A top Commerce Department official Tuesday vowed to unclog the country’s beleaguered patent office, linking efforts to clear hundreds of thousands of patent applications to creating jobs and reducing America’s trade deficit.

In an interview with MedCity News, David Kappos, Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property who directs the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said the Obama administration hopes to add more than 2,200 patent examiners over the next three years and overhaul the office’s aging computer systems.

“Innovation has become the centerpiece of the American economy,” Kappos said. “And patents are the currency of innovation. We’re not going to be a low-cost manufacturing economy. People understand the one thing that protects innovations and that’s intellectual property.”

When they started their business, a lack of capital was a worry for partners Mary Rogers and Rosemary Hartnett.

The pair planned to start an Abrakadoodle franchise -- a community center, school and day care program for children 2 to 12 -- but a lack of money would have delayed their Reston franchise from opening.

"We were looking to launch the business," Rogers said. "We didn't have a lot of capital to do this."

So, in 2002, she and Hartnett applied to INC.spire, a business incubator run by the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce that helps companies get started.

U2 singer Bono's stake in Elevation Partners has helped make him the "worst investor investor in America," according to the online publication 24/7 Wall Street.

U2 -- arguably the world's most popular rock 'n' roll band -- will perform June 12 at Denver's Invesco Field at Mile High.

With large investments in Palm, Forbes, and Move.com -- "an unprecedented string of disastrous investments which even bad luck could not explain" -- Elevation Partners has earned the distinction of being "arguably the worst run institutional fund of any size in the United States," 24/7 Wall Street asserts.

Reviewers have weighed in on the iPad. The consensus verdict is that Apple's tablet-style computing device is a stylish, versatile tool for e-reading, media viewing, and communicating—but it falls short as a full-on laptop or netbook replacement.

Veteran Wall Street Journal tech critic Walter Mossberg has been testing the iPad for the past week. The device has "the potential to change portable computing profoundly," Mossberg wrote, in a column published Thursday.

"If you're mainly a Web surfer, note taker, social networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music—this could be for you," wrote Mossberg.

"If you need to create or edit giant spreadsheets or long documents, or you have elaborate systems for organizing email, or need to perform video chats, the iPad isn't going to cut it as your go-to device," said Mossberg.

People skeptical of hearing water experts talking about water crises put their faith in the human capacity to innovate. They point to the rapid decline in costs of taking the salt out of sea water as evidence that – when we really have to – we will innovate and make sure we can meet our water needs.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Israel, one of the driest countries in the world, has invested heavily in non-conventional sources of water. Desalination currently provides around 40 percent of Israel’s municipal water supply and the plan is for this source to provide 70 percent by 2015. In March, a team from the the World Bank's WDR2010 and Middle East North Africa units visited the largest operational reverse osmosis desalination plant in the world, in Hadera.

Twenty minutes ago this water was sea water! from World Bank on Vimeo.

The big nasty untold (by the media) secret of the economy at the moment is that only government is hiring. And if that stays the case, the country will never be prosperous; prosperity granted to by at the someone else’s sufference (and someone else’s expense) isn’t “prosperity”, it’s being a pet.

If America’s economy is to recover, it’ll be when American business recovers. Not the “too big to fail” businesses, mind you, because if a business is “too big to fail”, it’s too big to really do anything new, innovative or transformative. (Indeed, the concept of “too big to fail” needs to be taken out and smothered).

No, America will be back when entrepreneurs can invent the better mousetrap.

Reports about the melting ice caps are distressing, but for the most part climate change remains abstract. The poor polar bear has been trotted out as the tangible face of global warming so often that we're beginning to see "polar bear fatigue." How about bringing the effects of Arctic melt close to home, as in what it will cost? A new study does just that, and the results are alarming, not just for Arctic dwellers but for all of us. According to lead author Eban Goodstein, Ph.D., over the next 40 years Arctic ice melt will take an economic toll of between $2.4 trillion and $24 trillion. Unless we change course — and fast.

Why is the melting Arctic so expensive? "The Arctic acts as the planet's air conditioner, and that function is already breaking down," says Goodstein, an economist and Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. The high price reflects anticipated losses in agriculture and real estate plus the cost of disease outbreaks and natural disasters associated with rising sea levels. The melt, he says, is already adding extra heat at an annual rate of 3 billion tons of CO2 — the equivalent of 500 coal-powered plants, or more than 40% of all U.S. fossil fuel emissions — and this is expected to more than double by the end of the century.

This is part of my [Mark Suster] ongoing series on Understanding Venture Capital.

I recently wrote a blog post on understanding how the size and age of a venture capital fund might affect you when you’re raising money.  Because it is a “series” I plan to get into some of the deeper complexities of funds such as “cross over funds” and “why VC’s hate to price their own deals” at a later stage. The last post was a high-level primer.  I know many super experienced entrepreneurs who don’t understand the basics of how fund size and age can affect them so I thought it was worth establishing a baseline.

Chris Dixon provided some commentary on Twitter that he believes my last post missed “the most important point about fund size.”  He’s specifically referring to his point of view that entrepreneurs shouldn’t take seed money from “big VC’s” (he defines them as > $100 million).  It actually wasn’t the point of my post – my point was just to get people thinking about the issues of size and age in the first place.

Taipei, April 5 (CNA) Private activist groups that have been pressing for a boycott of the passage of an industrial innovation bill urged the legislature Monday to put the brakes on its passage and review it again "before it is too late." Ruling Kuomintang (KMT) legislators were scheduled to meet their counterparts from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) the following day for negotiations over the bill, which failed to clear the legislative floor in late March due to a filibuster by DPP lawmakers.

Wang Jung-chang, convener of the Fairtax Alliance, said the bill, which continues and expands concessionary tax rates for major industrial investors, is full of injustice and partiality.

"The bill is not only unfair to smaller business and industrial operators, i

Stefan is London-based entrepreneur and angel investor from Germany. He is the co-founder of companions.de, companionsTV, ricardo.de and myblog.de. He is also the founding investor and executive Chairman of Mendeley.com and RjDj.me and has been in the same role at Last.fm.

After deciding to invest ‘a few hundred thousand’ in Last.fm this turned into a £22 million profit following its sale to CBS in 2007.  Stefan is a firm believer in European entrepreneurship and remains an active business angel. Outside of his business interests he holds a PhD in foreign exchange risk management and was a professional DJ for 15 years.

How long have you been a business angel?
My first experience as an angel investor was from 2000-2004. In 2005 I stopped investing to focus the vast majority of my time to helping build Last.fm. When we sold it in 2007, I became a full time angel again.

What attracted you towards becoming an angel investor?
It’s a function of age I’m afraid – pretty much the same reason why a football player evolves into a manager position. I love working on innovative ideas, and being an angel gives you more of an portfolio approach instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.

TEMPE, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kinetic Muscles Inc. (“KMI”, www.kineticmuscles.com), a leading innovator of neurorehabilitation technology, announced it has received a 2-year Phase II SBIR grant to study a new treatment for veterans returning from active duty with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Promising results from a Phase I study which combined neuropsychological therapy and digital gaming technology led the DoD to fund this Phase II study that will validate effectiveness of the therapy system through clinical testing in VA hospitals.

KMI will collaborate with Emory University, Division of Neuropsychology (Atlanta, GA), the DoD, the VA, and the University of Advancing Technology (Tempe, AZ) which is recognized as one of the foremost ‘gaming’ schools in the nation.

What are the signs that innovation in a company is set up to fail? Wouldn't it be great to have a checklist on this? Unfortunately, innovation is too complicated and company-specific for one standard rule.

It is possible, however, to become better at spotting the signs of failure.

Here's a list (in no particular order) of the red flags I look for when I talk with executives and innovation leaders trying to get an understanding of their corporate innovation capabilities.

• The lack of an innovation strategy

Executives and innovation leaders have failed to link innovation with overall corporate strategy. As a result, the innovation efforts have no clear direction, and there is not the necessary mix of incremental and radical innovation. No strategy, no focused effort, no results.

I spent four days in Aspen last November at the Aspen Design Summit where I worked with Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, and Henry King, the Global Account Manager at Doblin amongst a few others on a project with Mayo Clinic:

“The Mayo Clinic Rural Healthcare Project considered what a massive, local rural healthcare intervention might look like. The Project envisioned working across Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (CFI) platforms to research, prototype and build a healthcare delivery concept to improve healthcare services in rural communities.”

“After examining the concept of community network building and well-being, the design mandate became the creation of a community health association called “Austin.us.” The goal is to create a network that changed the focus of the community from the consumption of healthcare to the collective production of well-being. The association’s network would allow community well-being to be driven through individual connections and change the currency of healthcare from dollars to commitment.”

A state-sponsored fund launched last year to help Hawaii technology companies move beyond research and into commercialization is yielding impressive results.

The initial $5 million set aside by lawmakers in 2007 has since multiplied by six times to create $30 million in additional funding for 15 Hawaii-based tech companies that tapped into the fund. State funds were not released until January 2009, meaning the money went to work quickly over the past 15 months.

The 15 companies also credit the funding for creating a total of 90 new high-tech jobs in the Islands during the same time period and the commercialization of 20 products ranging from small aircraft to a specialized concrete that, when hardened, can alert a person to any forming cracks.

Karam Lakshman, program manager - iAccelerator, IIMAhmedabad believes that entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation required to encourage entrepreneurial success and lay down the conditions and solutions to the challenges that one might foresee in a venture. “Business is the backbone of a country’s economy and entrepreneurship is a tremendous force that has a huge impact on facilitating growth, recovery and societal progress. It results in innovation, employment generation and social empowerment. In India, entrepreneurship education is gradually picking up. That said, it needs to scale up further to make everyone involved – promoter, investor, parents, employees, etc - more aware about the different aspects,” he expresses.

“The time is right for the educated managers to stop looking for jobs and start providing them to others. Forming the right team is one of the challenges that an entrepreneur faces and if a person is starting early while he/she is in college, they will find the right kind of people amongst their friends, who they can work with easily,” he asserts.

This is the final blog post in a three part series on start-up success for Small Business Trends. I [Melinda Emerson] have talked about life planning, working from home and now the reasons why start-up businesses fail.

These are the things that can destroy your entrepreneurial dream if they go unaddressed. Do yourself a favor—spend the time to make sure you have these business elements well thought-out in your business planning before you go into business.

1) Not developing a Life Plan—People start small businesses for many reasons. They hate their job. They need extra money. They always wanted to open an art gallery or bakery. The trouble is that too many people do not take the time to really think about what they want out of life first, and then build a business around that. They also don’t think about what their life would be like as an entrepreneur. How long do you think you could physically sustain working 7 days per week? Do you like teenagers? Well, they may be the only employees that your business can afford. You need to develop a life plan because you just do not want to start a business that is NOT a good business for you.

Lately, I’ve [author] been digging through data and interviews related to the book on Gender and Innovation that I’m working on with Jacqueline Byrd.  The bulk of the data comes from 10,000+ respondents to Creatrix, an instrument created by Jacqueline.  As for interviews,  so far we’ve completed 20 (12 women and 8 men).  As unique and amazing as each story is, certain themes come up repeatedly from both male and female innovators.

One of those is their lack of seeing things that don’t work as failure.  Mind you, they easily talk about things that go wrong.   But while many people talk about learning from failure, they still experience failure as- well, failure.  Not so the innovators.  We hear it in their voices;  they absolutely believe that something that doesn’t work is just part of the process moving them forward to success.   It’s just one more experiment from which they can learn.  It has no more emotional impact than that.

That’s probably why they are able to take risks.  What others perceive as risks, they see as opportunities to learn.  Willingness to put oneself on the line is part of innovation.  It’s the difference between having a great idea and an innovation.  (Thousands of patents are issued every year that are never used,  inventions gathering dust because there’s been no personal and/or financial risk taken to act on them.)  Innovators rush in where fools fear to tread.  One of my favorite stories was told by Chuck House, author of the recently published HP Phenomenon.

This is the second part on VC Pitches, following last month’s post on preparing a Pitch Deck. Put simply, we said that venture capitalists want a PowerPoint presentation of fifteen slides or so. This makes sense, if you think about the purpose of the deck: To get a meeting with the venture capitalists. That’s it. They do not want a tome; they want concise reasons for spending their time to go more deeply into your idea.

In this post, we point out what they want (mainly, a seasoned management team and a robust market). By the way, this post refers mainly to venture capital funds, although they apply, to a lesser degree, to angel sources. There will be at least one post.

The draft human genome sequence, announced with much fanfare in 2000, promised great insights into human biology, medicine and evolution. In this special, Nature asks whether the sequence has delivered the insights that were anticipated, and what lessons have been learned from the first post-genome decade. Human genetics in 2010 looks infinitely more complex, and questions about how to make sense of the explosion in biological data are only becoming more pressing.

[MONTPELLIER, FRANCE] Smallholder farmers must become more entrepreneurial if food security is to be achieved, a key meeting on agricultural research heard yesterday (28 March).

Commercialisation of agriculture is not just about large international markets but also about vibrant and competitive local markets, according to Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and former director-general of the Africa Rice Center.

"Farming — irrespective of size and scale — must be considered as business," he told the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development in Montpellier, France (see Global summit seeks to transform agricultural research).

"We must think of the commercialisation of agriculture not just as the large commercial farms that feed the European Union and the United States but transforming smallholder farmers into commercial, local entrepreneurs that feed local demand. That is where you must stem cheap food coming into the country."