As Groupon would say, the deal is on.

The social buying site on Thursday filed to go public, a hotly anticipated debut that could raise $3 billion, according to two people close to the company who were not authorized to speak publicly. At that level, the company would be worth roughly $30 billion, surpassing the value of Google at its initial public offering.

Groupon is part of an elite club of social Internet companies that is fanning investor ardor for the next generation of technology giants. The gaming company Zynga is preparing to file for an offering that could value it at more than $10 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

"The first step to winning the future is encouraging American innovation." That was Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last January, when he hit the theme repeatedly, using the word innovation or innovate 11 times. And on this issue, at least, Republicans seem in sync with Obama. Listen to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Mitch Daniels and the word innovation pops up again and again. Everyone wants innovation and agrees that it is the key to America's future.

Innovation is as American as apple pie. It seems to accord with so many elements of our national character — ingenuity, freedom, flexibility, the willingness to question conventional wisdom and defy authority. But politicians are pinning their hopes on innovation for more urgent reasons. America's future growth will have to come from new industries that create new products and processes. Older industries are under tremendous pressure. Technological change is making factories and offices far more efficient. The rise of low-wage manufacturing in China and low-wage services in India is moving jobs overseas. The only durable strength we have — the only one that can withstand these gale winds — is innovation.

The summer after her first year at Harvard Business School, Halle Tecco got an internship at Apple in Cupertino, CA, helping to evaluate mobile apps for the health and medical category of the iTunes App Store. “I was on the phone all day with big hospitals and healthcare organizations who didn’t put the love into their apps,” she says. “They were building things with a check-box strategy, and in my opinion they didn’t have much creativity or innovation.”

Sitting in the next cubicle over, by contrast, was a woman who worked on game apps. “She had a really colorful cube with people in and out all day long. It was like a party,” says Tecco.

Tecco felt that health-related mobile apps could benefit from some of the same fun and imagination going into games—and the idea stuck with her. She went on to found Rock Health, a new non-profit incubator in San Francisco that’s exclusively tailored for startups working on Web- and mobile-based healthcare technologies. And today Rock Health named its first class of companies, from a team using camera phones to diagnose ear infections to a startup dedicated to using social networking to prevent Type 2 diabetes.

A disruptive hypothesis is an intentionally unreasonable statement that gets your thinking flowing in a different direction. It’s kind of like the evolutionary biology theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which states that evolution proceeds slowly and every once in a while is interrupted by sudden change. Disruptive hypotheses are designed to upset your comfortable business equilibrium and bring about an accelerated change in your own thinking.

Contrast this with the more traditional definition of “hypothesis,” which is a best-guess explanation that’s based on a set of facts and can be tested by further investigation. With a disruptive hypothesis, however, you don’t make a reasonable prediction (if I charge the battery, the phone will work). Instead, you make an unreasonable provocation (what if a cell phone didn’t need a battery at all?). The difference between prediction and provocation, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw’s famous line, is the difference between “seeing things as they are and asking, ‘Why?,’ or dreaming things as they never were and asking, ‘What if?’” In our fast-changing world, when business certainties are no longer certain, the ability to imagine things as they never were and ask, “What if?,” is an essential part of every executive’s skill set.

Imagine a great idea pops up in your company’s idea management system, in a brainstorm or over a beer after work. The first thing a manager will typically do is calculate the cost of implementing said idea. This cost will then be balanced against the value potential of the idea – usually additional income from increased sales or reduced operational costs. However, the more creative an idea is (and hence potentially innovative), the harder it can be to determine the value especially in monetary terms. As a result, many potentially very exciting ideas are not implemented simply because a manager has decided that to do so would be to costly.

While such managers can be very good at working out the cost of implementing an idea, they often fail completely to calculate the cost of not implementing an idea – and this can sometimes be far more expensive than implementing it, especially over the long term.

Mackinac Island— Gov. Rick Snyder and business leaders announced a $3 billion program today to increase borrowing and selling opportunities for Michigan businesses.

Snyder said Pure Michigan Business Connect "is the cornerstone of a new toolkit for economic gardening we are developing."

Under the program, Michigan businesses are encouraged to do more business with other Michigan businesses.

Little exists in the trade or academic literature regarding double bottom line fund performance metrics for industry benchmarking or best practices. This became apparent when a fund client of mine asked how to measure themselves against other funds for the purposes of raising a second fund. I suggested performing a blinded fund study to provide some comparable metrics hoping for some financial return data, despite the early stage of most of these types of funds.

This study was conducted in March and April 2011 with responses received from eight funds, covering five Midwest states. One fund had portfolio level data enabling an extraction of data for the life sciences portion to create a quasi fund. Therefore, the total number of reported funds equals nine, which I labeled Fund A through Fund I. Vintage years vary across the spectrum with the earliest in 2002 and the latest in 2010. As one might expect, in this small a sample size, these funds come in various shapes and sizes, and no one fund is a good direct comparable to another. Some performance indicators and best practices can be gleaned from the data despite the inconsistencies between all the funds. There was a wide disparity in fund’s data collection indicating some standardized practices would be useful for making future comparisons. Given variability in the funds, cumulating all the data to arrive at averages is not meaningful, so each fund is described separately with general conclusions.

Get inspired by Conan O'Brien and geniuses from Apple, Facebook, Google, Zynga, Twitter, and more in this interactive and video-filled iPad app that explores the creative processes driving 100 influential business leaders. Here are four of the lessons embedded in our package:

1. Creativity can come from anywhere.
2. Creativity can solve problems that seem insurmountable.
3. There is a limitless supply of creativity.
4. Creativity implies reinvention.

Shanghai, China (June 2, 2011) – On the first full day of a 10-day economic development mission to Asia, Governor Martin O’Malley today announced that Tasly Group, one of China’s leading biopharmaceutical companies, will invest $40 million in a new U.S. operation in Montgomery County, marking the largest investment in Maryland by a Chinese company. The company plans to open a 430,000-square-foot production facility and training center for traditional Chinese medicine in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, which will create dozens of jobs over the next three years. They selected Maryland to leverage the vast bioscience resources nearby as they prepare for Phase III clinical trials of their traditional Chinese medicine product Compound Danshen Dripping Pills (CDDP) developed to treat and prevent coronary disease. In making the announcement at Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, also known as China’s “Pharma Valley”, the Governor was joined by Tasly Chairman Dr. Yan Xijun.

“We are here in China to highlight the incredible opportunities there are for Maryland companies to collaborate with Chinese investors and researchers,” said Governor O’Malley. “By reaching across borders, we can share knowledge and research, generate promising partnerships, and leverage the power of innovation to create jobs and expand opportunity to make our children winners in this changing, global economy. We are pleased to welcome Tasly Group to Maryland.”

Minnesota approved a tweaked version of the angel investment tax credit to broaden the number of companies eligible for the credit and also bring internship salaries back to a market reality.

The change states that up to $4 million in private investment is eligible for the tax credit (previously that number was $2 million). That means, for example, that investors in a company that raised $1 million before it qualified for the tax credit can now receive a tax credit on $3 million of additional investment.

The other change was a minor tweak: altering language around intern salaries. The old version set minimum salaries for nonexecutives at about $20 per hour (at least 175 percent of the federal poverty guideline for a family of four). Now, interns will be paid at a rate that comes to about $12.69 per hour, said LifeScience Alley’s Frank Jaskulke. That wage figure is more in line with what engineering interns would make, Jaskulke said.

Everyday we face various Stop signs. Not only in a car, but in our professional and personal lives as well. When someone gives us unfavorable feedback, or we lose support, or we lose funding, or something does not work out, we face a Stop sign. But many people take these encounters far too literally and see “stop-trying signs.”

When you approach a Stop sign on the road I assume you don’t whine, or you don’t ditch your car, or turn back around. A Stop “sign” is just that: a signpost – a reminder to pause, think, reflect, and assess before moving forward once again.

How long does it take the plastic jug in your fridge to break down? Green Bottle has produced an alternative option which can be recycled or added to a compost. Best of all, it only takes approximately 5 weeks to decompose, reports The Random Forest.

Martin Myerscough realized that he was sitting on an immense idea when his son brought a papier mache balloon from school. He stated that the price and the speed of production for making these paper bottles is comparable to plastic bottles.

Green Bottle was funded with £4.5 million from private investors and advertising agency Mother, and is attempting to raise £1 million more from new investors. Green Bottle will attempt to produce a billion bottles in three years.

CCST released the preliminary assessment of California's Science and Technology (S&T) Innovation 'Ecosystem' on January 20, offering a specific list of recommendations for legislators to enhance the state's ability to foster and benefit from innovation.

This document was produced in response to a request from a bi-partisan group of California Legislators, which asked CCST to assess the state's innovation 'ecosystem' and offer a specific list of recommendations for legislators to enhance the state's ability to foster and benefit from innovation.

Market leaders are generally valued at a multiple of their lower ranked competitors which makes understanding the competition a key part of due diligence (see here for more on exit strategy). Generally speaking, VCs are looking to invest in the market leader, or in a company that can become a market leader in their segment, as defined by revenue or occasionally internet traffic. Moreover, once discussions have started to get serious coming to the conclusion that any given company isn’t likely enough to prevail is probably the most common reason for deciding to decline to invest.

The key thrust of due diligence into competition is to establish a ranking of the players in the market. For most industries the ranking is based on revenues, but in consumer internet traffic is often a better proxy for value at the stages at which VCs invest. In the relatively common scenario where revenues in both the target investee and the competition are minimal we will look to a number of other factors including product quality, hype/buzz, amount of capital raised, and the quality and quantity of early partners and customers. These are all pretty subjective measures though and for early stage companies we tend to look more to the team and take a view on whether they will out-execute their competitors.

I don’t know why, but an awful lot of people seem to be very confused about what innovation means and how it really works. Innovators are not geeks with giant-sized brains that think plaids, stripes, and polka-dots all match.

And, more often than not, they don’t have a single patent or PhD to their name.

In a recent New Yorker article and NPR interview, Malcolm Gladwell talks about what he calls the Creation Myth: that an innovator may not be the guy who comes up with the idea but the guy who turns that idea into something people can use.

In the last month I’ve had the chance to make about 50 new friends. I’ve suddenly become very popular with investment bankers and have been on the receiving end of over 50 emails that look something like the following:

“We met once a long time ago when I was with firm X. I’m now at firm Y. We are the blah blah blah best at blah blah most successful blah blah tied into blah blah working with blah blah blah connected with blah blah blah. Congrats on all the success at Company W. We are very interested in talking to them about blah blah strategic blah blah – can you introduce us to high-profile-CEO.”

At first I felt compelled to respond as part of my “answer every email and try to at least be polite / responsive to everyone” approach to life. After a few days, I started getting annoyed when I realized I was simply viewed as a conduit to an introduction. When I saw a few similar emails to my co-investors in at least one company, I realized that there was a complete lack of sincerity in many of these emails – it was no different than a random salesman emailing me asking if I wanted to buy a random widget.

For a few, delegating comes easily, maybe too easy. For others who are perfectionists, letting go of even the most trivial task is almost impossible. If you are in this second category, you probably don’t like the references behind your back that you are a “control freak” or a “micro-manager.”

Business school professor John Hunt notes that only 30 percent of managers think they can delegate well, and of those, only one in three is considered a good delegator by his or her subordinates. This means only about one manager in ten really knows how to empower others.

It's common for entrepreneurs who have never met to come up with the exact same startup at the exact same time.

It happened to "what should I wear" apps Fashism and GoTryItOn. It also happened to group texting startups GroupMe and Fast Society.

"The first time (I met GroupMe cofounder Jared Hecht) was three days before GroupMe launched. Jared asked what I was doing and I showed it to him. I saw his face," recalls Fast Society cofounder Matt Rosenberg.

Jonathan Wegener went through the TechStars NYC program two months ago.

He wrote a blog post explaining key differences between the accelerator and its similar-sounding predecessor, Y Combinator.

"Most people don't understand that the programs are radically different accelerator models," Wegener says.

"In short, Y Combinator is an isolationist model...TechStars is a collaborative model. And what's right for one startup might not be right for another."

Paul Graham wrote a post analyzing the success of Y Combinator startups.

Y Combinator is a six-year-old incubator; 316 startups have gone through the program.

Graham recognizes that six years isn't enough time to properly measure the success of a startup. The companies are still too young; anything could happen.

Still, Graham gives it a whirl by looking at overall funding amounts and company value.