The creation by entrepreneurs of a destination for tech companies in Rajasthan's Thar Desert shows it's time to rethink regional development planning

For government officials and planning consultants looking to create regional economic growth and drive innovation, industry clusters are the Holy Grail. Popularized by Harvard professor Michael Porter in the early 1990s, cluster theory holds that a government or economic development body can create a viable hub of economic activity in a specific industrial sector by bringing in businesses, suppliers, researchers, and additional related people or entities. In other words, a focused governmental effort can create something from nothing, turning, for example, a fallow field into a tech park bursting with highly competitive, innovative companies. Governments all over the world have invested millions—sometimes billions—of dollars to attract industries they consider strategic.

Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right? In this book, one of America’s leading educators cautions that the answer is all too often “yes.” Taking the first comprehensive look at the growing commercialization of our academic institutions, Derek Bok probes the efforts on campus to profit financially not only from athletics but increasingly, from education and research as well. He shows how such ventures are undermining core academic values and wha…  More

MUMBAI -(Dow Jones)- Venture Capital firms invested $475 million in 92 deals during 2009, down from the $836 million invested across 153 deals in the previous year, according to a study by Venture Intelligence and Global-India Venture Capital Association.

Venture capital firms, however, began to increase the pace of their investments in Indian companies in the October-December quarter, making 42 investments worth $265 million, compared to 23 investments worth $102 million in the comparative period a year earlier, the study said.

ATLANTA - (Business Wire) Much like the inventions themselves, IP Advocate (http://www.IPAdvocate.org) began just over a year ago as an idea in one inventor’s mind – and has since grown to become a national movement that has amplified the collective voice of academic researchers on critical issues related to intellectual property rights. Dr. Renee Kaswan, former research professor and inventor of the groundbreaking drug Restasis®, along with a team of experts, launched the non-profit advocacy organization to address the inherent problems in university commercialization.

In its freshman year IP Advocate has been recognized for:

• Widespread exposure for the issues of technology transfer and patent reform, in national press and influential online science forums and web publications
• Collaborations with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Small Business Coalition on Patent Legislation, the National Small Business Association and university technology transfer veterans nationwide
• Participation with recognized scientists, academic inventors and industry experts, who have contributed their opinions and insights exclusively for IP Advocate’s growing online community
• International awards in education, advocacy and user experience

IN THE old days, the job of eradicating disease fell to governments and inter-governmental bodies. Then charities, often led by celebrities or entrepreneurs, joined in. Finally, in the Western world at least, governments accepted the need to pool their efforts with those of private donors, big and small. The effort still seems unequal to the task. Every year, nearly 11m children die before the age of five because of a mixture of poor nutrition and preventable disease. Many of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (calling, for example, for a plunge in child and maternal mortality by 2015) look unattainable.

The good news is that more imaginative ways of raising and spending money are now on the horizon. How well they do will depend on many details—like the quality of information flowing between poor places and the governments, firms and individuals that want to help.

MADISON - Wisconsin entrepreneurs and researchers do a world-class job of coming up with ideas that will transform health care, energy, manufacturing and other industries. Finding the investors who can move those ideas forward is too often the problem.

While Wisconsin's angel capital investments have climbed steadily, the state continues to lag in the next stage of private equity investments - venture capital. These rounds of investment, which begin around $2 million and build upon smaller investments by individual “angels” or networks of such investors, can help turn a start-up into a thriving company.

Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, delivered the "2010 State of Entrepreneurship Address" on January 19, 2010, on the heels of alarming unemployment numbers and citing sobering new data that show a majority of American entrepreneurs do not expect to create jobs in 2010. He called on policymakers to make this cornerstone of American capitalism a priority.

During an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that included perspectives from entrepreneurs and remarks from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Schramm underscored the importance of entrepreneurs to economic recovery, emphasizing that hundreds of new companies are being created each day.

Schramm also unveiled a new survey of entrepreneurs, commissioned by the Kauffman Foundation and conducted by Douglas Schoen, LLC that shows entrepreneurs are optimistic about their companies but are struggling to expand and create jobs in the current economy. Highlights from the survey include the following:

• 36 percent of entrepreneurs reported reductions in head count in the past year; only 8 percent have added employees.
• Nearly two-thirds have seen their sales volume and their profitability decrease.
• 71 percent of entrepreneurs do not expect to add any new jobs in 2010.
• 61 percent of entrepreneurs think the economy is on the wrong track.

To catalyze job creation and to ease the burden that entrepreneurs feel in today's economic climate, Schramm presented a number of policy recommendations that he said would help set the country on a path toward economic recovery:

• Reform immigration policy, granting citizenship for foreign students graduating from American universities and other immigrants who want to start new companies and create jobs.
• Revise Sarbanes-Oxley regulations to allow company shareholders to choose whether their companies must fulfill some of the most onerous reporting requirements if they think the costs of compliance outweigh the benefits.
• Provide a temporary payroll tax holiday to companies less than five years old.
• Give academic entrepreneurs the choice of multiple avenues to commercialize their research so their innovations can reach consumers more quickly.
• Offer fellowships for doctoral graduates in scientific fields to educate them about how to start companies.
• Provide entrepreneurship education and training to students in high school and college.

More kids are getting mobile phones: Last year, more than 35% of U.S. children ages 10-11 had cellphones, almost double the amount in 2005, according to Mediamark data, via eMarketer. And even more than 5% of 6-7-year-olds had cellphones last year.

This whitepaper begins with the Department of Commerce report that 100% of net job growth over the last 20 years can be attributed to startup companies - and goes deeper, exploring the three main drivers of startup companies: investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship - and how cities across the country measure up in terms of these metrics. Then finally, we explain what cities can do to help jumpstart the growth of startup companies, focusing on an exciting new economic development tool called crowdsourcing. We take a by-the-numbers look at regional innovation competitions as a cost-effective way to drive real growth in local startups, innovation, and investment.

At the completion of his keynote address at the Global Urban Summit in Rotterdam on the 4th December 2009, Prof. Chris Ryan was joined by Prof. Han Brezet, from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, to announce the creation of the Rotterdam Eco-Innovation Lab: REIL. REIL will follow the methodology, and build on and adapt the outcomes, of VEIL within the development around the immense harbour of Rotterdam city. This development responds to the opening up of land for housing and commercial activity as the functions of the old harbour move ‘outwards’ towards the ocean. The Harbour development aims to set new environmental standards as part of an innovative new zone, known now as the “Clean Tech Delta”. In announcing the creation of REIL, with its collaboration with VEIL, Prof Brezet also announced that the Clean Tech Delta will send a staff member to Melbourne for several months (starting in Feb 2010) to work with the VEIL team to better understand the potential for similar projects in REIL.

Do people start businesses more frequently as a result of recessions? You might think so, but a new study just released by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation suggests otherwise.

The study Exploring Firm Formation: Why Is the Number of New Firms Constant? shows that the level of new firm formation has remained virtually consistent from year to year for more than 30 years.

Authors Dane Stangler and Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation researched several types of data on company formation, beginning in 1977. These included employer firms as tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Small Business Administration, firm startups tabulated by the Census Bureau, and new establishments (including existing firms adding locations) as tracked by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No matter which type of data the authors studied, they found that the number of new companies launched each year varied by just 3 to 6 percent. In fact, the number of startups stayed fairly consistent even from quarter to quarter within a given year.

Hype drives Hype – that’s what one gets to believe after reading Gartner’s Prediction for 2010 and beyond.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.

By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).

Europe's incoming innovation commissioner is pledging to tap the EU's structural funds to build research infrastructure and capacity. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn also revealed she would chair meetings of EU commissioners with responsibilities for innovation as part of her new "cross-cutting" portfolio.

Geoghegan-Quinn, who will take up the role of European commissioner for research, innovation and science if approved by MEPs, said she hoped to use €86bn of EU structural funds to beef up the so-called knowledge economy.

John Campbell survives on just five hours of sleep — and that’s on a good night.

But it’s apparently enough to fuel the 20-year-old college junior, who divides his time between running a successful sneaker shop in Boston and attending classes at nearby Babson College, where he heads the student government and maintains good grades.

"It’s tough to balance," said Campbell, a Plainfield native. "I never go out, pretty much, but I don’t mind."

We've seen similar articles a few times in the past, but the NY Times has yet another story about how startup execs are less interested in going public than in the past, and suggests two key reasons:

1. The regulatory nightmare of going public, means that it's all paperwork and lawyers, rather than focusing on growth, innovation and markets. Sarbanes-Oxley remains a key problem here.
2. For startup founders, it's become a lot more tempting to just sell out to someone big -- because it's a lot easier, but can still earn you enough money to totally change your life.

Again, neither of these issues are all that new, but a decade ago, the focus for most startups was very much on building companies that could go public and standalone. Admittedly, in the dot com insanity, a ton of startups went public that had no business whatsoever being public standalone companies, but there's reason to fear that we've gone too far in the other direction.

In this case, I am talking about early-stage investors and the sins that they sometimes commit when they decide to back a start-up company. I spend a lot of time engaged with such companies – and much of that time is spent working to set right things that were set in place when the first round of angel funding occurred. What follows is a partial list of ’sins’ and a few suggestions that might both mitigate their impact and improve the investors’ prospects.

CEO Compensation: I regularly come across pre-revenue companies that are paying the CEO at levels that would only be prudent if the company was generating a run-rate in the twenty to thirty million ranges. As a result, lots of the investment capital is going out the door in the form of a fat monthly check. CEO compensation should reflect the condition of the company and the unavoidable fact that, in start-up situations, cash is a very rarest of commodities and needs to be conserved.

SEATTLE — Investors in technology start-ups have been trying to end the drought in initial public offerings of tech companies. But for entrepreneurs, has taking a company public lost its allure?

That question is growing louder among those who start, invest in and advise Silicon Valley start-ups. “I.P.O. has become a bad word in the Valley,” said Richard Barton, a founder and the chief executive of Zillow.com, a real estate site, and a venture partner at Benchmark Capital.

When start-ups grow up, the founders pay back their investors by selling the business to a bigger company or selling shares to the public. Public offerings have long been the more desirable option. They earn the founders and investors more money and the promise of continuing returns, and enable them to keep expanding the company.

Some sweet deals and a bevy of venture financings marked a hectic week of presentations and networking at several conferences in San Francisco, including the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. While many small biotech executives were buoyed by an upbeat mood compared to last year’s event, they are mindful that times are still tough, good deal terms are hard to get, and they must focus on those compounds in their pipeline that offer the most potential for near term revenue. Several executives also expressed cautious optimism that the capital markets will continue to grow more favorable, keeping the possibility of a successful IPO alive.

In the biggest deal of the week, Belgian biotech Galapagos (GLPGF.PK) entered into a $580 million global multi-year strategic alliance with Swiss biopharmaceutical powerhouse Roche (RHHBY.PK) to develop potential new therapies in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. Their agreement calls for Galapagos to apply its target discovery platform to discover novel COPD targets and assume the discovery and development of new small molecule candidate drugs against these targets.

SINGAPORE: Plans are underway for Asia's first social stock exchange to be set up in Singapore.

US philanthropic organisation, the Rockefeller Foundation, is donating a sum of money to support the establishment of the social stock exchange. It is awarding US$495,000 to the Singapore-based agency, Impact Investment Exchange (IIX).

The grant will support research and proof-of-concept analysis that IIX will undertake prior to launch of the exchange.

This year Seoul is officially designated as the "World Design Capital" by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. The credit has to go to Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon who, under his leadership since 2006, introduced reforms that have turned Seoul into a design-driven city from where the Korean Wave continues to spread to other parts of Asia and beyond.

For Mayor Oh, Seoul is more than a design city. For him, Seoul is seeking to become a city of arts and culture too through his vision of "culturenomics", or promoting the city's creative economy. It will be the city where culture, modernity and tradition harmonise.

"Seoul boasts an endless series of beautiful mountains and an abundance of rivers and streams that harmonise wonderfully together with its 600 years of tradition in existence.