When discoveries from academic labs are developed into a blockbuster drug, universities often rake in big dollars from licensing revenue. With the translation of its life sciences research into commercial applications in mind, Harvard aims to put more financial muscle behind its 4-year-old Accelerator Fund, Xconomy's Greg Huang reports.

Huang got the scoop on Harvard's plans to raise $20 million to $30 million for the fund from the two bigwigs behind the effort: tech transfer legend Isaac Kohlberg, who serves as the Ivy League school's tech development head and senior associate provost, and Curtis Keith, the scientific chief of the Accelerator Fund and a co-founder of drug developer CombinatoRx (now called Zalicus). Kohlberg says the 5-year goal of the program is to have up to two drugs stemming from Harvard research enter clinical trials and for a start-up advancing Harvard technology to be in talks with a potential buyer.

We need innovators to restart the jobs engine. With their bold new ideas, entrepreneurs and next-generation leaders are our best hope for scaling high-growth businesses. If we want more jobs, we need more Steve Jobs.

But Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to get it. Old man Washington wages partisan war, disregarding his own house on fire with unemployment. Today only 58 percent of the population is working, the lowest number in nearly three decades. And 46 million Americans are on food stamps, a national record.

Luke Fishback is a smart guy. After graduating college with an engineering degree, he got a job at Lockheed Martin. But within a few years, he had had enough.

Why?

Well, Luke realized he was an entrepreneur at heart, and needed to start his own company. In fact, Luke had been an entrepreneur earlier in his life. When he was just 14 years old, he started Luke's Garbage Service, a waste disposal and recycling service for a rural community in Georgia.

So Luke started a company called PlotWatt. The company creates technology that helps people reduce their energy bills by providing customized money-saving recommendations.

But there was one thing Luke was missing: money. Luke needed money to build his team, develop his technology, and start marketing his company.

Fortunately Luke didn't follow the failed path that most entrepreneurs take; which is to try to secure millions of dollars in venture capital right away.

In the 1970s, with the backing of a Saudi prince, Georges Mougin proposed dragging icebergs from the North Atlantic to the drought-stricken shores of Africa.

Most experts laughed at him, and ever since, iceberg towing has been a mainstay of business opportunity scams and lore.

Well, it turns out that the “experts” were wrong. It is possible. And very feasible.

Cut to 2009 and French software firm Dassault Systemes, who thought maybe Mougin was on to something after all and contacted him to suggest modeling the whole idea on a computer. After applying 15 engineers to the problem, the team concluded that towing an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, could be done, and would take under five months, though it would cost nearly ten million dollars.

Duane Zobrist writing for Fast Company:

The struggling economy has turned up the volume of the voice inside the heads of potential business owners that says, “What do I have to lose?” The excuse of job security given by employees as the reason they never started a business has been disproved by the current recession. An untimely firing has awakened many to the fact that nothing is guaranteed, and loyalty doesn’t exist when it clashes with corporate profits. So instead of taking another job they can’t stand and may be pulled out from under them anyway, many are taking a leap into the entrepreneurial world.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is difficult for anyone, particularly when our smartphones buzz with each new email, no matter whether we’re on the way to the gym, in the grocery store, or relaxing at home. But the challenge can be exponentially harder for today’s entrepreneur. Starting a business requires a little insanity, to be sure, but you don’t want the lifestyle to send you over the edge.

So how do successful entrepreneurs stay sane while they prosper at work and at home? For me, finding balance boils down to taking it one day at a time, one step at a time, and always staying present in the moment while running and growing my business. Here are a few tips I like to incorporate into my daily routine:

There’s no doubt that if you can find a way to influence the top influencers in your industry, you are on your way to becoming an influencer yourself–in other words, finding your way into the secret club. But it’s not easy. Here are some tips for finding your way into the ranks of the top influencers in your niche.

Be Remarkable If you want to be remarkable, you have to do something remarkable. Look at all the influencers in your industry and you’ll see the same thing. These are people or businesses that have done something that makes a difference, or gets attention, or really makes a mark. You simply cannot become an influencer without doing something remarkable. Other influencers know what it took to get to their position, and they are looking for new members of the club who understand that they need to do the same thing. Unfortunately, doing something remarkable requires effort and a lot of hard work. If you can’t do that, you’re out before you were even considered. Get to work.

Over the last few weeks, six teams have been working out of Teens in Tech Labs HQ in Mountain View, CA building a product that they launched at the 2011 Teens in Tech Conference.

The incubator program lasted a little over eight weeks and was very hands on, in terms of mentor and advisor involvement. The Teens in Tech Incubator program came out of an idea that entrepreneurship doesn't have a start age — you can be an entrepreneur at any age. It was started by Daniel Brusilovsky a 19 year old serial entrepreneur.

Rarely do we find a company so committed to social innovation that it runs through every fibre of its commercial vein; I found one such company, Adlens Ltd. It produces Emergensee, self adjustable glasses for near-and far-sighted people. These glasses are easy to use and instant vision correction ideal for any emergency, as a replacement, to share among the family or in medical cases where temporary fluctuating vision exists. Adlens wants to provide its products to people in the developing world including those affected by emergency disaster situations, such as the recent earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand.

Imagine a small airstrip where single-seat planes head down the runway, get 100 feet into the air and crash back to Earth, joining a heap of wreckage that grows by the day.

You'd think this might discourage people deciding to become a pilot.

That's a snapshot of what the recent recession did to many small businesses in America, where beneath the wreckage of failed companies lies a collection of would-be entrepreneurs. Economic funk, poor sales, tight credit, competition from new entrepreneurs abroad—all either choked existing businesses or caused aspiring entrepreneurs to hunker down and not take the leap.

A 10 percent decline in the U.S. stock market over the past few weeks isn’t going to bolster the enthusiasm of venture capitalists or healthcare startup owners.

It’s all a matter of confidence. With weak sentiment coming out of Wall Street and Main Street, business investors are keeping their powder dry, and are largely refraining from making any big financial bets until the smoke clears.

For healthcare entrepreneurs looking for cash, that’s cold comfort. Entrepreneurs usually don’t have the luxury of waiting around for the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to come around, or for the unemployment rate to recede.

Academic institutions produced more startup companies as they commercialized their researchers' work in 2010 than they did in 2009, although some other forms of licensing activity decreased slightly, according to the preliminary results of an annual survey of the Association of University Technology Managers. The number of new U.S. patent applications filed by the institutions in the AUTM survey soared to 12,281 in in 2010, from 8,364 in 2009; the number of patents issued also rose, and licensed technologies and inventions at the surveyed institutions produced 651 startup companies in 2010, up from 596 in 2009. But the number of commercial products created stayed flat (657 vs. 658 in 2009) and the number of licenses executed dipped.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2011) — New York University neuroscientists have identified the parts of the brain we use to remember the timing of events within an episode. The study, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Science, enhances our understanding of how memories are processed and provides a potential roadmap for addressing memory-related afflictions.

Previous research has shown the brain's medial temporal lobe (MTL) has a significant role in declarative memory -- that is, memory of facts and events or episodes. Past studies have shown that damage to the MTL causes impairment in memory for the timing of events within an episode. More specifically, declarative memory is impaired in patients suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. However, little is known about how individual structures within the MTL remember information about "what happened when" within a particular episode, such as the order of the toasts at a wedding reception or what preceded a game-winning hit in a baseball game.

You’ve likely heard of the pharma patent cliff. But upcoming drug patent expiration dates are also threatening another sector: university technology transfer offices.

The University of Minnesota, which has spent years resuscitating its tech transfer prowess, is now among the institutions facing a patent cliff that will dry up revenue from commercialized research. Most of its tech transfer revenue over the last decade has come from the patents related to the Ziagen AIDS drug that will fully expire in 2013.

The tech transfer office will lose $6 million to $7 million annually after that drug patent expiration date passes, according to a panel of three experts commissioned to review the university’s Office for Technology Commercialization.

A new federal report on commercialization and technology transfer efforts from federal labs to the private sector shows inconsistent procedures, from licensing to payments to researchers and even measuring the success of programs.

Many of the report’s findings could have been written years ago, but despite efforts by many to streamline the process, barriers to technology transfer and commercialization remain, said Susannah Howieson, one of the report’s authors from the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which advises the White House and Congress on science policy issues.

The 177-page report, “Technology Transfer and Commercialization Landscape of the Federal Laboratories,” was prepared for the U.S. Department of Commerce. The first public discussion of its findings was held Thursday at the Shady Grove Innovation Center business incubator in Rockville.

1. "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." - Peter F. Drucker

2. "If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny." - Dee Hock

3. "A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say 'we did it ourselves.'" - Lao Tzu

4. "The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader." - Albert Einstein

5. "The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why." - Warren Bennis

Moorhead, Minn. — A Minnesota organization is behind a move to create a regional initiative that could bring nanotechnology research dollars and jobs to the upper Midwest.

The proposal aims to connect researchers and businesses and build an international nanotech reputation for the region. Dubbed NanoVox, the regional nanotech center would encompass Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas and perhaps Manitoba, Canada.

Nanotechnology is manufacturing on the molecular scale that often finds new uses for traditional materials. Hundreds of products — from clothing to food packaging to medical devices — already use nanotechnology.

This week we published the third annual edition of the Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators. It’s the only source we know of where U.S. entrepreneurs starting technology, life sciences, or energy companies can survey all of the early-stage mentoring and investment programs open to them in a single document. (You can buy the downloadable file here.)

It’s a great resource, and I wanted to take a moment to recognize and thank our Cambridge, MA-based associate editor Erin Kutz for pulling it together. Erin had a huge job on her hands this year, for one simple reason: the nation has startup fever. While the rest of the economy slowly fizzles, investors, foundations, regional economic development authorities, and other organizations have been setting up incubators, accelerators, and similar programs for startups at a blistering pace.

Making their debut within throwing distance of Radio City Music Hall, the first 14 startups to graduate from the New York version of the DreamIt Ventures accelerator program presented to investors on Wednesday. Demo day brought to a close three months of mentoring that helped these fledgling companies strengthen their plans. Now that they have pitched their companies to an audience of angel investors and venture capitalists, the real work begins as these startups strive to make good on their ambitions.

DreamIt Ventures is a pre-seed-stage venture firm in Bryn Mawr, PA that runs an identical incubator program in Philadelphia. Mark Wachen, a managing partner with DreamIt, says the program offers funding and guidance from mentors who work one-on-one with their assigned startups. “We match each company with a seasoned entrepreneur, someone who’s made the commitment to spend three to five hours with the company each week,” Wachen says.

The boomer generation, spawned (literally) in the aftermath of the Second World War, will continue to shape the American landscape well into the 21st Century. They may be getting older, but these folks are still maintaining their power. Those born in the first ten years of the boomer generation  — between 1945 and 1955 — number 36 million, and they will continue to influence communities and real estate markets across the country, especially as they contemplate life after kids and retirement.

Much has been written about where “empty nesters” might move as their children move off on their own. One longstanding favorite is the notion that, having jettisoned their children, the boomers will also desert their suburban communities for the bright city lights.