In fiscal year 2010, 651 new companies were formed as a result of university research, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year, according to a survey report published Nov. 22 by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), a nonprofit association of academic technology transfer professionals.

AUTM announces the release of the AUTM U.S. Licensing Activity Survey: FY2010. The survey shares quantitative information about licensing activities at U.S. universities, hospitals and research institutions.

“This year marks the 20th anniversary of our licensing survey. Each year for the past two decades the survey report has provided important indicators about the successes and challenges of academic technology transfer, making the AUTM Licensing Activity Survey one of AUTM’s signature publications and positioning the association as a leader in soliciting, compiling and publishing these important data," says AUTM President Robin L. Rasor, CLP, RTTP.

The National Angel Capital organization will receive slightly less than $1 million to build the directory, as well as a database of co-investment opportunities for angel investors.

Standards and best practice e-learning modules to help with the professional development of angel investors will also be established.

Money will also be given to the Ontario chapter of the National Angel Organization to develop online tools that will create links between angel networks together with information and capital from other parts of the province.

Bahawalpur in eastern Pakistan is known for magnificent palaces built during the British Raj, but in the dusty part of town where most of the 400,000 residents actually live, four dozen farmers have gathered in the decidedly unpalatial concrete building that houses the local branch of the National Rural Support Programme Bank. Their darkened, sun-creased faces testify to the toll of tilling soil in one of the hotter places on Earth (at 11 a.m. in mid-June it’s ­already heading toward 105 degrees); many twist their hair into head scarves, and all don cotton ­tunics known as kurta.

Suddenly the front door swings open and a tall woman with piercing blue eyes and brownish blonde hair struts in, dressed in a red tunic and baggy pants. Accompanied by the bank’s president, Rashid Bajwa, Jacqueline Novogratz whips out her red notebook and gets down to business. “What kind of livestock do you have?” she asks one client. “How many male calves? How much money are you saving at the bank? What do you do with that cash?” An hour later, the notebook now filled with minute details of how, exactly, the farmers intend to pay back their loans, as well as whether their daughters go to school and what they want their children to do when they grow up, Novogratz walks out of the bank, satisfied. “I’m feeling optimistic about rural Pakistan,” she tells me, as a pickup truck, loaded with field hands, rumbles past a mosque. “Farmers are making good money.”

Do venture capitalists believe that there are more Facebooks and Groupons today than there were Apples and Microsofts in the 1980s?

The figure below suggests they do.  The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) reported that 2,749 companies received venture capital financing in 2010.  But back in 1985, the industry funded only 1,164 young businesses.  While the number of venture capital backed companies is now far below the peak of 6,373 in the Internet boom year of 2000, it has been far higher in the past decade than it was in the second half of the 1980s and early to mid 1990s.

In the past year, four communities in Northeast Ohio launched their own funds to support entrepreneurs: Barberton, Canton, Mansfield and Wooster. Find out more about how Wooster decided to create a new hyper-local resource to support small businesses in Wayne County and meet one of the first entrepreneurial companies to benefit—ManuscriptTracker.

Entrepreneurs interested in applying to these funds should visit www.jumpstartnetwork.org.

Tom Vander Ark is an edu-futurist par excellence. He's chair of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, author of the new Getting Smart: How Personal Digital Learning is Changing the World, and an investor in startup technology and entrepreneurship school General Assembly (see this month's Life in Beta) through his education-focused venture fund Learn Capital. Here, he shares some of his views on the importance of "just-in-time learning" and the "plummeting" value of traditional education.

FAST COMPANY: What's happening now in the world of education from an investor's perspective?

TOM VANDER ARK: The quality of the deal flow is so much better and bigger than when we started three years ago with Learn Capital. The world has exploded since ‘09. It's a really interesting mixture of powerful applications, development platforms, cheap devices like tablets, and broadband cloud computing.

In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon asked China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, for his assessment of the French Revolution, 183 years after the revolution’s conclusion. Zhou’s response: "It is too early to say."

Although we believe that the democracy that resulted from the French Revolution can be judged a success, the jury’s still out on some of the major challenges we still face. We are experiencing a major paradox: While problems and issues, like the global-warming crisis and the energy-water nexus, become more complex and require longer time frames to solve, the West is becoming increasingly shortsighted. China’s main competitive advantage over Europe and the United States may be its broader perception of time. Even the present financial crisis could have been avoided had we been looking at century-long cycles rather than four-year political periods.

As we near the end of the year, it seems natural to begin thinking about next year:  What will it bring?  What are my goals?  What do I hope to accomplish?

From an economic development standpoint, we tend to think about how to grow our economy.  How do we create jobs?  How do we drive investments into our regions?  How do we make life better for ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our communities?

There is a virtual mountain of empirical data showing that the most powerful economic engine on our planet is the entrepreneur.  CNN recently reported that, new companies “have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the past decade.”

I was reading one of my favorite link blogs and found a Kickstarter page for a gadget called Twine. Developed by David Carr and John Kestner from the MIT start-up Supermechanical, Twine is a small box loaded with sensors and a WiFi connection that hooks up with a web app that lets you set up and monitor the sensors so they can send you messages of your choosing.

Out of the box, Twine comes with four sensors: temperature, accelerometer, magnetic switch, and a motion sensor that let you measure all sorts of things around the house like when doors are opened or when a room is occupied. A pressure sensor and RFID reader are in the works.

Pet food billionaire Clay Mathile on how to nurture growing companies.

Three days after Steve Case, the founder of America Online, stepped down as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he took a longtime colleague out for pizza. Case wanted to get back to building companies. He wanted to open a new venture capital firm to attack old industries with the same dynamic, unwieldy Internet that AOL had harnessed before it was trampled in the mid-2000s.

One year later, his firm, Revolution, had acquired a vacation-home sharing company that now owns $1 billion in mansions around the world. Three years later, it helped to create what you know as Zipcar, now the world's largest car-sharing company. The same year, it invested in a new company started by four former employees called LivingSocial, an online social commerce company with more than 45 million global members.

The magic of startup life is the constant flow of new information; new ways of solving problems with solutions that surface from sleepless nights and wandering minds. Major tech companies like Microsoft and Apple were once startups themselves, small companies with innovative ideas that geared up to expand rapidly.

Microsoft and Apple grew into the powerhouses we know today and knocked IBM off its top shelf, all while constantly being challenged by small, groundbreaking companies that could maneuver much faster than a major corporation.

Bre Pettis knows a thing or two about getting things done rather than getting them perfect: He's the founder of Makerbot, a company that turns out cheap rapid prototyping machines. No one would say they've been perfectly realized, but a key to Makerbot's success is that it has evolved in the real world, rather than foundering as just another great idea.

With that in mind, Pettis and collaborator Kio Stark gave themselves exactly 20 minutes to create a manifesto encapsulating everything they knew about bring a creative vision to life. They called it The Done Manifesto. Illustrator James Provost then took the extra step of turning their 13 maxims into a poster:

U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)hailed the Senate passage of a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would renew a program integral to American innovation. The amendment would extend for eight years the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which allows small companies to compete for federal research dollars. A similar SBIR measure included by Shaheen during the bill’s original consideration in the Armed Services Committee helped pave the way for today’s vote.

The Senate is expected to vote on the entire NDAA later this week. The bill then must be reconciled with the version of the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

It’s not good enough to have an intellectual property policy based on the desire to assuage the demands of our trading partners. Canadians must think innovation policies through as a nation. Naturally, Canada must take account of global rules and the need for appropriate harmonization, but those rules provide a significant leeway.

Are Canadians simply less creative and innovative than other countries? Should we see ourselves as consumers and users of the creativity of others? Exactly the opposite is true. Canada has a vibrant community of writers, songwriters, filmmakers, to name just a few. Canada ranks among the very top countries in published scientific articles per capita. Yet Canada also ranks much lower on the global innovation scale. Why? In short because Canadians have ideas, but many of them do not know how to exploit them and the policy environment is not well structured to support them.

The Maryland Biotechnology Center’s (MBC) Biotechnology Development Awards provide funding to advance biotechnology research and development in Maryland along the path to commercialization.

MBC has two Biotechnology Development Awards programs available: the Biotechnology Commercialization Award and the Translational Research Award.  The primary difference in the types of projects funded by these two programs is the stage of commercialization of the technology associated with the proposed project.

European Commissioner for Research and Innovation Máire Geoghegan-Quinn was in Ireland yesterday to visit Tyndall National Institute, where she gave a heads-up on the EU's new research budget, as the EU moves towards creating an Innovation Union.

She said the EU needs to prioritise research and innovation as the motor for growth. In addition, Geoghegan-Quinn also spoke about how conditions need to be improved so Europe is more attractive for scientists and entrepreneurs.

Speaking yesterday at Tyndall  Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn also gave an advance look at EU's new Research budget and says Tyndall is ideally placed to benefit.

Energy utilities are increasingly looking for batteries that can help stabilize the grid. By quickly storing and delivering charge, batteries could accommodate fluctuations in supply and demand, and help to incorporate variable sources of power such as wind and solar. However, currently available battery technologies are either too expensive or don't last for enough charge cycles to be practical.

Researchers at Stanford University have now demonstrated a high-efficiency new nanomaterial battery electrode that lasts for 40,000 charge cycles without significantly losing its charge-holding capacity. The work was led by Yi Cui, a materials science and engineering professor at Stanford University. Cui says the electrode is a first step toward a new type of low-cost battery suitable for storing large amounts of electricity within the power grid.

The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. I wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It.

Fast forward to today. With its foundation cemented in social networks and cloud computing, network sharing appears to have regained favour. Most online activities revolve around sharing and distributing large amounts of personal information and IP. Most of us assume that we have a right to distribute as much data and information as we like. In fact, most online companies encourage us to share more content more often with other users. But why? What has changed in the last 10 years that has seen companies relax views on IP and allows users to distribute information so freely?

Bottom line — nothing. It’s just a change in perception, not a change in IP law or IP rights. Most online users don’t bother to read the terms and conditions on collaborative and social networks before agreeing to them.