As you’ve probably read, Steven Burrill’s predictions regarding the biotech industry go over at MedCity News the way former Detroit Lions President Matt Millen’s football forecasts go over in Michigan.

Nonetheless, it’s notable when the renowned biotech specialist, venture capitalist, author and keynote speaker offers his thoughts on currents events in life sciences and the future of the industry next year (even if it is to promote his upcoming book: Biotech 2011-Life Sciences: Looking Back to See Ahead).

Burrill believes the financial crisis has triggered changes in healthcare that have biotech executives “writing their new ‘play book’ in response.”

Looking to 2011. There have been plenty of Top Moments of 2010, but these typical end-of-the-year retrospectives have been short on 2011 predictions. N. Anthony Coles, president and CEO of Onyx Pharmaceuticals, offers his list:

1. An escalating legal battle over the constitutionality of President Obama’s healthcare reform legislation.
2. Implementation of the pharma tax, which is expected to raise $2.3 billion a year, and will target branded prescription drug sales of more than $5 million to Medicare and other government programs.
3. Rethinking biopharma and physician relationships in light of the implementation of the Sunshine Act in 2012.

As part of my entrepreneurship classes, I teach my students to raise capital. When people find this out, they often ask one question: What’s the most important thing I need to know about raising money? For entrepreneurs, four lessons are especially important.

1. For most entrepreneurs, seeking outside financing isn’t worth your time. Only a small fraction of new businesses obtain money from someone who is not a founder of the business.  Therefore, unless your business has a lot of hard assets that can be used as collateral for a loan, or one of a handful of startups that has the super-high growth potential and exit plan to attract accredited angel investors and venture capitalists, seeking outside money is unlikely to be fruitful.  You are better off developing a less capital-intensive business model and financing the startup yourself than you are spending your time trying to raise money.

How can you tell a real business opportunity, one with staying power,  from last year’s opportunity?

Some fields might seem hot right now but, for many, there’s a good chance that the real opportunity was over five months ago and the field will be totally glutted by February.

Then, too, the opportunities that shine like a beacon for larger firms might not work so well for microbusinesses.

So, how do you find microbusiness opportunities with staying power?

The naïve entrepreneur thinks he can relax, after he finally cashes the check from a professional investor, but in reality that’s when the work and the pressure starts. His first reality reset is that now, maybe for the first time, he really has a boss, or several bosses, and often very demanding ones at that.

Angel and venture capital investors rarely just give you the cash, and stand back to wait for you to spend it the way you want. First of all, they are usually more experienced than you in your own business domain, so they have strong views on what it takes to succeed, and probably would prefer it done their way.

As U.S. small businesses employ nearly 50 percent of the private workforce, many analysts are predicting that economic recovery will come primarily from this sector.

However, unemployment remains leveled at a stubborn 9.8 percent, and many economists such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have claimed it may take several years for unemployment to drop to pre-recession levels.

As we wrap up 2010, things might seem bleak. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States.

Personally, I think there’s a chance that the common wisdom is very, very wrong – and that the second decade of the 21st century may turn out to be the West’s – and in particular the United States’ – finest hour.

A warm and cuddly environment for companies sounds wonderful. A way to encourage the innovative economy that a high cost country such as the UK needs to sustain. We should see Incubators as the nursery schools for companies and Science Parks as the Secondary schools. Although rather less emphasis on testing and CRB checks!

Physical Infrastructure is the description on the Innovation Map, a bit dry and a limited shorthand necessary on such an overview. Looking at real life the offering from successful Incubators and Science Parks is a lot more sophisticated, as they keep telling me, so apologies to friends in the incubator and science park movements.

My advice for the new year: go East and South, young man and woman … and investor. America, Europe, and Japan are stagnant and ponderous. More and more, in the coming years, the real moving and shaking will happen elsewhere.

“2011 will be the year Android explodes!” cried a recent headline, citing a new Broadcom chipset that will reportedly make sub-$100 unsubsidized smartphones ubiquitous. Maybe so, but I second MG’s skepticism: North American carriers will fight this tooth and nail, and even when they lose, we’ll still have to wait for the three-year contracts that are status quo here to finally die. If that chipset is real, though, the headline’s not wrong; Android will explode … in the developing world, where virtually all phone service is pre-paid. (As, ahem, I predicted 20 months ago.)

Which state has the highest per capita marijuana use? Who has the most horses? Deer-collisions? What about suicides? Rice production?

There will be some stats on this graphic by our friends at 1bog that will not surprise you, such as the state with the largest economy or the most wind farms, but some of the stats will likely blow your mind.

Rick Snyder makes no secret of his urbanist tendencies or his belief that Michigan’s economy requires a healthy Detroit. He said as much during his Election Night victory speech.

The incoming Republican governor even tapped Dave Bing, Detroit’s Democratic mayor to serve as his inauguration’s master of ceremonies.

To be sure, Lansing can only help a Detroit that helps itself. But that’s finally happening.

Earlier this month, Americans woke up to the bad news that their education system was just "average" in the developed world. Worse news, however, was that Shanghai, China took the top spot. For a country already in a declinist mood, this was a blow. Perhaps not even U.S. President Barack Obama thought the future would arrive so quickly: As he told a group of educators at the White House earlier this year, the "nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow." 

America is rightfully worried about its sinking competitiveness, and does indeed need to improve its education system. But it could win the battle and lose the war, because India's and China's successes aren't due to their education systems, but despite them. You've probably heard of Indian outsourcing hotspots like Bangalore and Chennai, but it's not just call centers and software sweatshops Americans now need to worry about: Technology entrepreneurship is booming all over in China and India, and is beginning to innovate; these startups will soon start competing with Silicon Valley. The next Google could well be cooked up in a garage in Guangzhou or Ahmedabad.

No, not that kind of passion. I’m talking about projects that are related to work, but are things you love so much that they don’t feel like work. Working on these projects makes you feel energized, excited and yes, passionate, about what you do. Such projects might be in your day job, a side project or a hobby.

It can be too easy to slip into the daily routine of work and the rest of your life without thinking about what you love to do. The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on what you really want to be doing.

AS a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere — think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods — has its limits.

So can China become a prodigious inventor? The answer, in truth, will play out over decades — and go a long way toward determining not only China’s future, but also the shape of the global economy.

While the price of gold skyrockets at $1400 an ounce, far-sighted individuals in Barcelona, Spain, and Santiago, Chile, are looking to corner the market on a more renewable resource: entrepreneurship, or emprendimiento. This scarce and valuable resource drives economic growth and social development. Despite what policymakers will tell you, it is the root cause of national competitiveness, clusters, the knowledge economy and innovation systems. Not the other way around.

With that in mind, ambitious new organisations like Start-up Chile and Barcelona Activa are mining the world’s “entrepreneurial supply chain” in the belief that globally-oriented entrepreneurs will kick-start the next economic revolutions in Latin America and Europe.

In November, Start-Up Chile welcomed 25 teams of ambitious young entrepreneurs from 13 countries, including France, China, Portugal, Spain, Israel and India. "Today it is about global entrepreneurship," said founder Nicolas Shea, who returned to his native Chile from Silicon Valley to create Start-Up Chile. "Unlike countries such as Ireland or India, the Chilean diaspora is very small, so we need to accelerate with people from all around the world. “

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Was 2010 the year geek became chic? Tough to make a case against it -- Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was on the silver screen, deep-space tech bailed out some caved-in miners, and Julian Assange became the pallid rogue who kept governments guessing. But they weren't alone: Techland takes a look back on the top 25 nerds of the year.

The Midwest can’t compare to the coasts in volume of venture capital investment, but a strong performance last year has some predicting the region to be 2011′s hottest growth market.

Through the first three quarters of 2010, the amount of venture money invested in Midwestern startups grew 45 percent to $818 million, according to the National Venture Capital Association. That’s a higher amount than Midwestern venture investment in the full year of recession-plagued 2009.

So here we are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage (and enthrall) in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends—social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud—keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward. Below I highlight seven technologies that are ready to tip into the mainstream 2011.

Before I get into my predictions, let’s see how I did last year, when I wrote “Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010.” Some of my picks were spot on: the Tablet (hello, iPad), Geo (Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, mobile location-aware search, etc.), Realtime Search (it became an option on Google) and Android (now even bigger than the iPhone). Some are still playing out: HTML5 (it’s made great strides, but isn’t quite here yet), Augmented Reality (lots of cool apps have AR functionality, but for the most part it is still a parlor trick), Mobile Video (FaceTime and streaming video apps pushed it forward), Mobile Transactions (Square and other transaction processing options came onto the scene), and Social CRM (Salesforce pushed Chatter, and tons of social CRM startups pushed their wares, but enterprises are always slow to adopt). And one got pushed to 2011: Chrome OS (we are still waiting).

As we begin 2011, optimism is on the upswing. And we’ll need it: The technology industry has a lot of potential, as embodied in these 10 trends we’re seeing, but it will take continued growth — and a lot of hard work — to make them happen. What do you think of our crystal ball-gazing? Vote for your favorite trend in our poll at the end.

1. Apps spread everywhere – Sure, apps were a big story last year. But in 2011, they will be a tidal wave. Apps have become far bigger than the iPhone. Other smartphones have them. So do tablets and connected TVs. The Mac is getting apps, and so is just about every other hardware platform. It’s a shift in how we consume software, since nobody wants to take the time to download applications. People want to use apps on the go and in real time, as they need them. Apps work with a simple tap, not complex commands or a sequence of clicks. They are the quickest way to get things done. As they spread far and wide, we will need something to manage them. Discovering the right app is still going to be a tough problem, as no one has come up with the equivalent of search, which solved the problem of navigating through millions of web sites. As users embrace more and more platforms, they will want their favorite apps to be available on all of them.