Innovation advances your company towards the future - generating new products or services, boosting profits and increasing stakeholder value. To develop Innovation, the first step is to Inspire and Initiate your organization’s members. Innovation leaders need to provide the right support, both material and emotional, to stimulate new product development (NPD).

What are effective methods of inspiring innovation? For starters, keep the idea highway open to all. Good ideas can come from anywhere within your company and from any level. Communicate your innovation goals to the organization and encourage everyone’s feedback. Setting regular monthly in-person NPD meetings will ensure that the innovation process doesn’t fall off course. Hold your team members accountable for attending on time and actively participating at each meeting. Monitor progress, make new decisions and set target goals for the next meeting to steer the innovation process along.

Earlier this year, Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel announced a new fund that offers all Y Combinator startups $150,000 in convertible debt. Not only is The Start Fund a brilliant investment strategy, but the news was also a big win for Y Combinator and the startups housed and developed in the incubator. And it was only a matter of time before other incubators and funds caught on to the idea and emulated a similar strategy. Today, New World Ventures, one of the Midwest’s largest early stage funds, is partnering with Chicago incubator Excelerate Labs to offer their own version of the Start Fund.

Excelerate, which launched its incubator last year, will now offer its entrepreneurs $50,000 in convertible debt from New World Ventures, with no discount or cap. The money is available for Excelerate’s 2011 class of ten startups. Roughly one-third of the money is available for draw down during the Summer and the remainder is available after Demo Day in August.

If Nancy Sims had to pick one word to describe how researchers, students, and librarians feel about copyright, it would probably be "confused."

A lawyer and a librarian, Ms. Sims is copyright-program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. She's there to help people on campus and beyond—both users and owners of protected material—understand their rights.

"I'm not sure anybody has a very good knowledge" of copyright, she says.

For instance, in a recent informal survey she conducted at the university, only 30 percent or so of the faculty respondents knew the answers to basic questions such as how one gets a copyright and how long it lasts. (Librarians did somewhat better.)

Overnight success. It’s one of the biggest myths in the tech industry.

It’s a ongoing struggle to overcome this bias. I say “struggle to overcome” because I care about young people entering our industry with a set of realistic expectations about what “normal” is.

If you take a snapshot during an extraordinary surge in valuations, M&A activity, IPOs and thus wealth creation you’d echo John Doerr’s famous quote from 1999 that, “The Internet is the greatest legal creation of wealth in history.” That’s how it felt then and a bit how it feels in May 2011. If you were reading the headlines from only 2.5 years ago you’d remember RIP Good Times from Sequoia, which still strikes me as having been prudent advice in late 2008.

If you care about entrepreneurship and technology, it may be time to put Silicon Valley on the back burner. Recent trends suggest that New York is catching up on its west-coast rival, with a horde of start-ups blossoming and bringing a rich entrepreneurial culture along with them. California may have Google and Apple — but NYC has Tumblr, Foursquare, and a whole lot of creative energy.

The New York Forum is lucky to have Dennis Crowley, one of Foursquare’s co-founders, speaking at our conference later this month. Foursquare is a clever innovation that lets users “check in” on their smart phones as they traverse the city (or country, or world), showing friends the restaurants and services that they like. Launched as recently as March 2009, it has almost ten million users, who have collectively checked in more than 600 million times. Foursquare has raised $20 million to date, and rumors suggest a new funding round could value the company at $500 million, according to the Financial Times (Crowley declined to comment on those reports).

I've been on a mission to dramatically reduce the legal costs of a venture financing. Our firm is doing our part. On many of our recent transactions, we've gone without counsel and have signed documents without negotiation. That takes out the investor counsel costs. And we've been pushing company counsel to reduce their costs. But we are still seeing company counsel costs of $15k or more on venture financings even with our "no negotiation" approach. I'd like to see venture financing legal fees get to $5k or less. I don't know why raising a venture round can't be like signing a lease on an apartment with standardized docs and a one page rider for any changes.

As we dig into the costs on the company counsel side, there are areas we feel can be improved and areas that cannot. The entrepreneur still needs an experienced counsel to explain the deal to them. That time and money is valuable to everyone involved. I'm hopeful that Brad and Jason's upcoming book will help reduce the time and money spent educating entrpreneurs on venture financings, but realisitcally the company counsel is still going to have to do some hand holding.

As GOOD reported this April, Devex asked thousands of global development and aid professionals, “Which of the leading organizations in development do you believe are the most innovative in the sector?” Based on the results of this poll, Devex—a hub for the international development and aid community—unveiled the Top 40 Development Innovators, a listing of the most innovative of the largest organizations in global development. But what about the scrappy startups doing great?

Here we bring you five groups that were too small for consideration in the Top 40 list, but are still making a big impact. These social enterprises and nonprofits, in fact, are emblematic of innovation itself.

Sproxil: using text messages to make medicine safer

Counterfeit prescription drugs can be a devastating and pervasive problem in the developing world. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent to 30 percent of drugs in the developing world are counterfeit, compared to one percent or less in industrialized nations.

If you could get people who love the values of design thinking — such as the push to turn ideas into prototypes that customers can use — to apply its principles to new business building, you’d produce more winning entrepreneurs.

That’s the premise of the Stanford Design School’s Launchpad program — a 10 week course consisting of 20 assignments to which students from all over Stanford can apply. On May 25, I interviewed Launchpad’s co-founders Michael Dearing — a former eBay (EBAY) executive who earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School — and Perry Klebahn, formerly chief operating officer at Patagonia with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford who invented a market-leading snowshoe.

Richard Barker, who last week left the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry after six years at the helm, told The Daily Telegraph that the industry was "in the midst of a profound change".

"We're moving progressively from a model where most of the large companies did most of their research and development internally to an innovation ecosystem model," he said. "So it becomes increasingly important for the large companies to work closely with universities, research charities and small and medium-sized enterprises in the discovery adventure."

That partnership approach was illustrated yesterday as AstraZeneca announced a four-year research collaboration with Heptares Therapeutics, a biotech business.

When your friend shows up with the latest "must-have" product, it's more likely you'll buy the same product. By exploiting this phenomenon—and harnessing the information available through online social networks—marketers hope to better target products to would-be buyers.

In work presented this week at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks, researchers from the Norwegian telecom provider Telenor showed how important friend connections can be to the adoption of a product. Watching how adoption spreads within social networks could help predict whether a new product will become a viral smash, they say. The researchers looked at patterns of adoption for Apple's iPhone and iPad, as well as for the far-less-successful Doro mobile handset.

Two commonly discussed sources of entrepreneurial finance are venture capital firms, which are limited partnerships that invest in private companies, and business angels, who are individuals who invest their own money in similar businesses.

Contrary to the popular perception that the angel capital market is many times larger than the venture capital market, recent data shows that the two are approximately the same size.

The received wisdom is relatively simple – if the economy is doing well, investors put their money together and buy companies. If it's not, they avoid risks. At the moment things are going well, and so even Germany's relatively modest venture capital market is in good shape.

The German Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVK) recently reported that investors plowed 4.5 billion euros ($6.4 billion) into businesses in off-exchange transactions in 2010 – that's 59 percent more than the year before.

As Germany began to overhaul its energy policy, investors discovered green technologies, and negotiations are now under way with the government to make it easier to invest in that particular burgeoning industry. So is venture capital the new fashion in Germany?

Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (let's all pause a moment to reflect on kismet of that surname/job combination) made this video about the wide world of creatures that we call "jellyfish." It's a great summary of the extreme diversity encompassed under one, catch-all name, and does a really nice job of explaining relationships between different species and families of jelly-like creatures.

The Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University has established the Biotechnology Commercialization Fund to accelerate the development of promising biomedical technologies emerging from Stony Brook University, according to a university announcement.

Created with support from the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation (NYSTAR) and the Office of the Vice President for Research at Stony Brook University, the Fund will immediately help develop six technologies in partnership with researchers university-wide.

These projects, selected for support by an independent panel of industry and academic advisors, encompass a wide range of technologies with total funding reaching $456,000 for 2011. Overall, the projects center on the discovery of new diagnostics and therapeutics in areas such as musculoskeletal diseases, metabolic and cognitive disorders, cancer, burn injuries, inflammatory diseases, and other medical conditions, according to the announcement.

For some startups traction with users comes first, and a solid business model follows. But entrepreneur Joe Stump says the biggest mistake made by investors is telling entrepreneurs that they can wait to “turn on” revenue.

“Revenue isn’t a light switch. You have to practice making money,” Stump says. “I encourage every startup I advise and invest in to start experimenting with revenue on day one. I don’t care what they charge for, but charge for something on day one.”

Stump is the former lead architect at Digg, and the founder of SimpleGeo. He also advises and invests in startup including Kiip and StyleSeat. Though he grew up around entrepreneurs, he didn’t always know that he wanted to start his own business. “My mom and dad both owned their own businesses growing up so it never really occurred to me, but rather was ingrained from an early age I suppose,” he says. “I was always working on ideas as a kid: mowing neighbors lawns, writing and selling programs for the TI-85 in math class, etc.” After college Stump went into consulting. But although he’d already been to Silicon Valley for the first dotcom boom and was always interested in startup culture, it wasn’t until he moved to Seattle that he started thinking he should give it a try one day.

Over the last couple of years, Kickstarter’s growth as a source of disruption in the creative industries has been pretty hard to ignore. Om extolled the site’s virtues just the other day, and the concept that anybody who has an idea can try and raise money to get it finished has become a big hit — allowing them to raise millions of dollars for gadgets, fashion and even films. It’s so successful, in fact, that investors are now jumping in to back projects that don’t reach their target. Kickstarter for books?

Given Kickstarter’s success, it’s no surprise to see new services trying to piggyback on the idea of crowdfunding. So perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised to say hello to Unbound — a British startup that is trying to apply the same model specifically to books.

The current incarnation of SBIR has more lives than a cat. Twelve and counting. (Details HERE) This SBIR CR life segment will be four months long. Then what? Will small business innovation be sold out to the bigger better funded entities?

If Nydia has her way it will. She's so dedicated to that sell out that she even campaigned to kill SBIR rather than continue it as is. Yes, the Ranking Member of the House Small Business Committee sent out a Dear Colleague letter to her fellow Democrats in the House urging a NO vote on S.1082. She wanted SBIR to die, rather than continue "as is" to allow open debate.

A couple of years ago, seed venture capital investor Jeff Clavier would only invest in start-up firms based near his Silicon Valley offices. Like a lot of Valley denizens, he thought there weren’t enough talented software engineers outside the San Francisco Bay Area capable of building a viable company. dailystartup_D_20090806101628.jpgThe Manhattan offices of Foursquare, a Silicon Alley start-up.

But in the last year or so, Clavier has been making quarterly schleps to New York to hunt for deals. The founder of a small but influential venture firm called SoftTechVC, Clavier has so far invested in six New York-based start-ups, including URL shortener bitly, online marketing tool FanBridge, and Web video maker Animoto Productions.

“New York is completely credible now,” said Clavier. “Ever since the financial implosion you had labor available.”

The word cluster can spur a wide array of ideas and images – not all appropriate for public consumption. Nevertheless, these ideas all have to do with bringing things together, some loose amalgamation of related objects. Effective clustering speaks to bringing them together in a thoughtful and interconnected way so that it all seems to work. In other words, all the individual components benefit so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Try applying that cluster concept to economic development. Imagine a group of companies involved in a particular segment of an industry. Add to that entities such as universities and research organizations as well as government, funding and economic development bodies.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, less than 3% of all U.S. firms export. And less than 1% export to more than one country! Yet more than 50% of all world expenditures on security-related technologies take place outside of the U.S. Why don’t more U.S. firms export? Because it can be very expensive for startups and small to medium-sized companies. Salary.com lists average pay & benefits for a Washington D.C. International Sales Director at approx. $265K/year. Add international travel expenses and you’re easily topping $300K. However, there is now reportedly a way to beat expensive fees associated with hiring your own International Sales staff. Several former Pentagon Foreign Military Sales senior officials recently established a Wash D.C.-area firm called International Technology Sales LLC (ITS). ITS mission is to change the “price of admission” to global markets by outsourcing their international sales and export licensing skills at a fraction of the going rate to selected Award Winning defense, aerospace, intelligence and security-related companies. See www.int-tech-sales.com. ITS reports that it just completed drafting the 2011 Edition of “A Basic Guide to International Sales” under contract to the Raytheon Company. For more information and to obtain a free copy of this guide, send an email to Mike Patterson: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..