Editorial by Brian Darmody

Brian Darmody is an NASVF Board member and Associate Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of Maryland. He is a principal investigator for the University of Maryland’s EURECA partnership, funded by the U.S. Russia Foundation and other groups. He is the principal author of the Power of Place and Power of Innovation, two national policy papers written on behalf of the Association of University Research Parks (AURP).

The views he expresses here are his own, and do not reflect the views of any organization.

Do you know this person? His name is Sergey Brin. In the late 1970s, his family emigrated from Russia to the United State, his father becoming a math professor at the University of Maryland and his mother a researcher at nearby NASA-Goddard. He completed his computer science and math undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, moved to Stanford for his PhD, worked on some university research projects, but became so distracted launching a start-up company, he never finished his doctorate. (But he did get his Master’s degree.)

That start up’s name? Google.

Had Sergey Brin stayed in Russia for his studies, could he have launched Google? Not likely, for two reasons.

The story emanating from the Zynga is a wake-up call for startups.

Reports allege the company threatened to reclaim stock options originally granted to employees who, in the eyes of the company, were not performing to levels on par with their equity holdings. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not about the Zynga news. Therefore, I’m not going to comment on the particulars of those specific allegations in this post. That said, however, something is clearly going on and spreading around the developer community, and if the Hacker News community is any indicator, this earthquake could have powerful, plate-shifting aftershocks.

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) and the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP) representing the venture capitalists (VCs), angel investors and Global 1000 private funders of research commercialization

About this Series: On September 16, 2011, President Obama announced new steps that will help America's universities and research labs convert ideas into new products, expand the economy and create 21st century jobs. In coordination with the Administration, 135 university presidents committed to working more closely with industry, investors, and agencies to bolster entrepreneurship, encourage university-industry collaboration, and advance the nation’s social and economic interests. The commitments are aimed at helping achieve the President’s goal of strengthening commercialization of the nearly $148 billion in annual federally-funded research and development.

Startups, however, have found that, as with the rest of the global economy, belts have become tighter. Venture capitalists and angel investors are no longer as willing as they once were to provide that much-needed funding.

Despite talks of a “tech bubble” in the wider industry, the problems faced by start-ups in finding funding have been so prevalent that even The New York Times has reported on it.

When you become an entrepreneur, there will most likely come a point when you have to take significant risks. It is a large part of what defines an entrepreneur -- someone who wishes to add value to the world in a new way -- many times, by exploring uncharted business territory. You may risk your personal finances, security, and relationships to implement your idea in the real world -- and over 80% of ideas fail. Often times, there is not much to go on when making these decisions. For some, being an entrepreneur is not even a question -- it is exactly who you always thought you would be. Whether you were born an entrepreneur or strive to become one, there are a multitude of business plan competitions and incubation programs that provide potential start-ups with the tools and answers to everything it takes to begin your business.

The European Parliament is considering plans that would push EU countries to spend a third of their regional funds on research infrastructure – increasing the budget on science and innovation beyond that reserved in the upcoming research programme for 2014-2020.

The Parliament has already squared up for a fight with the European Commission over the research budget in the next Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF). The dispute centres on legislators' demands that €100 billion be set aside for Horizon 2020, the EU's 8th framework programme for research that will run from 2014 to 2020.

A report adopted by the Parliament plenary asks for €20 billion more to be set aside for research. But the Commission’s own proposal of €80 billion would itself represent one of the largest sectoral budget increases if ultimately approved.

It really is all about who you know, at least if you're an Ontario startup looking for money. A preliminary study on the role of contact networks in the success of Ontario startups has found that it's better to have a few powerful contacts than a whole lot of inconsequential ones when trying to land financing.

In essence, quality of contacts trumps quantity, according to a study by the Ontario Cross-Border Technology Innovation Ecosystem (OCTIE) initiative based at Ryerson University.

The University of New South Wales has decided to open a significant chunk of its patent pool to outsiders for free, in a strategy called Easy Access IP.

The strategy is being implemented and overseen through NSi, the university’s commercialization operation, under the hand of CEO Dr Kevin Cullen, who joined NSi in May and has pursued a similar strategy at the University of Glasgow.

Open innovation is clearly taking root in just about every industry, as organizations strive to create openness in their innovation and business processes. We see companies increasing their ability to leverage internal and external solutions yet struggle with building the right processes and tools to extract maximum value from the new solutions. (See NineSigma’s new OI Scorecard Survey Report  for more information). Among the factors that can make or break an open innovation program is intellectual property. We have come to realize in working with our clients and solution providers, collaborators can  enjoy all of the benefits that open innovation has to offer only if they understand the issues associated with intellectual property (IP).

A lot has been written about the Series A Crunch.  The gist of the argument is that the number of seed financings have gone up (with the advent of incubators such as Y-Combinator, TechStars, and Excelerate, as well as a new generation of Super Angels, who may or may not be hanging out at Bin 38), but the number of Series A financings have remained relatively steady.  Ergo, the percentage of companies that can’t raise a Series A must be going up.

The fifth annual Otis Report on the Creative Economy of the Los Angeles Region quantifies what Cultural Weekly readers already know – and gives us good sound-bites for cocktail party and funder conversations.

•    The creative economy produces in excess of $200 billion in total sales and receipts, and is one of the largest employment-generators with over 640,000 direct and indirect jobs.

WHY can’t Americans tap into the ingenuity that put men on the moon, created the Internet and sequenced the human genome to revitalize our economy?

I’m convinced we can. We are in the early phases of the next big technology-driven revolution, which I call “consumer health.” When fully unleashed, it could radically cut health care costs and become a huge global growth market.

Over the past few years, innovations like electronic health records and the use of mobile computing devices in hospitals have begun to improve medical care delivery. Consumer health information Web sites and online disease support groups have made millions of people active participants in their own health care.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, so hates wasting time at meetings that he once dumped his secretary to avoid being scheduled for them. He does not much like e-mail either — even his own Gmail — saying the tedious back-and-forth takes too long to solve problems.

Mr. Page has never been more impatient than he is now. He is on an urgent mission to pull Google through a midlife crisis that threatens to knock it off its perch as the coolest company in Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1998, Google is not yet 15, but in tech years, it is an aging giant that moves a lot slower than it did when it was a hot start-up. It is losing employees to the new, hotter start-ups, and is being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are all vying for people’s online time.

Do your employees seem a little—well, lackluster—lately? Have you noticed they just don’t seem to have the enthusiasm they used to? It’s not just your imagination. A recent Gallup poll found that 71 percent of American workers are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their work. Just 30 percent are “engaged,” or involved in and enthusiastic about their jobs.

What’s most interesting about this study to me is that the very workers you might expect to be most engaged are least so. Gallup found that:

• Workers with some college education are significantly less likely to be engaged at work than are employees with a high school diploma or less;

“With the pace of change accelerated for most people, the importance of following a process becomes an important, critical and really effective tool. The process is as important as the results it produces.” ~ Deborah Shane

How does anyone navigate change, be it business or personal? Whether it’s changing jobs, lifestyle, health or where you live, the unexpected is part of our lives today in a more relentless way then ever before. I’m thinking of real examples of people I know who have been thrown into the unknown. That unknown is producing some extraordinary outcomes because each one is following a process.

I’ve often wanted to let people see what a VC pitch is like to help new entrepreneurs have a better sense of what it’s like to present.

Obviously having a camera on will add a small bit of an artificial result because I don’t want to ask as much confidential information and with the camera on people are obviously a bit nicer.

But this interview is fairly authentic. If you like it I’ll do more and continue to strive for authenticity.

So here are Sahney Nager & Ryan Weber of Smarketplaces. I really like them. But I also asked some tough stuff.

* Walter says there should still be some limits to it

* US House of Representatives has passed crowdfunding bill

NEW YORK, Nov 9 (Reuters) - A new capital-raising method known as crowdfunding is a good idea, but it needs more restrictions to ensure that investors are protected, a U.S. securities regulator said on Wednesday.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress are reviewing potential regulatory changes to promote small companies' access to capital.

Acting on behalf of the Honourable Denis Lebel, Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities and Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, Jacques Gourde, Member of Parliament for Lotbinière–Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, today announced that the Quebec Biotechnology Innovation Centre (QBIC) has been granted funding to pursue its mission.

"Our government is pleased to lend its financial assistance to the Quebec Biotechnology Innovation Centre," said Mr. Gourde. "This support organization for innovative life sciences and health technology startups makes an important contribution to economic growth and job creation in the region."

I recently spent some time with a long time friend and entrepreneur who I’ve funded in the past. He’s working on a new company which I think is really neat and I’m already a user of. He called me for feedback on his fundraising strategy as well as to see if it’s something that we’d be interested in investing in.

It’s outside our themes and different than the type of business we invest in. Given our long relationship and the fact that he’s an awesome entrepreneur, I squinted hard at one of our themes, turned my head sideways, and decided to take a look. We spent a few days applying our process to it (each partner touches it and we give each other real time qualitative reactions) and quickly realized that it really wasn’t something for us as it was far outside anything that we felt like we could help much with beyond money and moral support (which my friend is going to get from me anyway.)

With the federal government and states scrambling to figure out ways to jump-start the economy, creating jobs seems like a politician's main job these days.

One tried (if not true) method has been for states to offer incentives to businesses to relocate from another state; or as an ode to our dismal economic times, offer incentives so a company doesn't take its jobs and leave. That's what happened recently when the O'Malley Administration offered about $9.5 million to keep Bechtel Corporation from moving its Frederick, Maryland manufacturing facility to Virginia and saving about 1,250 jobs.