Research from Jean-Philippe Deschamps, Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at IMD, indicates that there are at least nine possible models of innovation governance, some of which are more widely used than others. This second article in a series of three on the topic of Innovation Governance will review the various governance approaches or “models” that companies have put in place.

The world is built on the backs of the great entrepreneurs in history. Regardless of what society you are talking about or what time in history, the people who caused some of the greatest advances in business and commerce were entrepreneurs.

But what makes a great entrepreneur tick? There are several traits that all of the great entrepreneurs in history shared. As the next generation of entrepreneurs looks to start their own multi-million dollar corporations, they should all stop and learn some lessons from the great thinkers that came before them.

Most people think brainstorming sessions are all about ideas -- much in the same way Wall Street bankers think life is all about money.

While ideas are certainly a big part of brainstorming, they are only a part.

People who rush into a brainstorming session starving for new ideas will miss the boat (and the train, car, and unicycle) completely unless they tune into the some other important dynamics that are also at play:

1. INVESTIGATION: If you want your brainstorming sessions to be effective, you'll need to do some investigating before hand. Get curious. Ask questions. Dig deeper. The more you find out what the real issues are, the greater your chances of framing powerful questions to brainstorm and choosing the best techniques to use.

"Bravo to Sheryl Sandberg of leaving work at 5:30," CNN applauded in a recent headline. That's just one of many headlines congratulating the chief operating officer at Facebook for leaving work at a reasonable hour to spend time with her kids. During our most recent episode of Work Flow, Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran shared her weekday ritual of turning off her phone from 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. to focus on her family. For a few years now, author Tim Ferriss has teased us with the the 4-hour fantasy--the 4-hour work week and the 4-hour body--with "Superhuman" recipes for outsourcing your life and achieving a sexy shape.

As I look toward my own professional networks, I see an opposite trend. From work days that end at midnight to 60-hour work weeks, the winning recipe for many workers is, well, a lot of hard work. There are few shortcuts, even fewer opportunities to work less, and, unless you're the boss, turning off for long periods isn't always well-received.

Disruptive innovators — the likes of entrepreneurial masterminds Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Pierre Omidyar — think and behave differently. They possess a suite of skills that enable them to connect dots that the rest of us don’t usually perceive.

But are some of us born innovators and the rest of us just hopeless? Hal Gregersen, senior affiliate professor of leadership at INSEAD and co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA,” believes that there are five key skills that disruptive innovator’s possess: the cognitive skill of associating and the behavioral skills of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. And yes, all of us can learn to flex these innovator’s muscles, Gregersen told me in a recent interview.

Google Ventures' Twitter account is in the doldrums and Bill Maris isn't pleased. Maris, the intense managing partner of the search giant's venture-capital arm, is sitting in a huge window-paneled conference room with a few members of his marketing team. One of them tries to brighten the mood by noting @googleventures has about 34,000 followers. That's far more than arguably the hottest venture firm in Silicon Valley right now, Andreessen Horowitz (which has about 7,000 followers), though not as many as the A-list Sequoia Capital (around 43,000 followers). Maris isn't satisfied. When he gets excited, as he does now, his voice has a tendency to break into a higher register. "I want us to get not just up to the curve but ahead of the curve."

California wine is about to get more expensive.

Silicon Valley Bank, which provides the wine industry with commercial banking services, predicts the fine wine business will see sales growth of 7 to 11 percent this year amid a looming grape shortage.

With the economy still in the doldrums, our political leaders are desperate to find ways to boost economic growth. Innovation and entrepreneurship are among the most obvious pathways to a solution. Both were the subject of a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship chaired by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Wednesday. I was asked to participate in the discussion with other academics, government officials and entrepreneurs.

I left the hearing feeling depressed.

Government leaders — at least some of those present — actually seemed to believe they could, through legislation and spending, increase entrepreneurship and innovation. They asked questions such as: What legislation can we enact to build innovation ecosystems, facilitate mentorship, and teach entrepreneurship? They didn’t seem to understand that these are things entrepreneurs do—not governments.

Who actually owns venture capital firms? For two Boston area VC firms with five or more partners, at least 75 percent of the firm's equity is in the hands of one partner, according to newly available federal filings.

Meanwhile, for two other local VC firms — which both have more than 10 partners — just two partners own all of the equity in the firm, according to the filings. The filings are available on the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking to relocate you may want to consider South Dakota, which was ranked no. 1 in the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council’s Business Tax Index 2012.

The annual tax index grades the states on 18 different tax measures and combines those results into one single tax score. The ranked taxes include: income, property, death/inheritance, capital gains, unemployment, and other consumption based taxes like state gas. According to the index, the top 5 state tax systems for entrepreneurs in the U.S. are South Dakota, Texas, Nevada, Wyoming and Washington. While the worst of the list are District of Columbia, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Iowa.

Answer: After your business model makes boatloads of money.  :)

Ok, well, short of that, this is one of the questions I get most and here's what I've noticed about venture raise timing.  There seems to be three windows, each with their own pros, cons and complications.

Here are some general tips to keep in mind:

Phin tells companies to solve all the problems you can solve without money first.  I think this is great advice.

The quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human social needs and figure out how to mediate them online.

Look at the first wave of the Web/mobile/cloud startups that have done just that: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match.com, Pandora, Zynga, WordPress, LinkedIn.

It’s your turn.

Hard-Wired

This week I’m in New York teaching a 5-day version of my Lean LaunchPad class at Columbia University. While the class teaches a process to search and validate a business model, it does not offer any hints on how to create a killer startup idea. So after teaching several hundred teams in the last few years, one of my students finally asked this question—“So how do we come up with an idea for the next billion dollar company?”

The future of crowdfunding is now in the hands of the Securities and Exchange Commission. When Congress passed the law making it legal to sell small stakes in private companies to the general public online, lawmakers left it up to regulators to determine the mechanics of how such transactions will actually work.

In the crowdfunding portion of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, there are 22 places for the SEC to make rules, Karen Kerrigan, president of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, said Thursday at the first Crowdfunding Conference in New York. That’s just one section of the law. The agency, which raised concerns about aspects of the statute as it was debated, has 270 days from its April 5 enactment to make rules. That means they should be in place by Jan. 1, 2013. The SEC started taking public comments last week.

A group of researchers led by Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson ran an experiment in 2007 to study how shoppers decide what to buy. I learned about their startling discoveries while researching my new book, Marketing for Scientists.

Knutson’s team placed experimental subjects in front of a computer screen in an fMRI scanner and had them engage in a kind of online shopping simulation. The scanner showed that a brain region called the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) lit up when the subjects saw enticing images of products for sale. Then another region called the insula would glow when the subjects saw high prices on the screen. The NAcc is a reward center. The insula is involved in processing pain, anger, and fear.

There was a lot of startup excitement in Tallinn, Estonia this week, where investment and mentoring program Seedcamp organised their first ever event in Estonia – a tiny country, but best known for being the cradle for the development of Skype.

However, the Nordic tiger is no stranger to Seedcamp as six companies from the country – GrabCAD, Sportlyzer, Campalyst, Qminder, Transferwise and Pult – are already invested startups. In fact, Estonia is raising a few eyebrows given its tiny size, already producing a number of high quality startups at a prodigious rate. Even Estonian president Toomas Hendrik turned up to welcome attendees to “the startup country” and stayed on for the pitches!

The ICF Summit is an international gathering of mayors, chief administrative officers, chief information officers and economic development officers from cities, states and regions around the world.  Produced in partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, it is a unique opportunity to learn from the world's most dynamic communities how to use information and communications technology to build prosperous, inclusive and sustainable communities.

David Lawee is Google’s vice president of corporate development, the latest in his string of high-profile positions at the search giant. As the company’s M&A leader over the past seven years, he has been responsible for some of the company’s biggest acquisitions.

Onstage at the DEMO conference today in Santa Clara, he told VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall that before working at Google, he actually started (and sold) four companies himself as an entrepreneur. As a result, when it comes to being acquired or making an acquisition decision on the other side of the table, no one is more qualified to advise startups on how to get bought by a tech giant like Google.

We’ve been reporting on a lot of very cool tech and gaming projects that have found huge success on the New York based crowdfunding platform Kickstarter this year. The site, which never had a million dollar project before 2012, keeps breaking its own records, with the Pebble smartwatch, which has now raised more than $5 million, leading the pack.

But tech projects represent just one portion of Kickstarter’s funding base. Back in February Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler said the company was on pace to distribute more funding than the $146 million given out each year by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Technology teaches us to forget the past. Last year’s tech news seems like it has no use whatsoever. Thankfully, historians beg to differ, and they have begun to preserve the history of the tech industry as it becomes more and more important to the evolution of our lives and world. Those who understand the history of technology and the people who made it happen can probably figure out more quickly how to build on the shoulders of giants and advance technology further. Here’s some books that are great fun to read because they either relate great ideas that influenced a generation of technologists or because they chronicle the lives of people who changed the world. This list includes books that have stood the test of time and are worth a look for the history lover. And it includes new books, such as Walter Isaacson’s tome on Steve Jobs, that are likely to be the new classics. It doesn’t, however, include any tech textbooks. My focus is on books that deliver not just a technical understanding of how something works today, but hard-earned wisdom.

Pork-barrel spending continues despite a 2011 moratorium on the practice.  While, the amount allotted for congressional earmarks has decreased by 80 percent since 2010, the last year  the group Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) performed its analysis, the total amount still totals at $3.3 billion for 2012.

The portion of that pie going to research is $44 million, down from the $2.25 billion that The Chronicle of Higher Education estimated for 2008. While the decrease may have an impact of research institutions depending on that money, CAGW says that only a moratorium that is put into law permanently can prevent further transgressions.