitive edge. Creativity is a crucial part of the innovation equation.

In government IT, "doing more with innovation" is the big opportunity. Beyond just cost cutting, government tech teams are coming up with creative ways to offer new and improved services to their internal users and to the public.

For the fourth year in a row, InformationWeek Government set out to identify the top technology innovators at all levels of U.S. government--federal, state, and local. The 15 profiled here were chosen by our editors as InformationWeek's 2012 Government Innovators. Their fresh approaches take many forms, from mobile applications that put government information into the hands of on-the-go citizens to new cloud services.

If you are a first-time entrepreneur, I recommend that you team with a co-founder with experiences, connections, and a skill set that complements, but doesn’t duplicate yours. Even experienced entrepreneurs need a partner to back up each other and improve fundability. The question is how to find that elusive perfect-fit partner.

First, I will admit there is no magic formula here, just like in real life when trying to find a relationship partner. But from my own experience, and input from others, there are useful approaches that will improve your odds of success:

There may be an endless array of digital distractions today, but we can’t blame our tendency to procrastinate solely on Instagram and Facebook. Long before social media and gadgets like iPads were dubbed a distraction, people were very good at pushing aside tasks for another day.

For many, mild procrastination is harmless. But for others, procrastination can be a major stumbling block, particularly in today’s growing freelance economy. Consider a freelancer whose paycheck is tied to productivity, or an entrepreneur who wants to start a new business. In these cases, procrastination can be costly.

To test whether the strength of immune reaction changes with the body’s sleep and wake cycles, researchers tracked the levels of expression of TLR9, a receptor that detects infection within a cell by binding to viral or bacterial DNA (1). Mice expressed more TLR9 at night (2), when the animals are most awake and active. Researchers also found that the TLR9 receptor production was ramped up with the help circadian clock proteins (3), which activated TLR9 gene transcription. PRECISION GRAPHICS EDITOR’S CHOICE IN IMMUNOLOGY

People often feel tired when they get sick, and researchers think that the cytokines helping fight infection may induce sleepiness. If immune-system activation can affect sleep, might the converse be true—do sleep cycles affect the immune system? Erol Fikrig and colleagues at the Yale University School of Medicine isolated some of the molecular players in both the circadian and the innate immune systems. They showed that the strength of some immune responses was indeed affected by the time of day.

You don’t automatically think of the iconic songwriter and poet Bob Dylan as an entrepreneur. But he sure is one — and a rather shrewd one to boot. He started from scratch and built up the Bob Dylan brand, now in its 50th year, to spectacular heights.

Dylan dropped out of the University of Minnesota during his sophomore year, determined to make it as a folk singer. He left the Twin Cities and arrived in Greenwich Village, New York City in January 1961, with no connections and very little money.

Venture capital funds would identify people for start-ups

* Canada wants to lure high-tech and other entrepreneurs

* Sweeping changes being made to immigration system

By Randall Palmer

OTTAWA, Sept 11 (Reuters) - Canada plans to create a new class of visa that it hopes will attract high-tech and other entrepreneurs to immigrate to the country to start new companies, officials said on Tuesday.

Law firm Fenwick & West, which handles legal issues for a variety of technology companies, has examined 186 venture fundings of U.S.-based companies in the life-sciences sector over the first half of 2012, and found that valuations have ticked upward.

Getty Images Matt Rossiter, a partner at the firm and co-author of a recent survey on life-sciences deals, said he has also noticed increased involvement in deals by public medical-technology companies, who often turn to start-ups for new innovations.

Whether you want a raise, different responsibilities, or more resources, knowing how to negotiate is vital. Here are 5 (non-sleazy, promise!) tricks straight from the car lot that will help you get what you want at work.

The image of the sleazy, greasy car salesman is (kind of) unfair, at least based on my recent experience buying a car. The car dealers I worked with came across as neither; that said, it was clear they knew what they were doing and they weren’t afraid to employ some tricks of the trade to reach a mutually acceptable price. These weren’t even necessarily dirty tricks, just the tools of a skilled negotiator--the ones you would use, too, if only you knew them.

It’s not the flashes of football or laughter and chatter in this busy hotel lobby that are distracting me tonight. It’s a concept, a new metaphor for business, that has been boring through my thoughts, reordering how I view my career: Business is a river. Try it on. It may open new sources of revenue for you.

This metaphor is not my own. My good friend and coach Jody Johnson from ActionCoach introduced me to it recently. I was struggling with a dilemma. One of the leading innovation consulting firms had approached me about working with them and I was starting to wonder, should I continue on my own or join something more established? You’ve probably faced similar quandaries yourself: Should you abandon blazing your uncertain trail and step onto a better-worn path?

With less VC funding and more startups in the market in the market these days, entrepreneurs looking to nail down money for their newest venture could be in for a tough time. But there are some tricks of the trade that venture capitalists say they are looking for and successfully funded companies have.

According to early-stage VC firm New Enterprise Associates, there is about 20% less funding in the overall venture capital market today compared to a decade ago. This year alone has seen further contraction, with a 7% drop in investments during the first half of 2012 compared to the same period last year, with 5% fewer deals funded, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. IT and Internet investments have not been hit as hard by shrinking funds compared to healthcare and energy sectors, Dow Jones points out. But Peter Sonsini, general partner at NEA, says one reason there is less money is because there are fewer investors compared to the economic heyday of the tech bubble. Still though, VCs like Sonsini say they're still eager to invest if it's the right deal.

We begin with the argument that the organizational whole is, in fact, precisely the sum of its parts. "Moving a company forward takes more than a well-formulated strategy and good implementation processes: ultimately it comes down to how well each individual executive gets things done," writes IMD professor Jacques Horovitz on the Swiss business school's website. "Successful execution at an organizational level depends almost entirely on each individual manager executing his or her part promptly and efficiently."

So, then, how do we improve our parts for the good of the organizational whole? Horovitz's ten rules range from the ultra-tactical temporal (create a shared team calendar with clear deadlines and regularly scheduled updates) to the organizationally obvious but often overlooked (no project owner means no progress). Let us just stress that latter point. Even in this heydey of matrixism, "even the best ideas die fast unless someone takes responsibility for putting them into action," as Horovitz puts it. Eight more sounds rules in the full article.

Certain regions of the country continuously produce innovative, high-growth companies that have transcended the economic downturn of the last few years. Surprisingly, those regions include more than the expected locales like Boston and Silicon Valley. "The Ascent of America's High-Growth Companies," a report series released by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, reveals that high numbers of fast-growing firms are concentrated in unexpected regions and industrial sectors.

This comprehensive, first-ever analysis of the geography of Inc. 500 firms is presented here in an interactive U.S. map, detailed state-by-state profiles and interactive metro-area charts, and in-depth reports that explore geographic trends of high-growth firms over time, the movements of the founders, and state-by-state profiles.

Of all the articles I’ve read about “big data” recently, one stands out as particularly enlightening. It’s by Alex (Sandy) Pentland, a distinguished computer scientist and entrepreneurial professor at the MIT Media Lab, and it appears in John Brockman’s Edge.org.

Pentland argues that big data—in this case, analyzing details of social interactions and behaviors on a wide scale—will reinvent what it means to have a human society. He compares the impending transformation to the historical development of writing, education, and the Internet.

A trend has been taking place at several medical schools around the country in the past couple of years: Students are being required to own iPads. Some are even giving iPads to students. University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine has joined that trend by providing them to first- and second-year students, like an electronic welcome pack.

At Penn, according to the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian, a program was developed to tailor material for faculty lectures:

Using a program called iBooks Author, professors can create multi-touch textbooks that can include pictures, videos, interactive diagrams and hyperlinks. Students can type notes on the margins and highlight content.

When science fiction films depict the future, the best writers and directors are often less concerned with accurately predicting how specific technologies might reshape the world than they are with confronting the moral or philosophical quandaries of present day. It’s what makes those stories compelling--and relatable. When futurists attempt to tell us how (and when) technology leaps will occur, they’re not only speculating about what we’re capable of achieving in the coming decades but also imploring us to prepare--scientifically and psychologically--for those events.

Envisioning Technology, the firm behind the massive infographic explorations of the future of emerging technology and the future of education technology, is, as you might guess, run by a futurist: Michell Zappa. His most recent visualization maps the next three decades of health technology, charting how regeneration, augmentation, diagnostics, treatments, biogerontology, and telemedicine will change over time. According to ET, the stuff of science fiction--from cryogenics to all-out life extension, from robot health care to 3-D-printed synthetic organs--will be very real before too long.

In the last few decades, as suburbanization and deindustrialization devastated so many cities, they turned to two sectors that seemed not only immune to decline, but were actually growing: universities and hospitals. The so-called “eds and meds” sectors, often related through university affiliated hospitals, became a great stabilizer for many places. For example, the fabled Cleveland Clinic cushioned the blow of manufacturing decline in that city.  Après steel, a city like Pittsburgh practically saw themselves as defined by an eds and meds economy, with the new economic pillars being the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Carnegie-Mellon University.

SRI International, the brains behind Apple's Siri, has launched a dozen consumer products since its digital assistant got famous. We venture inside SRI's labs to find out why you haven't you heard of any of them.

Years before the Apple-loving world met Siri in 2010, Norman Winarsky was playing with SRI International’s then prototype virtual personal assistant among fellow passengers on board a delayed flight.

If you want to be an effective keynote speaker, and are looking for a few tips, you have come to the right place. Well, almost the right place. My article on the subject is actually on the Huffington Post. Just published. Today. Click here to get there.