Last week, EU’s Research Commissioner, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, announced that the European Union would invest 6.4 billion euros (US$8.3 billion) in research and innovation in 2011.

This is the most money that the research and innovation sector has ever received from the EU.

“This is the biggest package ever from the Seventh Research Framework Program, itself the biggest single such program in the world, with well over 50 billion euros of funding for the period 2007 to 2013. That is big money and it has never been needed more than now,” said Geoghegan-Quinn.

The fund will go to 16,000 participants from universities, research organizations, and private industry including 3,000 small and medium enterprises.

Innovation is currently defined as “A new idea that has a favorable economic outcome”. The problem is that nobody can solve one equation with two unknowns, i.e., what’s a new idea? and what’s the economic outcome? By this definition, you can only identify innovation after it has occurred. So, it’s not very useful – in fact, it is a tragic definition and it must be scrapped immediately.

The trick is to identify the new ideas and direct them to the appropriate economic outcome, not the other way around as many companies and agencies try to do. Most good ideas can’t find a place to be profitable in a silo, so they are scrapped. This is not the fault of talent or the idea, but invariably both are lost.

VCs invest in businesses that have the potential to go big and at the same time, given them a handsome RoI within a few years (maybe a short cycle?). VCs judgment (of understanding a business, from a typical MBAish perspective) has been questioned umpteen number of times and here are a few stark realities from the VC investments (happened in US, 2001-2009 period) that speaks of the model:

• # of VC-backed companies started: 24,100
• # of VC-backed companies with exits over $100m: 750 (3%)
• # of VC firms: ~850 [source]

“Radical Innovation” refers to high risk, high uncertainty projects which hold the potential to both influence the marketplace and bring high returns to firms. It’s a kind of “promised land” of differentiation, growth and wealth for businesses and nations. Radical innovation is different from gradual innovation, in which small, incremental changes are made to activities in order to create more value with less waste. The focus of this article is how firms can realize radical, or breakthrough, innovation, which is the more difficult type to foster.

A 2007 McKinsey Global Survey revealed that 70 percent of corporate leaders call innovation one of their top three priorities. They believe that breakthrough (or radical) innovation will have the greatest affect on corporate performance. The report shows that these leaders agree — “innovation is the best strategic decision for sustainable competitive advantage.” Yet these same leaders report that strategies for igniting innovation in their companies elude them. Too many barriers exist. Why?

WASHINGTON -- Reports of an effort to revive an on-again, off-again tax credit for research and development, and possibly to make it permanent, were met with a mix of hope and skepticism among advocates for Silicon Valley tech firms, who see it as a vital driver of innovation.

Economists, business leaders and politicians have long warned that the U.S. is at risk of losing its status at the world's leading innovation hub -- and that the country needs to act swiftly lest it lose out to global competitors like China and India.

Despite those fears, Congress allowed the R&D tax credit -- one of the most basic ways the government can encourage the creation of new technologies -- to expire at the end of 2009. It was the 13th time since the credit was established in 1981 that lawmakers and the president allowed it to lapse.

Stealth Mode Watch, a searchable data spider of often very revealing SEC form D filings, is the brain child of Denis Papathanasiou, who came up with the idea while researching funding options (a.k.a spying) for his ebooks startup Fifobooks, “I was just using it to keep tabs on specific investors and other competitors in the ebook space, but I mentioned it to a few people, and they were interested enough to want to use it themselves.”

Papathanasiou then added a public API and launched it in beta under its own domain. Right now the site allows a simple search mode which shows results for the past four weeks and then an extended API mode which allows results past that date as well as filtering parameters like “people,”"companies” and “places” (Humans beware: The data is delivered in XML files).

A couple weeks ago, Facebook officially opened their new office in Seattle, WA. At the time, Facebook’s Ari Steinberg (the main engineer in charge up there) wrote a post and shared a few pictures of what it looks like. But those pictures sort of made it look like a dismal, dreary version of Office Space (I know Seattle is cloudy all the time, but come on). So we’ve got a few better ones that show actual signs of life.

Just as when Facebook opened their new Bay Area office, and when Twitter opened their office, I think it’s sort of neat to see pictures inside these offices — to see where the sausage is made. We’ve been thinking about doing something like this for TechCrunch TV as well — think: Cribs for tech startups. We’ll expose ridiculous murals and raid startups’ fridges. Would that interest you?

Group 15: Technology based venture strategy for university spin off firm

The UK government is aware of the need for small businesses to obtain funding in their early years. For some time there has been an “equity gap” in the UK, meaning that it is more difficult for smaller companies, including start-up companies developing potentially important products in high technology areas, to receive adequate funding. One reason for this is the perception by investors that these companies are a particularly high risk investment and that it is safer to invest in larger, more established companies.

The government has encouraged the involvement of private investors in funds to invest in small companies and has introduced measures to guarantee loans made to smaller companies. There are also specific tax incentives for investors in new businesses in the UK and these are outlined below.

Greetings from D.C. While Congress continues honing the FY 2011 budget—always interesting during an election year—the Administration moves forward with developing the FY 2012 budget, due out February 2011. As is typical in late summer, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued guidance to agency heads, highlighting the science and technology priorities for the Administration—and how they should be reflected in the forthcoming 2012 budget.

Specifically, OMB calls out six overarching "challenges" that agency R&D budgets should strive to address. Agency R&D budgets should work to: 1) promote economic growth and job creation, 2) defeat dangerous diseases, 3) effect a clean energy future, 4) mitigate global climate change impacts, 5) manage the competing demands on land and water for the production of food, fiber, and fuels, and 6) develop the technologies to protect our troops, citizens, and national interests.

Continuing the thoughts on metrics from Part 1 last week! :

2. Plan the Path – Now that you have a direction to point your innovation efforts at, it’s time to plan the path to get to that effort. In the same way that strategy documents are formulated with multiple time points to set milestones for where the company wants to be at 1,3, and 5 years – so should your innovation plan and strategy as to how you’re going to help the company achieve those aims and the contribution the innovation program will make to the company’s strategic aims.

Your innovation pipeline will be led and directed by the strategic context of the program (see step 1 from last week) below, which follows the general form of:

i) Find and Identify the problems or barriers to achieving the strategic objectives and define each tightly in terms of applicability, feasibility, and commitment to implementation of the solution. Then decide upon the order in which to tackle those problems.

Biomedical and biotechnical jobs led the region in growth last year, outpacing all other sectors.

The trend for growth is expected to continue, according to an analysis by the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission.

"The industry is fast becoming a strong and regionally significant engine for growth and prosperity," the report said.

Expanding on the region's growth in biosciences is partly tied to the maturation of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, which officially opened Wednesday with little fanfare.

After reviewing over 9,000 proposals submitted from people in 176 countries, the judges of the Your Country Your Call competition have finally decided on the five proposals with the greatest potential to deliver ‘jobs and opportunity for Ireland.’

If you are unfamiliar with this campaign, it is an open competition initiated by the President’s husband, Dr. Martin McAleese, to find two direction-changing innovations for the island of Ireland. Each winning proposal will receive €100,000 in cash, but the proposal will then be taken out of the hands of the proposer and developed with governmental support into a national programme.

We are now down to the five finalists. One central plank of the campaign was to crowd-source ideas that could deliver tangible benefits for Ireland. Interestingly, only one of the proposals shortlisted was among the top fifty most supported on the YourCountryYourCall website. The proposal to ‘Make Ireland a Global Media Hub’ came in as the twentieth most supported, with support from 318 people and a discussion that amounted to 36 comments. The most popular proposal on the other hand received 1,947 expressions of support and 576 comments. The crowd clearly isn’t always right.

Every weekend, a group of poor farmers in Kanakpura village, in Karnataka, sit in a huddle infront of a television set to watch a video. The novelty doesn’t lie in the idiot box any more—they have known it for years. What brings them together is the video itself—a film that will help them increase their yeild of crops manifold and subsequently their profits.

The video, developed by a small firm, Digital Green, talks about agricultural patterns, new methods of farming and useful techniques that are being used by farmers in neighbouring villages. It tries to convince the farmers that the same techniques would benefit their lot as well. The owner of Digital Green, 28-year old Rikin Gandhi is an aeronautical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has worked with Oracle and consulted companies like Microsoft. He even made it to the US Air Force as a trainee pilot. “But my strong roots called me back to India, says Gandhi, whose hails from Gujarat’s Nadiad town.

He spoke for Hewlett-Packard's board when it showed ex-CEO Mark Hurd the door -- and is now part of the team searching for Hurd's successor. He played a role in eBay's spinout of Skype -- buying a $50 million chunk in the process. And he has the ear of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as that company marches toward battle with Google.

Marc Andreessen -- engaged, opinionated, assertive -- has long been a geek's geek but is now a power player like never before. Seventeen years after he developed the breakthrough Web browser that launched Netscape and the dot-com era, Andreessen, 39, is playing roles at HP, eBay, Skype and Facebook that prompted the tech news site VentureBeat to dub him "the King of Silicon Valley."

And that was before news surfaced that his venture fund, Andreessen Horowitz, is courting investors for a new $650 million fund -- only a year after it debuted with a $300 million fund.

Scientists are creating a massive global database of marine creatures, revealing tremendous biodiversity ranging from the ocean's shallows to its cold, dark depths

We are no longer completely at sea when it comes to the creatures that thrive beneath the ocean's surface, thanks to a decadelong effort to document marine diversity. The Census of Marine Life, an ambitious project to catalogue sea life, was prompted by estimates that science had sampled marine biota in only 0.1 percent of the volume of the world's oceans. The results compiled from this global collaboration of more than 2,700 scientists from 80 nations will be released in October, although some findings have been published in advance in a series of 12 papers available online August 2 in PLoS One.

The latest findings profile the diversity and distribution of known species in 25 important marine areas, including temperate, tropical and polar oceanic waters such as the Caribbean, Baltic and Mediterranean Seas as well as the Gulf of Mexico. The data provide a baseline for marine diversity that will be useful when assessing the future impacts of humans and nature on pelagic life.

Founded by Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google's China division, business incubator Innovation Works is funding 12 startups amid strong demand for Web technology

Kai-Fu Lee, who headed Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Chinese division during its biggest growth years, is investing in a mobile-software maker and 11 other businesses in China to foster a startup culture and benefit from booming demand for Web technology.

Tapas, a mobile operating system customized for Chinese users, is one of the businesses to hatch from Innovation Works, a Beijing business incubator Lee founded a year ago. The software will be offered this year on mobile phones made by three manufacturers, Lee, 48, said in an interview with Businessweek.com.

Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get.

Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp a fifth of Pakistan. President Mohamed Nasheed, of the Maldives, worries enough about future sea levels to hold a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear. (Don't miss this on YouTube!)

Parallel thinking should apply to a phenomenon of greater concern to readers here: "extreme academe." Think of it as the hysterical upgrading of ugly visions of the future already found in polite critiques of higher ed.

Back in 2003, for instance, former Harvard President Derek Bok, in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press), drilled home the problem capsulized in his subtitle by noting that throughout the 1980s, deans and professors brought him "one proposition after another to exchange some piece or product of Harvard for money—often, quite substantial sums of money."

Over the years, we have discussed how the Bayh-Dole Act, which created incentives for the research results in patents (often federal funded) Professor, failed miserably. Failure is based on bad reasons why people think that the patent system itself to improve innovation – despite much evidence to the contrary. Mistake to think that the main motivation of this research is to extract the highest monetary value in return, and that the key to marketing is permitted. This is not true. In academia, the research is determined by various factors, many of which have little to do with market incentives. Secondly, the key to marketing market tend to need, not licensing opportunities.

But this fact, tons of universities thought they would be rich and to establish technology transfer offices to assist these licensed patents new found wealth. The reality is not good. With a few exceptions (large reputable universities such as Stanford and MIT), almost all of the office of technology transfer has been losing money for college that govern them. In part, this is often because the office of technology transfer to overestimate the patents, and totally underestimated the actual implementation is necessary. But more importantly, the research that comes out in this way are often simply not have much commercial potential – and a big reason that reality may be the patent itself.