What a crazy week! I’m finally done with the rough draft of a very large paper, some of which deals with IP issues in this age of easy to copy digital media and CAD designs.

Speaking of rogue IP, today’s post is about grey markets. About a third of university research commercialization transactions take place in an IP grey market. At least two separate research surveys have arrived at the same conclusion: roughly 30% of university research is commercialized in self-regulated networks made up of primarily of university researchers and industry product developers. The formal market, the university tech transfer office, handles only a portion of the university’s intellectual property dealings. See Aldridge and Audretsch and Link, Siegel and Bozeman.

Let's get something straight, right upfront.

Michael Finney is not talking about possibly becoming the next CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. And Finney is not talking about the economic-development transition team he's leading for Gov.-elect Rick Snyder.

It's premature to talk about such things now, Finney insists.

OK, that's out of the way.

Now the rest of us can talk about Finney and the MEDC and what Michigan's economic priorities might look like when Snyder takes office in January.

Just about everybody in the in-crowds of Ann Arbor or Lansing, or anybody else who pays attention to Michigan politics or economic development matters, will be surprised if Finney does not become the next chief of the MEDC, or whatever they will call the top economic-development poobah in the Snyder administration.

The desire to make the world and the objects that surround us stronger, faster, more convenient and more beautiful serves as constant inspiration for today’s creative problem solvers. But sometimes, as with single-use packaging or the more complicated case of CFL lightbulbs, the innovative solutions we arrive at create other problems, or even predicaments, that become evident only in hindsight.

While the side effects of our creations can’t always be anticipated, we can strive to minimize any negative impact by embedding the right practices into our creative process. Namely, by filtering our potential projects through a series of qualifiers to distinguish genuine need from short-lived demand, and long-term solutions from quick fixes.

Social products are an interesting bird. For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what’s important, things may not be so clear.

The only magic I’ve found in designing compelling social products that have the best shot at breaking through the noise and capturing people’s time and money is in being extremely clear on how your social product meets a few key design principles.

Now that the elections are over and the Congress has a new controlling party, there is speculation that the business picture may get brighter.  But in Silicon Valley, there are ominous trends that point towards another tough year for the tech industry and perhaps worse beyond that.

For a long time, the lifeblood of high tech growth has been venture capital investment.  But there are growing signs that venture money is in a period of serious pullback.  The Cambridge Associates U.S. Venture Capital Index has reported that venture capital returned a measly 8.4 percent to investors over the last ten years.  This comes on the heels of more bad news from Ernst and Young who announced last month that venture capital investing is down nearly 50 percent for the first half of 2010.

Meanwhile, other major world economies, such as China and United Arab Emirates (UAE) are using government funds to make big bets on technology investment that could rapidly eclipse U.S. dominance in the high-tech market.  This column recently spoke with a high-ranking U.S. tech trade executive who did not want to be identified by name because of his group’s sensitive relations with both the U.S. government and foreign countries, but he was happy to talk about what he was seeing internationally.

FacebookFacebook, GoogleGoogle and Microsoft would not exist today if it weren’t for the visionary entrepreneurs that pushed each company into greatness. Those companies, and their then-young leaders have changed the very way we live. In the end, it’s these entrepreneurs who build their companies and catalyze positive change in our world.

In that spirit, we’ve decided to highlight a few young entrepreneurs who are making waves in the startup world and who are poised to cause disruption in multiple markets before their careers are done. Each has a different background and a different story, but share the same entrepreneurial calling and drive to build something that will last.

The conventional wisdom is that “early adopters” are the ideal target for startups, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, and secondly, their feedback may lead you directly away from your real target market of mainstream customers.

The term “early adopters” relates to the people who are eager to try almost any new technology products, and originates from Everett M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations book. Early adopters are usually no more than 10%-15% of the ultimate market potential, and marketing to them is quite different from marketing to the mainstream.

The good news is these people will readily provide candid feedback to help you refine future product releases, and push towards new features, increased control, and interoperability. The bad news is that they hardly ever push towards simplicity and increased usability needed by the masses.

Babson College and the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) have newly partnered to create an Entrepreneurial Experience Laboratory (EEL) to accelerate the design and development of new entrepreneur support solutions. Their latest efforts include the Entrepreneur StoryBooth, that lets people share instant 20 second videos about their entrepreneurial experience.

With President Obama’s recent declaration of National Entrepreneurs Day, it is no surprise the focus of global economic revival is on entrepreneurship, the small businesses, and the jobs that they create. However, the entrepreneurial support system, while growing tremendously right now, is still young and needs a lot more resources in order ensure the successes of these young companies.

“The current entrepreneurship support system is well-intended but insufficient to stimulate entrepreneurial activity at the scale and scope we need to revive the global economy. The system needs more than a tweak—it needs a transformation,” says BIF founder and Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan. “In most cases, the voice of the entrepreneur is all but absent from discussions about how to better support new venture creation and there is little ongoing experimentation to facilitate the design and development of new approaches. With the launch of the Entrepreneurship Experience Lab, Babson and BIF have the opportunity to leverage our unique strengths to change this dynamic.”

National Innovation Council (NIC) has written to various states to set up state-level innovation council.

Such councils are needed in every state and the agenda given here might help states which really wish to transform the polity and make it more inclusive. National Innovation Foundation (NIF) is trying to link with each state to strengthen the dissemination as well as scouting of grassroots innovations and promote creativity among children.

Centre for Innovations in Public Systems (CIPS), set up on the basis of recommendation of 13th Finance Commission, is trying to pool innovations in public systems and find ways of replicating the same across sectors.

Let’s be honest. At least a third of your sales people probably need to go… now.

Why are you holding on to them? Are you scared of their relationships with key clients? Do you feel guilty that you haven’t given them all of the tools, training and attention they needed to be successful? Is the process of hiring new salespeople so painful that you would rather hold on to these people than go look for new ones? All of the above and more?

Never show fear to animals, children or sales people — they can sense weakness and they will take advantage of it.

From the outside, an inventor looks a lot like an entrepreneur. Both are creative, pioneering and driven to solve problems.

But that’s where their similarities end.

An entrepreneur may also happen to be an inventor, or he or she may borrow something from working elsewhere, make a slight tweak to an existing product, or just change the way something is distributed.

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing coming to this event with a designer friend of mine. “What are you going to talk about?” he asked. “Oh, you know. How in the 21st century economy, design provides the differentiating factor that can really determine whether a modern day company thrives or fails,” I said merrily. His reaction was not quite what I’d hoped for. In fact, he laughed in my face. “That old shtick? Ugh. Are people *still* saying that?” he asked with a hint of derision in his voice. “Er. Yes?” I stammered in reply.

Now bear in mind that this was a designer talking! This was not a jaded executive with no connection to the creative department. This was someone who has devoted years of study and thousands of dollars to getting a well-rounded design education. He’s worked hard and done well, working as a designer in various major American corporations hailed for their attention to innovation and design. He is you. And he should have been excited and delighted and should according to my calculations have assured me that I was doing precisely the right thing and that this was an excellently interesting topic that would make for a perfectly acceptable—albeit possibly fairly bland—speech at the Design Thinkers conference in Toronto.

There’s nothing like a TV interview request to focus the mind on a piece of overlooked research. That’s what happened to me the other day when I received a call from CCTV, a 24-hour English language news service in China, asking for my on-camera comments on a new UNESCO report that I had completely missed. A quick perusal of the report on scientific research, innovation, and higher education, which was released at UNESCO’s Paris HQ on November 10, revealed a storyline that has become familiar in recent years: “USA, Europe, and Japan increasingly challenged by emerging countries” read the headline of an accompanying press-release.

The study highlights statistic upon statistic documenting the erosion of the long-established scientific dominance of North America, the European Union, and Japan. For instance: Asia’s share of the world’s R&D spending, or GERD (for gross domestic expenditure on research and development), grew from 27 to 32 percent from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea. The EU, Japan, and the United States saw decreases during the same period. In the same vein, the U.S. proportion of articles in Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index (SCI), while still the highest in the world, fell more than that of any other country from 2002 to 2008, dropping from about 30.9 to 27.7 percent. Meantime, the number of Chinese publications recorded in the SCI more than doubled. Ditto for Brazil. And so on.

The Facebook Keiretsu is the newest in a strong tradition of techies still working together once they hit it rich. Going way back, Intel was founded by refugees from Fairchild Semiconductor, who earlier left Shockley Semiconductor. Former employees of Microsoft have backed startups in everything from office productivity to biotech. After Paypal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, former employees stayed in touch as what became known as “The Paypal Mafia,” investing in each other’s projects and credited for starting the Web 2.0 boom with companies like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. Paypal founder Peter Theil was also the first big investor in Facebook.

Google may have today’s most active group of alums. About 100 ex-Googlers (“Xooglers”) meet once a quarter in San Francisco to talk about companies and investing. The rules are that you must have been a full-time employee, and today are either a full-time investor or a full-time entrepreneur with a company. They swap deal ideas, and have panels on topics like investing in the New York City area, or the outlook for social gaming. “It’s probably ten times bigger than PayPal, but we don’t talk about it a lot,” says one of the group’s members. “Bigger than Microsoft.” In the past two years, all of Silicon Valley’s big venture capital firms have hired former Google stars, usually product managers who have a good eye on current deals.

Over the last couple years, the hunt for employee liquidity has been a hot topic around companies like Facebook and Zynga, where valuations have surged but exits could still be years away. This has led to a rise in marketplaces like SecondMarket, which help connect employees eager to sell stock with potential buyers. And Russian firm DST has made major investments in Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon, which have gone toward giving founders and early employees some liquidity without increasing the number of company shareholders. Now there’s a new firm that’s hoping to add a new twist to the liquidity market.

It’s called 137 Ventures, and it’s giving early employees the opportunity to forgo selling their stock for the time being — by using their stock as collateral for a non-recourse loan. The firm was covered today by The Wall Street Journal, which reported that 137 Ventures is raising upwards of $100 million to be used as loans to employees at these hot companies; the Journal also reports that 137 Ventures will charge “12% interest on the loans, as well as a 10% fee paid in stock”. But Justin Fishner-Wolfson, a Founders Fund alum who now heads 137 Ventures, contends that the articles published today aren’t entirely accurate.

It’s no secret. We love to highlight vintage video of cultural icons. This weekend, we showed you the last days of Leo Tolstoy to commemorate the centennial of the great writer’s death, and you expressed your appreciation. And it led us to think: why not dig through our archive, and revive some of the great treasures previously featured on Open Culture? And so here it goes: Below, you will find 45+ video & audio clips that record the words and actions of major figures from a bygone era. Artists, architects, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, world-changing leaders, and those not easily categorized – they’re all here. So close, you can almost touch them. Enjoy the list, and if we’re missing some good clips, don’t hesitate to send them our way…