A truism in the venture capital industry is that firms “invest in people,” not just great business ideas. So what if that premise was literally true?

Three entrepreneurs are offering a share of their life’s income in exchange for cash upfront and have banded together to form the Thrust Fund, an online marketplace for such personal investments.

 Kjerstin Erickson, a 26-year-old Stanford graduate who founded a non-profit called FORGE that rebuilds community services in Sub-Saharan African refugee camps, is offering 6 percent of her life’s income for $600,000.

“So many friends are in the same boat as me — they’re struggling along, wanting to see so much more from their organizations or to let them fly on their own. But it’s hard not being able to get out of the daily grind and raise what you need for payroll,” she said. “The Thrust Fund is appealing because it lets me fast-forward a couple years.”

Earlier this week The Upswing brought you news--and a real purdy picture!-- detailing the five hottest cities in the country in terms of generating green jobs. Today, we'd like to offer yet more good news in this area.

Seems the Department of Energy just dropped a $100 million check on Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (or ARPA-E) to go toward three main areas of green technology production. The areas are:

1. Developing cost-effective, non-toxic means for energy storage.
2. Building power converters that can reduce energy consumption by 30%.
3. Exploring additional high-efficiency technology for heating and cooling systems.

While Washington debates how to help the country’s struggling small businesses, states and municipalities have stepped up with an array of initiatives to stanch closings and save jobs.

The local approaches are as varied as subsidizing wages for new hires, running a $100,000 regional business-plan competition and giving out grants to help small manufacturers reposition themselves. Some states and cities are using federal stimulus dollars, and others are mixing federal, state and private dollars.

Here are some examples:

A 100 Percent Hiring Subsidy

San Francisco is using federal stimulus funds to give immediate aid to small-business owners. Its $25 million program reimburses owners for 100 percent of the wages for certain new hires. So far, restaurants, cafes, delivery services and even law firms have hired nearly 1,800 people through the program, called Jobs Now.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — BioEnterprise Inc., the bioscience venture developer in Northeast Ohio, has formalized a partnership with Team NEO to win new medical imaging, neurostimulation, cardiovascular device and orthopedic companies to the region.

Both non-profits work in Northeast Ohio, and sometimes they bump against each other or duplicate efforts, said Annette Ballou, director of strategic marketing and communications for BioEnterprise. So the two organizations developed a strategic plan to jointly attract companies in these four industries.

“We’re going to be the frontrunners,” Ballou said. “We’ll do the cold calls, the meet-and-greets” with out-of-region companies. “We’ll pull Team NEO in when we find a company that’s interested in moving here. BioEnterprise is the industry expert in these areas. We’re not the relocation expert.”

But Team NEO is. “This was the natural progression between two partners that have different areas expertise but a common goal — to advance the region’s economy,” said Carin Rockind, vice president of marketing and communications for Team NEO.

The Cabinet is planning to stimulate the development of innovative clusters, which are groups of linked enterprises concentrated in a single territory.

Officials promise to give grants not only to small and medium-size businesses, but subsidies to regions to help support the aggregation of companies into clusters.

The Economic Development Minister will gather plans from regional governments by March 15 to decide on how much money will be allotted from the federal budget, a high-placed official in the ministry told Vedomosti.

The clusters will be formed as a result of the concentration of connected companies in one area, said Alexei Prazdnichnykh, a partner at Strategy Partners. "They are connected by proximity to a buyer or supplier, by infrastructure or by human resources; universities that prepare specialists for such enterprises are also often included in clusters."

Dr. Mary Good, dean of UALR's Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT), will help host the first of a series of regional meetings of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy to highlight best practices in innovation and related new business creation.

Beginning at 2 p.m. Monday, March 8, and concluding at 2 p.m. Tuesday, the meeting at the Clinton Presidential Center will engage top-level Arkansas business, academic, and political leaders with high-level U.S. government officials and others positioned to help drive innovation and business incubation in the state.

"UALR is collaborating with Dr. Charles Wessner, director of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship for the National Academies, on this event, and we are confident this session and the cooperative efforts derived from it, have the potential to be genuinely useful, both for Arkansas and for the nation," Good said.

Participants also include Richard A. Bendis, president and CEO of Innovation America; David Thomison, vice president of Enterprise Services, i2E; Susan Hackwood, executive director of the California Council of Science and Technology; and Don Senich, Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Division, National Science Foundation.

Gov. Mike Beebe and his wife, Ginger, will host the board at a dinner Monday evening at the Governor's Mansion.

Exponential growth is the strongest indicator of success for any start-up venture, and BIO-Europe Spring is experiencing a powerful lift as it reaches its fourth year. Registrations for the event began as early as November and continued in a steady stream approaching a record 1,735 delegates from 1038 companies in 42 countries.

The extraordinary number of partnering meetings, powered by the industry’s leading technology platform partneringONE®, explains in part the surging popularity of BIO-Europe Spring.

The other leading attraction for the event is a conference program that dominates activities on the first day and brings together more than 60 leading executives in Life Sciences for intensive panel discussions and workshop presentations.

99% of all Venture Capital websites are tributes to themselves.

The typical Venture Capital website is full of former investments, some good some bad. A virtual brochure and usually nothing more.

Not so with First Round Capital.  Most corporations can take a page or two out of their social playbook.  Some may need to borrow the entire guide. 

It’s starts with their tagline: “First Round Capital is a seed stage fund dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build remarkable companies. Read More”.  Music to any start-up CEO’s ears.  And, if they practice what they preach, then they’ll rise above their peers. 

A quick check of The Funded reveals the firm is well liked by prospective entrepreneurs but may be more difficult than others in securing favorable deal terms. 

Many of us in the technology, media and VC world sit on panels at lot.  Many of them are painfully boring.  It’s a shame since it’s such a golden opportunity for you to build awareness with your audience for who you are and what you do.  And it’s a surprisingly great way to meet people in this industry who share the stage with you. (photo from left to right: me, QD3, Brian Solis, Chamillionaire, Ian Rogers and Brian Zisk – most of whom I got to know through Twiistup panels)

I have written about the topic of sitting on panels before.  I sat on two panels in the past week – once at LeadsCon (** see appendix if you’re interested in a back story here) and today at the America’s Growth Capital conference.  So it’s fresh on my mind.  Hope I won’t be too repetitive.

Here’s my views on how to maximize your time on stage:

Give (your contribution)

1. Educate – Your primary role on stage is to educate the audience. People have paid good money to be at the show and often times it’s to hear people like you speak. It’s your job to know thy audience. And thy topic. Try to find out in advance the make of of the people who will be attending. Things to know: mix of entrepreneurs, big tech company execs, service providers, media people, VCs, etc. It would be good to undertand size of companies. Make sure you really try to get inside the minds of the audience so you speak about what you believe they will think is relevant. Obviously it should be closely aligned with what the topic of the panel is.

Despite making serious reductions in headcount last year, Yahoo's revenue per employee is still well below Google's.

Yahoo employees generated an average $124,000 each in revenue during Q4 '09, down from $132,823 in Q4 '08. Google, which also had its own small headcount reduction, saw revenue per employee hit $336,467 in the fourth quarter, which is way up from $281,916 during the year-ago quarter.

It sure is nice to have that Google search advertising cash machine at its disposal, even as the company entertains dozens of new projects.

Executives roundly proclaim the need for new ideas and products, but it's often little more than empty talk

Everyone knows that innovation is what drives business success in the 21st century, right? Well, sort of. While corporate leaders may intellectually accept the need for innovation and promote their commitment to innovation at every opportunity, many really don't get it. As a result, they can become a major roadblock in your own career path as an innovation leader.

For instance, the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C., sought to identify leadership trends by surveying 247 executives and managers who supervised at least 500 people and had more than 15 years of management experience. Fifty percent of these leaders in the 2007 poll said their organization was "top in class" in innovation. (The results are impossible, of course, if you accept the standard definition of "top in class" as the best 5% to 10%.)

Yet even if we go along with the self-evaluations, there is still plenty of room for improvement. So wouldn't you assume that these leaders would pursue every possible avenue to improve their organization's innovation capabilities? Unfortunately, the responses to the next question show that's not the case. When asked what they were doing to promote innovation in their organizations, the most popular strategy, adopting "overt innovation processes," was named by only 25%. Only 17% said they were undertaking "talent/talent development," the second most often mentioned answer, and 13% said they had rewards/recognition programs to support innovation.

IndustryWeek (Giffi, Vice Chairman, Deloitte LLP) - CEOs around the world say that the U.S. is no longer the most competitive location for manufacturing, says Deloitte. Working with the Council on Competitiveness, we are concluding a multi-year survey on global competitiveness in manufacturing to learn how CEOs and other senior leaders view manufacturing industry competitiveness around the world. While we won't have the final survey results until the spring, and more CEOs are responding each day, our work has already revealed findings that should cause us all to pause, take stock, and formulate a new path forward.

While this type of research will continue throughout the year, including a number of face-to-face discussions with senior manufacturing executives around the world, I can already outline several characteristics that I believe will be inherent to the leading manufacturing organizations of the future. Chief among these are:

• Global Orientation: Successful, sustainable manufacturers will be global, even if they never manufacture products outside their home nation. They will open their business processes to benefit from collaboration with partners around the world. They will pursue their markets and their customers in every corner of the world.

• Innovators and Champions of "the New": Innovation of products, processes, services, and sales will be the most important competitive differentiator of leading manufacturers around the world. The development of new products and services for new markets, as well as new products for existing customers, will be a recurring theme for best-in-class performers. 

• Intersection Conductors: Innovation will occur at the intersection of ideas (intellectual capital), investment (financial capital), talent (human capital) and infrastructure (physical capital) -- and winners will outpace their rivals developing and deploying their capital through superior leadership, collaboration and technology diffusion, as well as product and service commercialization capabilities.

The EU's new growth strategy, due to be rubber-stamped by the new Barroso Commission on Wednesday (3 March), includes a blueprint for transforming Europe into an 'Innovation Union' by 2020.

A leaked draft of the 'Europe 2020' strategy ties together research, education, finance and intellectual property as part of a holistic approach likely to be reflected in the European Commission's forthcoming innovation action plan.

Several of the proposed reforms are long-standing goals but officials say there is now unprecedented political impetus to fix old problems.

The 'Innovation Union' plan, one of nine "flagship initiatives," commits Brussels to boosting investment in research and making Europe an attractive place to develop new products.

The laser, a device used in everything from astrophysics to biology, was invented 50 years ago.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the laser, a device used in applications from performing precise surgical procedures to measuring gravitational waves. In 1917, Albert Einstein proposed that a photon hitting an atom in a high energy state would cause the atom to release a second photon identical in frequency and direction to the first. In the 1950s, scientists searched for a way to achieve this stimulated emission and amplify it so that a group of excited atoms would release photons in a chain reaction. In 1959, American physicist Gordon Gould publicly used the term “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” for the first time. A year later, scientists demonstrated the first working optical laser.

The first laser, demonstrated by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Laboratories, was a ruby crystal rod with mirrored ends, resting in the center of a coiled quartz flash tube. The tube lamp flashed an intense white light, which energized chromium atoms in the ruby. As the atoms lost energy, released photons bounced between the mirrors, stimulating more atoms, before finally escaping out of one end of the rod in short pulses of red light.

China is pressuring foreign makers of high-tech products for sensitive information at a time of growing concern over computer hacking, experts say.

The manufacturers must meet a May 1 deadline to register their communication products and comply with Chinese standards or face exclusion from government purchasing, the Financial Times reported on Feb. 21.

Some makers of products like secure routers and firewalls face the choice of providing source codes and opening possible "back doors" to information or losing market access, industry officials said.

John Neuffer, vice president for global policy at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), told the paper that U.S. companies "are feeling less welcome" in China, although they want to keep doing business there.

The Washington-based group represents over 40 U.S. suppliers of computer and communications technology.

It's 7 a.m. and the hiring hall here is buzzing. Day laborers file in, pick up a small numbered ball, and write their name and number on a large whiteboard. The ball then goes in a jug for the day's job lottery.

Soon about 40 men, mostly immigrants from Guatemala, crowd a large room at the job and social-services center, run by Neighbors Link, a local nonprofit group. The room doubles as a waiting room and classroom for the daily "Job English" class run by Westchester Community College.

The men chat, drinking coffee while they wait for area contractors and homeowners to hire them. The crowd thins as employers arrive and lottery balls are drawn. After a couple of hours, those who are left settle in for the three-hour English class led by an instructor from Westchester's main campus, in Valhalla, N.Y.

I [Thomas L. Friedman] was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.

And this contrast is playing out in the worst way — just slowly enough so the crisis never seems acute enough to take urgent action. But, eventually, infrastructure, education and innovation policies matter. Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.

I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.

While America still has the quality work force, political stability and natural resources a company like Intel needs, said Otellini, the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent and incentives to induce big multinationals to create lots more jobs here.

Once upon a time—actually it was just last year—the U.S. was the world innovation champion, according to an annual report by INSEAD and the Confederation of Indian Industry. In this year’s study, the nation slumps to 11th place. Perhaps even more surprising is the new No. 1: Iceland.

Soumitra Dutta, an INSEAD professor of business and technology, who oversaw the survey, theorizes that the rankings show that, as in so much else, size matters. But in this case it’s the smaller the better.

He tells me that having easy access to a big marketplace still makes it easier for innovators to profit from their inventions. Would the iPod or the iPhone have been such big hits if Apple had been based in, say, Iceland? But the Internet is turning the entire world into one big market, to which everyone everywhere has access, he says. Also, it appears that smaller, homogeneous countries can unite to support policies, institutions, and infrastructure that promote innovation—in the developed world, at least.

Size certainly makes a difference in the 2010 Global Innovation Index report. The most-populous land in the Top 10 is Sweden, with 9.2 million people. It finishes second. Several of the biggest nations in the developed world cluster just below the U.S. Japan is 13, with Britain at 14, and Germany at 16. Of the so-called BRIC giants in emerging markets, China comes out best, at 43. Trailing are India (56), Russia (64), and Brazil (68).

In recent years, we've heard plenty of talk about the development of a "smart grid," one that could help distribute energy from renewable sources like solar and wind. But so far, it hasn't materialized. With U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu's announcement of $100 million in new funding for breakthrough energy projects today, though, could that change?

This particular installment of funds marks the third wave of stimulus money (under the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy program) that's specifically aimed at building a new green infrastructure. According to Chu's announcement, the new funding will target three distinct areas: grid solutions, new transmission technologies and more energy-efficient air conditioners.

The idea of a "smart grid" refers to the massive infrastructure needed to capture energy, store and then deliver it where it's needed at any given time. Transmission technologies help power get to the places it needs to be. Meanwhile, according to a VentureBeat article, energy-efficient air conditioners are part of ARPA-E's overall interest in more efficient power converters. (While more energy-efficient air conditioners might not seem like a top priority, in fact, there are huge potential energy savings that can be found in better climate cooling devices -- particularly in the tropical world.)

Mother Nature’s recent one-two Washington weather wallop was big, it was debilitating and its first phase posed a formidable threat to Super Bowl parties. But it was not a surprise. Days in advance, weather forecasters warned of the first storm’s arrival, predicting an accumulation of up to 30 inches, which is precisely what the capital region got. Soon after, we were told to brace for a follow-on storm with high winds and a dozen or so more inches expected. And, like clockwork, that aftershock arrived and delivered its predicted payload.

Behind those spot-on forecasts was a sophisticated network of satellites eyeing our skies from above, radar and other sensors on the ground and sophisticated communication networks that coordinated with one another to give early and accurate assessments. The storms still did a lot of damage, but their impact was clearly diminished by a largely invisible and generally taken-for-granted web of technology, including wireless communications that have allowed many who were unable to reach their workplaces to continue their work.