The federal government should require universities receiving research grants to allow faculty inventors the right to choose their licensing agent

Arundeep Pradhan and I agree on the fundamental issue: Our economy and our society need more innovation, and universities are a rich source. We just disagree on the best way to maximize their potential.

The core of that disagreement is about the value and role of university "technology licensing offices" (TLOs). Pradhan—who is president of the Association of University Technology Managers, essentially the TLO trade association—thinks the system is working just fine, according to his recent BusinesWeek.com column. I think it could be improved through more competition.

Universities are supposed to be, and mostly are, "marketplaces of ideas." But when it comes to inventions developed by their faculty, there is only one avenue available. TLOs typically assert total control over which innovations can reach the market, in what form, and how fast. In the Harvard Business Review article that Pradhan criticizes, my co-author and I proposed some modest steps to expand the avenues to commercialization. For instance, why not allow faculty members to test the waters by approaching TLOs at other schools? Or better yet, let them use independent licensing agents who may have more expertise in the inventor's technology of choice? The net result—something we believe that Pradhan wants (or should want) no less than we—would be more inventions moving more quickly to market, thereby benefiting society, the university, and the inventors.

My name is Shirley and I haven’t started a new business in the last 9 months.

Entrepreneurship is an addiction. Every entrepreneur is stricken with the rush of adrenaline in starting a new venture. It is all very exciting, with new ideas, new products, and new people. And the most addictive part: Success.

I have been both blessed and cursed with the effects of success. I sold my business that I had since 1994 to a publicly traded company that was a competitor. I am staying on as Director of Ecommerce of www.AmericanBridal.com as part of the acquisition. It has been 9 months, and the physical transition was smooth, but the emotional one has been challenging.

You might say that I’ve had to go cold turkey with entrepreneurship. But sometimes I yearn for that high. Like a lot of drugs, the high you can get from entrepreneurship can make you forget about the consequences and the pain it can bring.

Dear SBIR Insider,

Here is a brief update on some results of your efforts to counter the antics of the "Honorable" Jason Altmire (lobbyist turned congressman D-PA) who attempted to trick the House into inserting his radical SBIR legislation (H.R. 2965) into the Jobs bill. (New subscribers, see www.zyn.com/sbir/insider/sb-insider02-23-10.htm for the background on this story).

Your response was great. The House received many emails from you, SBTC members, readers of Ann Eskesen's email, readers of Fred Patterson's Blog (The SBIR Coach), and I'm sure several other sources as well. Your voices were heard and it threw Mr. Altmire for a curve but he's bouncing back with a clarification to his previous email.

THE ALTMIRE QUAGMIRE PART DEUX

In what appears to be an attempt to negate the impact of your letters objecting to his original email, Altmire has sent out a second letter, this time suggesting a COMPROMISE between the House & Senate SBIR bills. The new part reads:

" As Congress crafts legislative packages to stimulate the economy and create jobs, American small businesses should be first and foremost on our minds. SBIR Reauthorizations passed the House and the Senate in 2009, but have yet to be reconciled and signed into law (H.R. 2965 and S.1233.) A compromise of these two bills to reauthorize SBIR would be an ideal job-creating addition to a jobs package."

Canada has an image problem. It’s too good. The country is too beautiful, the people too polite and friendly, the society too cohesive, the institutions too effective. It’s a nice problem to have!

I witnessed this as a guest of the Canadian government, when I presented them with my suggested ‘postcard’ for Canada — a lovely vista of snow capped mountains, with the catchy slogan, “May the moose be with you.” It all went down well in the commercial cities of Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, but boy did I upset them in the federal capital, Ottawa. The civil servants there told me: “We’re trying to get away from the stereotypes of Moose, Mounties and Mountains. We want them to know that Canada is edgy, sophisticated, economically diverse, etc.”

I replied: “You know, people think Aussies are kangaroos, koalas and beaches but it’s good to have a brand. Austria has to give out t-shirts saying ‘No we don’t have kangaroos, just to differentiate themselves from Australia’.”

Furthermore, Brand Canada is pretty successful. According to the global expert on country brands, Simon Anholt, Canada regularly is top of the charts and often pips Australia on a number of scores. And as Anholt points out, a minority of the world’s population will never get to see Canada, or Australia, but when a country hosts the Olympics, everyone with a TV set will be thinking about the host country. So like it not, everyone will be thinking and talking about Canada right now, as Vancouver hosts the Winter Olympics, just like Australia was ‘on display’ during the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

The dragons were sitting in an elegant den at the Royal Society in London, Britain’s national academy of sciences. Overlooked by portraits of great 18th-century scientists, the judges heard four powerful pitches for science-based businesses.

These included an image analysis system to assess the facial mobility of people who are suffering from paralysing diseases or have had surgery on the face; a “text mining” tool to extract chemical information from the world’s scientific literature; an educational venture, called Big Bang in a Box, to sell images of high-energy particle collisions at Cern’s new atom smasher; and a lightweight material stronger than steel, for use in body armour and the aerospace industry.

The Dragons’ Den competition – modelled on the popular venture capitalist television format – was the climax of a Business of Science programme put on by Imperial College Business School for the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows. These are some of Europe’s brightest scientists, typically in their 30s, who are funded for five years to work in a UK university.

Chicago-based Web site Groupon launched in 2008, and already an entire industry of imitators has sprung up around the world.

Click here to check out 10 sites offering deals with group coupons >

Groupon partners with restaurants and service providers to offer a major coupon in each city it covers every day, with a catch: The offer is only valid if some minimum number of people sign up for it. This ensures merchants that any deal they offer will generate a high volume of sales, and creates an incentive for consumers to provide free marketing, spreading the word about a deal on social networks to make sure enough people sign up to trigger it. As a result, merchants can offer better deals than they might otherwise.

Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures is trying to create a capital market for patents, inventions and intellectual property, one that would use the venture capital and private equity markets as a model. Is Myhrvold's brave new world of investment firms trading the rights to a better mousetrap feasible, or even ethical?

Intellectual Ventures -- most recently seen unveiling a mosquito death ray at the TED conference -- already owns more than 30,000 patents. Its eclectic approach matches the diverse interests of its founder, whom the New York Times called "the ultimate polymath":

"He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton and did postdoctorate research on quantum field theory under Stephen Hawking, before founding a start-up that Microsoft acquired.

"He is an accomplished French chef, who has also won a national barbecue contest in Tennessee. He is an avid wildlife photographer, and he has dabbled in paleontology, working on research projects digging for dinosaur remains in the Rockies."

In addition to offering academic programs to students, these colleges have recognized the importance of serving the needs of innovative, entrepreneurial and growing businesses in their area. Such companies are the economic backbones of the regions these colleges serve — and they are the creators of jobs their alumni will need upon graduation — at least, the graduates who don’t start their own companies immediately. Helping these companies succeed is important to these colleges’ success, as well.

Across the U.S. — indeed, around the world — universities are responding to a wave of students who want careers as entrepreneurs and small business owners. Over 110 university programs focused on such entrepreneurship, small business and family business education and training are now featured in the SmallBusiness.com University Entrepreneurship Programs Hub. Each entry features an overview of the program, along with contact information.

American colleges and universities are also homes to nearly 1,000 Small Business Development Centers (almost 850 are featured on the SmallBusiness.com SBDC Hub).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Since 1965, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) has played a pivotal role in catalyzing economic growth and addressing sudden and severe economic dislocations in distressed communities. In the current budget proposal, EDA seeks to build upon its already successful Regional Innovation Clusters approach to economic development to directly address the needs of auto and manufacturing dependent communities as they transition to the 21st century global economy.

EDA's existing focus on Regional Innovation Clusters will be expanded and refined to address the needs of those urban and rural communities suffering from sudden and severe economic dislocation due to the ongoing economic transformation affecting America's service, farming, natural resource-based, and manufacturing industries. EDA's approach will leverage its long experience employing the Regional Innovation Cluster development technique and integrate its planning, research, technical assistance, and infrastructure construction programs to catalyze the renewal and transformation of our economy in the context of increasing globalization.

As a catalyst for our nation's economic development, EDA leads the Federal economic development agenda by promoting globally competitive regions with its planning, technical assistance, and implementation programs that foster innovation, technology transfer and commercialization, and entrepreneurial activity, while innovating government itself to address changing economic conditions proactively.

Sustainable innovation, the endless effort to find a better way, cannot be achieved by robotically lining up best practices and imitating them. The real catalyzing agent for renewable innovation is the ground from which these best practices spring - the confluence of purpose, people, and processes better known as culture.

From where will the next wave of groundbreaking innovation come?

Not from organizations mechanically mimicking each other's best practices, but from organizations with the authentic commitment to take their stand on ground that has been cultivated for breakthrough.

If you check the contents of the most popular books on innovation, the same topics show up again and again: strategy, systems, process, leadership, customer focus, risk, speed to market, prototyping, metrics, mass collaboration, market intelligence, technology, and creative thinking.

It’s no secret I believe bloggers should be free to earn a living at their craft…

Which is why it bugs me when someone questions my right to mix a relatively miniscule volume of features or content with a blended commercial intent into what I [Jonathan Fields] do here.

Warning: Rant ahead!

I’ve said it in my recent posts on the NY Times putting up a paywall, bloggers getting paid for their content, my take on the errant ways of the free brigade and plenty of other posts. My friend, Dave Navarro has killer post up called, When Free Gets Ugly, on the topic.

We’re not here out of the kindness of our hearts.

Yes, we love to create valuable content and conversations. Most of us come alive through the opportunity to make an impact. But, it also takes a substantial amount of time, energy and passion.

New Web site will close gap between energy innovations and increasing consumer demand

(WASHINGTON) March 1, 2010 – With more than $80 billion already invested in U.S. clean energy development and another $150 billion being proposed, this emerging industry has been tagged as essential to jump-start the economy and create new jobs. Yet significant barriers plague this highly regulated, complex sector that prevent it from making the kind of progress that such high expectations demand.

Knowing that entrepreneurs can accelerate the clean energy revolution if given access to the right networks, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today launched the Energy Innovation Network (www.energyinnovationnetwork.org) at the Energy Innovation Summit co-hosted by the Kauffman Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy. The Energy Innovation Network will provide links to technologies, entrepreneurs, finance, buyers and policymakers to make the pathway for energy entrepreneurs more transparent.

"Few industries have had to overcome the high capital requirements, regulatory hurdles and variety of stakeholders that clean energy is facing," said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of Advancing Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. "While there may be an energy innovation imperative, there is no energy innovation mechanism. The Energy Innovation Network will help close the gap between demand and delivery."

When Dan Kincaid became one of Cincinnati’s newest angels in September, he promised to invest at least $250,000 in local startups within three years. Five months later, he’s more worried about exceeding that total than simply meeting it.

“There are a lot of interesting things going on in Cincinnati right now,” said Kincaid, a former health-insurance executive who sold his pharmacy management company in 2005, leaving him with time and money to invest.

Kincaid was one of five new investors to join Queen City Angels in 2009. The nine-year-old group of accredited investors now has 31 members, with growing expertise in the field of life sciences.

“With the bench strength we have now, we have a lot more confidence in our ability to adequately assess life-science deals and bring the proper expertise to the company if we make an investment,” said Tony Shipley, QCA chairman.

YouTube's new design will make the playlist feature part of the standard YouTube experience the Google (GOOG) video-sharing site announced today.

YouTube already has playlists, in which one video automatically begins when the last one ends. This will now be the standard throughout YouTube.

When a user navigates to a video via search, further search results will automatically be queued up to play next. Users will also be able to add videos to their queue.

There's been a lot written lately about the NYC startup scene. It's exploding. It's hot. Etc. And all that is true.

But as a first-time founder trying to raise capital and achieve product-market fit, the question for me is not "Is NYC hot?" or even "Is NYC becoming a better startup hub?" so much as it is "Is NYC the best place to locate my startup?" And on that question, I'm not sure the answer is yes.

See, here's the thing: As far as I can tell, startups face two main environmental challenges:

1) Raising Capital
2) Finding Talent

Here's how NYC scores on this...

Raising Capital

Good: Folks like Chris Dixon, Betaworks and Fred Wilson are here. Smart, visionary investors. 
Bad: Folks like Chris Dixon, Betaworks, and Fred Wilson are a TINY fraction of the market. 

In reality, the capital markets in NYC are flooded with Wall Streeters turned venture capitalists. These are people who know how to analyze and pick in assets, not people who know how to build companies. These are people who do dumb shit like ask about pricing for a premium version of a genuinely novel product (in a category with no existing market) that hasn't even launched yet...in the first meeting. #VCFAIL (Ok, there's some exceptions, but not tons...)

TASHKENT, Mar 01, 2010 (AsiaPulse via COMTEX) --

Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov on Friday signed into creation the Association of Enterprises of Small Business and Private Entrepreneurship.

The association is part of a push to develop better antimonopoly regulations and competition.

The new association will assist in the modernization and technological re-equipment of small businesses and entrepreneurship entities.

The next task is organizing marketing research, giving assistance to small enterprises in mastering how to use new production methods to make new types of products competitive in the local and foreign markets, and product promotion in world and regional markets.

Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics called for the redesign of hot dogs. "If you were to take the best engineers in the world and asked them to design a perfect plug for a child's airway, you couldn't do better than a hot dog," said Dr. Gary Smith, former chairman of the AAP's Committee on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. "When it's wedged in tightly, that child is going to die." Never ones to resist a challenge, or the chance to play with our food, we carved out a little time to explore the redesign of the hot dog.

We began by thinking outside the bun. What other ways could we come up with for hot dog delivery? Looking for inspirations from food innovations like GoGurt and Push Pops, we briefly toyed with the idea of a semi-solid hot-dog paste...a Push-Pup, if you will, not unlike the Sushi Popper. But frankly, the idea of a hot dog in a non-Newtonian form, was more than a little gag-inducing.

we ate all the fruit snacks 10/365For enhancing a sense of play, we flirted with the idea of Lego-inspired shapes, like the fruit snacks at right. But, given the reason behind the call for redesign, it seemed a bad idea to train kids to eat things shaped like toys.

Despite its importance to Europe, there is a feeling that the pharma industry is not as innovative as it once was and has lost ground to foreign rivals. This shift has been exacerbated by ambivalent attitudes from regional governments towards the industry; on the one hand, governments value the industry's economic contribution and its role in providing medicines, but they are also preoccupied with the rising cost of healthcare. As a result, pharma companies are under pressure to reduce their product prices.

European companies believe that government cost containment measures have damaged the region's competitiveness, and point to R&D investment figures as evidence. In 1990, pharmaceutical R&D investment in the US was less than in Europe; however, R&D investment in Europe now is only approximately 70% of the US figure.1 Between 1990 and 2008, R&D investment in the US grew by 5.6 times compared with 3.5 times in Europe.1 To compound the situation, Europe also faces competition from further afield because of the rapid growth in the research environment in emerging economies, such as China and India. The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry Associations (EFPIA) has expressed its concern that this trend has led to the closure of European R&D sites.

Government policies alone, however, cannot be blamed for the difficult R&D conditions. Because of the inherent risks of drug development, many companies have adopted a conservative attitude to using new technologies that may add extra risk to the process, but the steady decline in new drug output suggests that this cautious approach is undermining innovation. However, although there is recognition that bottlenecks exist in the current R&D process, few solutions have been found to ease them.

Videos like this one remind me that I live in a very tiny corner of the universe.

Only 8% of the people interviewed (out of a sample of over 50) correctly defined a browser. It also shows how effective Google has been in their approach to branding, especially given that they just aired their first TV commercial a few weeks ago.