Last week I attended the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Summit, hosted by the Council on Competitiveness in Washington DC.  During the Summit, the Council released a comprehensive national manufacturing strategy to create a more robust and globally competitive industrial base. In the report, the Council states “American manufacturing is either in steep decline, doing reasonably well or poised to grow.”

Depending on your perspective and the data you use, there is some truth in each view. But what does this mean for our future?  How can U.S. manufacturing continue to be competitive and relevant within the context of an ever changing, technology-driven, global economy?

Technology gurus have long lamented how hard it is for foreign talent to secure American visas and create start-ups here. As Congress spins its wheels with endless debate over immigration, an ambitious venture based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is trying to chart a more productive course aboard a 600-foot boat, or possibly a barge.

That’s the idea behind Blueseed, which aims to create a visa-free, floating incubator for international entrepreneurs off the California coast near Silicon Valley.

I am pleased (a gross understatement) to inform you that SBIR HAS NOW BEEN REAUTHORIZED for a period of 6 years, ending September 30, 2017, and that includes STTR, and what was the Commercialization Pilot Program (CPP), now to be known as the Commercialization Readiness Program (CRP).

This was all done under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) HR.1540. All that's left is for the President to sign the bill into law, and he has said he would.

There are many changes and additions to these programs, many you will probably like, some, perhaps "not so much. What you won't read in press releases or the main stream press is that the SBIR program was a stone's throw from being laid to rest.

SheerWind is a Chaska, Minnesota-based start-up with a wind power generator concept that looks nothing like any wind turbine you have ever seen. The venture’s “Invelox” technology recently won the 2011 CleanTech Open’s Sustainability Award for the North Central Region. SheerWind’s Founder and CEO, Dr. Daryoush Allaei, has 25 years of research and development experience, including leading projects funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy (DOE).

Interestingly, his technical expertise is not in wind power, or even renewable energy, but in systems dynamics–specifically, noise and vibration. He first developed the idea for Invelox in late 2008, while working on a proposal for a project to monitor wind turbine vibration, in response to a DOE solicitation.

Killer read: The slow death of the printed book is claiming more and more victims. First, big chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders wiped out the independent corner bookshop. Now the megastores face their own adapt-or-die agenda with the arrival of e-books. Initially rejected as an inferior way to read, consumer e-books are suddenly soaring in sales, which are expected to hit $2 billion next year. Booksellers including Amazon have launched e-readers like the Kindle Fire shown above, but the damage isn’t over. Borders recently declared bankruptcy, and Barnes & Noble, despite winning 26 percent of the e-book market with its Nook e-reader, is losing money too.

Attention holiday shoppers! New documents reveal that Santa Claus recently obtained his Ph.D. in child psychology. Disguised as a scruffy graduate student in worn-out jeans, he managed to conceal his identity despite his foot-long white beard and obsession with red velvet jackets.

His dissertation, titled, "Whence Play?: Why Children Need More," offered an eyewitness report on the decline of play in the last quarter- century. Playtime has dropped from 40 percent of children's time in 1987 to a mere 25 percent by 1997. In the last decade alone, children have lost eight hours of playtime per week, and many schools have dropped recess. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a dire report urging families to allow their children to play with real toys -- blocks, dolls, and jump ropes. Dr. Santa and other experts in child development understand that real educational toys like board games (an easy way to learn math), construction toys (grist for learning about space and physics), and art supplies (a boon to creative thinking and problem solving) are being passed over for toys imprinted with the words "educational" and "electronic." "There is little evidence that toys claiming to be educational really are," Dr. Santa asserted as he cited a report by the Kaiser Foundation as well as a study by researchers at the University of Washington indicating that toddlers who watch so-called "educational" videos have a poorer vocabulary than their peers. "The demise of playtime in children's lives is equivalent to the crisis in global warming," they wrote.

According to the most commonly accepted definition, open innovation is the use of both internal and external knowledge to fuel innovation, and both internal and external paths to commercialize new products and business models (Chesbrough 2003). Businesses adopting open innovation use both external and internal ideas to create value: internal ideas can be taken to market through external channels and ideas can start from outside the firm and be taken inside.

Some industries have been adopting open innovation models for a long time -although definition might have been different- through networks of partnerships and alliances, aimed at cooperating along the value chain. As the concept has gained momentum in recent years, it is often studied supposing a clear-cut dichotomy between closed and open approaches, while many industries, such as automotive, pharma IT and software, are in transition. Similarly, different models of open innovation can be found in the practice of companies as regard the number and types of partners, the kind of governance of the innovation networks, the degree of integration and the kind of support they seek from innovation intermediaries.

Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.

“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”

As Facebook prepares for a much-anticipated public offering, the company is eager to show off its momentum by building on its huge membership: more than 800 million active users around the world, Facebook says, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.

I recently returned from Paris where I had the honor of speaking to 3,000 people who attended LeWeb, a conference notable for high-profile technology leaders.  In addition to innovators like fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, speakers included the leaders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Virgin Galactic, and many other brands transforming our world.  Unless they were on a panel, speakers were given approximately 20 to 25 minutes to deliver their presentations.  I think that’s a good amount of time for most presentations.  Twenty minutes is long enough to expand on key points but short enough to keep the audience’s attention.  John F. Kennedy inspired a nation in 18 minutes.  If you need much more time to get your point across, you need to edit!

In mid-March, cutting edge creative business minds in the arts, biosciences, digital media, and sustainability fields will meet in New Orleans for a program that merges the city’s character with fresh and inventive entrepreneurship. Twenty five individuals will be selected for an all expenses trip – that includes airfare, transportation, meals, and room and board – that will provide them with special access to New Orleans Entrepreneur Week events, which includes the opportunity to meet with leaders in respected industries as well as an immersion in the local richness of New Orleans’s people and culture. Applications are open through this Friday, December 16, at benolabound.com.

Why New Orleans?

Both Forbes and Inc. magazines have pointed to the city as an emerging mecca for startups, and NOLAbound is intent on showcasing not only the ideas and people coming to this event, but New Orleans itself, as the city rebuilds and provides ample opportunities for merging tradition with innovation.

In 2000, three African undergraduates at MIT, inspired by their experience with MIT’s LeaderShape leadership training program, founded an organization whose goal was to give students in the developing world the programming skills to create locally relevant e-commerce applications. After graduating that spring, two of the students — Paul Njoroge and Martin Mbaya — returned to their native Kenya, along with a fellow alumnus and a graduate student in linguistics, to conduct a six-week course on Java and Linux for 45 undergraduates at Nairobi’s Strathmore University.

First things first – your startup needs a name! This may seem a silly and frivolous task, but it may be the most important decision you make. The name of your business has a tremendous impact on how customers and investors view you, and in today’s small world, it’s a world-wide decision.

Please don’t send me any more business plans with TBD or NewCo in the title position. Right or wrong, the name you choose, or don’t choose, speaks volumes about your business savvy and understanding of the world you are about to enter. Here are some key things I look for in the name, with some help from Alex Frankel and others:

Unique and unforgettable. In the trade, this is called “stickiness.” But the issue of stickiness turns out to be kind of, well, sticky. Every company wants a name that stands out from the crowd, a catchy handle that will remain fresh and memorable over time. That’s a challenge because naming trends change, often year by year, making timeless names hard to find (remember the dot.coms).

A deal to reauthorize the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, which were set to expire this Friday, is close to being approved, according to the House Small Business Committee. The two popular programs each set aside government research and development money for small businesses to create and commercialize technology innovations that benefit federal agencies.

The agreement would gradually increase the annual set asides for the programs and extend them through Sept. 2017. Congress could approve it this week and tack it onto the fiscal 2012 defense budget bill.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

There is no hard and fast rule for working out the value of a business. Some industries base the value on the turnover, such as professional practices like accountants, while others have established valuation methods that are peculiar to their industry, such as newsagents.

Greg Cangialosi, a Baltimore entrepreneur who sold his email marketing company this year after a 10-year success streak, is hoping to help jump-start the next big startups in Baltimore.

Cangialosi is teaming up with Sean Lane, chief executive of BTS Corp., a fast-growing software company in Locust Point, to launch what they're calling a hybrid accelerator. Their goal: Make small investments in several startups, germinate their own ideas, and help nurture the city's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

"We want to bring in bright people who are running companies, to help give them a shot in the arm," Cangialosi said.

Vision is the ability to plan for the future based on everything that you have learned so far. But if you don’t know what you want, then it’s hard to plan for it — regardless of intellect or ability.

What do you want?  We’re facing the new year, again. And I can’t help but wonder – are you any closer to that dream?

Simple Questions

• Did you hire the people you thought you needed? Did you train or retrain the team that you already have?

Meetings, travel, Le Web and pitches from countless startups have left me exhausted. I have hardly slept for nearly a week. I am tired and a little irritated and in need of a pick-me-up. An espresso shot isn’t enough. What I need is a conversation that would sharpen my senses dulled by repetitiveness of ideas and marginality of ambition.

And in the nick of time (pun intended), enter Nick D’Aloisio — founder and for now chief executive officer of a London-based company, Summly. (Download the app) On paper, it is yet another start-up with yet another iPhoneapp. Summly essentially looks at the content of a web page and creates a quick summary of that web page, then formats it nicely for the iPhone screen.

As long as most voters avoid reading the likes of Bloomberg and Business Insider, then life science startups – and, more directly, the investors enriched by the good ones – are going to be OK.

But coming under increasing attack from millionaires, billionaires and media types is the concept that rich people and entrepreneurs create jobs.

I participated in a panel last week at the IMPACT 2011 conference in Philadelphia. The panel was all about the technology exit environment and VC’s perspective on how their companies are getting to their desired exits.

The one key point I tried to drill into the audience was about the need to proactively architect your exit.  There are several reasons why I stressed this point:

1. “Companies with great exits are bought, not sold.”

Which means that you need to find a way to get a strategic buyer to notice your company, to see the opportunity in acquiring it, to want your company bad enough, and to make a great offer.  It takes a lot to get an acquirer to that point. And you can’t bank on building one relationship. You need to build the relationship with several potential acquirers in order to even hope of landing one.  These types of relationships take 12-18 months to build. Unless, that is, you get lucky. You could build something that is so obvious and strategic, that you wouldn’t have to lift a finger to pursue an acquisition.  The rest of us have to work a bit harder than that.

If you you think you want to be a CEO, what should you do?

I was talking to a former CEO who had a very successful exit almost two years ago. This a good friend who I have known for over 20 years now. I first met him when I interviewed him to take my job when I was being promoted in 1990 at Oracle.

He worked for me for seven years before he left to take his first role outside of Oracle as a president of a startup. I enjoyed working with him, mentoring him and learning as much from him as he learned from me. We have stayed close professionally and personally, as we both enjoy the outdoors.