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Matt Galloway spoke with Tom Rand, MaRS Cleantech Advisor about his book, Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit.

Tyler Hamilton, Business Columnist for the Toronto Star, had a launch party September 8, 2011 at the MaRS Centre regarding his new "Mad Like Tesla." Tyler Hamilton states the book is about "Underdog Inventors and their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy."

A Web 2.0 focused resource site for entrepreneurs, Virtual Handshake provides links to industry blogs, wikis, and discussion groups. Links to informative social networking sites, software (freeware), and other virtual communities can also be found, as is a comprehensive directory of other online networking/social software companies.

Bitstrips, a MaRS digital media client, was recently featured in the Globe and Mail. Bitstrips is an online comic book that is created by users. Their free online toys make it fast, fun and easy to create comics. The article shows how Bitstrips for Schools is helping teachers get students engaged creatively using digital media while promoting reading, writing and media literacy. Find out more about this company to watch.

MTS Allstream Inc. ("MTS Allstream") has named Indigo, Canada's largest book retailer, as the official bookseller of the 2009 Allstream Global Forum: An Evening with Vice President Al Gore being held November 24 at the Allstream Centre, Toronto. MaRS Discovery District is a partner of the 2009 Allstream Global Forum. Nov 13, 2009

Small business startup Wave Accounting has raised $12 million in its second round of funding, the company announced today.

Hire people with the right attitude: coachable, emotionally intelligent, motivated, well-suited temperament, and yes, still have the technical skills (but that's the easy part).

Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.

By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry and won themselves a Nobel Prize. At the time, Watson was only twenty-four, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science's greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions, and bitter rivalries. With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his and Crick's desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

The iPod is a harbinger of a revolution in product design: innovation that targets customer emotion, self-image, and fantasy, not just product function. Read the hidden stories behind BodyMedia's SenseWear body monitor, Herman Miller's Mirra Chair, Swiffer's mops, OXO's potato peelers, Adidas' intelligent shoes, the new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and many other winning innovations. Meet the innovators, learning how they inspire and motivate their people, as they shepherd their visions through corporate bureaucracy to profitable reality. The authors deconstruct the entire process of design innovation, showing how it really works, and how today's smartest companies are innovating more effectively than ever before.

Developing clean technologies is no longer a social issue championed by environmentalists; it's a moneymaking enterprise moving solidly into the business mainstream.

The review: a must-read for product engineers. "A perfect addendum to the works of Donald Norman, The Human Factor explores a number of examples in which major engineering problems and disasters initially attributed to user error were approached from a humanist perspective, and simple enhancements with the user in mind have helped prevent future catastrophes from airplane malfunction to nuclear power plant explosions. Vicente does a wonderful job of explaining with the phrase "user error" is often used erroneously, and attention given to the way a product is used, not just the way it is intended to be used by engineers, will continue to produce safer, more efficient products and avoid unnecessary accidents."

In today's information-rich environment, companies can no longer afford to rely entirely on their own ideas to advance their business, nor can they restrict their innovations to a single path to market. As a result, says Harvard Business School professor Henry W. Chesbrough, the traditional model for innovation--which has been largely internally focused, closed off from outside ideas and technologies--is becoming obsolete. Emerging in its place is a new paradigm, open innovation, which strategically leverages internal and external sources of ideas and takes them to market through multiple paths. Arguing that companies in all industries must transform the way they commercialize knowledge, Chesbrough convincingly shows how open innovation can unlock the latent economic value in a company''s ideas and technologies.

In Municipal Mind, Toronto's Poet Laureate offers a blueprint for building sustainable cities in a global era, predicated on city soul. By weaving bold and savvy strategies for urban creativity and civic prosperity together with a reasoned appeal for mutual respect, understanding and interaction among citizens, he persuades us that - in the delicate balancing of universal values and individual needs - cities can do far, far, better. Municipal Mind offers up a whole new way of civic being and thinking that puts wonder before commerce and nothing before human encounter.

New global R&D management challenges, trends and emerging patterns are presented in smooth theoretical and practical flow. Management models, innovations in intellectual property management, technology listening posts, leading R&D centers (and more) are discussed and depicted through an array of excellent cases ranging from Xerox to Daimler to Roche.

The groundswell of geothermal interest among builders, developers and individual homeowners all over the GTA is mainly because it's what "green" venture capitalist and MaRS Advisor Tom Rand calls "low hanging fruit" on the energy tree - easy to pluck and very cheap in the long run. Tom talks about the opportunities available to enterprising, innovative businesses.

Mention of mesh event happening at the MaRS Centre, April 6-8, 2009.

Mention of mesh event happening at the MaRS Centre, April 6-8, 2009. April 7, 2009

CEO's top concern globally is innovation and growth. "Real time Collaboration Enterprise" is the new business innovation model for market domination. Billions of dollars will be spent in this field, and by 2007 the majority of Global 1000 enterprises will be deploying real-time collaboration business processes to be a core of their business portfolios. Based on their extensive experience with cutting-edge technology, the authors discuss how to successfully implement collaboration commerce solutions, reporting lessons learned from leading companies such as P&G, Astra Zeneca, SAP, and Microsoft.