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."

On May 19-21, the leaders of ICF's Top Seven Intelligent Communities will share success stories from around the world in creating and retaining the talent that powers an innovation economy.  At the annual Building the Broadband Economy summit in New York City, you will hear from speakers including Mayor J.M.L.N. Mikkers of Veldhoven in the Eindhoven region of the Netherlands; Dana McDaniel, Deputy City Manager of Dublin, Ohio, USA; Mayor Larry O'Brien of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; and Mike Galloway, Director of City Development, Dundee, Scotland, UK. 

In 2010, the BBE summit theme is about talent and how to keep it.  In today's Broadband Economy, communities must continually raise the skill levels of citizens at all ages and in all walks of life.  But investments in education pay no dividends to the community if the people with new skills cannot find desirable and challenging work in the local economy.  You will hear from Smart21 and Top Seven Intelligent Community leaders who have grappled with this challenge and developed innovative strategies to close the education "last mile."

An exclusive, invitational event produced by the Intelligent Community Forum and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the summit attracts attendees from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.  It is a unique opportunity to learn from the world’s most dynamic communities how to use information and communications technology to build prosperous, inclusive and sustainable communities.  

The audience for BBE 2009 is limited to 300 attendees in order to provide the right environment to share knowledge and build relationships.  Attendance is principally by invitation but a limited number of paid registrations are also available for Innovation America subscribers at a 20% discount. (Register under VIP Registration at www.icfsummit.com using VIP Code PTR2010.) Registration is now open. 

Intelligent Community Forum
www.intelligentcommunity.org    

Attention non-profit and public sector organizations – a few weeks ago, InnoCentive announced a program just for you.  We’ve had some good response to this program so far, but we think there are more organizations in need that haven’t heard about it yet, and our goal is to help as many people as possible.  So here it is again – please spread the word.

Throughout 2010, InnoCentive will waive its typical fee for posting and managing a single Challenge for selected non-profit and public sector organizations.

Participating organizations have the same access as our corporate Seekers to InnoCentive’s expert services and diverse international network of 200,000+ Solvers – scientists, inventors, engineers, researchers, and innovators from all walks of life – who can help you solve key challenges facing your organization and your community.

The Islamic & Middle Eastern VC Market Despite the fact that there are literally millions of Muslim entrepreneurs in both developed and developing nations looking for investment capital for their new start-up ventures, the realm of the Islamic venture capitalist remains in an evolutionary state. Nonetheless, the untapped potential for Islamic venture capital remains huge. Moreover, the Islamic world has more than its fair share of investors with high-end net worth looking to invest in potentially lucrative deals. Thus, the convergence of both a ‘need’ and a ’supply’ invariably lead to the creation of a new product, and this is equally so in the case of purely Islamic venture capital.

The core to any proposed Islamic financing transaction is that Shariah (Islamic law) prohibits interest-based lending. Moreover, Shariah further prohibits investments in certain activities which are seen as being in violation of Islam, such as gambling.

However, in essence, the mechanisms of venture capital do not provide for interest-bearing lending. Rather, at the core of any venture capital funding is an agreement to share in the risks of the business venture in return for the profits derived from such business venture.

WASHINGTON, April 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, today sent a letter to Senate colleagues requesting support of several measures aimed at creating jobs and spurring small business growth. Sen. Landrieu is requesting that the proposals be included in the next jobs bill to be considered by the Senate.

"As Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I am writing to ask for your support on a package of small business measures that I would like to see become a part of any upcoming jobs bills in the Senate," Sen. Landrieu said in the letter. "Most of these proposals have passed by a large bipartisan margin out of the Committee, and for a modest amount all of these measures will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2010. These proposals would make key improvements to the U.S. Small Business Administration's (SBA) lending, exporting, contracting, innovation and business counseling programs."

Jim Horan has only been on the job for three-plus months as CEO of Montgomery County-based Y-Carbon, but the swirl of nanotechnology and clean energy activity that has captured the attention of the state and nation has made him one of the Delaware Valley’s busiest businessmen.

The latest for Y-Carbon, which is developing nanotech for breakthrough performance in fields of energy, is a Department of Energy Small Business Innovation Research phase 1 grant for $149,938. The federal stimulus funding has allowed the company, which is a portfolio company of both the Pennsylvania NanoMaterials Commercialization Center and The Nanotechnology Institute of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, to increase its staff by three to nine and expand the business from research to manufacturing.

San Diego Innovation Economy Doubles Start-up Rate and VC Funding -

By: Fred Patterson – The SBIR Coach® (www.SBIRcoach.com)

The Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) got a small boost last week with the long-promised raising of the grant program’s funding caps by the SBA.  First proposed back in 2008, and supported by everyone associated with the program, the action has been held up with the anticipation of enactment of a comprehensive SBIR reauthorization bill.  With passage of that legislation stalled by a refusal of the House Small Business Committee to negotiate with the Senate, the SBA evidently decided not to wait any longer, asserted some long awaited leadership, and took independent action. 

[Effective March 30th, SBIR Phase I award amounts may be as much as $150K (up 50%), Phase IIs as much as $1M (up 33%).  STTR awards stay the same for now.  They’re covered by a different law, but changes are expected there soon as well.]

These increases, while a welcome boost to the small businesses who apply for these seed funds, don’t solve the biggest problem faced by SBIR funded companies – how to get their innovative technology transitioned into end use – aka commercialization, the mythical and elusive Phase III. 

The original intent of SBIR was that the government would provide the seed funding for development of dual-use potential technology to a working prototype (proof of concept) and the private sector would then take over the funding and help take the resulting products to eagerly awaiting markets.  It hasn’t worked quite as anticipated.

Rarely can a company take the work product coming off a Phase II and effect a quick transition to end use.  At that point they enter what’s known as the Valley of Death.  Whether it’s additional technical development work, system integration, packaging, supply chain building, configuration for manufacturing, or marketing and sales channel development, there’s money needed for getting from a prototype to a product that is market-ready.  Lots of money. 

A few weeks ago, we highlighted many of the cool startups that have popped up in New York City in recent years.

And now we turn to Silicon Valley.

Over the past few weeks, we've asked VCs, angel investors, entrepreneurs, and other tech journalists about their favorite up-and-coming Valley startups. We've written about many of these companies before, obviously, and we'll be writing about many of them again.