It is the time of year for giving gifts. A season when selling and buying—consuming—is measured and breathlessly reported as if the fate of our economy were buoyed by each sales transaction. As a lifelong practitioner of secular Christmas, I enjoy last-minute shopping. It's fun to try to find presents for family and friends, to walk amid crowds of holiday shoppers who seem happier than crowds in stores and malls usually are.

But as an environmental advocate, I sometimes feel guilty about all the consumption I'm responsible for, the packaging, the waste. Think of almost any product—clothes, electronics, food—and there is a hidden trail of often-harmful consequences that stretches back from your purchase to impact people and the planet. Depending on how you use that product and how you throw it out when it's worn out/empty/broken, you could be unknowingly adding to the cycle of harm. Annie Leonard's book, The Story of Stuff, is a useful resource for understanding the social and environmental impacts of the ways the "stuff" we buy is extracted, produced, distributed, consumed, and disposed of.

Montana businesses are on the cutting edge of biotech research.

In Bozeman, LygoCyte Pharmaceuticals Inc. is working to develop a vaccine against norovirus, which causes the worst, most common type of intestinal flu.

In Big Fork, Swan Valley Medical Inc. is testing urological surgical instruments.

A GlaxoSmithKline plant in Hamilton is producing a key component for a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer.

In Belgrade, Bacterin International Inc. employs 50 people to make antibacterial coatings for surgical implants.

College students who want to start a company while still in school are getting a jump on the process by competing in contests now held by several universities.

To play, they have to come up with a business idea or plan. Then they get the chance to try it out, often in front of judges who are venture capitalists or other types of investors.

The prizes, in many cases: funds to help turn it into an actual business.

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USC senior Nick Smith's team entered an idea for a small sail that could be used by skateboarders and skiers.

"We want to use the money to explore a more abrasion-resistant fabric for a pro model," said Smith, 22, whose Sporting-Sails start-up was one of the three entries to win a $12,500 top prize this month at a schoolwide competition for new venture ideas.

We take in children to schools as (question marks) and release them to the society as (Full stops). This is what present day conventional education system does. One of the greatest philosophers of our time Henry David Thoreau; said “Our education system makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.”

Through the conventional education system, we all have been trained to look at our past performance, history records and to extrapolate to the future in order to predict our sales projections, to forecast weather patterns and even to predict countries development indices.

2011 is almost upon us, and beyond being reminded that I’m another year older with a few more grey hairs, I’m anticipating another strong year for cleantech ahead. But my specific opinions stemming from ten years in cleantech investing may be different from many, so I’d like to present yo with my “Top 11 List” and outline how I believe the industry will evolve within the next 12 months.

• Cleantech will become more visible. Cleantech applications will get wider acceptance in many industries. The “electrification of transpo tation” and its infrastructure, including (fast) charging and supporting energy storage, will become more important. LED-based products will become more common on Home Depot and Walmart shelves. Energy efficiency will become the building industry standar , and cleantech will start to make more significant inroads in traditional oil, coal, and gas processes. The “mainstreaming of cleantech” will finally take off.

While the economic climate in the United States remains uncertain, economists and pundits alike continue to define our recent fiscal crisis with words like recession, downturn and depression. But labeling America’s current financial woes should not be the focus for Americans as the overall economy struggles to free itself from its malaise. What really matters is how the current circumstances affect you and what they mean to your future.

In his book, The Great Reset, Richard Florida calls periods like the one currently facing the United States “Great Resets.” There have been two such periods before the current one, and both of these earlier downturns changed our culture in profound ways.

Humorist P.J. O'Rourke titled his 1995 memoir Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut. He was writing about his journey from hippie to conservative, but the phrase applies just as well to the differences between younger and older entrepreneurs, according to a recent article by Annie Lowery on Slate.

In the piece, Lowery quotes research by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, showing that the cohort of entrepreneurs under 35 may have created more new businesses in 2009, but accounted for only 19.1% of "total entrepreneurial activity." Additional studies by the entrepreneurship-focused Kaufmann Foundation found that the average age of entrepreneurs was 39, with far more successful businesses launched by Americans over 50.

Our nation’s economic growth and competitiveness in 2011 will top the list of things to worry about among policymakers in Washington. The extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for another two years beginning January 1 means the debate over short-term economic stimulus is, hopefully, behind us. Now the fight over fiscal policy really begins. And the debate will focus on how to put our fiscal house in order, not whether we need to do so, which in turn means the term “investment” will be politically loaded—and hotly debated. After all, investment to some means future growth but to others is just federal pork to be cut or blocked.

So let’s delineate what meaningful investment is all about. To do so, investment should be paired with another “I” word: innovation. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech and his administration’s expected reiteration of its innovation policy next month will surely focus on economic growth and competitiveness, as will the president’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget, which begins October 1, 2011. And the key to the success of the president’s policy objectives will be how innovation powers our economy and our global competitiveness.

One of the simple ways that I try to make experimentation an everyday activity is to always try at least one new thing each time I give a presentation. One such recent experiment I called "choose your own presentation." I looked back at the 20 or so talks that I'd given this past year, and I tried to group material into the questions that I most commonly get asked. I ended up with 31 questions. My colleagues circulated the list before my presentation, and I went through the eight questions that garnered the most interest.

I thought it would be helpful to provide the list of 31 questions, and my one sentence perspective on each question, as it dovetails with my current book project (tentatively titled, The Little Black Book of Innovation.) Consider it a summary of what's on my mind as 2010 comes to a close.

Ask any successful entrepreneur or investor what attributes are critical to building a successful business, and it's a safe bet that "perseverance" will be near the top of the list.

And there's no better illustration of this than the stories of two of the country's original successful startups -- the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies.

It looks like everyone is buffing up their predictions for another year of astonishing growth by social media. The last several years have brought so many surprises that the next several are promising to yield a bumper crop of “I told you so” fodder for “Pithier than thou” crowd.

In General:

The interest coming due on our national debt will consume increasingly more of the money that institutions need to provide basic services. As these institutions weaken, they will increasingly be replaced by social media enterprise. The structurally weakened economy will drive social media innovation more than any other factor.

Specifically:

1. Social vetting will catch everyone by surprise. Google buying Yelp is the game changer that will shake markets to the core. A market can only be as efficient as its vetting mechanism. To control vetting is to control a market – ask any despot. Where the vetting institutions of the old paradigm break down, they will be replaces by social media vetting. Nothing is sacred – the SEC, AMA, Federal Reserve – everything is vulnerable. Google knows this and will usher in an era of social media applications that will completely disrupt the gatekeepers.

I don’t see much positive news coming out of the LP community about attitudes towards venture so I was very pleased to see the chart below in a recent Preqin report. LPs are the pension funds and insurance companies that provide most of the money to venture capital and private equity funds, and Preqin does research into their market.

Introduction

1.    Entrepreneurs shift economic resources into areas that yield higher productivity and returns. This definition was offered by Jean-Baptiste Say at the beginning of the nineteenth century and, despite the debates that have evolved ever since, it is, in its quintessence, still valid today. Shifting economic resources requires information as well as the will and power to employ this information in decision making. Very often becoming an entrepreneur is the result of a personal decision making process in which one assesses opportunities and their costs (being employed, being unemployed, being one‟s own boss) and risk-reward relationships (what is at stake). Values, beliefs and behaviours, embedded in the culture of a country and a place, influence this decision as do the individual‟s knowledge, skills, competences and experience. This paper examines how entrepreneurship values, beliefs and behaviours as well as knowledge, skills, competences and experiences are developed by universities amongst their graduates.

2.    The debate on whether or not entrepreneurship can be taught and learned is well-known, and does not need to be unfolded in this note, which aims to provide practical advice to policy makers on how to stimulate entrepreneurship in a time of post-crisis recovery. We start from the assumption that „everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially‟ and that entrepreneurship is „behaviour rather than personality trait‟ (Peter F. Drucker 1993, 26; 34). Entrepreneurship can therefore be promoted by appropriate teaching. To complement entrepreneurship education, certain targeted start-up and early growth support needs to be provided, such as finance and training. Universities are key actors in both areas, and there is a clear role for public policy and local governance in supporting them in these tasks.

3.    The note focuses our attention on a number of key questions: „what‟ skills are most important in successfully starting and growing a business, „where and how‟ they are developed and „who‟ it is all for. It confirms that target groups for policy intervention are diverse and have a number of specificities in terms of attitudes and motivations for entrepreneurship as well as experience. Hence, to be successful, policy intervention requires tailoring of both design and delivery.

Download the PDF

IBM predicts that five technology innovations in the next five years will change people’s lives, Bloomberg reports:

- Tiny holographic cameras able to fit into cell phones, allowing users to see each other in 3-D.

- Batteries that use air to react with energy-dense metal to last 10 times longer, or smaller ones that are charged through “energy scavenging,” similar to how wrist watches work.

- “Citizen scientists” who will use devices and other consumer goods implanted with simple sensors that can track various environmental issues, such as climate data, invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems.

Every year, our phones get smarter, our cars safer, and our medical treatments more advanced. We all benefit from startups and established companies competing through constant innovation. So why is it that in one of the most advanced countries in the world, we’re still using the legal technology … of 1787? I mean, if you drove a car from 1787, it would be a horse!

I mean, surely some of the advances of the last two centuries have enabled new , better forms of government. For example, America’s founders were brilliant, but they couldn’t design a political system using the Internet, because it didn’t exist then.

The Commonwealth has a strong heritage of medical innovation. We are home to the first hospital in the U.S. with Pennsylvania Hospital, the first medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and the first polio vaccine, which was created by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh.
Life Sciences in Pennsylvania

The life science industry in Pennsylvania accounts for 1,900 companies and more than 354,000 industry-related jobs. From 2001-2008, growth in the life sciences occurred at nearly five times the rate of the total private sector in Pennsylvania. These companies and their employees are developing the biologics, medical devices, diagnostics and pharmaceuticals that are providing hope to countless patients.

Were you lucky enough to open an iPad Christmas morning? If you’re wondering what to do with your new tablet we’ve got you covered, with a healthy selection of info, tips, apps and accessory reviews.

First, you may have some questions about your iPad. Like for instance, why isn’t it a standalone device? If it’s such a game-changer, then why does it still rely on being plugged into a computer occasionally to operate? Dave Greenbaum has some answers. They may not be the ones you want to hear, but at least your iPad’s role as a companion device might make a bit more sense.

They are young, wired and starting businesses.

The poster child of this go-getter Millennial generation is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who at 26 is the youngest self-made billionaire.

Entrepreneurs of his generation, born as early as 1977 and as late as 1998, are doing more than making money. The baby-faced billionaire was named Time’s 2010 Person of the Year because his company “wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network.” If Facebook’s social network was a country, it would be the third-largest behind China and India, points out the magazine.

In West Michigan, Millennials — aka Gen Yers and echo boomers — are making their impact on the landscape as the region is positioning itself to come out ahead in a changing economy.