Do scientists' job locations have any impact on the way their work spreads? Or, in today’s highly networked world, does research flow around the globe without regard to its point of origin? According to a study co-authored by an MIT economist, location still does matter — a finding with implications for technology transfer, the process of deriving innovations from pure research.

The study shows that when scientists switch jobs — and job locations — during their careers, the move has two distinct effects on their influence. First, their papers gain citations from scholars who are their new neighbors, even as their citation frequency in papers by their former neighbors remains constant.

How perfect are you? Are you above error, mistakes and missteps? I am—and of course I am lying. Who is above the need for a little grace, both in and outside of the business setting?

In “Are You a Fallible Human Being?” John Mariotti puts that question on the table. In his article, Mariotti discusses the grace factor when it comes to celebrities and other high profile individuals. All I have to say about that is, Humans are humans and grace is grace – until you do something that I really can’t tolerate. (Well, you know how we humans are: We have a lot of grace for our favorites and none for yours).

But Mariotti did make me think about the small business owner. What happens when we misstep with our customers? Whether it is the business owner personally, someone on the team or a broken system that caused the problem, how do we deal with it?

Research output in Latin America and the Caribbean is rising but still lags behind the global average, according to a ranking of nearly 1,400 Ibero-American research institutions released last week (10 May).

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, in descending order, produced the greatest scientific output in the region in the period 2005–09, followed by Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba.

Brazil dominates the research scene, with around 163,000 scientific publications — 92 per cent of which came from the higher-education sector. Among the region's ten most productive universities, seven are Brazilian, led by the University of São Paulo.

The Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA), along with 15 other federal agencies within the Obama Administration, today announced a $33 million Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge to drive innovation-fueled job creation and global competitiveness through public-private partnerships in at least 20 regions around the country.

The Challenge will award funds to regions with high-growth industries that support a wide range of economic and workforce development activities.

The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration will invest up to $20 million for technical skills training; EDA will invest up to $10 million in Economic Adjustment Assistance funds; and the Small Business Administration will invest up to $3 million in technical assistance.

To My SBIR Clients and Friends,  

This won't be news to those of you who subscribe to Rick Shindell's SBIR Insider, but I'm adding my voice to the entreaties to stabilize the SBIR funding landscape for a full year.

The Senate recently passed S.990 which (as the 12th continuing resolution in the current string) extends the SBIR, STTR and CPP programs one full year, until May 31st, 2012.

The bill comes up for a vote in the House this week. It's being slotted for a vote under "suspension" which would be a voice vote, but any member can request a recorded vote, and we expect that will happen.

So, we're encouraging everyone to quickly contact your House Member (and more specifically their Legislative Counsel for Small Business issues) and urge passage of this bill.

Legislation that Gov. Scott Walker says will create jobs would provide hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to insurance companies, while giving control of a $250 million fund to out-of-state financial management companies that would not have to pay back the fund's principal and would keep up to 80% of its profits.

The proposal is supported by a group of Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac) and Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel). But some others - including at least one Republican legislator - are calling it a massive corporate giveaway.

The program is called the Jobs Now Fund and represents part of the $400 million Wisconsin Jobs Act. It aims to jump-start job creation in Wisconsin by promising $200 million in future tax credits in exchange for $250 million raised from insurance companies.

Contrary to popular belief, the US venture capital industry is not a necessary condition in driving high-growth entrepreneurship.

According to Right-Sizing the US Venture Capital Industry, (pdf) a 2009 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, America's leading entrepreneurship think-tank, while venture capital will continue to be crucial to some forms of high-growth companies, the report concludes that the sector’s size must be reduced to be viable. The venture industry has seen stagnating and declining returns coupled with rapid expansion in venture capital assets under management in recent years.

The study says that there is no denying the importance of the venture capital industry. Despite being relatively young, having only reached its modern form in the last thirty years, this business of investing risk capital in growth companies has had many major successes. Some of the best known and most successful growth companies and brands in the world are venture-backed, including Apple, Google, Genentech, Home Depot, Microsoft, Starbucks, Cisco, and many others. The National Venture Capital Association, the industry’s main lobbyist, claims a study it sponsored shows that venture-backed companies from 1970–2005 accounted for 10m jobs and $2.1trn in revenues by 2005, as well as representing 17% of US gross domestic product (GDP).

Setting the right price for a product or service is critical for a small business. But many entrepreneurs don't succeed the first time – or the second or third, in some cases.

The problem is that there is no one formula that yields the best price point, experts say.

On the most basic level, the price should cover the overhead of the business and provide some profit. That can be tricky to calculate, especially at start-ups, says Patricia Sigmon, author of "Six Steps to Creating Profit" and president of David Advisory Group in New York, a consulting firm for small and mid-sized businesses.

Typically, entrepreneurs come up with a price based simply on the cost to produce the product, she says. They often overlook a slew of behind-the-scenes operational expenses such as "licenses, taxes, workman's compensation or the telephone bill," she says

Jeff Bollengier's rise from cash-strapped construction worker to sought-after inventor started with a spill.

The lifelong surfer was sitting on a beach in Mexico dipping tortilla chips in a tub of salsa when first a dollop and then another fell onto the sand. A tinkerer by nature, he dreamed up a bowl with a wavelike shape whose curved lip would prevent spills.

Bollengier, 39, said he carried the idea for the "CaliBowl" with him through stints in pro baseball and modeling and into his adult life as a contractor and father of four.

But when housing development slowed to a trickle in 2007, he decided to see how far his vision could take him. He never imagined that he would be fielding calls from major manufacturers and distributors in the housewares industry in just a few years.

There are huge markets where people have needs -- for food, shelter, education and more -- but can't afford to pay money out of their own pockets to have their needs met.

In the United States, the government created the 501 (c) (3) nonprofit corporation to help address this situation. Technically speaking, a 501(c)(3) is a tax-exempt legal structure that can receive charitable donations from individuals, businesses, government agencies, and philanthropic foundations. Examples of well-known not-for-profits include: the Boys and Girls Clubs, the YMCA and the Sierra Club. People who donate money to these charitable organizations benefit by deducting the contributions from their taxable income.

Herb Kim has a problem. The American CEO of British company Codeworks thinks there are a few things that people tend to get wrong about his adopted homeland. The biggest?

“The obvious thing I disagree with is that trying to do a tech startup in the U.K. is hopeless — that you should move to Silicon Valley if you want to have any hope at all,” he says. “Trying to do a tech startup anywhere in the world is bloody hard work, as we all know. To say that successful startups can only happen between San Jose and San Francisco is a bit of a joke: it’s lazy journalism and almost antithetical to the very nature of creativity and innovation.”

Between 1993 and 2000, Cisco became a role model of tech M&A, making 75 acquisitions over those seven years. At its peak, those acquisitions collectively represented 50 percent of Cisco’s revenue. We learned a lot along the way. In my previous post, I explained two of my six key principles of a successful acquisition strategy: keeping objectives consistent and understanding probability. In today’s post, I’ll describe the remaining four.
3. Option value

Another way to look at this issue of probability is that big acquirers are actually purchasing options in the future success of the acquired entity. These options tend to be worthless, but about 20 percent of the time, they produce a huge outcome.

When we began the mergers-and-acquisitions journey at Cisco in 1993, we had no idea what we were getting into. It was clear that there was a new category of products called “switches” that was threatening our leadership position in routing at the time. Our engineering team felt that they could build a better switching product based on Cisco’s existing technology foundation. But the venture community had funded a number of switching companies that were months if not years ahead of Cisco in the race to market. Instead of developing our own technology, we decided to buy Crescendo Communications, which turned out to be a huge success. The descendants of that Crescendo product line provide Cisco with in excess of $10 billion in revenue and rich profits today.

The truth is, we got a bit lucky. Historical data shows that the majority of acquisitions fail. The Crescendo acquisition didn’t, and we were encouraged, so we set ourselves on a path that eventually lead to 75 acquisitions over the next seven years. At its peak, these acquisitions collectively represented 50 percent of Cisco’s revenue. Along the way, we made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of important lessons, but we were also fortunate to be held as one of the role models of tech M&A.

Morgan‘s posts about careers, science and science funding seem to strike nerves with some of our readers. One thing Morgan hasn’t addressed, although I’m sure it’s on her list, is leadership.

We’ve just published an evaluation of an article in the Harvard Business Review, The Wise Leader, in their ‘The Big Idea’ series. The two (Japanese) authors–one at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, the other at Harvard Business School–have spent the last twenty years studying, teaching and interviewing business leaders in different types of organizations. They’ve come up with six abilities common to successful ‘phronetic’ leaders–that is, Aristotle’s ‘practical wisdom’.

Briefly (and paraphrased), these qualities are

1. Wise leaders make good moral decisions;
2. They quickly grasp the essence of any situation or problem;
3. They create informal and formal shared contexts for colleagues to interact;
4. They use metaphors and stories educate individuals and groups;
5. They exercise political power to bring people together and motivate them;
6. They mentor front-line employees to develop practical wisdom.

Y Combinator is considered by many as Silicon Valley’s elite start-up school, offering selected entrepreneurs a three-month crash course to help them build companies and raise capital.

But about a five-mile drive up El Camino, on the third floor of AOL’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., another start-up accelerator is emerging as a clubhouse of choice for some talented young entrepreneurs.

Only about a year-and-a-half old, SSE Labs is drawing the attention of heavy-hitting investors in part because of its direct ties to Stanford University, nesting ground to Cisco Systems Inc., Google Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and other giant Silicon Valley tech companies.

Need to turn around your company? Trying to start a movement? Want to change the world? Easy Peasy! Just turn it in to a game. Everywhere we turn, it seems there are experts claiming that the best path forward is to engage people with elements of competitive play. The business world in particular has gone gaga for gamification.

I thought games were mainly for kids, and the occasional ice-breaker or temporary escape from reality. Why encourage more of them? As adults, aren’t we supposed to set aside childish things and get down to work on the problems of the real world?

Truth be told, I have always loved games. Stratego was a mainstay among my school buddies. We spent hour upon hour lining up red and blue soldiers to protect our flags. My family’s Monopoly games were epic battles, beginning with the fight over game pieces. (No, I get the Scottish Terrier!) The side deals we struck and the arguments that ensued still liven up family gatherings. In college I became a professional Risk player. Tell me you didn’t learn about the challenges of fighting a multi-front war from playing Risk. Who among us hasn’t attempted to conquer the world by way of Kamchatka?

Budapest, 19 May 2011 - The Governing Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) appointed today José Manuel Leceta as the Director of the Institute. Mr Leceta, a Spanish citizen, will lead the EIT's headquarters during the next four years.

Mr José Manuel Leceta, formerly International Director at CDTI, the Spanish Innovation Agency worked with fostering the Spanish participation in European and international R&D programmes and representing Spain in R&D related forums.

As EIT Director Mr Leceta will lead the EIT Headquarters in Budapest and will work closely with the three Knowledge and Innovation Communities towards an impact on the European innovation landscape and the delivery of results in the field of entrepreneurship education and the creation of new business.

The London Stock Exchange is collaborating with the European Commission to devise new funding mechanisms for SMEs, and new SME envoys from all member states will meet for the first time in Budapest next week, the European Business Summit heard yesterday (19 May).

Speaking at a session questioning whether Europe had a future in the global economy (19 May), Commission Vice President Antonio Tajani said: "We are changing the rules on access to finance, where we need to account more for the needs of SMEs. The London Stock Exchange is working with me within the Financial Future Forum on formulating solutions to access to funding for SMEs."

He told EurActiv that the deal to co-operate had been reached at a meeting between the CEO of the London Stock Exchange, Mr Xavier Roleta, and members of the Financial Future Forum.

General Motors (GM) got a shout-out last week from the Patent Board, which just ranked GM as the number one global auto innovator. (You can see the scorecard on the Patent Board’s home page.) That might sound surprising given GM’s recent near-death experience — and that’s because the Patent Board pretty much only measures the issuance and scope of a company’s patents, which actually have relatively little to do with how innovative it actually is.

So set that aside. What really matters is that GM’s strategic application of innovation is starting to pick up again now that it’s passed through the valley of the shadow of death. The introduction of the Chevy Volt electric-vehicle is a prime example. The creation of an in-house venture capital arm to proactively nurture entrepreneurial auto technology is another. This is innovation investment that could yield major returns.

Big Question: Is Chicago witnessing the emergence of a new innovation ecosystem?

In less than 2 years, the Chicago technology and innovation ecosystem has seen an escalation of successful startup fundraising, growth and acquisitions. Chicago’s business and technology leaders now discuss how this represents a “new ecosystem” of tech in the city. I’ve had the benefit of participating in several conversations around this groundswell of activity in Chicago’s tech community ecosystem, support structures, incubators, networks and general ‘connectivity’ of Chicago startups, technology, and innovation. From our perception, the Chicago innovation ecosystem appeared- grew- and became aware of its impact on a global stage.

Question 1: Does the growth of Chicago innovation create a new ecosystem?

A counter-question would be: does the Chicago ecosystem of universities, corporations, civic leaders enable a new type of innovation? Chicago has, for decades, proved unique as a multi-dimensional capital of art, education, finance, corporate management, media, and entertainment. Chicago has one of the most diverse yet sustainable ecosystems of any major city.