As governments around the world are scaling back support for renewable energy, venture capitalists are shifting their clean technology investment strategy. They're focusing less on high-risk technologies and more on technologies, such as those for improving energy efficiency, that could have a faster payoff but a smaller impact. The shift is raising concerns about how innovative energy technologies will  be commercialized.

Venture capitalists have traditionally focused on companies with low capital requirements that can quickly get bought up or go public. Many Internet startups fall into this category. But in recent years, many venture capitalists have been enticed to risk longer-term, high-capital energy investments in clean energy, thanks to by generous government subsidies in renewable energy markets. In particular, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on solar-cell startups that need to build expensive equipment and factories to prove their technologies, and can take many years to generate a return on investment.

We have previously found that healthy aged rats are more likely to suffer profound memory impairments following a severe bacterial infection than are younger adult rats. Such a peripheral challenge is capable of producing a neuroinflammatory response, and in the aged brain this response is exaggerated and prolonged. Normal aging primes, or sensitizes, microglia, and this appears to be the source of this amplified inflammatory response. Among the outcomes of this exaggerated neuroinflammatory response are impairments in synaptic plasticity and reductions of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), both of which have been associated with cognitive impairments. Since it has been shown that physical exercise increases BDNF mRNA in the hippocampus, the present study examined voluntary exercise in 24-month-old F344×BN rats as a neuroprotective therapeutic in our bacterial infection model. Although aged rats ran only an average of 0.7 km per week, this small amount of exercise was sufficient to completely reverse infection-induced impairments in hippocampus-dependent long-term memory compared with sedentary animals. Strikingly, exercise prevented the infection-induced exaggerated neuroinflammatory response and the blunted BDNF mRNA induction seen in the hippocampus of sedentary rats. Moreover, voluntary exercise abrogated age-related microglial sensitization, suggesting a possible mechanism for exercise-induced neuroprotection in aging.

2011 began with President Barack Obama telling us in the State of the Union Address that we need to reinvent ourselves and our businesses as we move forward.  This week’s stock market drop has ramped up that challenge.

So how do you reinvent?

As I have observed innovators and practiced the art of reinventing myself, I have identified six skills that all creative innovators have in common.  They aren’t technical.  You don’t have to be highly educated or talented to use these skills.  You only have to be open to the possibilities around you and seize the opportunities the universe and God put before you.  Here is what it takes to become a “self re-inventor.”

This is the first post in this series after a four week break due to the summer holidays, and the subject this time is common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when producing documents that describe their companies.  I referred to ‘business plans’ in the title of the post for brevity, but everything below applies equally to executive summaries and introductory Powerpoint decks.

Earlier today I polled my partners with the question “what are the common errors people make when writing their business plans?” and the following list is an amalgam of their responses and my own thoughts.

To the slew of data indicating that working remotely is no longer a rarity, but becoming commonplace, you can add the latest Work Without Walls findings from Microsoft. Microsoft’s research shows that enabling employees to work remotely is fast becoming not a perk, but a business imperative.

Here are some of the findings:

• More than half (56 percent) of information workers at small companies surveyed say their company has no formal telework policy allowing remote work. (39 percent have a telework policy.)
• 36 percent of information workers feel their peers support remote working arrangements, while only 31 percent think their bosses are supportive.

Once you are able to achieve some real “traction” with your business (paying customers, revenue stream), it may seem the time to relax a bit, but in fact this is the point where many founders start to flounder. All the skills and instincts you needed to get to this level can actually start working against you, and you can fail to scale.

Investors often say that successfully navigating the early stages of a startup requires lots of street smarts, guts, and luck. For successful scaling of the business, there has to be a transition to “executive” mode in the more traditional business sense. Certain behaviors between these two modes are incompatible, and can cause real problems.

The tech market has booms and busts, but one thing stays constant: most startups don't succeed.

That means that whatever the market is doing, there's a more or less constant stream of companies that get shut down because they simply couldn't raise enough money or get enough customers in time to repay their investors.

Today, blog peHUB posted a great interview with Marty Pichinson, the founder of Palo Alto consulting firm Sherwood Partners. The company is known as the undertaker of Silicon Valley for its role in shutting down startups and auctioning off their assets.

The 30th anniversary of the IBM PC is Friday, and the two companies most responsible for its success both explained how they're moving on today.

IBM engineer Mark Dean, who was on the team that built the first IBM PC, says the PC era is basically over. He's proud he was involved -- but he's also "proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo."

Dean says that he has switched to a tablet (he doesn't say which one, but odds are it's an iPad), and that the PC is going the way of "vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs" -- which echoes what he told us back in March.

The Bayh-Dole Act and the more than $2 billion-a-year industry it spawned through technology transfer from academia survived its strongest challenge in June when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Stanford v. Roche case. It held, by a 7–2 vote, that Roche shares ownership with Stanford University in three U.S. patents for a PCR-based test kit to detect and quantify levels of HIV in the blood.

Eleven days before that decision was rendered, a bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would rewrite two of Bayh-Dole’s most important provisions. The aim of this bill is to revive the nation’s manufacturing sector and create a source of federal funds for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.

One of the most important characteristics of any technology transfer office is the mandate under which it operates.  While the goal of technology transfer is to bring the results of research into the public marketplace where they can be put to public use, the emphasis and approach is dependent on the culture of the institution.  Considering one example, many offices now make their primary function the generation of revenue from their portfolio:

• for the researchers who have invested to advance their field
• for the institution that provides research support services
• or as part of a directive for regional economic development

NEW YORK, Aug. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Venture capital (VC) funding in the Life Sciences sector, which includes the Biotechnology and Medical Device industries, leapt 37 percent during the second quarter of 2011, according to a new PwC US report, "High-dollar deals."   The report includes data from the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree™ Report, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Venture capitalists invested $2.1 billion in 206 Life Sciences deals, delivering the seventh best quarter since the MoneyTree Report began collecting data in 1995.  Despite the quarter's strong performance, dollars invested in Life Sciences declined 3 percent when compared with the same quarter of 2010. Deal volume also decreased year over year, but by a greater margin of 21 percent. Compared with the first quarter of 2011, deal volume looked more positive, showing an increase of 12 percent.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (08/10/2011) —Reviewers from three of the nation’s top university technology transfer operations praised the University of Minnesota for dramatic improvements in its approach to bringing researcher discoveries to the marketplace. Among other findings, their report declared that the U of M “… has an outstanding track record of accomplishments that put it at the highest ranks of university tech transfer offices,” adding, “… the office has done so on a much more limited budget and staffing model than most of its peers. The University clearly has much for which it should be proud.”

The reviewers, leaders of the technology transfer offices at Stanford, Columbia and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, noted the dramatic turnaround since Jay Schrankler took over as executive director of the Office for Technology Commercialization (OTC) four years ago. A thorough overhaul of the university’s technology transfer operations, including recruitment of a new director, was one of the key strategies that Vice President for Research R. Timothy Mulcahy identified as a top priority when he arrived at the university in 2005.

Venture capitalists are taking exception to recent comments by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who said in an Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal guest column that the agency’s cautious approach to approving new medical treatments boosts consumer confidence in products on the market, and stimulates economic growth.

Investors in emerging medical technologies, who say that a number of start-up companies have either gone out of business or moved overseas because of delays and uncertainty at the FDA, say the agency’s caution has given way to overzealousness, and that it is now next to impossible to get new devices or drugs approved in a timely manner.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced at the end of July that it is setting up a public–private partnership to turn the most promising breakthroughs from its funding portfolio into successful start-ups. The partnership, called Innovation Corps (I-Corps), will teach participants the basics of entrepreneurship, connect them with mentors, and provide $50,000 in seed funding. This is essentially a Silicon Valley-style incubator for scientists and engineers.

If past is prologue, the vast majority of the start-ups to emerge from this program will fail. Even venture capitalists only claim to have a one-in-ten batting average. The government can’t possibly do better. But I am optimistic that I-Corps will be a game changer. In the long term, it will likely produce returns that are orders of magnitude greater than the $5 million per year that will be spent. That’s because it addresses one of the core problems of the university research system, narrowing the gap between science and innovation.

Can the complexity of cities really be reduced to a single set of equations, as the physicist Geoffrey West claims, or even 3,000 of them? Is it really true, as West’s numbers would indicate, that Corvallis, Oregon--a city of 55,000 two hours’ drive south of Portland--is the most innovative city in America? Perhaps there’s something in the water, or it may have more to do with the fact that West's model loves patents and Hewlett Packard’s Advanced Products Division is based there, along with its patent portfolio, one developed by thousands of researchers worldwide.

West’s conclusions are only as good as the data and the models (patents equal innovation) he has to work with. This problem--if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it--combined with the impulse to improve cities by models, is driving both IBM’s “smarter city” strategy and the nascent “urban systems” movement, which seek to apply complexity science to cities. IBM sponsored the first Urban Systems Symposium in May (where West co-starred in a show-stopping discussion with Paul Romer and Stewart Brand) and today announced the latest plank in its smarter city platform: an “app” containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities’ emergent behavior. IBM also revealed its first customer, the City of Portland, Oregon.

Mentorship is a critical component for many successful entrepreneurs. No matter how smart you are – and how good your idea is – it’s always easier when you have someone who has been through it before (in some capacity).

I’ve previously written about how to capture the eye of a venture capitalist as a mentor, but sometimes it’s more advantageous to be under the wing of an industry leader. The problem is: Odds are you don’t know any.

I study mentorship in a method and magnitude method that helped me become one of Stanford’s first EIRs (entrepreneur in residence). Here are some morsels on how to secure a mentorship from those heads of industry – even when they don’t know you from Adam.

Move towards something specific – When you make a commitment, the universe moves with you. That might sound a little new-age-y, but I believe moving towards something specific helps a lot in achieving that goal – in this case, getting a mentor.

There is right now, today, a tremendous opportunity for cities across the US and around the world to effectively recruit and retain the young, hungry, visionary and highly productive talent that impact and accelerate cities. Those progressive folks that make the really big things happen.

The following essay will outline the process I have dubbed Launch City. A for-profit model that leverages this hyper-fertile landscape, implementable in any city with just a few pivotal elements. One that when combined with the goals and resources intrinsic to an emerging city, creates a perfect storm of ambition, advocacy and acceleration, resulting in an efficient, productive and profitable platform for entrepreneurship.

The U.S. business community is facing a war of intelligence attrition. Fortune 500s will see countless experienced knowledge workers walk out the door over the next two decades. The U.S. Armed Forces are losing millions of officers and key personnel to retirement.

For even those companies that thrive on innovation, the numbers are daunting – and demand action. Some 900,0 A 00 white collar workers from the Executive Branch of government, and another 5,400 federal executives, will be up for retirement over the next decade, according to an August 2007 study from Tandberg.

McKinsey Quarterly survey in 2007 found that the Baby Boomer generation is “the best-educated, most highly skilled aging workforce in U.S. history.” Though they’re “only” about 40% of the workforce, they comprise more than half of all managers and almost half of all professionals, like doctors and lawyers.

More than half of federal workers value creativity and innovation in their jobs, according to a new report from a nonprofit organization.

The Partnership for Public Service and the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm, looked at the factors driving innovation in agencies and found 63.3 percent of employees gave the government a positive score on innovation. The percentage was based on the average of three innovation-related questions posed in the Office of Personnel Management's annual survey of federal employee attitudes; the 2010 survey included more than 263,000 employees from 32 large agencies, 34 small agencies and 224 agency subcomponents.

NASA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission topped the list of most innovative agencies, according to the report. The General Services Administration, State Department and Army rounded out the top five agencies. Employees ranked the Securities and Exchange Commission last for innovation on the list of 28 agencies included in the snapshot.

As a teenager, Curtiss Pope worked as a clerk at Food 4 Less in east San Jose, Calif., gathering up shopping carts and helping customers find grocery items. He got the job to help his single mother of nine pay the bills, but it also seeded the idea for a start-up he's launched while helping to buck a well-documented Silicon Valley trend.

Pope, an 29-year-old African-American, goes up against some tough stats as he seeks funding for his company, AisleFinder, which aims to help people find items in grocery stores.

According to a recent CB Insights report, which tracked founders of 165 companies that had received a first round of venture funding during the first half of 2010, just 1 percent were African-American, even though 11 percent of the U.S. population is black. That's compared with 87 percent of founders who were white (whites make up 77 percent of the U.S. population), and 12 percent of start-up founders who are Asian (Asians make up 4 percent of the population).