An innovative corporate culture is one that supports the creation of new ideas and the implementation of those ideas.  Leaders need to help employees see innovation in the right light.  The most innovative companies do the following:

1.  See innovation as a competency:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone and applied systematic.  Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill by:

• Creating a well-defined set of innovation competencies and embedding them into every employee’s competency model along with other required behaviors such as ethics and leadership.
• Conducting regular training courses in creativity methods and innovation management.
• Staffing internal innovation experts and coaches who work with teams to help guide their innovation efforts and facilitate their success.
• Not rewarding employees for innovation, but rather expecting it as part of the value system

Golden Gate Ventures, a new Singapore-based startup accelerator and early stage fund, is open for business and is accepting applications.

Backed by i/o Ventures, a well-known Silicon Valley startup accelerator, Golden Gate’s partners, investors, and mentors originate from the Silicon Valley and all around Asia.

The company’s logo is a stylized bridge, and that is what it hopes to become — a bridge between the well known technology hub and Asia. The most promising teams from the Golden Gate program will get a chance to work in San Francisco for one to two months each semester.

The Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development (MCED), the University of Maine’s Target Technology Center and the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center (MAIC) announced today the formation of the Maine Business Incubation System (MeBIS). With funding from the Maine Technology Institute and the recently announced investment from the Blackstone Charitable foundation, MeBIS will provide appropriate, focused, in-depth support to entrepreneurs by utilizing networks and expertise both inside Maine and beyond to create jobs and sustainable enterprises.

“Maine does a good job of starting companies, but very, very few break through to over ten employees. We expect the number of scalable entrepreneurs served by this program to increase from the 40 currently served to 240 statewide by late 2014 generating 1,000 new jobs over time,” says Don Gooding, Executive Director of MCED.

Social networking for career enrichment is on the rise. With online networking, you have access to more professionals — and will inevitably make faster connections — as your connections expand throughout your industry.

Online networking also gives you the opportunity to put your personal brand on display — a type of communication that may feel like bragging in face-to-face meetings. We’ve all heard of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and how to use these platforms to find a job, but it’s time to look beyond “the usual suspects.”

The world's first robot capable of lifting and transferring patients will soon be put to the test in nursing homes and other health care settings. Commercialization of the robot should follow in about three years, said Chris Salzberg, a spokesman for the global relations office of RIKEN institute of Physical and Chemical Research.

RIBA-II will be used to help nurses and other health professionals do the heavy lifting of patients during bed-to-wheelchair or other transfers, Salzberg said in an interview at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.

The Japanese love affair and expertise with robotic technology has produced a robot with enough "joints" that it can bend its arms to hold a human body and even crouch down to floor level, if necessary. The robot, which has adorable bearlike facial features, has a soft exterior, touch-screen panels, tactile sensors and travel guidance controls.

Is Canada’s venture capital industry still struggling, or showing signs of coming back to life?

It is difficult to reach a definitive conclusion one way or the other based on a recent report by the CVCA, Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association.

According to the CVCA, the amount of venture capital invested last year was $1.5-billion, a 34-per-cent increase from 2010.

When Chantel Waterbury came to pitch me back in August of 2010 for chloe + isabel, she started off the conversation with a simple description--that there were four other companies in her space each doing over a hundred million dollars of revenue and that, in total, they still made up a small percentage of the overall market.  She told me a few assumptions about how much each of her merchandizers would sell, and within a couple of minutes I was super psyched about the potential for her business and the scale it could get to.

It should be pretty easy to tell whether or not something has the potential to be big within a short mental exercise.  This is what is known as the "back of the napkin" approach.  I know... it's a highly technical term so stay with me on this.

The Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan Competition allows students who are interested in entrepreneurship to experience what it is like to create a real business plan.

Students get to work with mentors and Iowa business professionals who help them further develop their business plans. Students prepare to talk about their plans in front of the judges.

The ISU Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship, which was created by John Pappajohn, is a gateway for ISU students and faculty to become connected with the entrepreneurial world. It connects Iowa businesses to the ISU community.

The team at Jobs Bolega, a start-up from India, is hoping to transform the way workers find jobs in developing countries.

Jobs Bolega, which means "Jobs will now talk", is aimed at people in the lower-income brackets who may not have access to the internet, but have a mobile phone.

"Using mobile voice technology, essentially we are getting employers and employees in a network like LinkedIn to get them a job," says Krishanu Dutta, a founding member of the team.

"We are creating a voice resume (CV) for them."

Krishanu and his team have come to Singapore as part of an accelerator program for start-ups from around Asia to develop their business ideas.

KARACHI:  During an interactive session held in connection with the Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011, the moderator asked a sizeable group of management students present in the audience if they wanted to be entrepreneurs after graduation.

Hardly 20% replied affirmatively. The rest of them said they would rather get a secure job, preferably at a multinational, which promised a steady income and growth.

Are our business schools turning out good employees while killing the entrepreneurial spirit of potential business leaders of tomorrow?

According to Haris Hamdani – who graduated from a private university in 2009 and now runs a clothing brand for men namely Red Tree – career counselling at the undergraduate level was more about getting a stable job instead of entrepreneurship.

Microsoft and Google are developing web platforms combining the roles of social media and search engines – ‘social search’ – in moves that reveal a raging battle to harness cloud computing and combine the web’s most popular functions.

At a seminar on social media in Brussels on 8 February, Microsoft revealed that it is developing a ‘social search’ tool, called So.cl, currently in use at experimental stage primarily amongst the academic community.

Google Plus, which launched last autumn – and in January allowed users older than 13 years to join – combines the search giant’s usual engines with new social services and has been described as an attempt to rival the social network Facebook.

A common characteristic across sustainable organizations is the ability to recognize public eco awareness and deliver new products that address societal and environmental challenges in a way that delivers business sustainability and long term value.  However, questions still remain unanswered on the most effective way to harness and drive creativity in an increasingly transparent but equally competitive world.

The Harvard Business Review recently weighed in on the “open” debate with its post, Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries.  Commenting that today’s markets are being transformed into social forums, the article offers some key concepts to consider:

Leaders and senior teams can take advantage of contrasting innovation modes, paradoxical organizational requirements, and associated dynamic boundaries.

If your startup is your dream, why would you want to think about an exit? It’s going to be so successful and so much fun that you don’t need to think about what comes after. Wrong. There are two very real and practical reasons why you need to plan an exit:

• Outside investors want to collect their return. Remember that equity investments are not like loans with interest. The investor sees no return until he cashes out, or the company is sold. Even three years is a long time to wait for any pay check.
• Entrepreneurs love the art of the start. Assuming your startup takes off, you will probably find that the fun is gone by the time you reach 50 employees, or a few million in revenue. The job changes from creating a “work of art” to operating a “cookie cutter.”

Its been a busy start to the new year and tons of new tech companies have launched.

Here are some of the most promising new startups of 2012.

While many people do not yet associate Israel with technology and startups, Israel has the second-largest concentration of startups per capita after Silicon Valley.

Many of the leading tech companies have established a presence in “Startup Nation” and the latest of the bunch is of course Apple with its acquisition of Anobit and a new R&D center in Haifa, Israel.

Where is this? The question is simple enough, and in a non-metropolitan environment, the answer may be correspondingly unambiguous. But in large cities, where the flow of human traffic is fast and vast, place names are fluid. They change over time, and expand or contract according to the ebb and flow of populations, professions and reputations.

Few Italians remain in the Lower Manhattan neighbourhood once known as Little Italy (1), for example. Most of the area - and the toponym - has been swallowed up by an expanding Chinatown. Part of the late Little Italy has been renamed Nolita (“North of Little Italy”). The new name was a conscious re-branding of the area to lure in yuppies, who migrate in packs, but only feel safe in neighbourhoods with portmanteau names (2)

QUEBEC — One by one, five athletes hurl themselves off a wall beneath the sweeping arches of what once was the St.-Esprit church. Sixteen feet below, they land on a trampoline, snap back toward the wall and send themselves outward again.

The vertigo-inducing activity, performed here at Quebec Circus School, a training program for the circus arts, is known as wall trampoline. Part gymnastics, part parkour, it is a nascent sport that has few participants — they call themselves bouncers — and a rule book that is still being written. But the inventors of wall trampoline, toiling in the chamber of the repurposed church, have big plans for it.

Our friends at Bab­son College have asked us to help out on their new cam­paign, “Rede­fine Entre­pre­neurship”.

It’s a sim­ple enough idea: If they can own a new idea of what entre­pre­neurship is, or at least, be a prime mover in the con­ver­sa­tion, then peo­ple will go to them to get a piece of the action. Good for the stu­dents and faculty, good for the brand and good for the sta­kehol­ders. Exactly.

Of course, the mea­ning of the word has been rede­fi­ned over and over many times already, from in its ori­gins in the Indus­trial Revo­lu­tion of yes­ter­day, to Sili­con Valley today, to India and China and Africa tomo­rrow. Lan­guage is orga­nic and fluid, after all, and to hope to come up with the all-encompassing, defi­ni­tive wor­ding for it, isn’t going to hap­pen in our life­time. The word already has a million defi­ni­tions, anyway.

An important context for figuring out problems through reasoning is puzzle play, say researchers at University of Chicago.

Psychologist Susan Levine and colleagues recently conducted a study that found 2-4 year-old children, who play with puzzles, have better spatial skills when assessed at 4 1/2 years of age.

After controlling for differences in parents’ income, education and overall amount of parent language input, researchers say puzzle play proved to be a significant predictor of spatial skills–skills important in mathematics, science and technology and a key aspect of cognition.

“As early as the preschool years and persisting into adulthood, there are individual and gender differences on certain spatial tasks, notably those involving mental rotation (of objects),” the researchers write in their report, published in Developmental Science. “These variations are of considerable interest because of their reported relation to mathematics achievement.”

Public Service Review's Caroline Pennington describes how the IMI's 4th Call is focusing on new methods of developing safer and more effective treatments for patients

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has recently launched a 4th Call for proposals to revolutionise collaborative research in seven new major public health topics, going out to people, organisations and enterprises interested in participating in future IMI projects. The EU has confirmed it will contribute up to €105m to projects in the 4th Call, and funding will be matched with contributions from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).