Over the next few days all the great results and accounts of our recent National Angel Summit will be provided in this blog and in our e-newsletter. For starters, here are links to our keynote speakers’ slide presentations for your further consideration:

Infosys co-founder and chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy sold company shares worth around US$37mn to set up a venture capital fund for incubating Indian start-ups. Murthy will use the money as seed capital for a venture capital fund which he plans to set up in India. A statement issued by Infosys said that the proposed venture capital fund would encourage and support young entrepreneurs having brilliant business ideas. "The fund will primarily invest in India and may, on a case-to-case basis, consider investing overseas," Infosys said. In a statement issued to the stock exchanges on Thursday, Infosys said that Murthy had sold eight lakh shares, some 0.13% of the company's equity capital, on October 21 and October 22, raising around Rs1.74bn. After the transactions, Murthy holds 2.38mn shares in Infosys.

Volkswagen is taking great strides in making the roads safer and remove the dangerous fun from driving by developing fully autonomous vehicles. I had a chance to talk to Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, director of the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) about the future of the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) at Stanford University and how the technology developed there is being integrated into Volkswagen Group vehicles. You may be able to buy a real-life K.I.T.T before you know it. It probably won’t be a Pontiac though.

You may recall that Volkswagen was the first team to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 by having a fully autonomous Volkswagen Touareg SUV (his name was Stanley, btw) drive 132 miles through the Mojave Desert. Then for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a VW Passat Wagon took second place behind Tartan Racing team from Carnegie Mellon University in a 60 mile urban course. But those two challenges are nothing compared to what’s on tap for next year: Pikes Peak in an autonomous Audi TT-S.

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner:

The VC gender gap - Are VCs sexist? – The Venture Capital game is a boy’s club. Jeff Bussgang, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, would know as he sees it every day – which caused him to wonder: Is the VC world one that actively discourages women?...

Capturing national attention for initiating successful programs to sustain the nation's position as a global leader for innovation and competitiveness, six organizations were named recipients of SSTI's 2009 Excellence in TBED Award. The third annual awards follow a nationwide competition recognizing outstanding achievements in tech-based economic development (TBED) emphasizing impact, strategic value and replicability.

"The impressive stories behind each of these six initiatives illustrate how strategic TBED investments work to promote regional growth through science and innovation," said Dan Berglund, SSTI President and CEO. "These organizations serve as best practice models in the field for their demonstrated leadership and meaningful impact to state and regional economies."
Recipients were honored today during a ceremony at SSTI's 13th Annual Conference in Overland Park, KS, attended by top economic development professionals from across the nation. The following initiatives were selected to receive the Excellence in TBED Award for 2009:

NEW YORK — A theme is emerging from the flood of recent corporate earnings reports: Cost cuts are boosting profits.

Investors are cheering, but they shouldn't. Even in these tough times, more CEOs should be talking about how they are seeking out investments, developing new technologies and making acquisitions.

That's what will set their companies up for a stronger future.

Oct 23 (BusinessWire) – The Government’s has unveiled an important chunk of its slowly emerging innovation agenda today with the publication of proposals to radically simplify funding for scientific research by the Minister of Research, Science and Technology, Wayne Mapp.

“The changes we will deliver in the next six to nine months are arguably the most significant in 10 to 15 years” in science policy and will be a centre-piece of the 2010 Budget, Mapp told BusinessWire in an exclusive interview.

Bearing the heavy stamp, as well as the credibility, of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser, Professor Peter Gluckman from the University of Auckland’s Liggins Institute, the feedback paper proposes trimming to fewer, more strategic “priority areas” of RS&T investment. The proposals relate mainly to the funds administered by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, the Health Research Council and the Royal Society of New Zealand. These relate mainly to Crown Research Institute funding.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 40 percent of business was carried out by women, it said. Despite this significant contribution to the national economy, CDE said, those taking on larger companies were still few. "Although most of the barriers to enterprise development are not linked to gender, women are hampered by the issue of credibility when starting a business," CDE said. "Once on the right track, however, they are just as successful as their male colleagues." Female business managers needed to stand up to the challenge and be more assertive when facing their bank manager so as to secure loans. Women managers rarely had time to develop business-related networks within professional associations as they had to combine their professional life with running a home, it said. CDE said their criteria for success were linked to both their activities and their family, but their mobility was restricted by the contrast of the latter. "They often lack self-confidence and easily become disconcerted by male sarcasm, especially when they are just starting out," it said. A number of national and international initiatives have been put in place to help female entrepreneurs. The World Association of Women Entrepreneurs enables them to meet their peers on a global scale and to form partnerships. The CDE said associations bringing together female business managers were being set up at the local level while professional associations now understood they had to absorb women entrepreneurs. The CDE is an organ of the ACP states and the EU in the framework of the Cotonou Agreement. It forms part of the general system of support the European Commission created for promoting the private sector and thus helping to combat poverty. ' New Ziana.

A new innovation report by Grant Thornton International (GT), a consulting and advisory firm, examined the thoughts and attitudes of business executives globally towards innovation. The report is based on a survey conducted by the renowned Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

In the GT 2009 report, the role of customers, along with the attitude of companies to their customers, emerges as a defining characteristic. "No longer simply passive recipients of goods and services, customers now help to shape the future of their own consumption." They are now the leading source of innovations globally (41 per cent), more important than anything inside companies, including research and development.

In the previous decades, most large corporations have practiced glocalization: developing products in rich countries, then distributing them around the world, adapting the products slightly for different local markets.

According to Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan, these days of glocalization may be drawing to a close. He wrote in the recent Harvard Business Review article, “How GE is Disrupting Itself“:

President Barack Obama said the U.S. must be a leader in alternative energy innovation to ensure continued economic growth and national security and to confront the peril of climate change.

Obama, speaking Friday to students and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said worldwide energy supplies are getting scarcer while demand continues to grow. He urged them to extend the U.S. legacy of innovation to meet that challenge and called on Congress to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

Inventors Digest magazine selected the four winners of its national and Carolinas youth innovation essay contests, after evaluating some 400 submissions from across the country.

The contests, part of National Inventors Month last August, sought essays that best articulated what technology, tool, product or service would shape our lives in 2059.

Winners of the national contests each will receive laptop computers, a year’s subscription to Inventors Digest, their essays published in the December 2009 issue of the magazine and on this Web site, a possible appearance on the Emmy award-winning television series Everyday Edisons, a T-shirt and brain-teaser game. Winners of the Carolinas regional contests each will receive iPods courtesy of the Charlotte Observer and Charlotteobserver.com, and other prizes. Congratulations to:

A consortium of Irish executives who hold senior roles in some of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious technology firms are building an all-island US$100-million venture capital fund to ensure Ireland achieves breakthrough success stories.

The Irish Technology Leaders Group (ITLG) is a group of Irish and American senior executives in Silicon Valley who are committed to ensuring that Ireland remains not only attractive for mobile investment by US technology giants but also that Irish entrepreneurs can grow global businesses.

Are you an entrepreneur, engineer, researcher, business person, developer, university student or professor, with an idea or project that has the potential to become a disruptive technology or innovation? Do you see this project as potentially powerful, when targeted at an existing, or emerging, market? Have you developed a business plan or mission statement, and begun to build a successful team?

Gov. Rick Perry today credited the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF) with helping strengthen Texas’ economy by attracting innovative companies, research dollars and jobs to the state. The governor spoke at the Gulf Coast Innovation Conference and Showcase, where he announced ETF investments in three Texas companies.

“Since its inception, the ETF has galvanized the research environment in our state by harnessing Texans’ amazing ideas and encouraging even greater efforts to inquire, innovate and invest,” Gov. Perry said. “These investments make a difference not only by creating cures for diseases, therapies for afflictions and technologies that make life easier, but also by growing our economy and creating jobs that allow Texans to earn a living and support their families.”

The State Science and Technology Institute (SSTI) announced the winners of its 2009 tech-based economic development awards.

The SSTI gave awards in six separate categories to nonprofits that initiated successful programs to sustain the nation’s position as a global leader for innovation and competitiveness at a ceremony in Overland Park, Kansas. Values emphasized included impact, strategic value and ability to replicate.

Noted management consultant Peter Drucker used to say that entrepreneurship is the exclusive province of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs see problems others do not and find novel solutions. Someone close to a particular problem is the most apt entrepreneur, and in community college education the two people closest to the challenges that get in the way of success are faculty members and students.

According to these two men, it takes more than smarts to be an entrepreneur. You must be able to deal with pressure. They also mention a new book they will be writing together titled, “The Midas Touch”.

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Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

A new study by the Center for an Urban Future finds that New York City’s leading universities and scientific research centers have not become catalysts for entrepreneurship and local economic development the way similar institutions have in other regions.

The report argues that this is a huge missed opportunity for New York, given the need to diversify the economy and create new engines of job growth. The study details why New York is falling short, showing that university leaders have not done enough to support start-up ventures.