I [chrisjhorn] spoke this morning at the Irish Universities Association event on corporate governance.   The main theme of my presentation was the dangers inherent in poor stewardship of intellectual property and the processes therein.  This in turn is one major reason for the urgent need for a national intellectual property protocol.

Innovation is riskful.

Failure is an anathema. We have had outrageous failures in our banks, our health system, the Roman Catholic Church, in corporate governance, in public procurement and in regulatory oversight. Failure is devastating and unacceptable when a priori we have no reason to expect any deficiency. Failure may however be acceptable, if perhaps disappointing, when we know in advance that a venture may fail. For example, we accept failure in sport is because we cannot reasonably expect perpetual success.

The saving of Luton and indeed of Britain, (restoring our 'Great' prefix) would be the New Technology Economic Model, a 'model' which has been identified around the world with USA, Canada and Malaysia taking a keen interest. The basic principle is the use of technological innovation to drive the economy. Today, the US has an economic stimulus package in basic R&D, biomedical research facilities and essential broadband infrastructure as a response to their economic environment. A major research university can provide a huge economic boost to a regional economy with the University of Calgary (Canada) benefiting Alberta economy about $50 million per year circa 1994, including faculty and professional staff knowledge transfer. Spin-off companies commercialise intellectual property from university laboratories and are significant drivers of innovation appearing to effectively transfer technology out of universities, leading to job and wealth creation. However to contribute to economic growth, they must survive and succeed. Canada reports over 80% of their spin-off companies are still in business five years from start-up.

It is generally recognized that developed countries are moving to economies based on commercialising intellectual property and other intangible assets. In these new economies, concepts such as patents, copyrights, customer relationships, brand value, unique institutional designs, the value of future products and services and their structural capital (culture, systems and processes) are critically important to a region’s businesses. Economic performance is determined by a region’s effectiveness in using its comparative advantages to create and expand knowledge assets and convert them into economic value.

What is the state of the planet in 2010? The Economist, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Ericsson held a conference last week in an attempt to answer that question. Climate change showed up in each of the four sessions, which covered poverty, economic recovery, and international systems as well. What were the experts talking about?

Three main themes emerged from the panels. They included the need to communicate better with the public about the effects and science of climate change, region-specific clean energy technology, and how to craft an effective global climate treaty.

Communicating Climate Science

The first panel of the day at the State of the Planet was devoted exclusively to climate change. It featured Mark Cane and Wallace Broecker, two climate scientists from Columbia University as well as panels in New Delhi and Beijing. Mr. Cane first brought up the challenge of communicating climate research. He stated that scientists are "not the right people" to convey messages about scientific findings and their policy applications.

Raising money for your start-up is difficult. There are few people that are willing to invest their money in someone else’s relatively-unproven business, but even if you have those people, fewer businesses have the right characteristics to be financed through an external capital raise. HispanicBusiness.com featured an article that discussed Shark Tank, it’s use as an investing/entrepreneurship educational tool, and what many professors thought of the show and it’s hopeful business-owners that have appeared on it.

The Shark Tank is actually a U.S.-spin off of popular British television show Dragons’ Den. Most of the academics said that Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank are useful educational tools. Part of the programs’ benefit comes from having a celebrity deliver a message. As Sarah Dodd of Alba Business School puts it: “Three minutes with Dragon Theo Paphitis convinces my students far more than three hours of me saying the same things.”

Check out what HispanicBusiness had to say about our Shark Tank Entrepeneurs in their article below:

Two weeks from now in Deloitte's downtown Toronto office towers, 14 Canadian technology entrepreneurs will go on a dream date of sorts, hoping to hook up with eight Boston-based venture capitalists flying in for the day to scope out the talent.

The Bostonians have money to spend and "a propensity to invest in Canada" - welcome news to emerging Canadian tech companies frustrated by the prolonged slump in domestic venture capital activity, said charted accountant John Ruffolo, national leader of Deloitte's technology practice and an organizer of the invitation-only event.

The coming "mini venture fair" is a first for Deloitte in Canada and a sign of the times, said Mr. Ruffolo, who also plans to lead a delegation of Canadian tech firms to meet venture capitalists in California's Silicon Valley later this year.

Disruptive innovation seems to have bypassed the health care industry.

Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen’s theory predicts that entrenched companies, products and services are often “disrupted” from below by competitors who are able to meet the needs of most current customers with products that do less (but just enough) and are much, much cheaper.

So why has health care been on this rampant march of incredibly escalating costs that seem impervious to competing forces? Where are the disruptive innovators?

Nearly every tech-focused venture capital firm in the Seattle area is tossing financial support behind TechStars, a "startup boot camp" of sorts which plans to accept its first 10 enrollees this fall. TechStars -- already established in Boston and Boulder -- has raised $450,000 in Seattle from more than 15 venture capital firms and angel investors.

About half of those funds will be used for operations of the Seattle branch, while the other half will go to direct investments in the companies accepted into the program, said Andy Sack, a Seattle angel investor who is helping to organize TechStars Seattle. Sack, who also runs the angel firm Founder's Co-op, said Seattle is unique in the way the entire investment community has rallied to support the idea.

Many of us are "burned out" from all the health care legislative battles on the hill as well as the non-stop media analysis. Among what appeared to be out of control unsupervised children fighting in our government sandbox, there was one group of heroes working above and beyond the call of duty.

These heroes are made up of House & Senate staffers that work in the "well" and on the floor of the House & Senate, from clerks to secretaries, stenographers to parliamentarians. Under the strain of all those extra hours, both parties scheming to employ unusual tactics to outsmart each other, these heroic staffers took on everything that was thrown at them, and never flinched.

Conversely in the Senate session that stretched past 2:00am on Thursday, March 25, (with well over 20 roll call votes) most of the senators resembled Wile Coyote after a failed attempt on the Roadrunner. At the end of the session, President pro tempore Al Franken (D-MN) looked and sounded more like he was part of a failed Saturday Night Live skit than an actual session of congress! Nevertheless the staffers hardly missed a beat. Kudos to them for a great job.

"I am here to watch you." So began anthropologist Arpita Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing to finish work on the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC carries the hopes of generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach energies never before achieved in a collider and — possibly — to produce a zoo of particles new to science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes explode.

"The LHC allows a unique sociological study of how an experiment develops in real time: how scientists form opinions, make technical decisions and circulate knowledge in such a big project," says Arianna Borrelli, a particle physicist and philosopher of physics at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

Another Earth Hour has passed by this weekend. Electrical systems across the globe were shut down to observe, for an hour, that energy is precious. In this moment, we also acknowledge that as humanity, we have the power to do better for ourselves. One great thing about Earth Hour is the photos. If you haven't yet, check out the brilliant photo essay at Boston.com on Earth Hour 2010.

If you haven't taken initiative to shut down your computer yet, read on to get a refresher on how better computing resource utilization creates a better world.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it is investing $37.5 million in joint research initiatives with organizations in China over the next five years. After this sum is matched by private organizations, about $75 million will go toward U.S. efforts to improve energy efficiency, clean coal technologies, carbon sequestration and green vehicles.

Specifically, the money will be used to construct a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, which will have branches in both countries. China will kick in another $75 million to develop technologies it can use to cut carbon emissions and become more energy efficient. With electric cars rolling out en masse in both countries in the next two years, this kind of research is more critical than ever.

An environmental group pushing the solar power industry to adopt best practices for “greener” manufacturing has released a scorecard showing which companies rated highest on solar panel recycling and other environmental efforts.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), a nonprofit based in San Jose, Calif., released its SolarScorecard — the first of what it plans to make an annual survey. The report lists 24 leading makers of photovoltaic (PV) solar modules and one maker of solar cells supplied to module makers. While only 14 companies responded to the survey, they represent a 24 percent share of the market for solar modules.

The companies were rated on a scale of 1 to 100 based on whether they take back solar modules they’ve sold at the end of their life for recycling, whether they seek to reduce the use of environmentally hazardous materials in making solar panels, whether they monitor the green practices of their supply chain partners, and how transparent they are in disclosing their own manufacturing practices.

So you want to be the next big shot entrepreneur to come up with an idea that will change the world, but can't seem to come up with that golden ticket of an idea? Well perhaps you need to look no further than the world of art for inspiration. While looking through Hacker News posts, I stumbled across an illustrated SlideShare presentation from San Francisco-based cartoonist Betsy Streeter that suggests ways artists can unleash their "creative beasts" hiding within - an interesting approach to creativity that aspiring entrepreneurs can also take advantage of.

According to Streeter, the best way to get started is to first "give it permission to come out and play" by throwing away rules and judgements. For artists this means just free drawing at letting whatever comes to mind make its way onto the paper; for entrepreneurs, this means when you are brainstorming, don't throw any ideas away - everything and anything is free game, including the "impossible".

The $50 million angel tax credit passed by the Minnesota legislature Monday will no doubt provide much needed early stage capital for young start-ups. But the law’s biggest benefit may not be dollars and cents but rather how outsiders see Minnesota and how Minnesota sees itself.

By passing the bill quickly in the legislative year and with such overwhelming bipartisan support in the face of a $2 billion budget gap, lawmakers have instantly established Minnesota as a credible place to innovate and embrace risk, investors and entrepreneurs say. That’s quite a departure from the traditional rap on Minnesota, a high tax state whose 19 Fortune 500 companies had made its residents and leaders complacent and timid.

“People always whispered about these things but were too scared to say anything,” said Peter Bianco, director of life science business development for Nilan Johnson Lewis in Minneapolis. The angel credit will spark “an awakening that changes people’s attitudes and help us get out of this funk.”

In mid-February, about a month after a massive earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a wound-care team from Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston traveled to the devastated capital. The team's task was to help care for scores of patients suffering from the large open wounds that accompany amputations, crushed limbs, and other injuries. Among the team was MIT graduate student Danielle Zurovcik, who arrived ready to test a device she had developed as part of her thesis research--a cheap and portable version of the negative-pressure devices currently used to speed wound healing in hospitals.

Zurovcik and her collaborators hope the device, which costs about $3, will provide a way to improve care for patients after the emergency phase of relief efforts, including life- and limb-saving surgeries, has ended. Even after many of the emergency medical teams leave the disaster zone, the dangers of chronic wounds remain high.

"My experience in Haiti and other major earthquakes is that after the acute medical response, such as amputating limbs and setting fractures, the major disease burden is wounds," says Robert Riviello, a trauma surgeon at Brigham and Women's, and Zurovcik's collaborator. Negative-pressure therapy decreases the need to change wound dressings from one to three times per day to once every few days, a major benefit when medical staff is in short supply.

Remember the satisfying sizzle of ants under a magnifying glass? No? Is that just me, then? Whatever, haters.

ANYway, the same science responsible for frying ants is at work on a larger scale in this clip from James May's "Big Ideas" series. What you've got here is a solar furnace, a carefully arranged array of mirrors that catches heat from the sun and reflects it, focusing it to point—effectively taking a lot of disparate, comfy sunbeams and gathering them together in a tight bundle. By their powers combined, the reflected beam can reach temperatures of 3,500 °C (6,330 °F). Watch in wonder and terror as the beam turns a hot dog to char and melts steel.

Venture capitalists have called for the creation of a Green Investment Bank (GIB) to accelerate private sector investment in support of the UK’s 2020 and 2050 low carbon, renewable energy and energy security targets.

A paper written by the British Venture Capital Association, published this week says that creating a low carbon economy will entail vast investment. For a start, a minimum £200 billion needs to be invested in power generation and grid investment to 2020; more money will be required to back technologies and companies in energy efficiency, smart grid and new forms of transport and power generation.

The paper proposes the primary objectives and operating principles of a GIB, and argues that action is needed quickly.

Congress this week takes important steps toward investing in applied innovation. We have known for decades, of course, that federal support for research and development can lead to scientific discoveries and new technologies that can solve some of the country’s most pressing problems. But as House members hear testimony tomorrow from innovation experts and consider a batch of bills that will fund important research at the Department of Energy on Thursday, they will have the opportunity to embrace a new approach to innovation championed by the Obama administration.

These new policies ensure that scientists, engineers, and taxpayers alike get the most out of those federal investments in basic research and development by taking what researchers know about the process of moving ideas from the lab to the market and linking universities, businesses, and the government in an effort to grow regional economies. The first steps begin on Wednesday, when the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation of the House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on “Supporting Innovation in the 21st Century Economy.” Then on Thursday, the full committee will markup bills authorizing the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, R&D programs within the DOE Office of Science, and DOE’s Energy Innovation Hubs program.

BB pal Orli Cotel of Sierra Club tells me, "We are offering this ridiculous opportunity that just might be the best internship on earth, where you get paid to travel all over the country as the Sierra Club's youth outdoors ambassador, host a videoblog about helping to get young people outside, and get a bonus $2000 worth of free gear from The North Face." Deadline to apply is March 31. Hey Orli, does a 40-year-old still count as "youth"? Here's the gig:

• Travel around the country hiking, rafting, and enjoying the outdoors with the Sierra Club's youth programs
• Create an awesome video blog that documents the experience

The startup community in Philadelphia is abuzz over a provision in Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) draft financial reform bill that could impose significant costs and uncertainties on angel investing.

Angel investors are wealthy individuals who purchase equity or convertible debt securities to contribute much-needed seed capital to startup businesses. Angel investors are different from venture capitalists (VC’s) in that they are individuals rather than professionally managed investment funds and typically invest much smaller sums of money (usually a couple of million dollars or less) than would interest VC’s. (Angels are also less demanding in terms of the economic and participatory rights of ownership, such as liquidation preferences, vesting of entrepreneurs’ equity stakes, seats on the board, etc.) With VC funding virtually non-existent due to the Great Recession, angel investments are the lifeblood for many struggling startups.

Sales of securities to wealthy angel investors normally come under the private placement exemptions to the Securities Act of 1933, which as a general matter requires filing of a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prior to sale (a costly and onerous process). Under the safe harbor granted in Rule 506 of the SEC’s Regulation D (give yourself a pinch if your eyes start to glaze over at this point!), a company can sell securities in a private placement (i.e., without a general solicitation) to accredited investors and certain sophisticated non-accredited investors without filing a registration statement. Compliance with Rule 506 also enables the company to take advantage of exemptions from state securities laws (also known as “blue sky laws”), which otherwise can impose requirements in addition to those in the federal securities laws.