The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Mr Batt O’Keeffe T.D. has welcomed Enterprise Ireland’s Annual Report and Accounts 2009 published today, (Thursday 8 July 2010) saying the report shows a robust performance by Irish companies during the global economic recession in 2009. Minister O’Keeffe also stated that Enterprise Ireland client companies will create 60,000 jobs by the end of 2015.

Enterprise Ireland is the Government agency responsible for the development of Irish companies and driving Irish export sales. Enterprise Ireland client companies are responsible for over 250,000 jobs (134,000 directly employed) and spend an estimated €19bn per annum in the Irish economy, delivering huge economic impact to communities across almost every town in Ireland.

Women often pin all their hopes on a good mentor, aiming to engineer the kinds of career connections that seem to materialize organically for men. Myths about mentors abound. They are assumed to have superpowers for solving every kind of career dilemma, from meeting the folks in the next department to getting chosen for a career-making assignment. They are believed to have telepathic empathy, be unendingly patient, and be willing to advocate for you at every turn.

That sounds an awful lot like another American icon: Mom.

But your mentor is not your mom. Of course, your relationship with your mentor should be mutually productive and satisfying, but, keep in mind that this is about getting ahead in your career. Women sometimes expect a maternal level of emotional investment from their mentors and want someone who will look out for them like a mother hen. If you’re emotionally overinvested, you’re already off track. You’ll be disappointed with your mentor in particular — and cynical about mentoring overall — if you have unrealistic expectations about the nature of this important relationship.

Today, President Obama spoke with workers at Smith Electric’s new factory in Kansas City. Missouri. With a $32 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act coupled with $36 million in private capital, the electric vehicle company is building up to 500 all-electric trucks.

While he was there, the President also had the pleasure of announcing the company was hiring its 50th worker at the plant. By September, that number is expected to grow to 70, and at the project’s peak, Smith tells us the project will create more than 220 direct and indirect jobs. As the President said:

[T]he reason I’m here today is because, at this plant, you’re doing more than just building new vehicles. You are helping to fight our way through a vicious recession and you are building the economy of America’s future.

Albert Wenger, Partner at Union Square Ventures, is an experienced VC, advisory board member, and former entrepreneur who knows what it takes to start a successful business.

He recently posted seven solid pieces of career advice for entrepreneurs on his blog, Continuations.

From Wenger's blog:

First: many people think they want to be an entrepreneur but few actually are. The best way to tell is to look at the things you have already done. If you have never taken the initiative to create something from scratch (and even if that something is just a new club at school) you are probably not well suited to being an entrepreneur.

For all its problems, America is a great place. And one thing that makes America great is its prosperity. Yes, some people have suffered during the recession — but compared to all the other countries in the history of the world, America is rich. Why?

One reason is that America is a good place to do business.

Dinesh D'Souza, author of "What's So Great about America," points out: "In most other societies, the businessman has been looked down upon. He's been seen as a kind of sleazy guy. But then American founders specifically put protection for patents and trademarks in the Constitution.

And suddenly, the entrepreneur is taken from the bottom of the heap and brought to the front."

Speaking in Brussels yesterday (8 July), European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said the EU would need a harmonised feed-in tariff to boost investment in solar power and other renewable energies. His comments came as the parliament in his native Germany was voting to approve cuts to the national feed-in tariff.

The commissioner praised the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) for guaranteeing "a fair price" for renewable energy, urging Europe to adopt something similar.

"I think we need a European EEG," the German suggested.

The ground-breaking regulation, adopted a decade ago, made Germany the world's biggest solar market despite its northern location and paved the way for similar schemes to be applied elsewhere across Europe.

It can sometimes be a difficult task deciding whether or not to include a particular clip in our weekly Beer O’Clock newsletter (The Best and Worst of Anthill TV).

While the mandate might seem simple — the video needs to be about innovation, invention, creativity and/or entrepreneurship (the values we hold dear) — the selection process actually involves a surprisingly complex number of considerations, such as balance, educational content, local relevance, chuckle-factor and good taste.

Investment bank Allen & Co. is once again hosting its media summit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Attendees include Google cofounder Larry Page, News Corp king Rupert Murdoch, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, and whole bunch of other people who flew in on their own jets.

At the event two years ago, an image of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang banging his head on the table perfectly told the story of his company's failed merger with Microsoft.

Which image of the billionaires and millionares descending on Sun Valley tells this year's story best? For us, it's the one where not-yet-rich-guy Pandora founder Tim Westergren looks back at the horde of photographers camped outside his hotel with a half-smile and a little tiny bit of fear.

Innovators around the world are scrambling to find ways to make the world a better place. The only problem is their ideas tend to require a lot of money to make and use! What's more is that most of these helpful inventions are made to be used in third world countries where funds are limited.

Solution? Here are five clever people who use simple household appliances to save lives and improve the quality of the planet.

One of the best things that happened to me as a grad student was receiving the gift of a laptop from my brother-in-law. What was great about it was that what was a new computer to me was not, in fact, a new computer at all. In fact, it was quite old: five or six years old. What was so great about this? It didn't have a wireless card in it, so I couldn't get on the Internet. That meant that when I needed to find something online, I had to leave my dissertation study, lock the door, go down several floors in the library, find a computer to jump on, locate what I was looking for, and then go all the way back upstairs. Doing this was such a pain, that I typically found myself staying put and writing for several hours at a time.

It's no longer convenient for me to work with that computer, but there are plenty of times when I miss the freedom that old computer gave me from the temptations of email, Twitter, and the rest of the Internet. Figuring out how to free yourself from distractions so you can do your best work (pace Merlin Mann ) is something that all academics—and all writers—need to learn how to do.

BlackBerrys, iPhones and Droids may dot congressional committee chambers and sometimes — despite rules to the contrary — appear on the House and Senate floors. But a growing frustration still pervades Silicon Valley that there is more than distance separating Washington and Silicon Valley. There’s a gap in knowledge, too. Washington doesn’t get tech.

Some call it Capitol Hill’s own “digital divide” — the growing gap in understanding between lawmakers responsible for resolving the tech community’s most pressing issues and the industry leaders who first call attention to these issues.

The gap is all the more worrisome to tech industry leaders because of the speed with which new devices and practices are clashing with old ways of doing business.

Australia's job creation has been explosive, beating estimates by 200% yesterday. Unemployment is plummeting, already sitting at a level where most economists consider an economy 'fully employed'.

Yet Australian job creation could soon hit the brakes, not for lack of jobs, but for lack of workers.

A new joint report from the Australian Industry Group and Deloitte explains that one of Australian CEOs largest concerns is that a shortage of available workers will crimp their companies' growth prospects.

Running a startup is a combination of luck and skill. The luck part of that you can’t control, but serial entrepreneur and technical innovator Jerry Kaplan notes there are certain qualities that successful entrepreneurs share. He runs down the five most important in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University. Business acumen is helpful, but to really succeed, he says, people skills are just as important.

Back in January 2010, Google declared that it was no longer willing to continue censoring search results on Google.cn, and that it would possibly shut down the Chinese search page, and potentially even its offices in China. In March, Google backed that talk up by redirecting Google.cn to Google.com.hk, a move that enabled it to keep providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese but from Hong-Kong.

At the end of last month, the Chinese government made it clear to the company that it wasn’t happy with the redirect, and that its Internet Content Provider license would not be renewed if they would keep up this “unacceptable” behavior.

Arizona may be ground zero for the conflict over U.S. immigration policy, but it takes only a few minutes of watching cable television news and scanning local op-ed pages to see how raw and divisive the matter has become in the nation's political sphere.

Yet with all the heated rhetoric about illegals, border security, amnesty, racial profiling, and other incendiary topics, one aspect of immigration isn't emphasized enough: the job-creating potential of immigrant entrepreneurs. They're the vanguard in America's global competition for entrepreneurial talent and innovative ideas. The nation needs to encourage more entrepreneurs from other nations to call America home. Their energy is the elixir of future economic growth.

Take a recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute on U.S. multinational corporations. In Growth and competitiveness in the United States: The role of its multinational companies, the consulting firm notes that big business comprises less than 1 percent all U.S. companies, yet the 2,270 multinational corporations in its database accounted for 31 percent of the growth in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product from 1990 to 2007. Even more important, U.S. multinational corporations have contributed 41 percent of gains in labor productivity since 1990—and 53 percent of the productivity increases during expansions.

Lexington, Mass.-based CommonAngels has reportedly raised $10 million for a new (it’s third) co-investment fund, according to a regulatory filing today. The last time the group raised funds was back in 2005, to the tune of just over $10M.

CommonAngels, named after the city’s historic public meeting grounds, is a group of 75 leading private investors and several dozen limited partners in two co-investment funds (make it three now). Their main focus is on capital efficiency: Series A rounds of $5ook-$5M with total capital less than $20M.

Congrats to James Geshwiler and everyone at CommonAngels on this latest fund raising; this news will certainly excite the innovation economy here in Boston.

We've fallen behind according to studies and my experience as a CEO. Here's how to reclaim our edge.

America is the inventing nation. A stream of inventions helped make the 20th century the American century.

We've always welcomed a diverse group of dreamers from across the globe and offered them opportunities to advance by virtue of their hard work. We believe in the free flow of ideas and built a public education system that was once the envy of the world.

We have also steadfastly maintained a strong business climate that promotes the value of innovation and reinforces Americans' frontier spirit that sees obstacles as challenges to be overcome.

Unfortunately, America's economy is in danger of losing what ...

Comcast Corp. said it will contribute at least $20 million to a venture capital fund that the cable giant is creating to back minority entrepreneurs in developing new media content and technology.

ROBERTS The move is part of Comcast's effort to ease concerns from minority groups about its proposed deal to take control of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal. A marriage of the biggest cable and broadband provider with a huge content company has some fearing that there will be a loss of diversity in both in the programming people see and the executives behind the scenes.

In a letter to Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), Comcast also said it would add to its systems four cable networks whose majority owners are African American.

With a few hiccups, green technology has been one of the bright spots in a lagging economy. But identifying which new technologies are ready for investment has remained a bit of a puzzle.

Recognizing the importance of investment in developing these technologies, the Department of Energy (DOE) has launched a new resource that will help potential investors identify opportunities.

The EERE Technology Commercialization Portal is an online resource that provides key information about energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies being researched by DOE labs and institutions using DOE funds.

The company is developing crops that tolerate salty soils.

Around the world, a billion acres of agricultural land lay abandoned. In the United States, 15 million acres of cropland falls under this category. Decades of repeated irrigation and declining water quality have made much of this once-productive land too salty to support plant growth. Among the strategies to put this land back to use is to develop crops that can tolerate high-salinity soils.

Last week, Ceres, a biotechnology company in Thousand Oaks, CA, announced that it had developed a trait that allows several common crops to grow under highly saline conditions, even in seawater. Ceres researchers have tested the trait in Arabidopsis thaliana, rice, and switchgrass, a hardy perennial that's used as a feedstock for making ethanol and other biofuels. "The fact that we've seen this very high-level salt tolerance in three different plant species gives us a high degree of confidence that this trait will recapitulate itself in other energy grasses as well," says Ceres CEO Richard Hamilton.