The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) just released a report stressing that boosting innovation and entrepreneurship will be key to bringing us out recession. The think-tank's report explains how governments not only need to encourage supply, they need to create demand for innovation. This is obviously crucial in the commercial world for new products and companies. However, demand for innovation here isn't nearly needed as much compared to innovation needed to tackle today's greatest challenges.

Startups that develop web apps played an important role in bringing the internet to what we know as "web 2.0" today. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, and others redefined the web to be "socially" enhanced making it easy to share, form connections, and track what users "like". Ironically, it may not be startups who lead us from community-type websites to the next generation of the web.  Instead, we're starting to see governments and NGO's leading the rally for open data initiatives and linked data, which are both becoming the foundation for the growth of the semantic web.