The other day, one of my colleagues asked me, "What exactly do you mean when you use the word 'innovation?'" Answering the question led to a productive discussion about what really inhibits innovation inside large organizations.

When I use the word innovation, I think of three interlocking components:

Obviously, each of these components carries significant complexity, but more often than not, they cover the basics of innovation.

The senior leaders I talk to believe that the bulk of their innovation challenges lie in the first two components. I suspect this is because the third piece looks like execution, and of course, large organizations know all about execution. And yet, my field experience suggests that it's this third component, not the first two, that actually blocks innovation.

America’s Real Dream Team.......Look to our High Schools

Went to a big Washington dinner last week. You know the kind: Large hall; black ties; long dresses. But this was no ordinary dinner. There were 40 guests of honor. So here’s my Sunday news quiz: I’ll give you the names of most of the honorees, and you tell me what dinner I was at. Ready?

Linda Zhou, Alice Wei Zhao, Lori Ying, Angela Yu-Yun Yeung, Lynnelle Lin Ye, Kevin Young Xu, Benjamin Chang Sun, Jane Yoonhae Suh, Katheryn Cheng Shi, Sunanda Sharma, Sarine Gayaneh Shahmirian, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakant, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, David Chienyun Liu, Elisa Bisi Lin, Yifan Li, Lanair Amaad Lett, Ruoyi Jiang, Otana Agape Jakpor, Peter Danming Hu, Yale Wang Fan, Yuval Yaacov Calev, Levent Alpoge, John Vincenzo Capodilupo and Namrata Anand.

O.K. All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards dinner was Tuesday, and, as you can see from the above list, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.

Oklahoma's OCAST positioned to bring innovation

State research and development budgets were challenged last year by an international recession but as I look across the nation, a handful of innovation-based state agencies continue to make progress even in difficult times. The Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology is one of those.

OCAST has a robust pipeline of programs that includes applied research, health research, small-business innovation research (SBIR), research and development intern partnerships, nanotechnology, plant research, manufacturing excellence and technology commercialization. This pipeline is vital to the infrastructure that can help transform a state’s economy.

Yale boosting venture capital coffers: Despite dismal returns, university is upping its commitment to private equity. Gurley is vindicated.

Yale University, which has the second largest endowment behind Harvard and is the top performing endowment in the U.S., has increased its allocation to private equity, including venture capital, according to a report released yesterday. The endowment is boosting its private-equity allocation from 21 percent to 26 percent, despite having lost 26% of the value of its private-equity investments in 2009.

The decision, made at a June 2009 committee meeting, is a pleasant surprise for venture capital firms. The consensus in the industry has been that pullback from endowments, pension funds, and other big institutions that keep funds flowing to the global Silicon Valley will leave the venture industry at half its size within five years. But those were the optimistic folks. Others argued that poor returns in the VC industry was the main reason the for the pullback, and that as a result, the VC industry could be cut even further – or possibly even go away.

An inside look at ESPN's Innovation Lab

IHE: Accelerating venture creation and building on mutual strengths in experimental business labs

This paper articulates the opportunity of using an experimental business laboratory approach as a means of accelerating the creation, incubation and testing of new venture ideas. Such a strategy leads to the establishment of a micro-ecosystem of aspiring entrepreneurs and others in a business laboratory environment. The goal is to create a mini idea-supercollider, in which a microscopic ‘De Medici Effect’ (Johansson, 2004) can be achieved, with aspiring entrepreneurs with different ideas, experiences and disciplines meeting in a spirit of open innovation – the sum of the whole being much greater than the sum of the individual parts. The development of an ecosystem for idea generation and rapid testing using business simulation tools can accelerate the creation, mobilization and diffusion stages of the knowledge lifecycle (Birkinshaw and Sheehan, 2002) in a knowledge- driven entrepreneurship venture, while de-risking potential ventures before significant capital is applied.

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50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology

He was breathless, but determined.

This Navy veteran had worked an eight-hour shift until Saturday morning and then driven three hours from the Central Valley to participate in Catapult Innovation and Learning in San Jose. The program was half over, but as soon as he got the attention of 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology selectees Mike Beasley, Arnold Brown and Ed Young, he began his elevator speech.

First, he pulled out copiies of his resume which included a new bachelors degree in information technology from DeVry University, host for the workshop on building aad financing growth companies along with the Bay Area Chapter of BDPA.

While serving in the U.S. Navy, he had served aboard several ships as a LAN administrator a decade, but he had not been able to find work in the field as a civilian for the past four years.

OPINION COLUMN: World faces fresh water crisis

Earth's population is now closing in on 6.5 billion, having tripled in the 20th century. Our use of water resources, however, actually has increased six-fold over that same time period!

With world population expected to increase by half over the next 50 years and with urbanization and industrialization growing at an alarming rate, especially in the most populous "developing" countries, our demand and hope for fresh water, sanitation and a clean environment are clearly in jeopardy.

More than a billion people today lack safe drinking water while moe than two billion lack adequate sanitation. The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 4,000 children die every day of water borne diseases. Half of those facing sanitation challenges don't even have toilets, latrines or other means to separate human waste from daily life.

The effect on women and girls in particular is shocking. Half the girls who drop out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa do so because there are no facilities for their use and/or because they must spend that potential learning time carrying water long distances for family use.

Sacramento designated as an Innovation Hub

The Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance ( SARTA) has been chosen as one of six Innovation Hubs in the state, allowing the nonprofit to better market its clean-tech and med-tech efforts in the region.

The so-called iHubs will improve the state’s competitive efforts for economic development, job creation and partnerships with specific research clusters.

The goal is to build better collaboration between research institutions, startup technology companies, local governments, venture capitalists and economic development organizations, state Business, Transportation and Housing Agency Secretary Dale Bonner said in a news release Friday.

In support of the Startup Visa

If you think we could use a few more jobs in the U.S. right about now, you should know about the Startup Visa, an idea that has been gaining momentum in the blogosphere since last spring. Last month, Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar introduced a bill that would create a new class of visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs who start companies (and attract funding for them) here.

Ex- Cantabrigian Paul Graham, an entrepreneur who sold an e-commerce company to Yahoo in the late 1990s and is now well known as the founder of Y Combinator, got things rolling last April with a post titled "The Founder Visa." Graham wrote:

The manageability of innovation

“Innovation” means different things to different people but, generally, it involves the application of novel ideas, products or processes for some purpose. But even if we can agree on “what” it is, do we understand “how” innovation happens?

There is a significant change taking place in the way that the process of innovation is understood. We can put this in the context of developments in the manageability of other areas of business activity in recent times.

“Selling” in the 1970s

Until about the 1970s in most organisations, “selling” was done by salesman who used skills with which they were born, rather than trained; they had a reputation for being overly friendly and free spirits! The concepts of describing the process of “selling”, of managing these people through the process and of training others who were not “born salesmen” to follow it were not given much credibility. But then, at about that time, came the realisation that the activities of selling do follow patterns and we can identify stages and describe sales funnels, measure what is happening, and so on.

Turkey’s next challenge: the development of the ‘intrapreneur’

As Turkey begins to recover from some of the worst effects of the global economic downturn, it could be time to examine how a new brand of entrepreneur could help to sustain the revival of confidence.

According to Johan Stael von Holstein of the global business incubator IQube, speaking at the World Entrepreneurship Forum, “Every problem will eventually be solved by an entrepreneur.” But given the fact that so many of our current problems were generated by major international corporations, how can entrepreneurship seriously be considered a solution to them? The answer, according to the dean of the EM Lyon business school, Patrice Houdayer, lies in the development of the entrepreneurial spirit within the structures of these very corporations.

“I believe that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial leadership, in particular, are possibly more important within large businesses than they are within smaller companies,” he says. “In uncertain times like these, large organizations need to be as flexible as possible, ready to change and develop rapidly to accommodate the shifting needs of their customers and the market as a whole. But many only pay lip service to ‘intrapreneurship,’ the internal version of classic entrepreneurship, or even stifle it, because they fear losing control.”

Hong Kong Science Park adept in incubating innovators and entrepreneurs

Hong Kong (HKSAR) - The Science Park had proven to be adept at not only bringing complementary businesses and facilities together, but also in incubating and nurturing innovators and entrepreneurs, the Commissioner for Innovation and Technology, Miss Janet Wong, said today (March 19). Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the Incubation Programme of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, Miss Wong said the Incubation Programme, from its inception in 1992, had always been an important part in assisting technology-based companies at the critical start-up stage. She said, "The programme has successfully incubated more than 230 start-up companies, over 180 of which are still in business today." Miss Wong pointed out that in the past seven years, incubatees and graduates had filed over 360 intellectual properties, including patents, trademarks and registered designs.

Over 160 international and local awards have been won by companies under the programme. Among them, six of the companies graduated today. In the same period, the graduates had obtained over 180 cases of government funding, and attracted over $665 million in "angel"/venture capital investment.

InnoCentive Challenges featured at International Environmental Engineering Event

I’m not sure when I first heard the term “The New Normal”. With the internet, it was easy enough to Google the term and, to my surprise, books, articles, and blogs have all laid claim to the phrase for some time. In fact, some declared the New Normal immediately after Y2K as a reflection of the connectedness of technology, markets, and people. Then again after the internet bubble burst, the term was brought back and now again referring to the new realities resulting from the Global Financial Crisis.

The Economic Crisis is heralding a New Normal for Innovation that represents enormous opportunity for 21st century businesses, governments and society. This New Normal is powered by what some call Crowdsourcing and captured more broadly by the term Open Innovation.

Going Global, Stateside

Marshall Hewitt, a consultant with Dean Foster Associates, gives employees of Hollister Inc. lessons in Japanese dining etiquette.

Training to communicate across cultures has long been part of the preparation for executives moving overseas to work. But now, the training is increasingly for employees who may never leave the country, yet will work closely with companies and people around the world.

“Whether a multinational or a start-up business out of a garage, everybody is global these days,” said Dean Foster, president of Dean Foster Associates, an intercultural consultancy in New York. “In today’s economy, there is no room for failure. Companies have to understand the culture they are working in from Day 1.”

Mr. Foster recounted how an American businessman recently gave four antique clocks wrapped in white paper to a prospective client in China. What the man did not realize, he said, was that the words in Mandarin for clock and the number four are similar to the word for death, and white is a funeral color in many Asian countries. “The symbolism was so powerful,” Mr. Foster said, that the man lost the deal.

Politicians have been misled by innovation myths

There is one simple science policy issue that has united the main political parties over the past three decades: how to squeeze more profit out of Britain's world-class science.

Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and the prime ministers in between have been passionate about the central role that science should play in a modern economy.

So it comes as a surprise to see the chronic policy blunders identified by a recent report from the University of Cambridge. Cambridge is seen as a beacon of how to innovate and has spawned new sectors of industry in printing technology, semiconductors, wireless technology, software and scientific instruments, for example.

Exploding the Myths of UK Innovation Policy argues from the example of Cambridge that government thinking has been heavily influenced by three myths:

Microsoft's Patent Portfolio’s Focus on Quality and Innovation Earns High Marks

Each year the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) rates the quality of companies’ patent portfolios, and this year again, Microsoft’s portfolio is rated the strongest in the software industry. It’s the third straight year that Microsoft has topped the IEEE Spectrum Patent Scorecard.

In another independent survey released this week, Microsoft ranked #1 in the Patent Board Scorecard, far surpassing all other information technology companies in the strength of our science and technology. Also this week, Forbes named Microsoft on its list of America’s Most Inventive Companies, based on the strength of our patent portfolio and return on R&D investments. And in January, Bloomberg BusinessWeek assessed Microsoft’s patent portfolio as having the highest value, beating out other leaders including IBM and Samsung. The magazine also placed Microsoft at the top of its Most Inventive Companies list.

These consistently high marks from experts in the industry signify that Microsoft’s focus on high-quality patent protection is working. Microsoft invests more than $9 billion annually in research and development, and the innovations that result from that R&D commitment are directly related to the quality of our patents. We’ve expanded our patent filings in recent years to match the accelerating pace of breakthrough technology developed at Microsoft, and these filings are closely aligned with our strategic business goals.

The New Normal

What's Stopping Innovation?