Building on our competitive insights from more than a decade of innovation surveys, Arthur D. Little is launching its 8th Global Innovation Excellence Survey, and we are delighted to invite you to participate.

With expected input from more than 600 innovation and R&D executives world-wide, this survey focuses on developing a better understanding of:

1. Innovation performance: how you compare against your industry peers for different parts of the innovation process 
2. Growth: how innovation can support growth through new products processes & services, development of new markets or new business models 
3. Industry-specific innovation challenges: what are your sector’s key challenges and how well are you and your peers responding to them

If becoming an entrepreneur has always been a dream of yours, there's probably one key reason why you haven't followed your dream: money. Some businesses may require very little capital while others may need a lot. Here are a few of the most popular ways to fund a startup's first year.

The Bank When people need money, the first place they think of is a bank. Since the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis, even existing business owners have found it difficult to secure bank loans. Although lending to larger companies has improved, small businesses or startup loans have not recovered as well. If you're turned down by a bank, try a credit union. Credit unions are non-profit community oriented institutions similar to banks. Credit unions are

As lovers of technology and slaves to the news cycle, we all get caught up in the next new thing. The cynic in me notes that the 43rd anniversary of the moon landing – an occurrence that changed the course of history with a completeness and intensity that few warmongers have ever been able to induce – is just another moon landing anniversary. It isn’t the 25th or the 50th or the 100th. It’s just something that happened 43 years ago today at about 8pm UTC. In short, two men – born helpless as the rest of us – through time, training, and sheer will, were thrust into space by the greatest minds of our generation and then stepped onto a lunar soil that the New York Times reported as being fine and powdery.

Why, then, commemorate this date? Because, aside from World War II, the space race was the thing that put us firmly on the path of technological advancement we are taking today. Had we not dared when we did, at a time when our technology was woefully primitive, I wager that we would still today think the moon and the stars were out of reach.

Equality agreements allow the transferring organization to appropriate the value of knowledge transferred and diffused within the organization, and commercially realized through auxiliary implementation. As such, equity arrangements are economically preferable to royally agreements when:

 reVc  >  rlVp

Where re is the equality stake as a percentage, Vc is the value of the company, rl is the royalty rate and Vp is the commercial value of the product.  Now suppose that both the equity stake and royalty rate coefficients accurately represent the transferring organization’s relative contribution to commercial success of the firm or product, respectively. This may be accomplished, in theory, as the rates may be adjusted such that ex post revenues to the transferring organization are equal.

There's a popular ice breaker called Two Lies and a Truth — you state three semi-outlandish things about yourself and a group tries to guess which of the statements is true. The last time I played the game, I said that I was a professional software programmer at the age of 14, I pitched a no-hitter in Little League Baseball, and I am a distant relative of singer-songwriter Marc Anthony.*

Executives unintentionally play a game like this too. If asked to state their three biggest frustrations with their innovation efforts, I bet most of them would say: my organization lacks good ideas, we don't have enough resources to drive innovation, and innovation takes too long. But only one of these is actually true.

Conservationists are reluctantly experimenting with three forms of triage to help them decide which species to try to save or not save. Each method has different priorities: "Function first" favors species that perform a unique job in nature. "Evolution first" seeks to preserve genetic diversity. "Hot spots" prefers ecosystems rich in species.

So which animals and plants would flourish or perish in each of the schemes?

Stuart Crabb, a director in the executive offices of Facebook, naturally likes to extol the extraordinary benefits of computers and smartphones. But like a growing number of technology leaders, he offers a warning: log off once in a while, and put them down. Enlarge This Image

Annie Tritt for The Nwe York Times Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of Wisdom 2.0, an annual conference about the pursuit of balance in the digital age. In a place where technology is seen as an all-powerful answer, it is increasingly being seen as too powerful, even addictive.

The concern, voiced in conferences and in recent interviews with many top executives of technology companies, is that the lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving that can hurt productivity and personal interactions.

The word “innovation” has become one of those words that businesses and organizations use to fluff up their mission statements and half-heartedly motivate their workers to work harder.

While all organizations want to be innovative, what does it really mean and how can it be transformed from a company catchphrase to a meaningful action?

Webster defines the term “innovation” as the “introduction of something new.” While that’s all fine and dandy, there are two things that should be noted at this point (1) this isn’t a spelling bee, so we don’t really need this definition, and (2) this definition will hardly inspire anyone to work harder.

Innovation nowadays has many similarities with voyages of discovery in the past. In this blog Gijs van Wulfen walks us through practical learnings for innovation inspired by successful explorers.

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

This advertisement ran in a London newspaper in 1913. Could you have imagined answering it? If you did, you are a real innovator. Besides you, over 1000 men did. They were hoping to be chosen for an Antarctic exploration led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. He gained fame for his 1909 expedition to the South Pole. When I read this ad in one of my travel books it struck me that 100 years later this could have been and ad for an innovation project. Innovation nowadays has so many similarities with voyages of discovery in the past.

There are different approaches to facilitating cultural change within an organization in order to promote innovation. Bengt Järrehult argues that the viral change, whereby successful changes are achieved through experimentation and then spread by different groups copying or adopting the change leads to faster and more long-lasting culture change.

More and more companies realize that the most important aspect to consider when pursuing a change towards a more innovative company is to look at the Innovation culture. The question is, how is this done in the “best” way and how do we know which is the most suitable culture for our company? What works for Company A does not necessarily work for Company B. Change to promote innovation is a constant process. Some say that “The only thing that is constant is change.” Hmmmm… I prefer “Everything has changed. Even Change has changed.”  We change all the time. Change is not a one-off situation, it is ongoing and has a new look every day. Let us once again  use metaphors to clarify the situation.

It’s fair to observe that many big, established organizations tend not to think or act in a very entrepreneurial way. Of course, those of you who manage large organizations (or hold their stock in your portfolio) are probably thinking, “Yes, and it’s a good thing that executives don’t behave like crazy entrepreneurs.” After all, managers of established enterprises are accountable to their shareholders, customers and employees first and foremost to successfully maintain and operate the going concern – and only secondarily to grow it and improve on it.

The Great Recession knocked the new establishment birth rate – the number of new establishments founded as a percentage of operating establishments – down from its historical average.

Source: Created from Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Since 1993, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first made the data available, the new establishment birth rate has averaged 3.2 percent of total establishments in operation, as the figure above shows.

If you're new to the Silicon Valley startup scene, who are the best early-stage investors to pitch? There are a lot of people and early-stage firms who can cut your startup's first checks. Ron Conway and the SV Angel team, for example, can give entrepreneurs a few hundred-thousand dollars or a few million. Angel investors like Dave Morin and Dave McClure write startups dozens of checks for tens of thousands of dollars.

Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. These should be carefully selected, with a proven track record, willing and available to help, and be completely trustworthy. Make sure they are willing to check their egos at the door.

Let’s talk specifics. I recommend that every early-stage startup find three Advisory Board members. These should all be people who bring credibility and value to your company just by their very association with your company name. They should have deep backgrounds and experience in a relevant domain to your startup, and executive experience in running a company.

Through the creation and strengthening of NSF activities and programs as well as through links with other government agencies, NSF will help foster innovation among faculty and students, promote regional coordination and linkages, and develop technology-based networks of researchers. Those contributions to the innovation ecosystem will penetrate deeply and broadly across the country to engage the most creative and consequential ideas and talents in the process of innovation. By instilling an understanding of innovation and providing opportunities for knowledge transfer between academia and industry, NSF will equip more faculty and students to be creative, technologically-savvy leaders.

NSF's contribution to the innovation ecosystem encourages American colleges and universities to promote "engines of innovation" that operate in close partnership with industry across numerous disciplines. The ultimate goal is to extend America's historical reputation for ingenuity to a new recognition as "a nation of innovators."

After twelve years horsetrading, a voluntary agreement between the European Commission and Europe’s research bodies aims to get 27 national research systems functioning as one, and complete the European Research Area (ERA)

EU Research Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn signed an agreement with a broad swathe of Europe’s research funding bodies this week, in an attempt to glue together the European Research Area and open up a single market for research jobs and scientific data in time for the start of Horizon 2020  – the EU’s new €80 billion research funding plan - in 2014.

“We want to ensure that researchers can move as freely between Rome and Riga, or Sofia and Stockholm, as they can between Wisconsin and Washington, or Massachusetts and Minnesota,” Geoghegan-Quinn said.

This is part of my Series on Student Entrepreneurship

In the previous posts in this Series we established the mindset and awareness required, the immersion you need to inititate in your local startup ecosystem, what you need to do to acquire subject matter expertise, how to develop a social media presence, the importance of finding a mentor, and how to cultivate lasting ties with investors, all with the objective of greatly increasing your chances of success as an entrepreneur.

In this installment, I’m going to highlight the fact that among the many awesome advantages you have as a student entrepreneur (your sheer youth, the spare time you have, your .edu address, the willingness of most people to help you, your freedom to operate, etc.) is the fact that you can apply for a staggering array of competitions and grants geared specifically to student entrepreneurs like yourself!

So often, we think of savvy entrepreneurs who have built their companies on nothing and turned them into zillion-dollar enterprises as being almost superhuman. They're unassailable forces for whom the rules don't apply. When actually, there's no such thing as an overnight success or someone who makes no mistakes. We love rags to riches stories so much that I think part of our psyches help build the legends of these people.

And because we look up to them, we think, "Hey, I don't have to do my due diligence: They trusted their gut, so I can, too."

Well, it's horse plop.

As Louis Pasteur once famously said, "Chance favors only the prepared mind." To be an innovative entrepreneur, you want to foster creativity in your daily life so that your mind is ready when opportunity arises.

"Creative ideas often come from unusual combinations," explains Steven Smith, professor of cognitive psychology at Texas A&M University. "The best solution is not going to be the thing everyone thinks of. It's going to be something unusual."

These unusual combinations, called "remote associations," are related ideas that may seem unrelated at first glance. They are the essence of creative thinking.

Something that always gives me pause is when I hear entrepreneurs and their managers refer to their small business as “the company”, or even worse, “the corporation.”

I was talking with an entrepreneur who has two partners and no employees.  Their business seemed to be kind of “stuck.”  They were not getting some important, and yet basic things done to market their business and take better care of their customers.  He kept saying things like “the corporation needs to do this” and “the corporation should do that.”  They were spending most of their time trying to determine who should have what title and how to create a well-defined structure.