Whenever I try to conjure up what innovation looks like, the same slideshow of images clicks across my mind: that photo of Einstein with his tongue sticking out, Edison with his light bulb, Steve Jobs onstage in his black turtleneck, introducing the latest iThing. Unoriginal and overdone, to be sure. And not all that accurate.

Because it’s not just about that romantic “ah ha!” moment in front of a chalkboard or a cocktail napkin, it’s about the nitty-gritty work that comes after the idea:  getting it accepted and implemented. Who are these faces? And, most importantly, as I’m sure you’re all asking yourselves: where do I fit in?

You're the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day. Here's how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic." 

Whatever that means.

The National Research Council will publicly release Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Prosperity and Security on June 14, 2012, at 11:00 am.  The release event will be held in the Lecture Room of the National Academy of Sciences building at 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20418. 

This report, a follow-up to Rising Above the Gathering Storm, examines the health and competitiveness of our nation’s research universities and their strong partnership with government and industry that is critical to the nation’s prosperity and national goals.  The report responds to a request from Congress for “the top ten actions that Congress, the federal government, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence in research and doctoral education needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century.”  

What are the signs that innovation in a company is set up to fail? Wouldn’t it be great to have a checklist on this? Unfortunately, innovation is too complicated and company-specific for one standard rule. It is possible, however, to become better at spotting the signs of failure.

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the red flags I look for when I talk with executives and innovation leaders trying to get an understanding of their corporate innovation capabilities.

1. The lack of an innovation strategy

Executives and innovation leaders have failed to link innovation with overall corporate strategy. As a result, the innovation efforts have no clear direction, and there is not the necessary mix of incremental and radical innovation. No strategy, no focused effort, no results.

The premise of the knowledge-driven economy originates back to the 1960s, described as an efficient system of distribution and access to knowledge for increasing the amount of innovative opportunity.1 However, policies supporting transformation of regions into knowledge-driven economies are primarily focused on setting the most favourable conditions for supporting the innovation, talents and creation of knowledge-based companies and their growth. Under the current paradigm, knowledge-based entrepreneurship is recognised as the key ingredient of regional future economic growth and competitiveness.

Science and technology parks are one of the key institutions of the regional innovation ecosystem, viewed as a catalyst facilitating flow of knowledge and innovation between the academic, public and business environments towards market. The core objective of the technology park is to link innovations with knowledge-based business. By providing companies with the necessary infrastructure, services, education/training and promotion, it motivates entrepreneurial potential and assists in the realisation of initiatives with high levels of knowledge and market potential. At the same time it enables matchmaking and synergies with the domestic and foreign development, research, financial and market environments.

Richard Florida’s interview with Jonah Lehrer over at the Atlantic Cities about “creative density” got me thinking about the work I did on “degree density” in 2010. The concept that Lehrer describes is relatively simple: lots of like minded people in close proximity to each other drives creativity because these people can bounce ideas off of each other and learn from each other.

Lehrer talks about David Bryne of the Talking Heads:

David Byrne, after all, wasn’t influenced by the Latin rhythms of some distant musician. Instead, Byrne was seduced by his local dance clubs, blasting those songs he could hear from the sidewalk. It is the sheer density of the city — the proximity of all those overlapping minds — that makes it such an inexhaustible source of creativity.

I sent a tweet out last week that resulted in some healthy debate:

“three years ago, I was telling everyone I met to start companies. These days, I’m telling everyone to think twice”

Of course, it’s not fair to give general advice like that.  But what I meant was, 3-5 years ago, when I met someone who was thinking about starting a company, my bias was one of action. Today, my bias is one of caution.

What’s changed?  Couple thoughts:

1. First, part of my perspective is just driven by my natural instincts to be counter-cultural. When there seems to be a lot of hype around an area or activity, I find myself pretty un-attracted to it.  Bill Sahlman has a wonderful chart he shows students about the trends in the industries that HBS students tend to flock to, and the subsequent performance of those industries.  When a surge of students start pursuing an area, you can almost predict that a crash is coming. I can tell you that the surge of HBS students pursuing startups right now is at a new high.

Germany sets an example worldwide for cutting-edge technologies, innovations, and a strong workforce, from political offices to the classroom. At the “Manufacturing, Innovation, and Workforce Training: What Works in Germany and the United States for Jobs and Growth” conference to take place this Wednesday at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC, leading experts will examine approaches through which policy can further strengthen the overall competitiveness and capacity for innovation in Germany and the U.S.

United States Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Rebecca M. Blank will deliver the keynote address for the conference, providing domestic perspectives on manufacturing and commerce.

The Canadian government last week revealed its Economic Action Plan 2012, which highlights its commitment to support entrepreneurs, world-class research and innovators. Citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney said: "Our government's top priority remains jobs, growth and long-term prosperity. Canada cannot afford to lose out in the competition for foreign entrepreneurs among immigrant-receiving countries." He added: "We need to proactively target a new type of immigrant entrepreneur who has the potential to build innovative companies that can compete on a global scale and create jobs for Canadians."

Major League baseball pitchers spend far more time preparing to pitch than they actually do pitching. The same should be true of an entrepreneur who is attempting to secure money from sophisticated investors.

The steps outlined below represent an ideal approach to raising capital from sophisticated investors. Unfortunately, your fundraising efforts will be less linear. You might be at Step 2 with one VC and Step 3 with another. However, the greater degree that you can sequentially follow these steps while keeping your discussions with each venture capitalist (VC) at relatively the same stage, the sooner you can spend less time in the company of investors and get back to running your business.

Welcome to our annual celebration of business innovators who dare to think differently. They're the ones taking risks and discovering surprising new solutions to old problems. This year, they tell you exactly how they do what they do. Click on their names in the list below to find advice and read about their career milestones. Or for tips on a set of creative skills, browse the tool box to the right.

Is the venture industry going up, down or sideways?

With fundraising a difficult task for most venture firms in 2011, you’d expect the ranks of active firms to keep shrinking.

But that’s not what happened, according to an analysis by Dow Jones VentureSource, which shows that 923 firms made at least one investment in a U.S.-based company last year, up from 900 in 2010.

That’s still well below a peak of 1,312 active investors in 2000 and the uptick is more a sign of the persistence of firms, whose funds last a decade or more, than an indication that the industry has started growing again.

Download a PDF of the presentation.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has published a report arguing that the venture capital model is broken. And it lays blame not at the feet of general partners, but rather of limited partners who have continued to invest in venture capital without insisting on structural changes.

This comes, of course, just days after I revisited the whole "VC model is broken" discussion from several years back, in the wake of Sevin Rosen basically returning its entire eighth fund (on paper) from the successful Splunk IPO. So a lot of you asked for me to chime in on the Kauffman study. Or, in the words of one reader, "admit that you don't know what you're talking about."

I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked: "As an author of creativity books, how on earth can you live in Singapore?"

And when I reply, "Because I think it is the best place in the world to live for a creative person", most people think I am kidding and everyone asks me to explain.

But no, I am not kidding. And yes, let me explain.

I moved to Beijing from my native Sweden in 2005 because I wanted to be in Asia when Asian countries truly started to embrace creativity.

If you talk to a software engineer, they're probably most interested in attacking difficult and interesting problems that affect a lot fo people.

But it's really not surprising that some of the most popular software companies among engineers and developers also pay the best, according to salary data we pulled from GlassDoor.

We've assembled a list of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley that pay their software engineers and developers the best.

Following  the election of French socialist President François Hollande, the European Commission has tacked firmly towards the growth agenda and called for a new industrial revolution for Europe. After an anti-austerity backlash by voters in Greece and France on Sunday (6 May), European Council President Herman Van Rompuy called yesterday (8 May) an informal summit of EU leaders for May 23 to discuss the growth agenda.

The informal dinner on May 23 will lay the ground for another meeting on June 28-29 when leaders are to take formal decisions on their growth and budget consolidation strategy.

During the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney lamented that incumbent president, Barack Obama, spent too much time at Harvard. Romney, who has two degrees from Harvard, does not doubt the value of intellectual life, but knows well that today’s heroes are successful business leaders, like himself, and not the men or women of ideas.

Amid a global economic crisis that seems to be without an end, policy innovators with the ability to link the world of ideas with the real world are increasingly missed. The world’s attention seems to have shifted from policy innovators to the “technopreneurs” - celebrity technology entrepreneurs - such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Around the world, these Silicon Valley-styled technopreneurs are given hero status. Their opinions and advice are sourced at summits, conferences and by media outlets while politicians compete for photo ops.

There’s a lot of money floating around Silicon Valley right now, and it’s becoming easier and easier for entrepreneurs to get access to the capital they need to get their companies off the ground. Resources like AngelList are trying to level the playing field, and facilitate conversations between founder and investor, and the passage of the JOBS Act will alter the landscape for early-stage companies by giving them access to crowdfunding from the masses. There are even charity initiatives like the ones launched by Exec and Motion To Dismiss Cancer that give a select few access to top entrepreneurs and VCs.

At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. As the Kauffman report points out, most VC funds aren’t generating more than the three to five percent return one finds in the public markets — the yield investors expect, the report finds. In fact, the report states “VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late ’90s”.

When life happens, entrepreneurs don’t have the option to call in sick or ask for some time off.  Whether you’re sick, have suffered a business setback, or just having a really bad day, an entrepreneur can’t usually just walk away for a period of time without damaging their business.  But just because you’re self-employed doesn’t mean that you don’t still need some mental breaks. If you ignore problems and push through, it will eventually catch up with you.

Here are 4 simple tips for entrepreneurs to get that well deserved break we all need from time to time.

1. Small Steps

Owning and running your own business that serves as the financial lifeline for you, your family and possibly employees can be overwhelming at times.  When you’re dealing with problems – within your business or outside – taking a step back and dissecting the issue into smaller steps can greatly alleviate the pressure on any situation.