The word innovation appears frequently in advertisements, positioning statements, branding, marketing, mission statements and is used by most businesses and organizations in some fashion or form. But the question is how many businesses and organizations really make innovation a top priority? And how many businesses and organizations are truly good at innovation? One recent AMA/HRI study found that although most organizations say that innovation is a top priority, few companies are actually good at it.

Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach wants to know whether you have been asked and tasked to innovate within your company or organization? And the follow-up question is are you having difficulty getting started and achieving results? I suspect that many readers of this article have experienced or witnessed that one of the biggest issues with innovation is that they really are not sure just where to start. So, with that in mind, Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach offers the following list of twenty (20) tips to inspire and initiate innovation for you and your business.

Innovation Tip #1: Develop a clearly defined and focused vision for innovation within your business.

I have been listening recently to the different sounds of how a dog barks. Sometimes the sound is sharp if a small terrier, if a german sheppard, firm and often echoes, a small new born maltese, faint and weak, a bulldog is strong and aggressive. Thinking of the different dog barks, it occurred to me that Innovation is like the Bark of a Dog.

Innovation is all about being heard in the crowd. Dogs like to be heard in any crowd, no matter how big or small they may be.

Innovation is like the steady beat of a drum to ensure breakthrough results. Dogs are like this as they are persistent in ensuring their drum beat is heard and they seldom stop easily, if if taken away from a barking doggie jamming session - they soon return with renewed eloquence to keep their beats being heard.

Are you undecided on what direction your career should take? Maybe you need a fresh way to see your role in the game of business.   If you do, you may want to read Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals.

Authors Nathan Bennett and Stephen Miles have  written a wonderful modern playbook for career decisions.  Bennett is a Professor of Management at Georgia Tech and owner of consulting firm Red Buoy Consulting, and Stephen Miles is  vice-chairman of Heidrick and Struggles‘ Leadership Consulting Practice.

I knew Bennett previously during my MBA studies at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.  While researching my next books to review, I came across this book while reading the business school website.  I reached out to Bennett, hoping the book’s topic would benefit small businesses.

I wonder whether you have heard of Kobi Levi or not, a very talented but weird shoe designer. To be honest, I was sad for a long time and felt very sorry for Alexander McQueen’s death. A talented wizard is gone. But today, (I don’t know whether this is good news or bad news for fashion filed.) a person named Kobi Levi appeared. His creativity is even stranger than Alexander McQueen. Exactly, very funny and you can’t help giggling or laughing when you see his designs.

Before I show you his “Marvelous and incredible” works, I’d like to tell you a little bit about who Kobi Levi is. Graduated from Bezalel academy of art & design, Jerusalem, Kobi Levi specializes in designing unusual footwear that blurs the line between fashion and art. Levi has worked as a free lance designer since graduation and he describes his personal shoe creations as ‘artistic footwear’. He makes each pair in his studio by hand. “The shoe is the trigger to create a new piece when an idea comes, or a concept or an image comes to mind.” He said. The combination of the image and footwear creates a new hybrid and his design concepts all come from life. In a word, each piece is a wearable sculpture.

Teens' interest in gadgets is at an all time high. Cell phones, once a privilege for the few, are now as frequent in a young person's life as school books. Game players are common, and most teens know how to use a computer.

A recent Pew Internet Research study found 75 percent of children aged 12-17 own a cell phone. Six years ago in it was 45 percent. The same Pew study found the average teen sends 50 text messages per day.  

Yet despite heavy use of technology, a majority of teens are less likely to pursue a career in the fields that allow for its existence. Youth interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- the "STEM" fields -- has suffered a major decline since the tech boom (and subsequent bust) of the late 1990s.

Seated in a college classroom in Kokomo, Rod Patterson listens intently as a professor describes how motors power an electric car.

A middle-aged senior manufacturing engineer, Patterson is no ordinary student. He’s part of the larger transition in the Indiana economy.

Across the state, companies are trying to find what comes next to lift them up from the shattered remains of the recession.

Delphi, a 1,500-employee auto-parts maker in Kokomo, has sent Patterson and 287 other engineers it employs back to school for an hour or two each week to study electric autos.

At stake, of course, are jobs. Just how well Indiana companies such as Delphi can innovate and develop new products will help determine how many jobs the state will create to replace those lost over the past three years.

Yes, you heard this before. The Death of Cable TV. Yet, it hasn’t happened. But now, so many disruptions are happening in the video space, cable tv is really stepping towards the cliff. Don’t expect the cable industry to just give up.

We’ll get some new insights next week when the largest U.S. cable operator (23 million cable customers), Comcast, reports its Q3 earnings and subscriber count. Comcast cable customers dropped nearly 3% in Q2 compared to last year. In Q2 for the industry overall, a record 711,000 subscribers abandoned cable tv, and six of eight operators suffered their worst quarterly subscriber losses ever.

With Halloween approaching, I thought it would be amusing to write a bit about candy, or more specifically, a system that aims to rank it. In this case, the rubric would be according to "emotional zeal" or something more jargony sounding like "joy induction." Anyway, this hierarchy is the work of a friend and colleague, Ben Cohen. Ben is an environmental historian over at the University of Virginia, but in a previous life, he and I use to write on a blog together. This partnership happened because of our backgrounds publishing science humour (see Ben's clip list here), so in some respects, this "Candy Hierarchy" is just another creative juncture.

Someone once told me at a tech meet-up some months back that competition is the best way to judge if an idea is good or bad. “When there are other entrepreneurs interested in building a similar product to what you have, pat yourself on the back and get to work” he said.

Competition is everywhere these days, some startups fail to keep up and ultimately fold, see wesabe. A different case study is box.net and dropbox, two online collaboration and file sharing platforms that have done just fine. Competition can be really healthy, amongst other things I think it actually pushes companies to work that much harder.

Rich Bendis (NASVF Vice Chair and President/CEO Innovation America) participates in the session “Early Stage Business: Building Strategies That Work” with Rich Lunak (Innovation Works), Lisa Delp (Ohio Department of Development) and moderator Mark Huston (Cimarron Capital Partners).

Last month we announced HuffPost's 2010 Game Changers -- 100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders who are changing the way we look at the world and the way we live in it. And we asked you to weigh in on who the Ultimate Game Changer is in each of our 12 categories: Politics, Entertainment, Style, Tech, Business, Travel, Green, Sports, Food, Education, Media, and Impact (where we salute those changing the game when it comes to philanthropy and service).

The response was tremendous. You cast over 3 million votes. Thank you!

Now it's time to reveal your picks for the Ultimate 12.

They are an eclectic mix of those accustomed to the spotlight and those who have been working under the radar. And there were more than a few surprises. For instance, despite the presence of a number of superstar athletes in Sports, you voted in Amy Palmiero-Winters & Catherine Hughes, two below-the-knee amputees who show that disabilities need not be an end to dreams of athletic triumph.

Everywhere you turn, businesses have closed up shop or they have been shut down due to the dismal nature of the economy over the last few years; but green enterprises are booming -- continuing to buck the downward trend. There is much to be learned by adopting the ideologies, both old and new, that eco businesses are setting forth - tips that can help your small business, whether you are an "eco" business or not. Here's a look at five green business types that are turning big profits in a down economy, and how you can cash in by following their sage business practices.

1. Bicycle shops: Build a business based on service

Bike shops exemplify the smart model of starting a business based on repair and service -- forging ongoing relationships with customers -- rather than one-time sales. Bicycle shops across the country have been reporting big business based on commuters' dwindling interest in expensive gasoline and sitting it traffic during a recession. Co-owner of a small but bustling bike shop in New Riverside, Garfield Cooper offers, "People can't afford to pimp their cars these days, but they can fix up their bikes." 

The United States still reels from the aftermath of the financial crisis. Many of us in the biomedical-research community, meanwhile, fear that our field may face a recession of its own in the not-too-distant future.

Reminiscent of the dot-com crash of the previous decade—and, indeed, of today's financial crisis, mainly precipitated by the implosion of the subprime-loan market—biomedical research is endangered by its precarious position atop a bubble of unsustainable financial practices. The unrestricted grant-making policies of the National Institutes of Health inflate the number of biomedical researchers in a fashion that cannot be matched by the availability of research funds and might eventually lead to a shortage of financial support for biomedical research.

The Moon, at least at the bottom of a deep, dark cold crater near its south pole, seems to be wetter than the Sahara, scientists reported Thursday.

In lunar terms, that is an oasis, surprisingly wet for a place that had long been thought by many planetary scientists to be utterly dry.

If astronauts were to visit this crater, they might be able to use eight wheelbarrows of soil to melt 10 to 13 gallons of water. The water, if purified, could be used for drinking, or broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel — to get home or travel to Mars.

“That is a very valuable resource,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — or Lcross, for short — which made the observations as it, by design, slammed into the Moon a year ago. “This is wetter than some places on Earth.”

Titian in a hoodie. AM 1690's Max Arbes speaks with New York-based artist Kehinde Wiley about his work. Wiley lectures tonight at the High Museum. [WMLB 1690]

Speaking of the masters, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art currently features the exhibit Nineteenth Century French Master Drawings and Sculpture from the Schlossberg Collection, which includes work by Delacroix, Renoir and Rousseau. Critic Jerry Cullum says "there can be few local resources as potentially rich as the 105 bronze sculptures and works on paper that [curator Lloyd] Nick has selected from [Atlantan] Dr. Michael Schlossberg’s brilliantly chosen acquisitions." [ArtsCriticATL]

It’s easy to think that being an organized person will stunt your creativity. Whether it’s in your work, relationships, business, career or whatever. There is a fear that systems and structure will confine us into a box where creativity and good ideas go to die.

This site is about rejecting the negative claims about organization. Instead, this site praises organization and makes a bold claim:

An Organized Life, Is An Extraordinary Life

At the very least, the organized person is in a much better position to do extraordinary things than those that are not. Organization is the structure, the glue, the concrete that gives your life the focus and clarity needed to do extraordinary things. Without a certain level of personal organization, our lives flounder, our work grows stale and we lack the direction needed to continually be moving towards great things.

CGA-Canada also says in its report, entitled Laying the Foundation for a National Entrepreneurship Strategy, that the government should assemble an expert panel to formulate such a game plan, which would encourage "innovation as a central component of government policy, with strong leadership at the highest political levels."

The organization says governments, universities and the private sector should collaborate to grow "centres of excellence" in entrepreneurship, with a focus on youth entrepreneurship.

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario announced a new Investing in Business Innovation program. The program offers matching grants for early-stage venture funding. This is a $190 Million  program running from 2010-2014.

There are provisions for startups and angel networks. Since we’re StartupNorth, let’s try to deal with the startup side first.

• Startups who receive a term sheet from a qualified angel investor (as defined by the Ontario Securities Commission) or venture capital firm (registered with the Canadian Venture Capital association) are eligible to apply for up $1 Million in loan from the federal government.
• Restrictions:
  • Start-up businesses will be eligible for repayable contributions up to $1 million for no more than one-third (33⅓ percent) of total eligible and supported project costs.
  • An angel and/or venture capital investor(s) must be committed to provide at least two-thirds (66⅔ percent) of the cash contribution toward eligible and supported project costs.
  • In-kind contributions related to mentoring, networking, and other business skills cannot be considered as part of the angel or venture capital investor’s cash contribution.
  • A maximum of one project per eligible start-up SME can be funded under the initiative.
  • Direct eligible costs for start-up businesses may include:
    • Labour, capital and operating expenditures;
    • Materials and supplies;
    • Consulting and/or professional fees (limited to market rate); and,
    • Minor and non-capital acquisitions (e.g., software).
  • All project activities must be completed by March 31, 2014;