yet2.com, the global Open Innovation services company, and the State of Ohio, announced jointly today that yet2.com has been granted nearly $2 million from the Ohio Third Frontier program to bring Open Innovation to small-to-mid-sized Ohio companies. Open Innovation is a process by which organizations use the best ideas developed both internally and externally to increase the flow of new products, develop new businesses and business models, and broaden their existing business. Since 1999, yet2.com has been on the forefront of Open Innovation. Its network of clients and affiliates scout for tactical and strategic new innovations world-wide.

“We’re delighted to be working with the forward-thinking people of Ohio to develop Open Innovation practices among the small- and mid-sized companies of the state,” said Tim Bernstein, yet2.com Chief Operating Officer. “Smaller companies form the engine of innovation, all around the world.” In addition to scouting for new technologies, yet2.com provides outlicensing marketing, advice on intellectual property and patents, and assists client companies through deal negotiations.

Irony is when I walk past a set of tents pitched in New York, or Washington, DC's McPherson Square, and my colleague, who works on international development in the Arab world, exclaims surprise at the number of homeless people and unemployed youth occupying those tents.

The Occupy Wall Street movement coincidentally emerged a few months after Tunisia's and Egypt's underemployed youth organized in the streets. As Americans, we are told to shift our focus from exporting goods to exporting services. In an earlier blog post, Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO of PolicyLink, said that the U.S. must embrace its diverse demographics to propel a "knowledge economy." Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, specifically calls this the "creative economy" because the U.S. has already spent its 20th century knowledge investment. What does that mean? And where do we go first? Let's work backwards from the goal: employ energetic, fresh graduates who might set up tents after an unsuccessful six-month job search or underemployment.

Effective communication is an absolute requirement for successfully starting a business, but it doesn’t come naturally to many entrepreneurs. Communication is considered a social skill, and inventors and engineers, for example, are not known to be social butterflies.

Founders have to communicate their ideas and products to investors, business partners, and the rest of the team. Then, hopefully, come customers, distribution channels, and going public or merging with an attractive buy-out candidate. Communication is not just talking, but also writing, body language, and “actions speak louder than words.”

I recently read Brad Feld’s thought provoking piece encouraging founders to sit on the board of another startup company.

I found it thought provoking because I’ve always believed startup founders need extreme focus on only their company to succeed.

We live in an era where the press espouses the entrepreneurs who have five startups. I’m not one who has subscribed to the “superman founder” narrative.

In 1999, Lawrence Gentilello and Tuyen Truong started something based on Stanford University’s facebook called, “The Facebook” online. They scanned in more than 7,000 student pictures to a database online which they cross-referenced with each student’s personal information: address, phone number and email.

What happened next sounds all too familiar: Stanford University shut it down.

“We bowed to the University pressure and took the site down,” says Gentilello. “They were scared it was going to be used for stalking.”

Understanding the investment process in Silicon Valley used to require membership to a very exclusive club of investors, plugged-in media and experienced entrepreneurs. Adeo Ressi wanted to change that.

After starting seven successful companies that generated more than $2 billion in shareholder value, he was faced with diminishing equity with each new company he would start. In 2007, Ressi unveiled the anonymously backed TheFunded.com to improve the relationship between investors and entrepreneurs.

Chicago-based digital health accelerator Healthbox (@health_box) has decided to spread its wings beyond the Windy City and this week announced they have partnered with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSM) to launch their first Boston-based class of startups.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts who has embraced our vision of supporting health care entrepreneurs and unlocking the industry knowledge needed to build game-changing companies,” said Nina Nashif, Founder of Healthbox.

Entrepreneurship and scientific research are not in conflict after all, according to a study of university spin-outs in Italy, which found researcher-entrepreneurs are more productive than peers that are wedded to academe. The findings have implications for university administrators who fear the quality of an institution’s basic research will suffer if scientists get caught up in commercialisation.

This fear is based on the “publish or perish” mantra that holds in much of the academic world. You live or die, career-wise, on the number of papers you publish, and their impact, that is, how much attention other researchers pay to your contributions to ‘the literature’.

Companies on the other hand want to keep their work secret and fear that publishing research results can damage their competitive advantage.

Here’s a secret: You probably already are. But as we need to find ways to conserve water, treated wastewater may become a more obvious part of what we drink. The trick to making that work isn’t technological, it’s psychological. 

Linda MacPherson studies water in a place where the resource does not, for a good portion of the year, appear to be in short supply: Portland, Oregon. But the same does not hold true everywhere. The world is facing a water crisis and, in the developed world, the water crisis is being fought along two fronts. On the one hand, pilot plants in San Diego and a national “NEWater” program in Singapore show that it’s both possible and practical to reclaim and reuse wastewater into clean drinking water. Yet, this process poses another problem--a cognitive one.

Why do some job hunters give up when they are just in sight of their goals? I've just seen Simon, a client who has been looking for a job for 6 months. Like many people on the market, he started out optimistically but has given up — not officially, mind you, but he's suddenly taken an urgent interest in redecorating his house.

Based on work with scores of clients like Simon, I suggest that there are six types of frustrated job hunters out there. The first type are people who think they know how to get hired, but don't. They have a lack-luster CV in overstuffed with clichés, a poor sense of what the market is looking for, and pay weak attention to the messages (both explicit and otherwise) they broadcast. If you've ever said to a friend, "All this job hunting advice is insultingly basic," this could be you — and you could be ensuring that you stay stuck in first gear. While some candidates say that job hunting and interview preparation are all common sense, plenty of employers simultaneously complain that even in a recession many applicants exclude themselves from a job conversation from the start.

Congratulations, smartypants, you've got the highest IQ in the room--too bad it'll make you a pain to work with. Here are 6 techniques for dealing when your genius just gets in the way.

I have had the good fortune to work for, with, and coach many brilliant people. I have watched many of them struggle with being smarter and faster than everyone around them.

In Dotcom 1.0 there were Incubators. These businesses typically rented space, facilities, admin and backoffice support to startups for some cash and a share in the success (or failure) of the business, typically back to backing it against investment from others who hoped to get into startup portfolio investment. Cometh the Dot Bomb, goeth the Incubators, and they got a bit of a bad name, a recent study by Jared Konczal of the Kaufmann Foundation, showing what everyone suspected empirically - Forbes:

The findings reveal that the effects of incubation are potentially deleterious to the long-term survival and performance of new ventures. Incubated firms outperform their peers in terms of employment and sales growth but fail sooner. These are important findings for policymakers who support incubation as a strategy to increase employment locally and for entrepreneurs who risk their livelihoods in order to earn a decent living.

Silicon Valley doesn't own the monopoly on being a tech development and startup hot spot: Meet the equivalent, exciting places on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

We all hear endlessly about the goings on in Silicon Valley, whether it be news about novel startups with a mission to change the world, the investors that back the projects, or the political machinations that go on in this well-known hotbed of technological innovation.

Can you make — or "make over" — an entrepreneur? It's a question that came up a lot as my co-authors and I researched our new book, Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck. Those are the four traits we deemed crucial to entrepreneurial and business-building success. We even came up an Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test to measure how company founders and business builders stacked up in the different traits, and to help you identify where you're strongest.

But are people simply born with a certain combination of these traits, like DNA, or can Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck be taught, nurtured and developed? We believe it's the latter, although of course it varies by person and by trait.

Twenty years ago, it took effort to stay connected with the office on vacation, but technology has decimated that barrier. Here are the three most effective tactics you can use to recreate that divide and get a true break.

How do you take vacation and then actually disconnect from work when you are away? These are two of the most consistent and, seemingly intractable, work and life challenges people in the U.S. struggle with, including me.

But, I’m proud to say that I just completed my first vacation in years where I almost totally disconnected from email (99%) and didn’t engage at all on any of my blogs, Facebook, or Twitter for two weeks.

Not only did I survive this true break from work, but I feel more energized and focused than I have after most of my previous days off.

Is your small business affected by the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs? In December, Congress voted to reauthorize the programs, and President Obama signed it into law. However, part of the reauthorization required the SBA to modify the rules governing the SBIR and STTR programs before the changes took effect.

Square’s tie-up with Starbucks may be this year’s most important venture capital deal.

The deal not only has the potential to change the way people pay for coffee and everything else, it also shows how small innovation applied to everyday tasks may be the next new thing for venture capital. Call it the rise of the ordinary innovators.

Under the deal announced last week, Square, the mobile payments device start-up, will process debit and credit card transactions for the coffee shop chain, whose customers will be able to use Square’s payment mobile phone app at participating stores. As part of the deal, Starbucks will invest $25 million in Square and Starbucks’s chief executive, Howard Schultz, will join the Square board.

Among the handful of venture-capital firms based in Philadelphia's leafy suburbs, First Round Capital stands out for its national reach and its rapid pace - more than a deal a week.

Now it's moving downtown.

Josh Kopelman, a 1993 graduate of Penn's Wharton School, started venture-backed Infonautics (he took it public in the dot.com boom), auctioneer Half.com (now part of eBay), and security firm TurnTide (sold to Symantec) before setting up First Round with Penn computer-scientist-turned-investor Howard Morgan in 2004. It's now the third-busiest venture-capital firm in the United States.

First Round invested in 71 technology companies last year, trailing only Silicon Valley-based rivals New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, though First Round's deals tend to be smaller.

There is no shortage of innovators and creative talents across the African continent. However, there are a number of factors that make it more difficult for their innovations and ideas to see the light of day. These include lack of access to sources of finance and weak or non-existent innovation ecosystems.

Poor Innovation Record

According to the Global Innovation Index 2011 - a report that ranks 125 countries/economies across the world in terms of their innovation capabilities and results – 24 countries from Sub- Saharan Africa were included in the rankings, but none made it to the top 30, and 17 were ranked within the bottom 25.

When the odds of expanding in its home market proved slim, the Berlin Börse (Berlin Stock Exchange) used new EU laws and ventured out into the world. Today, it’s a mecca for small European investors and companies looking for an easier European listing. But can growth continue as trading volumes across the continent contract?  

The Berlin Börse was long known as a sleepy little haven for regional investors. Then came the EU’s 2007 “Markets in Financial Instruments Directive” (MiFID).   

By harmonising investment regulations across Europe and allowing home countries to issue “passports” to domestic firms looking to expand financial services offerings within the EU, the directive opened new expansion possibilities for smaller markets. The Berlin Börse saw in this legislation an opportunity it couldn’t refuse: to grow and make money by reaching out to investors and brokers throughout Europe.