August 5, 2011—Agriculture and agriculture biosciences —agbioscience— are key to economic growth, job creation and quality of life in the North Central United States, according to a new study from Battelle.

In Power and Promise: Agbioscience in the North Central United States, Battelle researchers found agbioscience professionals at U.S. land-grant universities are leveraging advancements in modern science and technology to address crucial national and global needs, including agricultural productivity and food security, improved human health, renewable resource development (such as bio-energy and bio-based materials) and environmental sustainability.

“In our science and technology-based economic development practice at Battelle, we have observed the consistent rise of agbioscience as a core driver of economic growth and business expansion opportunities for the U.S.,” said Simon Tripp, lead author of the study, who will present an overview of the report at the A۰P۰L۰U  Annual Meeting in November. “This is an extremely dynamic sector, leveraging sustainable bio-based resources to produce goods that meet large-scale market needs.”

WASHINGTON (MMD Newswire) August 10, 2011 -- The U.S. Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration (EDA) today announced a $250,000 grant to Ann Arbor SPARK of Ann Arbor, Mich., to develop and implement a Business Accelerator Model that will help provide a full range of business development services to tech-based startup companies in Washtenaw and Western Wayne counties. The project is expected to create 255 jobs and generate $1.25 million in private investment, according to grantee estimates.

"Continuous innovation and a flow of new technologies to the marketplace are vital to our job creation and competitiveness," said U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development John Fernandez. "This EDA grant will spur and accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship in southeastern Michigan to help diversify the economy and create new job opportunities for the region's workers."

Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Everywhere you turn there’s a new startup accelerator launching. Time will tell if that’s a good thing or not, but as I said in my last post, if you’re not doing it [an accelerator] to make money, you’re doing it wrong. The feedback was mixed, which doesn’t surprise me, since there are many accelerators operating at the moment that don’t have a primary mandate of returning dollars on investment. They’re designed for other primary goals: economic development (which really should be about making money), building a startup ecosystem (again, really driven by making money), job creation (bad idea), etc. But ignore that for a moment, and let’s assume you’re hell bent on starting an accelerator no matter what. Great! So what should it look like?

Mark Wachen sits in the Manhattan outpost of DreamIt Ventures, the Philadelphia-based start-up incubator. Wachen is an angel investor who founded a start-up of his own called Optimost, which he sold in 2007 for $52 million. And this summer, on the 11th floor of a nondescript Garment District tower, and with the sound of two twenty-somethings playing ping-pong in the background, Wachen is helping a batch of entrepreneurs get their start.

Business incubators have been around for decades. But DreamIt Ventures is one of scores of tech and start-up incubators that have sprouted up across the country over the past five years, with the greatest proliferation in New York City and the San Francisco-Silicon Valley areas. This new breed of incubator is not only elite, but can prove lurative. Usually, a start-up incubator will require that fully formed teams of hopeful entrepreneurs go through a rigorous application process, after which the incubator culls 15 to 20 accepted teams from 100 or more applicants. The selected teams are then given somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000, access to experienced serial entrepreneurs, office space, and opportunities to meet with angel investors and venture capitalists. By the end of the session—a few months, usually—if all goes right, each team should be able to launch a fully functioning small business.

You could say that the institution of the startup incubator has gotten its chance to shine this year. One way we can tell? Our third annual Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators has nearly doubled in size from the 2010 version.

The big boom wasn’t a total surprise, given that this year politicians and the like have caught onto something that the innovation community has known all along: seriously fostering startup growth is a pursuit worth focusing on.

Does school prepare students for life?

Not necessarily, young entrepreneur Andrew Hsu might say.

“At Stanford, I took every business course I could get my hands on. But I’ve actually found interestingly, that they weren’t that useful,” says the 20-year-old, who holds three college degrees in in Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Chemistry. “There was tons of stuff that I had to learn on the fly.”

After having left grad school, Hsu launched his own startup, Airy Labs, where he develops social learning games for kids. Last week, Airy Labs secured $1.5 million in seed funding. Hsu is what you would call a wunderkind, and one of the Thiel Fellows who received $100,000 from Paypal founder Peter Thiel, to launch a startup. “My background isn’t normal,” he admits, “but starting a start-up very young is quite common in Silicon Valley.”

The VC post of the day is from Zack Shulman (Cayuga Venture Fund) titled Should Founders Personally Guaranty Bank Loans?

If, as an entrepreneur, you’ve raised any institution money, the answer should be – as Zack explains – a decisive NFW. In addition, your institutional investors are likely prohibited from doing this by their fund agreements.

I’ve explained publicly to many of my government friends why the SBA is totally ineffective around lending to high growth, venture backed companies. Their requirement for a personal guarantee from the founders and any owners (including investors) of over 20% of the company is another reason the SBA is a total fail when it comes to lending for high growth companies.

As governments around the world are scaling back support for renewable energy, venture capitalists are shifting their clean technology investment strategy. They're focusing less on high-risk technologies and more on technologies, such as those for improving energy efficiency, that could have a faster payoff but a smaller impact. The shift is raising concerns about how innovative energy technologies will  be commercialized.

Venture capitalists have traditionally focused on companies with low capital requirements that can quickly get bought up or go public. Many Internet startups fall into this category. But in recent years, many venture capitalists have been enticed to risk longer-term, high-capital energy investments in clean energy, thanks to by generous government subsidies in renewable energy markets. In particular, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on solar-cell startups that need to build expensive equipment and factories to prove their technologies, and can take many years to generate a return on investment.

We have previously found that healthy aged rats are more likely to suffer profound memory impairments following a severe bacterial infection than are younger adult rats. Such a peripheral challenge is capable of producing a neuroinflammatory response, and in the aged brain this response is exaggerated and prolonged. Normal aging primes, or sensitizes, microglia, and this appears to be the source of this amplified inflammatory response. Among the outcomes of this exaggerated neuroinflammatory response are impairments in synaptic plasticity and reductions of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), both of which have been associated with cognitive impairments. Since it has been shown that physical exercise increases BDNF mRNA in the hippocampus, the present study examined voluntary exercise in 24-month-old F344×BN rats as a neuroprotective therapeutic in our bacterial infection model. Although aged rats ran only an average of 0.7 km per week, this small amount of exercise was sufficient to completely reverse infection-induced impairments in hippocampus-dependent long-term memory compared with sedentary animals. Strikingly, exercise prevented the infection-induced exaggerated neuroinflammatory response and the blunted BDNF mRNA induction seen in the hippocampus of sedentary rats. Moreover, voluntary exercise abrogated age-related microglial sensitization, suggesting a possible mechanism for exercise-induced neuroprotection in aging.

2011 began with President Barack Obama telling us in the State of the Union Address that we need to reinvent ourselves and our businesses as we move forward.  This week’s stock market drop has ramped up that challenge.

So how do you reinvent?

As I have observed innovators and practiced the art of reinventing myself, I have identified six skills that all creative innovators have in common.  They aren’t technical.  You don’t have to be highly educated or talented to use these skills.  You only have to be open to the possibilities around you and seize the opportunities the universe and God put before you.  Here is what it takes to become a “self re-inventor.”

This is the first post in this series after a four week break due to the summer holidays, and the subject this time is common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when producing documents that describe their companies.  I referred to ‘business plans’ in the title of the post for brevity, but everything below applies equally to executive summaries and introductory Powerpoint decks.

Earlier today I polled my partners with the question “what are the common errors people make when writing their business plans?” and the following list is an amalgam of their responses and my own thoughts.

To the slew of data indicating that working remotely is no longer a rarity, but becoming commonplace, you can add the latest Work Without Walls findings from Microsoft. Microsoft’s research shows that enabling employees to work remotely is fast becoming not a perk, but a business imperative.

Here are some of the findings:

• More than half (56 percent) of information workers at small companies surveyed say their company has no formal telework policy allowing remote work. (39 percent have a telework policy.)
• 36 percent of information workers feel their peers support remote working arrangements, while only 31 percent think their bosses are supportive.

Once you are able to achieve some real “traction” with your business (paying customers, revenue stream), it may seem the time to relax a bit, but in fact this is the point where many founders start to flounder. All the skills and instincts you needed to get to this level can actually start working against you, and you can fail to scale.

Investors often say that successfully navigating the early stages of a startup requires lots of street smarts, guts, and luck. For successful scaling of the business, there has to be a transition to “executive” mode in the more traditional business sense. Certain behaviors between these two modes are incompatible, and can cause real problems.

The tech market has booms and busts, but one thing stays constant: most startups don't succeed.

That means that whatever the market is doing, there's a more or less constant stream of companies that get shut down because they simply couldn't raise enough money or get enough customers in time to repay their investors.

Today, blog peHUB posted a great interview with Marty Pichinson, the founder of Palo Alto consulting firm Sherwood Partners. The company is known as the undertaker of Silicon Valley for its role in shutting down startups and auctioning off their assets.

The 30th anniversary of the IBM PC is Friday, and the two companies most responsible for its success both explained how they're moving on today.

IBM engineer Mark Dean, who was on the team that built the first IBM PC, says the PC era is basically over. He's proud he was involved -- but he's also "proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo."

Dean says that he has switched to a tablet (he doesn't say which one, but odds are it's an iPad), and that the PC is going the way of "vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs" -- which echoes what he told us back in March.

The Bayh-Dole Act and the more than $2 billion-a-year industry it spawned through technology transfer from academia survived its strongest challenge in June when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Stanford v. Roche case. It held, by a 7–2 vote, that Roche shares ownership with Stanford University in three U.S. patents for a PCR-based test kit to detect and quantify levels of HIV in the blood.

Eleven days before that decision was rendered, a bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would rewrite two of Bayh-Dole’s most important provisions. The aim of this bill is to revive the nation’s manufacturing sector and create a source of federal funds for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.

One of the most important characteristics of any technology transfer office is the mandate under which it operates.  While the goal of technology transfer is to bring the results of research into the public marketplace where they can be put to public use, the emphasis and approach is dependent on the culture of the institution.  Considering one example, many offices now make their primary function the generation of revenue from their portfolio:

• for the researchers who have invested to advance their field
• for the institution that provides research support services
• or as part of a directive for regional economic development

NEW YORK, Aug. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Venture capital (VC) funding in the Life Sciences sector, which includes the Biotechnology and Medical Device industries, leapt 37 percent during the second quarter of 2011, according to a new PwC US report, "High-dollar deals."   The report includes data from the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree™ Report, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Venture capitalists invested $2.1 billion in 206 Life Sciences deals, delivering the seventh best quarter since the MoneyTree Report began collecting data in 1995.  Despite the quarter's strong performance, dollars invested in Life Sciences declined 3 percent when compared with the same quarter of 2010. Deal volume also decreased year over year, but by a greater margin of 21 percent. Compared with the first quarter of 2011, deal volume looked more positive, showing an increase of 12 percent.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (08/10/2011) —Reviewers from three of the nation’s top university technology transfer operations praised the University of Minnesota for dramatic improvements in its approach to bringing researcher discoveries to the marketplace. Among other findings, their report declared that the U of M “… has an outstanding track record of accomplishments that put it at the highest ranks of university tech transfer offices,” adding, “… the office has done so on a much more limited budget and staffing model than most of its peers. The University clearly has much for which it should be proud.”

The reviewers, leaders of the technology transfer offices at Stanford, Columbia and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, noted the dramatic turnaround since Jay Schrankler took over as executive director of the Office for Technology Commercialization (OTC) four years ago. A thorough overhaul of the university’s technology transfer operations, including recruitment of a new director, was one of the key strategies that Vice President for Research R. Timothy Mulcahy identified as a top priority when he arrived at the university in 2005.