The Fund for Our Economic Future this week approved a 2010 grant-making budget of $7.8 million to carry on its work of spurring economic development activity in Northeast Ohio.

The fund, made up of more than 100 philanthropic organizations in 16 counties, plans to award grants in June and September to the following six regional economic development initiatives:

• BioEnterprise, a business development group aimed at the health care and bioscience industries.

• JumpStart, which invests in and mentors early stage businesses.

• MAGNET, which supports area manufacturers.

• Minority Business Accelerator 2.5+, which assists the growth of minority-owned businesses with annual revenues of at least $2.5 million.

• NorTech, a nonprofit technology-based economic development organization.

• Team NEO, which works to attract new business to the region.

The fund has just begun its third three-year phase and anticipates making $20.5 million in grants throughout the phase.

One of the most powerful aspects of social media and the web is the fact that it isn’t specific to any location: so long as you have an Internet connection, you can be halfway across the world Skyping, tweeting, and communicating with your friends. It has broken down barriers, given people the ability to work remotely, and made it so that your location doesn’t have to determine your destiny.

Still, to discount location would be foolish: it’s where we socialize and, for the most part, where we work. We grow to love (or hate) the neighborhoods and cities in which we live. And with the rise of smartphones and GPS, location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Google Buzz have been growing like wildfire.

Thus, I’m not surprised that a new debate has been raging in entrepreneurship circles over whether it matters where your startup is based. For web entrepreneurs, the perceived epicenter has always been San Francisco and the Bay Area – often known as Silicon Valley. With a huge collection of technology companies, venture capitalists, and talented engineers, many advocate moving to the area if you’re serious about building a startup.

There is no doubt that these are tough economic times. Unemployment is high and credit is tight. Key indicates show that is the worse economy in a generation. Many technology transfer offices have seen potential business partners reduce their innovation portfolios and expenditures. This coupled with a reduction in funding sources, from grants and investors to university sources are blowing the technology transfer research commercialization efforts into the perfect storm.

There are difficulties and challenges, but these times also create opportunities. Here are seven tips to help your technology transfer office succeed in these tough economic times.

1. Maintain a list of problems that are relevant to the research and technologies in the pipeline.

Technology transfer offices typically get involved in research commercialization efforts late in the research and testing process. Get involved earlier in the process and start developing a list of problems of which the research can be applied.

This is really an early brainstorming exercise. Don’t just talk to the researchers. Get business input from those who are not involved with the research or the research teams. Independent ideas can be worth their weight in gold.

EDMONTON, AB, Mar. 5, 2010/ Troy Media/ — Will yesterday’s budget improve innovation in Canada? Let’s remember that Canada’s performance when it comes to innovation is woefully inadequate.

Let’s start by looking at the numbers:

• $108 million to support both young workers, through internships and skills development to help them find jobs, and Aboriginal students.
• Over $600 million to help develop and attract talented people, to strengthen our capacity for world-leading research and development, and to improve the commercialization of research.
• Canada becomes a tariff-free zone for manufacturers with the elimination of all remaining tariffs on machinery and equipment and goods imported for further manufacturing in Canada.
• A Red Tape Reduction Commission is established to reduce paperwork for businesses.
• Measures to support investment in clean-energy generation will be implemented.

The $600 million for innovation unfortunately looks like it is headed to universities rather than to business. This is how the money will flow:

Wind is generally considered the front-runner when it comes to renewable sources of energy. It’s both cheaper and more reliable than solar. The government certainly prioritized it last year when it doled out millions in grants mostly to wind firms. Now news of record-setting wind generation out of Texas confirms that turbines are probably the best bet.

Apparently, early this morning, about 19 percent of the power on the major Texan grid came from wind installations (about 6,272 megawatts) — that’s an incredible amount considering that green-minded states like California are hoping to hit 33 percent from renewable power in general 10 years from now. This is also significant given that not all of Texas’ turbines participated — the state’s Panhandle is actually on a different grid.

Kahuku Wind Power has just become the newest in a line of eight innovative companies and projects now receiving large loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. Just as Tesla Motors snagged $465 million for its electric sedan and Solyndra took in $535 million for innovative cylindrical solar systems, this experimental wind startup just received a $117 million stimulus loan guarantee to build a 30-megawatt farm on  the island of Oahu.

If you thought California was ambitious, endeavoring to generate 33 percent of its power from renewable source by 2020, Hawaii’s sights are even loftier. The state’s Clean Energy Initiative has set a goal to meet 70 percent of its energy demand with clean sources by 2030. The Kahuku plant could definitely make this target more realistic, especially since the islands currently get 90 percent of their energy from pricey imported oil.

If the Kahuku farm comes to fruition, it could deliver wind power to 7,700 homes via the Hawaiian Electric Company. Right now, the blueprints call for 12 turbine generators, putting out 2.5 megawatts each. There will also be a battery storage system installed to make the wind power more consistent and stabilize the energy load — this is what distinguishes it from other major wind farms. Because each island has its own contained electrical grid, the state is an apt laboratory for this sort of work.

THE two dozen or so people arranged around wooden tables, warming their hands and bellies with steaming mugs of coffee and plates of homemade biscuits, looked like just another Sunday brunch set in New York. But members of this group had braved knee-deep snow to gab about cutting-edge ideas and as they introduced themselves the roll call sounded like a Who’s Who of digital start-ups: Foursquare, Hot Potato, Six Apart, Flickr, Flavorpill, Trust Art, Vimeo.

“There’s a lot happening right here in our ZIP code,” said Dorothy McGivney, a former Google employee who is a co-coordinator of this group, the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, and runs Jauntsetter, a travel site for women. Like the others, she had come to the brunch to help foster the growth of her little local community of entrepreneurs.

The group had its inaugural meeting in January and is among a growing cluster of informal meet-and-greets for the local technology and media industries. A recent installment of another monthly event, called the New York Tech Meet-Up and held in Chelsea, drew 700 tech enthusiasts.

When Stacy Waite moved to Abu Dhabi last year, the opportunities for a budding entrepreneur seemed to jump from every corner of the growing city.

Experienced in working with digital media start-ups back home in the US, Ms Waite, 49, who arrived in Abu Dhabi from Los Angeles, saw a market whose surface was yet to be scratched by online businesses.

Why not launch a multilingual online training portal for hospitality workers, she wondered, or a site covering the elderly care market?

“It has been a huge learning curve,” she said. “What I have learnt is that there are so many opportunities here – but this is not an easy place to start a business.”

Ms Waite is no stranger to launching an original enterprise. When she was 19, and studying communications at the University of Albany in New York State, she started a travel business focusing on ski trips, using the student body as her first clients. In 1989, she became, at 28, the youngest woman ever to launch a hedge fund on Wall Street.

One of the questions I’m most often asked is, “what’s it like being a VC?”  I’ve been a VC for nearly 3 years now.  Since I answer this all the time anyway I thought it might make an interesting blog post.  I always start my answer to this question with, “you’d have to be a pretty big baby to complain about being a VC.” That’s true.  Here’s why:

1. I get paid (well) for interesting people to come in and tell me how they want to change the world – Being an entrepreneur is like having blinders on.  At least for the best entrepreneurs.  Some people do the conference circuit too much, get involved in lots of side projects and attend every entrepreneur dinner.  For me that’s always a bad sign.  When I was running startups I felt like a horse with blinders on because I was super focused on the content management market and ignored many other markets.

One of the things that I’m loving about this side of the people is that it really satisfies my intellectual curiosity. People come into my office several times per week and tell my about their plans for changing the world. They outline the problems that exist in markets, their approach to the solutions, they update me on competitors and they show me their economic models. We have debates about how the industries will change / evolve. It is the equivalent of going to a coffee shop every day and having intellectual debates. In fact, I often take meetings in coffee shops. I LOVE this part of my job.

The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don’t know from hunkering down. They just didn’t get the word.

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it’s because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.

Let me introduce Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun, set out several years ago to fund energy start-ups. His favorite baby right now is a company called Calera, which was begun with the Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who was studying how corals use CO2 to produce their calcium carbonate bones.

My last post triggered some interesting debates in the blogosphere about whether entrepreneurs were a product of nature or could be nurtured. It’s not black or white. People are a product of their upbringing and education. Average humans can achieve extraordinary feats when they really try. I’ll concede that, like some great athletes, some great entrepreneurs may have something different about them that gives them a special advantage (this is a topic that I am presently researching). But not every entrepreneur needs to reap the same fortune as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to qualify as a success. You can build a good lifestyle business that pays the bills, or that does good for the world, and be considered a successful entrepreneur. (And you’ll probably be happier and gain more respect than most billionaires do.) Entrepreneurship isn’t all about the IPO.

I hold steadfast to my belief — based on my experience in building two great technology companies and in mentoring around 200 entrepreneurs over some years and on what I’ve learned from my academic research into the background and motivations of entrepreneurs — that entrepreneurs can be made. People born into entrepreneurial families may have the advantage of knowing the ups and downs of business, and, all else being equal, people from entrepreneurial families are certainly more likely to become entrepreneurs than others are. But the skills required to build, manage, and grow a business can be learned, and this education can level the playing field. VCs who judge entrepreneurs based on age, sex, ethnicity, or family background are doing their limited partners, and society, a great disservice.

Venture capital - the lifeblood of high-tech startup companies - fell by nearly half in Arizona last year as investors retrenched nationwide.

But a new Arizona-based venture capital fund and other recent initiatives are aimed at building a local pipeline for such private equity investments, and driving high-tech economic development in the bargain.

The amount of venture capital invested in Arizona companies fell to $110.6 million in 2009, down 47 percent from $208.8 million in 2008, according to the latest MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

There were just 12 deals statewide last year, down from 20 in 2008.

Arizona's decline in part reflects a nationwide trend blamed on the struggling economy.

Losing the hard-fought battle to save the old Fitzsimons Army post in the mid-1990s turned out to be a boon for the state economy.

Back in 1995, when the 578-acre base was targeted for closure, Aurora planners estimated that Fitzsimons accounted for $328 million in local economic activity and 2,904 jobs.

The numbers are much bigger these days. In 2008, activities at the Fitzsimons site pumped $3.5 billion into the state's economy, generating $1.4 billion in personal income, according to a report on the campus' economic contributions. Not counting construction workers, there were more than 15,900 employees on the campus, mostly in health care delivery and education.

The Fitzsimons Life Sciences District and Anschutz Medical Campus has emerged as an economic bright spot in the area, bringing advanced health care and research facilities to the region, garnering national attention, and providing an economic engine that is expected to employ nearly 45,000 people when it is fully developed.

A recent article in Strategy+ Business on The Promise and Perils of Open Collaboration presented seven strategies you can use to make your open collaboration a success that are worth repeating.

1. Craft a Leadership Message
   The best CEOs articulate a leadership message that is both universal and of immediate relevance to a company's strategic needs. Open collaboration is a social process that needs to extend beyond R&D and penetrate the entire organization. For that to happen, a clear message of support needs to come from the top.
2. Collaborate with Your Customers
   Keeping abreast of the changing needs of consumers in a global marketplace is a tall order. Open collaboration provides new ways to incorporate customers' ideas and in some verticals, you'll find that lead users can generate more than half of your innovations.

After a tough crisis year 2009, the “Silicon Saxony” high-tech cluster around Dresden (Germany) is about to get back on track. While the once world-leading photovoltaics industry is increasingly getting under pressure from Asia and some players remain skeptical whether the crisis now is really over, chip manufacturer Globalfoundries is emerging as ‘king of the hill’ in the region.

The economic crisis hit the chip industry in and around Dresden particularly hard when memory devices maker Qimonda AG had to file for insolvency about a year ago. The liquidation of Qimonda’s production line in Dresden triggered a wave of redundancies. But while the semiconductor industry in the region suffered from the downturn during the first half of 2009, the photovoltaics industry prospered, fueled by government programs aiming at fostering renewable energies.

A new report from Harvard asks "Why are some metropolitan areas so much more entrepreneurial than others? Silicon Valley seems almost magically entrepreneurial with a new startup on every street corner, but in declining Rust Belt cities such startups are far and few between."

The report notes a close correlation with regional economic growth.

The new Policy Brief published by Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, which is sponsoring a series of talks on geography and entrepreneurship, economists Edward Glaeser and William Kerr report that high levels of entrepreneurship are closely correlated with regional economic growth, which means that local policy makers who are looking for ways to rev the economic engines of their cities often are interested in policies that can generate more entrepreneurship. Read more.

Welcome to the Innovation Web Portal!

The Department of Education has developed this Portal as an online forum where key stakeholders in education can share their innovative ideas and collaborate to turn those ideas into a new reality.

By connecting an idea from a teacher in Maine to a principal in Oklahoma, or a teacher-entrepreneur in North Dakota with a foundation in New York, the Portal will be a national marketplace of ideas of how we can ensure that every American child will graduate ready to succeed in college and the workplace.

The Web Portal is designed to engage all stakeholders in education: teachers, school administrators, parents, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and the American public. I’ve traveled across the country on a Listening and Learning Tour about education reform, and I have met countless Americans who want be a part of improving our schools. President Obama has set a goal that America, once again, will be the nation with the highest percentage of college-education citizens. To achieve that goal, we will need commitment – and the best and most innovative ideas – from all of our citizens.

One company uses ultrasound to repair damaged tooth roots. Another has developed a wireless body-monitoring device that sends real-time data to doctors, nurses and other caregivers.

They're among 384 companies across the province that have taken advantage of the province's Innovation Voucher Pilot Program to get their products closer to market.

SmileSonica Inc. Tuesday received $50,000 in vouchers that can be exchanged for services, the same amount that Kanata Health Solutions received when the program was launched last spring.

Kanata's monitoring device, which is worn on the wrist, is about to go into a trial with the Alexander First Nation near Morinville, which has a chronic diabetes problem, said Bhavin Rawal, a consulting physician to the company. It monitors glucose levels, pulse and other functions and transmits the information via Bluetooth to a base.

Last fall, after losing previous bids, Rio de Janeiro -- Brazil's second-largest city -- won the approval of the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. According to Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary general of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, this time around, Rio had learned from its earlier failed bids and had the success of hosting the 2007 Pan American Games under its belt. That, combined with Brazil's "special circumstances" of economic stability amid the global downturn, helped it to beat out rival cities. In an interview with Wharton management professor Felipe Monteiro and Ken Shropshire, a Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor, Osorio discussed the winning bid and the challenges that lie ahead.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Mr. Osorio, I'll start the conversation off by asking you a very general question. After bidding in the past, Rio finally won the right to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2016. What do you think made Rio the winner this time? What was the winning pitch?

Carlos Roberto Osorio: Bringing the Olympic Games for the first time to Rio -- and to Brazil and South America -- was a long journey. The previous bids were part of a learning process. When we first tried to get the Olympic Games for the year 2004, we had a very basic project, and not a very deep understanding of the Olympic world and the requirements to host the Olympic Games. So, I think what Rio did [this time around] was to find an objective. Rio is a sports city. Brazil is a sports country. Rio is a city that is absolutely tailor made for outdoor sports, and it has beautiful surroundings. Entertainment, leisure, sports and tourism are part of the city's core business. So, to organize major events was always at the core of Rio's plan for development.

The Kauffman Foundation is providing support on initiative that invites public nominations for the top 24 companies

Because startup companies become job creators and sources of innovation, Robert X. Cringely, author of the technology blog "I, Cringely" (www.cringely.com), has launched a plan to restart America called "Cringely's (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour." People are invited to nominate startup companies in six different categories, discuss them, and vote for favorites on a special website created just for the tour.

After about six weeks of collecting nominations and reviewing candidates, Cringely will announce the top 24 companies. He will then take the show on the road this summer, with a camera crew, to visit all 24 companies to learn about the businesses and the entrepreneurs who started them. Ultimately, the stories he collects will become a 12-hour reality TV series to be broadcast on a major cable network.
The Kauffman Foundation is proud to support this initiative that will put a spotlight on new companies and their contributions to the economy.

Click here to read more about the Startup Tour.
Click here to nominate, read nominations, and vote.