By accident last month I stumbled on a “tweet” from Saul Kaplan, a leading U.S. urban-planning guru.

“Looking forward to getting an innovation fix in Toronto this weekend,” Kaplan told his Twitter community. “I swear innovation is in the air up there.”

Kaplan works out of the Providence, R.I.-based “Business Innovation Factory” he cofounded, a collection of researchers in new urban and business models.

In 2000, Jeffrey Bussgang found himself across the table from John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist who funded Google and Amazon. Bussgang and his partner were pitching their start-up, Upromise, a loyalty program that lets people earn money for college by shopping at participating stores. When they reached Slide 17 of the PowerPoint presentation, Doerr started grilling them. "What are the revenue drivers that would bring the breakeven point forward another six months?" Doerr asked. "And why do you figure Year Four gross margins at 88 percent?" Bussgang froze. He can't remember what answer he managed to come up with. To his relief, Doerr decided to fund Upromise, which eventually went public.

In 2003, Bussgang went over to the other side. He joined Flybridge Capital Partners, a Boston-based early-stage venture capital firm in which he is now a general partner. After years as an investor, Bussgang wrote a guide for founders looking for venture capital. His book, Mastering the VC Game, due out this month, walks entrepreneurs through the inner workings of VC firms and offers advice on topics such as pitching investors and negotiating term sheets. He recently spoke with Inc. senior editor Bobbie Gossage about how to get funding.

We were lucky enough this morning to sit down with Kai-Fu Lee, one of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet universe. Known best and most recently for serving as the founding president of Google China, he also led R&D at Apple and founded the Microsoft Research division in China — the full trifecta of computing kingpins.

After departing Google last September (an event he remained understandably mum about during this meeting), he spied several gaps in China’s tech startup and venture capital culture. First and foremost, there were hardly any funds providing seed and early-stage financing to young entrepreneurs. The country lacked its own Ron Conway.

To remedy the problem, he founded Innovation Works, a startup incubator with a twist. Instead of just doling out a million dollars here and there to promising projects, the company recruits top engineering graduates throughout the country and enlists them to help its portfolio companies get off the ground, while simultaneously grooming them to found startups of their own in 12 to 18 months.

In just over a month, my friend (and Zappos CEO) Tony Hsieh will be launching his new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (you can pre-order it here). Reading a preview copy of the book led me to think back about the first time I met Tony, and what an impression it made on me.

You meet a lot of people in your life. Think about it for a moment. How many people do you think you’ve met? Count up all of the social events, work, airplanes, school and checkout counters. Out of all of those people, think about who you really remember. Think about those people and then pick out the most memorable five people of all and trace back the steps to where you first met.

We sometimes forget those moments until prompted, but I truly feel those are some of the most precious moments in our lives. They are like birthdays. Tiny sparks of joy and connection that sometimes you get the immediate hunch will last a lifetime. That’s how I felt when I met Tony Hsieh. I’ll never forget it and I’m going to guess I’m not alone.

A new report from the Council of Economic Advisors ( outlines four categories of Administration's policies to lay a foundation for 21st-century growth that will continue to strengthen and diversify the rural economy, support rural workers and businesses, and put rural America on a path toward a more prosperous future.) Many of these policies are already being implemented through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. But further work remains to ensure the prosperity and vitality of Main Streets across America.

The first category of Administration policies for strengthening rural America is focused on growing businesses and expanding employment opportunities. These policies include increased support for small business lending through Recovery Act funds to the Small Business Administration. They also include incentives to greatly expand biofuel production and renewable energy generation, which are often centered in rural areas. For instance, with the Renewable Fuels Standard just put into place, it is expected that over 100 ethanol plants will be built over the next decade, while incentives for renewable energy generation in the Recovery Act are expected to double wind generation. There are also important new opportunities for rural tourism and recreation.

The most recent issue of The Economist ran a wonderful survey of innovation in emerging markets (see Special Report on Innovation in Emerging Markets). The collection of articles discusses how innovation is helping developing countries catch up with their developed country counterparts, and how emerging market multinationals, through internal innovation and acquisition, are becoming formidable global competitors.

Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models.

Emerging-market champions have not only proved highly competitive in their own backyards, they are also going global themselves.

The United Nations World Investment Report calculates that there are now around 21,500 multinationals based in the emerging world. The best of these…are as good as anybody in the world. The number of companies from Brazil, India, China or Russia on the Financial Times 500 list more than quadrupled in 2006-08, from 15 to 62. Brazilian top 20 multinationals more than doubled their foreign assets in a single year, 2006.

In a recent article in the Zanesville Times Recorder, they look at how Ohio is concentrating on improving it's presence in the nation's leaders when it comes to academic and university innovation. The number of scientists and engineers in the state has risen since 2004. However, to continue with their innovative presence, many of the companies in the state must contribute to the state's innovative ways.

According to Ohio State professor Michael Bills,"This country was founded on ingenuity, invention and innovation. In the past 20 years, (business has) become exclusively focused on ... productivity and efficiency to the point where we drained any budget for exploration and experimentation."

SOUTHBURY, CT--(Marketwire - April 27, 2010) - A new group of business people -- known as "homepreneurs" -- are on the rise and are thriving throughout the nation. An indication of a changing business landscape, Business.gov, an official Web site of the U.S. government, reports that over half of all U.S. businesses are based out of an owner's home.

"The home-based business model has allowed our business coaches to own a competitive business while keeping their operating costs low," said Brian Miller, COO and President of The Entrepreneur's Source. "The technology that is available today really enables you to work just about anywhere."

Miller notes that the rise of home-based businesses is rooted in decades of telecommuting and technology that allows multiple people in various locations to access shared information over a common platform. This capability enables home-based businesses to provide all of the services that a traditional office-based entity can.

Many entrepreneurs have a great idea for business. They believe that they have all of the answers and are ready to get started. There’s only one small problem. They haven’t written much or anything in a proper business plan format. What’s really surprising is that they seem sincerely surprised when this deficiency is pointed out to them. They can’t understand why an angel investor just won’t hand them $1 million to get started – today. Well, here’s why. Every angel investor has a checklist of minimum criteria that they’ll need in a business plan to determine the investment viability of a startup company. Without this information, their checkbook stays in their pocket.

As you know, most PowerPoint presentations are boring and ineffective. Here’s why. We create them not to convey crucial information, but rather to help us ease our uncomfortableness with public speaking. I’m convinced this is true. We use PPT like a magician uses a lovely assistant — to misdirect the attention of the audience.

As a result, most slide decks are:

• Simply speech outlines. We encourage the audience to follow along by reading the screen rather than looking and listening to us. What could be more deadly?
• Jammed with much too much information, presented poorly. Your audience must decide whether to digest the slide or listen to the speaker — impossible to do both.
• Choreographed to bullet point style. Bullet points have no rhythm, no tempo, no liveliness — and neither do presentations that rely on them.

As a small business owner, you may think you don’t have to worry too much about creating a personal brand. Those ‘brand’ things are for bigger companies, the ones with budgets that rival a professional sports team. But the truth is, as a small business owner, you can benefit from creating a personal brand. In fact, you may even benefit more than the multi-million corporations.

How?

As a small business owner, developing a personal brand can help you and your company in the following ways.

You become an expert.

For better or worse, you are who people say you are. If you don’t take the steps to mold your own brand, someone may come along and help “mold” it for you. And it may not always be positive. By creating a personal brand, you help people get to know you for exactly what you want to be known for. Being active on your blog or site community, using social media, and taking steps to own your Google 10, can all be combined to give someone a compelling picture of who you are when doing research. Customers want to associate themselves with people they trust are experts in their field. By speaking and presenting yourself as an expert, you help elevate yourself onto a new pedestal and build social capital.

Temple University officials noticed something a little out of the ordinary when they looked at the results of the post-graduation survey of 2009’s undergraduate class: for the first time in the life of the survey, self employment ranked alongside banking, education and healthcare as one of the most popular career paths for recent graduates.

This came as a surprise to Rachel Brown, director of Temple’s career center, who noted that "self-employed" was not even a box to check off. Temple officials only found this contingent of would-be entrepreneurs when they investigated the unusually large number of students who selected “other” on the survey and wrote in that they were starting their own business or that they were otherwise self-employed.

It's pretty well known that dropping out is not an obstacle to being a successful entrepreneur. We can all rattle off the list of highly successful entrepreneurial drop outs, and we know that in startupland dropping out won't be held against you.

But in a recent blog post, Hunch cofounder Caterina Fake seems to be going further, arguing that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you should drop out.

From Women Entrepreneur:

I recently saw a tweet from a small-business owner who had just purchased a domain name and a hosting plan from a website company.

"There are all these other products . . . which ones do I need?" she asked the Twitterverse.

Choosing a domain name and website-hosting plan can be daunting enough for a small-business owner, let alone wading through the myriad add-on products offered by website hosting companies.

Many probably give up without ever knowing that a few key products can make a big difference in how they present their brand and do business online.

I have a few tips to guide you through securing a domain name and choosing a hosting plan. Then I'll follow up with the five best products for a small-business website.

A dozen foundations that have been key players in efforts to improve schools are pledging $506 million this year to spur education innovation, including a joint effort to help districts, schools, and nonprofit groups secure matching funds for the federal Investing in Innovation grant competition.

The new, collaborative effort is not a pooled fund of grants; each foundation will retain control over its contribution, and decide how it will award its funding. Nor is the initiative announced by the U.S. Department of Education April 29 a commitment of additional funding from those foundations—the $506 million represents the total amount of money they had planned to spend this year on what they consider education innovation.

“This is about being smarter and leveraging all of the funds available. This gives us greater visibility and greater focus,” said Bibb Hubbard, a program officer at the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the philanthropies. “This potentially could improve the way foundations collaborate.”

UNCTAD has introduced the topic of the "creative economy" in the world economic and development agenda.

The creative economy is an emerging concept dealing with the interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols.

Today, the creative industries are among the most dynamic sectors in the world economy providing new opportunities for developing countries to leapfrog into emerging high-growth areas of the world economy.

It's 2020. You drive your plug-in hybrid electric car home at 6 p.m., plug it in, let it charge via the solar panels on your roof or the wind power coming from the grid, and you leave it charging until the morning. Sounds simple enough, right? It's not. Utilities have a long way to go before they're prepared for the impending onslaught of energy-sucking vehicles--and they might not all be ready in time.

One utility that thinks it will: Southern California Edison. The utility covers a massive swath of land that includes 5 million meters, 14 million residents. By 2020, the utility's customers could have up to 1 million EVs on the road. But SoCal Edison is already gearing up for the early adopters, explained Pedro Pizarro, the executive vice president of Power Operations for Southern California Edison. "If you have a block with three or four Priuses, that's probably an early adopter neighborhood," he said. SoCal Edison is in the midst of surveying its customers to find out which ones plan on buying EVs early. The zip codes with the highest amount of early adopters will likely receive upgraded wiring and circuitry that can handle all the excess pressure on the grid from EVs.

We're getting it from all sides. Small business is being pushed by big bullies. What we get from SBIR funding is tantamount to lunch money -- just enough to keep us from starving. But they want it. Want it all. Want it bad enough to lie and cheat to get it.

Yes, lie.

The bullies make statements asserting that VC funded businesses can't participate in SBIR. Of course they can. The companies just can't be controlled by VCs and still be eligible. And they tearfully make statements asserting that VC controlled company SBIR eligibility was "taken away" in 2002. Bullfrogfeathers. It was never allowed. Tell a lie often enough and people begin to believe it. Trouble is, it's our elected officials who believe the lies. Or (tucking campaign fund envelopes in their pockets or purses) choose to ignore the truth.

“An improved exit environment is increasing liquidity opportunities for venture firms and providing better returns to limited partners,” the latest Silicon Valley Venture Capital Confidence Index survey notes, according to VentureBeat.

Further, the report adds, “disruptive market opportunities are being exploited by venture-backed firms, making them attractive acquisition targets by corporations who may have cut their R&D budgets … and are now flush with cash.”

The European Commission published Friday a report which outlines the double taxation problems that arise when venture capital is invested cross-border, as well as possible solutions.

The report sets out the findings and recommendations of an independent group of EU tax experts, which was set up by the Commission to look at how to remove the main tax barriers to cross-border investment in venture capital. Venture capital is a vital source of growth for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), according to the Commission, "therefore, facilitating venture capital investment within the EU is crucial for good economic growth."

The Commission will now consider how best to follow up on the findings in the Report, , in line with its broader agenda to eliminate double taxation in the EU.