Ask Americans if their school education made them interested in becoming an entrepreneur, and 51% will say it did, a new poll from Gallup shows. But ask around among Europeans, and only a quarter say that it did.

So what is it about U.S. education that might encourage budding business leaders?

Partly, U.S. society overall values entrepreneurship highly, typically more than European societies, people seem to generally agree.

Take Andreas Goeldi, a Swiss-born Internet entrepreneur based in Cambridge, Mass., who has written about the issue on his blog. He describes what he sees as a cult of entrepreneurship in the U.S., compared to a higher degree of risk aversion in Europe. Goeldi argues that Europeans attach so much shame to failing at starting a business they tend not to.

Several years before pronouncing that the " web is dead," Wired's Chris Anderson also predicted that "free is the future of business." (Don't let your skepticism about one assertion cloud your judgment of the other.)

Certainly "free" - and by extension "freemium" - has become one of the most popular pricing models for web companies. Evernote, Pandora, and as of yesterday SlideShare are among the companies that offer customers some version of their product for free, with additional features and services for a premium fee.

But just because a freemium model works for one company doesn't mean that it's right for all. And in a recent blog post, the Foundry Group's Seth Levine offers some advice on pricing, including as the title of his blog post suggests, "why you may not be charging enough for your product."

1. Beware of too many pricing tiers. Err on the side of simplicity, suggests Levine, as more tiers mean more complication and more confusion.

In a recent blog post proposing a definition of innovation, I noted that innovation means different things to different people. It ultimately is what you think it is. What’s a useful definition for you won’t work for others, and vice versa.

I asked for people’s definitions on several LinkedIn groups, and the community came forward with many interesting and valuable perspectives. For me, the value of this was two-fold:

1. Challenge my own perceptions of innovation and expand my horizons
2. Understand the different ways people talk about innovation

I went through the many great comments, and pulled out 25 definitions of innovation. I put together a simple map according to their similar characteristics:

We’ve searched the web (and James’ back catalogue) to bring you 10 of the greatest gadgets that have somehow made their way from the silver screen to the real world.

Anyone remember the story about the alleged undercover agent and the poisoned umbrella…

The largest primarily French-speaking city outside of Paris, Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and the largest in the province of Quebec. Despite some claims to the contrary, Montreal still maintains it is the cultural capital of Canada, and the city is often rated as one of the world's most livable.

Montreal is an important center for Canadian finance, telecommunications, aerospace, and software industries. Some reports state that as many as a third of the region's workers are part of the "creative class" - scientists, technology workers, entertainers, artists and designers. Montreal and Quebec have the highest level of tax credit support for developer salaries: For every $1 spent on developers, companies can get up to 65 cents back in cash from the government. And with six universities and twelve junior colleges within a 5 mile radius, Montreal has the highest concentration of post-secondary students of all the major cities in North America.

Having started my business career at the age of 16, I had a great handicap, the handicap of not knowing many of the basic fundamentals of business and finance. What I was doing during my early days could not really be classified as business. I would call it a way I had adapted, to keep paying for my pocket money, a source of income I had created to fund my hobbies and have fun with my friends.

In 1999, I was approached by a company which I thought was into plumbing and water supply. They gave me a proposition which according to them was irresistible. The company was Price Waterhouse Coopers and their plan was to help me raise venture capital for my big ideas. Having not knowing what venture capital was, I rejected their proposal to get me ‘a loan’. I only accepted to work with them when they told me venture capital was like a loan I never had to return. And they would help me make a business plan. Basically a spreadsheet which would help investors see why my business is a great place to invest in and get amazing returns.

Cities, states, and regions often battle to get the best and the brightest young people to live and work in their locales. Part of this competition involves attracting talented individuals, but another part involves keeping them in the place where they were born and raised, fighting what many observers call “brain drain.”

Most of the discussion of brain drain focuses on people who work for others. That’s understandable given how most people are employed.

But a recent working paper by Chad Moutray of the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, examines the issue of brain drain among the self-employed. Looking at what happened to the 1993 cohort of college graduates over their first ten years post graduation, he draws conclusions about the problem of entrepreneurial brain drain.

When a customer commits to spend money with your company, that is a “booking”. A booking is often tied to some form of contract between your company and the customer. The contract can be simple or very complicated. And some bookings do happen without a contract. Examples of these contracts with customers include an insertion order in advertising, a license agreement in enterprise software, and a subscription agreement in “software as a service” businesses.

Revenue happens when the service is actually provided. In the case of advertising, the revenue is recognized as the ads are run. In the case of licensed software, the revenue is recognized when the software is delivered and accepted by the customer. In the case of a subscription agreement, the revenue is most often recognized ratably over the life of the subscription.

Mark James, a visiting lecturer at the University of West Florida, declared his summer course in English literature technology-free—he skipped the PowerPoint slides and YouTube videos he usually shows, and he asked students to silence their cellphones and close their laptops.

Banishing the gear improved the course, he argues. "The students seemed more involved in the discussion than when I allowed them to go online," he told me as the summer term wound down. "They were more attentive, and we were able to go into a little more depth."

Mr. James is not antitechnology—he said he had some success in his composition courses using an online system that's sold with textbooks. But he is frustrated by professors and administrators who believe that injecting the latest technology into the classroom naturally improves teaching. That belief was highlighted in my College 2.0 column last month, in which some professors likened colleagues who don't teach with tech to doctors who ignore improvements in medicine.

Each year, Canada funds more than $12 billion in research and development to create the ideas that will become the basis for next-generation products.

Sadly for the future of Canadian innovation, the Canadian venture capital industry – whose crucial mission is to finance emerging companies’ commercialization of these ideas into products, jobs and exports – is in serious trouble.

In 2009, both the funding of Canadian venture capital firms and their investing in Canadian technology companies were at their lowest levels since the mid-90s. Because emerging Canadian technology companies cannot obtain needed venture funding, much of Canada’s huge R&D outlays are going to waste.

A lovely antidote to Monday morning stress! The only part about this that's a bummer? These wonderful, wild critters are stuck in a zoo.

Apple's iPad is selling about as fast as they can make the things, and it's not even completed its international roll-out yet. It stands to reason, then, that Apple's probably upped its efforts to develop the iPad's successor (given how long it takes for a design to go from concept to reality). This iPad 2 we would notionally have expected to be announced in January 2011, a year after the first device hit, and we still expect this to be the case. But now there's an increasingly real-sounding rumor that Apple has another 7-inch version on the way, and it may even arrive this year. Strangely enough, it's a rumor that makes perfect sense.

Seven-inch iPad rumors have popped up before, but these latest ones come directly from China's Economic Daily News newspaper, which pretty much nailed the original iPad's format and timing well before its launch and at a time when other media outlets were pondering if it was going to be Apple's netbook. Hence when the paper reports that some Taiwanese firms have won the contract to supply the new iPad, it's worth paying attention.

Chimmei Innolux has apparently been selected to supply the 7-inch IPS LCD units, though we don't know if these screens will have the iPhone 4's "retina display resolution" or the same pixel count as the existing iPad--the first case would be technologically trickier, and the second would allow for simpler programming issues. Touchscreen tech would be from Cando, and Compal Electronics (which already is the premier place to assemble laptops) will be putting the thing together. Interestingly Foxconn, which is one of Apple's biggest supplier/assemblers at the moment isn't mentioned here: Has Apple shied away from the firm, in the wake of all its bad PR?

Burned by a previous experience running a venture-capital-backed technology start-up, Elizabeth Charnock vowed to do things differently the next time. Despite challenges, Ms. Charnock, 43, is now making good on her promise as chief executive and founder of Cataphora, a bootstrapped, 60-employee firm that makes software used to track and analyze computer users’ online activity and communications.

So far, the company, founded in 2002 and based in Redwood Shores, Calif., has focused on gathering evidence for lawsuits and internal corporate investigations — such as unearthing incriminating patterns in an employee’s e-mailed communications. Now, Cataphora is entering the consumer market with Digital Mirror, software that allows its users to manage and optimize their online identities. Ms. Charnock, author of “E-Habits: What You Must do to Optimize Your Professional Digital Presence,” recently explained that diversifying on a shoestring is just the latest test for her company. A condensed version of the conversation follows.

New York City would seem a logical place to find a corporate leader, such as Richard A. Gross, on the front lines of economic innovation.

Yet Mr. Gross doesn't broker deals on Wall Street. Instead, he's a chemistry professor who can usually be found about two miles away, experimenting with plastics on the Brooklyn campus of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He's an expert in using microbes to produce synthetic materials in ways that avoid much of the waste and pollution associated with traditional chemical processes.

Now, encouraged by his university, he's entered the corporate world. Mr. Gross has formed a company that might soon be using his production methods to make biodegradable pesticides and grocery bags.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [ Images ] on Tuesday approved the setting up of a National Innovation Council to prepare a road map for the 'Decade of Innovation 2011-2020'.

Sam Pitroda [ Images ], adviser to the prime minister on public information infrastructure and innovations, will head the National Innovation Council.

The Council has been given the mandate to evolve an Indian model of innovation focussing on inclusive growth and creating an appropriate eco­system conducive to fostering inclusive innovation.

I read a few articles about how Christian Owens became a millionaire by the time he was 16. So I invited him to Mixergy to talk about how he did it.

Short story: he created a quick and dirty web page to collect email addresses of people who wanted to hear about discounted Mac software. Then he sent email to software developers and found some who let him bundle their software and sell it at a discount. Then he sold thousands of dollars of software. He keeps repeating that process and plowing back a share of his profits into marketing to grow his customer base and sales.

Want to hear the step-by-step details of how he did it? Listen to the full program.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

Start listening for guidance on innovation and you tend to hear a lot about Apple, Google, and other high-tech pioneers in Silicon Valley, Boston, or Seattle. You rarely hear about hospitals, especially those that operate closer to farm fields than oceans.

Yet in the extensive research my team has done to uncover the mystery of successful innovation, we've found few track records to rival that of The Mayo Clinic, in decidedly non-urban Rochester, Minnesota. The World Database of Innovation we are compiling, as a collaborative effort between my firm, Generate Companies, and several universities, represents over 20,000 hours of work to date. As well as over 200 in-depth case studies, it compiles the ideas of 4,500 or so innovation experts and consultancies.

An Irish energy expert's new book says Ireland has the potential to turn its energy the color of its green shamrocks and put lots of gold into the pockets of the Irish who lead the transition.

"Clean energy can help rescue Ireland from its current economic and energy challenges,"said John Travers, CEO of Alternative Energy Resources. In his new book, Green & Gold: Ireland: A Clean Energy World Leader?, Travers makes the case for the benefits that will come with transitioning the Emerald Isle to a new energy economy.

Santa Clara, Calif. -- What is the secret sauce behind Miasole, the maker of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar modules?

The heart of the company's technology is a large, hexagonal manufacturing machine festooned with valves and rollers that looks like a cross between a particle accelerator and a prop from a science fiction movie. A miles-long metal foil sheet goes in one end, gets turned 90 degrees so that it's vertical, and, in succession, is coated with molybendium, cadmium, indium, selenide and other materials.

It is like watching a multimillion-dollar spin-art machine.

"It produces a module every 90 seconds," said Joseph Laia, Miasole's CEO, during a tour earlier in June.

Sharks have remained relatively unchanged by evolution for 400 million years, but shark science has evolved significantly in just the past few decades. In 1987 when Discovery Channel's now-famous Shark Week series debuted, researchers had few means of studying the animals beyond underwater cages and crude acoustic tracking devices. Twenty-three years later, marine biologists studying elasmobranch (the subclass of cartilaginous fishes that include sharks, skates and rays) animals employ satellite tracking, genetic analysis and high-definition cameras to broaden their knowledge of shark biology and behavior.

This research is revealing, among other things, that even sharks like the great white are intelligent, curious animals with cognitive abilities worth studying. "Many sharks have good learning capacity, which is one way we measure intelligence," says Samuel Gruber, a marine biologist at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS), who discovered in 1975 that lemon sharks could learn a classical conditioning task 80 times faster than a cat or rabbit. "I was shocked to find that they could learn so rapidly," he says. Gruber's National Science Foundation–supported Bimini Biological Field Station in the Bahamas, known as Sharklab, is now planning to start a doctoral research program on shark cognition.