Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

It’s summer – time to spend just a bit of your time kicking back doing summer reading.
And time for the ChangePapers.org  SUMMER WRITING ASSIGNMENT.
Don’t worry. This is a quick and painless one. And if you do it right you can supercharge someone else’s thinking too.
Our challenge: spend no more than five minutes thinking about the [...]

All innovation is not in new products or technologies, and all innovation is not at new companies. A good deal of innovation takes place within existing companies, and much of it occurs as companies find ways to innovate in their processes — the way they structure and organize their work. In this post, David Boulay, [...]

In spite of what you might have heard (or thought you saw when you looked at the word), there is no “I” in innovation. But we sure act like there is.
In one of my favorite books, Ripples from the Zambezi, Italian consultant Ernesto Sirolli shares one of his key findings after 30 years of working [...]

A six pack of questions to test your entrepreneurial acumen:
1. Which racial/ethnic group is most likely to start a small business?
A.Whites
B. African Americans
C. Latinos/Hispanics
D. Asians
2. At what age is someone most likely to start a business?
A. 25-34
B. 35-44
C. 45-54
D. 55-64
3. If you had to pick, which of these four groups would be most likely to [...]

As a red-blooded adult male, I try to limit my crying to the biggies: birth of children, the Olympic theme song, and AT&T commercials.
As a policy wonk, I try to set similarly high standards: to make me cry, data has to 1) tell me something I don’t know; 2) anticipate all the questions I will [...]

In the Bay Area in early April, I could hear the sounds of slippage. Silicon Valley gurus are worried about getting knocked off the top of the innovation food chain. In the past couple of years the area has witnessed a decline in patents, equity investments and personal income, while losing a reported 90,000 jobs. [...]

It’s been a career week for capital in NC, and the combination of announcements should make birthing, incubating and growing innovative companies in North Carolina a lot easier.
On Monday, State Treasurer Janet Cowell announced she was hiring Credit Suisse to make up to $230 million (by my calculations, about 0.34% of the state’s pension fund) [...]

How do you think about innovation in tough economic times? During its meeting in Williamston last Thursday, the North Carolina Innovation Council got a look at the two very different ways it will need to answer that question: one could be called the regional challenge (with micro answers), with the other being the statewide challenge [...]

A pretty big tree just fell in the forest of innovation in North Carolina. It’s not clear that a whole lot of people heard.
In the crowded showroom of a restaurant supply business in Raleigh last Wednesday, Gov. Bev Perdue announced she was naming Scott Daugherty, head of UNC’s NC State-housed  Small Business and Technology Development [...]

Google’s announcement that the company is considering providing somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 people across the United States broadband Internet access with a speed of a gigabit per second starting (maybe) later this year. It’s a reminder of the arms race going on with broadband speed.
If the “giga” prefix sends you to Wikipedia or your [...]