BIO BizLink is an online platform that connects life sciences companies with an unparalleled community of pre-clinical and clinical R&D service vendors BIO BizLink is a portal to an unparalleled community of R&D vendors – including pre-clinical and clinical Contract Research Organiza­tions (CROs), Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMOs), and regulatory consultants – and a platform to take the administrative hassle out of RFP, vendor, and project management.

One of the under-appreciated features of the San Diego innovation ecosystem is the increasing significance of its proximity to one of North America’s most dynamic manufacturing hubs, Baja California, and in particular, Tijuana.

In 2006 my research team at UC San Diego published a bilingual report on the potential synergies between the innovation economy on the U.S. side of the border and the increasing manufacturing capabilities, engineering, and technical skills on the Mexican side. The cluster of manufacturing expertise includes companies in Tijuana that specialize in producing medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and electronics.

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The AUTM 2014 Eastern Region Meeting will take place in Baltimore, Maryland, also known as “city of neighborhoods” or Charm City. We will meet to discuss practices and strategies for industry-academia partnerships, culminating in successful company formation or product commercialization. We will also discuss and showcase successful practices and new strategies to help weather complicated economic times. 

Brainstorming is one those strategies that garners a lot of enthusiasm… but very few results.

In theory, the idea seems sound. A group of people get together and think up different ways to solve a problem until they find a workable solution.

Too bad the idea is a bust in practice.

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Healthbox, a leading business accelerator focused on healthcare technology and technology-enabled companies, today confirmed it is taking its accelerator program to Salt Lake City this August. Through partnerships with innovative organizations Intermountain Healthcare and HealthEquity, in addition to Zion's Bank and BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), Healthbox is sourcing companies, regardless of development stage, that meet the needs of a rapidly changing healthcare industry. The companies selected for the 16-week program will have unique access to Healthbox strategic partners, gaining an understanding of the key challenges plaguing these organizations and how to adapt their solutions to truly solve these challenges.

The GoPro camera, in its various renditions, has by and large democratised HD filming. Notable for its ease of use, durability — I mean GoPros have survived falls from near space! — and underwater housing capabilities, this little brand of camera has become a household name. If you’ve spent even just a little bit of time on the internet you’ve probably seen a gazillion and one GoPro videos, most likely hilarious animal POVs or extreme sports set to ‘Sail’ by AWOLNATION.

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Accelerator programs are proliferating with an estimated 300 to 2,000 programs worldwide. Programs that support social- and civic-minded ventures are no exception. The value and success of accelerators is hotly debated, as discussed in the recent Wall Street Journal article "Tech Startups Benefit From Accelerator Boom." After two years of running an accelerator program that supports for-profit businesses with an integrated societal or environmental mission, the board of Impact Engine reflected on some of the highs and lows of building a supportive ecosystem for impact entrepreneurs. Here are some tips, both for those looking to start an accelerator or those considering accepting a slot in an accelerator program.

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Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has held onto its No. 1 ranking as the top business incubator in the world for the second year in a row, Rice University said June 24. UBI Index, a Swedish research initiative, compared more than 300 university-affiliated business incubators in 67 countries in three categories: the value to the “ecosystem,” the value to the startups and the attractiveness of the incubation program.

Image: Slyworks Photography Rice University's A-76 Technologies walked away from the 2014 Rice Business Plan Competition with $550,000 in prizes — more than the grand prize winner. (From left: Lauren Thompson, Tim Aramil, Cameron Hatch, Brenden Phillips-Garrett) 

Carnegie Mellon University’s receiving a grant to study MOOCs is no surprise. But the source’s identity is bound to raise eyebrows.

Google announced on Tuesday that it would give Carnegie Mellon $300,000 in each of the next two years through the Google Focused Research Award program. Google can fund the research for a third year at the same price if it choose

At the Global Connect Summit in October 2013, University of California, San Diego Vice Chancellor of Research Sandra Brown and then-Director of the university’s new Division of Innovation and Industry Alliances Philip Bourne spoke about UCSD’s efforts to bridge the academia-industry divide, and the relatively uncharted path they were taking to do so. Eight months later, how is the school doing in implementing the plans Brown laid out, and what work remains to transition the university into the technology transfer giant and innovation partner administrators believe it can be?

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In the late 1990s, Steven Hankin of McKinsey provoked a lot of discussion when he coined the phrase “the war for talent.” As the phrase became more popular (and was elaborated in a book), others used it to warn corporations of impending talent shortfalls, advocating that it be considered a strategic business challenge that required attention at the highest levels. With the dot-com burst, the recession, and other upheavals, the imperative took a backseat, but the challenge still remains.

The original thesis of the war for talent was predicated on significant demographic shifts, like aging populations in the West.

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Distributed computing is the future of technology, but you'd never know it from how many tech organizations continue to operate. While our systems run across multiple servers and even data centers, our development teams too often sit within the same office. While there are real benefits to a co-located development team, the costs of competing for local talent may well outweigh them.

Ironically, open source has taught us how to effectively work in a distributed fashion, but far too few organizations have heeded its lessons.

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President Obama, nice boss that he is, wants you to stroll into work whenever you please.

All right, that's not entirely true. But at the White House Summit on Working Families this week, Obama did encourage employers to provide more flexibility--especially when it comes to family leave and childcare. As a first step toward that goal, the president outlined a policy for federal employees to request flexible work arrangements "without fear of retaliation."

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Bizdom Cleveland has formed a venture capital fund that will invest only in companies within Cleveland’s city limits.

The downtown Cleveland-based business accelerator has raised nearly $6 million that will be used to finance high-tech startup companies. Half of the money came in the form of a loan from the Ohio Third Frontier, a technology-focused economic development program.

Some of the money will likely be used to make follow-on investments in companies that have graduated from the Bizdom accelerator, which provides startups with cash, assistance and office space in exchange for equity.

As a graduate student or a postdoctoral research associate we are so focused on getting the experiment done or writing a publication worthy research article that we often forget that there is always a possibility that our experiments can be used as preliminary data to set-up a company. Yes, the research that we are working on can be commercialized but, unfortunately, most of us in the academic world do not consider the commercialization aspect of our discoveries on a daily basis, if ever at all. However, the transfer of research and technologies from benchtop to bedside, i.e., from the laboratory space to the market space is not an easy process. It requires time, careful planning, finances, intellectual property protection, legal and business knowledge and, most importantly, an entrepreneurial and cohesive team to take an idea and make it into a marketable product. If all these requirements above appear daunting to you then I urge you to take a class in commercialization of basic research.

For a startup, intellectual property is often the most valuable asset. Yet, IP isn't just about patents and inventions. It can also include your brand assets — everything from the company name to the logo and product tagline.

Trademarks help keep your brand ID safe, with the idea that no one else in the market can come in and use your brand or trademark for a similar thing. But how much do you understand about the trademark process? Here are the answers to 10 of the most frequently asked questions surrounding trademarks:

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Recently I had the opportunity to raise a small round of seed funding for my subscription sock company, NicSocks.com. The figure was about US$25 000 and I was raising it from an angel investor. We had an aligned vision, we spent months discussing where the business was going, how we were going to move the company towards our next goal and what we would use the funds for. Everything was on track. We had a handshake agreement that I thought was as good as gold. It wasn’t and the deal fell through after months and months of work.

Technology is one of the primary growth engines of the global economy, and governments around the world are investing in ways that attract technology talent to their cities. By mining the information in over 300 million member profiles, we identified several cities across the globe that attracted significant proportions of tech talent in the past year.*

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Should entrepreneurship be taught?

Whenever raised, this question brings on a passionate debate amongst entrepreneurs. Brian Breslin, founder of Refresh Miami and InfiniMedia, recently posted this question to his network on Facebook, which sparked an interesting debate amongst Miami entrepreneurs.

Some people were against the notion of entrepreneurship being taught in a seminar, saying:

“Nope. It can’t be taught, only learned (‘when the student is ready, the teacher will appear’ kind of thing… or more accurately, when the entrepreneur-student is ready, she will go to the ends of the earth and break down walls to find the information/figure out how to do it),” says Carrie Ann Mantha.

KANSAS CITY, Mo., June 24, 2014 - The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today that the 2014-2015 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship Program's Request for Proposals is available online, and proposals are being accepted now through Sept. 10, 2014.

The Kauffman Foundation will award up to 15 Dissertation Fellowship grants of $15,000 each to Ph.D., D.B.A. or other doctoral students for the support of dissertations in the area of entrepreneurship.