Venture capitalist and philanthropist J.B. Pritzker believes the challenges of growing a young tech company today are comparable to what entrepreneurs faced coming out of the last recession in 2002.

“It’s clear that for the next few years we will be in survival of the fittest mode for both startup companies and venture capitalists,” he said.

Pritzker, 44, has devoted much of his career to funding tech startups as a founding partner of New World Ventures (which recently relocated to the Loop from Evanston) and co-founder of the Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (i2a), which makes seed investments in local companies. He will be honored with the Richard J. Daley Medal award this evening during a ceremony hosted by the Illinois Venture Capital Association.

Getting a job at Google or a hot startup like Facebook can be a painful process.

Requirements:

* An Ivy League degree
* A 4.0 GPA (even if you're in your 30s)
* The ability to answer inane interview questions.
* An ardent desire to bring about world peace through a search engine or a social network. (Or the ability to fake one.)
* And, you know, complete and utter competence at the job.

Facebook engineers seem particularly hard to please. Consider this anecdote posted to Glassdoor.com by a former job applicant:

The state certainly should renew the Third Frontier program, which helps Ohio's fledgling high-tech industry to blossom and bear fruit, but the pertinent question is: How big should the assistance be?

House Democrats want to double the original bond issue to $1 billion over eight years, while Republicans appear to be leaning toward a Third Frontier renewal at $500 million, the amount of the previous bond issue. A compromise can and should be reached by Feb. 3 to allow the measure to go onto the 2010 primary ballot.

Have you ever come up with the right answer despite using flawed data? That seems to be the case with The Minnesota Daily’s editorial “A patented alternative,” published Dec. 2. The editorial staff asserts that commercialization of University-based technology and research partnerships with businesses represent important opportunities for the University. In fact, I have made that same point to the Board of Regents and University leadership repeatedly over the past five years and will again at my annual report to the regents Dec. 10.

Unfortunately, the editorial and a related piece (the Nov. 24 article “U struggles to market technology”) contain serious misinterpretations of data and mischaracterizations of the efforts of the Office for Technology Commercialization (OTC) to commercialize the University’s intellectual property.

Silicon Valley is on the verge of a new bout of Wall Street fever, as private technology companies rush to cash in on the first signs of stock market interest in initial public offerings for more than two years, according to venture capitalists.

Financiers are talking of public stock sales by tech companies at a level not seen since the 1990s – led by social networking company Facebook and a batch of other internet and “greentech” companies.

However, some experienced Valley financiers warn that most of the companies that have set their sights on Wall Street will never make it and will be forced instead to sell out to a larger company.

Fred Wilson blogged this morning about the bad policy in Senator Dodd's financial system regulatory reform bill that would make it harder for startups to raise seed financing from angels. Fred put it in the context of public policy concerns generally that impact startups, including immigration reform, software patents, net neutrality and open spectrum.

I'll [William Carleton] just speak here to Dodd's bill. As currently drafted, Dodd's bill would hurt seed financing for startups in two ways: (1) it would require the SEC to raise the net worth and income level thresholds needed to meet the "accredited investor" definition, and (2) it would end federal preemption of "all accredited" offerings, so that every state in the country would be permitted to regulate such offerings, even though they already met the federal requirements. See this post on Seattle 2.0 for a good overview of the current law and how federal preemption of state law in this area makes sense. Suffice it to say here that Dodd's bill, as written, could knock many angels out of the startup ecosystem, and would certainly greatly increase legal fees and costs for financings (perhaps even make modest seed financings not do-able at all where investors may be from different states).

Bendis agrees with William Carleton"s Position that raising the SEC  "Accredited Investor" definition would reduce the number of angel investors in America, and reduce the number of early stage financing's  for promising high risk, high growth entrepreneurs that are already dealing with a significant funding "Valley of Death and are dependent on angels to fill the Venture Capital void. Bendis recommends that NASVF, ACA, NASBIC  and NVCA all work together on educating members of Congress, regarding the financing challenges in the U.S. and unless the Federal Government intends to address the Valley of Death, everyone needs to do more to encourage accredited angel investors to continue thier investing in entrepreneurial small businesses, which are critical to creating jobs and helping America recover from this economic recession.

In the bicoastal battle for biotechnology executive talent, score three for the Bay State.

The region has picked up at least three new biotech CEOs from the San Francisco Bay Area in the past few months. All are the first full-time CEOs for their startups, and all said they were looking for companies with game-changing new technologies.

With unemployment north of 10 percent, there is renewed interest in a job creation agenda.  But many of the proposals put forth to date overlook two key sources of job growth going forward: exports and innovation.  An increase in sales from exports creates twice as many jobs as a dollar in sales from domestic demand, and jobs in technology firms can spur greater multipliers, creating even more jobs.  Moreover, exporting firms pay 9 percent more than jobs in firms that export less while jobs in technology industries pay 90 percent more than other jobs.  This ITIF WebMemo proposes nine ideas that can drive not only job growth in the short run, but competitiveness and innovation in the long run.

• Stop defending the dollar.
• Expand funding for trade enforcement at USTR.
• Temporarily expand funding for federal and state export assistance programs.
• Provide incentives for companies bringing back work from offshore to high unemployment areas.
• Provide a bonus R&D tax credit for 2010 and 2011.
• Allow IT investments to be expensed in 2010.
• Provide $500 million to universities that invest in needed research infrastructure in 2010.
• Allocate $1 billion for grants to support private sector researchers to take 18 month sabbaticals in universities or federal laboratories.
• Provide funding of $2 billion to state economic development agencies to help high-growth businesses start and grow.

As California’s second most famous open innovation scholar — a distant second — I sometimes get emails from people asking about open innovation topics. This week a couple of visitors came from Japan to pick my brain, and we got talking about various open innovation topics, including markets for IP and innovation.

One question I’d heard before was “how is open innovation practiced in Silicon Valley?” It’s been my impression that the various Chesbrough books on open innovation had less of an impact on Silicon Valley than almost anywhere else. Yes, HP created an “Open Innovation Office,” but that’s just a new name (and broader responsibilities) for the existing university relations staff.

Dr. Karl Ulrich spoke to me after his Wharton Talk at Supernova on the subject of Innovation Tournaments (which is also the title of his most recent book.) He describes innovation tournaments, and how companies are already using this format to help find more ideas that can be funneled and used to drive new products and services. The key is generating as many ideas as possible at the top of the funnel. Interestingly enough, Innovation Tournaments and American Idol have common elements, leading to a discussion of Kelly Clarkson versus Sanjaya.

When should companies try to come up with new ideas themselves—and when should they give the job to outside experts?

It's a question many companies are facing these days. As budgets tighten, businesses are outsourcing research and development and the creation of new products as a way to slash costs, speed development time and tap into top talent outside the company.

This report shows how three metropolitan areas—Portland (OR), Kansas City, and Boise—became centers of high technology industry without the presence of a major university. For each metropolitan area it describes the history of high-tech development, current status of high-tech industry clusters, and the roles that public policy and higher education played in spurring the growth of high-tech industry. In the three metropolitan areas high-tech industry is very specialized, anchor firms and new business startups helped it develop, high-tech industry predated supportive public policies, and local universities that were not major research institutions helped support high-tech growth after high-tech industry was already established. The evidence on high-tech development in the three metropolitan areas offers important information for policymakers and practitioners interested in technology-based economic development outside of large, well-established high tech centers.

A top official at the European Commission has signalled an important change in the EU's attitude towards innovation that will highlight the role of creativity and design. The new approach could see a shift away from support for high-tech companies and towards new 'creative clusters' of design firms, business support services and progressive regions.

It may also form the nucleus of a European Innovation Act, pledged by commission President José Manuel Barroso by the spring of next year. Some clues to the commission's thinking have now been revealed in a speech by Jean-Noël Durvy, Director of Innovation Policy at the Brussels enterprise department, as reported by the Brussels-based news service Euractiv.

There's a lot of action taking place in Barbados - all with the goals of boosting economic development and reducing business failures.

With these objectives as targets, the Barbados Entrepreneurs' Venture Capital Fund started late last month to encourage the island's investments market and entrepreneurs.

And Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson immediately encouraged the economic bandwagon by announcing that his government will guarantee for the principal amount invested in the fund.

International plans to combat global warming by switching to low-carbon energy technology have been handicapped by the world financial crisis, according to new figures seen by The Sunday Times.

The data will be worrying for world leaders who tomorrow begin nearly two weeks of talks in Copenhagen to hammer out a new global agreement to cut carbon emissions.

According to New Energy Finance (NEF), the research firm, funding for clean energy schemes this year will fall to $125 billion (£75 billion), down nearly a fifth from last year. The drop ends seven years of growth in which global low-carbon funding soared from $22 billion in 2002 to $155 billion last year. The decrease would have been even greater had the world’s governments not stepped in to support the sector with billions in economic stimulus cash.

I just posted about Umair's suggestion about a mega-version of the netflix prize. I've been involved with some of NESTA's many open innovation projects (here's Roland on one of their latest.)

Lots of events for entrepreneurs and small business people are coming up. And we’ve got the good stuff for you, as usual. Check out the following list of seminars, conferences, webinars and summits for growing companies, brought to you every other Saturday as a community service by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com.

While the politicians fiddle in Copenhagen, many believe the only way to solve the global warming problem is to take radical, creative new steps, deploying new technologies to tweak the temperature.

Over the past few years scientists have offered up some extreme measures — from carbon-capturing rocks to space nets — that could solve the crisis. Some focus on reducing or capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which trap the heat on Earth, while other solutions are aimed at cooling the planet by preventing some of the sun's rays from hitting its surface.

I [Hutch Carpenter] recently wrote up a post, Most Dangerous Innovation Misperception – The Silver Bullet Approach. In it, I discussed the issue of organizations myopically focusing on only disruptive innovations to the exclusion of more incremental or sustaining innovations.

In doing more research on the subject, I began thinking about the dynamics that apply when a firm pursues different kinds of innovation. A post by Venkatesh Rao, Disruptive versus Radical Innovations, was very useful for distinguishing between disruptive and radical innovations.

MUMBAI: Economic bubbles encourage innovation but they also induce people to live beyond their means, financial experts said at a seminar
here.

"Bubbles encourage innovation but also induce people to live beyond their means," MindTree's Executive Chairman, Ashok Soota, said.

The bubbles are difficult to predict but they inevitably burst, he said.