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Chance favors the connected mind. That is what author Steven B. Johnson says to those looking for the next big idea. Johnson is the author of "Where Ideas Come From" a book that looks at the macro trends on how innovation evolves.

Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow tothe head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?

Judy Estrin is a serial entrepreneur, having started seven tech companies since 1981. She was the former CTO of Cisco Systems from 1998-2000, and is on the boards of Disney and Packet Design and was a board member at Sun and FedEx for many years. She wrote Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy back in 2008. She now runs her own firm, JLabs, speaking and advising businesses on innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship.

Six months ago we did an overview of trends in the idea management market. At the time, most of the action was going on in the internal idea/innovation management area. This time around, the new trends are emerging around externally focused idea management solutions.

Each of the three trends we identified six months ago now has a corollary trend.

Ron Shulkin, VP of the Americas at CogniStreamer, recently wrote a blog post titled "Trust me: You do NOT want to go through your company's idea list manually." Shulkin makes the case against using a basic electronic idea box for ideation, or shoehorning ideas into existing tools, instead of an application dedicated to managing ideas.

"Without a proper mechanism for automatic idea promotion, someone is going to end up with a thousand ideas on their desk and have to filter them manually," Shulkin writes. "They'll have to read them all, sort through them, put them into categories, combine similar ones, somehow score them, rank them and decide which ones are the best." The result is that the person in charge of filtering through all these ideas won't be able to do a very good job, good ideas won't be implemented and people will be discouraged from submitting ideas.

How do you gather ideas at work? Are you using an idea management platform, dropping ideas into a box, or dealing with it all through e-mail or a forum?

The global recession, the consumerization of IT, the great cloud migration and other factors are changing the role of the CIO. Past failures of enterprise technology to live up to its promises and IT's lack of agility caused by legacy technology have decreased the influence of the CIO, explained R "Ray" Wang in a piece for Forbes last year.

Now in a new paper he has written for his own firm, Wang is exploring the future of the role that the CIO plays. He comes to the table with considerable insights. Wang is a global traveler who meets with CIOs on a constant basis in his role as principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research, an independent firm with a key focus on the transitions the enterprise is experiencing.

Altimeter Group analyst and co-founder R. "Ray" Wang, whom we quote often here, wrote a new post on enterprise technology trends. Most of them will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, but here's one that I think is worth highlighting: "Innovative Enterprises Push Forward Mostly On Their Own." Wang writes that most vendors are not innovating and that most enterprises at the Information Week 500 event "did not expect to gain market advantage from their existing and legacy vendors" (emphasis mine).

Net neutrality has been in a the news recently due to rumors, speculation and interpretation surrounding Google and Verizon's newly proposed legislative framework for the enforcement of net neutrality. The key principal behind net neutrality is ensuring service providers (like Verizon) cannot forge agreements with companies (like Google) to exclusively provide an unfair advantage by means of, say, increased bandwidth - thus maintaining neutrality. For startups and entrepreneurs, the debate is one to be monitored with a watchful eye, and some venture capitalists bloggers have begun to chime in once again on the issue.

Wednesday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of its annual Knight News Challenge, a contest funding innovative ideas for disseminating news and information to local communities with digital technologies. 12 entrants were awarded a grand total of $2.74 million, the largest share, $400k, going to Eric Rodenbeck and his data visualization project CityTracking.

Ticketfly, a startup that helps concert promoters leverage social media and sell tickets, announced earlier this week that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding from various firms and angels. Co-founded by Dan Teree and Andrew Dreskin, Ticketfly is - in a way - the rebirth of an earlier company, TicketWeb, which sold to Ticketmaster in 2000. After years of success, TicketWeb found itself unable to grow to its full potential, leading to the birth of a new venture, Ticketfly. Teree and Dreskin's story serves as a lesson to startups of how acquisitions by large, slow moving companies can lead to frustrated entrepreneurs.

A few weeks ago we mentioned an open door of opportunity for startups that could provide a solution to one the Internet's longest enduring problems: comment management. Shortly after that article was published, I received an email from Toma Bedolla, a Denver-based founder of a startup that was looking to provide a unique commenting service to online media outlets. This week I'm travelling in the Denver area for Boulder Startup Week, and Toma tracked me down at a tech meetup last night to tell me about his startup Veracious Entropy and its first experiment, HowTru.