America is supposed to be a place where independent inventors and small firms play a key role in the creation of new technology. As New York University economics Professor Will Baumol wrote in the 2008 Small Business Economy, “small enterprises have made … a critical contribution to … innovation accomplishments. Without breakthroughs such as the airplane, FM radio, and the personal computer, all introduced by small firms, life in the industrialized economies would be very different today.

Moreover, small firms are believed to be particularly productive inventors. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), small companies “produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.” And small firm patents tend to be more technically important. As the SBA explains, “these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

Thus, to such extent I thought you would enjoy watching through the following YouTube video clip that I bumped into earlier on (In Twitter, of course!) and which I think would make plenty of people think twice about how they can not only get things started, but move along at a lovely pace, too, with the rest of the employee workforce!

I am sure you will notice the subtle touch of humour behind LearningTOC‘s "Overcoming Resistance to Change – Isn’t It Obvious?"; it’s a short video clip of a bit over 6 minutes that clearly explains how Theory of Constraints can help in clearing up the mud that provoking those kinds of changes within the workplace can well invoke. I’m not going to talk much more about it; I think it will be rather self-explanatory as you move along playing the video itself. So, without much further ado, here you have got the embedded version of the clip, so you can start playing it right away…

How has Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) been able to maintain its innovative edge? I recently asked Inder Sidhu, senior vice president of strategy and planning for worldwide operations at Cisco (NYSE: CSCO), and the author of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth.

Mac Greer: You began the book by talking innovation. I was expecting to read about Apple or Google and instead you cited the example of Procter & Gamble and laundry detergent. So my question is, what does “laundry detergent compaction” have to do with innovation and why is it such a big deal for retailers like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) and Target (NYSE: TGT)?

Inder Sidhu: Laundry detergent compaction basically is a technique for really just compressing more and more cleaning powder into even smaller and smaller sizes or smaller and smaller concentrations, higher concentration, smaller size, right?  Basically in early 2000, what P&G did is they perfected a technique that could compact two or three times as much cleaning power into a liquid concentration.

“Even if we don’t have a lot of money we can still be innovative,” says Open Innovation guru Henry Chesbrough. The global economic crisis is a good opportunity for companies to open up, collaborate, and find new partnerships. The key, he says, is to create new business models that can add value to already existing technologies.

“The nice thing about Open Innovation in business models is that it isn’t just about having more money, it is about thinking differently about what you can offer to your customers and finding new ways to differentiate your business and add value to it,” said Chesbrough, Director of the Open Innovation Centre at Berkeley University in California, in an interview with Science|Business on a recent visit to Barcelona, where he is Visiting Professor at the business school, ESADE.

With world economies struggling, Chesbrough urges governments to support innovation. “The only way that countries with high debts are going to be able to deal with it is to figure out new ways to get economies to grow again, and to get this growth we need innovation,” he says. “It’s too punishing to citizens to simply cut spending and services, if we don’t get economies to grow again, it will be politically very difficult. Innovation is not only for companies, but for society.”

Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn has announced the EU’s biggest annual research budget ever for 2011 - at €6.4 billion - with a pledge to make the money easier to access.

But it was a case of giving with one hand and taking away with the other, as the Commission proposed that some Framework Programme 7 funds be diverted to plug the gap in the budget of the ITER nuclear fusion project. 

“I am determined that the package we are announcing today will not only be the biggest ever, but also the most effective and the best administered,” Geoghegan-Quinn promised.

Mergers of small biotechs, such as the recent union of Evotec AG and DeveloGen AG, could grow more common as public companies look for scale and as aging venture-backed players look for the exit, some observers say.

Publicly held Evotec, which agreed last week to buy venture-backed DeveloGen for EUR14 million ($18 million) in stock plus performance payments, bulks up with metabolic-disease technology and other assets, while DeveloGen backers, such as TVM Capital and Nomura Phase4 Ventures, are on track to profit from a bet they placed last decade.

“I do expect that there will be more of this, especially in times when it is difficult to take companies public,” said d Helmut Schühsler, DeveloGen’s chairman and managing partner of TVM Capital. “We looked around and said, ‘We don’t want to be in the company for another 10 years.’”

Investing in China is nothing new for U.S. venture capital firms, but recently these have firms begun raising local-currency funds to make it easier to invest in homegrown start-ups.

Investors like DCM are turning to Chinese yuan funds to invest in industries that might otherwise be off limits, like media and financial services companies, and to cut through some of the red tape that investing via foreign-currency denominated funds in China entails.

Imagine Walt Disney at the age of nineteen. His uncle asks him what he plans to do with his life, and he pulls out a drawing of a mouse and says, "I think this has a lot of potential."

Or Springsteen. In a concert he once told the story of how he and his dad used to go at it — how his father hated his guitar. Late one night, Springsteen came home to find his father waiting up for him in the kitchen. His father asked him what he thought he was doing with himself. "And the worst part about it," Springsteen says, "was I never knew how to explain it to him." How does he tell his father, "I'm going to be Bruce Springsteen?"

Nearly a dozen organizations from around the country will share in the first round of Social Innovation Fund (SIF) grants from the federal government totaling $50 million. Combined with the required private matching funds, the total in grants is $74 million.

The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) announced the inaugural SIF grants this morning. “This portfolio is a collection of extraordinary organizations with an unparalleled body of knowledge and expertise on growing what works,” Patrick Corvington, the corporation's CEO, said in a prepared statement. “They are all driven by the search for bold solutions and recognize that we must use evidence to target limited resources where they will have the greatest impact.”

CNCS announced this past April that it has received more than 200 letters of intent and ultimately requests from 69 organizations totaling $125 million. The 11 organizations were selected through “a rigorous review process involving 60 external experts” and represent “a diverse set of nonprofit organizations and private and community foundations and share a track record of success at identifying and growing high-performing nonprofit organizations.”

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

This Web-only article is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "When the Sea Saved Humanity," which appears in the August 2010 issue of Scientific American. The presentation was created by Zemi media. Find all our other interactive offerings here.

Mark Zuckerberg and “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick met for an on-stage conversation this evening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Zuckerberg was much more relaxed, less sweaty and nervous than the last time he was on a public stage in the U.S. at the d8 conference in June. He said that to get to Facebook’s next 500 million users, the company is focused on a handful of markets including South Korea, Russia and Japan. He also said the company is working on fixing its issues around creating friend groups.

Terra-Gen Power, a major developer of wind, solar and geothermal energy projects in the U.S., is $1.2 billion closer to building the country’s largest wind farm. This new capital, announced today, will help the company aggregate 570 megawatts-worth of power at its Alta Wind Energy Center site in Kern County, Calif.

This new capacity, composed of four separate projects, will be added to existing installations at the Center (150 megawatts-worth of turbines built by General Electric), which is expected to reach 3,000 megawatts — the largest amount produced at any one wind facility in the U.S. Terra-Gen will be buying 190 new turbines from Vestas-American Wind Technology.

DCM, a venture firm that invests in the United States, China, and Japan, announced today that it has finished raising two new funds. The big one is DCM Fund VI, the latest version of its main fund for early-stage investments, for which it raised more than $400 million. It also announced a new fund of 200 million Chinese yuan ($29.5 million) to make investments in China.

DCM also revealed that it has two new general partners — Jason Krikorian, cofounder of DCM investment Sling Media (which was acquired by Echostar) and creator of its  Slingbox TV streaming device; and Osuke Honda, who already works in DCM’s Tokyo office and is being promoted.

In this week’s episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch, we talk to Maureen Orth. An award winning journalist, Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair Magazine, former correspondent for NBC and author of two best-selling books, Orth’s career as a journalist spans four decades. Her passion though is education, specifically as founder of the Marina Orth Foundation which promotes advanced learning in technology and English at The Marina Orth School in Medellin, Colombia.

The school was the first in Colombia to participate in One Laptop per Child, a program that Orth credits with making a real difference to children studying in a region that was, until recently, better known for cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. Joining us by Skype from Washington DC, Orth explains the benefits of One Laptop Per Child, responds to Valley-based critics of the program …and appeals for the Robert Scobles of the world to donate just a few of their many laptops to a thoughly worthwhile cause.

Getting a job in the tech business sure has its perks.

Many companies have sprawling campuses that are constantly kissed by the California sun and equipped with athletic facilities, Xbox 360s and foosball in break rooms, gourmet cafeterias, and ultra-lax dress codes. It's enough to make your average office-bound 9-to-5er swoon.

But those cushy tech jobs come without downsides, too. Even the most avid foosball player can become disenchanted with office culture when the pay is low, the hours are long, and the competition is cutthroat.

Starting your own company is one of the hardest things you can do in business -- so it's invaluable to get advice from other people who have done it, too.

Fortunately, the blogosphere is packed with entrepreneurs, investors, and business gurus dying to share their knowledge.

Unfortunately, it can be a real pain trying to figure out which ones are worth your time.

Well, now the work is done for you: we sorted through others' suggestions, official lists of recommended bloggers, and our own personal favorites to pick out the 20 best blogs for entrepreneurs.

So, it turns out that Apple knew about the antenna problems with the new Iphone, but CEO Steve Jobs liked the design.  I don’t presume to know what went on internally at Apple, but I do know this.  When a HIPPO (Highest Paid Persons’ Opinion) appears, prepared to be trampled.   I do have a few tips for avoiding the trampling.  Here are 5 steps when a HIPPO threatens your project:

1. Say, “Great idea Boss! We’ll test it.” This comes directly from Jim Sterne who introduced the term to me through my BNET colleague, Sean Silverman. This gives you some time.

For all its merits, London isn't one of United Kingdom's best cities for cycling. A recent poll ranked it 17th. But Mayor Boris Johnson is trying to change that. This morning he announced the opening of two new "cycle superhighways" in the city. Each is five feet wide, has two lanes so as to accommodate traffic in both directions, and is painted bright blue to "represent freedom." One stretches 8.5 miles from the southern suburb of Merton to the city center. The other runs into town from Barking, in eastern London. Eventually, 12 of these commuter routes will radiate out from the center of London like spokes.

Dr. Lyn Stabler was among the Mississippi Technology Alliance’s first employees, most recently serving as vice president of policy and analysis. Lyn will be leaving MTA at the end of July, opening a new chapter in her life. We asked her to offer some perspective on how the innovation and technology landscape has changed in Mississippi since she began working with the commission that established MTA.

P.I.: What brought you to MTA?
I was introduced to many aspects of science and technology-related economic development in Mississippi when I served as facilitator and staff support for the Mississippi Science and Technology (S&T) Commission. The Commission was appointed by Governor Fordice in 1997 to assess Mississippi science and technology assets and recommend ways to bring our impressive university research capabilities, private sector strengths and natural resources together in innovative ways to catalyze economic development. The S&T Commission was composed of representatives from Mississippi’s science and technology “system” of leading technology companies such as Mississippi Power Company, Chevron and Triton Systems, research universities, community colleges, federal labs and MDA. The Commission assessed the state’s science and technology assets and gaps and reached consensus to recommend the creation of MTA, (then MS Tech Inc.) to drive technology and innovation-based economic development. I continued to provide staff support as MTA was organized and became a full time employee in 2002. My main focus at that time was to support the development of the organization and create the MS Innovation Index to monitor progress toward long term strategic goals.