On a recent morning, a half-dozen young software engineers hunched over laptops at The Cup, a café on bustling Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. They were holding an informal meeting about a social networking app they're developing and seemed to be on a first-name basis with the parade of techies walking through the door.

An influx of entrepreneurs like these has changed the face of this Colorado city of 98,000, making it a destination for Internet startups. With the University of Colorado as an anchor and a backyard full of mountains as lifestyle bait, Boulder now has the highest concentration of software engineers per capita in the nation. It's second only to Silicon Valley in percentage of workers employed in tech, according to the American Electronics Assn. Best-selling author and urban development expert Richard Florida says it has the greatest concentration of the "creative class"—scientists, artists, engineers, and the like—in the U.S.

The university and prestigious research labs such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Institute of Standards & Technology have long attracted well-educated folks to Boulder. In the 1970s, Celestial Seasonings and StorageTek helped foster a robust natural foods industry and a thriving tech community. Over the years, software, data services, and biotech blossomed as employees of those companies branched out to pursue other interests. The combination of entrepreneurship, engineering talent, and a counterculture vibe gave rise to many pre-bubble Net startups.

Dan Rosen, Joe Wallin and William Carleton: As we have previously blogged, Senator Dodd's financial reform bill has posed a grave threat to angel investment and startup communities nationwide by virtue of two provisions in the bill that would have upended Regulation D.

These "reforms" were ostensibly to address the problem of unscrupulous brokers, dealers, and promoters who have abused Reg D to defraud investors. The problem was, the provisions in Sen. Dodd's bill were unnecessarily broad.

Fraud is uncommon in angel investment transactions, and there were other ways to reform Reg D without gutting the rule that is working well to make startup and angel financing safe and efficient. Here's a quick refresher on the two problematic provisions in Sen. Dodd's bill, problematic for startups and angels.

This week, the American of Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment announced the 10 best green buildings completed in the past year. It's filled with all manner of green technologies--from passive heating and cooling using heat pumps, to man-made wetlands, to reclaimed materials. Here's a slideshow of all ten.

355 11th Street by Aidlin Darling Design. It's hard to tell, but the building was once a 100-year-old, derelict industrial warehouse. But the site happened to sit on the National Register of Historical Places--meaning the architects had to replicate the area of metal cladding and windows on the former building, in new materials.

For 30 years John Margolies has been documenting the diners, drive-ins and motor lodges that remain along our highways as box stores and strip malls slowly erase the quirk and character of consumerism. His book Roadside America collects nearly 400 photographs of this vanishing vision of over-the-top architecture, automotive freedom and the American dream.

This country runs on innovation. The American success story -- from Ben Franklin's bifocals to Thomas Edison's light bulb to Henry Ford's assembly line to today's advanced microprocessors -- is all about inventing our future. The companies we ran, Microsoft and DuPont, were successful because they invested deeply in new technologies and new ideas.

But our country is neglecting a field central to our national prospect and security: energy. Although the information technology and pharmaceutical industries spend 5 to 15 percent of their revenue on research and development each year, U.S. companies' spending on energy R&D has averaged only about one-quarter of 1 percent of revenue over the past 15 years.

And despite talk about the need for "21st-century" energy sources, federal spending on clean energy research -- less than $3 billion -- is also relatively small. Compare that with roughly $30 billion that the U.S. government annually spends on health research and $80 billion on defense research and development.

How many social media channels do you actively participate in?

If you’re one of the millions who have caught the social media wave in the past few years, there is a decent chance that you or someone you know felt pressured to climb aboard for fear of being left behind or mocked by the cool kids as being out of touch.

It’s a reasonable concern, especially for business people who have enough on their plate without feeling compelled to microupdate and engage at all hours of the day and night with whomever is up for a chinwag on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Skype, blog comments, instant message, email and so on.

The truth is, depending on how efficiently you manage your time and how much of it others demand of you, the number of online platforms in which you can actively participate is quite limited. “Actively participate” does not mean merely broadcasting your blog’s RSS feed. It means taking the time to make connections, to discuss ideas, to help others – to share the love.

In discussing employee-driven innovation, having a technology platform to deliver on objectives is a key part of a company’s strategy. Hard to get everyone tuned in when you rely only on email and conversations with your cubicle mates. But that’s just one factor. There are many other considerations for companies seeking to vault to the top of their industries through greater innovation.

One set of characteristics are what I term factors of “emergent” innovation. I use emergent here in the sense of conditions which let good ideas find their level inside a company, regardless of source. Think of this as an alternative to R&D-led innovation, or innovations decided solely in the executive suite and cast down for implementation by the troops.

Of course, there are more than six factors to emergent innovation. For instance, the actual process of turning someone’s idea into an innovation project has several factors of its own. But these six are a good start.

This post is long. The links below will take you directly to a specific section.

1. Healthy use of doubt
   
2. Rough alternatives
   
3. Experiments
   
4. Resource margin
   
5. Positive deviants
   
6. Diversity of viewpoints
   

The heads of the worlds five largest intellectual property offices agreed to move ahead on ten Foundation Projects, to provide a framework to support work-sharing, at a meeting in Guilin, China last week.

The five IP offices, or IP5, are the European Patent Office (EPO); the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The meeting was also attended by the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, Francis Gurry, as an observer.

The heads agreed the ten Foundation Projects are crucial in building a work-sharing environment and expressed their willingness to explore appropriate ways to speed up the process.

The importance of transparency in the IP5 process was agreed, as was the need for effective communication among the five offices, particularly with and between examiners, and with stakeholders.

Underlining the importance of the WIPO-administered Patent Cooperation Treaty in work-sharing, the five heads reaffirmed their commitment to collaborating with WIPO to improve the system, so its role can be further strengthened, as the vehicle for efficient work-sharing.

Leslie Christian
Founder, Upstream 21 & Portfolio 21, Seattle
"Small companies are critical to the future of our communities," says Leslie Christian, 62—so she helped concoct an innovative way to support them. Upstream 21, whose board she chairs, is a Portland-based regional holding company that acquires and supports small, locally focused, privately held companies in the Pacific Northwest—currently, three forest-products companies that are embracing sustainable practices. Right from the drafting of its foundational document, Upstream 21 aimed to break away from business as usual: "Our corporate charter specifically states that the best interests of employees, customers, suppliers, the community, and the environment must be balanced with those of the shareholders over both the short and long term," Christian explains. She is also president and CEO of Portfolio 21 Investments, which specializes in environmentally and socially responsible investing, offering a "healthy," if not hefty, return on investment. (Watch Christian explain the Upstream 21 vision here.)

Mike Mathieu
Founder, Front Seat, Seattle
After working at Microsoft and founding an Internet publishing firm, Mike Mathieu, 41, decided to put his software smarts to work for the greater social good. Seattle-based Front Seat, which he founded and chairs, has launched "civic software" projects like Walk Score, which shows you how "walkable" any given US address is, (Grist HQ scores a whopping 98 out of 100—a "Walkers' Paradise"), and City-Go-Round, which spotlights innovative public transit apps like Exit Strategy NYC, which shows you exactly where you should stand on the subway platform to arrive directly in front of the exit at your destination (brilliant). Walk Score has already started to change the way the real-estate industry thinks about walkability; its scores have been incorporated into sites like Zillow.com as well as many agents' individual listings, giving prospective homebuyers more info about the kinds of neighborhoods and lifestyles they might be buying into.

The primary goals for most universities across the country are to teach and/or to research, but many are not able to translate these resources to efficiently benefit the economy and society on a greater scale. So why is it so important for a research university to be entrepreneurial? It is important because universities have always been a key factor to the innovation of any economy, and it is the responsibility of these institutions to transition into an increasingly entrepreneurial economy. Also, since universities have always been at the forefront of discovery, it is their obligation to use the vast resources they have to find solutions to the most difficult problems. An entrepreneurial university takes these resources and solutions and attempts to implement them in the most efficient and sustainable way. Now the question remains: “How does an institution behave as entrepreneurial?” To answer this problem we must analyze the successes of past models looking at the very beginning. This essay looks to the original MIT model and its success to help understand what is required to create an entrepreneurial university.

First, we must recognize what made MIT such a perfect fit to be, what is considered, the first entrepreneurial university. Rory P. O’Shea from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes his university’s “success is based on the science and engineering resource base at MIT; the quality of research faculty; supporting organisational mechanisms and policies such as MIT’s Technology Licensing Office; and the culture within MIT faculty that encourages entrepreneurship.” The first factor he mentions is vital to any research university. Having a strong “science and engineering resource base” such as the one at MIT is the first step an entrepreneurial university must reach. By achieving this goal the university can effectively produce valuable research. This element is closely tied with a high quality research faculty which is also required to create new technologies. The next component according to Rory P. O’Shea is the need of for a well coordinated support system for emerging research and an effective licensing office. The management of these technologies has always been a key aspect of entrepreneurship which is clearly explained in Peter F. Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This management allows MIT to prioritize and to allocate their resources effectively. As far as the MIT Technology Licensing Office goes, Rory P. O’Shea credits its success to the quickness, organization, and guidance of the system. He says,

“Rather than waiting for a technology pull, reacting to requests for licenses from interested companies, the TLO (Technology Licensing Office) encouraged faculty to promptly disclose inventions, then quickly and carefully evaluate the market value of inventions, and obtain protection of intellectual property. It also meets with venture capitalists to discuss new technologies and ongoing research at the Institute that may be appropriate for a start-up venture. This approach began at MIT at a time when such an approach was viewed as ‘unseemly’ by some of MIT’s peer institutions.”

For the last 20 years, politicians, diplomats, and green activists alike have assumed that dealing with global warming would require a United Nations agreement on the transfer of clean energy technologies from rich countries to poor ones. But U.S. policymakers and firms feared that tech transfer was code for tech piracy: China already steals billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property annually--from Microsoft Office CDs to Avatar DVDs--so why would we give away our next generation of solar panels and wind turbines?

"Developing countries, like China and India, see climate change as an opportunity to gain free access to American [intellectual-property rights]," thundered Sen. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., before the Copenhagen talks in 2009, "but far from mitigating climate change, relaxation of IPR would ruin our only hope of responding."

Some business executives and economists have even argued that nations needed stronger, not weaker, intellectual-property laws. If China might reverse-engineer and more cheaply manufacture a breakthrough solar panel or nuclear plant from the United States, then there would be no point for investors to spend their money on development in the first place. "Why would anybody invest in anything that they would have to just give away?" a General Electric executive asked.

The Kauffman Foundation (H/T The Scientist) points to the Carolina Express Licensing Agreement (CELA) as an idea worth pursuing at other institutions.  As the Foundation outlines in a paper released this week, the CELA was developed in a collaborative effort between University of North Carolina faculty, technology transfer officials, and venture capitalists.  A standardized agreement runs counter to advise from the Association of University Technology Managers, which recommends that any technology transfer agreement must be customized due to its unique circumstances.  However, digging further into the agreement and the report, I’m not sure the two perspectives are in great conflict with each other.

The focus of the CELA is not on agreements between existing companies and the university, but between the university and faculty seeking to form start-up companies. Some may argue that in the realm of licensing this distinction doesn’t matter that much, but I’d point out that existing companies have the potential to organize in industrial groups and otherwise exert some influence on policymakers to help make sure their interests are given appropriate consideration.

Amendments to Senator Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) reform bill will allow for efficient capital access for entrepreneurs and also provide fraud protection for investors

East Hartford, April 21, 2010 – The Connecticut Technology Council supports two amendments that will be offered by Sen. Christopher Dodd on the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. These amendments will ensure that high growth entrepreneurs have access to a strong pool of angel capital and that investors are better protected from fraud.

CTC has been working with Dodd’s banking staff along with a number of other national pro-entrepreneurship policy support groups, most notably the Angel Capital Association (ACA) based in Kansas City, MO, to make its member’s concerns known about earlier versions of the bill.

According to many experts and especially the Angel investor community, two of the original bill’s sections had the potential of significantly reducing the number of accredited angel investors and also of creating complicated and potentially expensive regulations for entrepreneurs raising angel financing.

Constructing the perfect city means blending the best and boldest ideas from across the nation. Here are 12 we hope all future cities will embrace.

President Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2011 would direct $32.2 billion to the National Institutes of Health. That’s a boost of about 3.2 percent over the baseline budget from the previous year, and last week a coalition of 25 governors from across the country sent a letter to congressional representatives explaining the benefits of the investment and urging that they incorporate it into the final budget due later this fall.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act directed an additional one-time stimulus of $10 billion to NIH last year, a sum that helped offset the flat funding for the agency from 2004 to 2008. But “flat” actually meant that the NIH saw the purchasing power of its inflation-adjust budget dip 13 percent over that period.

In the letter, the governors point out that their states received $19 billion in grants from NIH last year, and funding from the agency directly supports 350,000 jobs around the country.

But most importantly, the governors write that the “greatest contribution NIH makes is to the health and well-being of Americans.” The agency funds research on everything from vaccines to cancer therapies—from investigations into the genetic roots of disease to the traumatic brain injuries suffered by U.S. combat troops.

In response to dwindling state funding and concerns related to leadership, focus and productivity in the state's current economic development model, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer announced the creation of a new quasi-public state agency to focus on targeted industries such as solar, science, technology, aerospace, and defense to help the state grow jobs and remain globally competitive. The Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) would replace the Arizona Department of Commerce, but does not assume all of its current functions. In addition to an annual appropriation from the general fund or another dedicated state funding source, private sector funds would be used to support the marketing efforts of the ACA. These funds come from a 1.5 percent fee charged to companies accessing certain state incentive programs. Read the press release or the  full report from the Governor's Commerce Advisory Council.

Back in February, John Treadway, director of cloud computing portfolio at Boston-based Unisys, wrote that, "I think we might be at the very beginning of an interesting new phase in the evolution of cloud computing -- regional and local clouds."

Treadway rightly points out that local and regional hosting is hardly new, as smaller players have been "operating in the shadows of the big hosting companies" for many years. Such firms often simply resell the data center capacity of large players, he notes, but some of them have their own facilities. North Carolina's Hosted Solutions and Massachusetts' InetServices are two examples. Another is Minnesota-based VISI.com's recently launched Reliacloud.

According to Treadway, it's only natural for some local hosters to start new cloud initiatives to keep their customers from ending up at Amazon, Rackspace or the like. "Some will be successful, while others will fail," he maintains. But he predicts that a market segment will develop for regional cloud providers.

Despite the fact that China led the world in clean energy investments last year, the Chinese government is now backing away from ambitious plans to plant megawatts of solar in the country.

Concerned by the high cost of solar -- which can be four times more expensive than fossil fuels -- and fears that solar power won't deliver on some of the anticipated goals, the Chinese government is not about to subsidize solar power on a national level, Shi Lishan, deputy director in China's energy bureau, said in an interview with Guangzhou's 21st Century CBH.com earlier this month.

A couple of weeks ago, the state-run China Securities Journal carried a similar report, saying that the funds shortage blocks the central government from introducing a feed-in tariff. Already, the government's annual subsidy for solar PV projects has hit RMB 7 billion, or more than US$1 billion, according to Wang Sicheng from China's National Development and Reform Commission, as quoted in the report.

Washington, D.C.--If it's dirty, it's gold.

That's one of the underlying themes at Creating Climate Wealth, a two-day conference taking place in Washington, D.C. this week. Instead of talking about solar or wind, a large number of the discussions and talks revolve around cleaning up ports, recycling and other somewhat anonymous industries not generally associated with fresh breezes and blue skies.

The term "gritty green" was uttered by Craig Cogut, the founder of Pegasus Capital Advisors, a private equity firm with a number of investments in efficiency. He used the term to refer to iGPS, a portfolio company that specializes in shipping pallets fashioned from recyclable plastic.

There are roughly 90 million shipping pallets in the U.S. and millions more worldwide, he noted. Until recently, virtually all of them were made of wood. The plastic pallets weigh 45 pounds, versus 75 pounds for a wood pallet, he noted, which in turn reduces fuel consumed in transportation. You also don't have to chop down forests to produce them.