You have a moment of inspiration for a new product.

You do a quick sketch of your idea. It all looks like it might work and could make some money.

You conduct a patent search on uspto.gov or freepatentsonline.com or Google. So far, so good – it appears no one has thought of your idea yet. Just to make sure, you conduct furthermarket research.

And if you’re interested in obtaining a patent, you definitely hire a patent agent or patent attorney to conduct a professional search.

The next step: See if your invention actually works. You’ll need a prototype. Fear not – they don’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

Dow Jones is reporting mixed numbers for venture fundraising this morning, releasing data that shows that capital raised for U.S. venture funds rose 20 percent over the same period a year ago, to $8.1 billion. But that stat comes with a caveat— the number of funds that held closings plummeted 38% to 50 funds. Seven firms were responsible for raising the bulk of the $8.1 billion, raising almost 80 percent of the total, or $6.3 billion. For basis of comparison, in the first half of 2010, 81 U.S. venture funds raised $6.8 billion. This trend was illustrated in this morning’s Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association report.

In the first half of 2011, a number of well-known VC firms closed significant funds. Bessemer closed a $1.6 billion fund, Sequoia closed a $1.3 billion fund, and Greylock added a $1 billion fund. In June, Accel closed two funds for a total of $1.35 billion in new capital. Andreessen Horowitz added a $200 million growth fund in April.

People in the biotech business (most, anyway) aren’t delusional. They know the odds are stacked against anybody who dares to develop a new drug. But even during the darkest days of recent economic history, December 2008, I heard a seasoned executive explain why the U.S. was, and would remain, the leading place in the world for biotech.

It was about attitude.

“Europeans always want to focus on the 100 reasons why something won’t work,” Bruce Carter, the British-born former ZymoGenetics CEO said. Americans, he went on, know the 100 reasons why a drug probably won’t work, yet “are willing to look at the one reason why it will.”

I’ve been wondering lately whether this is still true, whether biotech has lost its nerve, its anything-is-possible swaggering attitude. Sure, everybody tries to cast their companies and products in the best possible light, that will never change. But deep down, there’s a lot of lingering insecurity. People (me included) keep saying things like the venture capital model for biotech is broken, the IPO market is cruel, Big Pharma is slowly imploding, everything must be outsourced to China and India, young scientists can’t find jobs, drug price controls are inevitable, and the FDA is smothering life sciences innovation.

Last June, the United Nations Development Program released its Human Development Report for Egypt, which noted that 90 percent of the country’s unemployed, estimated to be 8 million, were younger than 30. Not surprisingly, time and again at post-revolution gatherings of political leaders and civil sector organizations set on creating a clear roadmap for the country’s political and economic development, youth entrepreneurship emerges as a key recommendation.

President Obama identified this himself during his last speech on the Middle East. One of the four pillars in aid to the region will be economic modernization, including establishing Egyptian-American Enterprise Funds to stimulate private sector investment, as well as building networks of entrepreneurs and fostering cooperation in science and technology. The hope of his $1 billion debt relief strategy is that Egyptian partners will invest resources to foster growth and entrepreneurship. “Entrepreneurs are brimming with ideas, but corruption leaves them unable to profit from those ideas,” he said.

We've been hearing about it for years, but the bookless library has finally arrived, making a beachhead on college campuses. At Drexel University's new Library Learning Terrace, which opened just last month, there is nary a bound volume, just rows of computers and plenty of seating offering access to the Philadelphia university's 170 million electronic items. Scott Erdy, designer of the new library, says open, flexible space — the furniture is movable and the walls act as one giant whiteboard — allows student and staff "knowledge transfer," a concept reinforced by Danuta Nitecki, dean of Drexel's libraries. "We don't just house books, we house learning," she says.

The trend began, naturally, with engineers, when Kansas State University's engineering library went primarily bookless in 2000. Last year, Stanford University pruned all but 10,000 printed volumes from its new engineering library, making more room for large tables and study areas. And the University of Texas at San Antonio ditched print in lieu of electronic material when it opened its engineering library in 2010.

An unexpected call in June gave Hyde Park resident James Dickerson one week to prepare a pitch and introduce his fledgling startup company to 70 of the world’s top entrepreneurs and investors.

The call came from the Clinton Global Initiative, a New York nonprofit founded by the former president in 2005, to brainstorm solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

The global organization was lining up participants for a June 29-30 Chicago meeting, its first in America dedicated to improving the economy and stimulating job growth.

Federal laboratories have been a source of innovation in the United States since the establishment of the first laboratory, The Smithsonian Institution, in 1846. The Stevenson- Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-480) stated, “technology transfer, consistent with mission responsibilities, is a responsibility of each laboratory science and engineering professional.” The act mandated the creation of an Office of Research and Technology Applications at major laboratories to facilitate transfers of technology from the laboratories. Since then, interest in increasing the intensity and effectiveness of technology transfer has focused on activities that accelerate commercialization to benefit the economy and society.

While academic researchers have studied the topic of technology transfer from the federal laboratories at length, many of the studies were completed before 2000, and substantial changes have occurred since then in the national and global economic landscape. Furthermore, past studies examined a small subset of agencies’ laboratories, minimizing the broad range of federal laboratories and their technology transfer activities. These studies are insufficient to understand the issues surrounding the transfer of technology and the commercialization of products and processes from the federal laboratories as a whole.

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Anyone who has spent any time on the overblown, abstract mission statements or the tired PowerPoint slides will appreciate the new book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. An academic and management consultant, Rumelt does for corporate strategy what those therapists on The Learning Channel do for problem hoarders. Rumelt shows how to throw out the “Sunday words ” and cut through the data to identify and develop an effective strategy.

Rumelt’s method for writing strategy will be sweet succor to anyone staring at a mountain of business documents in search of a way forward.  I know he’s already helped me. (In my last post, I wrote about Rumelt’s four signs of a bad strategy.)

Most venture capitalists think that Tech investing has been what makes the best returns – which is why they’re pouring money into Facebook, LinkedIn,  Twitter, and the like.  They may be right today and in the future, but at least over the past decade, they’ve been wrong: in the 2000′s, venture investing in the Life Sciences has outperformed venture investing in Tech.

The venture business is now 12 years into a slump in returns that has discouraged even the most enthusiastic investors and limited partners in the space.  Yet over the past 18 months, hope has sprung eternal amongst IT and Internet venture investors driven largely by a daily barrage of blog and news headlines covering the exponential growth and dramatic returns prospects of a small handful of social networking and gaming companies.

New York, July 11, 2011 – Thirty-seven US venture capital funds raised $2.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). This level marks a 28 percent increase by dollar commitments, but a 23 percent decline by number of funds compared to the second quarter of 2010, which saw 48 funds raise $2.1 billion during the period. US venture capital fundraising during the first half of 2011 totaled $10.2 billion from 76 funds, a 67% increase by dollars compared to the first half of 2010 but a 15% decrease by number of funds, marking the lowest number of funds garnering commitments since the first half of 1995.

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Public discussion of the jobs shortfall in the United States has tended to focus on the Great Recession of 2007-2009, but new research released today by the Kauffman Foundation suggests that the country faces a far more fundamental employment challenge that pre-dates the recession by many years: A long-term trend that the researchers call a slow jobs "leak."

The new study, the next in a continuing series on firm formation and economic growth, found that the new businesses that continue to generate the bulk of the economy's net job gains in recent years have been starting up with fewer workers than historic norms and are also adding fewer workers as they grow. Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America's Slow Leak in Job Creation said its analysis of government data shows that since the middle of the last decade and perhaps longer, the growth path and survival rate of new businesses means they are generating fewer and fewer new jobs.The cohort of new firms that started in 2009, for example, is on course to contribute one million fewer jobs in the next decade than historical averages would suggest.

With budgets getting tighter and health care needs growing, it makes sense to funnel shrinking resources to the most effective care. But, as Sharon Begley explains in "The Best Medicine" in the July 2011 issue of Scientific American, finding the best bang for our medical buck would be easier if we used the increasingly important analytical tool of comparative-effectiveness research.

More efficient health care means dispelling some common myths about what "good" care is. Here is a brief explanation of why some of the most prevalent assumptions about medical care in the U.S. and beyond are wrong:

A reader asks:  What is the best state to incorporate an LLC?  I have a plan for a website in which the only source of revenue will be from ads, so the revenue stream won’t be coming from a particular state. I’ve heard Nevada, based on their tax laws, is the best state in terms of starting a small business, but what do you think?

Answer: Although Nevada does not levy personal, business or corporate income taxes, that doesn’t automatically make it the right choice. When deciding which state to incorporate in, there are a number of things you should look at. Included among those are:

State laws regarding corporate governance – An LLC is a corporate entity that generally has the tax flow-through benefits of a partnership while maintaining the legal protections of a corporation.  Like a corporation, an LLC is a legal fiction, which means that it is a person that exists purely by creation by state statute.

Money raised by venture capital firms to fund startups is on the rise, but the number of venture capital firms raising that money is at a 16 year low.

The number fell by nearly a quarter, from 48 firms in the second quarter of 2010 to 37 firms in the second quarter this year, according to data compiled by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters.

A total of 76 venture capital firms raised money in the first half this year, down 15 percent from the first half of 2010 when 89 venture capital firms raised money. 162 venture capital firms raised money in 2010, which is still down compared to 233 firms in 2007 and 212 firms in 2008.

Welcome to the first edition of “Science Progressing,” SP’s weekly news report. Each week we will publish clips of the week’s top science and technology policy news that you might have missed. As always, we at SP are interested not just in keeping up with the frontiers of science, but in looking at the ways science and technology impact—or are impacted by—politics, society, and the economy. We’ll apply the same progressive policy lens that we use to choose our articles to the news we bring you here—from science legislation on Capitol Hill, to new innovations with the potential to change society, to science and technology happenings in the agencies, states, and industry.

7 July 2011 – Global investment in green energy rose by 32 per cent last year, driven largely by wind farms in China and small-scale solar panels on rooftops in Europe, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a new report on renewable energy trends released today.

Investors put a record $211 billion into renewable energy projects last year, about a third more than the $160 billion invested in 2009, and a 540 per cent rise since 2004, according to the report, entitled “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2011,” prepared for UNEP by the London-based Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Private investors will be given more opportunities to gain tax relief for backing early-stage companies, under new proposals set out by the Treasury this week. But rule changes will mean investors have to take on more risk, advisers predict.

On Wednesday, a consultation document on tax-advantaged venture capital investments confirmed the expansion of venture capital trusts (VCTs) and enterprise investment schemes (EISs) outlined in this year’s Budget – and proposed a new Business Angel Seed Investment Scheme (Basis) to generate more ‘seed’ funding for companies at the pre-trading stage.

Call it a tale of two surveys ’ and a decent clue on the direction of small business lending for healthcare entrepreneurs.

Two headlines frame the story; one on May 2, 2011, and the other on June 30, 2011.

’Small Business Borrowing Cools,’ Reuters, May 2, 2011

’Small Business Borrowing Surges,’ Reuters: June 30, 2011

So what happened within 60 days that helped paint a more positive picture on the small business lending front?

The Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index has the answers — or at least some of them, anyway.

The very idea of what is a phone call is changing, and changing fast. What used to be a fixed phone turned into anywhere calling. Now Facebook, Google and Skype have made calls about video chat, friends and social circles, not phone numbers. It’s perhaps time to rethink the very notion of a phone call and what defines the classic phone network.

Tom Evslin, who has spent his entire life in telecom and data services industries, believes it’s time for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to come to grips with the reality that people are choosing cellular or Internet voice over traditional phone systems. He points to a recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics that notes that by 2018, only 6 percent of the U.S. population will be using the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which to non-telecom geeks means: your home phone from the phone company.

When he was pre-planning Nintendo Wii video game Disney Epic Mickey, gaming legend Warren Spector (creator of classic games System Shock and Deus Ex) took a slightly different approach to how the game would pan out.

Instead of having his best designers, scripters, coders and creatives brainstorming ideas, Spector got a bunch of interns together from the Disney Interactive Studios intern group. He then let them have free range over coming up with ideas on the game’s look, feel and plot. The result is one of the most unique and successful games from last year’s holiday period, with a great twist in gameplay mechanics. It’s also proof in Warren Spector’s belief in the power of a great idea: you don’t have to have years of experience to come up with greatness.

Now think how your business can transfer a video game’s approach to your overall one.