Iceland took first place in INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index (PDF) this year. Last year it won an award for best entrepreneurship movement. Iceland’s strengths, therefore, in entrepreneurship and innovation could help the country recover from its recent banking collapse. Read more at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.

Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies.  She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx, the advisory board of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). We met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Kaizen: What was it like growing up in a high-powered science-and-engineering family?

Estrin: That’s hard to answer because I don’t know anything but growing up steeped in science. A lot of the trips we took during the summer were to academic scientific conferences throughout the world. As I talk about in the preface of Closing the Innovation Gap, it wasn’t just that my parents were both academics, but both were Ph.D.s in electrical engineering — it was quite rare at the time for a woman to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. And so I just grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by academics and scientists.

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Microsoft was working on e-books and tablet PCs a decade ago. So why did it never get around to releasing them? Why, with so many intelligent and talented employees, is it falling behind Apple in innovation? Dick Brass, who was a Microsoft vice president for seven years, explains how Microsoft’s lack of systems that support innovation lead to risk-avoidance and internal struggles that crush great ideas before they ever make it into the marketplace.

Read the article at the New York Times.

Entrepreneurship is all about rethinking the old way of doing things, so let’s start off the New Year by reading about ten breakthrough ideas for 2010 at Harvard Business Review. Some of the interesting issues explored by the authors are: What truly motivates employees? Can we create a better model for the pharmaceutical business? How can we speed up the process by which innovative research makes it to the marketplace? And, what lessons can we learn about productivity from hackers?

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reported that patent filings are down for 2009. Is this a symptom of the economy, or of the fact that the time it takes to successfully file a patent is a serious barrier to innovative entrepreneurs?

Read Mike Drummond’s article at Harvard Business Review for more.

The boy who harnessed the wind — a 14-year old who decides to design and build a windmill to bring electricity to his remote village in Malawi. A deeply human story of initiative, ingenuity, and independence.

Also watch his appearance on the Daily Show:

“What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley tick?”

Read this article at Harvard Business Review to find out.

Also of interest: Harvard Business Review’s Creativity at Work package.

An article by Vivek Wadhwa at TechCrunch explains why “VCs follow innovation, they don’t lead.”

The National Venture Capital Association claims in their Venture Impact report that companies like Microsoft and Google “…would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists.”

But what about the entrepreneurs who, as Wadhwa puts it, “risk their life savings, max out their credit cards and put their families in the back seat?”

Read the article here.

Very cool: McKinsey, together with the World Economic Forum, has created an “Innovation Heat Map,” which identifies the common factors of the world’s successful innovation hubs. (Via Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship)

Dr. Stephen Hicks was invited to speak at three conferences over the past few months. In September, he was a special guest speaker at the Fiserv Connect Forum in Orlando, Florida, where he discussed “Innovation, Ethics, and ‘Creative Destruction.’” In July, he delivered two lectures on “Capitalism and Art in Contemporary America” at The Atlas Society’s summer seminar in Portland, Oregon. And in June he gave a talk on “The Role of Outside Donors in the College Curriculum,” at the International Association for Business and Society’s 2008 conference in Tampere, Finland.