If the Supreme Court gives universities greater control over the inventions created by their faculty and grad students, the Court should also require universities to publish metrics that shed light into how they are managing their invention portfolios.  As the Stanford vs. Roche case  makes its way to the Supreme Court, we will see a public and thorough examination of the nuances surrounding ownership of inventions created on university campuses.    Good arguments that highlight what’s at stake have been made in favor of, and against Stanford, such as MIT’s amicus brief and Gerry Barnett’s ongoing analysis. 

If Stanford wins, hopefully there will be consensus in the university technlogy transfer community on a least one issue:  with privilege comes accountability.  If universities enjoy complete control over anything invented by their employees, they should also commit to a transparent technology transfer process.  Simple transparency is key.  When I say metrics, I don’t mean  that the federal government should add new reporting requirements to over-burdened university tech transfer offices.  Universities already struggle to manage unfunded mandates that accompany federal funding (see the Goldwater Institute article on administrative bloat in universities– a data-based and very interesting read by JP Greene, Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills.)   Instead, we should implement a mandatory but simple system of checks and balances that’s based on data that’s already being tracked, or is easy to pull from the tech transfer office’s in-house database.  Today’s software tools and database technology, combined with the Internet, make it simple to open a low-cost window into the inner workings of a university tech transfer office.

Just listening to David McClure recap his recent travel schedule is exhausting. From the start of October through mid-November the 44-year-old venture capitalist addressed entrepreneurs at 14 conferences from Toronto to Nanjing, China. During one stretch he flew from New York to Dublin, where he landed at 6 a.m., gave a speech at 8 a.m. and talked startups with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey at a club until 3:30 a.m.; 36 hours later he was trick-or-treating with his two kids in Palo Alto, Calif.

Many investors scour specific arenas looking for big winners. That model hasn't worked so well for many VCs, thanks to a dearth of acquisitions and initial public offerings in recent years. As of June 30 the VC industry had posted a -4.2% annualized return over the previous decade, versus a -1.6% for the S&P 500, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

The split between the haves and have-nots of the workplace couldn't be more dramatic.

On Nov. 29, President Obama announced a two-year pay freeze for non-military federal workers. And on Dec. 3, the government is expected to confirm that the U.S. unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.6 percent, according to the median estimate of 57 economists surveyed by Bloomberg, which will translate to anemic pay gains. But not at Google (GOOG). The search-engine behemoth, looking to stem the defection of key workers to other hot Silicon Valley employers, announced last month that its 20,300 employees will get a 10 percent wage hike starting in 2011. (Imagine, when will the average employee feel it's a reasonable gamble to walk into the boss' office and demand a 10 percent raise or threaten to walk?) "Google has to preempt the desire for its talented employees to seek work elsewhere," says Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. "I've seen talented employees flee the previous employer of the moment for the next employer of the moment—just ask Microsoft (MSFT)."

After the idea, it’s all about execution. I often hear from investors that a great idea is necessary, but not sufficient. The most important thing is a proven team, meaning one who has built a startup before, and has experience with the execution process in this domain.

I’ve talked before about the best personality traits for a good entrepreneur, but I’ve never talked about the importance of process. Yes, even entrepreneurs need to follow a disciplined execution process if they want to maximize their probability for success.

Even though John Spence in Awesomely Simple, was talking about larger organizations, I think his concepts adapt equally well to a startup. Here is my adaptation of the key steps to ensure a winning execution in any business:

Create a vision and instill values. The vision may be yours alone, but the communication has to include your team, potential investors, and customers. For most people the communication is the hard part – written, verbal, over and over again.

DARIEN, IL — A study in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal SLEEP found that loud snoring and two common insomnia symptoms – difficulty falling asleep and unrefreshing sleep – each significantly predicted the development of the metabolic syndrome. The study emphasizes the importance of screening for common sleep complaints in routine clinical practice.

Results of multivariate logistic regression models show that the risk of developing the metabolic syndrome over a three-year follow-up period was more than two times higher in adults who reported frequent loud snoring (odds ratio = 2.30). This risk also was increased by 80 percent in adults who reported having difficulty falling asleep (OR = 1.81) and by 70 percent in those who reported that their sleep was unrefreshing (OR = 1.71).

If you’re like me, you prepare a lot of PowerPoint presentations. I’ve been creating slide presentations for nearly 20 years. In that time I’ve learned a few things about how to make presentation slides useful and stimulating.

I won’t say my slides are works of art — I know they’re not. And for the first decade of my business career they were pretty boring. They were almost all text!   But over the years I’ve learned a few things about how to keep them functional, simple, yet visually stimulating.  Here are a few things I’ve learned:

Use an image at least every-other slide – Nothing is more boring than a slide presentation consisting of an unrelenting sea of text!   Images “open up” your slides and draw the viewer in.  Images stimulate our right brain (intuitive / creative side) while words stimulate our left brain (analytical side).  Thus, you give your slides more sensory appeal by including an image (or chart) on every slide — or at the very least, on every other slide.

Socks designed by a vascular surgeon at University College London that improve circulation for hospital patients and professional soccer players make money for the university. A gene-therapy drug to treat a rare form of inherited blindness very likely will not. A 15-year research project that involves banking and analyzing blood-serum samples and health records of 200,000 women across the British Isles doesn't generate a return now, but someday it probably will.

University College London Business, the institution's technology-transfer company, plays a role in those and hundreds of other projects. And the mix of the financially profitable and socially relevant in its portfolio is no accident.

Gartner today announced eight predictions for IT in 2015. Last week, we looked at the broad trends Gartner and two other analyst firms expect to shape the future of IT. This latest announcement makes some more specific predictions about changes the firm's analysts expect to see by 2015 or earlier. For example, the firm predicts that 80% of enterprises will support tablets by 2013 and by 2014 90% of organizations will support enterprise applications on personal devices.

The predictions are as follows:

1. By 2015, a G20 nation's critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.
2. By 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most new Global 2000 CIOs.

Germany regularly cuts its feed-in tariffs for renewable energy. The cuts cause anxiety in the solar world, but generally don't lead to a panic because of the measured, reasonable actions taken by the government and the fact that demand continues to grow in other parts of the world.

Think of it: solar is expected to grow 50 percent a year in the U.S. between 2008 and 2012. Utility-scale capacity in the U.S. sits at under 250 megawatts today: current contracts could boost it to 5 gigawatts in five years. Only Farmville grows faster.

Real GDP declined in 38 states in 2009, led by national downturns in durable–goods manufacturing and construction, according to new statistics that breakdown GDP by state released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.1 U.S. real GDP by state declined 2.1 percent in 2009 after increasing 0.1 percent in 2008.

If reports are to be believed, Google is about to buy Groupon for $6 billion.

When that happens, Chicago-based angel investors Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky will clear close to $3 billion between them.

(Lefkofksky owns about 30% of the company. Keywell, 10%.)

For their next trick, the pair have formed a new angel-investing firm called Lightbank.

With Lightbank, Keywell and Lefkofsky are betting millions of dollars on a series of startups in Chicago, the midwestern home of successful startups FeedBurner, Groupon, Threadless and 37Signals.

When most people think of entrepreneurship, they think of dot com startups, well funded franchises and other such complex and expensive sounding ventures.

The truth is, however, you don’t have to have a lot of money, or a special skill, to start a business. Just to prove the point, we’ve come up with fifty simple, easy to execute ideas that you can use today, with very little investment, to start your road to entrepreneurship.

So, without further ado, here are the fifty simplest entrepreneurship ideas we can come up with:

Two years into the ostensible recovery, Brookings has published a comprehensive report on the strongest metro economies before, during and after the global recession.

There's no doubt where the recovery has been strongest. Emerging markets make up all of the 15 top ranked metros, including Shanghai, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. VCs and angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. More executives, or other more creative titles are seen as a big red flag.

In reality, startup titles should be more about the division of labor than an executive position. The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. A few other credible ones would include Chairman of the Board (COB), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

With 2010 about to draw to a close, we're taking a look back at some of the big products and moves in tech that just didn't work out.

Google has the most flops in 2010, by our count, than any other company. (Microsoft is second.)

While it might be embarrassing for Google to have all these failures, it's also encouraging. It shows the company is willing to take big swings. And if it misses, it just shuts down the product and moves on. It's better to swing and miss than to strike out looking.

While most of the world's richest people earned their money, some had farther to climb. Neither Bill Gates nor Warren Buffett inherited wealth, but they were raised in affluent homes so they didn't have to worry about keeping their families fed.

In contrast, there's something reassuring about a billionaire who grew up poor—something that goes beyond the classic, clichéd tale of the American Dream.

For all the allure that stems from the lifestyle afforded by such wealth, the billionaires on this list say their mission was rarely about the grand money game. Making a billion dollars from nothing was most often about filling a need and getting started in a small business. Whether they were born in poverty, dropped out of high school, immigrated to the U.S., or even lived homeless for a time, these 20 Americans started at the bottom and worked their way to the top.