Six years ago we gave our brewery a major, $25 million upgrade. Boulevard Brewing Company’s Unfiltered Wheat Beer and Pale Ale were already among the most popular craft beers in the Midwest, but we had outgrown our 1950s-era facility where we could only brew 35 barrels at a time. So, we expanded to a state-of-the-art brewhouse with a sky-lit-atrium, a glass skywalk, and the capacity to brew 150 barrels of beer in one batch. We extended our product line to 26 premium brews, which made us the largest craft brewery in the Midwest.

The problem was, we kept our old-school technology. At least once every couple of years, we’d lose power due to a storm or other weather problem. Every time that happened, our two workstations went down, and we’d lose all of our real-time brewing data. Sometimes the power was out only for a few minutes, but we’d still need to scrap all of the beer, because we had lost track of where the materials were in the brewing process. It was a huge waste -- thousands of dollars in ingredients lost.

President Obama has pointed to the peak the nation has to summit for a brighter cleaner energy future, but will venture capitalists join the trek?

That is a big question in the current climate where VCs seem, well, deflated about investing in cleantech. Bets on producing solar panels and biofuels are taking so much longer to get any returns. Smart meters are finding foes in some energy regulators and consumers. Electric cars are gaining public attention, but they won’t reach critical mass for a while – maybe 10 percent in the United States by 2020.

“We haven’t seen many new comers in the venture capital space in the last few years. This will have to change if we want things to move forward,” said Gil Forer, global director of cleantech at Ernst & Young, during a panel discussion at an energy conference in Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago. “If you look at exits for VCs, they took three to five years in the 90s; seven years in 2004-05. Now we are talking about nine years plus. Not a lot of VCs can sustain this time frame from investment to exits."

The University of Massachusetts President’s Office is pleased to announce the 2011 Creative Economy Initiatives Fund. Established in 2007, and created to complement the President’s Science and Technology Initiatives Fund, the Creative Economy Fund represents a continued commitment to maintaining the University’s central role in the social and economic development of the Commonwealth and directly supports the Trustees’ strategic priority of strengthening the University’s research enterprise and growing that portfolio substantially. Total funding available will be contingent on the University’s budget situation.

Last year, Sean Glass was ready to return to the United States after living in London to start an online gambling firm that ended up folding. After selling off the company’s assets, he wanted to settle in a city with vibrant entrepreneurial and venture capital communities and considered all the usual hubs: Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Austin, Tex., and Raleigh, N.C. But in July, Mr. Glass, 31, and his wife moved to Washington, D.C.

“There’s a phenomenal pool of engineers, and the quality of life is great,” Mr. Glass said. Now he is a venture partner at Novak Biddle, a venture capital firm based in Washington, and he recently started Employ Insight, a software company that helps employers with the hiring process.

Every year Fortune magazine releases its list of the country's best companies to work for. But it's pretty silly when you think about it: Do you really think that the culture and benefits of working at The Container Store can be directly compared to the perks associated with a Google job? Putting them all on a list makes it seems like they succeed along similar dimensions, when it really couldn't be further from the truth. Every company is different, and they treat their employees differently with regard to the culture, benefits, and job roles.

Synthetic blood vessels that can be made in advance and stored until surgery could help patients undergoing heart surgery, hemodialysis—cleansing of the blood in cases of kidney failure—and other procedures. Laura Niklason, an anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer at Yale University, and her collaborators have grown blood vessels using human cells and tested them in baboons, showing that they provoke no immune rejection and avoid common complications of synthetic vessels, such as clotting, bursting, or contracting over time. Researchers hope these studies will show that the vessels are safe enough to win permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials.

Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. This one had better grab their attention, or they won’t look further.

You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary. They all offer a list of requirements that might take 50 pages to address, but of course they ask you to write concisely. Take a look at my website for the Sample Executive Summary, which shows what can be done in one page (both sides).

I have grown up in the business world working and interacting directly with people for many years. I enjoy it, I look forward to it and I still say it’s where the magic happens in relationships. But today, we have two worlds that are learning how to blend, balance and work together: online/Web-based and offline/in person.

In the past few years, so much emphasis and shifting has gone to the Web/online world because that is where the growth and movement trends are. In-person networking has taken a hit, as evidenced with declining enrollment in chambers of commerce, fee-based networking events and professional organizations. It’s not that people don’t want to go; it’s simply a matter of finances . . . or is it? Are we substituting an e-mail, tweet, post or text for live, in-person activities. thinking that is going to grow relationships?

President Obama's State of the Union speech unveiled a national competitiveness strategy that begins in Washington. But Washington can only help so much. It's up to each of the 50 states themselves to create their own plans to innovate and grow.

Which states are leading the country in innovation by attracting educated and highly skilled workers, funding their research, and producing world-leading tech companies? To answer that question, the Milken Institute produced the 2011 State Technology and Science Index, which grades each state according to about 80 indicators, including research and development funding, the education and skill level of the workforce, and the percent of companies in high-tech categories.* Here are the top ten states:

Economists love to pontificate about which industries are expected to grow over the next several years. We tend to hear a lot about "green jobs" and health care. While their estimates are often on the right track, it would also be useful to know which sectors have shown actual job growth already. Since the U.S. labor market began its slow recovery in 2010, we can do some analysis to determine which industries have begun growing significantly compared to others. Analyzing the approximately 150 sectors and sub-sectors from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there about a dozen that stand out.

A Chinese firm is currently designing a rough equivalent of the iPad, Apple's smash-hit tablet computer. The Chinese version is expected to retail for about $80, or a fifth of the iPad's $499 base price at launch. A European carmaker is also midway through a new design -- for vehicles targeting several emerging markets. The company is borrowing design features and manufacturing ideas from its joint venture partner in India. And Fiat Brazil's Fiat Mio, an urban-targeted compact car, is being designed in Brazil for global markets.

Product development efforts at these three companies underline an accelerating trend of sourcing innovation from within mostly large, rapidly developing economies for end users in home markets, but also for export, including to the developed world. Once viewed as low-cost copycats, companies from China, India and Brazil are moving up the value chain, creating innovative products with global appeal. Ignore them at your own peril -- especially as a new "two-speed" world emerges. This duality is characterized by high incomes but slow GDP growth in the developed countries of Western Europe, the U.S. and Japan; and explosive GDP growth but low household incomes in rapidly developing economies -- most notably China, India and Brazil. This parallel dynamic is likely to continue for years. In this article, experts from Wharton and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) look at the importance of innovation as a source of competitive advantage in this two-speed world.

As leaders in business and academia, we are pleased that you are meeting to prioritise innovation in Europe. New ideas, products, services and business models will be critical to bring Europe out of economic malaise. But innovation, as underlined in the European Commission’s recent Innovation Union strategy, requires a consistent, coordinated effort. That has been lacking in Europe.

The challenge is daunting for governments, private sector and academics alike. Europe, where the modern scientific method was invented, is falling behind in both quality and quantity of ideas. The R&D intensity of the European economy, at 1.9% of gross domestic product, lags dangerously behind the US and Japan and is being overtaken by China. Just a quarter of international patents come from the EU, compared to 35% in the US and 31% in Japan. Relatively few European universities score at the top of world league tables. On current trends, within a generation as little as 10% of the world’s new ‘ideas’ – measured in varied ways – may originate in Europe.

As a small business owner, I’m always looking for lessons or mantras that I can hold on to. Little nuggets that I can use to guide my decision making help keep me on the right path during difficult times. Over the past two years, I’ve come up with four mantras that I think any small business owner would do well to follow. I’ll share them below. Let me know if you agree or, perhaps, what your own mantras are for your business or your brand.

The Technology Innovation Program (TIP), a program within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), released its Three-Year Plan covering proposed grant competition topics through FY 2014. Future TIP grant competitions may target specific research topics within eight areas of critical national need: civil infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, health care, water resources, complex networks and sustainability. For additional information regarding these topic areas or to comment on TIP's authored whitepapers visit http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/index.cfm. Program officials emphasize that the three-year plan is not a formal solicitation for proposals. There are no current TIP competitions. Specific competitions related to these topics will be announced in the Federal Register, on grants.gov and on the TIP website.

Read the Plan

I’ve been doing a lot of investor pitch preparation with clients recently and one area where companies are consistently weak is the “competition slide“.

Looking for some inspiration on improving these I came across a great analysis from Jason Cohen of Capital Factory in Austin. He identified two classes of competitive positioning flaws that showed up frequently in 150 pitches he reviewed:

1. Being dismissive of the competition or worse claiming to have no competitors
2. Defining your company by comparison with the competition

I’d add a third:
3. Misunderstanding what a sustainable competitive advantage is.

Invasive seaweed is putting a deadly choke hold on Hawaii's coral reefs. In an effort to save them and the fish that rely on coral as a habitat, scientists have started breeding native sea urchins to eat the offending seaweed.

The culprits are two seaweed algae called Kappaphycus alvarezii and K. striatum. First brought to Hawaii in 1974 for commercial cultivation, the seaweed soon made its way into the wild and has now been plaguing the 50th state's coral reefs for years. The seaweed blankets the coral, smothering it to death, the Honolulu Star–Advertiser reports.

The sea horse's signature "S" shape holds a secret weapon: It is an adaptation for the ambush hunting style favored by these tiny, carnivorous fish, according to new research that looked at the biomechanical properties of the sea horse's curvaceous neck region.

Sea horses evolved from long, narrow swimmers similar to pipefishes. Anchored by their prehensile tails, they hover in sculptural stillness near coral reefs and sea grass beds until a tiny shrimp or larval fish swims by. Then, with a subtle tilt of the head and a slurp, the diminutive predators suck in unassuming prey. Both sea horses and pipefishes employ the tilt-and-slurp technique, known as pivot feeding. Sea horses, however, do not pursue their prey as pipefishes do, so the reach of their necks is an important determinant of their hunting success.

Geekmedia, the company that operates Israeli technology blog newsgeek.co.il, is getting into the startup incubation business with a new program called Venturegeeks.

Based in Tel Aviv, Venturegeeks sounds like it will be structured similarly to well-known US incubator programs like Y Combinator. Startups accepted into the program will receive $20,000, as well as three months of mentorship and office space, in return for a 10 percent stake in the company.

Some entrepreneurs consider 409A valuations a necessary evil. But too many aren’t particularly familiar with this particular section of the corporate tax code. And while we realize tax law might not be red-hot cocktail party conversation, it’s something that should be top of mind for start-up owners.

409A valuations are most commonly performed to assist companies with setting the strike price for their employee stock options, which needs to be at or above fair market value. The most common questions surrounding those are: “Do I really need a valuation?,” “How do I select an appraiser and why does it cost so much? “ and our personal favorite “Why is my common stock worth so much?”