A few months ago, Business Leaders for Michigan emerged as a new organization of CEOs from across the state all speaking in one voice around one goal: making Michigan a “Top Ten” state in the long term and an above-average state in the short term for job and economic growth.

To get us there, we have proposed the Michigan Turnaround Plan, a comprehensive strategy that lays out the case for change, sets achievable goals, identifies specific action steps and explains the impact of change. Specific to innovation and entrepreneurship, we call for:

Suppose you’ve started a business that needs $100,000 of external financing to get off the ground. Because none of your friends or family has the money to make the investment, you’re looking for an accredited angel investor.

That investor is going to be very, very hard to find. Statistically, very few people are in a position to make these kinds of investments.

Let me give you some numbers to show you how rare this source of financing is. Because only a small number of new companies are successful enough to generate a reasonable return on an investor’s capital, most accredited angel investors realize that they need a diversified portfolio. Therefore, most investors will only invest a small portion – sophisticated angels say no more than 10 percent – of their net worth in start-ups. So a person who can invest $100,000 in start-ups needs a net worth of at least $1 million.

New Haven, Conn. — A consortium of six leading research universities and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) today announced their endorsement of a far-reaching “Statement of Principles and Strategies for the Equitable Dissemination of Medical Technologies” in the developing world.

Harvard, Yale, Brown, Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oregon Health & Science University and AUTM have taken a major step beyond Nine Points to Consider in Licensing University Technology, a 2007 statement endorsed by about 70 organizations and academic institutions, committing themselves to “implementing technology transfer strategies that promote the availability of health-related technologies in developing countries for essential medical care.”

Kentucky Broadband model used as national example goes global

LEXINGTON, KY - After being lauded as model for the United States in President Barack Obama's stimulus plan, the head of the program that has made it so 95 percent of Kentuckians can have access to high speed Internet has been invited to advise Malaysian Prime Minister Dato' Sri Mohd Najib bin Tun Abdul Razak.

Brian Mefford, chairman and CEO of Connected Nation, which grew out of ConnectKentucky – a program established in 2002 by the non-profit Center for Information Technology Enterprises to give people across the commonwealth the ability to connect to Web on more than just dial-up – was invited by the Malaysian PM to be a part of the Southeast Asian country's 12th International Advisory Panel Meeting.

Landing a banking or consulting job used to be the main reason for going to B-school. These days, it's just as likely to be launching a business

Business schools have quietly become the back door to starting your own business. Once considered merely the hallway to a high-salaried career with an investment banking or consulting firm, business schools are now drawing attention from those tinkering in their garages and hoping to find the next big thing. Through virtual and traditional business incubators, business schools are helping students launch startups with everything from fund-raising and networking to finding office space and interns.

During the economic crisis, many people took shelter in graduate programs, while many others who had been pursuing careers at companies large and small sought opportunities to become their own boss so they won't have to worry about the next round of layoffs. These ingredients have come together in a recipe that has graduate business programs cooking up entrepreneurial ideas like never before—from RecipeKey, a reverse search engine that has visitors to its Web site typing in ingredients to get recipes, to WallStreetOasis.com, an online community for finance professionals.

Newswise — The Fox School of Business at Temple University and the National Association of Seed Venture Funds (NASVF) have released a new survey indicating that about half of the organizations polled reported that 25 percent of their portfolio is in-loss.

The survey respondents were comprised of NASVF and non-NASVF members that included angel investors, angel funds, early- and seed-stage venture capital funds and economic development agencies that provide investments for startup and early-stage emerging companies.

BERLIN (IDN) – There is so much gloom and doom after Barcelona and St. Andrews that a catastrophic climate change appears inevitable. Some seem to envision the planet Earth being smashed to the smithereens if the milestone Copenhagen conference fails to reach a legally binding agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol that holds the ground until 2012.

In this treaty agreed 1997, 37 industrialized states committed themselves to cutting emissions by an average of 5 per cent against 1990 levels over the period from 2008 to 2012.

The months-long wait for small device companies looking for revisions to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program may be nearing an end as a compromise version could be introduced later this month, a Senate staffer says. “We’re hopeful we will be able to reach compromise before the November recess,” Vicki Ekstrom, spokeswoman for the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, said.

David Brophy, director of the Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity Finance at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, was honored Monday night with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual awards dinner of the Ann Arbor-based Michigan Venture Capital Association.

In 1972, Brophy, who is also an associate professor of finance, founded the Michigan Growth Capital Symposium to help diversify the state’s economy away from its dependence on auto manufacturing.

TORONTO, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Activity in Canada's venture capital market hit a 14-year low in the third quarter, tumbling 51 percent to $191 million from the same period a year ago as uneasy investors stayed out of the market.

According to data put out by the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) and Thomson Reuters, the province of Ontario saw the steepest fall in investment, sagging to $24 million from $179 million a year earlier.

The venture-capital industry is undergoing some tough times, with returns scarce and new money hard to raise in the recession. But a new survey by law firm Fenwick & West shows some optimism is emerging as venture capitalists mark up the valuations of their start-up investments.

According to the Fenwick & West survey, which covers the third quarter, 41% of new venture financings in that period were for up rounds, which means a company was given a higher valuation when it received venture money. That compares to 36% down rounds and 23% flat rounds. It was the first quarter this year where up rounds exceeded down rounds, said the survey.

Massachusetts ranked first in the nation per capita for the total number of patents produced by higher education institutions - with a rate nearly twice as high as the next closest state, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce said.

That was one headline of Competitiveness Scorecard issued by the chamber. The scorecard aims to be a barometer of cost and competitiveness issues facing the Massachusetts economy and a comparison of how the commonwealth fares against the 49 other states. This iteration of the scorecard focuses on the role that colleges and universities in the state play on promoting and sustaining innovation.

Either Twitter is a special case, or its investors are signaling to Silicon Valley that you still have to spend big to win big.

Wellington's economic development agency is hopeful a $20 million digital innovation hub proposed for the capital could help attract more foreign business to New Zealand shores.

The New Zealand Institute for Screen Innovation and the Hong Kong digital hub Cyberport are working together to establish the centre, which would be a smaller version of a $2.8 billion hub already being run in Hong Kong.

The central Wellington centre would house the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and facilities to allow it to record musical scores for films, as well as other digital entertainment ventures.

What do John Deere, Cisco, and Obopay have in common? All three companies form a new breed of enlightened Western firms that have embraced what I call "polycentric innovation."

Polycentric innovation is an emerging business practice that consists of networking international talent, capital, and ideas to meet global demand for new products and services. Wait, isn't that what multinationals have been doing for decades? Not really. While it's true that leading American and European MNCs (I won't name any here for fear of embarrassing them) have been operating R&D centers in emerging markets like India and China for years, these regional R&D centers merely adapted existing technologies and products developed in the West for distribution in local markets.

It's not what we're trained for as leaders or how our businesses are set up to work.

Most companies everywhere are struggling to grow right now. With their revenues flat to down, they're cutting costs to raise profits. But cutting costs faster than revenues decline is no prescription for long-term success. It is, rather, as Gary Hamel, the author of The Future of Management, puts it, "management inertia." Businesses are on a track that is easy to follow but ultimately self-destructive.

The answer seems to be innovation. Yet few businesses are any good at innovation. For all their brainstorming exercises and "open innovation" programs, they mostly just come up with reformulations of existing products, new pricing plans and basic updates--the same old things just a little cheaper, faster or better.

Another first. This time in New Delhi, a mega city with 100 million people living in its metropolitan area. Today we had our first ONE DAY WITH INNOVATION in India. And in our way to the ONE DAY we found 24 billboards promoting the Seminar. A big event with a massive audience.

Thanks to the efforts of our INNOVATION’s Director in India, Pradeep Sharma.

As more U.S. companies send their sophisticated R&D offshore, America must provide worker retraining to maintain its tech leadership

Research and development is increasingly going global, according to a new report by Duke's Offshoring Research Network (ORN). More than half of U.S. companies now have corporatewide initiatives to outsource innovation activities, up from 22% in 2005, according to the ORN, which has been tracking the growth of outsourcing since 2004. And of those companies already offshoring development, 60% intend to do so more aggressively.

The days when you could trace development of the majority of the world's innovative technologies back to U.S. labs are fading fast. Outsourcing of R&D is irreversible. Still, the U.S. retains key advantages and remains well-positioned to continue its technology leadership. But that can happen only if as a nation we recognize the changing role of R&D and refrain from wasting scarce resources trying to recapture a bygone era. Mandating that R&D traditionally performed in the U.S. should stay in America would tie the hands of companies at precisely the time they need flexibility to compete against up-and-coming foreign competitors.

In just a short period of time the spatial location of invention can shift substantially. The San Francisco Bay Area grew from 5 percent of U.S. domestic patents in 1975-1984 to over 12 percent in 1995-2004, for example, while the share for New York City declined from 12 percent to 7 percent. Smaller cities like Austin, Texas, and Boise, Idaho, seem to have become clusters of innovation overnight. Despite the prevalence of these movements, we know very little about what drives spatial adjustments in U.S. invention, the speed at which these reallocations occur, and their economic consequences. In this paper, HBS professor William R. Kerr investigates whether breakthrough inventions draw subsequent research efforts for a technology to a local area. Evidence strongly supports the conclusion that centers of breakthrough innovations experience subsequent growth in innovation relative to their peer locations. Key concepts include:

Breakthrough inventions spur higher subsequent growth in innovation within a local area and technology compared to peer locations that, for example, have the same overall numbers of patents and similar technologies at the time when the breakthrough occurred.

The underlying mobility of the workforce is quite important for the speed at which spatial adjustments occur. Immigrants, and particularly new immigration to the United States, can facilitate faster spatial reallocation.

Skimming the recent spate of somewhat rosy articles touting the resurgence and benefits of angel investing, I was persuaded to dig through some of my older posts to examine whether my somewhat caveat emptor position on raising angel capital had been swayed. With a few exceptions, it hadn’t.

This is not to say that I am a critic of the practice of start-up teams chasing investment dollars from individuals. Capital coming from private individuals is still how many, if not most, start-ups initially get off the ground. Additionally, in a challenging funding environment like the one we currently inhabit, finding individuals ready and able to “top off” institutional investment rounds is often a key element in getting those rounds closed at all. Indeed, one of my more popular posts over the last couple years, The Rise of the Pledge Fund, focused upon the emergence of “fundless” or non-committed funds that were targeting seed stage deals and offering individual angels the administrative, post-investment supervisory and deal flow benefits of a traditional venture fund without some of the drawbacks of being in a committed fund. On balance, I was a fan.