We need to move beyond using spending on research and development (R&D) as an indicator of innovation to a systems perspective, writes Eduardo Viotti.

How can we best assess a country's development in science, technology and innovation (STI)? Many would say we can do this simply by measuring the deployment of R&D resources — but this does not give us the full picture.

It is certainly true that R&D spending is one key indicator of the health of a country's STI development. But it is also true that such R&D indicators measure only a small part of a more complex process.

Kansas, like the rest of the United States, has felt the effects of the economic recession. But thanks in part to the state’s diversified economy, we are emerging from the recession stronger than ever. While many states rely on one or two major industries for economic growth, Kansas is investing in several promising sectors of our economy, including the biosciences.

A recent study, prepared by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice for Biotechnology Industry Organization, says, “the biosciences are already shaping up to be a key engine of economic growth in the United States.”

Thankfully, for the past few years Kansas has been involved in building our bioscience infrastructure. Working through the Kansas Bioscience Authority, the state has invested millions of dollars in efforts such as the Animal Health Corridor (from Manhattan to Columbia), the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan and artificial joint composite research at Wichita State University. These projects are moving us forward in bioscience research, development, commercialization, education and workforce preparation.

NASA 2010 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program Phase 1 awards have been selected and publicly announced on Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at 4:00 pm. The press release, list of awards, and award abstracts can be downloaded from this page. Please click on any of the items below.

2010 SBIR Phase 1 Press Release
2010 SBIR Phase 1 State Distribution

2010 SBIR Phase 1 Awards List (By Firm)
2010 SBIR Phase 1 Awards List (By Topic)
2010 SBIR Phase 1 Awards List (By State)

2010 SBIR Phase 1 Awards Abstract Search
(Provides company point of contact information and an abstract of the work to be performed)

View or Download the complete archive of 2010 SBIR Phase 1 abstracts

If you have any further questions, you can e-mail them to the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Debriefings

Debriefings for Phase 1 proposals submitted in response to the 2010 SBIR/STTR solicitations will be emailed to offerors by February 08, 2011. If your e-mail address has changed or if you have not received your debriefing by this date, please contact us in writing, by e-mail, mail or fax, to the SBIR/STTR Program Support Office (contact information below). Telephone requests will not be honored. Written debriefings, which include the comments of the evaluators, will be sent only to the Business Official designated in the proposal. Address to:

REI Systems, Inc.
NASA SBIR/STTR Support Office
4041 Powder Mill Road, Suite 311
Calverton, MD 20705
Fax: 301-937-0204
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Superficially at least, California’s problems are well known. Are they well understood? Apparently not.

About a year ago Time ran an article, "Why California is Still America's future," touting California's future, a future that includes gold-rush-like prosperity in an environmentally pure little piece of heaven, brought to us by "public-sector foresight."

More recently, Brett Arends' piece at Market Watch, "The Truth About California," is more of the same. California's governor elect, Jerry Brown, liked this piece so much that he tweeted a link to it.

Setting up your own business may seem attractive from afar. The freedom from corporate drudgery, the pulse-quickening start, the sense of control over your destiny and perhaps, if you're lucky, a golden exit which sets you up for life. But the economic aspects are just one side of the challenge. Rarely discussed is the personal toll of life as an entrepreneur. The reason is obvious. You must have the brassy ring of confidence even when the product's not moving, the creditors are calling and your personal life is in tatters after months or years of relentless work.

Meg Hirshberg is seeking to break the silence around the personal lives of entrepreneurs, being the wife of Gary Hirshberg, the founder of the yoghurt maker Stonyfield Farm, and a pioneer in the organic food movement. Hirshberg is developing a cult following by addressing subjects such as why so many entrepreneurs get divorced, what happens to the children of these business fanatics and the challenges of working in your spouse's company. Her column in Inc magazine and speeches to companies and business schools has led to her writing a book on life as an entrepreneur's wife.

When business leaders gathered Monday to announce the creation of a venture capital fund to help entrepreneurs at the very earliest stages of business development, they took a small step toward filling a funding gap that has persisted in New Orleans and Louisiana for decades.

The primary goal of the New Orleans Startup Fund is to provide $25,000 to $250,000 in early-stage capital to individuals looking to start high-growth businesses in the New Orleans region. But it's the fund's tertiary goal of growing the venture capital pool in the New Orleans area that may provide the greatest impact to the business community.

The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Batt O’Keeffe TD, today launched a new €17m fund for innovative new Irish firms to create 'high-quality' jobs.

The Bank of Ireland start-up and emerging sectors equity fund will help entrepreneurs to turn ideas into new products and services for export markets. It is the second fund launched by Bank of Ireland and Enterprise Ireland for start-up and early-stage growth firms and it is the 10th new fund supported by the Government through Enterprise Ireland’s Seed and Venture Capital Programme 2007-2012.

Bank of Ireland is investing €15m in the fund, with €2m provided by the Government through Enterprise Ireland and it will target investments between €100,000 and €500,000

Recent consulting studies have re-confirmed that most performance improvement programs fail to achieve their stated goals and improve the business. These change initiatives are worse than “much ado about nothing”, as they divert attention and resources away from more critical needs and frustrate and exhaust the employees who worked on the initiatives.

In general, when undertaking change, companies often make one of three critical mistakes right at the outset.

1. Companies try to change too much.
2. Companies change the wrong things.
3. Companies try to skip bases and implement change that the business is not capable of doing.

Your company’s brand is its identity. And, generally, having a Web presence is critical.

It’s also valuable – and cybersquatters know this. That’s why there’s such a bustling practice in people buying the “.net,” “.biz” and other non-“.com” extensions of company names. Typically, these folks demand a lot of money before they’re willing to surrender the domain that you should already own. Luckily there are a few things you can do.

Cease and Desist Letter – The first step is to ask the other side to give back your domain name, demand that they stop using it and assign it to your company. Give them a deadline so that you know whether or not they are just ignoring you. Once it passes, you’ve got two choices: Go through the ICANN Uniform Dispute Process (UDRP) or file a lawsuit.

Twitter has just released their list of top trends on Twitter for 2010. Surprisingly, Justin Bieber did not dominate the list. Instead, the Gulf oil spill did. The service says that 25 billion tweets were sent in total in 2010.

Below, find the list of the top overall trends, followed by the top trends for different categories:

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

Franco Recchia has taken the internet by storm with his unique works of art, which incorporate parts of old computers. In this way he gives these objects, which other people see as trash, a new life through art. He says that he has always enjoyed seeing what is inside the things that we often take for granted as whole objects, and so this part of his art was a kind of natural progression.

One of the most vexing hurdles for an idea management system deployment is deciding which people should contribute ideas on any given challenge. Then there’s the decision of picking a group of people to work on embellishing an idea once it has been submitted.

There is certainly value to tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd” but sometimes an organization wants certain people to work on certain idea streams. You want to consider which people make up a group when you consider:

* · The initial group of people who are invited to join the idea management system
* · The people who join the idea system as the collaborative system experiences organic growth.

In the spirit of the season, please forgive us this walk down memory lane as we highlight the top five articles on the Greentech Media news website this year.  These were the news pieces most read by hundreds of thousands of our loyal readers around the globe.

Bloom Energy Revealed On 60 Minutes

Michael Kanellos joined previous 60 Minutes guests such as Bill Gates, Bob Dylan and Mark Zuckerberg on the venerable American TV show.

He served as the voice of moderation in a piece on Silicon Valley fuel-cell startup Bloom Energy's coming-out party.  Kanellos' take on the reality of the fuel cell market provided a counter-balance to Leslie Stahl's uninformed and obsequious sycophancy. 

Bloom is shipping their solid-oxide fuel cell to premier customers such as Adobe, Coca-Cola, Federal Express, Cypress Semiconductor and Google, getting those firms off of the electrical grid to some extent with a distributed generation source.  Is a natural gas-powered fuel cell a fragile value proposition if the price of natural gas skyrockets? Is Bloom making a profit on their "Bloom Boxes"?   Will Bloom go public in 2011?  Stay tuned.

Today and tomorrow the Senate will vote on President Obama’s announced deal to extend for two years all of the tax cuts, both those from the Bush years and those for low-income workers from last year’s stimulus package. Under this proposal, recently expired benefits for the long-term unemployed would also be extended for another 13 months. In addition, the agreement would cut payroll taxes for one-year. What does all this mean for entrepreneurs?

The unemployment pressure does not appear to abate. Layoffs continue and despite massive government intervention for economic recovery, there is little evidence of anything more than a slow, prolonged recovery. This week it is likely the compromise deal will go into law but when tax reform is eventually revisited, it is time for policymakers to consider new ways at using the tax code to incentivize actions that lead to economic growth and reward those who put their wealth to work in expanding the economy.

How many new billion dollar firms would it take to permanently increase the U.S. GDP by one percentage point? A new Kauffman Foundation study estimates the answer is most likely between 30 and 60. According to Inventive Billion Dollar Firms: A Faster Way to Grow?, the collective impact from high-growth firms that are able to realize $1 billion in revenue could significantly accelerate the U.S. economic recovery, and over time increase income and wealth of the average American household.

According to Robert Litan, Kauffman Foundation’s vice president for research and policy and author of the study, the potential economic impacts demonstrate that if the economy grew at 4 percent annually rather than the average of 3 percent, GDP would double six years faster (18 versus 24 years). With compounding, this extra 1 percent would cumulate over a century to produce roughly three times the level of GDP than would otherwise exist.

Intelligent people live longer—the correlation is as strong as that between smoking and premature death. But the reason is not fully understood. Beyond simply making wiser choices in life, these people also may have biology working in their favor. Now research in honeybees offers evidence that learning ability is indeed linked with a general capacity to withstand one of the rigors of aging—namely, oxidative stress.

Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, has proposed the term “system integrity” for the possible biological link between intelligence and long life: in his conception, a well-wired system not only performs better on mental tests but is less susceptible to environmental onslaughts. Gro Amdam of Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences was intrigued by the idea and last year devised a way to test it in bees.

Babson College Professor Joel Shulman has created a stock Mutual Fund of Global Entrepreneurs.  The new mutual fund, EntrepreneurShares, is based on the entrepreneurial characteristics of business managers at more than 400 of the best-managed, publicly-traded, entrepreneurial companies in the world.  Visit http://entrepreneurshares.com/

“The EntrepreneurShares Global Fund hinges on a proprietary set of 15 characteristics deemed to make a company entrepreneurial,” says Shulman, “The Mutual Fund follows a 5-year track record of privately managed funds that has significantly outperformed peer benchmarks.”   

“Global Entrepreneurs have generated an annualized rate of return over 11% for the past 5 years, including the worst bear market since the Great Depression.”

15 Attributes That Define Entrepreneurial From Non-Entrepreneurial Companies

1.       Organic growth opportunities

2.       Above average ownership stake among key stakeholders

3.       Low SG&A

4.       Above average return on invested capital

5.       Sustainable growth

6.       Manageable debt

7.       Active strategic alliances/partnerships/licensing

8.       Aligned executive compensation packages

9.       Low executive turnover

10.    Transparent governance

11.    Long duration of key managers

12.    Low or no dividends

13.    Family involvement

14.    High EBITDA Margin %

15.    Other significant stakeholder relationship