As a recent graduate of the first TechStars NYC class, I thought I'd take a moment to share some of my thoughts. This blog post isn't going to sing the praises of TechStars -- Eli (Thinknear), Kevin (Red Rover), Matt (Nestio) and Vin (not even part of TechStars!) have already done that quite well. Instead, I'd like to reflect on some of the key differences in accelerator programs.

Most people talk about TechStars and Y Combinator and interchangeably. But most people don't understand that the programs are radically different accelerator models: In short, Y Combinator is an isolationist model (for lack of a better word I use isolationist, but the negative intention of the word is not intended). TechStars is a collaborative model. And what's right for one startup might not be right for another. (note: I haven't actually been through YC. My knowledge of that program is entirely second-hand.)

Rock star, folk singer, poet, and national treasure Bob Dylan turns 70 today, and just in case you haven’t made plans to mark the occasion, we’ve got a few options for you: If you’d like some company, you can check out this Google map of all the septuagenarian celebrations worldwide to see if there will be one in your hometown. Or you can re-read Joe Queenan’s brilliantly incorrect assessment of the rebel at 50 in Spy Magazine. And if you’re feeling solitary and reflective, there’s always Chronicles Vol. 1 and DylanRadio by candlelight.

AsianScientist (May 22, 2011) – With your papers published and your patent portfolio lined up, your new technology for green energy, curing cancer or vaccinating against nicotine is finally complete. Now, it is time for the world to recognize your genius and send your technology on the fast-track to market success.

But not so fast, the number of superb technologies at the bottom of the biotech start-up waste basket is huge and many if not most of them, all else being equal, were probably good enough to go commercial.

So why aren’t most academic scientists millionaires?

1. You may not have assembled the right team for this technology.

When asked, VCs will tell you that a technology’s likelihood of success is based on the team backing it up. The worth of a new company is essentially the sum of its capital minus its debt. Capital can be intellectual in the sense of licensed and patented technology, but it is also human capital. In some ways, the ability to draw in resources, generate investment enthusiasm and fix the thousands of problems that will be encountered along the timeline of commercialization is the ability of human, rather than physical or intellectual capital. Having the right level of seniority and accomplishment in the project, wherein the leaders of the new venture are senior and connected enough to convince the field of the internal value, but not having people so senior that they don’t actually do anything productive other than lend their names, is critical. Without it, many good technologies never get out of the gate.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- IBM's(IBM_) headquarters in New York may be thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley, but the company has still managed to maintain a strong presence among venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Big Blue, however, has taken a vastly different approach to promoting innovation than the approach of its West Coast counterparts.

Unlike other tech heavyweights like Intel(INTC_) and Cisco(CSCO_), IBM doesn't make direct investments in fledgling companies.

Rather, Big Blue has a special venture capital division that builds relationships with top-tier venture firms and their portfolio companies and advises them on the best ways to bring their products to market.

This morning, the NVCA released the Q4 2010 venture capital performance numbers from our partner Cambridge Associates and the news continues to be encouraging. As you can see in the press release, venture returns improved at the end of the year in nearly every time horizon, marking the second consecutive quarter in which we saw meaningful increases.

Based on current exit market activity, we feel that the venture industry is on a steady, upwards trajectory rather than experiencing a quarterly blip. In other words, barring any unforeseen market dynamics, returns hit bottom last year and are headed back up. Still, we do have a ways to go before the venture industry can boast the type of performance that compels limited partners to expand their venture capital allocation beyond what it is today.

Common: Doing everything or nothing under the label of "student" - often leading to either burnout or dropout.

Uncommon: As I mentioned in Part 1, "This week marks an important milestone in my life. I am no longer a full time student of conventional education." Since the last post, final grades were announced, and it looks as though I will graduate magna cum laude.

This comes as quite a pleasant surprise considering the demands of my "extracurricular" commitments. Of course there are always students that make me look like an underachiever, but my approach and my goals differed from many students and valedictorians.

I never set out to get perfect grades. In fact, I clearly intended to place business and personal preferences as a priority. This was rather unusual in undergraduate school. My competitiveness kept me striving for good grades, but my lack of time kept me focused on effectiveness. Unexpectedly, this illogical amalgamation served me well.

Siberia, of all places? Ernst-Detlef Schulze's wife rolled her eyes when her husband agreed to lead a major ecosystem study in the Yenisey region in the heart of Russia's eastern vastness. At first, Schulze, the founding director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, had been hesitant himself — but sensing a unique opportunity to study how the Arctic tundra and boreal forests store and release carbon, he decided to pack his bags.

The German carbon-cycle expert is one of 40 foreign or expatriate Russian scientists working in the West who last year received a new type of grant to bring their expertise to Russian universities. The 12-billion-rouble (US$428-million) 'mega-grant' programme is part of Russia's attempt to strengthen research at its neglected universities and modernize the country's science and economy at large (see Nature 465, 858; 2010).

FORTUNE -- Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room; Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Google's (GOOG) Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded their respective companies in their twenties. All of them were young when they got their start, and that's not a coincidence according to a report released by SV Angel's Ron Conway and David Lee. Apparently, the younger you are, the higher your odds are at succeeding in an increasingly competitive area of the industry where skyrocketing valuations are the norm.

Conway is in a good position to know: he told Fortune earlier this year he fields 70% of all start-up deals in Silicon Valley. And at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City, he and Lee revealed early data from a report in which they queried more than 500 start-ups they've invested in over the last 15 years. Of the start-ups with potential or actual exit values of $25 million or more, 47% of those were run by founders who were under 30. But the higher those potential exit values got, the younger the founders became. Case in point: 67% of the companies that could sell for $500 million or more have founders under 30.

Over the past two years, interest in emerging markets has exploded as a new source of customer, capital and, not least, innovative ideas. A special report in The Economist published last year profiled affordable new products from the Tata Nano automobile to the GE Healthcare MAC800 electrocardiogram, arising from the inherent scarcities of emerging markets. The applicability of such products in mature markets in the United States and Europe is a phenomenon that Vijay Govindarajan at Tuck (Dartmouth) has coined “reverse innovation.”

While the question of whether products with innovative features can be sourced and developed in emerging markets has been resolved, the more provocative question is whether the developed world can learn how to accelerate the innovation process itself?

The big idea: Grass-roots innovation processes combined with a healthy tolerance for failure is a recipe for game-changing innovation and organic growth.

The scenario: Microsoft employs 90,000 people and its products are used by millions of people around the world every day. Developing the next version of Windows or Office is easy for Microsoft, but the company has struggled when it comes to more radical innovation. In particular, significant organic growth has been difficult to come by and the company has resorted to acquisition as a strategy to fuel growth. Some of these never panned out — remember Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo in 2008? — and the future is unclear regarding the impact of others, such as the recent acquisition of Skype. Meanwhile, competitors such as Apple and Google have consistently delivered organic growth and dominated Microsoft in key markets such as smartphones and tablets. To understand why this has happened, we need to consider the processes that drive innovation at Microsoft.

Many of us have been waiting for the right moment. The right moment to… ask the boss for a raise; find a job that’s more satisfying; pitch your new product idea; propose; start writing your book; launch your own blog; suggest that better way of doing things.

So we wait. We wait until the time is right.

Until after the newly re-org’d leadership is more settled. Until after your kids are older. Until you get the promotion. Until it feels like you’re not in the middle of things.

But the reality is… you and everyone else will always be in the middle of things. Life doesn’t have a pause button. And if you wait for the current swirl to calm, it’ll be replaced by swirl – going the other direction!

Stop waiting for the “perfect moment” and make that moment now.

In his book, Coaching the Artist Within, Eric Maisel’s dedicates a chapter on creating “in the middle of things.”

In the early 1980s I was trundling along on a New York subway with a colleague when he suddenly said, “14, 18, 23, 28, 34. What is the next number in this series?”

For the next ten minutes I manfully tried to figure out the mathematical relationship among these numbers. Finally, as we stepped off the subway I admitted I was stumped. My colleague, with a devilish grin, merely pointed at 42 emblazoned on the wall of the subway station. We had just travelled from 14th to 42nd Street, and it had never occurred to me that the answer was a stop on the subway. I had been so locked into the assumption that numerical problems had mathematical solutions that I failed to notice the answer staring at me from the pillars of every station.

As any Zen Master worth his salt would gleefully point out, I had failed to pay attention. Intent on asking the wrong questions, I paid a stiff price in embarrassment and chagrin.

Do scientists' job locations have any impact on the way their work spreads? Or, in today’s highly networked world, does research flow around the globe without regard to its point of origin? According to a study co-authored by an MIT economist, location still does matter — a finding with implications for technology transfer, the process of deriving innovations from pure research.

The study shows that when scientists switch jobs — and job locations — during their careers, the move has two distinct effects on their influence. First, their papers gain citations from scholars who are their new neighbors, even as their citation frequency in papers by their former neighbors remains constant.

How perfect are you? Are you above error, mistakes and missteps? I am—and of course I am lying. Who is above the need for a little grace, both in and outside of the business setting?

In “Are You a Fallible Human Being?” John Mariotti puts that question on the table. In his article, Mariotti discusses the grace factor when it comes to celebrities and other high profile individuals. All I have to say about that is, Humans are humans and grace is grace – until you do something that I really can’t tolerate. (Well, you know how we humans are: We have a lot of grace for our favorites and none for yours).

But Mariotti did make me think about the small business owner. What happens when we misstep with our customers? Whether it is the business owner personally, someone on the team or a broken system that caused the problem, how do we deal with it?

Research output in Latin America and the Caribbean is rising but still lags behind the global average, according to a ranking of nearly 1,400 Ibero-American research institutions released last week (10 May).

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, in descending order, produced the greatest scientific output in the region in the period 2005–09, followed by Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba.

Brazil dominates the research scene, with around 163,000 scientific publications — 92 per cent of which came from the higher-education sector. Among the region's ten most productive universities, seven are Brazilian, led by the University of São Paulo.

The Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA), along with 15 other federal agencies within the Obama Administration, today announced a $33 million Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge to drive innovation-fueled job creation and global competitiveness through public-private partnerships in at least 20 regions around the country.

The Challenge will award funds to regions with high-growth industries that support a wide range of economic and workforce development activities.

The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration will invest up to $20 million for technical skills training; EDA will invest up to $10 million in Economic Adjustment Assistance funds; and the Small Business Administration will invest up to $3 million in technical assistance.

To My SBIR Clients and Friends,  

This won't be news to those of you who subscribe to Rick Shindell's SBIR Insider, but I'm adding my voice to the entreaties to stabilize the SBIR funding landscape for a full year.

The Senate recently passed S.990 which (as the 12th continuing resolution in the current string) extends the SBIR, STTR and CPP programs one full year, until May 31st, 2012.

The bill comes up for a vote in the House this week. It's being slotted for a vote under "suspension" which would be a voice vote, but any member can request a recorded vote, and we expect that will happen.

So, we're encouraging everyone to quickly contact your House Member (and more specifically their Legislative Counsel for Small Business issues) and urge passage of this bill.

Legislation that Gov. Scott Walker says will create jobs would provide hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to insurance companies, while giving control of a $250 million fund to out-of-state financial management companies that would not have to pay back the fund's principal and would keep up to 80% of its profits.

The proposal is supported by a group of Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac) and Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel). But some others - including at least one Republican legislator - are calling it a massive corporate giveaway.

The program is called the Jobs Now Fund and represents part of the $400 million Wisconsin Jobs Act. It aims to jump-start job creation in Wisconsin by promising $200 million in future tax credits in exchange for $250 million raised from insurance companies.

Contrary to popular belief, the US venture capital industry is not a necessary condition in driving high-growth entrepreneurship.

According to Right-Sizing the US Venture Capital Industry, (pdf) a 2009 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, America's leading entrepreneurship think-tank, while venture capital will continue to be crucial to some forms of high-growth companies, the report concludes that the sector’s size must be reduced to be viable. The venture industry has seen stagnating and declining returns coupled with rapid expansion in venture capital assets under management in recent years.

The study says that there is no denying the importance of the venture capital industry. Despite being relatively young, having only reached its modern form in the last thirty years, this business of investing risk capital in growth companies has had many major successes. Some of the best known and most successful growth companies and brands in the world are venture-backed, including Apple, Google, Genentech, Home Depot, Microsoft, Starbucks, Cisco, and many others. The National Venture Capital Association, the industry’s main lobbyist, claims a study it sponsored shows that venture-backed companies from 1970–2005 accounted for 10m jobs and $2.1trn in revenues by 2005, as well as representing 17% of US gross domestic product (GDP).

Setting the right price for a product or service is critical for a small business. But many entrepreneurs don't succeed the first time – or the second or third, in some cases.

The problem is that there is no one formula that yields the best price point, experts say.

On the most basic level, the price should cover the overhead of the business and provide some profit. That can be tricky to calculate, especially at start-ups, says Patricia Sigmon, author of "Six Steps to Creating Profit" and president of David Advisory Group in New York, a consulting firm for small and mid-sized businesses.

Typically, entrepreneurs come up with a price based simply on the cost to produce the product, she says. They often overlook a slew of behind-the-scenes operational expenses such as "licenses, taxes, workman's compensation or the telephone bill," she says