The UK government has sounded out plans to set up an exclusive group of technology and innovation centres across the country.

They will focus on developing technology and methods that will help Britain commercialise its world-renowned academic research in order to derive economic benefits.

The announcement was made by UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, who was attending a presentation which was being given by technology entrepreneur Hermann Hauser.

The latter outlined the benefits of commercialising innovation centres and gave examples of similar technology groups run by countries around the world.

Finding a name for a company is sort of like finding a name for a band: all the good ones seem to be taken already.

Furthermore, while it might not be what actually matters about what you do, all creators have a sense that it matters. Plus there's the matter of finding (or buying) the domain name(s).

As you'll see, even some of the biggest tech giants got their names kind of at random, so even if you pick out something that might sound stupid, it might not kill you.

For nearly three decades Jack Lasersohn has put money into health care start-ups as an investor for Vertical Group and its predecessor F. Eberstadt & Co. Among his successful investments are Kyphon Inc., which went public in 2002, and E.P. Technologies Inc., which was acquired by Boston-Scientific Corp. in 1995 and pioneered the catheter-based treatment of cardiac arrhythmia.

As a board member for eight health-care companies, Lasersohn has closely followed Congress’ wrangling over health-care reform. We chatted with him today to get his thoughts on the new bill. Here’s an edited excerpt of that interview:

Q. What is your overall reaction to the health-care reform legislation?

There are going to be some positives. There will be more people insured, so there will be greater numbers of dollars flowing into the health-care system. There are things we applaud [such as] the follow-on biologics statute [calling for a 12-year data-exclusivity period for innovator biologics]. The venture capital industry fought very, very hard for a reasonable compromise for data exclusivity.

For the past 3 years at Small Business Trends Radio we’ve brought readers the most complete and thorough list of  online small business podcasts that we can find. This year is no different.

We’ve assembled a superb list of 100 of the best small business podcasts we found online. We know you’re short on time, so we’ve done the legwork for you.  The main focus of these podcasts is business and we’ve made the list easy for you to navigate by organizing them into separate categories.

Business leaders from TechNet - the bipartisan policy and political network of CEOs that promotes innovation - are in Washington, DC this week to discuss policy solutions necessary to spur the economy, create new jobs in technical fields and maintain America's innovation leadership.

The executives will be meeting with senior administration officials as well as congressional leaders to advocate for innovation and improvement in areas such as the educational system, human capital support, fostering a globally competitive business climate and driving investment for clean technology.

Scotland hopes to ride the next renewable energy wave. Site leases for several big wave and tidal power projects were awarded last week by the U.K. government, concluding a two-year bidding process that elicited strong interest from major utilities and energy entrepreneurs. The awards open the way for six wave energy projects and four tidal energy systems around Scotland's Orkney Islands that could collectively generate up to 1.2 gigawatts, exceeding the U.K.'s 700-megawatt target for the bidding round. This is an immense scale for an industry that so far has installed only pilot projects involving a handful of small devices.

"This industry is about to grow up," says Martin McAdam, CEO of Edinburgh-based Aquamarine Power, which secured a 200-megawatt site in partnership with the U.K. utility Scottish and Southern Energy, presently the country's top renewable energy generator. Construction of the projects could begin as early as 2013.

The Cabinet, during its meeting on March 9, approved a budget of one billion baht to carry out “creative economy” projects under the “Thai Khem Khaeng,” or “Thailand: Investing from Strength to Strength 2012,” Operation Plan.

The fund was proposed by the National Creative Economy Policy Committee, chaired by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. The committee also proposed a number of creative economy projects that are ready for implementation in 2010, so as to achieve the “Creative Thailand Commitments” in four areas.

The first area, Creative Infrastructure, seeks to upgrade infrastructure projects to support the creative economy system. The second area, Creative Education and Human Resources, seeks to lay the foundations for creative thinking in the Thai education system.

I [Author] founded one of the first spas in the world for men, and wrote a book about the experience, which is now being used in several university entrepreneurship programs. Recently, a university professor who is using my book in her course, asked me what the most important lesson that I learned was.

There are many ways that I could have answered this question. I could have said that the most important lesson that I learned was to choose the right location, or to make sure that if you hire a business consultant to help you with your business plan, that he or she is the right person for the job. Or, perhaps the most important lesson that

I learned was that if you need help writing your business plan, perhaps you shouldn’t be starting a business at all. Hiring the right number of staff is an important lesson, as is hiring the right staff. As you can see, I haven’t even scratched the surface of all of the important lessons that I learned in starting one of the first spas in the world for men.

Two venture capital backed high-tech firms went public in big ways Wednesday, giving a boost to an exit route seldom used over the past two years of the recession.

Both posted gains of more than 10 percent from the opening.

MaxLinear, a chip maker, went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: MXL) and closed at $18.70.

San Francisco - Mike Maples, whose investment vehicle Maples Investments has over the past five years backed firms including Twitter, Digg, Smule and Gowalla, announced on Wednesday the launch of a full-fledged venture capital firm, dubbed Floodgate, TechCrunch reported.

Maples said that Ann Miura-Ko will be brought in as his first full-time partner and co-founder of Floodgate.

Maples calls his investment strategy the "Super Angel" model, seeking out potentially "disruptive" technologies at early stages.

You already know the about the state of the venture capital industry in 2009: venture investing down (32%), exits down (14%; slowest exit year for VC backed companies since 1995), fundraising down (56%),IPO’s almost non-existent (8 venture backed IPOs in 2009). It’s a bleak picture for the industry overall, even if there’s a group of us that continue to believe this is a great market in which to be investing (and it clearly is). These stats got me thinking about the future of the venture industry and I thought I’d offer up some thoughts on where we might be headed.

First, let me frame the conversation by stating that I agree with Fred Wilson’s assumption that somewhere around $15Bn is the right “steady state” investment pace for the venture industry as an asset class. At this investment level the return profile of the industry maps to a reasonable expectation of inputs and outputs (the money invested in start-ups as compared to the exit activity). By that measure, we actually still have a ways to go to reach that equilibrium in the venture markets.

ITIF President Rob Atkinson testified before the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, offering suggestions on how th  e government can support innovation and strengthen U.S. competitiveness. In his testimony Atkinson laid out ITIF’s analysis showing how the U.S. is falling behind other nations and made the case for eight steps that include the establishment of a national innovation foundation, improvements in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education, and smarter commercialization of research.

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SUMMARY: In September 2009, President Obama released his national innovation strategy, which is designed to promote sustainable growth and the creation of quality jobs. Two key parts of this strategy are to increase support for both the fundamental research at our nation's universities and the effective commercialization of promising technologies.

The Federal government supports university-based research for a variety of reasons. Expanding the frontiers of human knowledge is a worthy objective in its own right. Basic research that is not motivated by any particular application can have a transformative impact. As President Obama noted in his National Academy speech, ``It was basic research in the photoelectric field that would one day lead to solar panels. It was basic research in physics that would eventually produce the CAT scan. The calculations of today's GPS satellites are based on the equations that Einstein put to paper more than a century ago.''

Yet it is often transferring viable research discoveries to the marketplace that can pose the greatest challenge to innovators and entrepreneurs. As a result, the Administration is interested in working with all stakeholders (including universities, companies, Federal research labs, entrepreneurs, investors, and non-profits) to identify ways in which we can increase the economic impact of Federal investment in university R&D and the innovations being fostered in Federal and private proof of concept centers (POCCs). This RFI is designed to collect input from the public on ideas for promoting the commercialization of Federally funded research. The first section of the RFI seeks public comments on how best to encourage commercialization of university research. The second section of the RFI seeks public comments on whether POCCs can be a means of stimulating the commercialization of early-stage technologies by bridging the ``valley of death.''

Background: Federally-funded research has contributed to economic growth, job creation and improvements in our quality of life. In the information and communications sector, for example, university-based research has played a key role in the development of technologies such as the Internet, electronic design automation, mass storage, speech recognition, parallel computing, computer graphics, and workstations. In the life sciences, university research has led to new tools to diagnose, prevent and treat diseases.

Personalised healthcare started off as a great idea some years ago. The promise: With the benefit of modern biology and genetic and diagnostic tools, tailor a medical treatment to targeted groups of patients. Improve effectiveness and outcomes. Reduce side-effects and errors. It made sense then – and it still does now. Certainly, the antique model of one-treatment-fits-all is more than ready for an upgrade.

The reality has been different than the promise. Roll-out has been slower, investment difficult. Regulatory clearance has been fragmented. While there has been progress and hints of the benefits to come, many barriers still stand in the way of deployment.

Why, and what are the barriers? This is the topic of a European research project and series of conferences being organised during 2010 by Science|Business, in collaboration with leading medical university Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm, and a consortium of industrial partners including Novartis, Pfizer, Microsoft and Genzyme. The research project, to be released this spring, analyses expert attitudes towards the technology in four European Union countries. The first of the conferences to discuss the results was held in Brussels on February 4.

Geoff Greenfield is an example of the type of entrepreneur who is becoming the modern face of the economy in Appalachian Ohio.

As founder and president of Third Sun Solar and Wind Power in Athens, Greenfield is part of a thriving alternative energy industry that is making its home in Athens County.

Third Sun was ranked 21st among Ohio's fastest growing companies by Inc. magazine in 2009 due to its three-year growth rate of 390 percent. It was 32nd nationwide among all energy companies.

Greenfield started the company in 1997 because of his commitment to alternative energy sources.  But in the last few years, interest in green energy has spiked new opportunities that have helped him grow his business substantially.

The biggest rumble down south was between a pair of location-based gaming services: Austin-based Gowalla and New York-based Foursquare. Both services are similar — users "check in" to real-world locations through their smartphones and are rewarded with badges and discounts for frequenting hotspots. Foursquare is the established favorite and has a larger user base, but Gowalla led a strong insurgency, with a slickly designed iPhone application and a heavy presence at the festival. Who won? We'll call this one a draw, as many festival-goers used both services simultaneously to locate their friends and track down parties.

Gowalla and Foursquare both face the same challenge ahead — breaking outside of the tech-heavy communities on the coasts to become a tool in everyday life. Its not an easy road. The two services must deal with privacy concerns (although they track your location only when you give them permission) while fighting to build partnerships with merchants and brands to help encourage skeptical users to give them a try. But even if these services remain niche distractions, location isn't going away anytime soon. The Web's social giants also want you to start sharing your whereabouts: Twitter has already added the ability to add location to tweets, and Facebook reportedly plans to roll out a similar feature in their status updates before the summer.

Most people start their first company while they still have a day job. It makes sense: You don’t need loans. You don’t need funding. And if you “fail,” all you’ve lost is time.

But you’ve also placed yourself in a hazardous – potentially legally ambiguous – situation. If managed improperly, you’re unnecessarily risking lawsuits and worse.

I’ve been on both sides of the table: I’ve done a startup while working and I’ve employed people who either were or are very capable of having their own startup on the side. And I’ve known people who were sued because of it, and not all of them won.

U.S. small business is closely associated with the development of new technologies in many of the science-based industries likely to be important to future economic growth. Without the organizational barriers that often impede risk taking at larger companies, small businesses produce many of the radical innovations that lead to groundbreaking new products and even new industries. From air conditioning to optical scanners, from solid fuel rocket engines to personal computers, small-business innovations have helped to transform American society while making important contributions to national economic growth (National Science Board 2008; Schramm 2006; Baumol 2002).

Until better data on a broader set of innovation-related indicators become available, an examination of research and development (R&D) performance by small firms can help to provide some indication of the role that they play in the nation's scientific enterprise (National Research Council 2005). Data on small-business R&D performance presented in this InfoBrief come from the annual Survey of Industrial Research and Development sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey was designed to produce national level estimates of R&D performance. The sample includes companies in all size ranges across all non-farm industries, with an emphasis on large R&D performers. A majority of the 32,000 companies sampled report no R&D activity.

On January 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton addressed a standing-room only crowd at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. He articulated the pressing need for the United States to strengthen its investment in science and technology. A “top priority” was a major increase in the federal funding for nanotechnology, which involves studying materials at the level of molecules and atoms. Clinton extolled the benefits of the proposed National Nanotechnology Initiative, or NNI, with a description straddling science fact and fiction:

Just imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumors that are only a few cells in size. Some of these research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve. But that is why…there is such a critical role for the federal government.

As the NNI enters its second decade, a broad appraisal of the federal investment in nanotechnology is called for. Rather than frame this is as a matter of success and failure, let’s consider the new issues and concerns that have arisen since 2000. The effects of large-scale R&D investment can unfold in surprising ways and the NNI is no different.

Sweden, for the first time, tops the rankings as the world's most networked economy.  The Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010 ranks 133 economies on how well they use Information and Communications Technology or ICT to advance their economic growth and development.  The report, published by the World Economic Forum, is being released in Geneva.

Four Nordic countries rank among the top 10. The United States moves down two positions to fifth place. Two Asian tigers, Singapore and Hong Kong also make the top 10.