Peter Shea, an attorney at Katten Muchin Rosenman who specializes in these funds, reports that despite regulatory uncertainty, sponsors continue to float new exchange-traded product ideas.

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Part of the meet-up is designed to foster new product ideas.

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Pepsi has small product-development teams that come up with new ideas and perform consumer testing, independent of brand managers overseeing established products.

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They take their time to think about new-fangled ideas, so the wait to launch a new financial product can be interminable.

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Throughout his long and storied career, Neil Young has been a virtual factory of songs, musical innovation, ideas, inventions and a near-constant stream of new product.

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The cloud provides a low-cost way for engineers, product developers and even marketing folks to experiment with new ideas and test their feasibility within a short timeframe so that they can quickly move forward with successful ones.

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Under pressure to shrink overhead and telescope the new-product cycle, big companies are more likely to turn to universities or small companies to help develop ideas.

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Startup America, he says, was "on the same track" as Startup Weekend, which was launched four years ago and has since organized thousands of 54-hour networking events, where software developers, engineers, product managers and others share ideas for new ventures.

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