Medtronic, the world's largest medical-device maker, has created devices to stimulate the brain and the heart, pump drugs, monitor blood sugar, repair valves, and stabilize the spine. The company needs a constant influx of new ideas to improve its products, and these ideas traditionally come from physicians.

To hone these ideas, Medtronic increasingly employs social-networking technologies within the company and also solicits solutions from inventors around the world. "We are now trying to use new technologies to tap sources of ideas outside of the regular landscape," says Mike Hess, the company's vice president of innovative excellence.

Even though I have seen many startups succeed, and many that failed, I still struggle with what really makes the difference. It seems like some CEOs are just more tuned in to the market realities, customer dynamics, people interactions, and are better leaders. But what does that really mean?

A while back I found some great business leadership insights in “The Secrets of Tuned In Leaders”, by Craig Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott. They did a series of interviews with CEOs to understand how technology companies create success, and why most fail. They found many similarities between the companies that are winning in the marketplace and those that are struggling.

But behind the scenes, seven critical success factors emerged. So pragmatic were these “secrets” that most of the CEOs treated them as nothing more significant than looking both ways before crossing the street. But we all know that looking both ways first can save your life.

This post originally ran on TechCrunch. Lately I have seen a number of deals announced on TechCrunch in which 5 or more different VCs were participating in the deal.

This always makes me chuckle because in my first company we had 5 investors in our first round and we picked up 5 more before we finally sold the company.

In my second company I had only 1 investor.

Quarterly reports about venture capital investment are fairly commonplace. But information about early stage investment can be more difficult to come by.

To help investigate some of the investment trends, the Angel Capital Education Foundation (ACEF), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and CB Insights are announcing a partnership that will produce a quarterly research report. The aptly-titled Halo Report will track angel investment activity in the U.S. and Canada, providing data that entrepreneurs and early-stage investors have long sought after.

NEW YORK, Feb. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Millennium Technology Value Partners issued a statement today reviewing highlights of the firm's recent activities and offering several forecasts for the future development of private technology companies and the next generation venture capital ecosystem in which many of them will be operating.

"We are witnessing a new period of extraordinary growth and value creation by leading technology companies, yet more than any other time in recent capital markets history, the world's most promising technology companies are electing to remain private longer, and seeking alternate sources of liquidity to accomplish that goal," said Millennium Managing Partner Sam Schwerin. "Millennium's Funds have long been designed to supply these best-of-breed companies with flexible but wholesale solutions to all of their capital needs over the private and public company phases of their development and evolution. This includes growth capital, venture debt, and shareholder liquidity. We believe in serving as a long-term, fundamental partner to our portfolio companies in whatever capacity our companies most need."

As part of its 2011 Budget submission, the British Venture Capital Association (BVCA) is urging the government to nominate a venture tsar to attract more private sector investors into private VC funds.

This is needed to send a clear message about the government’s commitment to economic growth, and to ensure that the UK remains the centre of entrepreneurship in Europe, says BVCA chief executive Simon Walker.

“As Budget day approaches, the one thing we can all agree on is the need to restore strong sustainable growth to the UK economy,” he says. “Private equity and venture capital can help bring this about by investing in new businesses and growing existing ones.”

I blogged last month on this page about the importance of commercialization in the green industry. Reliance on government subsidies can be dangerous, as subsidies inevitably run out. We have seen this in wind and solar. In the public sector, I have found that a good idea backed by good science, even in the abstract, is often enough to attract seed funding and legitimate consideration from, say, the U.S. Department of Energy. And rightly so -- after all, these types of organizations help private companies develop complex scientific abstractions into commercial concepts for the marketplace.

Unlike in government, however, it is difficult to actually sell green ideas on the open market when business applications have yet to be tested, even if they are backed by good science. Solar paint is a great example (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a reason,) but even solar paint is starting to take a step closer to reality: its value is being communicated with increasing clarity to the marketplace.

There are a number of well-known awards recognizing innovation in government. The most prominent is the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance’s “Innovations in American Government Awards.” But these awards shine a spotlight on existing efforts. The new twist to innovation awards these days is to spark innovation by offering a reward to solve previously unsolved problems.

This new twist isn’t really that new. As long ago as the 1600s, prizes were used to encourage innovation by compensating research results with monetary rewards or medals. Historically, these prizes have been used to spark innovations in areas such as mathematics, medicine, and technology. For example, the British government sponsored a prize in 1714 for the first inventor of an instrument for accurately measuring longitude at sea. And a privately-funded prize encouraged Charles Lindbergh to become the first solo pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927.

The shakeout in the venture industry is on, and it is ugly.

Many, many firms are dying -- all while the top firms are doing extremely well.

We've gone from 1000 venture firms in 2007 to less than 400 today, and more are shutting down. That's one depressing finding from a Mercury News report on the VC industry. For the first time, the overall ten-year returns of the industry are now negative, as the dotcom bubble fades.

There's been talk for many years of an impending shakeout in the VC industry, which grew too large in the dotcom days, and it is by necessity a slow one because funds are raised for 10 years (often more) and there are plenty of "zombie firms" which have long stopped investing but still manage a portfolio of some sort.

I read this morning the board of Apple is facing a bit of a shareholder backlash. Investors want to see a succession plan for Steve Jobs, who’s taken medical leave for the third time in seven years. And the board don’t want to tell them what’s contained in the plan for fear of “revealing secret plans (that) would aid competitors and make it harder to retain executives.”

The real issue here – whether reality matches perception or not – is Apple has an “innovation hero” problem.

An innovation hero occurs whenever your innovation effort crucially relies on a single individual to get things done. The individual – probably someone pretty senior– uses his or her personal control of resource, hierarchical power, or charisma to make innovation happen, often with very little support from any structured system that fosters innovative outcomes. I’ve written before that most innovation programmes don’t work for this reason in the long term.

To inspire and enhance state efforts to significantly boost college completion and close attainment gaps for traditionally underrepresented populations, Complete College America, with funding support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has launched the Completion Innovation Challenge.

Governors from all 50 states are invited to submit proposals to win one of ten $1 million, 18-month implementation grants. Grants will be awarded to states that produce the best plans to develop and deploy innovative, statewide strategies designed to substantially increase college completion.

Two years ago, Fast Company compiled a list of the Most Influential Women In Tech, in part to recognize the challenges that women in technology face--proper recognition being just one of them. We continued in 2010. Our 2011 list highlights 30 women in six categories. All of them bring unique brands of
thought to their industries.

Think women don't launch startups?

1) You're not alone, and 2) Think again!

Over the last couple of months there has been another round of women in tech and startup debates.

Robert Scoble says in a Facebook Group that he wants to write about women launching world-changing startups but struggles to find them. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch says "the press is dying to write about (women startups)." Over on Quora, there is a discussion about the hottest companies started by women. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch is one of the most popular answers.

It's easy to complain that it's hard to find women run startups--or to provide excuses. But instead, let's focus on 25 women running kick-ass startups. Will they change the world? I don't use crystal balls, but I sure do think that they have huge potential to make a serious mark.

Creativity is good -- and more critical than ever in business. So why do so many once-creative companies get bogged down over time, with continuous innovation the exception and not the norm? Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller and colleagues from Cornell University and the Indian School of Business have gained critical insight into why.

In a paper titled, "Recognizing Creative Leadership: Can Creative Idea Expression Negatively Relate to Perceptions of Leadership Potential?" to be published in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Mueller and co-authors Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell and Dishan Kamdar of ISB undertook three studies to examine how creative people were viewed by colleagues. The troubling finding: Those individuals who expressed more creative ideas were viewed as having less, not more, leadership potential. The exception, they found, was when people were specifically told to focus on charismatic leaders. In that case, creative types fared better. But the bottom line is that, in most cases, being creative seems to put people at a disadvantage for climbing the corporate ladder. "It is not easy to select creative leaders," says Mueller. "It takes more time and effort to recognize a creative leader than we might have previously thought."

Imagine if you could tap the brainpower of proven innovators from around the globe to help your company create its next business breakthrough and enhance its environmental record. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) announced today that it is teaming up with InnoCentive, a global leader in crowdsourced innovation, to help companies do just that through a new Eco-Challenge Series to accelerate green innovation in business.

Breakthrough ideas can--and often do--emerge from bringing a new and diverse perspective to a familiar problem. Having that "fresh set of eyes" is one way that EDF has been able to catalyze and spread environmental innovations like redesigned packaging with McDonald's, hybrid trucks with FedEx, and next-generation solar technology with Walmart.

WASHINGTON—Is a "mystery tube" the key to improving science education in the United States? The prop, a cylinder with two pieces of string running through it, briefly took center stage here at a packed symposium on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education, part of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Mark Stefanski, a high school biology teacher from Marin Academy in San Rafael, Calif., called up two volunteers from the audience and asked them to figure out the internal structure of the opaque tube, made of about 10 inches of PVC pipe. They began shaking the tube and pulling on the strings, just as Stefanski's high school students do in class.

Businesses have been using personality tests for years to determine employee’s thinking styles and corporate fit. In general, the benefit from all this testing and analysis has been meager. The test results, communicated in complex language, are not easy to put in practice.

Quick question: What does ESTJ mean to you?

Nevertheless, having an understanding of how your leaders think, their personality, and what they prefer to do is important. For several years, we used the more straightforward HBDI testing (Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument) to determine how someone thinks and what they prefer to do. Keeping it simple, the test measures someone’s method of thinking along four quadrants, which can be defined as follows:

1. Analytical
2. Organized
3. Inter-personal
4. Creative

I regularly get asked the question, “What really is the impact on my business of not ranking in the Top 10 in Google?” The truth is I have absolutely no idea. The reality is I guarantee the impact is significant enough for you to care.

In this post I’ve applied math to some well-known, published data about search engine usage and paid search. I then related it to a Page 1 versus a Page 2 organic search ranking.

The outcome demonstrates the foregone revenue for a particular business of being ranked on Page 2 rather than Page 1 in Google.

There are 4 billion Google searches performed every single day (ComScore.com, December 2009) which accounts for approximately 75% of all Internet searches. Of those searchers, 30% will click on the paid side of search (Google Adwords/PPC) while the other 70% will click on the organic side of search.

Facing massive government deficits and stagnant regional economies, many states are exploring new options for their economic development activities. Three states recently have taken steps towards eliminating their primary economic development agencies, and replacing them with public-private partnerships, intended to reduce state spending and improve the responsiveness of state efforts.