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.

(Media-Newswire.com) - India’s Minister for Human Resources Development, Kapil Sibal, visited Imperial College London yesterday to explore university innovation and the process of translating research into new technologies and applications.

The visit formed part of a five-day tour of the UK to strengthen educational ties between the two countries. It comes at a time when India is exploring ways to develop its higher education sector, including plans for ‘innovation universities’, the first tranche of which will centre on health, the environment and new technologies for power plants.

The afternoon of activities at Imperial aimed to provide the minister with an insight into the College’s approach to innovation, from pure research right through to its translation to the market place. Key strategies discussed included the creation of interdisciplinary institutes that draw together researchers with a range of expertise to jointly tackle issues such as sustainable energy, climate change, global health and security science. Mr Sibal also explored Imperial’s creation of the UK’s first Academic Health Science Centre, in partnership with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which integrates the administrative structures of the university and the Trust in a way that enables research findings to be turned into new therapies for patients much more quickly than previously possible.

A paper out of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) examines answers to "Does Broadband Boost Local Economic Development?"

Many might flame PPIC for daring to ask such a question, but with billions of dollars in public funds being spent by governments around the world, it seems appropriate for some science to be applied to study the benefits.

The federal government and the state of California, as well as other states throughout the nation, have made universal access to broadband service a public policy goal, assuming that multiple economic and social benefits will accrue from increasing broadband access.

The study found a positive relationship between broadband expansion and employment growth, but the benefits for local residents are ambiguous.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010, everyone will have the opportunity to watch a live Webcast of the Kauffman Foundation's State of Entrepreneurship Address, taking place at the National Press Club in Washington, DC from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST

Kauffman President and CEO Carl Schramm will assess the outlook for entrepreneurship in 2010, including the challenges facing new businesses and solutions for fueling job growth as part of the economic recovery.

What's a second-stage company, you ask? Well, based on research from the Cassopolis, Mich.-based Edward Lowe Foundation, a second-stage company is a small business that has about 10 to 100 employees, and $1 million to $50 million in revenue.

The Lowe Foundation's research - as we explain in print this week - indicates that second-stage businesses are creating jobs, not just in Michigan but across the U.S., and the foundation is suggesting something called "economic gardening" as an economic development stratgey for state and local governments. That means supporting existing companies, not trying to lure new businesses in from outside the state. As the foundation's research has shown, the "hunting" method of economic development doesn't tend to result in net job creation. Gardening, on the other hand, does.

Although the list goes on an on, these reasons alone are enough to convince me that I have chosen the right path!

1. You get to keep ALL of the profits of the business, not just a meager tidbit of what you are worth.
2. You can tap into your unlimited potential and explore your true passion.
3. You don’t have to set an alarm clock.
4. You can decide when to work and when to take a break.
5. You can wear your pajamas to work.

From his apartment in 1999, Marc Benioff started a new-fangled software company, Salesforce.com (CRM). While there have been some missteps along the way, the company is a model of success. Today, Salesforce.com generates more than $1 billion in sales, is profitable and has a market cap of $9 billion.

How did Marc do it? Well, now we have a chance to find out. That is, he has written an excellent book about his experiences and strategies, called Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company -- and Revolutionized an Industry.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading a bipartisan congressional delegation to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. On this trip, Members of Congress are seeing first-hand the innovative technologies the auto industry is investing in to create the jobs of the future and to ensure our national competitiveness.

Over the last three years, the New Direction Congress has taken a series of steps to spur innovation in the auto industry, strengthen U.S. manufacturing, and create the jobs of the future. Beginning with the Innovation Agenda and the 2007 energy bill, through the auto industry rescue, and this year with the Recovery Act, Cash for Clunkers, and the Omnibus spending bill, this Congress has worked to spur an economic turnaround for the auto industry, U.S. manufacturing and Michigan. In 2010, more will soon be delivered through the Recovery Act along with key legislation in progress. Congress is committed to continuing to preserve our manufacturing base, which is essential to our economic and national security.

LONDON, ENGLAND: It took only a few weeks of research for Romanian entrepreneur Emi Gal to decide to base his digital media firm in London, and his choice confounds a fairly enduring set of stereotypes about Britain's global appeal.

International experts agree there has been genuine progress in the country which a few decades ago was fast fading as a magnet for the science, health and technology brains and entrepreneurship that also drive the knowledge economy.

'London is pretty much the centre of the world if you want to work in media and advertising,' Mr Gal, 23, told Reuters.

Newswise - An international report on new business development released Thursday (Jan. 14) in Santiago, Chile, includes the first global study of social entrepreneurship, co-produced by a professor at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

For the first time, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) includes a study of the prevalence of people engaged in entrepreneurial activities with a social goal, whether profit or non-profit, public or private.

Siri A. Terjesen, assistant professor of strategic management and international entrepreneurship, produced the social entrepreneurship component of the report with Rachida Justo of the Instituto de Empresa in Spain and Jan Lepoutre of Ghent University in Belgium.

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--A proposal that would change how certain private placements are regulated could mean another hurdle for small businesses in a cash-strapped, recessionary environment.

Sen. Christopher Dodd's draft legislation for sweeping financial reform includes a provision that would give back to state regulators the authority to oversee certain aspects of private placements, known as Reg-D offerings. States lost certain powers, such as the ability to review offerings and to prohibit bad actors from initiating Reg-D offerings, when Congress enacted the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996, or NSMIA. That watershed law aimed to create uniform federal regulation of certain "covered securities" previously regulated at both the state and federal levels.

This is the eighth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Rocco Tarasi

Is there an industry more in need of innovation than education?

Rethinking University Education - It is one of the largest industries in the United States, with over $1 trillion dollars spent annually. You are a consumer in this industry practically from birth until death. And yet most believe that the industry has lagged the pace of innovation so much that the education market today is comparable to the newspaper industry of 1999 - enjoying healthy profits before innovative start-ups disrupt their existing (archaic) business models.

Before you write off the American economy, consider this remark from Nathan Myhrvold, the ex-Microsoft genius who now runs an idea factory called Intellectual Ventures: “For the last few decades I’ve bought Japanese or German cars but no Japanese or German software. Only the United States can handle the thinking speed of the software field.”

We live in a country where makers of high-value-added software are hounded as antitrust outlaws, while the smoke-belching industry of making money-losing cars is lavished with government bailouts, but never mind that. US business ingenuity is so robust that not even the government can kill it.

As Gregg Easterbrook demonstrates in his engaging new book, “Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed” (Random House), the big challenge today is to accept challenge — perpetual, stressful, constant upheaval. The chances that someone in your family will suffer economic trauma — pay cut, loss of job — in a given year are up to 26%. Like the treadmill, the world economy punishes as it delivers benefits.