For this Sunday's Globe column, I spoke with (and e-mailed with) about fifteen techies, designers, entrepreneurs, and executives around Boston. Rather than talking specifically about the way-too-ballyhooed iPad, I asked them what lessons — positive and negative — they've learned from Apple and Steve Jobs.

- Antonio Rodriguez, venture capitalist at Matrix Partners and founder of Tabblo

- Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen, the Boston marketing agency

- Avid Technology founder Bill Warner

- Harvard Business School professor and author Rosabeth Moss Kanter

- Harry West and Ed Milano of the West Newton design firm Continuum

- OfficeDrop chief executive Prasad Thammineni

- Philip Greenspun, entrepreneur, MIT instructor, flight school owner

- Vijay Kailas, founder of the start-up Numote

There is no doubt that these are tough economic times. Unemployment is high and credit is tight. Key indicates show that is the worse economy in a generation. Many technology transfer offices have seen potential business partners reduce their innovation portfolios and expenditures. This coupled with a reduction in funding sources, from grants and investors to university sources are blowing the technology transfer research commercialization efforts into the perfect storm.

There are difficulties and challenges, but these times also create opportunities. Here are seven tips to help your technology transfer office succeed in these tough economic times.

1. Maintain a list of problems that are relevant to the research and technologies in the pipeline.

Technology transfer offices typically get involved in research commercialization efforts late in the research and testing process. Get involved earlier in the process and start developing a list of problems of which the research can be applied.

At 8.35am, the Apple staff counted down to the dropping of the black curtain, which had shrouded the store windows. As it got closer to 9am and the opening of the doors, the excitement of the crowd was tangible.

The morning survey of news items yielded a find that inspired me to revisit all the recent articles I've collected about migration. Albeit pre-Great Recession, deconstructing the rush to Atlanta:

This week the Atlanta Regional Commission released one of its periodic Regional Snapshots -- the topic was "Domestic Migration: Who's Moving In and Where Are They Coming From?" The snapshot looked at the 20-county greater metro area that includes Coweta County from 2000 through 2007. The source of the report was IRS tax records. That makes the report somewhat skewed because everyone does not file a tax return, but the report is a good indicator of where people are coming and going.

The first revelation is that most moves are local. In fact, 52.1 percent of the people on the move in metro Atlanta moved from one of the 20 counties within the region. Slightly more than 37 percent of those moving to the region came from a different state. And 7.5 percent moved from another county in Georgia outside the 20-county region. Other migration made up slightly more than 3 percent of the incoming population.

A local firm has developed a new type of scanner that can see through concrete and steel and save companies millions in lost operational days, and the company is getting set to commercialize its product.

“ We are going through an exciting time right now because we are trying to scale up to do a more commercialization effort , ” said John Bowles, vice-president of Inversa Systems Ltd.

Based at the University of New Brunswick campus, Inversa uses “deep backscatter tomography” technology to peer into the insides of all kinds of dense materials and create images of what it sees inside.

Bowles said the technology is a spinoff from one originally developed for medical use.

I [Author] am not convinced that blind innovation is categorically bad—if it’s a meaningful concept at all. Starting from scratch and trying to make a game that is unique is a great way for game designers to get out of their comfort zone and produce something that aggressively explores and opens up the space of possible game rule combinations.

The Naive View

Let’s assume that innovation and fun can be objectively defined and universally acknowledged. In this case, I see innovation through the improvement of existing systems as moving a particular genre of game forward towards “perfection.” A perfect game is one where the mechanics, if changed incrementally, cannot be made more fun. If you don’t fundamentally alter the rules of a perfect game, you cannot make it more fun. It has reached the end of its evolutionary development. Innovation for innovation’s sake is not moving forward, it is moving laterally. Different paths towards the perfect game are found by discarding what mechanics have come before and coming up with something entirely new. Discarding mechanics can happen at any level: you can discard really basic mechanics like the character being in one world; you can discard mechanics like character death upon reaching 0 HP; you can discard relatively superficial mechanics like instanced raids. Through discarding the old in favor of building the new from scratch, new passageways to perfect games can be opened and these new perfect games have the potential to be more fun than past perfect games.

Running your startup, don't waste time on tasks that apps can help you do -- especially if those apps are free or cheap.

Thankfully, there's a post on the Flexvite blog that put together a list of 12 cheap or free web tools that help you with that.

More investment in public-private partnerships and prioritizing key technologies are crucial if America is to avoid losing its competitive edge in manufacturing, industry and policy leaders warned Congress in recent testimony.

With a heavy focus on manufacturing innovation and government’s role in stimulating new technologies, experts from private, public and academic backgrounds said rival economies have already mobilized their resources in more efficient, targeted areas.

“In order to be relevant, we need to ensure that government R&D programs are focused on ways to provide high-quality assembly, non-destructive evaluation, and high rates of repeatability at large volumes,” said Susan Smyth, director of General Motors’ manufacturing systems research lab, in testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology on March 17.

What is it that entrepreneurs most need? When I ask that question at business schools, the answer is always “money.” But when I ask it of entrepreneurs themselves, the answer is something else — and it’s always the same: “stamina.”

I’ve interviewed successful business owners around the world, and that’s always the answer I get. When you think about it, the reason is obvious. If you quit, the game’s over and you know the outcome. But if you can keep going, you still have a chance. The question is, How do you keep yourself going? The answer may surprise you.

Liz Elting, who runs Transperfect, one of the world’s largest translation companies, vividly remembers an all-nighter she and her co-founder Phil Shawe pulled for a prestigious new client: “I remember one Christmas Eve that Phil and I were doing a job for Goldman Sachs, and we were in there working through the night. When it was done, we were late (and exhausted!) for our own personal family celebrations… In the first few years, there was a lot we gave up.”

Aspiring entrepreneurs usually believe one or more of the following:

• Their idea will get them rich

• Their idea will get them rich quickly

• They can escape the corporate grind

• They can be their own boss and have the freedom to do what they want, when they want

• They can work shorter hours and have more free time for their hobbies, families and other passions

• They can be in control of their career path or their own destiny

• They can leave their mark on the world

• They can do more of what they love to do; and/or

• They should open their own business because they will “do it better”

However, most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t understand what it means to be an entrepreneur. What’s worse is that they don’t understand that being talented at making goods or performing services does not mean you will be talented at running a business.

While the rules of poker are simple and the game itself is quite accessible, success typically requires more skill than luck. There’s a wisdom there that we can take from the game and apply to the startup life.

So if you’re looking to win a big pot, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Calculate the odds – Good poker players calculate two kinds of odds before playing: the Pot Odds (or the ratio of money to put divided by the money to gain – the Pot itself) and Card Odds (the probability to have a winning hand). Anytime the Pot Odds are higher than the Card Odds, the hand is worth playing.

Likewise, you must try to evaluate the odds of your startup’s success: How likely is it to succeed? And how big would the ‘pot’ you’d win be?

Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass published an opinion article in the New York Times, arguing that the Redmond giant has become "a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator," with "a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams." The company, though hugely profitable, "is failing," he says. Here are some of Brass's key points.

 

It’s hard. You know how important a blog can be to your social media efforts so you’ve dedicated real time to building it out and making it the focal point of your social marketing strategy. You slave over it trying to make your blog a place that houses both useful content and great community discussions. But even so, your closest competitor has 2,000 more blog subscribers than you do and you feel like you’ll never catch up. How is he/she doing it and what can you do to not only match, but beat the numbers?

Here are ten reasons why your competition has double your blog subscribers and what you can do to help turn it around.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM) is in trouble.

Not because of yesterday's earnings problems -- missing revenue and unit shipment expectations because of a one-time inventory adjustment at one of its carrier partners. But, rather, because RIM is simply not positioned well for the future.

Specifically, RIM is at risk of becoming a mid- to low-end player in a smartphone market that is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android leading the way.

And unless RIM can make big changes to its hardware, software, and platform products, it risks losing its high-end status, getting pushed down carriers' priority lists, and facing shrinking margins. It risks becoming another Palm, which was once a smartphone leader, and is now struggling to make a comeback.

Social games company Playdom announced the acquisition of Buenos Aires-based developer Three Melons today.

This is the latest in a series of acquisitions in social gaming over the past few months.

With industry leader Zynga raising $180 million in December, and gaming giant Electronic Arts making a huge play in social games by acquiring Playfish, there is a lot of cash lying around and plenty of pressure to scale up to stay competitive.

Some of the deals that have been announced thus far:

• Zynga acquired Serious Business in early February.
• Playdom acquired Offbeat Creations in early March.
• Ex-MySpace boss Chris DeWolfe raised over $20 million, acquired MindJolt, and made clear his intentions to keep on buying up game developers.
• Several weeks ago, Playdom acquired Metro Games, another Argentine company.

Regular Anthill readers will know by now that we are big fans of the TED talks series. This talk by marketing maverick Seth Godin — delivered at the TED 2009 conference in Long Beach, California — ranks in the top 10 most popular TED talks of all time. And rightly so.

Over 18-minutes, Godin outlines his theory that the internet has banished the era of mass marketing, and that the ancient social unit of the tribe has returned, empowering ordinary people to lead extraordinary movements.

Sometimes it seems like we are all puppets being manipulated by the puppeteers. Think about what influences our behavior. It is media that permeates our lives everywhere we turn.

Behavior is the result of actions created by beliefs. Beliefs are created from experiences that influences the four components of the human DNA. Our DNA is like capital waiting to be used to “produce” something with or for others. The four capital component we each possess are intellectual, social, creative and spiritual capital. (see The Emergence of the Know Profile)

These four elements represent the human DNA that determines our individual and collective productivity. Our individual and collective productivity represents an economy. An economy is fueled by rates of production and consumption. Consumption is influenced by media used to propagate the value of things  produced.

In the past I’ve written on the topic of “Raising Venture Capital” but today I’m starting a new series called “Understanding VC’s.”  My goal is writing this series of to make it easier for you as a startup needing to raise money to understand how venture capital firms work so you can be more efficient and more effective in your process.

In today’s post I want to talk about the concept of a VC flightpath. This is my description of a VC process, not one I’ve heard from other VCs so don’t expect it to be accepted nomenclature. But I use this all of the time as a metaphor when talking with entrepreneurs in person and I’ve found it to be a useful way of explaining to entrepreneurs what is going in in the VC’s life.

When you visit a VC to tell them about your wonderful idea it’s easy to imagine that this person is not evaluating any other deals at the moment. I have no idea why, but that’s always how it always felt to me when I was an entrepreneur raising money. Of course I knew that they sat on other boards that kept them busy but somehow it seemed like I had all of their attention to myself during the fund raising process – especially the ones who seemed to like me and spend time with me. Even when you’re getting the VC love this reality I imagined couldn’t be further from the truth.

Investors write checks because they hope to get a decent return on their money. The way venture capitalists reap those returns is by taking their companies public, or perhaps selling them to other companies. That's a tough game when demand for IPOs is anemic, as it was in 2009.

Demand hasn't been robust in 2010, but things are thawing. As of this writing, eight companies had done IPOs thus far this year--the same amount for all of last year, according to CB Insights, a Manhattan firm that tracks private-company funding trends (including venture capital, private equity and government-backed deals).

"The venture funding and M&A activity we've observed so far in 2010 suggests that this year's venture funding levels will be higher than last year, but still below those highs of a few years ago," says Anand Sanwal, a CB Insights founding partner.

Jose Ferreira, Founder and CEO of Knewton, reveals the secrets to snagging venture capital in a recent post for HuffPo

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Ferreira says a startup that has all five of these characteristics is a surefire investment for any VC firm.

And a startup that comes up short in any of these areas has a fundamental problem in their strategy.