Graduation season is upon us, and everyone from President Obama to John Grisham is delivering commencement speeches across the country. TIME looks at some of the most successful people to never receive their sheepskins.

The Harvard Crimson called him "Harvard's most successful dropout" — the rest of the world just calls him ridiculously rich. For more than a decade, Bill Gates has been one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, men in the world. The son of an attorney and a schoolteacher, Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973, only to drop out two years later to found Microsoft with childhood friend Paul Allen. In 2007, more than thirty years after he left Harvard, the co-founder of Microsoft would finally receive his degree (an honorary doctorate) from his alma mater. At the commencement, Gates said, "I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today."

ORLANDO — Al Gore on Monday made the business case for sustainability and said corporations play a key role in carrying the effort forward.

Gore, speaking at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, said companies were increasingly focused on sustainability and that’s going to have a positive effect on the environment.

“The business community is showing impressive leadership in sustainability,” Gore said.

Much of Gore’s talk was a climate change lecture, but he did note a few reasons why sustainability is becoming more than just a greenwashing marketing mantra and a part of actual business practices.

Recently we have noted here and here that the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act--one of the nation's key vehicles for keeping the nation competitive--seemed to be proceeding well, with the addition of several important updates, including language embracing the Department of Energy’s Energy Innovation Hubs, a related pilot for clean energy regional consortia, and a new regional innovation clusters title.

Well, we spoke too soon. Hours after an amendment to add the Regional Energy Innovation Consortia program to the America COMPETES Act as a pilot program passed on the floor of the House by an encouraging vote of 254-173, a mischievous amendment that linked a hard-to-vote-against ban on federal salaries going to workers who look at pornography on government computers to major cuts in the bill prevailed and has now thrown the whole bill into uncertainty.

Thanks to the amendment by Ranking House Science & Technology Committee Member Ralph Hall (R-Tex.), Science & Technology Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) has at least for now had to yank a bill that has now been shorn of the needed hubs, consortia, and clusters elements as well as critical funding increases for core innovation agencies.

Having enough money is crucial for the success of a startup, and insufficient funding is one of the top reasons why new businesses fail. Too often entrepreneurs underestimate the amount of money they'll need - not just to get started but to keep running. And although you want to be able to raise the money you need, it's not always practical or possible or even advisable to seek venture capitalist funding right away.

Nevertheless you do need enough money to get your startup through an initial period - until you are able to fund yourself or be in a position to secure a larger investment. Despite the notion that you can never really have enough funding for your business, it's important to remember that sometimes these early investments can be quite small. In other words, you don't need to have or ask for millions of dollars.

There are many considerations when deciding the avenue to pursue when you consider your funding sources. Do you have another source of income, for example? How might this early funding shape your exit strategy? How will it impact how future investors assess your business? There is no single universally correct answer here, it should be noted, as different types of businesses may find more or less success with different options.

Every start-up needs money at the outset. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) had $538 in working capital. Apple (AAPL) got its early funding, a reputed $250,000, from a former Intel (INTC) engineer who struck it rich on his stock when the chip maker went public.

Unfortunately for tech entrepreneurs, seed money has become harder to get and the outlook is worse. A witching hour triple threat endangers the ability of start-ups to raise money. A combination of fundamental shifts on Wall Street, regulatory modifications from Congress, and changing habits of venture capitalists will shake how young companies seek funding to establish themselves and grow.

When Bill Gates and Warren Buffett stood on stage together at the New York Public Library and the elder billionaire announced the he was going to give away most of his fortune through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help the poor, a new ideology was born.

Matthew Bishop

According to Matthew Bishop, US business editor and New York bureau chief of The Economist, and co-author of ‘Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World’, that was the seminal moment for philanthrocapitalism, essentially a marriage of philanthropy and capitalism.

“That struck me as a genuinely unique moment in history, and a moment which needed to be understood. It raised many, many questions about the responsibilities of wealth, the opportunities that wealth gave, and about the future and nature of capitalism.”

These questions, he says, have become more relevant since the global economic crisis, which has resulted in a lot of new questions being asked -- about what this force of capitalism is, how do we get a capitalism that actually works with society, rather than against it.

More than three billion people live in poverty around the world, but millions are managing to raise their living standards to some degree, thanks to microfinance. Even so, there’s plenty of scope for scaling up the current model of microlending to help others.

Organisations like ACCION were willing to hedge their bets on the poor as far back as the 1970s -- and today microfinance is flourishing in Asia especially, with around 49 million borrowers.

Stanley Kwok

“We are product-neutral, gender-neutral,” says Stanley Kwok, ACCION’s Chief Executive Officer, who took part recently in an Asia Society talk in Hong Kong called ‘Microfinance in Asia: What lies in store?’

As one of the pioneers of microfinancing, Kwok reveals it wasn’t easy for ACCION in the early days. “It took us 12 years to figure out microfinance was going to help people and in 1973, we made our first microloan.”

8 Websites You Need to Stop Building - Websites that let me know what my friends are up to; Website whose sole purpose is to share things; Read the entire oatmeal list here.

Friend or Foe? Angels, VCs Debate Who has the Upper hand: “It’s The Angels’ Time,” was the title of the speech by angel investor and blogger Basil Peters, who asserted that VCs are essentially dinosaurs saddled with too-big funds at a time when entrepreneurs can create companies cheaply and quickly, sometimes over a weekend.

Now is the time to call or email your Senators in Washington DC to let them know they should vote for SA 4037, introduced yesterday by Senator Bond of Missouri and co-sponsored by Senators Cantwell of Washington, Warner of Virginia and Brown of Massachusetts.

As readers of this blog know, Senator Dodd's financial regulatory reform bill (in recent days, identified colloquially as the Wall Street Reform Bill), currently being debated on the floor of the Senate, contains two provisions that would be devastating to startup seed financing and angel investing in our country.

Sen. Bond's amendment is a fix that should now be supported by the entire startup ecosystem.

It’s finally happened: the venture industry’s 10-year index has turned negative.

Not that it’s a surprise to anyone – this has been predicted for a while – but it is a milestone for an industry that has long boasted of outstanding returns that make a lack of liquidity worthwhile.

Cambridge Associates and the National Venture Capital Association released the data today, pegging 10-year venture capital returns at minus-0.9% as of December. (It takes a while to calculate these things.) The index was 8.4% for the ten years ending last September and 35% for the decade ending Dec. 31, 2008, courtesy of the lingering effects of the tech bubble. Those eye-popping returns have now largely rolled off the ten-year spreadsheet. Nine-year returns are even worse, at minus-3.7%.

The population of the Earth is now consuming 1.3 times its available resources, Will Day, the CEO of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission and an advisor to the UN warned Ireland's business leaders today, but out of the chaos come opportunities, reports John Kennedy.

Speaking at the Green Economy Business & Leadership Briefing in Dublin this morning, Day (pictured) said that sustainability is the single biggest business opportunity of the 21st century. Everything from the carbon challenge, global warming, food supply and security suggests the world is at a serious tipping point. But on the other hand, in all of these challenges, Day said, there are opportunities.

"Human society is part of the bioshphere and we forget that. The economy is a subset of human society, so in theory we're in charge of this thing - though the last two years have convinced me we're not."

Facebook has endured another storm of PR hell in recent weeks, as mainstream media and the blogosphere pounds away at its "open disdain" for privacy.  CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dorm-room IMs haven't helped.  And the recent storm is only the latest in a long line of such storms, dating back to the site's very beginnings.

And the concern and howls are understandable: Facebook often shares way more information with the world than its users know, expect, or want.  It consistently approaches innovation and privacy changes with a do-it-first-and-then-see-what-happens attitude, which enrages those who feel it should ask permission first.  And it has often done a bad job of explaining to users what it is doing, why, and when, as well as what control users have over this.

But Facebook's aggressiveness on the privacy front is a big reason for the site's success. The company will survive the latest PR flap, just as it has survived all the other PR flaps. And unless the latest blow-up scares it into changing its ways (let's hope not), Facebook will continuing growing like a weed until it is by far the most popular web site in the world (and note what "most popular" means: It means that, despite the howling of a tiny minority, more people choose to spend more time on Facebook than any other site in the world).

From experience and ongoing research, there are fairly common situations Blocking Business Innovation across companies. No business has all of them, but the presence of just a couple of them will scuttle the most modest dreams of bringing new possibilities to life to benefit others.

None of these NO’s are insurmountable, so it’s important to understand what causes each of them and some steps to take to navigate around them and get innovation going.

1. NO Knack for Innovation

There simply isn’t an orientation toward innovation. It may be a mature industry, a company that’s had success with an intense focus, one that’s grown through M&A, or has been burned on previous formal innovation efforts. Whatever the reason, innovation doesn’t appear to be in the company’s DNA.

While the fast-growing economies of China and India have siphoned off much work that used to be done in America, copying them wouldn't be a smart strategy for the United States, according to the Obama administration's manufacturing czar.

Ron Bloom, the president's senior counselor for manufacturing policy, was in Milwaukee recently to meet with chief executives of nine industrial companies. He said in an interview that he sees no advantage in what many label a race to the bottom: trying to slash American labor costs to compete with China and India.

Asked why automakers in Germany and Japan can make cars at a profit, even though their labor costs often exceed U.S. levels and those nations offer universal health care, Bloom said:

"What Germany and Japan teach us is that paying people well is a good thing. High-wage, high-productivity, high-road strategies are the only way that advanced economies can succeed in manufacturing.

Jeffrey Bussgang, a successful serial entrepreneur for 10 years, wrote an insider’s guide to what venture capitalists (VC) are looking for in the start of the second decade of the new millennium entitled, Mastering the VC Game, published by Portfolio. Currently, Mr. Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm with more than $500 million under management.

Before becoming a venture capitalist, he was the co-founder of Upromise, the largest private source of college funding contributions in the United States. He currently serves as an entrepreneur in residence at Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA. The following is an interview with Mr. Bussgang about his new book.

I've gotten into the habit lately of waking up with friends and collaborators. It's not what you think. These helpers are the good ideas that come to me in the middle of the night or—if I'm lucky—first thing in the morning. I've long believed there was value in the expression, "let's sleep on it." Now and again, I've woken up to an old idea that had been buried away in my unconscious. Sometimes I've awakened with a new perspective on a problem that was bugging me the day before. Or suddenly, I've been able to spit out a name that had recently been on the tip of my tongue. But now that I've reviewed some of the very recent research on what goes on in the brain during sleep, I'm ready to take much better advantage of my sleep-induced ideas.

For years, scientists thought that the function of sleep was merely to rest the body and mind, but recent research suggests that sleep is essential for both learning and creativity.[1]  It's no surprise that people who are well rested learn better and are more creative. What is new is the value of sleeping after learning something or during a break in trying to solve a problem. Studies have looked at the benefits of taking naps as well as sleeping through the night.[2]

WASHINGTON -- This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the first working laser. Today, lasers can be found almost everywhere, from telephone lines to cutting edge scientific research, supermarket scanners, and even cat toys.

The first laser light was produced on May 16, 1960 at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu, California when Theodore Maimen switched on his fist-sized device that flashed a bright red spot onto a photo-detector. Since then, lasers have become smaller, more powerful, and ubiquitous in modern technology.

"It's the invisible wheel. We so take it for granted now," said Tom Baer, the executive director of the Stanford Photonics Research Center, Palo Alto, California. "Half the [U.S] gross domestic product is impacted substantially by the laser."

This article examines the impact of the emerging model of open innovation on state public policy, particularly the practice of technology-based economic development in weak research and development (R&D) states. Open innovation describes the nascent practice of firms using knowledge created outside their boundaries and also marketing ideas they would not commercialize themselves. Firms engaging in open innovation thrive on knowledge spillovers, and weak R&D regions could benefit from this model through the creation of Marshallian externalities. It is therefore interesting to ask whether weak R&D states take advantage of this model. This case study analysis shows that states involved in the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research partially support the emerging open innovation paradigm. All states have science and technology strategies and actively support and invest in their higher education infrastructure. They show variation in their support for university–industry partnerships, entrepreneurship, capital access, commercialization, and technology transfer. None of the states, however, uses the open innovation framework explicitly.

The TRIPS agreement came into force in 1995, the BRIC countries have significant reforms in intellectual property systems adopted. A relatively new definition component analysis industrial economy is "creative industries", in which creativity and intellectual property as input and output. Worldwide, agreed that mapping the creative industries are indeed "economically significant" legitimate and comparable to other high-profileSectors with regard to their contribution to income, employment and trade.

The concept of intellectual property in BRIC
Brazil adopted its first intellectual property in 1887. Brazil meets international standards of protection of intellectual property. Brazil is a signatory to various conventions, treaties and agreements that define fundamental, internationally recognized for the protection of intellectual property rights, including, inter alia, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Brazil is also a member ofTrade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The new Industrial Property Law entered into force in May 1996. This law has led the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office system up to par with international standards specified in travel. Intellectual property protection in Brazil and also the copyright of software and some secondary laws.

In Russia, the concept of intellectual property such as patents primarily to be understood in the times of the former Soviet Union. The owner of the patent andas all innovations had always been. The concept of intellectual property in Russia has already changed radically and is now seen in intellectual property consisting of patents, trademarks, ways of utility, design, domain names and copyrights. After 10 years in Russia the independence of the country began to come into line with international standards on intellectual property protection. Today much work is needed to be done to bring Russia to the international level.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group convened its seventh annual CEO Business Climate Summit on April 19 in Menlo Park. One panel discussion on America's competitiveness first featured White House senior energy adviser Matt Rogers and venture capitalist John Doerr, focusing on energy policy. They were then joined by CEOs Aart de Geus of Synopsys and Dave DeWalt of McAfee. This is an edited transcript of the discussion.

Panel members

Matt Rogers, senior adviser to the secretary for Recovery Act Implementation, U.S. Department of Energy

John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Aart de Geus, CEO and co-founder, Synopsys

Dave DeWalt, CEO, McAfee

Barbara Marshman, editorial page editor, San Jose Mercury News, moderator