It might be said that the Planet Traveler hotel in Kensington Market, in which Rand is a partner, is a bit of a test case. Although it appeared initially that geothermal wouldn't be possible on such a tight city lot, Rand approached the city about using the lane behind the hotel to sink his geothermal pipes.

purpose of feeding India’s rural poor. He invested $1m—and many years of his life—in breeding a superchicken

invented a “lapdesk” that sits on the child’s lap and provides a stable surface. The desks are covered in advertisements, so Mr Immelman is able to hand them out free,

In the long run, however, the best thing that entrepreneurs can do for the poor may be simply to see them as workers and customers.

Axela sells to the $20-billion life sciences market with its current platform, focusing first on protein-research applications, and enabling and capturing applications for downstream personalized medicine and human diagnostics.

Because it’s an attractive market, you see large diagnostic companies like Bayer Animal Health move some of its testing platforms that it would use for diagnostics into animal health testing

Indeed, one of the items of Small Wooden Shoe's 11-point artistic manifesto is: "The separation of emotion, body and intellect is destroying the world." (Others include: "Not being able to do something is no excuse not to" and "Good fun is essential.")

"To make failure a learning experience, first you have to celebrate it by acknowledging in a very positive way, the person who tried something and failed. You can't hide it under a table," says Plant. "You've got to develop a system that both rewards for the attempt as well as the success. Frequently, we don't do that and that sends a bad message. The act of punishing people makes them want to stop innovating."

We also need to build more accountability into failure, according to Plant who says that when failures are detrimental to the economy, we can't pretend that nothing happened. "Right now, some people are being rewarded for absolutely hideous failures, such as in the banking system," says Plant, who is also a Chartered Management Accountant. "Part of the problem is accounting which does a very poor job of measuring risk. Never leave anything up to the accountants!"

According to Plant, there's a different risk tolerance in smaller companies versus big ones, although he doesn't see a real difference by industry. Whether a company tolerates or accepts risk depends largely on the nature of the company. "The more established companies probably don't tolerate failure as well so they don't actually incubate a culture of risk," says Plant. "Larger companies do a lot of things to make sure they don't fail. Smaller ones tend to favour risk because it's the only way they can get ahead. And if you're doing things that haven't been done before, then you're going to fail again and again."

"You have to allow people to fail in this economy," says Plant. "It's failure that leads to productivity gain and innovation."

"You need a culture that allows failure for success because without it, people become anti-failure," says Charles Plant. "Trying different things is the act of innovation. If you fail 14 times, hopefully you're going to succeed on the 15th try. Without failure, we're not going to be driving and growing the economy."