ANNAPOLIS, Md., November 1, 2010 - The BoatUS Foundation's "Innovation in Life Jacket Design Competition" is once again calling for out-of-the-box life jacket design entries.

Five years ago, the Innovation in Life Jacket Design Competition resulted with the introduction of several new and innovative life jacket designs to the public, the US Coast Guard and recreational boating industry. Since then, the interest in new, more comfortable designs has not faded. While current models of life jackets save lives every day, many are still bulky and uncomfortable, leaving boaters reluctant to wear them.

So the BoatUS Foundation, along with Underwriters Laboratories and the Personal Floatation Device Manufacturer's Association, decided another competition was necessary to keep the momentum going to seek out the newest technologies and design innovations that could rethink a 100-year-old design.

Connecticut must leverage the research achievements from its knowledge corridor into entrepreneurial ventures, especially by spurring private individuals and organizations to invest in these start-ups. Peter Longo, president and executive director, Connecticut Innovations

That was the message from the head of Connecticut state investment fund after a senior official from the Obama Administration came to Windsor on Nov. 1 looking for ways to bolster America’s development of breakthrough research.

“The reality is you need to get money in the hands of the entrepreneurs,” said Peter Longo, president and executive director of Connecticut Innovations, the quasi-public state investment fund.

At the Northeast Technology Exchange Conference in Windsor, Longo and several other members from the state business and investment community sat on a panel hosted by Ginger Lew — the White House’s senior counselor on technology transfer — where she decried the nation’s problems in taking groundbreaking research and turning it into profitable business ventures.

I believe the Business model canvas, presented by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur in their book “Business Model Generation”, holds a very powerful way for Venture Capital to use in their assessments of promising ventures they are considering for investment.

Traditional pitches to VC’s are loaded with financial numbers, providing crisp, well written business plans pitched by teams oozing with optimism but much of this is still highly intangible in reality. There is often a decision made on the people chemistry more than anything else. There is nothing wrong with that if you are the lucky one, but tough on the countless thousands that face rejection after rejection for their ideas to attract the necessary funding needed to move their business forward.

Angel investing in most parts of the country remains a relatively informal and unstructured process. The depressed economy has dampened the angel community’s appetite, making the identification of the trophy investor more important than ever. Professional angel investing takes time, knowledge, skills and resources. The trophy investor understands these challenges and has developed a professional process to manage his investments.

Main Street Venture Fund LLC, an angel fund of about 25 private investors, was formed by Ruffolo Benson LLC in northeast Indiana with the intention of bringing together area entrepreneurs and private investors to create economic value for the region. I will share several of our group’s insights from the past two years.

For an angel investor, it’s a buyer’s market. At Main Street, we consistently have more money available than we have found good opportunities for investment. The ideal angel investor possesses a variety of personal characteristics that likely have contributed to successful achievements in his or her own careers.

A miracle eye implant has restored sight to the blind, said the Daily Express. Many newspapers reported this ‘proof of concept’ trial in three patients who were completely blind due to a genetic condition. Each patient had a microchip implanted into one of their eyes, which was designed to convert light patterns into electrical impulses that could be fed into the optic nerve.

All three patients were better able to perceive light and locate light objects on a dark table. Furthermore, one patient could recognise objects such as a cup and a spoon on a table and could determine letters.

As the Daily Express implies, this is exciting research. Although complete vision restoration remains a long way off, a crude improvement in vision from complete blindness is a promising result. As this was a small pilot study, further work is needed to assess how well the device works in a larger group of patients and to refine the surgical technique and the device itself.

THE ECONOMIC downturn has presented both challenges and opportunities that put us at a crossroads. We know all too well what the challenges are, but to find the opportunities, we must move beyond old economic development models and the noisy rhetoric that demonizes government or business. We must come together as a region to unleash the creative and innovative spirit that resides here to create what we call the new innovation economy.

Virginia has the nation's highest concentration of technology workers, but it lags in technology transfer, or commercialization, and seed-stage capital formation, both key factors when creating the next generation of technology companies.

AS the sun rose over the mountains circling Los Reyes, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one morning in March 2009, a caravan of more than 300 heavily armed law enforcement agents set out on a raid.

All but the lead vehicle turned off their headlights to evade lookouts, called “falcons,” who work for La Familia Michoacana, the brutal Mexican cartel that controls the drug trade. This time, the police weren’t hunting for a secret stash of drugs, guns or money. Instead, they looked to crack down on La Familia’s growing counterfeit software ring.

The police reached the house undetected, barreled in and found rooms crammed with about 50 machines used to copy CDs and make counterfeit versions of software like Microsoft Office and Xbox video games. They arrested three men on the spot, who were later released while the authorities investigate the case. “The entire operation was very complicated and risky,” says a person close to the investigation, who demanded anonymity out of fear for his life.

What is the most important thing you can do to help your company grow over the long term?

The idle answers to this question are easy to imagine: “Oh, expand into new markets”; “offshore your manufacturing to China or India”; or “follow the money, seek investment, and invest it wisely”.

In fact, the evidence points overwhelmingly to a much more profound answer, which can be summed up in one word: innovate. Yes, innovate.

The “tech transfer health index” is a simple but powerful technique to quantify the impact and productivity of the entire long tail curve of technologies in a university’s IP portfolio. Here’s why we should adopt it. When I worked in a university technology transfer office, we spent a lot of time pulling together performance metrics. We had 14 different reports, each with its own subtle nuances and unique methodologies. Needless to say, despite our best efforts, our metrics didn’t reconcile well over time and unintentionally gave the impression that our tech transfer office was somewhat, uh, creative in our accounting. The problem, however, wasn’t just accuracy.

Our metrics missed the mark because they didn’t reflect the whole story: we counted mostly technology activity in the head of the long tail curve of distribution – the high-earning technologies, new startups, and issued patents. However, most staff time was spent managing “tail” technologies – filing provisional patents, marketing technologies, keeping on top of licensees who weren’t paying their bills, putting on events, and processing all types of agreement-related paperwork. Another limitation of our approach was that we counted all commercial licenses the same way, regardless of their associated impact or revenue (of course revenue is not a perfect proxy for impact, but pumping up commercial license counts by counting any invention worth a few dollars or more created a meaningless and distorted depiction of our performance). Finally, we tallied metrics in our own, idiosyncratic way that was hard to explain to outsiders, so even our AUTM metrics could not be easily compared to those from a different tech transfer office.

EVERY once in while, there are symbolically intriguing historical moments in the corporate world, and one of them occurred last month. On Oct. 18, Apple and I.B.M. reported their quarterly results, and Apple’s total profit surged past I.B.M.’s.

The two companies have long been cast as polar opposites, even before Apple’s commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl that depicted a female rebel (Apple) striking a blow against a corporate Big Brother (I.B.M.).

Today, Big Blue is seen as a machine — a company that caters to big corporate and government customers and is known for steady improvement and five-year profit plans. Indeed, I.B.M.’s profit rose 12 percent for the third quarter, the 31st consecutive quarter that the company delivered higher earnings. Apple, by contrast, is seen as a consumer-product hit factory that is on a roll.

Summer might be in the books, but sound business strategies are for all seasons.

That's just the kind of old-fashioned thinking that runs small companies right off a cliff, right? Innovate, adapt, synergize. These are the new shibboleths in this dynamic, disruptive economy. And anyway those words look great in a PowerPoint deck.

Here's a thought: How about simply doing more of what works? I found three entrepreneurs who did just that this summer--and delighted customers all the way to the bank.

Forget hospitals. Forget doctors’ offices. Heck, forget even the Internet.

If you really want to influence people on healthcare, look no further than your local Target store.

It makes sense, when you think about it. Target and its rival Wal-Mart already offer everything under the sun — health clinics, pharmacies, groceries, exercise-related merchandise. You name it, they sell it, and sell it well.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A state-owned technology and research park in South Charleston could become a "signature center" that spurs the development of West Virginia's chemical, energy and materials industries in West Virginia, according to a preliminary report released Friday.

"It will really enable West Virginia to step up on the national stage," said Mitch Horowitz, a consultant hired to help plan the tech park's future.

Horowitz, who works for the Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute, issued a series of recommendations Friday, providing a blueprint for the tech park's development.

Bob Compton and I finally have something to agree about.

The Washington, D.C.–based venture capitalist produced a provocative documentary, 2 Million Minutes, which tracked six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. It showed the Indian and Chinese students slogging to learn mathematics and science, and the Americans partying and playing video games. Bob concluded that the Indians and Chinese will eat our children’s lunch since they are better educated. I was featured in the documentary and agreed that Indian and Chinese children do indeed work much harder than American children; that they are brought up to believe that education is everything and will make the difference between success and starvation; and that most of their childhood is spent memorizing books on advanced subjects. I argued, however, that things aren’t nearly as dire for U.S. competitiveness as they might appear to be in the documentary. My team’s research into global engineering education showed that more than 95% of Indians and Chinese do not receive a good education, and even those that do receive one take much longer to develop crucial real-world skills than do Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They innovate from the get-go.

For all the fuss about “super angels” and “angels are the new VCs,” a report out this week from the University of New Hampshire says angel investors are putting less money into companies overall, especially at the seed and startup stages, compared with previous years. Of course, there are many factors at play here.

The numbers cover the first half of 2010, and they come from a report released by the Center for Venture Research at UNH. According to the report, angel investments in this period totaled $8.5 billion, a decrease of 6.5 percent over the same period in 2009. Angel investors put money into a total of 25,200 entrepreneurial ventures in the first half of this year—a 3 percent increase in the number of deals from the first half of 2009. But the number of active individual investors was 125,100, an 11 percent drop from last year.

Perhaps more telling was that only 26 percent of angel investments were classified as seed or startup stage. This continues a downward trend that saw seed/startup investments make up 45 percent of deals in 2008, and 35 percent in 2009.

Cellular carriers' competing claims as to what constitutes 4G (fourth-generation) cellular data networks got me to thinking about how speed is only one part of the story about why allegedly faster networks are being built. I've been writing about Wi-Fi since 2000, and that informs my thinking, because Wi-Fi has matured to a point where raw speed doesn't have the same marketing value it once did, because networks are generally fast enough. Instead, multiple properties come into play.

I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another.

Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity's sake, let's consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir's capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances.

You may find yourself in a panic before breakfast, and it’s baffling to you because, hey, you’re livin’ the dream.

And by “the dream” I mean building your business as an entrepreneur. “Isn’t this what I wanted?” you ask yourself anxiously. “Isn’t this what I’d been planning for when I was in that cubicle?”

Yes, this is what you wanted, and sure, this is what you’ve been planning for since those days spent in that box. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I’m sure life has taught many of us that getting what we want doesn’t always result in insta-joy. On the contrary, the work, the next round of it, at least, begins anew at every turn.

I often get asked the age-old question (by men) of “Who are the best entrepreneurs, men or women?” Women already believe they know the answer, so they never ask. I always try the diplomatic answer of “It depends”, but that doesn’t satisfy anybody.

First, here are a few facts to set the stage. Only one in four companies in the USA today are run by women, but the number of female-owned firms is growing twice as fast as all businesses. Overall, female-run businesses grow slower, so create fewer jobs.

You can find lots of research facts on this subject, with much hedging on meaning. An SBA research study a while back is typical in concluding that gender is not a factor in new venture performance.

You'll notice something funny about the worst states to do business, which were identified by the conservative Tax Foundation. They include some of America's biggest state economies, like New York and California.

But whatever your politics, it's clear that these states tax the hell out of local businesses.

States were ranked based on analysis of taxes for corporations, individual income, sales, unemployment insurance and property.