Do you want to start a business or fund a creative venture but are hobbled by the current economy? Have you been turned down by venture capitalists who believe your idea is not scientific enough or won’t be the next Facebook?

No fear - a new form of funding is on the rise, driven in part by the continuing ascent of social networking and possibly by the work ethic
generated by the software open source movement.

Scale matters in technology transfer and commercialisation – to secure enough research funding to build a rich patent portfolio; provide access the depth and variety of expertise to engage corporate partners, and develop leading edge intellectual property that will attract venture capital partners.

But scale of course implies distance, and this works against the other prime requirement of technology transfer and commercialisation, which is intimate knowledge of the science, the expertise of the researchers, and the ambitions and requirements of spin-out companies.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Startup America Partnership, the private sector alliance launched at the White House on January 31st to celebrate and accelerate entrepreneurship, announced the appointment of Timothy “Scott” Case as Chief Executive Officer.

“Whether starting and growing entrepreneurial companies like Priceline, or scaling critically important public-private partnerships like Malaria No More, Scott has demonstrated a unique ability to bring innovative ideas to life," said Steve Case , chairman of the Startup America Partnership. "I can think of no one better suited to lead the Startup America Partnership.”

So you've got a great product that’s gone from an idea on a cocktail napkin to the beginnings of something that could be bigger than sliced bread. But you’ll be stuck in neutral for quite awhile unless you can secure the necessary capital to keep things running. For startups and early stage companies, success and failure boils down to whether you can intrigue a potential investor in the time it takes to ride an elevator from the lobby to the executive suite.

The elevator pitch is an essential tool to grab the attention of venture capitalists, and no one knows that better than presentation coach Steve Bowman. Founder of BizClarity, a consulting firm headquartered in Media, Bowman has earned the reputation of "The Pitch Doctor," going beyond presentation deliveries and PowerPoint slides and delving deep into content to find and compose his client’s core message.

What do you do when colleagues in your university laboratory complain that you are taking up valuable research space to run a business and hampering their PhD work?

Answer: Bring in the beer and explain what you are doing.

Above all, make sure the university president supports academic enterprise. Such lab rivalries are not uncommon, and can hinder campus start-ups, according to students attending a meeting earlier this month hosted by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The goal was to gather input from young entrepreneurs on encouraging technological innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe.

An artificial heart and its lightweight power drive. A better airline for Brazil. Chocolate from Madagascar and a soccer shirt made of plastic water bottles. A fashion leader escaping its pattern, a smelter, and that little coupon startup in Chicago that's suddenly worth billions. All this from one simple word: innovation.

The 50 companies on our 2011 list have chosen a unique path. Today's business landscape is littered with heritage companies whose CEOs battle their industry's broken model with inertia, layoffs, lawsuits -- anything that squeezes pennies and delays the inevitable. How many of these companies will be dominant in 2025? Few.

It’s that time of year again. The time when companies descend on Stanford, Berkeley and other college campuses across the country to try and recruit top students as summer interns.

Most startup founders recognize that interns can be a critical resource for making new hires and getting part-time help at a discount. Startups, with their small bankroll and even smaller brand recognition, have to compete for the best talent with the likes of Google and Facebook who offer large hourly salaries, a great name on a resume, and access all summer to free beer and a sushi bar.

The machines are taking over! IBM’s Watson supercomputer soundly defeated its human opponents in the final round of man vs. machine on the Jeopardy TV show.

The computer defeated Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, after a three-night tournament that drew lots of chatter about the progress of artificial intelligence. It’s a testament to the talented human engineers at IBM who figured out how to make a machine that could beat a human at the popular TV game show.

Does higher productivity destroy jobs? Sometimes, but only in the very short term, considering US economic performance over the past 80 years. In fact, every ten-year rolling period but one since 1929 has seen increases in both US productivity and employment. Even on a rolling annual basis, 69 percent of periods have delivered both productivity and jobs growth (Exhibit 1). Over the long term, apparently, it’s a fallacy to suggest that there’s a trade-off between unemployment and productivity. These are among the key findings of the latest report from the McKinsey Global Institute, Growth and renewal in the United States: Retooling America’s economic engine.

In this clip, Square and Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey shares how Twitter came into existence, while he was working at Odeo, a consumer podcasting company. Dorsey joined Odeo to gain a greater understanding of the consumer Internet market, but eventually learned that few people at the company, including him, were interested in podcasting. Dorsey says the Twitter project began at Odeo, when at the company's urging for new ideas, he suggested the concept that would become Twitter.

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann shares a story to illustrate how innovation occurs in the field of biotechnology. She describes the development of an innovative cancer drug at Genentech, even in the face of great skepticism, and the team effort it took to gain regulatory approval.

These are indeed exciting times for HR and OD practitioners and the organizations they serve because the business and socioeconomic implications of managing talent have never been so well understood, measureable, or vital. There are immense opportunities for HR and OD professionals to collaborate and actually lead the formulation and execution of winning talent management strategies in their organizations. The demand for strategy-based talent management has never been greater. Senior management, boards of directors, analysts, and investors often factor a company’s talent management maturity and the quality of its workforce into the valuation equation. Considering that staff costs including salaries and benefits comprise a very large percentage of most companies’ overall spending, it is vitally important to run talent management like a business in order to drive maximum return on investment in people.

In this article we focus more on what the actual work is rather than who should deliver it. The fact is that who actu- ally has responsibility for the different elements of talent management varies from organization to organization. By focusing on the work to be done or HR and OD domains, it is our hope that business and HR and OD leaders will have a guide to help them define specific roles, responsibilities and structures that best suit and leverage their organizations’ values, vision, mission, and strategy. Our goals for this article are to:

1.    Examine examples of current role confusion and overlap between HR and OD practitioners when it comes to practicing talent management.
2.    Review the strong business case for talent management and position it as the only potential sustainable competitive advantage that a company can develop.
3.    Explore opportunities for HR and OD to collaborate and use their valuable interdependencies and complimentary skill sets, knowledge, and roles to leverage their unique purview of the whole organization and have impact at the whole system level. We propose a structure to more clearly define the separate domains of HR and OD work and the area of overlap we call integrated talent management.
4.    Introduce a conceptual yet practical model of integrated talent management that helps HR, OD, and others work together more effectively and realize synergies created by their complementary strengths and capabilities.

HR + OD = Integrated Talent Management (Download the PDF)

Let’s do this again.

This week, Michigan rolled out Angel 2.0, a three-year, $27 million effort to encourage wealthy individuals to fund promising high startups in the state.

“This is a huge deal,” says Paul Brown, vice president of capital markets for the Michigan Economic Development Corp. who’s supervising the program. “Angels had been advocating for this for years.”

Winter is only halfway done, but while they've been stuck indoors, entrepreneurs have been busy churning out some amazing new business concepts.

Each day, we scour the web for these daily million-dollar ideas and ask you to vote for them.

Here is a list of the fifteen hottest ones we've seen this winter, based on readers' votes.

AOL is opening a new office, in Florida, where the engineers are cheap. Software engineers, developers, and programmers in Florida have a median salary of $84,201.

That's $18,565 less than the median salary for the same position in California.

As tech companies slowly take over the world, software engineers, developers, and programmers are in huge demand. But some areas of the country pay much better in such positions, than others.

My partner David Beisel has an excellent series on his blog about Finding the Perfect Startup job. I’d recommend it to anyone in the process - he offers both very practical and in some cases, counter-intuitive advice.

Definitely read his series first, but here are a couple additional tips that I find I give folks in a similar situation:

* Narrow the Universe. Not all startup jobs are created equal. The less focused you are the more daunting the task of finding a great role. Plus, working at a startup requires a great deal of commitment - it’s not an easy gig. So folks who are hiring can sense whether you really care passionately about the role, stage, industry, and specific company you are talking to. Practically, I think it makes sense to narrow things down by geography, stage, or sector (or all three). Sector is the most important, because by doing the work to do this, you actually gain more market intelligence and become a better candidate in the process. You will become fluent in the topics that matter in the industry, the big and small players, the investors that focus here, etc. By the way, if you aren’t excited enough about a sector to at least do this work, why do you think you will be excited about working 80-hour weeks in this sector?

A few weeks back I took a call from a group looking to start a new seed fund. After exchanging backgrounds and niceties I asked why they wanted to start the fund. Their response? To make money.

My response? They’d make more money putting their cash into a money market account. That’s not very sexy or exciting but it’s reality. Today’s data from Cambridge Associates backs that up. From the report:

The median net return to VC fund investors has not been positive for any vintage year since 1998. Just think about that for a moment. Despite the past decade’s many hits (Google, YouTube, EqualLogic, etc.), the typical VC fund has lost money for its limited partners. Even the top-quartile benchmarks aren’t very impressive over the past decade, with the best figure coming in at 5.59% for 2001 vintage funds.

Cellphone dead zones might soon become a thing of the past.

Technology developed by three graduate students in engineering at Stanford University could allow wireless systems, including telephone and WiFi networks, to simultaneously send and receive information, doubling their speed and improving their performance—and keeping them from deafening themselves.

As it is, a signal transmitted on a network to the other is stronger at its point of origin than incoming signals are. In essence, each end of a network is talking so loudly it can’t hear what the other end is saying.

There’s not an entrepreneur on the planet who likes thinking about taxes. I know, it’s only February, so you’re likely still in deep denial about April 15. But it’s time to get organized! Almost every aspect of your business has tax ramifications and if you don’t know what they are, you’re inviting trouble down the road (can you say “audit?”).

For tips, I recently spoke to Sandy Botkin, a CPA, attorney, former trainer of IRS attorneys, and the CEO of The Tax Reduction Institute in Germantown, MD. He’s also the author of “Lower Your Taxes — Big Time 2011-2012.” Botkin shared 10 common tax misconceptions that both fledgling and experienced small business owners are guilty of. How many of these phrases have you uttered?

Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country.

We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.

The VC partner, somebody I greatly respect said, “Yeah, we like Gil and what they’re doing. I’m just not sure you can build a great technology firm outside of Bay Area.”