Cities are the engines of innovation. While repeated so often that it has become a cliché, the wisdom behind this is predicated on the power of cities to aggregate people, allow for collaboration, the cross-pollination of ideas, and the spread of information. One of the places where this most often occurs is within the walls of the research university.

We know that cities produce an inordinate amount of scientific output. The science journal Nature even devoted a special issue to the importance of cities and their relationship to science. We know many of the outputs of science at the city level (such as papers and citations), and even some of the inputs (such as the number of students and researchers), but there is one area where data are lacking: the amount of science-related funding that a given city pulls in.

Slowly but surely, Maryland is changing its image from a state primarily focused on research to one where scientists can put their ideas into actual commercial products, executives and public officials said during a first-time conference on technology transfer in Rockville.

“There has been a transformation,” said Richard Bendis, president and CEO of BioHealth Innovation, a private-public partnership focusing on helping commercialize life sciences innovations in Central Maryland.

Look no further than MedImmune in Gaithersburg, said Aris Melissaratos, a senior adviser to the president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and former secretary of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. MedImmune grew from a venture capital-backed startup in 1988 into one of the largest biotechnology companies in the nation when it was sold to AstraZeneca of London in 2007 for $15.6 billion. The company produces Synagis, a drug targeting respiratory infections in children, and the nasal spray influenza vaccine FluMist.

When we think about a company getting acquired, we tend to remember the biggest successes: YouTube, Instagram, and other $1 billion dollar plus exits. But startups are hard. Even with a great product and a great team, sometimes the market fit or the timing just isn’t right. Recent research at Harvard Business School found that as many as three-quarters of venture-backed startups fail. There are plenty of companies that get acquired in smaller deals. So if you are a founder that has realized the time is right for you to sell, how do you estimate what a realistic price might be?

Silicon Valley CEOs have helped both presidential candidates, but will both presidential candidates help Silicon Valley?

When it comes to Silicon Valley and America's innovation economy, here are the issues we need the next commander in chief to champion from the Oval Office. Spoiler alert: You heard little to nothing about these issues in the three presidential debates.

Skilled workforce. Americans deserve a great education system for our kids around the country and a smart immigration system to attract the smartest kids from around the globe. It's not one or the other; it's both. Nineteen of every 20 people in the world are born outside of the United States. We would be beyond arrogant to believe there are not smart people born outside the United States, and we want them working with us rather than competing against us. Today, 54 percent of Silicon Valley companies have a foreign-born CEO or founder. Highly skilled workers, often trained in our own universities, are to be cherished, not chased away after graduation.

COLUMBIA, Md. (Oct. 31, 2012) – The Maryland Stem Cell Research Commission (Commission) announced today that it has received the 2012 Excellence in Technology-Based Economic Development (TBED) Award from the State Science and Technology Institute (SSTI). This award, presented at SSTI's 16th annual conference in Atlanta, recognizes the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund (MSCRF) programs for providing competitive grants to public and private entities, advancing cutting-edge research and technology, leveraging state funds, and developing strong economic growth in the life sciences sector. The Excellence in TBED Award follows a national competition to identify the most effective and innovative approaches to building tech-based state and regional economies. The MSCRF is one of only six agencies nationwide to have received this prestigious award.

The MSCRF, which is administered by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), received this award in the "Expanding the Research Capacity" category for its best practice models in technology-based economic development. MSCRF funding supports a variety of grant programs for stem cell research in Maryland, with the dual goal of developing new medical strategies for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human diseases and spurring economic development in the State. 

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.

The weirdness of this juxtaposition is hardly acknowledged anymore, because we’ve all had a few decades to get used to it. But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in Newark’s machine shops and tanneries, Trenton’s rubber and metal plants, Chester’s shipyard, Baltimore’s steel mills. That’s where raw material was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent wages even if they didn’t have a lot of education. Generation after generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall Street got a small commission for turning the nation’s savings into industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as America’s driving force.

What’s the first thing to do when considering starting a small business? Ask more questions. That may seem like a rather flip response, but it’s true. Success in small business hinges on gathering as much information as possible in order to make sound, informed decisions. That includes understanding your target market, your resources, and—perhaps most importantly—yourself.

Entrepreneurship has many rewards, but also many responsibilities. And if you’re not prepared to handle them, those dreams of being your own boss will almost certainly become real-life nightmares.

I used to work as a startup attorney and now I’ve co-founded a startup that in part helps entrepreneurs get legal services, so I’ve seen startups make a lot of legal mistakes over the years, and there are a few that I keep seeing repeated. These mistakes are almost always the result of a simple failure in common sense; I’ve seen entrepreneurs of all pedigrees make them. Here are the top four:

Mistake 1: Not having every founder sign up to a vesting schedule and an intellectual property assignment agreement.

Entrepreneurs who have been waiting to take advantage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (or JOBS) Act may have to wait a little longer. The Securities and Exchange Commission continues to drag its heels on implementing the new law, which allows start-ups to find investors online via crowdfunding.

When Congress, in an almost unheard-of display of bipartisanship, passed the JOBS Act in April, crowdfunding seemed poised to boom. In 2011 alone, crowdfunding platforms helped raise about $1.5 billion for start-ups and other projects, according to Massolution, a research firm covering the space. Currently, the money raised on sites such as Kickstarter and Indie­gogo is characterized as donations (for which donors are often offered rewards and opportunities to preorder products). The JOBS Act allows start-ups to potentially raise a lot more money online by using crowdfunding to sell equity in their companies.

The 10 minutes or so an entrepreneur has to pitch an investor can often make or break the future of the startup. When the encounter goes well, millions of dollars in financing can propel an idea into a successful reality. But, more often than not, entrepreneurs don't nail the pitch.

The investors at New York City-based venture capital firm FirstMark Capital, for example, receive more than 1,000 inquiries from entrepreneurs each year. They meet with only a couple hundred hopefuls, and it can be clear within the first few minutes if an investment is worthwhile or not.

SAN FRANCISCO – An index of venture capital confidence rose slightly during the third quarter despite VC-backed IPO busts during the period like Facebook and Zynga.

The Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index, a quarterly survey of 31 Bay Area VCs launched in 2004, rose to 3.53 in the third quarter on a five-point scale (with “5” indicating highest confidence). The index was 3.47 in the previous quarter.

VCs responding to the to the Q3 survey “pointed to concerns over stubbornly high valuations despite recent venture-backed public market disappointments such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, and despite the overall performance of the venture asset class,” Mark Cannice, a University of San Francisco management professor and survey compiler, said in releasing the results.

Yesterday, I had a chance to observe investors in their natural habitat — at TechStars’ Seattle Demo Day, the graduation ceremony for the ten startups that have spent the past three months being mentored in the TechStars incubator program.

Watching the presentations, it quickly became clear that the bar for landing venture capital is high now. Showing up with a vague idea, a prototype, and statistics about market potential isn’t cutting it. There are a few specific benchmarks the startups all hit that got investors to commit.

Last week on GigaOM, the always thought-provoking Bobbie Johnson challenged Europe’s entrepreneurs to “shake off the past and stop playing a game that’s stacked against them”. He says we should stop trying to be the next Silicon Valley and instead focus on the next big thing in technology, whatever that turns out to be.

I agree with much of what Johnson says. He’s exactly right that Europe suffers from the weight of it’s own history; our inability to free ourselves from our history so often holds us back. I left the UK for California in 1996 because I felt the weight of this – real and perceived historical precedents were always being cited for why a good idea was “too hard” or simply “not what we did here”.

What do you do when the other person simply won't budge from an entrenched position in which they have a great deal of personal and professional commitment? How do you bridge the gap between your position and his?

Most people try to win the other person over to their point of view by argument. The trouble is, in many cases they don't have all the facts to fully understand why the other person doesn't agree. What's more, the gap may be down to differences in values or cultures that are not particularly amenable to reasoned arguments. Whatever the source of the differences or gaps, when you can't win by reason, you start to get angry at what you see is the other person's lack of it, which gets mirrored, and so the gap only gets wider.

If you really want to impress a startup founder as a potential employee, or you want to be a smart investor, you need to know the right questions to ask. These are the questions that get past the hype of a founder “vision to change the world,” and into the realm of real business strengths, weaknesses, and current health.

Some founders try to deflect these questions by talking incessantly, so you often need to be calm, patient, and persistent to get the answers. My advice to founders out there is to not volunteer too much, but be open and honest in the face of direct questions like the following:

When deciding to pursue the tumultuous and exciting life of an entrepreneur, it’s best to start when you are young. Derek Ball, founder of social data program Tynt, wasted no time when at age six he started selling his old toys for newer toys in his first entrepreneurship venture. As a youngster, his family moved around the country a lot, which he feels has benefited him in his later entrepreneurship years.

“I learned you have to enter each new environment with confidence,” he says. “When you are an entrepreneur, you have to do what it takes and travel to where the customers are. You are often out of your comfort zone.”

There are four kinds of managers that I have seen and heard much about. They find their way into one small business or another and just help things unravel. Sometimes the owner brings them right through the front door, tucked behind their own personality.

Mr. Or Ms. “Over-Does-It” Says Too Much, Too Harshly 

The team can barely breathe around them. They’re the kind of manager that wants their employees to generate great ideas and innovative solutions. But they oppress the atmosphere and then wonder why nobody comes up with anything interesting.

Every year management consulting Booz & Co. puts together a comprehensive report on the world's 1000 biggest spenders on research and development, and the connection between that spending and performance. Booz & Co. senior partner Barry Jaruzelski told us that "in the US, Europe, and Japan that's fairly easy to put together, but to do it on every market, to get South Africa, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Israel, etc. takes a fair amount more effort." There's an incredible amount of money in R&D. The top 20 companies alone spent $153.6 billion last year, which is more than a quarter of the total $603 billion by the world's 1000 biggest spenders. 

When my friend’s small business was struggling a while back, I suggested he add some social media marketing initiatives, and his answer was that he was “too busy.” His business has since closed, but his mindset is still out there. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, only 60% of companies today use social media for marketing, and only 12% of those feel that they are using it effectively.

What’s the problem? It seems to me that there is abundant proof in the marketplace of the financial returns to both large and small businesses, the low cost of entry, and the ubiquity of social networks. Dell announced years ago that it had earned $3 million in revenue from using Twitter, and other businesses report daily on increases in web traffic up to 800%.

As millions of East Coast residents scrambled to get out of the way of “superstorm” Sandy this week, Liquid Robotics was steering one of its seagoing robots directly into the storm’s path.

The Sunnyvale, CA-based company says its robot, a “Wave Glider” model named Mercury, rode out the storm unscathed, and was able to transmit data on water temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed back to controllers in near-real time.