On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, “Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router.” That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton’s important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010.

There’s lots of discussion out there about a new and much-loved service called AngelList that connects entrepreneurs to angel investors.

I was reluctant to write about AngelList because the debate on pros / cons is pretty nuanced. But with some heat flying I felt it worthwhile to give anybody on the sidelines a better understanding of the issues.

* Bryce Roberts, a person whose opinion and judgment I greatly respect as well as a person I consider of high integrity has gone on record as having “deleted his AngelList account.” You should read this post. It is thoughtful and respectful.

Facilitators look for rejuvenated tools that fit an innovation era. Have you seen it?

No question, some leaders still find it’s easier to move a graveyard than to lead change at work. Renewal can happen in spite of setbacks or stagnation, though, and it starts with leadership development. Why replicate outmoded leadership traits, in obsolete MBA halls, for instance? Where’s the profit in shaping future leaders for past generations? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Every year, the top officials, policy wonks, and business managers convene at the annual State of the Valley conference to discuss and debate the health of the region. Over a thousand attendees trekked to San Jose, Calif., on Feb. 18 for the release of this year’s report. Published since 1995 by Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network and distributed for free, the new 2011 Index of Silicon Valley reported bleak indicators and a gloomy outlook.

The event provided Valley insiders a moment to reflect on the economic storm, and the mood was darkly optimistic. A persistent phrase tossed out was the “new normal,” old Wall Street jargon describing a repressed economic environment. Growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate, and government intervenes to save a struggling private sector.

The Economist Intelligence Unit has identified the most livable cities in the world. Three of them are in Canada. Four are in Australia. There's also one in New Zealand.

In fact, the EIU's list has hardly changed at all since last year, so there's little doubt that these are the world's best cities.

Cities were ranked on 30 criteria involving health care, stability, culture, environment, education and infrastructure.

Common: Subscribing to traditional beliefs about a universal reality with predetermined parameters about what is practical and possible.

Uncommon: From a young age we’re told tales of this daunting place called the “real world.” It’s a place where practicality always trumps imagination and undaunted ambition. “Better dream now and enjoy it,” we’re implicitly told, “because when you grow up you’ll realize that things don’t work that way in the real world.”

Advice about the “real world” may come with good intentions, but that doesn’t make it accurate. What someone else finds true need not become your dogma.

As the games business transitions from console and PC titles to social and mobile games, China is set to take away the United States’ leadership in the business.

That’s the bold prediction from Tim Merel, who has made a splash analyzing the video game market in the past couple of years as the managing director at investment bank Digi-Capital. Merel believes that in 2010, video game investment and acquisition activity changed fundamentally and accelerated in a way that it never had in the industry’s decades-long history.

Startup patenting strategies have become as sophisticated as those of incumbent companies and startup patenting costs have reached new heights — the average reported cost of a single patent was $38,000. (See the Kauffman-funded Berkeley Patent Survey of 2008, by Stuart Graham, Tech Sichelman, Robert Merges, and Pam Samuelson). The Survey data on startup patent strategies offers insight into our current university model of startup formation.

For those unfamiliar with the role US universities play in startup formation, US universities license university-owned inventions to entrepreneurs who want to form a startup; typically the recipient of a startup license is a university faculty member, students, and sometimes a person not affiliated with the university who has a passion for the technology. Startups that license university inventions, like most startups, don’t have much money and finding early-stage VC backing rarely happens. Universities want to help launch these startups. In response to faculty demand and increasing social pressure to demonstrate that they, too, have an entrepreneurial spirit, most universities will cover their startups’ patent fees in exchange for a chunk of equity or an IOU.

Every startup lucky enough to get some traction gets to the point where they decide to hire some “regular employees” for sales, marketing, and administrative tasks. Then they are surprised to see productivity and creativity take a big dip. What they should be doing is hiring only “entrepreneurs,” meaning people who think and act as if this is their own business.

This commitment to hire people who think like entrepreneurs, or instill an “owner’s mindset” in every employee, should be a high priority in every business. It’s what every customer looks for in every transaction. Most people will tell you this is impossible, but I found a new book, “Army of Entrepreneurs,” by Jennifer Prosek, where she seems to have actually accomplished this.

College graduates need an international perspective to be competitive in today's job market. Many will have to negotiate foreign cultures whether they work in the United States or abroad. As part of this continuing change, international college internships should now be viewed as steppingstones to career success.

Even though relatively few American students go on internships abroad, the number increased 133 percent from the 2003-4 to the 2008-9 academic years, according to the latest figures from the Institute of International Education, which looked at students who received credit for such programs.

The current economic system, driven by dirty fossil fuels and reckless exploitation of natural resources, is unsustainable and unjust. Investing just two percent of global GDP could kick-start a transition towards a green economy as well as fighting poverty worldwide, says a report by UNEP.

How two per cent of global GDP can trigger greener, smarter growth while fighting poverty

21st February 2011 - UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Investing two per cent of global GDP into ten key sectors can kick-start a transition towards a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy a new report launched today says.

The sum, currently amounting to an average of around $1.3 trillion a year and backed by forward-looking national and international policies, would grow the global economy at around the same rate if not higher than those forecast, under current economic models.

Want your work to feel more fulfilling? Just do a little soul searching, says Dan Buettner of Psychology Today.

Specifically, ask yourself ten questions. "Examining the answers will help you to maximize the aspects of your job which contribute to overall workplace satisfaction," Buettner writes.

Here's what to ask:

* How is this work important?

* What can I contribute?

* What excites me?

It’s official: We are two months into the new year and one month away from slipping back into old and sometimes unproductive habits. We know what this looks like—we see it all around us. From calorie-conscious shoppers in the grocery store because everyone is dieting for the New Year to overcrowded gyms because all of us are redesigning our bodies. “Give it a month,” said the lady beside me at the gym, “and half of these people will disappear. Then there will be plenty of room. Just wait. You’ll see.”

But is that what we really want in our business? To slip back into old habits? I want better outcomes for myself and my clients. So let’s get fit to achieve our 2011 business goals.

Where does most product innovation come from? You might look for it in the R&D units of consumer-product manufacturers, but you'd be better off checking the basement workshop of your next-door neighbor. In a survey conducted in the U.K. last year, MIT's Eric von Hippel and colleagues found evidence that that the amount of money consumers spent tweaking products dwarfed the R&D outlays by all British consumer-product firms combined. David Talbot, Technology Review's chief correspondent, recently asked von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at the Sloan School of Management, what lessons he gleaned from the survey on how companies can recognize and tap the power of user innovation.

TR: You surveyed 1,173 U.K. adults about their product-tinkering and inventive habits. What did you find?

Von Hippel: We found that 6.2 percent—representing 2.9 million people, or two orders of magnitude more than are employed as product developers in the U.K.—created or modified consumer products over the past three years and spent 2.3 billion pounds per year, more than double what the U.K. firms spent on consumer-product R&D.

What will we no longer need in the not-so-distant future? Desktop computers? Paper? A sense of direction?

This ad by glass manufacturer Corning says “yes” to all three. The commercial follows an inhumanly tidy family through a day filled with touch-screens, heads-up displays, GPS mapping and 3D projections. Not a sheet of paper, book or PC in sight. (Corning notes craftily that all of these glass products are simply “electronics enabling,” which means Corning has little or nothing to do with the tech magic the glass displays).

The ad continues a theme that Anthill pounced on a few days ago after U.S. Borders bookstores filed for Chapter 11 — what’s next in line for obsolescence? Candidates in the ensuing conversation included fax machines, textbooks, CDs, data cables and corks.

I was on a panel last night at an even organised by Jon Watts of MTM London. The event was billed as a discussion about building internet businesses in the UK, but much of the debate turned to whether we are in a bubble at the moment, a topic that keeps coming up at the moment.

When there is talk of bubbles the comparison point is always with the 1999-2000 internet bubble, a period in which a) valuations sky-rocketed and b) many highly valued businesses lacked the substance to become real businesses.

The parallels between now and the late 1990s are:

* that some businesses are commanding huge valuations – Twitter $8-10bn, Facebook $60-70bn, Groupon $12bn etc.
* some much earlier stage companies are also receiving investments at valuations getting towards $100m for companies with a small number of months of good user growth but little else
* there is a widespread feeling that new levels of web penetration are going to change the way we live and do business – last time round with the wired web, this time round with mobile

Big-ticket sales of products and/or services can be hard to pull off in a time- or cost-efficient manner – especially when the customer is large and sophisticated. It’s just as hard to control the business and legal risks.

Large-volume customers usually have strict internal policies and procedures for purchasing that include “mandatory” terms and multiple levels of review and approval, by both legal and business teams. This means the negotiations can drag on, lengthening the sales cycle, burdening internal resources, increasing outside legal costs, and resulting in last-minute concessions to close the deal timely.

As we struggle with the lingering effects of the recession, it’s hard to see the silver lining in our economic forecast. Despite the statistical end to the recession, many economists don’t believe that we will recover to 2007 employment levels for another two to three years. The big question is: where will this growth come from?

The short answer? Entrepreneurs. A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation found that the rate of business startups is very stable from year to year, varying between 3% to 6%. Entrepreneurship is resilient to both economic booms and busts which is good news for policymakers interested in a sustainable growth strategy that doesn’t suffer from cyclical downturns.

If you work in economic development or are in a business that thrives on innovation you have probably heard about regional innovation clusters or some version of the theme. With the White House promoting Startup America with a focus innovation and entrepreneurship from coast to Cleveland and looking to regions as partners you soon may have a regional innovation cluster map drawn over your workplace.

The core model of economic clusters is not new but the approach has evolved over the years. For a unique approach and a best practice I recommend the TechBelt Initiative. TechBelt has been linking economic development activities in the Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh corridor for several years now.