NESTA and the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge University Engineering Department have just published a review of current knowledge on the role of business incubation in supporting high-growth ventures. A summary of the key findings are given below (as this topic has strong resonance with open innovation) and the full report can be downloaded from the NESTA publication website.

Incubation for Growth: A review of the impact of business incubation on new ventures with high growth potential Nicola J. Dee, Finbarr Livesey, David Gill and Tim Minshall Business incubators have proliferated since their emergence over 50 years ago. Over this time business incubation has evolved to include a range of incubation practices. Nonetheless business incubation can deliver critical value to tenants. Contrasting early definitions of incubation where survival of tenants was emphasised, we define incubation as “...a shared office-space facility that seeks to provide its incubatees with a strategic, valueadding intervention system of monitoring and business assistance.” (Hackett, S. M. and Dilts, D.M. (2004b) A Systematic Review of Business Incubation Research. ‘Journal of Technology Transfer.’ 29: 55-82). Our key findings follow the structure of the report.

Ever since I was old enough to realize there would never be a want ad in a newspaper that described a job I wanted, I've loved working in cafes. I never really thought much about it until a few days ago when a baffled friend of mine asked why I was so into it.

His assumption? That working in a cafe would be a distraction. A distraction? Dude, quite the opposite.

And so, at the risk of trotting out a few half-baked conclusions that my non-cafe-going critics will have a field day trashing, here goes:

Downingtown Area School District officials approached their predicament like the problem solvers they hope to develop at the district's newest high school.

The equation included student overcrowding, a limited budget, and a plan to modernize programs with a cutting-edge curriculum.

Their solution opened its doors Aug. 29, when the new Downingtown STEM Academy held its first classes for 450 students in one of the Chester County district's oldest buildings.

The new magnet high school offers specialized curriculum in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). It is one of a growing number of similar programs and schools popping up in the region.

The academy offers a program that includes a rigorous curriculum of high school and college-level courses that are recognized internationally. Students pick a special area of academic focus in their junior and senior years. They also must participate in community-service projects and

Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression. While we are in a recovery period, this recovery does not appear to be off to a strong start. And yet start-ups are still being created, companies are still growing, and many are achieving significant revenues.

These companies are proving that, if a business has strategic growth drivers in place from the very beginning, it will have the opportunity to grow, no matter what the economic climate. A fundamental piece to this puzzle is ensuring that the business model that you create and develop enables value creation and the possibility for creating a successful business, not just a successful product line.

"The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” is a revised version of the famous book “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber.

It is one of the best books in the field of entrepreneurship. I’ve just read the revised edition and think it is still valid and vital for entrepreneurs.

Gerber says entrepreneurs should work on their business, not in it. When an entrepreneur works in their business, they become a technician, a doer, a problem solver, but they also become a slave of that small business. They cannot change results radically. Instead of doing the daily tasks of whatever the business may be, such as cooking pies in a pastry shop, designing a project in the office or selling goods on the street, an entrepreneur should be working on the business model.

Foreign visitors to Silicon Valley continually mention how willing we are to help, network and connect strangers. We take it so for granted we never even to bother to talk about it. It's the "Pay-It-Forward" culture.

We're all in this together -- The Chips are Down

In 1962 Walker's Wagon Wheel Bar/Restaurant in Mountain View became the lunch hangout for employees at Fairchild Semiconductor. When the first spin-outs began to leave Fairchild, they discovered that fabricating semiconductors reliably was a black art. At times you'd have the recipe and turn out chips, and the next week something would go wrong, and your fab couldn't make anything that would work. Engineers in the very small world of silicon and semiconductors would meet at the Wagon Wheel and swap technical problems and solutions with co-workers and competitors.

We're all in this together -- A Computer in every Home

Jonathan Greenblatt, who served as chief executive of the company that oversees Good magazine and helped create All for Good, an online volunteer database, has been named the new director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.

Mr. Greenblatt replaces Sonal Shah, who stepped down in August after heading the office since it was created in 2009.

Mr. Greenblatt started his new position today, said Shannon Gilson, a White House spokeswoman.

Mr. Greenblatt was a lecturer at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the Impact Economy Initiative, a program of the Aspen Institute that explores ways to encourage social enterprise.

In 2002, the State of Ohio planted the seeds to grow a statewide entrepreneurial ecosystem, and over the past nine years the State has invested $1.1 billion through the Ohio Third Frontier to help efficiently and seamlessly move great ideas from the lab to the marketplace. Ohio is realizing the beginning of a high tech renaissance, and State support for entrepreneurs is stronger than ever. In fact, officials are doubling-down on their support of entrepreneurial ventures, increasing funding and assistance to innovative startups that they hope will drive Ohio’s economic revitalization. At the beginning of this month, the Ohio Third Frontier Commission approved a portion of the investment plan for fiscal year 2012, which includes approximately $184 million of investments in technology-based economic development efforts this year, of which $76 million is expected to be directed toward entrepreneurial support programs. This proposed plan represents a shift in Ohio Third Frontier’s past investment activity. In a discussion with Norm Chagnon, Executive Director of the Ohio Third Frontier Commission, I learned why the State has decided to make some changes to this highly effective program.

In November 2009, the West family embarked on an unusual family project. Parents John and Judy and teenagers Anne and Paul each had their genomes sequenced, and enlisted a team of scientists at Stanford University to interpret the meaning of the combined 24 billion letters of DNA in those genomes.

The findings, published today in the journal PLoS Genetics, are the first attempt to analyze the genome of a healthy family, a feat that gives family members clues to their future risk of disease, points to lifestyle changes that may help mitigate those risks, and highlights the drugs that are most likely to help or harm them. One of the major benefits of sequencing a family is that it generates much more accurate data, by allowing scientists to filter out sequencing errors. More broadly, the project hints at the future of personal genomics, capturing both the potential for preventative medicine and the challenges in interpreting the meaning of the genome for people who are largely healthy.

There aren't too many doctors in the village of Hari Ke Kalan, in the Punjab region of northern India. But for $1, residents who bicycle to a new health clinic can get an appointment with a physician appearing on a large-screen television and beamed in over broadband Internet.

The clinic, built by a startup called Healthpoint Services, is one of a network of eight "e-health points" that the for-profit company has built in India as part of a growing effort by entrepreneurs to capitalize on the rapid expansion of cellular and broadband access in the poorest parts of the world. With successes such as text-message-based mobile payments taking off in some countries, many experts see medicine as the next major application of technology in poor nations.

It’s that time of year again. Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS Top University Ranking, and U.S. News & World Report’s annual list have just been published, and will shortly be followed by the Times Higher Education world rankings. Despite pages of critique, rankings still have the capacity to create fear and loathing in the higher-education and policy worlds – even before the ink is dry. Surely no one really believes that universities can move up or down the rankings scale in any meaningful way, on an annual basis – so why such hysteria?

It seems to me that the common denominator is status and wealth. Rankings bring vital visibility to nations and universities in an increasingly competitive world. The more globalization drives a single market in education, as it does in most goods and services, the more higher education is a beacon for investment and talent – the more this kind of barometer is inevitable. The publication of the Shanghai ranking in 2003 set the cat among the pigeons. Governments and universities around the world sat up and took notice – because rankings challenged, in a very public way, self-perceptions of excellence. It called attention to what I call the gap between self-declaration and external-verification.

Within the past week I have learned about two new programs to help entrepreneurs raise funding from individual or angel investors.

Will entrepreneurs successfully raise money with them? Yes.

Will they work for you? Probably not.

Let me explain.

It is every entrepreneur's dream to submit a business plan online and have investors magically appear and write them big funding checks.

But unfortunately, this is just a dream. It is NOT how investing work. Sure, it works sometimes, and perhaps one out of every thousand entrepreneurs who tries is able to find investors this way. But I'm not willing to bet on 0.1% odds.

DES MOINES - In the final action of its existence, the Iowa Economic Development Board approved state financial awards Thursday for projects in five Iowa communities that will impact up to 481 jobs.

Thursday marked the end of the line for the 13 board members, unless they need a final conference call to mop up some administrative loose ends. Next month, the state Department of Economic Development will launch a new public-private entity, the Iowa Partnership for Economic Progress. It will be made up of the Economic Development Authority - a state-funded agency with a new oversight board - and the Economic Development Corp., a not-for-profit organization that will be financed by the private sector and possibly federal grants.

HAVANA, Cuba, Thursday, September 15, 2011 – Licenses for self-employment have doubled with the number of licenses granted increasing from about 150,000 last year to 333,000 at present.

This according to Minister of Labour and Social Security, Margarita Gonzalez, who stated that since the implementation of the guidelines passed during the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), last year, employment alternative have been increased to 181 specialties.

Can two startups help make peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

Theodore Grossman hopes so.

The Babson College professor, specializing in technology and information systems, is helping to drive commerce between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, by teaching Palestinians and Israeli's entrepreneurship at Babson College.

"How can we use new methods to bring the people together?", Professor Grossman said.

As we start our convertible debt series, we’ll focus on the discount. Remember that a convertible debt deal doesn’t purchase equity in your company. Instead, it’s simply a loan that has the ability to convert to equity based on some future financing event (we’ll tackle the conversion mechanics in a later post.)

Until recently, we had never seen a convertible debt deal that didn’t convert at a discount to the next financing round. Given some of the excited market conditions at the seed stage, we’ve heard of convertible deals with no discount, but view this as irregular and not sustainable over the long term.

Startups are usually so focused on selling more of their branded product or service to their own customer base (organic growth) that they don’t consider the more indirect methods (non-organic growth) of increasing revenue and market share. Non-organic growth would include OEM relationships, finding strategic partners, “coopetition,” as well as acquisitions.

This initial focus is usually driven by limited financial and people resources, as well as the bandwidth of the executive team. Yet a creative and skilled team will often find that non-organic growth techniques can better leverage these limited resources.

An example of a startup which used non-organic growth early and effectively was Microsoft. Bill Gates started producing software solutions, like his Basic Interpreter and MS DOS, but quickly focused on adding thousands of small partners for applications, and major partners like IBM and other hardware manufacturers. Even mergers and acquisitions (M&A) came early.

Oh that Jesse Brown. He’s at it again. Regular readers probably remember our spirited back and forth recently about Apple’s relative level of importance to technology over the past decade. Now, with his latest post on Maclean's, Jesse has me frothing over another topic: video games.

In his post, he takes issue with the big tax breaks and other financial incentives that video game companies have received in many countries to set up shop there, especially Canada. As Jesse puts it, it’s a highly profitable industry that’s also one of the most subsidized:

"The health of the industry is inarguable—sales of video games reached $15 billion in the U.S. alone last year, eclipsing the music industry, if that still means anything—and it would likely do just fine without the charity. So why the corporate welfare?"

When was the last time you sat staring off into space daydreaming? Now, when you have a moment of down time, you probably check your e-mails, text, go online or play Angry Birds.

There’s plenty of technology on that smartphone to keep your mind occupied. But here's the rub: Your brain needs to be bored to be creative. It also needs down time to re-group.

Just think back to the days when your mom kicked you out of the house and told you to come home when it’s dark. Think of how creative you were at filling that unstructured time.

While President Obama urged Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs bill combining tax cuts and new government spending, skepticism remains as to whether the package could kick-start the stalled economy and if it would indeed pay for itself as the President promised.

President Obama’s “American Jobs Act” proposals include a 50 percent cut in payroll taxes, incentives for businesses to hire returning veterans and people who have been unemployed for more than six months, and new spending on America’s infrastructure. The President said that the proposals would not increase the growing federal deficit, and that he has ambitions for long-term deficit reduction through spending cuts.