In this post, I want to attack a controversial topic—something that people are starting to believe as an empirical truth. Something that I don’t believe has to be true.

It seems like most people are starting to believe that it is inevitable that formal innovation efforts begin with high energy and wane over time. And that this is true even if you’ve built robust innovation processes and have strong support for innovation at all levels of an organization.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been exploring some of the more confusing terminology of VC term sheets. In my last post, I discussed “protective provisions,” which grant the investors the right to veto or block certain corporate actions. In today’s post I examine “drag-along” or “bring-along” provisions, which can be very tricky.

Drag-along provisions grant the investors the right to compel the founders and other stockholders to vote in favor of (or otherwise agree to) the sale, merger or other “deemed liquidation” of the company. Investors view such provisions as an important protection, particularly if they seek to exit their investment and sell the company for a price less than the amount of their liquidation preference.

As a serial entrepreneur, Julia Middleton posed this question to me and requested that I write this blog post. At first, it sounded like an easy assignment…but once you drill down into it, it certainly gets the grey matter working!

At the outset, I completely buy into the “serve to lead model” concept (incidentally the Sandhurst Military Academy motto) which for me encapsulates “leadership”; therefore it is the essence of ‘serving others’ that is at very core of my thinking. So who are the others that we should be serving?
1. Customers
2. Employees
3. Shareholders
4. The Community

Entrepreneurship is not a job for the Lone Ranger. Every startup requires building and maintaining effective relationships with people, including partners, team members, customers, and investors. That means giving and asking for feedback, and learning from it, especially negative feedback.

“Friction” is feedback mixed with emotion, making it all the more difficult to sort out the value. There should be no immediate assumption that one side is right, and the other is wrong. It may be an indication that one party isn’t giving the feedback well, or the other isn’t taking it well, or both. Both of these modes are wrong, and non-productive.

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens, educational technologist and researcher at Athabasca University, has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

It's become increasingly clear that what matters most in web acquisitions is what happens after the acquisition, not before.

The small news that personal profile service About.me struck a partnership with Moo.com to let users print business cards for free is actually a big deal from the perspective of how big companies do M&A, because About.me got acquired by AOL recently. It's actually quite rare for "acq-hires" like About.me to come out with cool, innovative features like that.

Since the old economy broke down in 2008, presidents, prime ministers and mayors have been promising their electorate "green" or "sustainable growth" -- and that is good news. In order to confront "the epidemic" of global warming and shape a safe economic future, we need to combine green and growth.

The bad news is that nobody knows what "green growth" is. The term has risen to stardom despite a very fragile fact base and almost no academic understanding of how, e.g., reducing emissions of CO2 can actually create jobs and additional activity in the economy. And that is a very dangerous situation. Without firm definitions and a body of evidence to support policies and investments, there is a great deal of risk that green growth will not happen. It will be too easy to argue against.

In my view successful and sustained economic growth is almost always based on a mix of ambitious, local entrepreneurs and investment by national or international firms.

In any effort to build a successful industry cluster, there are distinct roles for both larger, established firms and entrepreneurial start-ups.

In any jurisdiction, only a very small percentage of small start-up firms will every break out and become global leaders in their industry. Determining how a cadre of these ambitious entrepreneurs can be fostered in a specific area is the holy grail of economic development.

An interesting report published this week by the World Economic Forum sheds some light on the factors that drive successful entrepreneurship. The report studied evidence from 110 surveys in 22 different countries.

So often people ask me, “How does research get out in the world?” When that question comes around, to me it means that someone is not asking how best to write her next academic paper. Rather, generally someone seems to be interested in how innovations can see the light of day in industry. On campus, we have a number of resources that students and faculty can take advantage of: the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship which bridges the academic and business world at the Robert H. Smith School of Business; the Maryland Industrial Partnership which funds partnerships with industry; the Technology Advancement Program which offers resources for developing companies.

Even startup incubators have to reinvent themselves from time to time, as ably demonstrated by the new abi Innovation Incubator in Manchester, NH. It seeks to attract new talent. For inspiration, and wall decoration in its old mill space, the incubator's operators tapped a deep local well of wise words from some sage local innovators.

First established in 1997, the Manchester incubator was recently renovated and its business mission fine tuned to the innovation exigencies of today.

In a story published this week by the New Hampshire Business Review, incubabator vice president of strategic initiatives and entrepreneur-in-residence Jamie Coughlin said he hopes the reinvented incubator will become the "home for all things startup and innovation" in the state.

It’s happened to all of us: Something we do one way is suddenly made more effective by an innovation. It could be a technology like webinars that changes the way we learn and train, or a new approach like open floor-plan offices that help ideas spread in a flatter corporate structure. In the field of global development there are many transformative innovations underway, from mhealth to microfinance.

These and other innovations may hold the keys to truly transformative change. That’s why as a community that cares about making the world a better place, it’s important we incentivize and celebrate innovation as a means to generate faster and more effective change for people around the world.

It’s in that light that we at Devex are delighted to present the Top 40 Development Innovators. At the core of this initiative is a survey of aid workers and international development professionals designed to recognize the most innovative of the world’s leading international development organizations. Today, the survey is complete and the results are in!

What happens when you have the right stuff at the wrong time?

Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week, and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in June — and all the seats are spoken for.

“Morale is pretty low,” said Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”

A term I’m hearing more and more these days is “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to create and manage a venture to make social change.

On the surface, this sounds like entrepreneurs who want to build a non-profit organization. Yet the term seems to be more often associated with people whose work is targeted toward long-term socio-economic change. Think Margaret Sanger (birth control) or Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent), as opposed to the leaders of the Cancer Society or Goodwill Industries.

Whether the objective is to generate profits or social capital, the common element for all entrepreneurs is the recognition that there is a problem which needs solving, or there is an opportunity to improve the status quo.

As an ever greater number of foreign companies are investing in the Russian innovation and new technology sector, economic modernization was central on the agenda of the Russian Business Week Forum and the Global Innovation Partnership Forum which took place in Moscow this week.

Russia’s state-run companies, often criticized for being slow in Russia and abroad, lead in innovation spending. Nearly one third of non-budgetary financing for research and design projects is channeled to state-run corporations, such as Gazprom, Russian Railways and United Aircraft Building Corporation. Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said this as he addressed the Russian Business Week Forum in Moscow.

A new documentary film takes a look at the lives of the original rat pack of venture capitalists including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine.

George Doriot, the father of venture capitalism, liked to quip "Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete." Doriot died in 1987, but his ideas about venture funding can be seen to this day; Intel, Apple, and Cisco (to name a few) are some of the first companies to be funded by venture capitalists. The VCs that followed in his footsteps—including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine—have, through their work, trailblazed a path of American innovation.

Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year's TIME 100

YOU bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel and rented the car. But have you packed the right credit card?

As credit card companies vie for a favored position in customers’ wallets, they’re pitching new travel enticements, from waiving foreign transaction fees that can add up to 3 percent to your purchases abroad to picking up fees for checked baggage. Earlier this month, for example, American Express did away with the 2.7 percent foreign transaction fees on international purchases for Platinum Card holders, and added two new travel benefits — Priority Pass Select airport lounge access in more than 300 cities worldwide and free membership to Global Entry, which offers expedited security clearance for pre-approved travelers entering the United States.

Stephen Daze can't understand why teaching young people about starting and owning a business isn't a bigger priority in Ottawa's schools. We want our children to grow up to be self-sufficient, independent and ready for the challenges of tomorrow's economy. And studies show many kids are interested in owning their own business. So shouldn't they learn about entrepreneurship in the classroom?

"Other places get it," says Daze, OCRI's executive director for entrepreneurship and talent.

"They teach entrepreneurship as a life skill."

In Canada, he says, business isn't really part of the curriculum, apart from a bit of talk in economics class about the role of big industry. But the majority of jobs being created today are in small and medium-sized companies, not giant manufacturers. For some reason, we aren't introducing students to the intricacies of small business.

The exponentially increasing amount of digital information, along with new challenges in storing valuable data and massive datasets, are changing the architecture of today’s newest supercomputers as well as how researchers will use them to accelerate scientific discovery, said Michael Norman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

In a presentation during the 3rd Annual La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit this week, Norman said that the amount of digital data generated just by instruments such as DNA sequencers, cameras, telescopes, and MRIs is now doubling every 18 months.