This survey from Duke is a few years old, but its startling results need to be heard today as we consider ways to “protect our borders” and “save jobs for Americans.”

• Immigrants were key founders of 25 percent of engineering and tech companies founded from 1995 to 2005.
• This pool of immigrant-founded companies was responsible for generating an estimated $52 billion in 2005 sales.
• The companies created just under 450,000 jobs in the U.S. as of 2005.

That’s why Harvard Business School professor Bill George argues the US needs immigration reform for legal immigrants. This isn’t about undocumented illegals crossing the borders, but immigrants who come here to attend school, get a job and start companies of their own.

Modern economics says that global trading can often create additional value for all involved. A country’s economy will function more efficiently if it produces an excess of goods that are easier for it to make and trades these for other goods; that’s a basic extension of the concept of division of labor. The obvious negative impacts of global trading are transportation costs, both financial and ecological; but if we can develop cleaner modes of transportation, surely the positive economic effects outweigh the ecological costs?

I had thought as much, until Professor Ben Linder of Olin College of Engineering made me rethink my assumptions. In a sustainability workshop that I’ll be chewing on for a while, Ben said that global trade’s real threat to sustainability has to do not with transportation costs, but with carrying capacities.

First, a brief ecology lesson. Picture a world of three tribes: the Sumerians, Babylonians and Phoenicians. For simplicity, these ancient people need only three things to survive: stones (for building houses), barley, and fruit, say one unit per person. Each tribe practices an internal division of labor and produces some of each resource.

Although wind dwarfs solar in alternative energy production, wind hasn't exactly soared with VCs.

More than 200 solar companies have received VC funds. Only a handful of wind companies have.

This reluctance arises in part from the manufacturing footprint and capital required. Vestas and General Electric are the top two players in wind and Siemens recently vowed to become a strong number three by 2012 through internal investments and acquisitions. GE itself got into wind by buying Enron's wind business after that game of Texas Hold 'Em ended.

From sustainable software design to the future of the Internet to a biodegradable shoe campaign, the women from last year's 100 Most Creative People in Business have spent 2010 innovating. Of the women who graced the 2009 list, some have changed markets, others have celebrated anniversaries with their current companies, and all of them have kept our attention. This year's 100 Most Creative People in Business launches later this month, but before we show you who's next, here are the top ladies from 2009.

Coming up with good ideas is a major part of your job, so you want to have the right tools on hand to generate as many ideas as possible during a brainstorming session. Here are some tools and techniques for doing just that.

When you want to do free-form thinking and gather ideas and tasks around a central concept, try a mind map. In the middle of the page, write down your topic. Then, all around the topic, jot down tasks, words, ideas, and connect them by drawing lines between them and branching similar ideas off of them. The most effective offline tool for mind mapping is probably a classic whiteboard, wet marker, and eraser. To mind map online, check out MindMeister.com, a free Web app where you can create, share, and publish your maps. The advantage of mind mapping is that it's not linear bullet points, and because it's unstructured it can encourage more free thinking.

Once again, entrepreneurial activity showed big in the United States. Last year was a tough year for entrepreneurs. We have experienced a deep recession, credit crunch and record unemployment rates. But although the odds were against them, new-business creation during the 2007-2009 recession years increased steadily year to year (e.g. 60,000 more starts per month in 2009 than in 2007) and 2009 became the year business startups reached their highest level in 14 years. The number of startups even exceeded the count during the peak of the 1999-2000 technology boom.

I encourage all readers to view the interactive graphics highlighting the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. The Index is an indicator that captures new business owners in their first month of significant business activity through the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The graphics really bring numbers to life and allow one to see key Index findings since 1996.

In addition to the overall rate of entrepreneurial activity, the Index offers insights into the demographic and geographic composition of new entrepreneurs across the country between 1996 and 2009. For example, the latest Index report reveals that although their rate of entrepreneurship remains below other racial groups, African-Americans experienced greatest increases in business-creation rates from 2008 to 2009. In terms of age, entrepreneurship growth was highest among 35- to 44-year-olds. Among states, Oklahoma and Montana had the highest entrepreneurial activity rates, with 470 per 100,000 adults creating businesses each month. In general, business creation is highest in western and southern states, and lowest in the Midwestern and Northeastern states.

Philips has just unveiled what it's calling the "world's first LED replacement for [the] most common household bulb," taking aim at the aging, inefficient 60W gizmo that's been lighting our homes since forever. This is the future of lighting, people.

Philips lifted the veil--or perhaps, pulled back the shutter--on its new EnduraLED effort at the Lightfair International tradeshow, but it'll be a few months until it's piling onto shelves in consumer hardware stores. In fact, it'll arrive right at the end of this year in the U.S., but that's still months ahead of upcoming legislation that requires more efficient lighting systems.

Innovation has become a buzzword in academic journals, popular media, corporate promotional materials and government strategies.

The word has expanded from a noun to various hyphenated transmutations. Thus, today we don’t only talk of the importance of innovation to societies, but often of specific types of innovation too, such as green innovation, social innovation, open innovation. The innovation jargon has also expanded to innovation corridors, clusters, poles, and valleys, and to “disruptive”, “radical” and “incremental”.

Not surprisingly then, the average policymaker finds him or herself lost in the maze of innovation studies jargon. Academics and researchers concerned with innovation have produced a new genre of literature that is difficult to use to generate effective policy. In fact, little in the way of standard public policy analysis finds its way into innovation policy work, and hence too often the political, social, and economic feasibility of many recommendations are not taken into consideration.

One reason for this is the tendency of many innovation policy analysts to focus primarily on the big picture, such as the industrial structures of nations, their business cultures, education systems, and legislative frameworks. As a result, governments are often offered recommendations requiring some major socio-economic changes, ranging from calls to overhaul existing educational systems, to calls for centralising or decentralising governance structures. The malleability, risks and costs of such recommendations often go unnoticed, and the policymaker becomes either sceptical or dismissive, despite the validity of many such calls.

' Northern countries' such as Finland, Germany and Sweden remain the favourite locations of businessmen, thanks to good start-up advice and access to finance, a new study has found.

The third edition of the 'European Cities Entrepreneurship Ranking', which identifies the most attractive cities for starting a business, was published yesterday (10 May).

This year's overall winner is Frankfurt, followed by the Swedish city of Malmö and Polish capital Warsaw. Other cities among the top ten include Hamburg, Berlin, Lisbon, Helsinki, Cologne, Lyon and Stuttgart.

What do 10,000 cows and diesel generators have in common?

Both have the ability to power a 1-megawatt data center. Diesel generators are already used for this purpose at some data center sites, though the energy source is not very environmentally friendly. On the other hand, 10,000 cows grazing a dairy farm produce 20,000 metric tons of manure each year that can be turned into methane gas and eventually electrical power.

That's according to researchers from HP Labs, who are presenting a paper on these findings at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Phoenix on Wednesday.

The idea is this: As our demand grows for computing power and data storage, the capacity to power data centers is not keeping up properly. HP's goal is to use sustainable processes to build data centers that are self-sufficient. That is, build data centers whose power sources are from sustainable energy sources and whose heat output can be recycled and reused within that same data center.

Hallie Satz is a veteran of the commercial printing business. She ran a family-owned printing company, and even after it was sold to a demanding investor group, continued to lead it for seven years. "A lot of people encouraged me to start my own company. I was a good manager, got good sales, but I was scared," she recalls.

Luckily for Satz, 51, the self-doubt didn't last. A competitor wanted to hire her; she told him that what she really wanted was $1.5 million to start her own operation. Today she is the owner of HighRoad Press, a six-year-old printing company in New York's Soho, with sales of $11.5 million last year.

Satz's success is highly unusual among women. Although women own 50% of U.S. businesses, men establish companies at a higher rate, and with eight times more funding, says Candida Brush, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College.

Robert Brands is an innovation coach with a lot of experience with real-world product innovation. It’s no surprise then that his book, Robert’s Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival, is heavy on the consumer products side of innovation. Nevertheless, the 10 rules he presents can be applied in any setting.

Innovation is first a leadership issue. Innovation begins with the Chief Executive Officer who has to be the Chief Innovation Officer. It is the important first step.

Social entrepreneurship—the art of creating programs with a transformative business model focused on bringing about large-scale, positive change—plays a critical role in building a more sustainable future by increasing income, improving environmental quality, creating jobs, and enhancing quality of life. But just like any start-up, there comes a time when a great idea needs an infusion of cash to have a large-scale impact. That is where the The Skoll Foundation comes into play.

The foundation, through its  Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, funds social entrepreneurs working to solve global challenges, such as poverty, deforestation, water scarcity and access to health care. The award is a change agent’s dream: unrestricted funding and support  to take a promising solution to scale.

Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, is the force behind the award, the flagship program of the Skoll Foundation, as well as the annual Skoll World Forum in Oxford. As a successful business entrepreneur, Skoll is using his wealth to “to drive large-scale change by investing in, connecting, and celebrating social entrepreneurs and other innovators dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems.”

In the latest Ease of Doing Business ranking from the World Bank, one country made a spectacular leap—from 143rd on the list to 67th. It was Rwanda, whose population and institutions had been decimated by genocide in the 1990s. On the World Bank list, Rwanda catapulted out of the neighborhood of Haiti, Liberia, and the West Bank and Gaza, and sailed past Italy, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and Poland. On one subindex in the study, the ease of opening a new business, Rwanda ranked 11th worldwide.

You can see and even smell the signs of Rwanda’s business revolution at Costco, one of the retail world’s most demanding trade customers, where pungent coffee grown by the nation’s small farmer-entrepreneurs is stocked on the shelves. And in Rwanda itself the evidence is dramatic—per capita GDP has almost quadrupled since 1995.

The China Tech Letter is a service of RedTech, a Shanghai-based advisory firm specializing in China’s ConsumerTech, CleanTech and MedTech sectors. It provides research, strategy and investment services to institutional investors and multinational companies, helping them make sense of local technology trends, companies, consumers and government IT policy in Asia's most dynamic market. Click here to download a pdf of RedTech's Company & Services Overview.

In The China Tech Letter this week:

• China Mobile brings interactivity to fledgling mobile TV service
• China UnionPay establishes mobile payment industrial alliance
• Suicides at EMS giant Foxconn ramping up, latest is attempt # 10
• Drop in ‘gadgets to farmers’ a seasonal blip, says MOC
• Baidu Map teams with Big Brother to choke off Google Maps
• Taozilla putting the squeeze on small, defenseless store owners
• China’s most notorious hacker lands a job at Giant Interactive
• New copyright association targets Net cafes for video royalties
• Kaixin hits 80mn users, opens up to third-party developers
• China Telecom spins up fiber network for home users in 13 citie

To read The Letter, click on this pdf link or surf to www.redtechadvisors.com and look for The China Tech Letter tab at the top of the page.

As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

Breaking the Spanish government’s admission here at Pajamas Media probably didn’t hurt their interest in finally reporting on the leaked admission. Obama’s obvious hope of rushing into place his “fundamental transformation” of America into something more like Europe’s social democracies — where even the most basic freedoms have been moved from individuals and families to the state — before the house of cards collapsed has suffered what we can only hope proves to be its fatal blow. At least on this front.

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”

If there's one thing Steve Jobs isn't interested in, it's consensus. From the early days of the Mac to his recent vocal disapproval of Flash, Jobs stays true to his vision like few other figures in the technology industry. It's hard to imagine Jobs putting much stock into customer communities like Dell's IdeaStorm or any other variants of crowdsourcing. That kind of collaboration is based on giving everyone a say.

At just 26, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hasn't built up the mythologized reputation Jobs has, but he operates in much the same single-minded way. Which is why, like Jobs, he'll likely be known as a great innovator. Ignoring the Web 2.0 mandate to collaborate, collaborate and more collaborate some more is the best way to get things done, says Henry Blodgett on Business Insider. He writes:

If Facebook were to radically change its approach to innovation, meanwhile, seeking prior approval for every change it makes, its innovation would slow to a crawl. It would also sacrifice the opportunity to roll out innovations that initially freak people out but that soon become wildly popular (News Feed). Given that Facebook's whole product is walking this ever-flammable line between public and private, Facebook's users won't likely know what they're cool with until they see it in action.  So asking them ahead of time would just lead to a lot of "no's," even with respect to innovations that people would eventually want.

A slight resurgence in the IPO market and an upswing in M&A activity mean venture capitalists have some hopes of exiting investments.

The motto of the venture capital industry this year could be: Well, anything is better than 2008 and 2009.

Driving such a renewed sense of optimism is the relative resurgence in the IPO market and a strong pickup in mergers-and-acquisitions activity. That means VCs now at least have some hopes of exiting investments after an almost two-year drought in both areas.

Nine venture-backed companies went public in the first quarter of 2010, raising $936 million, more than double the amount raised during the fourth quarter of 2009, according to data from Thomson Reuters. But to really get a sense of the improvement, look back to the first quarter of 2009, when not a single VC-backed company went public.

For those wanting a quick update on the US venture capital industry, here are 4 Top Trends:

1. Industry as a Whole: In January of 2010 the US Venture Capital industry’s 10-year returns turned negative (2000-2010). Estimates range from -0.92% to -7% for the ten year period. In 2009 alone the US Venture Capital Index returned 2.95%, significantly lower than Barclay’s government and corporate bond index at 4.52%. In 2009 the Dow Jones Industrial Average returned 22.68%, the S&P 500 returned 26.46% and the Nasdaq returned 43.89%, making venture capital the lowest performing investment class last year amongst such peers.

Bottom Line – The VC industry is struggling to rebound from a tough decade of poor aggregate returns.