With a flurry of new drug applications filed or approved recently, some promising Boston area companies have been moving from research to commercialization and emerging as more formidable players on the local biotechnology scene.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., the fast-growing Cambridge company, is leading the way. In May it won Food and Drug Administration approval to market a new tablet to treat hepatitis C. And last week the company, which is building a new headquarters on the South Boston Waterfront, filed an application with the FDA for a cystic fibrosis drug.

There’s a blog post over on BNET that makes my blood boil on so many levels that it’s tough to know how to respond, so I’ll just dive right in. In the post, entitled, Why GenY Entrepreneurship Will Be a Disaster, blogger Steve Tobak gives us ten reasons why “Generation Y's predilection for entrepreneurship will be bad for their careers, bad for corporate America, and bad for the nation.” Wow. While I won't address all ten of his specious arguments, here are the ones that make me particularly apoplectic:

“The question of necessity versus choice is actually an important one. If it’s necessity - bad economy, no capital, no jobs - then where’s all the capital going to come from to fund all these start-ups? And who’s got the cash to buy all the new products and services all these new entrepreneurs will be creating?”

Among the world’s major advanced countries, the United States remains a demographic outlier, with a comparatively youthful and growing population. This provides an unusual opportunity for America’s resurgence over the next several decades, as population growth elsewhere slows dramatically, and even declines dramatically, in a host of important countries.

This demographic vitality, however, can only work if there is substantive increase in the economic growth rate and particularly in employment. A growing population brings new entrants into the labor force at a rapid rate. Historically, a relatively positive relationship between workforce entrants and dependents, both old and young, has generated waves of growth across the past several decades. This is widely known as “the demographic dividend.”

Approximately 80% of small businesses fail within the first year. How many of the people you know who have started a business have truly succeeded? How many of them put on a happy face yet are still at every networking meeting looking for business?

I spent 15 years working in corporate America for startups to fortune 500 organizations. Although I enjoyed it for many years, as the economy began to tumble it became less fulfilling. I survived 13 layoffs at one company alone, yet it came at a cost of life balance.  I started to lose the passion for marketing and business. I was losing myself and the goals and dreams that once inspired me.

In soccer (or football outside the U.S.), the term talisman is given to the one player whose genius can turn a game around. With him, his team wins—without him, his team falters.

Over the past 25 years, Steve Jobs clashed with Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Michael Dell, but during the past decade, he led Apple’s resurgence with the additions of the iPod, iPhone and iPad, driving Apple to become the world’s most valuable company.

I know why I’m not a billionaire. Other than having the consistent self-sabotaging quality of destroying money in massive bonfires every time I sell a company, I also have a severe psychosocial disorder which makes me a horrible connector of people. Connecting people who can benefit each other is the most useful skill you can have on the entrepreneurial ladder of skills. When you help others make money by connecting them together, the world forces itself into the Möbius strip of success that brings the money right back to you times ten. Some billionaires are great at it. If I write Mark Cuban an email he responds in two seconds even though he doesn’t even know me. He’s a “Super Connector”. I know quite a few talented super connectors and they will be very successful as they grow into future Mark Cubans.(See, "How I Helped Mark Cuban Make a Billion Dollars and 5 Other Things I learned from him".)

NYC's Mayor Mike Bloomberg visited TechStars NYC on Demo Day this week. He gave a funny and inspiring talk about being an entrepreneur. This is the Mike Bloomberg the NYC tech community needs. He's the most successful tech entrepreneur in NYC and he's also our mayor. It made me so happy to see him do that. He talked about installing 4800 baud modems in closets in Chicago to set up Bloomberg's wide area network before there was a commercial internet and he talked about the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur.

When oil was still spewing uncontrollably from the Deepwater Horizon well last summer, philanthropist Wendy Schmidt and the X Prize Foundation issued a $1.4 million challenge calling for better technologies to clean up oil spills. Aside from Schmidt’s concern for the environment, the need for innovation in this arena was dire.

In 1989, teams cleaning up the oil from the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska recovered less than 15 percent of the total. Teams cleaning up oil from the Deep Water Horizon spill were not doing much better.

The first five companies selected to participate in the Hampton Roads’ Economic Gardening Network Technical Assistance Pilot Program are ready to get to work.

Economic Gardening is part of the “grow-your-own” economic development cluster strategy for Innovate!Hampton Roads™, a program of the Hampton Roads Partnership and a vital component of the first region-wide Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, Vision Hampton Roads. A product of strategic inputs from hundreds of community leaders and citizens, this is the region’s roadmap to help navigate its course to the future – “Plan B” as it’s been referenced in many recent newspaper columns and editorials. Vision Hampton Roads, adopted by the region’s municipalities on February 19, 2010, received approval by the U.S. Economic Development Administration on November 23, 2010. The first annual report, submitted September 30, 2011, received immediate approval. Innovate!HamptonRoads™ is about connecting entrepreneurs, ideas and investment. The goals of Innovate!HamptonRoads™ are to stimulate high growth-potential new business formation, accelerate the growth of existing tech businesses and ignite the commercialization of research innovation. More InnovateHamptonRoads.com.

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the first results of its new funding initiative, the Proof of Concept.  These 'top up' grants, worth up to €150,000 each, are designed to help ERC-funded blue sky research maximise value. In total, 30 top researchers, already holding ERC grants across Europe, will be given this additional support to bridge the gap between their research and the earliest stage of a marketable innovation. The funding can cover activities related to for instance intellectual property rights, technical validation, market research or investigation of commercial and business opportunities.

The projects, selected through peer review evaluation, treat topics ranging from health to telecommunication: research on needle-free injections of vaccines, safer mobile communications, responses to consumers' concerns on health and food safety, as well as devices controlling e.g. wheel chairs manoeuvred  with the nose simply by sniffing. With a very limited part of the whole ERC budget, the initiative could unleash considerable innovation potential.

Experts participating in a conference hosted by The Brookings Institution Wednesday suggested, among other things, that Congress do more to keep up with the fast pace of innovation in technology.

Darrell West, Vice President and Director of Governonace Studies at the think tank based in Washington, D.C. and author of a similarly titled paper guided three of the nation’s leading high-tech and innovation experts through a discussion centered around the role of technology in job creation and economic growth. The conference, titled “Technology and the Innovation Economy: How to Harness New Engines for Growth,” also focused on specific advances that could help jump-start America’s economy both within and outside the technology sector.

Guests included Chief Technology Officer of Intel and the Director of Intel Labs Justin Rattner, Senior Innovation Advisor to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Eric Nakajima and Senior Vice President of Federal Government Affairs at TechAmerica Kevin Richards.

The collection, analysis and use of consumer data is and will continue to both be valuable and yet threatening to privacy and individual preferences.  Think about the implications already being revealed.  How and what you communicate and associate with reflects your character, affinities and values. All of the related data is for the world to see and organizations to use both for you and against you. Data drives everything we know and don’t yet know. Data also drives the economic value of internet offerings. Every time we type an email, dial a number, add a tweet, land on a page or publish content we are adding data to the “network” and that data carries meaning and meaningful indicators of behavior.

Data is exploding faster than most imagine and with explosive growth organizations, people and machines are learning more about human behavior and people’s preferences faster than ever before.

The more people I talk to and the more research I do a consistent theme stands out. People don’t resist change they resist being changed. In the social networking space most users want improvements while operators resist the very improvements users want. Instead operators throw out features to copy competitors or features they dreamed up with little customer feedback.

When I think about all the social networking platforms out there several issues show up as “the blinding flash of the obvious” in terms of what should change for me to save time and be more productive.

On September 16, President Obama announced that his Administration will develop a National Bioeconomy Blueprint detailing Administration-wide steps to harness biological research innovations to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment. Biological research underpins the foundation of a significant portion of the Nation’s economy. By better leveraging America’s national investments in biological research and development, the Administration aims to stimulate the growth of high-wage, high-skill jobs while improving the lives of all Americans. OSTP has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to solicit input from all interested parties on how best to develop the National Bioeconomy Blueprint.

If you thought random doodling or scribbling that you casually indulge in is just another pastime, think again. Body language experts and image enhancers believe that the doodle you scribble gives away subtle hints about your personality. There may also be a reason why you doodle a particular object frequently, say flowers or butterflies. Image enhancer Rita Gangwani explains, “Doodling is actually a way of ordering information inside the brain that allows the unconscious to render in symbolic expression. Symbols have universal as well as personal meaning.

When one is stuck for an answer to a problem or looking for creative innovation, doodles will unleash the hidden symbolic powers of the unconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is attempting to contact usall the time and it comes to surface in the form of a doodle.”

A strategic technology is defined as a technology that can have a significant impact on a company. It may be an existing technology that has matured or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers a strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.

Here are 10 top strategic technologies you need to keep your eye on:

Media Tablets. Users can choose between various form factors when it comes to mobile computing. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with two to four intelligent clients through 2015. IT leaders need a managed diversity programme to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace. Organisations will have to come up with two mobile strategies — one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario. On the B2E front, IT must consider social goals, business goals, financial goals, and risk management goals. On the B2C front, which includes business to business (B2B) activities to support consumers, IT needs to address a number of additional issues such as surfacing and managing APIs to access enterprise information and systems, integration with third-party applications, integration with various partners for capabilities such as search and social networking, and delivery through app stores.

Years ago, there used to something called “the corporate ladder.” Now, it wasn’t a physical ladder, but it was real. As a matter of fact, you may have climbed it once or twice yourself. . .

Back in the “Beaver Cleaver” days, if you wanted to be a white collar worker, you would go to a decent college and study hard. During your summers off, you would grab an internship with one of the local corporations you were interested in working for. Hopefully, you’d impress them enough to warrant a formal job offer after you graduated.

A recent safari in the Serengeti was supposed to get my mind off of work. I figured that being thousands of miles away from the office, with no connectivity or even a phone, I would be able to completely detach myself from any thoughts relating to business.

Instead, as I was watching wildebeests, lion, elephants and zebras in their natural habitat, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much of their behavior reflects the competitive nature of an entrepreneurial business.

This year’s Summit was organized for the third time in partnership with the EU Presidency, the European Commission and the European Parliament. The Warsaw event was a ‘Ministerial Conference’ organized by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and its results will be presented at the Commission ‘Innovation Convention’ on 6 December (09:00 – 10:30) in Brussels.

With more than 100 speakers and 700 participants in both Warsaw and Brussels, the Summit conferences provided a unique opportunity to present and debate the key topics along the innovation value chain from education to internationalization of companies. The Warsaw event primarily focused on the role of the member states and regions as the drivers of the Innovation Union. The focus of the Brussels event was on the need for talent, the role of business and transatlantic innovation cooperation. The summit ended with a fresh discussion on the future of innovation in Europe and lunch debates on wireless communications and EU-Russia innovation cooperation.

Redefining Innovation

Shridan Tatsuno, Dreamscape Global

Eunika Mercier-Laurent does a yeoman job of reviewing innovation strategies and types of innovation around the world, which helps newcomers and experts alike to place their ideas of innovation into a broader context. As a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and a Japan watcher, I find her framework useful for thinking about new ways to innovate since it's easy to get lost in the details when launching new ventures.  In particular, the idea of co-innovating with clients is particularly useful in order to overcome the tradition bias of technology-, product- and service-push strategies.  Among venture capitalists (VCs) and angel investors, technology alone is insufficient since over 80% of VC-funded startups fail.

To raise funding and survive, entrepreneurs must validate their products, services and business models with customers before refining and marketing them.  

Recently, the concept of lean startups has become popular, but it too may be a fad reflecting the bias toward "fast-flip" (quick acquisition) strategies and social media startups.  Eunika's diagram of the Silicon Valley startup process is useful for understanding our thinking.