ENTREPRENEURS and businesses looking to come up with innovations could win up to £20,000 worth of support from Newcastle Science City.

The organisation has launched a competition to find people in the region who are looking for assistance to develop high-growth businesses that target unmet needs and are ready to launch within 12 months.

While the event has been dubbed a search for the “North East’s innovators of tomorrow”, Science City is by no means ruling out the prospect of luring an outside business or two to the region.

As we begin this series, I would like to thank Eric Lanke, chair of the WSAE Innovation Task Force, and all of the Task Force members for their excellent work in creating this white paper for the benefit of the entire association community. It is a terrific conversation starter that leaves plenty of room to explore divergent perspectives on the critical issues of association innovation, and I’m really pleased to be able to make a contribution to the dialogue. Please make your contribution by sharing your thoughts in the comments below.

In this initial post, we will consider the following question:

Why is innovation critical to the future of associations?

My last post in this series covered what an LP looks for in a venture capital fund manager, and the aim of it was to provide the entrepreneurs amongst you with some insight into the pressures on VCs and hence how they behave. This post is similar, although more directly related to the way investors make investment decisions and manage their portfolios, and hence to entrepreneurs.

The vast majority of funds in the venture industry are what we call ‘closed end funds’, which means they operate over a fixed time period. These time periods determine the rhythm by which VC funds operate and are the most important structural element of the venture industry for an entrepreneur to understand.

I just read the National Venture Capital Association’s report on the national M&A and IPO activity for 2010. In summary, 2010 had 72 venture-backed IPOs for the year and over 400 M&A deals, representing a total value of over $25 billion. While we’re not quite back to 2007 levels, we’re sure heading in the right direction.

Mark Heesen, President of the NVCA, said that the year moved the industry from “abysmal to viable,” but I’m feeling a bit more positive about things; in fact, I’m feeling downright excited about the liquidity being achieved by the market. Liquidity begets additional investment and should help, even in a small way, to fill the growth capital funding gap that has gotten wider over the past few years.

Companies get hot. And investors start throwing money at them. Entrepreneurs get calls and emails all day long from investors wanting to invest. After a while, the entrepreneurs start to think that they should take the money. Not because they need it, but because they figure if people are throwing money at them, it's probably a good idea to take some.

Given that we are in the "throwing money at entrepreneurs" period in web investing, I thought I'd say a few things about this.

New government figures for the global climate show that 2010 was the wettest year in the historical record, and it tied 2005 as the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880.

The new figures confirm that 2010 will go down as one of the more remarkable years in the annals of climatology. It featured prodigious snowstorms that broke seasonal records in the United States and Europe; a record-shattering summer heat wave that scorched Russia; strong floods that drove people from their homes in places like Pakistan, Australia, California and Tennessee; a severe die-off of coral reefs; and a continuation in the global trend of a warming climate.

By: Brian Darmody, Immediate Past President, Association of University Research Parks and Associate Vice President for Research and Economic Development, University of Maryland

The race is not to the swift, but chance and circumstance happens to all, including countries. But it helps at least to be in the competition.

Fortunately the United States is again in the race, with December’s last-minute passage of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. America COMPETES is the country’s three-year blueprint for increasing research, science and innovation. The Act calls for a 13 percent boost in funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) by 2013, with similar growth for other science agencies.

The bill includes a new regional innovation program, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education support, and new commercialization programs. Importantly, for the first time ever, the federal government has developed a program to support university research parks through a modest program of building loan guarantees.

Ironically, the U.S. was the country with the world’s first research park, started at Stanford University in 1951. Since that time, other countries have copied our model, using national investments to create huge research parks that dwarf anything in the U.S. Many U.S. corporations have moved advanced research and development to these overseas parks.

The decade-long glut of funding in the venture business is finally getting unwound as LPs get choosier and choosier about which venture funds to keep backing. Meanwhile, venture capitalists slogging it out with the new breed of super angels, striving to get in the hottest deals at remotely reasonable prices would probably argue there’s little room in the market for a new firm either. So it’s not exactly the easiest time to raise a new fund.

Enter Bullpen Capital: A new firm that the super angel elite are welcoming with open arms. Why? It aims fill the hole in the market between angels and VCs.

In what is the first but certainly not the last time we’ll hear of Silicon Valley venture capitalists opening up an office in New York, storied venture firm and Facebook/Groupon backer Accel Partners has opened a New York outpost at 11th and Broadway. This will be the second US location for Accel, which has offices in Bangalore, Beijing, London, New Delhi and Shanghai.

East Coast vs. West Coast has been a universal theme ever since Biggie and Tupac and now it’s extending itself to the world of startups and venture capital. Accel Partners is justifying the move by saying that it’s made over 15 investments in the New York Area in the past three years and that it does not plan on stopping its aggressive NYC investment pace. Indeed, its (offical) New York investment roster includes:

·         Quidsi – Diapers.com – parent company for www.diapers.com and www.soap.com

·         Etsy – DIY craft marketplace

·         Squarespace – Website and blog publishing platform

·         Learnvest – The leading independent personal finance website for women

In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.”

There’s something about the combination of human nature (rationalization and self deception) and large hierarchical organizations (corporations, military, government, etc.) that actively conspire to hide failure and errors. Institutional cover-ups are so ingrained that we take them for granted.

Yet for a startup a cover-up culture is death. In a startup founders and the board need to do exact the opposite of a large company – failures need to be shared, discussed and dissected to extract “lessons learned” so a new direction can be set.

Email Delivery is an often neglected aspect of email marketing. You will find many free and paid tools that will help you send an email. You can easily upload a CSV file with email addresses, create an html email and send it using a SMTP server or even your regular outlook program. There are many email service providers as well. However it’s one thing to send an email and quite another thing to get it delivered in the Inbox. So to continue with the series of articles on email marketing, in this article I want to focus on email delivery.

Email delivery rate is the percentage of emails that get delivered in the recipient’s inbox. It is possible that you have all clean email addresses, but only 95% of them reach your readers. The rest 5% are either dropped by the ISP or can land in the spam folders.

Perna Gupta is the CEO of Khush, the developer behind the music creation iPhone app LaDiDa – an app which has been downloaded 270,000 times and is unashamedly about having fun.  She wrote a guest post on Techcrunch on Sunday complaining about how her company had got to the final stages of two prestigious start-up competitions, been the audience favourite, but been dismissed by judges because she isn’t solving an obvious pain point.  In her words:

Earlier this year, my company advanced to the final stages of two prestigious start-up competitions. Both times, I got up on stage and belted out my prezo in C Major (our product is LaDiDa, an iPhone app that helps bad singers make music), and then backed up the singing with solid growth metrics on our business. The audience loved it, and LaDiDa was a crowd favorite to win in both contests. But when it came time for the judges’ feedback, I was frustrated to hear a familiar refrain: “Your demo is great, really cool app,” they said, “but we can’t give you this award because your product doesn’t solve any obvious pain point.”

Ever since transportation authorities placed rigorous limits on the amount of liquids allowed on flights, travellers have had to figure out how to both pack their favourite toiletries and comply with those regulations.

According to trendspotter Springwise, helping consumers avoid bag-check charges or confiscation of their non-compliant toiletries and cosmetics, New York-based 3floz is an online boutique that sells beauty and grooming products in TSA-approved sizes only.

I firmly believe that China will be a leader in social innovation. But while there is a tremendous amount of dynamism and energy in this newly emerging sector, we don’t have world famous organizations like Kiva, Pro Mujer Microloans or Aravind Eye Hospitals in China … yet.

Ventures such as Shokay, Xuping Rabbit, Bambu Home, GIGA or others may eventually become the success stories that are immediately associated with Chinese social innovation, much the way that Grameen Bank is a shorthand for development success and innovation in Bangladesh.

Hey, print journalists -- things aren't so bad!

Much has been said about the decline of print journalism in the past several years. With the iPad only Daily now about to be unveiled, people are speculating as to whether or not it will be yet another nail in print journalism's coffin.

So, inspired by the New Times Blog, we thought print journalists could use some cheering up!

Today Verizon is expected to announce it will be carrying the iPhone, ending AT&T's three and a half year exclusive in the U.S.

After the release of the app store, this is the single biggest event in the history of the iPhone. People have been clamoring for Verizon from the get go, decrying poor service from AT&T.

As Apple moves forward with a big milestone for the iPhone, we decided to take a look back at the original iPhone keynote from Steve Jobs from January 9, 2007.

What do you think: Are we all underestimating the importance of email? Maybe because it gets lost in spam, or because of alternative channels in twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? A smart person reminded me recently that email is the backbone of social media.

And in a recent post on business etiquette in the American Express OPEN Forum, small business expert Steve Strauss wrote:

I’m often approached by people who claim to have invented the next big thing, and ask me how much it’s worth, or complain that they can’t find an investor who will fund it. The honest answer is that ideas and new technologies are worth nothing, outside the context of a specific business plan that meets a market need for a fair price.

Invention is the process of creating a new technology. Business innovation is taking that technology and successfully bringing it to market in a way people want. There is a variation on an old quote that sums it up for me: "Invention is turning money into technology. Business innovation is turning technology into money."