The following guidelines are examples of things you can do to facilitate groups of people to be more productive in meetings - and specifically, meetings require creativity and innovation.
1. Design the work...

When designing a process that enhances creativity and innovation think in terms of crafting a set of activities instead of an making an agenda. Agendas are topic or subject focused and most often require working linearly through each topic. Activities are interactive and product focused (see below) and require participants to engage with each other, learn from each other, and create something together.

In our work we've found there are generally six types of activities in creative work:

• activities that orient (to the situation or challenge)
• activities that explore (the territory around the situation or challenge)
• activities that build (models)
• activities that test (models)
• activities that incubate (step away)
• activities that exchange (trade value)

Making the most of New Jersey‟s heritage as a home to innovation and invention will be the key to creating the jobs of the future, and the ongoing goal of a new coalition called Innovation NJ, dedicated to fostering partnerships between businesses and institutions of higher education.

An announcement of the new coalition was made July 15 at AT&T‟s Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster. The event was hosted by Michael Schweder, president of AT&T New Jersey; who was joined by Thomas F. Degnan Jr., chairman of the Research & Development Council of New Jersey and manager of Breakthrough and Leads Generation for ExxonMobil; Judith Sheft, associate vice president for Technology Development at the New Jersey Institute of Technology; Dr. Kathleen W. Scotto, vice president of Research and interim dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and Maxine Ballen, president and CEO of the NJ Technology Council at the event.

Everyone likes to think they work harder than everyone else, but the latest OECD data may surprise some Europeans and Americans who expected to be at the top of the world's hard work list.

The latest data from the OECD sheds light on not just paid work, but also unpaid work such as cooking and other housework.

Notable absentees from the top 14 include Germany, France, and the UK. All of the countries listed have a work day longer than the OECD average.

The richest Americans in history come primarily from several eras of extreme inequality.

One group of robber barons, like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, lived between the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Then there are the tech mavens and investors who made a fortune in the past twenty years.

We identified peak net worth for historical figures based on scholarly estimates. All figures are adjusted for inflation.

April 18th approaches and as tax season starts to heat up we all start steaming about the cash the government wants from us for living in the U.S.A.

But let's just put something into perspective real quickly.

In other countries taxes are way higher.

And in fact, it's only because our own taxes can go way higher that foreign bond investors haven't totally freaked out yet about lending us so much money.

You’re the head of a growing San Francisco startup looking to cut a sweet deal on a “creative” new office space to contain your ever-expanding cadre of devoted young employees and make your old incubator buddies jealous. Should be a cakewalk in a down market, right?

Err, not so much. While much of the office space available within the city’s traditional high-rise buildings are still experiencing elevated vacancy rates and lower leasing prices, hit the tech industry enclave of the SoMA neighborhood, and it’s a whole different scene.

i6 Green builds on the success of last year’s inaugural i6 Challenge and is designed to encourage and reward innovative approaches to accelerating technology commercialization, new venture formation, job creation, and economic growth across the United States. This year’s $12M challenge rewards communities that utilize a Proof of Concept Center model, such as that championed by the Deshpande Center, to accelerate technology led economic development in pursuit of a vibrant, innovative clean economy.

i6 Green is led by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA), in partnership with the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For more information, visit: http://www.eda.gov/i6

Click here to register to this Webinar (or go to https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/279553330)

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The EU Commission moved to simplify and sharply cut the cost of patent registration in 25 EU members on Wednesday, but Italy and Spain stayed out of the scheme because of unhappiness that their languages were left out.

The Commission's proposal for a new patent system aims to bolster European innovation and competitiveness in the face of fierce competition from rivals such as China.

But both Italy and Spain are dissatisfied that their national languages being excluded from the proposed scheme, fearing losing a competitive edge.

How can you make your employees more productive? Jane Murphy, workplace coaching blogger and author of What Could Happen if You Do Nothing: A Manager's Handbook for Coaching Conversations offers 10 critical tips to get more out of your people.

1. Know them: People are more than a resume. Take the time to get to know your people-their values, their interests, their capabilities, their challenges and aspirations. You can discover untapped skills and abilities. They can air any unaddressed concerns. People will feel better understood and appreciated.

I recently had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed, a company who focuses on helping media companies make their content go viral.

His words, “we find things on Sunday morning that will be on the Today show on Tuesday morning.” That’s why people turn up to Buzzfeed.

We talked about a lot of great stuff in the video including how to do sales calls and a how a new “culture of writing” is emerging as a critical skill set in business today. We also talked about why Jon decided to leave Google to become an EIR at a VC firm (Polaris) – minute 33.

Most of us have travelled abroad and experienced the challenges and frustrations of getting what we want without being laughed at or insulting our hosts. Similar issues prevail when doing business in other countries, cultures and languages. Even if you think your business is all local, multi-ethnic sensitivities are more relevant than you may think, including the US.

Although the Internet gives you pervasive reach, it hasn’t reduced the world to one locale for your business. The international opportunity is large, as I related in an earlier article, but there are some major challenges as well. Here are a few examples from my personal experience:

1.

You need to translate/localize your products. I was once asked by a top executive of a major software company why we were not selling more products in Finland. I informed him that we needed to translate the software into Finnish at a cost of $50,000.

The benefits of blueberry consumption have been demonstrated in several nutrition studies, more specifically the cardio-protective benefits derived from their high polyphenol content. Blueberries have shown potential to have a positive effect on everything from aging to metabolic syndrome. Recently, a researcher from Texas Woman’s University (TWU) in Denton, TX, examined whether blueberries could play a role in reducing one of the world’s greatest health challenges: obesity.

Shiwani Moghe, MS, a graduate student at TWU, decided to evaluate whether blueberry polyphenols play a role in adipocyte differentiation, the process in which a relatively unspecialized cell acquires specialized features of an adipocyte, an animal connective tissue cell specialized for the synthesis and storage of fat. Plant polyphenols have been shown to fight adipogenesis, which is the development of fat cells, and induce lipolysis, which is the breakdown of lipids/fat. Moghe will present her research at the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting for the American Society for Nutrition on Sunday, April 10, at 12:45 pm.

Facebook just opened a futuristic, energy efficient data center that cost them tens of millions of dollars to build.

The data center is the company's first -- Facebook previously leased data center space -- and it's located in Prineville, Oregon.

It's 38% more energy efficient than the standard data center and cost 24% less to build.

The best trick: Facebook released all the specs for the data center as part of a new Open Compute Project.

Why do startups fail? There's a number of reasons. Sometimes its the wrong person at the wrong time.

Sometimes though, the problem is just too big too tackle.

Sometimes there's a reason nobody has been able to solve the problem a startup is tackling.

What follows is a list of such ideas, culled from a question on Quora: "What are some startup ideas that persistently fail?"

Kids are leading the world's transition to digital media.

This is in part because kids aren't afraid of technology, and in part because kids haven't spent years getting use to anything else.

So if you want to get a sense of where the world's media habits are headed, it makes sense to watch what kids are doing.

The Kaiser Family Foundation did just that in a comprehensive survey released last year. Kaiser surveyed more than 2,000 families, and turned up all sorts of interesting information about the media habits of 8-18 year olds.

Measures designed to slash bureaucracy for micro-entreprises are set to be drastically diluted by EU countries after national governments blocked the proposals, fearing that they would make them less competitive as business locations.

The Hungarian EU Presidency is in the process of finalising a compromise on draft measures exempting micro-businesses from obligations to prepare annual accounts.

The initiative is part of a broader aim to cut red tape pushed by the EU's High Level Group of Independent Stakeholders on Administrative Burdens. But the proposals have been drastically watered down during discussions in the Council working party on company law.

A new way of making battery electrodes based on nanostructured metal foams has been used to make a lithium-ion battery that can be 90 percent charged in two minutes. If the method can be commercialized, it could lead to laptops that charge in a few minutes or cell phones that charge in 30 seconds.

The methods used to make the ultrafast-charging electrodes are compatible with a range of battery chemistries; the researchers have also used them to make nickel-metal-hydride batteries, the kind commonly used in hybrid and electric vehicles.

I have been an innovation consultant since 1986 and have worked with hundreds of organizations in more than 15 industries. The products and services of my clients have all been different -- as have their acronyms, mission statements, and cafeteria food.

But they all have one thing in common -- and that is a pronounced tendency to undervalue the power of appreciation.

Sure, they give out gold watches and Employee of the Month awards, but the simple act of acknowledging and appreciating each other on a daily basis is in woeful short supply.

Over the past several years, there’s been a huge increase in accelerator programs that fund, mentor, and incubate young technology companies. The two most highly visible and popular programs – TechStars and YCominbator — have acceptance rates that rival Ivy League colleges. TechStars, for instance, has programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York and receives approximately 2000 applications for 40 spots. But if your company is lucky enough to be accepted, it’s a bit like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

For an elite group of young people in New York, this will be the summer to hang out with famous people, hone their craft and get a shot at stardom.

No, they're not actors — they are the next generation of New York tech entrepreneurs who soon will be treated to an unprecedented opportunity to fast-track their fledgling companies.

Calling all future Foursquares. By June, the city will be the home of at least five summer programs that provide funds, mentoring, free office space and valuable contacts to promising tech startups.

Last year there was just one.

"For an entrepreneur starting a company in New York, it has never been easier to get going," said David Tisch, managing director of TechStars NYC, one of the launching pads open for business here this summer.