In 1998, Chuck Templeton started OpenTable Inc. in the bedroom of his San Francisco condo with $50,000. Twelve years and $72 million in venture capital and other investor funding later, the company has 13,000 customers in North America, Europe and Japan.

Mr. Templeton, 42, who now lives in Chicago, says the venture funding was crucial to scaling up OpenTable, which lets diners make reservations online.

To attract customers, "we needed to have as many restaurants in a city using our product as possible," he says. OpenTable used the VC money to hire sales and IT staff to drive that growth.

Even in this era of global markets, new ideas, new companies and new jobs are still created on a local level. One of the bright spots for the future of the U.S. economy is growing evidence that a culture of entrepreneurship is beginning to spread beyond Silicon Valley to urban and rural areas across the country.

States as diverse as Ohio, Kansas, Georgia and Pennsylvania are among the regions bringing together three essential ingredients for innovation: specialized talents, networks and knowledge.

Yes, we are living through a time of economic transition. North Dakota, probably not the first state to come to mind, was a national leader in job growth in the last decade. Philadelphia, where I live and work, was once a major manufacturing center; now one of its major sources of jobs is the health care and life sciences industry, a stable employer even in tough economic times.

By Rich Bendis
President, CEO, Innovation America

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On the heels of the latest Android phone, the Sprint HTC EVO, and as we approach iPhone 4, it seems like mobile devices and platforms are innovating at about five times the pace of personal computers.

Rapid advancement in mobile is often attributed to the natural disruption by which emerging industries innovate quickly, while established markets like PCs follow a slower, more sustained trajectory.

But there are deeper fundamentals driving the breathtaking pace of smartphone advancement. Component vendors supplying to smartphone OEMs have evolved a much different DNA than those supplying to PC makers. Smartphones are an evolution of embedded systems, not PCs, and embedded markets have long favored vendors who don’t simply provide the most highly integrated chipsets, but who can also partner with OEMs to drive system-level integration and software at a rapid pace.

Whether in innovation and governance, private equity, or entrepreneurship, the messages in today’s increasingly global business environment are loud and clear: think differently, don’t underestimate emerging markets, and get back to basics. These were some of the main themes voiced at INSEAD’s Leadership Summit Europe 2010 held recently in Fontainebleau.

As economic and social systems become more complex, business leaders say the first order of business is to get back to basics.

In a session summarising the takeaways from panels held earlier in the day, Claudia Zeisberger, Affiliate Professor of Decision Sciences and Academic Co-Director of the Global Private Equity Initiative at INSEAD, cited one panellist as saying: “Simple is the new sexy.”

Recently there has been a lot of discussion of what the recession has done to venture capitalists’ efforts to exit their investments. Clearly, the bad economic situation has made cashing out more difficult, but viewing the data over time suggests that the economic downturn may have only exacerbated longer term trends.

Looking at the numbers back to 1992, I see three strong patterns:
• A shift to mergers and acquisitions as the primary exit mode that began in the late 1990s.
• A decreasing share of VC-backed investments resulting in exits that began around the same time.
• A decline in the real dollar value of exits through IPO in the aftermath of the Internet bubble.

In a recent survey reported by the Financial Post, one in three Canadians said they were interested in starting their own business in the next two years. Of that group, 35% said they're going to follow through with those plans.

If we extrapolate from the survey of 1,010 Canadians by the tax and accounting software maker Intuit, that means almost one-quarter of Canadians plan to start their own businesses soon. If even half of those do follow up on their dreams, that will be quite astonishing.

A prototype computer vision system can generate a live text description of what's happening in a feed from a surveillance camera. Although not yet ready for commercial use, the system demonstrates how software could make it easier to skim or search through video or image collections. It was developed by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with ObjectVideo of Reston, VA.

"You can see from the existence of YouTube and all the other growing sources of video around us that being able to search video is a major problem," says Song-Chun Zhu, lead researcher and professor of statistics and computer science at UCLA.

"Almost all search for images or video is still done using the surrounding text," he says. Zhu and UCLA colleagues Benjamin Yao and Haifeng Gong developed a new system, called I2T (Image to Text), which is intended to change that.

My RA Guli Zhu has been helping me look at VC performance over the past few decades. The results of our analysis thus far are interesting. We find that (i) the median VC firm performs very poorly and is comfortably outperformed by S&P500 index; unless you (the LP) are investing in a VC firm in the top 5% of VC firms, you are perhaps wasting money, (ii) the VC industry is increasingly becoming more hit driven with the top few firms generate almost the entire industry profits. 

When the CEO and Founder of Groupon, Andrew Mason, launched his online business in the fall of 2008, he never thought it would be so successful. In my interview he told me, “I never considered myself an entrepreneur or set out to launch a billion dollar coupon company. It was a total mistake.”

Groupon formed out of an existing company Mason founded while he was still in public policy graduate school called The Point.com—a website focused on collective action, allowing individuals to start a campaign by asking other online users to give money or do something as a group, but only if the campaign hits a predetermined tipping point.

This oil spill sure is getting depressing. We've become extremely talented at hiding away the ill effects of our consumption decisions. We don't see the inhumane chicken farms behind our chicken McNuggets, or the Chinese factories that produce our shoes, or the offshore oil rigs that extract our oil from the center of the earth. The end result is that, when we're finally forced to confront the ugliness that makes our civilized life possible, we're shocked and appalled. My cheap ground beef comes from that feedlot? My gas station depends on that infrastructure?

The danger of this lifestyle is that we become blind to potential problems. Because we don't think about feedlots, we don't worry (enough) about antibiotic resistance in cattle. Because those rigs are so far offshore - outta sight outta mind - we haven't prepared for the possibility of this epic disaster. As a result, the unlikely event becomes inconceivable - this is the availability heuristic at work - and the inherent riskiness of a situation is underestimated.

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- Seven hundred Generation Y movers-and-shakers gathered in Washington this past weekend to do the MingleStick bump.

Not familiar with the move? It was new to many Summit Series attendees as well, though the flock of twenty- and thirtysomethings was happy to ditch paper business cards in favor of the new networking gadget. At a conference dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, artists, investors and philanthropists make connections, the hallways were filled with melding MingleSticks.

The process is a bit awkward at first. The two minglers have to
position themselves just right and stand face-to-face for a moment as
they align their flash-drive-like gizmos. Press a button, and zap --
your name, photo, e-mail and whatever other info you choose to share
gets transferred. Plugging the device into a PC later uploads all the
contact details.

A new study by the Economic Development Research Group released today by the United States Conference of Mayors found that high speed rail projects in the U.S. would be a substantial job creator and economic generator.

Four regions were selected for the study: Los Angeles, Chicago, Orlando, and Albany. According to the report, “by 2035, HSR can add roughly $255 million in new spending in the Orlando area, $260 million in the Los Angeles area, $50 million in the Chicago area, and more than $100 million in the greater Albany area.”
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As for the methodology, here’s how the executive summary describes it:

This study does not seek to take positions regarding specific alignments, stations, speeds or development time frames. Rather, it recognizes that the nature of high-speed rail service may evolve over a period of several decades as initial high-speed rail lines are upgraded and extended, and new services are introduced. Thus, the scenarios examined here are intended to span the full range of proposed and potential future rail service characteristics — including both 110 mph and 220 mph high-speed rail service.

Liquid-crystal displays, or LCDs, found in televisions, computers, and cell phones, are very inefficient: their complex optical layers discard over 90 percent of the light they produce internally, some of it because it's not quite the right color. Displays that will be in products made by Korean electronics company LG at the end of the year will have a better color gamut and save battery life by using more of the light that normally gets tossed out.

The displays incorporate nanomaterials called quantum dots that convert light from the backlight into narrowly defined bands of color that are matched to the display's filters. Depending on the design of the display, the addition of quantum dots made by Palo Alto, CA-based company Nanosys improves power efficiency by more than 10 percent and significantly improves the color gamut of the display. LG demonstrated a cell-phone-sized display incorporating the quantum-dot technology last week at the Society for Information Display's annual meeting in Seattle. The company has not yet announced what particular product the quantum-dot backlight will be used in first.

That’s a shout World Cup enthusiasts don’t hear too frequently. Soccer’s known for low-scoring games, which makes it difficult to find an objective means of measuring the skill of top players. In a given game, a couple might nail a goal or have an assist. But who’s the best of the best?

This conundrum plagued Luis Amaral as a kid in Portugal. Now, a professor of biology and chemical engineering at Northwestern, he used his team’s computational skills to find the best. The work is in the journal Public Library of Science One. [Jordi Duch, Joshua Waitzman and Luis Amaral, http://bit.ly/azpqyU]

Forwards: The architects.
Leading the charge, forwards live for the glory of innovation – the big score. They are pro-risk, self-starters, who have little trouble making hard decisions. They’re not afraid to proceed full speed ahead, and risk everything for the sake of maximum return.

Typically, they will hone a specific skill set and become an expert in their field. Accordingly, forwards do best when empowered to use their full expertise and creativity to create something new and vital.

They are dynamic and mesmerizing, but often highly impatient. They don’t like to document the creation process, and they like even less being asked to repeat a star performance. Once a forward has solved a problem, his engagement drops off sharply. Change, new challenges, and a regular infusion of triumph (and the attendant praise) are what keep them going.

WhiteyBoard — maker of stick-on-the-wall whiteboards — has obtained approximately $500,000 in seed funding, the company’s founders announced today. Bill Liao, who is best known as a founder of Xing.com, the dominant social network for business professionals in Europe, led the investment. He has taken eight companies public and is the author of “Stone Soup: The Secret Recipe for Making Something From Nothing.”

While Mr. Liao usually starts and invests in technology businesses, he said he decided to take an active role in WhiteyBoard, a physical goods company, because, “I love a product you don’t have to explain. And I always want to get new things out there.” It didn’t hurt that Jason Wilk, 25, a founder and a chief executive of WhiteyBoard in Los Angeles, was a Y Combinator-winning entrepreneur before approaching him.

Y Combinator is the early stage investment fund that uses a biannual, weekend-long pitch and demonstration competition to find investment-worthy companies. It has inspired the formation of several other incubator and accelerator funds that borrow its pitch competition and boot camp approach to helping technology companies get started. Other Y Combinator winners — like Reddit, the social bookmarking site, and Posterous, the content publishing platform — have created popular consumer Web technologies.

“Whenever I see a problem, I start a business,” said Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus at the May 24th kick off program of the Commonwealth Club’s series on social entrepreneurship in America. Dr. Yunus hit upon one of the main themes of the series: the blurring line between profit and nonprofit, business and charity when providing a social good.

Muhammad Yunus has been pushing the envelope when it comes to the notion of business for social good since his first loan of $27 in his native Bangladesh. His current idea is to push this notion even further. He believes that it is possible to run successful “social businesses”—businesses that provide a social good but do not derive profit. In his book, he cites several examples of companies working with Grameen according to this model: Grameen Danon providing low-cost yogurt to children in Bangladesh; Grameen Veolia providing inexpensive, clean water; and Grameen Intel using Intel technology to more accurately monitor infant-maternal health. Dr. Yunus believes that companies should want to engage in this type of business as it enhances corporate reputation, pride and employee loyalty. Certainly, there is no question that the pioneering firms working with Dr. Yunus are learning a great deal about working with the poor in Bangladesh and receiving worldwide recognition for their groundbreaking partnerships with this amazing Nobel Laureate.

The forecasting methods that we are developing at the Ingenesist Project have become sufficiently vetted and organized that I have decided to formalize them for review by others. The “WIKiD Tools” method is fairly simple to describe and demonstrate, but be assured, it is a powerful method for predicting futures outcomes.

WIKiD stands for:

Wisdom > Innovation > Knowledge > Information > Data

All five of these elements are related to each other – in fact, each is derived from the prior element by integrating the tools of that medium. For example information is derived from data by integrating the tools of the data medium. Knowledge is derived from information by integrating the tools of information medium, innovation is derived from knowledge by integrating the tools of the knowledge medium, etc.

Likewise, if I want to predict innovation, I look for high rates of change of knowledge in it’s medium….and so on for all five elements as needed.

If your company is like the one I work for, your people are talking about the need for innovation. Mine has just announced a new program “that will bring a standardized approach to gathering and evaluating your ideas for generating new revenue and improving our business.” An Innovation Team has just formed, with a new electronic mailbox and a contest offering cash prizes for the year’s best ideas.

Why do we need innovation?

Three answers seem obvious. First, you need innovation because our rapidly changing technology demands it. You cannot afford to do “business as usual,” because what was best in its class yesterday is today’s routine and tomorrow’s technological dinosaur. You have to innovate just to stay up.

Edison Research just released its latest report on social network usage, based on polling data from phone calls to a representative sample of 1,753 Americans.

The study compares the behavior and demographics of frequent users of social networks to those of the population at large.

Some of the results:

• Though social networking is rapidly becoming more common throughout the wider population, it is still most popular among the young; students are especially overrepresented.
• Women are bigger users than men.