July’s Global Innovation Summit (GIS) in Silicon Valley brought together 400 people to share ideas and on what makes a good startup ecosystem. After much debate, shareholders determined that there’s no single solution. However, there are several tactics that may work to replicate Silicon Valley's success anywhere: 

Persevere. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first venture went from a student startup to a $100billon IPO in 8 years. But a typical profile for a successful entrepreneur is more likely to include a number of ventures that didn’t quite work out. Ultimately, what makes them succeed is there endurance and the willingness to try and try again. 

The Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) and BioAccel announce their collaboration with AZ Furnace, Arizona's first-of-its-kind statewide business accelerator program that encourages entrepreneurs from across the country to find and commercialize innovations developed within the state's universities and research institutions. Partners already include Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the Dignity Health Group. 

The ACA will commit up to $400,000 in seed funding, with BioAccel matching up to $150,000. This financial commitment is an investment in Arizona's overall economy by fostering promising, innovative business creation – a key initiative of both the ACA and BioAccel. 

Spend any time at SAP‘s headquarters in Silicon Valley and you’ll hear the name “HANA” spoken in hushed and reverential tones by flip-flop wearing engineers and buttoned-up executives alike. HANA is fast, expensive, and touted as one of the most exciting developments in years.

Hana is not a beautiful woman or flashy car. “HANA” (which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is a container that can store up to 500 terabytes of data, and execute at high speed.

MYTHS used to be about ancient Greeks. They taught us about greed (King Midas and gold) or hubris (Icarus flying too close to the sun). But when authors write about myths today, they mean something more prosaic: a misconception, a statement that almost everyone thinks is true but really isn’t.

As we approach Election Day, the number of such myths appears to be skyrocketing. Myth-busting articles from the past month include “Five Myths About Obama’s Stimulus,” “Five Myths About the U.S.-Iran Conflict,” “Top Three Myths About Medicare,” “Top Six Myths About Medicare” and, not to be outdone, “Ten Medicare Myths.” We all love to see supposed myths debunked, but these opinion articles and blog posts are not as straightforward as they seem. It’s important that readers know how to interpret them. In

Where were you when news of the tsunami hit Japan in 2011? How about when Michael Jackson died? Probably online, according to many experts who claim that social media has become the main media source for hundreds of millions of people. Not just in the U.S., either; Facebook alone has more than 900 million users spread across the globe as of 2012. Other social media giants like Twitter have facilitated revolution against unjust leaders and warned people of impending natural disaster. In fact, so many people regularly interact online that if the Internet were a nation, it would exceed the Americas, Europe and the Middle East combined in population. No wonder more than 13 million members of the online community used Reddit and other media platforms to protest SOPA, a proposed Internet censorship bill. Keep this graphic in mind next time you log on, because knowledge is power — and a little knowledge goes a long way in the Internet Age.

Eighteen Presidential Innovation Fellows, sworn into government service by Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry on Thursday, have six months to get five major government initiatives up and running.

A few of the fellows, whom federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park sometimes calls “badass innovators,” have been at work for several weeks.

A team focused on easing the burden of government contracting for small businesses already has developed a tool for release late Thursday on the social coding site GitHub, where developers and contractors can offer feedback. The tool is a statement of work composer that aims to cut down composition time for contracting officers and companies bidding on software contracts, Sean Greene, associate administrator at the Small Business Administration and the government liaison for the RFP-EZ team, said during Thursday’s launch event.

In an article published in Monday’s New York Times and available now online, I wrote about a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of the nation’s new patent law, the America Invents Act.

Opponents of the law say it would hurt small inventors and American innovation. Supporters of the legislation, which passed by large majorities in both the House and the Senate, say the constitutional critique is misguided. They also assert that the fears of small inventors are greatly exaggerated, and that the new law will streamline the patent system and thus invigorate the nation’s innovation ecosystem as a whole.

California legislators last week sent a bill to the governor’s desk that would prohibit colleges from requiring students to hand over access to their social media accounts, raising the re-emerging question of how much control athletes -- who are very much public faces of many universities -- should have over personal accounts that nonetheless are visible in the public domain.

The California Senate passed the bill the same week the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville became the latest institutions to take flak on the issue, for requiring athletes to install software that monitors posts on their accounts or forfeit their spot on the team. The Golden State is the second in two months to pass such a bill, after Delaware, which forbade colleges from requesting or requiring login information or software installation, or allowing officials to view content that an athlete has classified as private online. (Both Facebook and Twitter allow users to customize privacy settings.) Maryland’s Senate passed a similar bill that ultimately stalled.

With a $3 million gift to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a globally ranked program in the business school is getting a new name.

The gift from the Regnier Family Foundations establishes the Regnier Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, housed in the Henry W. Bloch School of Management.

The seven-year-old Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation aims to nurture entrepreneurs and innovators from a range of disciplines.

Since April, we've been documenting pockets of innovation across America, under the premise that today's flux-driven economy can support entrepreneurs in any city, no matter how small and far-flung. In many ways, that underdog status is a boon, enabling outlandish ideas that wouldn't rate in more competitive markets, such as San Francisco and New York. Take Madison, Wisconsin, where progressive legislation is helping produce a new generation of tech startups, or Northern Arkansas, which has transformed into a hub for innovative retail companies in part because the biggest retailer of all, Walmart, is based there. The old barriers to starting and growing a business no longer abide. Here, we round up the best ideas emerging from some of the country's least likely places.

For anyone from California, you know there are vast differences between the northern and southern parts of the state – so vast in fact that, to us, they could just as easily stand alone as two separate states. In a recent Forbes.com article, contributor Tara Brown wrote of her own misapprehension moving from San Francisco to Southern California, saying, “I’m a technologist and moving away from the tech hub of the world to the land of Botox seemed like a really bad career move. I assumed that the people of Los Angeles were disingenuous attention whores and didn’t know anything about technology.”

The great NorCal vs. SoCal debate is a longstanding, undeniable rivalry between the stereotypical surfer dudes of the south and environmental geeks to the north. But what Silicon Valley doesn’t know could hurt them. There are a lot of misconceptions about SoCal and it’s time we set them straight.

Who is more engaged and more committed to their work and rates their leaders the highest?

A. People who work in the office B. People who work remotely

If you picked A, you might be as surprised as the investment firm I worked with recently, which found in reviewing results of a 360-degree feedback process that the answer was, in fact, B.

The team members who were not in the same location with their leaders were more engaged and committed — and rated the same leader higher — than team members sitting right nearby. While the differences were not enormous (a couple of tenths of a point in both categories), they were enough to provoke some interesting speculations as to why this might be happening.

The new hot topic for entrepreneurs these days is crowd funding, which is anticipated to at least supplement, if not replace, the slow and mysterious process of current Angel and venture capital investors. The problem is that crowd funding means something different to everyone, and even I have been confused by the different ways the term gets used.

So I have set out here to outline and offer some practical advice on the many different models currently used with the term “crowd funding” and “crowd sourcing.” The newest model was passed into law recently via the JOBS Act, and won’t even be available until the end of this year or maybe mid-2013 in the USA, while waiting for the rules to be finalized:

A good entrepreneur is not necessarily born a good salesman. In fact, they are often the opposite, more focused on building things rather than selling them. Yet, in today’s world of information overload, marketing and selling skills are critical to the success of every startup.

The alternative “If we build it, they will come” approach has long been relegated to the field of dreams, after Kevin Costner’s movie by the same name. In my own effort to keep up with the times, I finished a book by Julie Steelman a while back, “The Effortless Yes: Demystifying the Selling Process.” Julie is known as the entrepreneur’s selling mentor, for both men and women.

Apple won a decisive victory on Friday in a lawsuit against Samsung, a verdict that will give Apple ammunition in a far-flung patent war with its global competitors in the smartphone business.

The nine jurors in the case, who faced the daunting task of answering more than 700 questions on sometimes highly technical matters, returned a verdict after just three days of deliberations at a federal courthouse in San Jose, Calif. They found that Samsung infringed on a series of Apple’s patents on mobile devices, awarding Apple more than $1 billion in damages.

Every year mathematicians and artists converge for the conference Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science, a festival celebrating the links between mathematics and the arts. The Bridges Organization was founded in 1998 under the leadership of Towson University mathematician Reza Sarhangi with the goal of promoting interdisciplinary work in mathematics and art.

"Mathematics in general is the study of patterns, structures, relationships," says George Hart, a mathematician, sculptor and founding board member of the Bridges Organization. "The same ways of thinking and looking for patterns can be applied to formal artwork. This year, the conference was held in late July at Towson University outside of Baltimore.

Entrepreneurship used to be seen as a risky career path for an MBA grad, but that perception has changed over the last few years. Today, prospective MBAs view entrepreneurship as one of the top five content areas they want schools to offer, according to a 2011 survey (PDF) conducted by the Association of Business Schools.

Business schools have responded by beefing up their coverage of entrepreneurship, offering more one-on-one counseling, and encouraging students to get involved in business plan competitions. However, taking advantage of all the resources can be a challenge, especially in the first year of business school. All too often, a student’s original intention to develop an idea for a business, or work on an existing business plan, gets pushed aside as he or she acclimates to a hectic new schedule, says Timothy Faley, managing director of the Samuel Zell and Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Alison Damast spoke with Faley this week about how students can avoid this trap and get a jump start on becoming an entrepreneur in the first year of B-school. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

The dream of running your own business can be a powerful one. Unfortunately, it sometimes blinds people to the world's ugly realities. The odds of success aren't great, of course - but even first time entrepreneurs know that on some level. Startlingly few of the ones who do make it think forward to their golden years, however, which could present a big problem when they're ready to retire. Those who do consider retirement options often consider selling their company as the sole exit strategy, and investment option. A big buyout, after all, is likely to top whatever they can squirrel away in IRAs and mutual funds. Reality has a way of squashing those dreams, though.

In the innovation economy, a lot can happen in 48 hours. That was proven in grand terms at this year’s BIO International Convention, held in Boston this June:

• Massachusetts and Israel provided a combined $1.3 million in initial funding to four joint ventures developing new technologies in life sciences, clean energy, and information technology.

The Knockoff Economy  explores the validity of the belief that innovation and growth only happen when there are strong protections against copying or duplication.  The authors, both lawyers, make a compelling argument that IP protections like copyright, patents, etc. do not themselves create an environment of innovation.

Creating ‘monopoly’ rights is not a requirement for vibrant innovation, growth and creativity.  Rather than argue against IP protection, the authors provide examples of industries with low IP protections and a degree of copying that still have high levels of growth and innovation.  In showing the positive case, the authors provide a compelling and thoughtful view on the connection between protection and innovation.