Learning across most of the country has stalled. Is your city a bright spot?

A decade ago, urbanists had just about written the obituary for St. John’s, Nfld. The fate of the hard-luck port town, like much of Newfoundland, was wedded to the fisheries. Between 1992, when the cod moratorium was announced, and 2006, the province lost 11 per cent of its population—the youngest, brightest and most productive 11 per cent, as Newfoundlanders will tell you. Everyone figured St. John’s would become a wasteland, because it had such low learning and employment opportunities, says Paul Cappon, president and chief executive of the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), an Ottawa-based non-profit that ranks more than 4,500 Canadian cities and communities annually.

With all the recent interest in metropolitan regions as a unit of economic competitiveness (most prominently in the White House’s Regional Clusters of Innovation Initiative, but also its intellectual antecedents at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and the Science Progress project of the Center for American Progress), some readers might find interesting a database on metropolitan geographies that I have built from U.S. Census data. I am making it available free of charge here.

The nature vs. nurture debate is a common one in just about any field, but in the world of startups, it’s hotly contested. Some say you need inherent skills to stand any sort of chance at succeeding, while others believe it’s possible to learn the ropes academically and successfully launch your own company. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, New Enterprises Associates’ Patrick Chung and Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard Law School debated the premise for over an hour earlier this year at a panel at Stanford’s Technology Venture Program. The entire 65-minute discussion is embedded below.

With the constant fluctuation of energy and natural resource prices, more and more companies are evaluating and embracing sustainability not only to cut and stabilize energy costs, but also to drive innovation and ensure competitive advantage. “Becoming environment-friendly can lower your costs and increase your revenues. That’s why sustainability should be a touchstone for all innovation” states a 2009 Harvard Business Review article. Walmart’s new Supplier Sustainability Assessment is the strongest indicator yet that sustainability is quickly becoming a valuable business tool. A well executed sustainability program can reduce employee turn-over and enable for a methodical and process driven approach to evaluating resource use, a prevailing theme at this year’s CRO Summit.

In the age of greenwashing and eco-everything, it's becoming increasingly hard to standardize and fairly assess what constitutes a green product. The USDA has attempted to do this for food with its organic labeling system and the architecture world has its LEED certification for buildings, though even these systems have faced significant controversy over the years. But what about common household products, from toiletries to furniture?

This week witnessed the historic launch of nonprofit Green Products Innovation Institute, founded on the principles of cradle-to-cradle design, or C2C, coined by architect William McDonough and chemist Dr. Michael Braungart. (For a succinct and compelling introduction to this philosophy, see McDonough's excellent 2005 TED talk.)

At times VC’s forget who their business is built on.

Nice Car
Last week in a car showroom of all places I ran into a VC who I hadn’t seen in ten years. He had sat on the board of my last company and we chatted and made small talk as he was admiring a new car.

It was clear that he had no memory of a phone conversation my partner and I have never forgotten.

Big Name CEO
It was the Internet bubble and after almost three years our startup had found a business model and we were scaling revenue and headcount fast. Our second round of funding was from a firm and VC whose names were household words. This partner lived up to his reputation and helped us hire an experienced, world-class CEO from a large consulting company that we thought would be the guy to take our company to a billion dollars (think Internet-bubble Kool-aid.)

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, NYCEDC President Seth W. Pinsky, New York State Senator Martin Golden and SUNY Downstate President Dr. John C. LaRosa announced yesterday the start of development of BioBAT, a 486,000-square-foot center for commercial bioscience at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The design of BioBAT - a partnership between New York City and SUNY Downstate Medical Center - is now underway. View new renderings or read press release.

The Brooklyn Army Terminal is a 97-acre, Cass Gilbert-designed facility on the Brooklyn waterfront, owned by New York City and managed by NYCEDC. The 4 million square foot Brooklyn Army Terminal is already home to IAVI, which developed and occupied 36,000 square feet of lab space.

"The development of BioBAT is an important step in the evolution of the biotech industry in New York City," said NYCEDC President Seth Pinsky. "The addition of nearly 500,000 square feet of commercial lab space on the Brooklyn waterfront means that more of the talented scientists and researchers coming out of our academic institutions can develop their innovations here and create good jobs."

Learn more about New York City’s thriving bioscience industry at the NYCEDC's bioscience page.

Today, 70% of corporate value is in intangibles. This is most clearly seen in mergers and acquisitions activity but is actually true for every company  This value comes from knowledge that is developed by people and turbocharged by IT. But because our management systems and accounting are still based on industrial-era customs, this value remains invisible, misunderstood and unrecognized.
 
We have been successful in helping our clients use intangible capital tools to negotiate with merger partners, gain financing, improve performance and build the value of their companies. In early 2008, as we began writing about what we saw as the coming recession, we knew that it was time to take our IC message to a larger market. That fall, we sold our book concept to Praeger and during the dark days of the recession we worked on the manuscript, hoping to contribute to the recovery. I'm happy to say that the book is launching this week.

Making the Most of Intangibles

Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization is a practical handbook for every manager struggling to succeed and innovate in today's knowledge-based economy. It explains why intangibles are critical to performance, value and innovation. Why reputation is the new bottom line. And why intangible management skills and tools are critical to the future of your business.

Authors: Mary Adams (Author), Michael Oleksak (Author)

The stench instantly assaulted the senses, almost compelling a visitor to bolt from the bio-energy research lab.

"If it smells funny here, it's because we're turning poop into energy," said Mauricio Espinoza, spokesman for the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.

In Akron, a Bridgestone executive envisioned the day when tires would be made from a new crop grown by Ohio farmers - Russian dandelions. "The 'green' technology you start to see in tires is a big part of our future," said Bob Handlos, vice president of product development, as he led a tour of the tiremaker's research center.

And in an old building on an Athens side street, Gov. Ted Strickland hoisted a shiny metal cylinder that can provide electrical power for a space satellite for a decade. Over the next four years, Sunpower will build 25 of the Stirling converters for NASA, said Mark Schweizer, the company's chief executive officer.

Handing the cylinder back to Schweizer, Strickland asked how much one costs.

"On the order of $1 million each," Schweizer replied.

"Really!" Strickland said. "Can I hold it again?"

Everywhere innovation has become a buzzword: in academic journals, popular media, corporate promotional materials and government strategies. The use of the word has rapidly expanded from a noun to its various hyphenated transmutations. Thus, today we don’t only talk of the importance of innovation to societies, but often the importance of specific types of innovation too, such as green innovation, social innovation, open-innovation. The innovation jargon has expanded exponentially with colourful analogies ranging from innovation corridors, clusters, poles, and valleys, to “disruptive” , ‘radical’and ‘incremental’ innovations.

Not surprisingly then, the average policymaker finds herself lost in the maze of innovation studies jargon. Academics and researchers of innovation have produced a new genre of literature that is difficult to use in order to generate effective (policy) solutions. 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 is not taken into consideration.

Sami Mahroum

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.

In 1968 Andy Warhol famously said, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." And every day it seems like he’s a little bit more on target.

We would more likely say that everyone is given the stage and a microphone, but what will you do to make sure people tune in for a full 15 minutes…or more?

If you were to tell anyone in 1968 that by 2010 we would all be carrying around pocket-sized telephones, with built in movie cameras that would allow us to click a few buttons and show the world our “masterpieces” they would look at you like you came from…well, the future.

Ok, so it’s a bit melodramatic, but we do have the power to create masterpieces and movies-- all in our pockets. The problem is, even though we have the greatest network in history at our fingertips—how can we get people to pay attention? How can you stand out in all the noise that’s being generated every second?

As the economy pushes more corporate workers out into freelance work, technology is making it easier and cheaper for them to thrive.

Over the past 12 months, a couple of related developments have made it much easier for solo entrepreneurs to keep up on work while on the go, as well as manage relationships with distant clients and partners. For one thing, connections to speedy 3G wireless networks have become widespread among lightweight netbooks and smart phones, making it much easier to get online whenever necessary and tap into powerful applications over the Web.

At the same time, software developers have started offering up more of those Web-based programs—saving solo entrepreneurs from the difficulties of running complex software on their own computers and often allowing free access for small users.

I recently wrote a piece about how Entrepreneurs Should be Respected, Not Loved.  The premise was that some leaders are too enamored with the approbation of their peers than making the tough decisions in the business that are bound to upset some people.

The corollary to this rule is “decision by indecision.”  This is one of my favorite lines to remind entrepreneurs because it is the sort of garden variety mistake that is so common in everyday life.  It is the anthesis of JFDI.  And I use it so often that my wife must be sick of hearing it.  But that’s mostly because it’s so prevalent.  It affects us all in everyday life.  Decisions by indecision are those where having not made up your mind early enough your options are constrained or gone altogether.

The Huffington Post is now five years old.

In another five years, the Huffington Post will likely have blown past the few remaining news sites that are still bigger than it is -- the New York Times and CNN, for example -- and become the largest independent news site in the world.

Don't believe it? Let's go to the numbers.

Two-and-a-half years ago, according to Comscore, the Huffington Post was visited by 1.2 million U.S. uniques a month. That compared to 11.1 million at the main site of the New York Times, 5.8 million at the Washington Post, 2.8 million at the Wall Street Journal, and 2.6 million at the LA Times.

For the past six months, prominent players in the New York City technology community have loudly – and increasingly – asserted that NYC is “hot,” or “exploding,” or “insert any other dramatic adjective here.”

The individuals making these claims are as smart as they are savvy, and are astutely aware of the value of increased attention on the blogosphere. Although provocative, these declarations have generally lacked hard evidence and usually have been inspired by biased anecdotes from a select few.

I set out to go beyond one-off observations by analyzing concrete macroeconomic data about technology entrepreneurship in NYC. As part of this process, I conducted 35 interviews with local investors, start-up founders, and government officials. It might be a long list of some of the who’s-who of New York, but it is unfortunately far from exhaustive.

Anthropologist and Babson Entrepreneurship Professor Lisa DiCarlo discusses her off-shore undergraduate course, “Social Responsibility Through Eco-Enterprises in Turkey.” Her research areas include transnational migration, consumption and sustainability, entrepreneurship and creative economy, and the intersection of ethnographic research and social entrepreneurship.

European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes today (19 May) unveiled her strategy to create a "virtuous and self-replicating digital economy". The five-year plan concentrates on infrastructure for high-speed Internet and fostering a borderless market for online music and film.

Kroes, who has held the Commission's new 'digital agenda' portfolio for almost three months, presented a 39-page plan to boost the digital economy.  

The plan aims "to put the interests of Europe's citizens and businesses at the forefront of the digital revolution and maximise the potential of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to advance job creation, sustainability and social inclusion," Kroes said in a statement.

Short on cash and long on energy, most new business start-ups struggle through their first few months on the flexibility and stick-to-itiveness of their founder. Like feeling around for the light switch in the dark, you try to find a formula that works.

All of that experimentation usually gets you through the first few months but also creates a business highly dependent on your intuition. If you are feeling your way around, it is hard to train employees and therefore difficult to scale a business into anything more than a glorified job.

Instead of thrashing around in the first few months, follow this formula for starting a business that can grow beyond just you:

Step 1: Pick a product or service that has the potential to scale

Melinda Moree, 45, wants to treat neglected people suffering from neglected diseases.

Armed with a Ph.D. in microbiology and a desire to help people around the world receive antibiotics and aid, Moree became the principal investigator on the Malaria Policy Project, and the director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, before she took on her current post as the CEO of Washington, D.C.–based Bio Ventures for Global Health.

The company is a nonprofit organization that seeks to enlist biotechnology companies to apply their knowledge and expertise to about 16 neglected diseases that claim the lives of millions each year. Moree takes the time to talk about Bio Ventures for Global Health and the state of global health today.

When I attended Wayne State University in Detroit back in the mid-’80s, scattered around downtown Detroit were white pillars that supported… nothing. They looked as though they were part of a kind of ancient Roman ruin—but these pillars were brand new. They were the beginnings of Detroit’s People Mover, a raised monorail that was to take riders to various sites downtown. It was also derided as then-Mayor Coleman A. Young’s “train to nowhere,” the Motor City’s poor excuse for a mass transit system. The pillars stood alone for a few years because funding had run out in the middle of construction. At the time, these columns appeared to be emblematic of everything that was wrong with Detroit—a half-thought-out idea with no support.

But now more than ever, Detroit needs new ideas, and before they can be thought through and sufficiently supported somebody needs to start tossing them out there. Which brings me to Xconomy’s just-ended series in which we asked our Xconomists—some of the nation’s leading entrepreneurs and innovators—to answer the open-ended question: “What are five things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy?” Of course, you cannot ask innovators to always color within the lines, so some gave us four things, others six, but all of them were insightful, provocative, even at times humorous.