A new way of making battery electrodes based on nanostructured metal foams has been used to make a lithium-ion battery that can be 90 percent charged in two minutes. If the method can be commercialized, it could lead to laptops that charge in a few minutes or cell phones that charge in 30 seconds.

The methods used to make the ultrafast-charging electrodes are compatible with a range of battery chemistries; the researchers have also used them to make nickel-metal-hydride batteries, the kind commonly used in hybrid and electric vehicles.

I have been an innovation consultant since 1986 and have worked with hundreds of organizations in more than 15 industries. The products and services of my clients have all been different -- as have their acronyms, mission statements, and cafeteria food.

But they all have one thing in common -- and that is a pronounced tendency to undervalue the power of appreciation.

Sure, they give out gold watches and Employee of the Month awards, but the simple act of acknowledging and appreciating each other on a daily basis is in woeful short supply.

Over the past several years, there’s been a huge increase in accelerator programs that fund, mentor, and incubate young technology companies. The two most highly visible and popular programs – TechStars and YCominbator — have acceptance rates that rival Ivy League colleges. TechStars, for instance, has programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York and receives approximately 2000 applications for 40 spots. But if your company is lucky enough to be accepted, it’s a bit like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

For an elite group of young people in New York, this will be the summer to hang out with famous people, hone their craft and get a shot at stardom.

No, they're not actors — they are the next generation of New York tech entrepreneurs who soon will be treated to an unprecedented opportunity to fast-track their fledgling companies.

Calling all future Foursquares. By June, the city will be the home of at least five summer programs that provide funds, mentoring, free office space and valuable contacts to promising tech startups.

Last year there was just one.

"For an entrepreneur starting a company in New York, it has never been easier to get going," said David Tisch, managing director of TechStars NYC, one of the launching pads open for business here this summer.

Perhaps the most striking feature of “crowdfunding” is the broad geographic dispersion of in-vestors. This contrasts with existing theories that predict entrepreneurs and investors will beco-located due to distance-sensitive costs. We examine a crowdfunding setting that connectsartist-entrepreneurs with investors over the internet for financing early stage musical projects.The average distance between artists and investors is about 3,000 miles, suggesting a reduced rolefor spatial proximity. Still, distance does play a role. Within a single round of financing, localinvestors invest relatively early, and they appear less responsive to decisions by other investors.We show this geography effect is driven by investors who likely have a personal connection withthe artist-entrepreneur (“family and friends”). Although the online platform seems to elimi-nate most distance-related economic frictions such as monitoring progress, providing input, andgathering information, it does not eliminate social-related frictions

To build innovation muscle, companies must include innovation in their competency models. A competency is a persistent pattern of behavior resulting from a cluster of knowledge, skills, abilities, and motivations. Competency models formalize that behavior and make it persistent. They prescribe the ideal patterns needed for exceptional performance. They help diagnose and evaluate employee performance. It takes a lot of work to develop one, but it's worth it.

Here is a nice example of an innovation competency modeled developed at Central Michigan University through a collaboration of authors. It could be customized to address the specific needs of a company or industry.

U.S. venture capital firms raised more money last quarter than in any period since 2001. The total raised for new funds was $7.7 billion, according to Dow Jones LP Source. The capital going into VC funds was up 97 percent from a year ago, when they raised $3.9 billion. (Venture capital funds benefited from an overall influx of money into U.S. private equity funds overall, which attracted a total of $31.6 billion in the quarter, up from $13.5 billion a year ago).

Institutional investors and limited partners are putting more money into ventre capital, but are concentrating their bets in fewer, higher-quality funds. The money from limited partners, however, was not spread willy-nilly. Only 25 funds tracked by Dow Jones were able to raise money, the smallest number since 2003.

The students, alumni, and professors at MIT are a brainy -- and busy -- bunch. To mark the university's 150th year, we tracked a handful of smarty-pants with ties to the school.

Forgetting someone's name in a social situation is embarrassing, but in a business setting it can be disastrous. In this week's episode of Work Smart, I talk with memory expert Bob Gray about how to remember the names of the people you meet.

Here's a quick recap -- watch the video for a more thorough explanation.

1. Hear the name (really listen for it).

2. Spell the name.

3. Comment on the name.

Until last week, I hadn’t recognized mentor-based internships as a concept of “social entrepreneurship”. When asked about the subject during a live interview with @MaggieMistal on Sirius/XM’s Martha Stewart channel, I said: “I’m not sure that ‘paying it forward’ should be the primary impetus for bringing on an intern.”

Since that interview I had the pleasure of sitting down with friends and business partners. Many felt that statement about paying it forward was wrong. Apparently, dead wrong.

In looking back, even before the interview, not a conversation went by without the mention of social entrepreneurship; “pay it forward” and “giving something back” were clearly more than just catch phrases. And from perhaps the least experienced (an amazing @SyreetaGates) to seasoned professionals and true experts (@AllisonCheston is brilliant) the thought of mentor-based internships serving as a form of social entrepreneurship was downright prevalent.

A reader asks: We’ve gotten commitments for a seed investment of $600,000, and the lead investor advised us that to save time and money on legal fees we should use the Series Seed documents, which he said are just fill-in-the-blank forms, with no negotiations. Have you heard of the Series Seed documents and, if so, do you think this makes sense?

Answer: The so-called “Series Seed” documents are a stripped-down set of preferred stock financing documents, which were designed for seed investments by Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang (with an assist from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz). The goal, as Ted notes on the site, was to “(create) a simple set of documents for early stage investment.”

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.

I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.

Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.

Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.

There’s actually quite a few options for wannabe-founders looking to live vicariously through this current startup explosion:

A) You can read TechCrunch and hash out whether or not a product will succeed in the comments section.

B) You can hang out on Hacker News, lauding people who have dropped out of school to build a startup and voting up articles that basically amount to entrepreneurship porn.

C) You can engage in the intense debates surrounding questions about startups on Quora, despite having no startup experience yourself.

Five years ago, in a small town on the east coast of Canada, the team behind Radian6 realized that businesses, big and small, would need a better way to engage with customers on the web. They built a platform to facilitate customer relationships by listening first. Now you can monitor a brand online to understand whether a product is getting compliments or complaints, attracting fans or foes. Radian6 quickly grew to dominate this space, with clients including Dell, Microsoft, and General Electric. But there was no better sign that listening is serious business than when Salesforce just announced it was buying the New Brunswick company for a whopping $316 million.

Whether you use Radian6 or simply manage your digital presence through search, there are a few key strategies to make the most of brand monitoring. If each of these are followed well, you will quickly find your most loyal ambassadors and give your reputation a boost.

(Bridgewater, NJ - April 7, 2011) Creating the jobs of tomorrow, growing New Jersey’s economy and making the state more competitive for investment requires a collaborative partnership between the state’s business and higher education communities. That’s the mission of Innovation NJ, a coalition of industry, academia and government, that today unveiled its new website, www.innovationnj.org, the latest tool to foster greater discussion and exchange of ideas among New Jersey’s innovation community.

The site is an information clearinghouse featuring a calendar of innovation-related events, articles on innovation, member news and government resources. Most importantly, it’s a place where New Jersey’s businesses and colleges and universities can share ideas and discuss ways to team-up to undertake collaborative research that will lead to the development of new, innovative processes and products.

Led by Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher, more than 300 scholars, experts, and stakeholders representing a variety of fields from across the state gathered in Albany today to kick off the final phase of implementation of the State University of New York’s strategic plan. One of the six Big Ideas in the plan – Energy-Smart New York – aims to position the 64-campus system as a key developer of innovative green technologies and create a newly trained New York-based workforce for the emerging clean energy economy.

“SUNY touches every community in New York, and we are one of this state’s greatest assets. Our strategic plan – The Power of SUNY – and all of the work being done today are about harnessing the unlimited potential of our 64 campuses and making them work for New York,” said Chancellor Zimpher. “As part of our strategic plan, SUNY has embraced our natural role as a source for research and innovation, and we are leveraging it to break new ground in clean energy technology and prepare the workforce that will lead New York’s new economy. We are turning words and ideas into action and jobs – this is the very essence of The Power of SUNY.”

Entrepreneurship is not about startups! That may sound surprising but right at the beginning we need to make something very clear. Entrepreneurship is about tackling unknown problems or unknown solutions. In contrast, more traditional management deals with known problems and known solutions. While startups often wrestle with unknown problems or solutions, startups aren’t the only types of firms that face unknown problems. Large firms, old firms, governments, not-for-profits, virtually every organization faces the unknown from time to time. When they do, they are facing entrepreneurial problems. Therefore, entrepreneurship is not about the type of firm, it is about the type of problem.

One of the original intentions of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was to make federally-funded U.S. university research more readily available to small businesses. It worked. Today, three decades later, universities do a brisk business licensing patents to small, technology-based businesses. Each year, roughly half of the patent licenses that universities sign are to small technology-based firms managed by regional entrepreneurs. These small firms employ fewer than 500 employees, offer their regions high quality technology jobs, and transform early-stage university research into innovative products or services.

What many people don’t realize is that these small businesses are not the Googles or the “get rich quick” whiz kid startup that comes up with a radically new product, successfully navigates the shark-infested waters of venture capital, and then goes public in a blaze of fiscal glory a few years after signing its first patent license. No, most of the small businesses that come looking for university patents have been around for a few years, live nearby, will never end up on the NASDAQ or hone their elevator pitch at cocktail parties. These small businesses don’t have equity to give to the university since there’s no “exit strategy.” These small business entrepreneurs don’t dream of big riches. They dream of being their own boss, making payroll, feeding their families, and spending their days doing something that matters.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? In many ways, the question posed in this common expression can also be applied to science and innovation: If an R&D center develops a new technology or discovers a scientific finding in a lab, is it really progress if no one knows about it and is able to bring it to market?

Ensuring that all “trees” of innovation are heard beyond the R&D “forest” is the underlying principle behind technology transfer and knowledge sharing. And now more than ever are these fundamentals critical for supporting growth in emerging innovation economies like Russia’s, where a combination of historical, cultural, linguistic, bureaucratic and geographical factors makes the R&D landscape sometimes difficult to tap for domestic and foreign investors alike.

For the entrepreneurs looking to go global, international press and press in foreign local markets can help give your business the boost it needs to capture market share. As part of your international expansion plan, you’ll want to try to capture some media attention to generate some awareness and legitimacy in the new markets you are targeting.

The media has always been a useful avenue for exposure so you would be wise to find ways to leverage their influence to help you in targeting your new international markets.