Canada’s venture capital industry is a damsel in distress so we should be thankful the federal and provincial governments are coming to the rescue.

With not enough money being sprinkled by VCs on money-hungry startups, the federal and provincial governments has been stepping into the breach. Earlier this week, FedDev (a federal government agency with $190-million to invest) injected $4.85-million in eight Ontario startups, while VCs and angels coughed up an additional $15.2-million.

“Ideas and innovation are what the creative economy is all about,” Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in a statement. “This will create highly skilled jobs in southern Ontario, and have the potential to make a lasting impression on the economy of our region and beyond.”

Small is beautiful in the world of innovation. But while technology start-ups may be fleet of foot, it can be difficult for them to find time to look up from the task in hand and go prospecting for the support and finance needed to grow.

Yet Europe’s legions of SMEs now find themselves at the nodes of open innovation networks, responsible for teasing new research and technologies out of universities and developing them to the point where they are of interest to large corporations.

Seed funding for tech start-ups is under pressure as venture capital struggles to survive the recession. In a session on financing entrepreneurship, Axel Polack, General Partner at TVM Capital, warned the European Entrepreneurship Summit in Brussels that in Europe “we are losing investors into venture capital left and right. There is a dramatically shrinking VC industry.”

In Germany, Polack warned, without super angels “it would be really really grim”. Super angels come in at a later stage in the development of a business and back more mature companies with larger amounts, he explained.

Where in the world does a solar company have the best chance of success? It’s not the economic powerhouse you might think, though the U.S. and China aren’t far behind.

The cleantech industry--an all-encompassing term that includes wind power, solar power, smart grid technologies, recycling, biofuels, energy store, transportation, and more--is growing. Even a faltering economy won’t stop its climb; during the financial crisis, investments dropped just 6.6% compared to 19% in the oil and gas industry. That being said, some countries are markedly more friendly towards cleantech startups than others.

Step inside any company, no matter the size, stage of development, or level of success, and the culture is either driving the strategy or undermining it.

Debate and difference of opinion, lightly salted with an appropriate amount of passion and tenacity, can help lead to significant breakthroughs. In the world of corporate correctness we are all living in, this should be highly encouraged. I really appreciated Bob Frisch's response to my recent article on the importance of culture. Though I think he missed the point, the overwhelming number of people who embraced the notion that culture is imperative for sustained success is an indication of the importance of this issue and the opportunity culture offers for positive change.

Many people, especially those who have spent years struggling up the corporate ladder, dream of jumping ship and becoming an entrepreneur. But every job move is fraught with risk, and the move from employee to entrepreneur is on the high end of the risk curve. This is a big jump, especially in an unstable economy, so do your homework first on this one.

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago, “Five Ways to Bungle a Job Change,” there are at least five common missteps that professionals make when moving to a new job.

Crowdsourcing has been heating up for more than a year. This hasn’t been lost on venture capitalists.

VCs invested $280 million in 35 crowdsourcing companies last year, favoring early stage startups, but financing several significant later and expansion rounds.

This assessment comes from a new report by research firm massolution. The report is based on data collected from 32 crowdsourcing companies in the fourth quarter of last year.

It’s a truth universally accepted (and also supported by many surveys) that today’s young people are more interested than ever in entrepreneurship. Having seen their parents laid off from corporate jobs, having grown up with entrepreneurial role models like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, and having witnessed their older siblings’ difficulty finding entry-level jobs in today’s economy, it’s no surprise that youth today often express more interest in starting their own businesses than in working for someone else.

When Joanne Wilson was in college, she rented a summer room in a fraternity from one of the brothers, Fred.

Now the two are married and they're a couple of New York's most involved, savvy startup investors.

Fred is a partner at Union Square Ventures; his investments include Zynga, Twitter and Foursquare.  None of the companies in his portfolio are women-founded.

Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane may have changed the game of baseball, but what if the Moneyball approach could be applied to startups so investors could make better bets?

Serial entrepreneur Nick O'Neill, who made millions selling SocialTimes to WebMediaBrands in 2010, is launching a company called StartupStats that uses data from AngelList and Twitter to help investors discover new companies.

Even though open innovation is still in its infancy compared to many other business philosophies, it seems to have a great deal of potential, particularly in the way it connects disparate technologies for better solutions.

Businesses are starting to go open. No, it doesn’t mean they’re unveiling all their intellectual property to the world. It is, however, the result of a particularly difficult business climate for innovation. The recession has battered manufacturers of all types, forcing them to focus on getting their product out the door and keeping the lights on, rather than investing in R&D. In many instances, those R&D engineers found themselves out of a job. In best-case scenarios, manufacturers struggled to deal with customers that wanted better products, and sooner, while their existing staff of knowledgeable engineers — the Baby Boomers —sought out retirement.

PUTRAJAYA: The long-established partnership comprising the Government, business sector and knowledge institutions in Malaysia's innovation policy has been extended to now include the rakyat.

The future of the nation hinges on this “Quadruple Helix”, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, adding that Malaysia is the first country to introduce such a strategy in its innovation ecosystem.

He said innovation could not happen in isolation, making it vital for cooperation between the four segments of the helix to work together in making Malaysia globally competitive.

The U.S. Department of Defense may have funded the research that led to the Internet, but freewheeling innovation created the patchwork of privately owned technology that makes up the Internet today. Now the U.S. government is trying to wrest back some control, as it adjusts to an era when cyberattacks on U.S. corporations and government agencies are common.

At the RSA computer security conference yesterday, representatives of the White House, U.S. Department of Defense, and National Security Agency said that safeguarding U.S. interests required them to take a more active role in governing what has been a purely commercial, civilian resource. But some experts are concerned that the growing influence of defense and military organizations on the operation and future development of the Internet will compromise the freedom that has made it a success.

Policymakers often believe that if something is good, they should provide incentives for more of it. This philosophy is apparent in policies to encourage the commercialization of university technology; local, state, and federal governments are all working to spur universities to bring more inventions to market. Take, for example, the latest federal efforts: a university commercialization prize and a pledge by university administrators to expand their technology commercialization programs.

But incentives aren’t the answer to everything. Pushing universities to commercialize ever more inventions is unproductive because incentives alone don’t make people better at producing valuable inventions.

Obesity is considered the leading preventable cause of death worldwide — until you reach old age, that is. Though obesity increases the risk of an early death, shaving an average of six to seven years off a person’s lifespan, Tel Aviv University researchers have found that this trend may reverse itself after the age of 85. In these people, excess fat seems to have a “protective” effect, decreasing the risk of death when compared to those who are considered at a normal body weight.

When we reach a very old age, some of the factors that affect mortality in younger people may no longer be significant, explain Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield and Rotem Perach of the Herczeg Institute on Aging and the Sackler Faculty of Medicine. Heavier people have lower rates of osteoporosis, which could decrease incidences of falls and subsequent injury. Obesity could also provide excess energy storage in times of trauma or stress, or prolong the period of weight loss caused by a decrease in appetite, a common occurrence as people near death.

In 22 years of working with venture capitalists, Steven M. Cohen, co-manager of Morgan Lewis's emerging business and technology practice, can only remember one time when a venture capitalist returned feedback to a presenter and ultimately invested. When the odds are that slim, "how do you get that first meeting and give yourself the best shot at getting a potential investor?" he asked.

Cohen moderated a panel titled, "VC Confessionals: Why We Funded, Why We Passed," during Wharton's recent 2012 Entrepreneurship Conference, whose theme was "Turning Painpoints into Opportunity". In explaining that tagline, the conference organizers noted that "pain has often been embedded in entrepreneurship. The pain of a personal frustration inspired a new venture. The pain, sweat and tears of an idea turned it into a viable business. The growing pains of the startup helped it morph from being in a league of its own, to one in which it became an industry leader. Pain has often revealed opportunity."

Most aspiring entrepreneurs believe their initial idea and inspiration requires the most important creative thinking. Experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that the initial idea is the easy part, and it’s the later implementation, and the competitive business marketing that are the real creative challenges.

There is a tough balance here to achieve, since a large portion of starting and running a business requires analytical, logical thinking. In fact, our education and training to logically associate related concepts reduces our ability to add the creative side, even though we were all born without that bias. Maybe that’s why “thinking outside the box” is so rare.

From artificial floating wetlands designed to clean the Chesapeake Bay to electronic baseball plates, faculty members and graduate students across the state, including this university, are developing new technology projects with $4.1 million from the Maryland Industrial Partnerships.

The MIPS program — which was founded at this university 25 years ago to help companies fund research projects to develop new products — has approved 16 different projects teaming up companies with researchers from campuses across the University System of Maryland. This year's projects, seven of which involve faculty from this university, range from eco-friendly technology to food preservation to state-of-the-art running shoes and will receive funding from MIPS, the sponsoring companies and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency.

You may not think that you can control the actions of the company you work for, but there are a few simple ways you can shift the way your employer does business--for the better.

You may be stuck in a job you don’t like, where you feel like you don’t have any control. That’s ok, you don’t have to be a high-powered executive to do some good. In fact, you may be the only person that can. When my co-author Billy Parish and I interviewed people for Making Good, our book on finding meaning, money, and community, we didn’t just talk to the all-star social entrepreneurs. We dug a little deeper and talked to a lot of people that were in jobs that simply weren’t ideal for making change. Somehow not only were they making good, but they were finding meaning in the most unlikely of places. Follow the tips below that we took from their experiences and see what you can make happen in your job:

Ten Innovation Roles Inspired by Moneyball – Woody Bendle With Moneyball a six time Academy Award nominee, I thought I’d put together my thoughts about the ten different innovation roles and have some fun by using some baseball analogies in my discussion.

Yes I know there are nine players on a baseball team.  But, the Oakland A’s are in the American League, and the starting rosters of AL baseball teams include the Designated Hitter,  (9 + 1  = 10)!

Just a quick refresher on innovation before we slide into to our discussion about the ten innovation roles.