I recently returned from a visit to Chile, which launched an ambitious effort in 2000 to become an IT outsourcing hub. It did so in an effort to break its economic dependence on its mining industry. By offering massive subsidies, the Chilean government created an outsourcing industry that generated $800 million in revenue and employed 20,000 people in 2008. The Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO) asked my research team at Duke University to advise them on a way to grow this to a $5 billion industry by 2015.

I told themit was impossible. Chile had a population of 16 million people, and its universities graduated only 1,400 engineers per year. That put getting 100,000 additional IT workers for its outsourcing industry out of reach. Before long, the industry would start cannibalizing other important, technical professions. Civil engineers, mining engineers and university professors would abandon their posts for higher-paying IT service jobs. And salaries would increase to a point where the industry would cease to be competitive. I recommended Chile try to be more like Israel and less like India. Israel’s smaller, entrepreneurial population makes it a better model for Chile, whereas India’s much larger population gives it an advantage in pursuing the more traditional outsourcing industry model.

The invasion is under way. The newest generation – those so-called Millennials born since the 1980s and raised on ever-present mobile devices, ubiquitous online access and social media – are entering the digital workplace in force.

How will the unique environment that this generation grew up in influence the way they work? There’s plenty of social and political research on Millennials but little geared at helping IT managers support and get the best out of this technology-engaged cohort. With that in mind, we surveyed 400 U.S. Millennials, ages 20 through 29, on their attitudes and behavior around at-work technology and tech support, communications preferences and problem-solving styles. We found that Millennials have distinctive characteristics around response time, communications channels and self-sufficiency that IT needs to address to make these workers productive and avoid potential problems.

When independent film producer Joe Avella sought funding last year for his Master of Inventions movie, he looked beyond the usual suspects – he turned to the crowd.

Avella and his filming cohorts posted a video plea for money on Kickstarter, one of dozens of websites where inventors and others with new products, ideas and projects can seek donations from family, friends and anonymous people in the ether.

Crowdfunding is a viable funding alternative for inventors who are serious about developing and commercializing their ideas. Crowdfunding, by its Darwinian nature, also serves as a viable means test. Ideas that have popular appeal get funded; ideas that suck, die a merciful death. And as the saying goes, it’s better to fail early.

Scott Maxwell grew up in Silicon Valley, but these days he is practically operating a shadow economic development agency in Massachusetts. As founder of OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm (and before that as the head of the Boston office of Insight Venture Partners), he has persuaded more than a half-dozen companies from around the world set up shop here.

OpenView targets software and Internet companies that have already created a product or service, and begun generating revenue. "We look for companies that have around $5 million in revenue when we invest," Maxwell says, "so it's really expansion investing, giving them the resources they need for growth." OpenView will invest in start-ups anywhere in the world, Maxwell adds, "but the company needs to have a North American strategy." Often, that entails setting up a new headquarters in the U.S. and hiring a CEO here. OpenView's current fund totals $233 million, Maxwell says, and typically the firm puts about $7 million or $8 million into a company as its initial investment.

I would argue, and often have, that while money, technology and innovation (I'll come back to this) are considered more glamorous and therefore more important, communication is the single most critical factor in the success of any endeavor.

Communication is what transforms an idea into a vision, defines how it's different, explains why it will work, and engages people in helping make it a reality. Communication is what keeps your vision alive, whether you are in the room explaining it to someone, or they are thinking about it in places far from where you've ever been or will ever go.

For millennia, the human race has relied on one powerful skill to build the world we now see around us - the ability to innovate.

From the discovery of fire to the invention of the spacecraft, innovation has driven us to achieve the unachievable.

Whether you call it ibtikar, as it is known in the Arab world, or "innovation", it all begins with a passion for excellence and an ability to bring together the collective experience and insight of the brightest minds.

Innovation thrives in an environment in which problems are perceived as opportunities and non-linear thinking is encouraged. It needs to be driven not merely by ambition, but by a vision and a culture of openness to sharing ideas and best practice.

With concerns about the global economy dominating the headlines, worries about the strength of our local economy are understandable. Fortunately, the Knoxville–Oak Ridge region is rich in opportunities for business and job growth.

Innovation Valley Inc. is capitalizing on these opportunities through a coordinated effort to move our region's economy forward. IVI is a partnership of six regional economic development agencies, supported by regional business and government partners, that was created to implement a five-year blueprint for business growth in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge region. This blueprint focuses on six program areas: technology and entrepreneurship, education and work-force development, global marketing, business retention and expansion, public policy, and resources for living. It is available online at http://www.innovationvalleyinc.org/strategic-blueprint.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans in Hawaii continued to set the national standard in wellbeing in the first half of 2011, followed closely by North Dakota. West Virginia and Kentucky maintained their status as the states with the lowest wellbeing. Nebraska, which showed the biggest gains in wellbeing rank from 2009 (25th) to 2010 (10th), continued to move up, landing in the top five.

These state-level data, from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, are meant to provide a preliminary reading on the wellbeing of U.S. states in anticipation of the complete 2011 rankings, to be released early next year.

Facebook's new Messenger app for Android phones and iPhones is designed to let groups of people communicate with one another in real time no matter where they are. It's the first instance in which Facebook has split a core part of its social network from the main product—a move that reflects a shift in how people are using social-media tools.

Messenger lets groups of Facebook users communicate with one another in the moment even if they're using different communication technologies—for example, with one person using instant messaging, another text, and a third e-mail. Messenger taps into Facebook's vast supply of data about contacts and connections, including users' e-mail addresses, instant-message handles, and phone numbers.

David Lauren was racked with anxiety. It was 2 a.m. in London and a small crowd of Ralph Lauren employees huddled outside the company's U.K. flagship on New Bond Street, trying desperately to make a technology come to life in an unprecedented way. David, the 39-year-old son of Ralph and the company's executive vice president, was planning to debut a novel 4-D light show in less than 24 hours, to celebrate the launch of Ralph Lauren e-commerce in the U.K. The 4-D project had been months in the making, relying on architectural light-mapping techniques to create an eight-minute holographic video that would be projected onto the storefront. If everything went right, the building would seemingly disappear, replaced by 3-D images of 15-foot-tall models walking down runways and giant polo players galloping across fields. A rendering of Ralph himself would wave to the throng of fans. The exorbitant fourth dimension: the scent of Big Pony cologne, which would be spritzed onto the crowd below.

When I first got into VC I decided I better have some investment themes. My macro theme was “great entrepreneurs” who mapped to my belief system about the kind of entrepreneurs I wanted to work with.

My background was 8 years of telecoms & mobile and 8 years of cloud computing & SaaS – so these two themes were a given.

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Electronic devices with muscles-like stretchability have long been pursued, but not achieved due to the requirement that all materials in the devices – electrodes, semiconductor, and dielectric – are stretchable. In their pursuit of fully flexible and stretchable electronic devices, researchers have already reported stretchable solar cells and transistors as well as stretchable active-matrix displays. The nanomaterials used for these purposes range from coiled nanowires to graphene ("Foaming for stretchable electronics").

Recently, researchers at UCLA have successfully demonstrated a stretchable polymer composite that is highly transparent and highly conductive, and applied this nanocomposite material to fabricating stretchable devices.

Each week in Business Rx, we typically feature entrepreneurs growing their businesses. But what if you just have an inkling of an idea … or the dream of working for yourself? You have to start somewhere, and knowing where to begin can be daunting.

The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business focuses on this early-stage innovation process from the back of the napkin to the first million dollars. Beginning today, 40 University of Maryland students hope off on the right foot during Dingman’s “Jumpstart” program. Successful Washington-region entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers and business leaders plan to give participants a realistic look at the startup environment and walk them through critical first steps to building a new venture, including how to brainstorm ideas, build a strong team, test the waters and roll out a marketing plan.

A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship in among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school. I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating to the Midwest– didn’t necessarily agree. “That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they’ve all gone overseas,” he said.

It was then that the great American panic of a few years came rushing back to me. Somehow I’d forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn’t just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China.

If you don't believe that the Arctic ice cap is melting, ask the Russians about it.

In 2007, while many of us were busy arguing about whether or not climate change is real, a Russian mini-sub planted a titanium flag on the sea floor far beneath the floating ice lid, claiming the North Pole for the Motherland. Not surprisingly, that claim didn't go over well with the representatives of the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, all of whom also have strong territorial interests--and military presences--in the Arctic.

Until recently, nobody seemed to care much about who owned what up there among the polar bears, but things have changed. This summer saw the second largest meltback of sea ice on record. What was once considered a useless, frozen wasteland is now a booming frontier, and national tempers are heating up along with the local climate.

David McRaney spends a lot of time thinking about all the ways thinking doesn't work. He catalogues delusions, fallacies of thinking, and the psychological short-circuits that cause procrastination, groupthink, and poor decisions. But McRaney swears his index of common mental shortcomings actually inspires him--and could inspire you to know thy working self.

You Are Not So Smart, McRaney's blog and forthcoming book, is intentionally labeled as a "Celebration of Self-Delusion." Sure, topics like the bystander effect, showing how bigger crowds encourage less help for people in trouble, and the backfire effect, where people learn to reject science when it questions their beliefs, are likely to get under anyone's skin after some reflection. But McRaney says that understanding our mental malfuctions should inspire us.

Color me cynical, but for a long time, I assumed that all the political blather about green jobs meant only one thing: They were fake. But according to this infographic by Column Five for solar-power company 1Bog, green jobs are very much real--and in fact might be one of the only places in this awful economy where a person can hope to get a decent manufacturing job.

Granted, we're not experiencing the hockey-stick growth you might expect from such a burgeoning field. As the topmost chart shows, the green economy expanded three times faster than the economy as a whole, in the decade ended in 2007. (Who knows exactly what that ratio looks like now, but we're betting that it's larger.)

The developing world has, for the first time, outstripped richer economies in providing new investment in the renewable energy sector, according to a report.

And research and development (R&D) funding from government sources, at US$5 billion in 2010, for the first time overtook corporate R&D investment, according to 'Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2011', published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) last month (7 July).

"The increase in government R&D funding is a global phenomenon and reflects, partly, the spending of money from the 'green stimulus' packages that were introduced [by some countries] in 2008–9 after the financial crisis," said Angus McCrone, chief editor of the research and analysis provider Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which prepared the report.

Just like the word innovation, or even ‘the precursor to acceleration’ (‘startup incubation’) this particular use of the word acceleration (probably originating in this context with leading startup accelerators Y Combinator and TechStars) is being used to mean just about anything that those involved want it to, but here at the iij we’re getting a strange sense of déjà vu.

Readers of the iij are probably more than familiar with our efforts to define the word startup: ‘Why startup is a crazy term‘, Innovation Investment Journal, April 2011.

It’s not at all uncommon that when something is successful, other companies attempt to mirror that success by following some of the same methods. From the first cars to the recent deluge of daily deals sites, the behavior is far from surprising.

It stands to reason then that we’d start seeing a number of startup incubators and accelerators popping up across the world, given the success of some of the bigger names within this vein. While the track records of accelerators such as Y Combinator and TechStars are subject to your definition of success, the fact that these companies have spawned some of the names that are now huge within the technology industry will continue to lead more people down a similar path.