The newer model for starting businesses relies on hypothesis, experiment and testing in the marketplace, from the day a company is founded. That is a sharp break with the traditional approach of drawing up a business plan, setting financial targets, building a finished product and then rolling out the business and hoping to succeed. It was time-consuming and costly. The preferred formula today is often called the “lean start-up.” Its foremost proponents include Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur and author who coined the term and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School, and Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford.  [Steve Lohr, New York Times, Dec 6]

Arguably, the defining economic event of the 20th century was the rise of the American middle class.  Fortunes were made by entrepreneurs who built companies to serve this American middle class.  Car companies, energy companies, electronics companies, pharmaceutical companies, financial services companies…  Indeed, much of the Fortune 500 grew up by serving America’s growing middle class.  Today, most American entrepreneurs continue to be focused on building businesses that are fundamentally about serving the American middle class ... except for one thing: the defining economic event of the 21st century is likely to be the rise of the global middle class.  ....   I’d bet on entrepreneurs in emerging markets, the folks who deeply understand the growing global middle class — because they’re a part of it.  [Josh Green, venturebeat.com, Nov 6]  But since global middel class doesn't vote in America, our politicians don't try to understand them.

The Internet's impact on global growth is rising rapidly. The Internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years among the developed countries MGI studied, a sharp acceleration from the 10 percent contribution over 15 years. Most of the economic value created by the Internet falls outside of the technology sector, with 75 percent of the benefits captured by companies in more traditional industries. The Internet is also a catalyst for job creation. Among 4,800 small and medium sized enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each lost to technology related efficiencies. [McKinsey report, May 11]

For the third consecutive year, Switzerland ranked first in the forum’s annual competitiveness survey, which assesses countries based on 12 categories including innovation, infrastructure and the macroeconomic environment.The United States, which topped the list in 2008, continued its decline, also for the third year in a row, falling one place to fifth. The weaker performance was attributed to economic vulnerabilities as well as “some aspects of the United States’ institutional environment,” notably low public trust in politicians and concerns about government inefficiency.  [Matthew Saltmarsh, New York Times, Sep 8]

Materials scientist, applied physicist, and entrepreneur John Rogers, 43, of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2011. The award is given to a scientist whose inventions offer innovative solutions to real-world problems.Rogers's inventions tend to be hybrids that blend biology, electronics, nanomaterials, and optics. They include a photovoltaic technology that uses tiny ball lenses to focus sunlight onto solar cells. Rogers and colleagues are developing this technology, which produces a highly efficient conversion of sunlight to electrical energy, through Semprius, a company they launched in 2006.Rogers launched another company, mc10 (Waltham, MA; one SBIR) , in 2008 to commercialize his designs for “stretchable electronics,” silicon-and-rubber medical devices that can curve and twist to map the electrical properties of the heart or the folds of the human brain.

[UMd professor] John Haltiwanger thinks he may have discovered one reason why the private sector is not creating more jobs this far into the so-called recovery, ... The U.S. economy has become less dynamic and entrepreneurial. .... In job creation, it turns out, it is not size that matters but the age of the firm. Small businesses don’t create all the new jobs — young ones do. ... The culprit, Haltiwanger suspects, has been the measurable slowdown in business startups and the unusually slow job growth among those all-important young and fast-growing firms.  [Steve Pearlstein, Washington Post, Jun 1] Serious business economists consistently show that most small biz pleading is political junk food, tastes good to the politicians and can be supplied cheaply in endless quantities, and SBIR is right in there with its own brand of economic nonsense to beg government subsidy of uncompetitive businesses. And the more the federal agencies use SBIR for their internal R&D, the less impact SBIR will have on the entrepreneurial economy.

six startups that are developing new technology tools for the financial services industry started a 12-week program of mentorship, networking, and seed funding from New York City Investment Fund, a 15-year-old fund founded by Henry Kravis  [Arlene Weintraub, xconomy.com/new-york, May

"If we didn't import from China, we'd import from somewhere else,... Chinese imports help increase the choices for Americans and keep inflation down. ...  It is difficult to make a comprehensive plan. It is even more difficult to implement the plan. I believe that the challenge before China is one of evolution, evolving to an economy where there is more innovation, higher value added products, less reliance on exports, more on domestic consumption." [Henry Paulson, speaking in China, reported by China Watch, an advertising supplement]

As soon as we solve one problem, another one appears. So let's try to keep this one going as long as possible. [cartoon, Wall Street Journal, May 4] So also with government R&D contracting, never finish solving the problem.

the ideal of clean, abundant electricity and transportation fuel holds enormous promise for American consumers, businesses, workers and our environment. On the other hand, it's not hard to find people who are opposed to subsidies on principle. For many of us, subsidies represent a corruption of the free market that we cherish. [Josh Prueher, Wall Street Journal, May 4] A bad subsidy is one that you don't get a piece of.

In technology pursuing technology failure, the French have found the remains of the deeply drowned Rio-Paris flight of June 2009.  The deep submersibles found and recovered the memory unit of the flight data recorder system.  If they can read that data they can know what went wrong with the sophisticated flight control system. The curious can follow the search at http://www.bea.aero/en/index.php

Silicon Valley chief executives continue to be upbeat on the economy but decidedly gloomy about the state of the state, ... including state budget gridlock and public employee pension costs. [Pete Carey, San Jose Mercury News, Apr 22] The CEOs dream of all the usual solutions for political conflict without realizing that where power is concerned, any solution will be manipulated to produce gridlock anyway. Today's problems were yesterday's solutions, and vice versa.

America has proved to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of “failing forward” as a common tech-industry phrase puts it: in Germany bankruptcy can end your business career whereas in Silicon Valley it is almost a badge of honour.  ... Businesses cannot invent the future—their own future—without taking risks. [The Economist, Apr 16]

Forget today’s green technologies like electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells and smart grids, in other words. None meets what Mr Khosla calls the “Chindia price”—the price at which people in China and India will buy them without a subsidy. “Everything’s a toy until it reaches that point,” he says.  Mr Khosla has a different plan to save the planet. He is investing over $1 billion of his clients’ money in “black swans”—ideas with the potential for sudden jumps in technology that promise huge environmental benefits, easy scalability and rapid payback. The catch? Mr Khosla expects nine out of ten of his investments to fail.  [The Economist, Mar 12]  Could a federal agency ever bring itself to bet those kind of odds with Congress always looking for success statistics? One huge problem with SBIR is thinking of success rate instead of total return.

But the numbers coming from banks such as Wells Fargo, hurt by continued weak loan demand, contradict the buoyant market for corporate buying of tech products.  [David Callaway, MarketWatch]

Just-in-time or just-in-case.  As U.S. auto assembly lines grind to a halt for want of components that usually come from now-disabled factories in northeastern Japan, business strategists may be forced to rethink the way globalized companies do business. ...  Almost every manufacturer, from your local maker of wedding dresses to Boeing and Caterpillar, is a global company, because its production relies critically on parts or other inputs made or designed outside its home country. ... A shortage of freight cars, a dock strike, a factory closure due to lack of water, a riot that keeps a supplier’s employees from getting to work  [Mark Levinson, Foreign Affairs Newsletter, Apr 21]

Austin is the U.S. market that is most conducive to the creation and development of small businesses, according to the latest On Numbers rankings. Oklahoma City is second in the current standings, followed by Charleston, S.C., Charlotte and Seattle. ... The highest scores in our study went to areas that have prosperous economies, are expanding rapidly, and are densely packed with small businesses.  [Austin Business Journal, Apr 12]

Major biotechnology companies, long a staple of the Boston area’s economy, are finding it harder to remain independent. ...  driven by an unforgiving regulatory environment and the failure of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs.  [Robert Weisman, Boston Globe, Apr 13] Capitalism develops its own economic demand for innovations.

Cost of capital on the rise. The European Central Bank became the first monetary authority in a major developed economy to raise interest rates since the global financial crisis struck—a sign that the long period of easy credit is beginning to come to a close.  [Brian Blackstone and David Wessel, Wall Street Journal, Apr 8]

A pharmaceutical startup with one foot in the Triangle and another in China has raised $100 million in financing from investors, an astounding sum for a company just a few months old.  It helps that the new company, Ascletis (ineligible for SBIR) , was co-founded by Chinese real estate billionaire Jinxing Qi, who also is an investor in the business. .. Ascletis isn't the only pharmaceutical enterprise whose efforts span from the Triangle to China. The nonprofit Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, based in RTP, is working with Chinese businesses and a medical research park in China to develop and test new medicines in both countries. Ascletis is focusing on treatments for cancer and infectious diseases. The company has eight employees - two in the Triangle, five in China and Wu himself, who is shuttling between the two countries  [David Ranii, Raleigh News & Observer, Apr 7, 11]

Boston, eat your heart out. Google Inc. won't be building its state-of-the-art fiber-optic data network here, or anyplace else in Massachusetts. The giant Internet search company announced today that Kansas City, Kansas has captured the prize. [Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, Apr 1]

Renewable energy still hasn't outgrown criticisms that have dogged it for years: It remains too expensive to compete head-to-head with fossil fuels, and it is too dependent on government subsidies. Most renewable energy faces another major obstacle. Much of it remains intermittent—and technical advances that could make it a reliable, full-time power provider remain elusive. [Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal, Mar 31]  But for lovers of government subsidy programs, it's still a goldmine. More, they say, more and bigger SBIR (but not big enough to have a real impact for the best economic prospects. Just a steady flow of sub-critical handouts to mediocre companies.

Private investors in China are quickly moving to put money into China's growing life-sciences and medical industries as the country pushes to improve its health-care system.  In the past two years, China has moved 500 million people onto its basic health-care rolls, and in the next five years the country is expected to provide a more robust health program for more of its citizens, according to David Wang, a managing director at trans-Pacific venture-capital firm WI Harper Group. ...R&Dcenters also have shifted from the U.S. and Europe to India and China, said Yi Shi, the managing director of Lilly Asian Ventures, the venture-capital arm of drug company Eli Lilly & Co. [Wall Street Journal, Mar 31]

San Diego’s innovation economy continues to move mostly sideways, with venture capital investments plunging and employment improving slightly among high technology and life sciences startups, according to a report today from Connect, the nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship. [Bruce Bigelow, xconomy.com, Mar 29, 11]

Officials at North Carolina's first ethanol plant say they are halting production temporarily in hopes that high corn prices will drop.  The Fayetteville Observer reported Friday that Clean Burn Fuels in Hoke County will place an undetermined number of its 40 workers on furlough for two to three months until production resumes. Company President Jack Carlisle said corn prices have doubled in the past few months largely because of increased demands from developing countries. Meanwhile, ethanol prices have risen only a quarter of that amount. [AP, Mar 12, 11]

What of the nine decades to come? Here, speculation begins. Telekinesis will be commonplace, with appliances controlled by brain scanners; microscopic sensors will continuously monitor cells for signs of danger, extending human life span; internet-enabled contact lenses will tag anything and anyone in sight, enabling omniscience on demand. In short, by the dawn of the 22nd century man shall, in the eyes of his early 21st-century forebears, wield godlike powers. Hyperbole aside, such claims are not that far-fetched. After all, technologies seen as humdrum today, like cars, aircraft, computers and mobile phones, might have inspired similarly divine awe a century or so ago.  [The Economist. Mar 12]

Someday carbon cars.  the use of carbon fibre is turning into a critical area of competitive advantage for carmakers. Although it is much lighter than metal for parts,  The difficulty is that carbon fibre can be an expensive and labour-intensive material to work with.  Customers for high-performance products like aircraft wings, racing cars and tough mountain bikes [and anything military] are prepared to pay the extra cost for added performance. But to take these performance gains to broader markets producers need to find ways to make carbon fibre more suitable for high-volume production. ... BMW has been extremely impressed with the potential of carbon fibre, so far. The company has been working with SGL on a type of injection-moulding process that can produce parts in minutes, and be handled mainly by robots.  [The Economist, Mar 5]  Many an BMDO (MDA) SBIR dollar once went into carbon-carbon and metal-carbon composites. 

The first new drug to treat lupus in more than half a century won [FDA] approval ... The drug, Benlysta, is also the first product approved for its developer, Human Genome Sciences  (no SBIR), which has accumulated losses of more than $2 billion since its founding in 1992. GlaxoSmithKline will help market the drug. [Andrew Pollack, New York Times, Mar 9, 11]

America is the most enterprising big economy.  ...  On the list of all countries great and small, Denmark comes top and America slips to third. Four of the five Nordic countries are in the top ten. This suggests that it is possible to combine crackling enterprise with a big welfare state. [Says the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor] focuses on the outcome—business creation—rather than the policies that foster it   [The Economist, Feb 26]

"If you have an idea, it's really easy to make stuff now."  Alibaba.com, a Chinese e-commerce company ;that finds factories]... which has about 60 engineers in its Santa Clara, Calif., office, has identified the U.S. as its top investment priority.  [Joseph Galante, Bloomberg News, Mar 6]

Seeking fame?  The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress [Natalie Portman] in a leading role. .... While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star.  ... the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.  ...  You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV.    [Natalie Angier, New York Times, Mar 1]

"Charlie and I believe that those entrusted with handling the funds of others should establish performance goals at the onset of their stewardship. Lacking such standards, managements are tempted to shoot the arrow of performance and then paint the bull’s-eye around wherever it lands." -- Warren E. Buffett, chairman of the board, in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual shareholder letter. [Industry Week]

Today MVP RV (Riverside, CA) is on the verge of hiring 1,200 workers and boosting production by some 30,000 motor homes to 40,000 this year. The difference is a $310 million investment from a Chinese entrepreneur who sees Asia as an untapped market for American-made RVs.  ....  It isn't clear how much of the Chinese investment funds go to small businesses. Many of the deals with small businesses are under $10 million and involve Chinese investors looking for early-stage U.S. partners as an entree into the U.S. market and for exporting goods and services back to China,, says Siva Yam, president of the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce.  Recent deals have involved clean-energy, automotive, aerospace, information-technology and health-care industries, he says.  [Angus Loten, Wall Street Journal, Mar 1]

CSR, a British chip maker, agreed on Monday to buy the Zoran Corporation (no SBIR), a maker of technology for digital photography and video, for about $679 million in stock.  The deal is an effort by CSR to keep pace in the burgeoning market for smartphones with advanced cameras that can upload photos and video to various social media.  [M de le Merced, New York Times, Feb 22, 11] Even the British are coming.

Medtronic, the world's largest medical device maker, said today it will lay off up to 2,000 workers as part of a restructuring effort to make up for anemic sales of its implants.  [Matthew Perrone, AP, Feb 22]

Intel is investing about $26 million in six mobile technology startups ... CloudMade (Menlo Park, CA) startup that provides tools to developers of location-based applications.  ...  InVisage Technologies (Menlo Park, CA) startup that is developing a custom semiconductor material, replacing silicon, for image sensors ... Beijing-based Borqs, New York-based Kaltura, Toronto-based SecureKey Technologies and Reading, England-based VisionOSS Solutions [Frank Russell, San Jose Mercury News, Feb 14]

there are literally thousands of high-paid job openings in San Diego County just waiting for the applicants with the right skills, according to the leaders of the local high-tech community. But they say that finding those applicants can be a challenge, partly because of the area’s high cost of living and the lingering perception that San Diego’s more of a beach town than a Silicon Valley South.  [Dean Calbreath, signonsandiego.com, Feb 12]

Small outsourcing.  technology makes it easy for even a tiny business to outsource projects to Pakistan, China and other developing nations. These tend to be “knowledge-based” jobs, from designing a simple website to doing financial research, in which the final work product can be delivered electronically. ...  By 2015, U.S, companies will move 3.3 million service jobs to offshore locations, accounting for some $136 billion in wages  [Tanya Mannes, signonsandiego.com, Feb 13]

Seeking comfort rather than wealth. that low-hanging fruit is exhausted, Cowen continues, and since 1974, the United States has experienced slower growth, slower increases in median income, slower job creation, slower productivity gains, slower life-expectancy improvements and slower rates of technological change. ....   For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.  [David Brooks commenting on Tyler Cowen's idea that the US has reached a tech plateau, New York Times, Feb 15]

Frugal innovation.  Weigao’s labs are a steaming cauldron of creativity. Medtronic, a giant American maker of medical devices, entered a joint venture with the Chinese firm two years ago. Its designers and engineers work side by side with local talent, and have already launched half a dozen inexpensive, novel products that Medtronic would not have made on its own.  [The Economist, Jan 22]  While SBIR competitors clamor for more government money per award to maintain a "proper" work place, Chinese competitors turn down the thermostats and turn out the market-clearing innovations. The US firms can only insist on high awards because the awards themselves are more political than economic and therefore have no market competition.

The nonprofit group NC IDEA is seeking to hand out a new round of grants of up to $50,000 to startup technology companies. .....   has awarded $1.9 million to 52 companies across the state since 2006 ... for North Carolina-based companies and entrepreneurs [in] information technology, medical devices or material sciences ...  Go to www.ncidea.org for more information  [David Ranii, Raleigh News & Observer, Feb 11]

To prosper, get to a city.  Cities magnify people’s strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. If you want to compete in a global marketplace it really helps to be near a downtown. Companies that are near the geographic center of their industry are more productive. Year by year, workers in cities see their wages grow faster than workers outside of cities because their skills grow faster. Inventors disproportionately cite ideas from others who live physically close to them.  [David Brooks, New York Times, Fe8]

Pfizer toasts Sandwich. Pharma giant Pfizer will close its 2400-job research center where Viagra was invented in Sandwich, England. Productivity, efficiency, and beggar-thy-neighbor come to mind as grounds for closing such foreign operations to satisfy home politicians. [The Times, Feb 3]

Pfizer said it will significantly cut research spending and shift billions of dollars to buying back stock [Wall Street Journal, Feb 2]

Turn about as fair play. an "intricate web" of new rules "considered by many international technology companies to be a blueprint for technology theft on a scale the world has never seen before."  The 44-page report, "China's Drive for 'Indigenous Innovation': A Web of Industrial Policies" (  http://www.uschamber.com/reports/chinas-drive-indigenous-innovation-web-industrial-policies  ), maps the complex set of new initiatives that foreign companies face. ... [the Chinese ministries say]  "re-innovating" or "assimilating" foreign technology, that's no different from what Japan and Western countries did when they industrialized&  [Jonathan Bussey, Wall Street Journal, Feb 2]

Think global.  Like their larger counterparts, [small American businesses] are drawn by new markets that are often growing much faster than those at home. Their forays abroad are made possible by technologies like file sharing and video conferencing, which allow managers to communicate easily across continents. Though these technologies aren't new, their price has fallen sharply over the past decade. [Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal, Jan 27] Such thoughts are only for market-driven companies, not SBIR junkies who keep advocating for more SBIR from a government that doesn't care about profits and markets.

Massachusetts once again topped the State Tech and Science Index developed by the Milken Institute, ...  The index seeks to gauge a state’s research-and-development capabilities, and such measures as industrial, academic, and federal R&D funding, small business innovation research awards, and human capital capacity are factored into the rankings, The Milken Institute's top 10 list this year is: 1. Massachusetts  2. Maryland  3. Colorado  4. California  5. Utah  6. Washington 7. New Hampshire  8. Virginia 9. Connecticut 10. Delaware  [Boston Globe, Jan 26] Got an open mind about where to put your R&D company?  Look for good tech schools, educated people, established tech companies, and mobile labor pool. Oh, and don't focus on government handout programs that can be a trap that puts you on thankless road to the government's unstable objectives. And don't fret taxes; low tax states have lowball environments for high tech business.

The real answer to the China challenge, like the competition from Japan in the 1980s, must come from the United States, the industrial policy thinkers say. A mix of several ingredients will undoubtedly be sought: skillful government policy, smart private-sector strategies, national investment in research and development for long-term innovation, and improved performance of the American education system. In short, all the things the United States should be doing anyway, but with an added measure of urgency because of the global competition that China epitomizes — an economic Sputnik. [Steve Lohr, New York Times, Jan 22]  Skillful government and long-term innovation will make a tough challenge for our politicians whose horizon only extends to the next election and whose public utterings target domestic political consumption.

What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness? It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. ....  ultimately, we’re in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals.  [Paul Krugman, New York Times, Jan 24]  Buzzwords like "competitiveness" make good politics but sloppy economics. Besides, in a globalized world, the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before. Companies like GE and IBM improve their competitiveness by moving more operations overseas while the Chinese buy American companies. Ultimately, private sector jobs are in an international competition.

First can be lonely. Contrary to popular belief, being the first to market rarely pays off, a new research paper concludes.  Pioneering firms commonly die young because consumers aren't ready to embrace their business models, according to authors Stanislav Dobrev, a professor at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business, and Aleksios Gotsopoulos, a professor at Boston University School of Management. And since market forerunners lack predecessors to look to for guidance, the unprecedented decisions they make often end up fatal.   [Wall Street Journal, Jan 20]

R&D Partnerships You need $200,000 to build a prototype. You could form a limited partnership in which a subsidiary of your company is the general partner and the limited partners are individual investors. LPs put up cash in return for a majority interest in the partnership; your company handles the R&D while the LP books the costs. Limited partners get paid a royalty (or perhaps a cut of the profits) when the product generates revenue, and often the payments ebb after a prenegotiated level of return. LPs also get the right to convert their interest in the LP to equity in your company. These arrangements were a popular (and tarnished) tax shelter for high-net-worth investors in the 1980s, but the concept remains sound.  [Dileep Rao, Forbes, Jan 17]  Or you can go to the government's handout SBIR, which doesn't really care about your financial success, and get free money for doing something a federal agency thinks it wants and needs form another set-aside program. You will have to compete with firms that have no future after the SBIR.

Capital Invasion. Ni Pin runs the U.S. operations of a Chinese company called Wanxiang International, an auto parts giant with worldwide revenue of $8 billion. Over the past decade, Wanxiang America has purchased or invested in more than 20 U.S. firms and now employs more Americans - 5,000 at last count - than any other Chinese company. [John Pomfret, Washington Post, Jan 19] First they lent us money to buy their cheap goods. Would more SBIR as currently practiced make any difference?  Just ask the beneficiaries if they would like more free money.

Teradici (Canada), developer of desktop virtualization and display technology, announced a strategic investment and development agreement from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and U.S. intelligence community. Terms were not disclosed (duh). ...  founded in 2004 and takes advantage of graphics algorithms and high-performance computing to try to reinvent how PCs are used, deployed, and managed.  [Greg Huang, xconomy.com, Jan 13, 11]

The Austin Technology Incubator and the State Energy Conservation Office are seeking applicants for two new clean energy incubators at Texas Universities. Recipients will receive $200,000 each to launch the incubators, which will help aid the commercialization of clean energy technologies and foster the growth of companies in the clean energy sector in Texas. ATI’s Clean Energy Incubator says that over the past two years it has identified a pipeline of more than 200 clean energy companies and worked closely with 15 of them. Those companies have raised about $20 million in investment capital. Applications are due by Jan. 21. For information on how to apply go to www.ati.utexas.edu/cei-rfp.  [Lori Hawkins, Austin American Statesman, Dec 6]

China’s president Hu Jintao has raised questions on the role of the US dollar in the global monetary system on the eve of a state visit to Washington, saying “the current international currency system is the product of the past”.  [Richard McGregor, Financial Times, Jan 16]  We have a lot of financial aspects anchored to a disappearing past.

[The Tevatron] will also be remembered as a fount of technological development whose influence spread far beyond high-energy physics. The development, in partnership with industry, of superconducting magnets for Fermilab’s machine, said Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of the lab, helped pave the way for cheap M.R.I. machines for hospitals. [Dennis Overbye, New York Times, Jan 18] The Tevatron at Fermi Lab (Illinois) is to close this year.

Dot.com redux? financiers and investors alike are casting their gaze back to Silicon Valley, in what is shaping up as an echo of the dot-com craze that minted millionaires on both coasts over a decade ago.  ... the technology-oriented Nasdaq-100 index on Monday surpassed its 2007 highs to put the measure at its highest point since February 2001, the waning days of the dot-com bubble.  [Cheng Tam, and Das, Wall Street Journal, Jan 8]

Private markets close off this exchange of information, making it likelier that prices are wrong, letting bubbles brew. Private capital is funding highly valued startups beyond Facebook, including gaming site Zynga and social-coupon company Groupon. Having these companies grow to huge sizes without disclosing their performance beyond a small group of private investors means we are losing the benefits of public-market disclosure. [L Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal, Jan 10]

carbon fiber is too expensive for widespread use—it costs at least four times as much as steel by weight. That's why its use has been limited to luxury vehicles such as the Audi R8 and racing cars, along with some airplanes and golf clubs.  Now, researchers hope to make automotive-grade carbon fiber using a process similar to how knitting yarn is created. The development could lower the price of carbon fiber by as much as 25%.  [Mike Ramsey, Wall Street Journal, Jan 6]

Ever more competition.  [Korean] Samsung Group said Wednesday it plans to carry out record investment and hiring this year as it seeks to extend global dominance in products including flat screen televisions and memory chips. ... will invest 43.1 trillion won ($38.4 billion) in 2011 for an increase of 18 percent over last year. Samsung also said that it will hire 25,000 people for a gain of 11 percent over 2010.  ... with 12.1 trillion earmarked for research and development  [Kelly Olsen, AP, Jan 5]

alphadogg writes "DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said. Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of $0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys." [slashdot.org, Jan 4]

"We preserved cash" over the past few years, said Jim Flaws, chief financial officer of Corning. "Now we're turning around and feeling comfortable about our outlook and spending it." ... investing $300 million to expand its research and development center near its headquarters in Corning, N.Y., adding about 100 researchers and Ph.D.s. It also is spending $800 million on a liquid-crystal display factory in China and building more LCD capacity in Taiwan. [James Hagerty and Dana Mattioli, Wall Street Journal, Jen 3]

The purpose of a prediction column isn't to be accurate a year from now. No one remembers what I write the day after they read it. [Joel Stein, Time, Jan 10]

Growth market. China's online population hits 450 million, up 20% in one year [Tini Tran, AP, Jan 3] That's half again the entire US population. What's more, they're putting up 30-story condo buildings for all those newly urban people.

---------------   2010  ---------------

IBM unveiled its fifth annual "Next Five in Five":  people interact with 3-D holograms of your friends in real time, batteries to last about 10 times longer than they do today ..  that use air to react with energy-dense metal, sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet and even your tweets will collect data that will give scientists a real-time picture of your environment (but the climate deniers reserve the right to call it one big lie), adaptive traffic [with] personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in the fastest time, recycled heat from server farms. [Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal, Dec 30]

Most famously, in 1714, the British government offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could devise a reliable way of measuring longitude at sea, a problem neither Newton nor Galileo could solve. (Clockmaker John Harrison won in 1773.) [Annie Lowry, Washington Post, Jan 2] Mostly true, except that Harrison never collected the full prize and only got the portion he did after big trouble. Read the fascinating story in Dava Sobel's Longitude.

AS a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere — think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods — has its limits. ...  a recent government document containing goals for drastically increasing the nation’s production of patents. .... intends to roughly double its number of patent examiners, to 9,000, by 2015. (The United States has 6,300 examiners.) [and an urge to cut government] ...  double the number of patents that its residents and companies file in other countries. ... cash bonuses, better housing for individual filers and tax breaks for companies that are prolific patent producers. ... DESPITE China’s inevitable rise, Mr. Kao said, the United States has a comparative advantage because it is the country most open to innovation. “American culture, more than any other, forgives failure, tolerates risk and embraces uncertainty,” Mr. Kao says. [Steve Lohr, New York Times, Jan 1]

A solar technology company spun off by Intel Corp. will close a plant in New York that will affect more than 100 workers less than a year after the plant opened. In a short news release, SpectraWatt blamed the shutdown on a steep decline in demand for solar cells due to a harsher-than-usual European winter. ...  was offered about $8 million in government subsidies to help get it started, along with at least $91.4 million in private investment. Intel launched SpectraWatt in Hillsboro OR in 2008, but stopped construction of a planned 65,000-square-foot-plant last year when it couldn't find funding.  In April 2009, it announced plans to start up in New York. [AP, Dec 22]

Self-analysis.  these days, there is a pervasive sense that San Diego’s innovation economy is flagging—and might even be faltering. The hometown venture capital firms that helped fuel this area’s extraordinary expansion during the booming 1990s have largely evaporated—and this time the path forward is far from obvious. ...  Venture funding is down 67 percent from its peak of $541 million in the first quarter of 2009 ... Increased federal funding over the past two years has buoyed San Diego’s research and development community ...  But funding is unlikely to continue at such levels ...  Rightly or wrongly, on the tech side we do hard things. We don’t do 100 different consumer Web apps—we do mini-cameras, we do 3D imaging.” [Bruce Bigelow and Wade Roush, signonsandiego.com, Dec 22]

2011 will be a year in which there are far more corporate births than burials. .. “lean start-ups” can now launch for a fraction of the $3m-5m needed a few years ago. ...  And there will be no shortage of entrepreneurs now that many big firms have slashed their research and development spending. ... entrepreneurs will benefit from the rise of “super angels”—wealthy individuals or managers of small funds who plan to make tons of tiny bets on tiny companies ...  Dave McClure, who recently launched a tech incubator called 500 Start-ups and is raising a $30m fund, says he expects to make around 150-200 investments over the next two years, committing $50,000-250,000 to each one.  [Martin Giles, The World in 2011,  The Economist] 

In 2011 China will consolidate its position as the second-largest national source of scientific papers (it overtook Britain in 2008). With luck, these papers will be of better quality, too. There is a feeling inside and outside the country that Chinese science risks becoming a paper mill, churning out publications of questionable value (and even, all too often, ones whose results have actually been fabricated). But the fraudsters will be confronted by those who recognise that science must be done honestly. In 2010 two science journalists were beaten up for their investigative activities. [Geoffrey Carr, The World in 2011, The Economist]

Connecticut, which already lags in creating new businesses, is in danger of losing some of its cherished high-growth technology firms because of its poor entrepreneurial environment, says a report being released today by the Connecticut Technology Council says. ...  The issues that need attention include formal and informal networks that help connect entrepreneurs; links to research being done at Yale and UConn; and more knowledgeable government agencies, the study shows.  ...  There has, however, been some progress in a few areas in the past year or so — a new angel investor tax credit, and a $200 million state technology tax credit for startup firms  [Anne Hamilton, Hartford Courant, Dec 20]  If CT needs a role model, look to ATMI and Gene Banucci.

Fair and Balanced, so it claims.  Media Matters, a watchdog group, has reported that a top Fox News official last year instructed the network's journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY [sic] pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." The email was sent shortly after a Fox correspondent accurately reported on-air during the Copenhagen talks that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest [decade] on record."  [AAAS, Dec 22] No mention was made of a warning about questions surrounding conservative economic models and theories.

The camels that trod the old Silk Road laden with spices and porcelain will have been replaced with air and sea freighters hauling solar panels and all sorts of goods based on copied technologies and purloined intellectual property. ... Every deal to tap the vast Chinese market comes with a requirement that they turn over their technology to the Chinese: nuclear plants, green energy products, autos will be made by American companies in China –until the Chinese complete construction of their copycat plants. The initial orders satisfy the American executives, their eyes focused on the next quarterly report.  [Irwin Stelzer, Weekly Standard, Dec 18]

Driving the [Silicon Valley] area's recovery is continuing worldwide demand for tech products, much of which still originates in Silicon Valley. "There's an absolutely insatiable demand" for tech products spurred by trends such as smartphones, said Brocade's Mr. Klayko, adding that he doesn't expect demand to taper off "in our lifetimes." [Pui-Wing Tam, Wall Street Journal, Dec 20]

While venture capitalists are pouring money into social networking, e-commerce and online-game companies, investments in chipmakers are close to a 12-year low. And yet semiconductors — made from silicon wafers — provide the brains for everything from computers and mobile phones to nuclear missiles.  At issue is the expense to get a startup off the ground. .... That contrasts with China, whose role as a manufacturing hub for semiconductors is helping it play a bigger role in design and innovation. The country's worldwide share of chip-related patents is expected to rise to 33 percent this year from 22 percent last year, according to a November report from PricewaterhouseCoopers. ...   Meanwhile, the expense of starting software and Internet companies has actually gone down, thanks to cheap Web-based programs and services. [Ari Levy and Ian King, Bloomberg, Dec 18]

New competition. An Italian medical diagnostics company, Silicon Biosystems of Bologna, has established the headquarters for a new U.S. subsidiary in San Diego, according to a statement from the company. ... says its new U.S. business is focused on the North American research and clinical diagnostics markets for its DEPArray technology platform   [Bruce Bigelow, signonsandiego.com, Dec 15]

In research reported Thursday in the journal Science, the scientists at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google and the Encyclopedia Britannica unveiled a database of two billion words and phrases drawn from 5.2 million books in Google's digital library published during the past 200 years. With this tool, researchers can measure trends through the language authors used and the names of people they mentioned. It's the first time scholars have used Google's controversial trove of digital books for academic research, and the result was opened to the public online Thursday. ... All told, about 129 million books have been published since the invention of the printing press. In 2004, Google software engineers began making electronic copies of them, and have about 15 million so far, comprising more than two trillion words in 400 languages.  [RL Hotz, Wall Street Journal, Dec 17]  As electronic storage capacity expands, users find ways to fill it.

Growing competition.  China is on the verge of overtaking Japan as the second-biggest spender on research and development after the U.S., marking another key shift in the rivalry between the world's economic powerhouses, a new report shows. ... expected to spend $153.7 billion on R&D in 2011, up from the $141.4 billion it will spend this year, according to Battelle Memorial Institute  [Gautam Naik, Wall Street Journal, Dec 15]

Small business is often looked to as a source of job growth. But the latest monthly survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business advocacy group, found that 75% of owners felt it wasn't a good time to expand, and one in five said the main reason was doubt about policy environment, including taxes. [McKinnon, Fields, and Saunders, Wall Street Journal, Dec 14] The latest compromise on Bush tax cuts trades stability and responsibility for a short term back-scratching deal that simply ads more deficit.

The Great Recession's most worrisome legacy could be this common allergy toward risk-taking. Having underestimated risks in the bubble years, we may overestimate them now. Consider the shriveling of venture capital - a big source of money for high-tech start-ups. In 2009, venture capital funds received less than half the $35 billion they raised in 2007, and inflows in 2010 are running 27 percent below 2009 levels. The institutions (pensions, endowments) and wealthy individuals that provide venture capital have less money to invest and are less willing to commit it to chancy firms.  [Robert Samuelson, Washington Post, Dec 13]

the United States has even more important structural advantages.  The public and private research-university network, apart from producing an educated, high-end workforce and drawing talent from around the world, has been the incubator for most high-value technologies. U.S. universities are under intense economic pressure, but the gap between the best of them and those in the rest of the world is still enormous. Unless we thoughtlessly dissipate this asset, it should remain a significant wealth generator. [James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly, Dec 10]

The third U.S. structural advantage is our much-maligned legal and financial framework, which fosters the creation of new enterprises that can put discoveries to productive use. Like the United States of the mid-19th century, China of the early 21st century has taken a shortcut to development through lax intellectual-property laws that permit the copying of others' ideas. Many other countries have done so to a less flagrant extent. But that puts a low ceiling on a country's ability to develop its own high-value industries. I have interviewed Chinese entrepreneurs who plan to incorporate their companies in California's Silicon Valley for fear of intellectual-property theft if they were based in their own country.  [James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly, Dec 10]

the economic importance of communications, ... The businesses he describes have been some of the American economy’s great global successes: Google, NBC, Paramount Pictures and many others. They were able to lead the way in part because they could take advantage of the fruits of this country’s long tradition — now somewhat diminished — of government investment in basic scientific research that the private sector would never find profitable. The Internet, to take one example, may now be the world’s communications network. But it started as a Defense Department project. As “The Master Switch” artfully shows, the government often has a role that no company will play on its own. [David Leonhardt reviewing Wu' The Master Switch, New York Times, Dec 11]

Get over it. The National Academies breathlessly reports that China is now No. 2 in the world in publication of biomedical research papers. To which the only possible response is, "Duh! Did you think one-fifth of the world's people were all stupid?" ...  But will the American middle class ever again be massively more prosperous than that in other countries, and will the US have the dominance it once had in scientific and technological discovery? No, and no. Get over it. [Michael Elliott, Fortune, Dec 6, 10]

Comparative Advantage. according to several recent scholarly articles by Andrew A. Toole and Dirk Czarnitzki. ... found that engaging in entrepreneurial activities tends to lower [academic researchers'] publication rate, even after returning to the university full-time. ... has a nontrivial impact on knowledge creation in the nonprofit research sector, particularly since researchers who engage in entrepreneurial activity tend to publish at a higher rate than other faculty before they leave to pursue private sector opportunities. ... The authors suggest that the correct balance of research and commercialization has not yet been achieved. [SSTI, Dec 1]  And will probably never be achieved in an open capitalist system. Although Adam Smith advocated a comparative advantage scheme for nations,  perfect salaried professors and perfect profit-maximizing entrepreneurs are not separate species. Although a different licensing system might induce the professors to stay in academia while reaping the fruits of their advances, our political system would erupt in speeches about over-compensated professors.

Some conclude there is almost a cultural aversion to entrepreneurship in Japan. Banks are reluctant to provide credit to start-ups. Venture capital is scarce. Many say it reflects the communal nature of Japanese society, developed in the rice paddies and reflected in the time-worn adage, “the nail that sticks up will be hammered down.”   [The Economist, Nov 20]

Cost effective. a former American Heart Association president, Clyde Yancy, warned doctors to be "somewhat circumspect" about using the $35,000 gadgets until there is proof they are cost effective. Many heart patients already get an older version of the Medtronic device that costs less. It is not clear the additional expense and higher complication rate of the new gadget is worth it for all heart patients, doctors say. ...  It could get worse. President Obama is pushing "comparative effectiveness" studies that could pit pricey medical devices against cheap generic pills. Regulators are threatening to close loopholes that allow some devices to get approved without proof that they work.  [Matthew Herper, Forbes, Dec 2]  Cost effective means affordable and worth it.

Mark Murray, engineer at the U.S. Naval Academy, found that the saw-tooth-like bumps (called tubercles) running up the edge of a humpback whale's fin make the creatures perform better in low-flow water. This, in turn, implies that lining the blades of underwater turbines with similar bumps could make them much better at capturing energy from ocean tides. [Amina Khan, LA Times, Dec 5]

Silicon Roundabout. in the second division of [technology] hubs, this chunk of east London is near the top, along with the likes of Boston and Tel Aviv. That its growth took place so quickly, and during a recession, is remarkable enough: the high-tech zone in Cambridge has taken decades to evolve. But the fact that Silicon Roundabout also emerged without government support, or even direct links with universities, should pique the interest of countries that have tried to cultivate technology hubs without the same success. ...  The congregation owes something to the advantages of London generally: its wealth, its appeal to global talent, the English language. But the entrepreneurs in Silicon Roundabout stress the unique draw of the east of the city, with its bohemianism and relatively cheap rents, for young, creative workers.  [The Economist, Nov 27]  Note: roundabout is English English for a traffic circle.

Lord Layard has long argued that GDP is overrated as a gauge of a country’s well-being. Once an economy reaches an income per person of about $15,000 (measured at purchasing-power parity), economic growth ceases to add to happiness, he says. America, for example, is considerably richer than Denmark, but Americans are no more satisfied with their lives. His claim was echoed in “The Spirit Level”, a recent book by two British academics, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.[The Economist, Nov 27]

What to do with all those dollars. The Chinese growth story has proved, more than anything else, that growth begets growth. Its strategy of leveraging its pool of low-cost labour to spur manufacturing, while creating capacities and infrastructure for achieving this, has made it one of the biggest users, importers and investors of most commodities....  China’s huge trade surplus has facilitated its continued investment in the US and enabled the continuation of a low interest rate regime that the latter wanted to maintain in its effort to steer the economy out of the woods. A low interest rate regime in the US led to most of its investors chasing the emerging market returns, thereby pressurising currency fundamentals. Though these two economies may be putting on public posture against each other, they are quietly playing a tango that neither can step out of. The same messy equilibrium contributed to the Great Depression and is now causing the current consternation in world currency markets. But it is an equilibrium, nonetheless.  [Debojyoti Dey   Venkatachalam Shunmugam , VOX http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5885, Dec 3]

A survey of medical technology companies and venture capital firms with a presence in the life sciences field revealed that the U.S. is at risk of losing its global leadership position in medtech innovation because of unpredictable, inefficient, and expensive regulatory processes within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Further, survey data indicate that innovators and medical device companies are relocating to other countries in greater numbers to take advantage of more streamlined regulatory processes and lower costs. [SSTI, Dec 1]  Go ahead, buy drugs developed and approved in Asia.  Make life exciting!

China is not like Japan or others it is a far different circumstance with aggressive mercantilism, manipulation, flouting of the rules, labor arbitrage, IP theft, lax environment or safety regulation and other market distorting effects on a scale not seen in prior situations. Japan may have been initially an exporter of cheap trinkets - they soon became dominant in autos, electronics, machine tools and so forth. China is quickly moving up the "value chain" as well - much faster than Japan did.  Unless the US finally abandons its 30 year experiment with failed economic and trade ideology, and gets back in the global trade game with serious coordinated trade and industrial strategies, we will indeed see the final wane of the US century and the rise of the china century, much like Great Britain saw in the final years of its empire [Abogle's comment, Industry Week, Nov 29]  It's a whole lot easier to demand a policy than to prescribe one that would actually work in a competitive world. We do have to face our success in spreading American culture and ideas around the world that was prostrate in 1945.  On the other hand, declinists have to realize that trees don't grow to the sky and our new competitors will face the same leveling S-curve that we found. And with Republicans controlling at least one house of Congress, we're not going to have restrictive trade and industrial strategies.   

Boosting capitalism.  In an attempt to give China's private businesses a boost, Beijing is encouraging venture capital and private-equity firms to assist with the country's lending business, hoping that the new investors can help China's big banks open up their wallets.  ...  In recent months, foreign and local funds have invested more than $260 million in loan guaranty companies, firms that promise to act as guarantor to small firms and repay the bank its loans in case the firms default.  [Wall Street Journal, Nov 24]  The SBIR advocates want the USG to do the opposite - to reserve SBIR handouts for companies that don't attract venture capital.

Kai-Fu Lee was tapped by Bill Gates to lead Microsoft's operations in China, personally wooed away by Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and turned down an offer by Steve Jobs. ...   his new venture, Innovation Works, a $115 million fund to back early-stage technology companies, is something of a laboratory to teach this nation of 1.2 billion people a course that could be best described as "Silicon Valley 101." ....  Chinese ambitions for creating change-the-world-businesses are growing   [John Boudreau, San Jose Mercury News, Nov 28]  Meanwhile, The Chongqing government plans to turn Xiyong into western China's silicon valley, with an annual production of 80 million notebook PCs, generating $80 billion in exports and imports by 2015. [Meng Jing, China Daily, Nov 6]  

In its first major U.S. expansion, SunPower, a leader in solar panel technology, plans to open an operations center in Austin next year, bringing 450 jobs and an estimated $10 million in capital investment  ...  Gov. Rick Perry said the state would invest $2.5 million through the Texas Enterprise Fund ...  designs and manufactures solar technology around the world for homes, businesses and utility companies. SunPower has offices in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, and it reported $1.5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2009. [Shonda Novak, Austin American Statesman, Nov 24]

China's new grand strategy, the Four "Mores": Consume more, import more, invest abroad more and innovate more.  ...  What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance. This time the Eastern challenger is for real, both economically and geopolitically.  [Niall Ferguson, Wall Street Journal, Nov 20] The US counter?  Write one as derived from the financial situation and the latest political posturing.

Good is not enough. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which dictate what treatments the massive federal health-insurance program for the elderly will cover, is running a "national coverage analysis" of Provenge, the first vaccine approved for treating any cancer. The treatment, developed by Seattle-based Dendreon, costs $93,000 a patient and has been shown to extend patients' lives by about four months.  [Rob Stein, Washington Post, Nov 14, 10]

Rob Vierhout of ePure, a European ethanol trade association, said: “The blender’s credit was not set up with the intention to facilitate exports” and warned of legal action to halt US shipments subsidised by the credit. [Gregory Meyer, Financial Times, Nov 15]  Subsidies look good only to the recipient.

Even the pharmaceutical industry, a major beneficiary of biomedical research, does not like to invest too heavily in basic science. Rather, it lets private venture capital support the small biotechnology companies that first try to bring new findings to market, and then buys up the few winners of this harsh winnowing process.   If basic research is fraught with such a high failure rate, why then does it yield such rich economic returns? The answer is that such government financing agencies as the [NIH] and the [NSF] are like the managers of a stock index fund: they buy everything in the market, and the few spectacular winners make up for all the disasters. [Nicholas Wade, New York Times, Nov 8]

such a risk for California to earmark $3 billion specifically for stem cell research over the next 10 years. Stem cells are just one of many promising fields of biomedical research. They could yield great advances, or become an exercise in sustained failure, as gene therapy has so far been. By allocating so much money to a single field, California is placing an enormous bet on a single horse, and the chances are substantial that its taxpayers will lose their collective shirt.  Stem cell researchers have created an illusion of progress by claiming regular advances in the 12 years since human embryonic stem cells were first developed. But a notable fraction of these claims have turned out to be wrong or fraudulent, and many others have amounted to yet another new way of getting to square one by finding better methods of deriving human embryonic stem cells. [Nicholas Wade, New York Times, Nov 8]

“I’ve learned over the years that the best predictor for what will be new and exciting is, ‘Expect the unexpected,’ ” said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, a Nobel laureate who is professor and chairman of the department of medical genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.  Dr. David Baltimore of CalTech, another Nobel laureate, said, “If you could predict it, it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”  [Gina Kolata, New York Times, Nov 8]

A wave of cutbacks is erasing nearly 400 jobs at Massachusetts life sciences companies and reshaping a sector that is key to the state’s economy, with global drug makers stepping up to play a larger role as home-grown players shrink operations. [Boston Globe, Nov 6]

Texas is ranked among the top states in the nation for business climate, according to Site Selection magazine. The Lone Star State ranked third overall based on work-force skills, state and local tax schemes and transportation infrastructure. The top five states in the rankings were North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and South Carolina.  [San Antonio Business Journal, Nov 1] Love those high oil prices!   Now, why are the top five states in the red-state Confederacy? Only Ohio and Indiana are non-Confederacy states in the top ten. Low taxes are more important than good education and the federal government pays for a lot of the transport infrastructure which is a lot cheaper without severe winter?  And non-union worker skills can be easily imported?

Eli Lilly will open a research center in Shanghai by mid-2011 to search for new treatments for diabetes in China. ... an estimated 92 million people in China -- almost 10 percent of the adult population -- have diabetes.  [Indianapolis Star, Nov 4]  What is the economics of a medical research center in China's New York City where real estate is highly prized?

Research and development spending at major companies declined last year for the first time in more than a decade, according to a survey by management consulting firm Booz & Co. But R&D as a percentage of revenues was up slightly from a year earlier because revenues dropped at a faster rate than R&D spending. ... The three most frequently chosen [as most innovative] by respondents were Apple, Google and 3M, none of which was among the 10 biggest spenders on R&D in 2009.    [James Hagerty, Wall Street Journal, Nov 3]  It takes more than money to make innovation.

Can "NO" our globalization answer?  Having traveled to both China and India in the last few weeks, here’s a scary thought I have: What if — for all the hype about China, India and globalization — they’re actually underhyped? What if these sleeping giants are just finishing a 20-year process of getting the basic technological and educational infrastructure in place to become innovation hubs and that we haven’t seen anything yet? [Tom Friedman, New York Times, Nov 3]  No worry, we now have an aroused Republican party that ran on no mandate beyond "NO". Unfortunately, "NO" won't get them far in governing.

Edenvale Technology Park gives a glimpse of the new Silicon Valley. The long recession only tiptoed through the 2,300-acre office park, with many start-ups here expanding their operations over the past 18 months. ....   Silicon Valley's start-up economy has quietly broadened beyond information technology. It now includes a growing cadre of bioscience and "clean technology" firms, presaging a more-diversified economic base and bolstering the valley's status as the world's innovation hotbed. ... Less than a third of Silicon Valley's work force is now employed in chips and computer manufacturing, compared with more than 50% in 1990, according to research firm Collaborative Economics.   [Pui-Wing Tam and Cari Tuna, Wall Street Journal, Oct 22]

Incandescent bulbs will soon be history, and some fluorescents may not be far behind, as light-emitting diodes grab a larger share of the market.  ...  GE says More than half its lighting products will be LEDs by 2020 [Albany Times Union, Oct 20]

Chinese officials are signaling plans to further reduce rare-earth exports next year, sustaining its controls of the metals—key ingredients in high-technology batteries and defense products—that have already severely frustrated foreign governments. ...  produces around 97% of world supply  [Wall Street Journal, Oct 20]

The United States isn't just competing against China -- it's trying to escape its own recent history. Over the last quarter-century, the country has lost much of the manufacturing capital required to launch a new industry from whole cloth. The same trends that led American companies to hand over previous generations of the battery industry to Japan -- the loss of heavy industrial capacity and diminished investments in research and development that followed the shareholder-value mania of the 1980s and 1990s -- have left the country ill-prepared to establish itself as a leader in the next generation. Meanwhile, rising middle-class living standards and job opportunities in China, India, and elsewhere mean that the United States can no longer count on attracting the world's best and brightest. Increasingly, the sharpest minds in engineering and the sciences would just as soon stay home -- or, like Wan Gang, move back. "I fear for the Americans," says Harrop, the technology consultant. "They are so far behind in terms of mass production and also don't have the customers in their own area. The Obama money gives Americans a chance. But it certainly doesn't guarantee success -- and doesn't outspend the East."   [Steve LeVine , Foreign Policy, Nov 2010] 

“In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, “On balance, the sweet spot for innovation today is moving down, not up.”  As such, government’s job today is to inspire, liberate, empower and enable all that stuff coming up from below, while learning to live with and manage the chaos. [Tom Friedman, New York Times, Oct 17]  Unfortunately for innovation, federal mission agencies abhor chaos and steer their SBIR (and other R&D money) into safe advances in knowledge.  They don't do SBIR topics like "Surprises and Opportunities."

In-house [pharmaceutical] R&D currently delivers internal rates of return of 7.5%, below the industry's cost of capital, and down from 12% a decade ago, according to McKinsey estimates. The industry argues its work has also become harder: developing frontier cancer treatments is more complex than producing pills for high blood pressure. But efforts by some drugs groups to drive up returns appear to be paying off.  Productivity is improving. Despite a fall in world-wide R&D spending, a drug in late-stage development now has more than a one in three chance of reaching the market, versus one in four in 2007, notes BofA Merrill Lynch.  [Wall Street Journal, Oct 16]  Would that SBIR were approached from such an economic viewpoint instead of success story anecdotes and handwaving about the beauty of small business.

Santa Clara's SVB Financial Group opened a subsidiary in Beijing on Tuesday, offering a range of services for tech companies and venture capitalists in both the United States and China. [Andrew Ross, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct 13]

A report from the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy measures the performance of 71 countries against what it defines as the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index, which incorporates multiple individual and institutional variables.  The U.S. ranked third overall, after Denmark (1) and Canada (2). The U.S. was found to be first in the aspirations sub-index, but lagged in the entrepreneurial attitudes and activities sub-indices.  The authors state that the findings should serve more as an eye-opener than as a cause for alarm. [AAAS, Oct 6] But does the SBA have any credibility in assessing world entrepreneurship?

Don't look back; they're gaining. more patents may be filed in China this year than in Japan for the first time, putting China in striking distance of America. It is an astonishing reversal. As recently as 2000, Japanese patent filings were four times greater than China’s. [The Economist, Sep 30]

In an effort to better connect with inventors, some large manufacturers including Clorox Co., Kraft Foods, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, and GlaxoSmithKline PLC, have launched websites in recent years for soliciting product ideas. Some of the sites occasionally feature specific requests from the companies' research-and-development teams. ...  Even if an inventor's idea gets noticed, the odds of reaping big bucks are slim. Companies typically offer compensation in the form of royalty fees, small percentages of wholesale earnings. ...  says Michael C. Miller, director of product partnerships [at Danco, Inc]. "To put something on a shelf, another product would have to come off," [Sarah Needleman, Wall Street Journal, Oct 6]

Eureka prizes are back. After disappearing for much of the 20th century, prizes have recently re-emerged as a strategy for stimulating innovation.  .... when there are tough problems to solve during lean economic times. ...  According to a 2009 study by McKinsey & Co., more than 60 prizes of at least $100,000 made their debuts from 2000 to 2007, representing almost $250 million in new prize money. [Eric Hintz, Wall Street Journal, Sep 27]

biotech guru G. Steven Burrill said that he's close to securing $1 billion to support a major biobusiness park he envisions on a rural tract north of Rochester [MN]  ....  aspirations to bring biotech companies to a site near the famed Mayo Clinic. ...  Burrill said the investor is a sovereign wealth fund [Wendy Lee, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sep 15, 10]

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., recently developed a new way to kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA—one of the most widespread and deadliest superbugs—on contact using tiny tubes coated with proteins to destroy the bugs by deflating them like balloons. ... They found that within two hours the enzyme combination killed more than 99% of MRSA. And, as expected, it didn't kill other kinds of bacteria, like E. coli. The goal is to add the enzyme-coated nanotubes to paint and other substances to coat hospital walls or medical instruments, says Dr. Dordick. In something like paint, which doesn't involve direct contact with a person, a product could hit the market within two years at a cost of 10% more than the current retail price of paint, says Dr. Dordick.    [Shirley Wang, Wall Street Journal, Sep 14]

Eli Lilly plans to invest as much as $150 million in three venture capital funds to speed development of new medicines. [Bloomberg News, Sep 9]

N.C. State University is looking forward to the day when people are buzzing about the cool new venture that got started in The Garage ...  a new 2,000-square-foot incubator space for student entrepreneurs outfitted for the university by Linux software company Red Hat. [David Ranii, Raleigh News & Observer, Sep 10, 10]

We are living in the most exciting intellectual time in history. In my lifetime we have discovered such profundities, such huge principles.  [David Attenboro, naturalist]

The U.S. economy needs new fast growing businesses like Microsoft, Google and Home Depot that can grow from a few employees to tens of thousands. This should be a national priority but it is hardly discussed.  Success on this front will require a different mindset about government involvement in business and a higher regard for entrepreneurship and venture-capital investing....  Grants might be replaced with equity ownership for the government, such as the Health and Human Services-proposed Strategic Investment Firm, which will invest in small companies developing medical countermeasures to a WMD attack, such as from bioterrorism. ...  If the U.S. Small Business Administration were staffed by people with a deeper knowledge of entrepreneurship   [Jeremy Wiesen, professor of entrepreneurship (emeritus) at New York University's Stern School of Business, Wall Street Journal, Sep 13]  In other words, completely re-write the US innovation system by a Congress that cannot resist handouts for political purposes.

Boston is once again tops. Paris and Amsterdam ranked second and third, ... when it comes to innovation. So claims 2thinknow, an Australian consulting firm that said it investigated nearly 300 cities worldwide to determine which one should be ranked as the top city of the global innovation economy.  [Boston Globe, Sep 10]

IN WINCHESTER, VA. The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s. ... a 2007 energy conservation measure set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. [forcing] millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.  ...  the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China. [Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post, Sep 8]

[Craig Venter's] star power has attracted $110 million in investment so far, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in research financing, making Synthetic Genomics among the wealthiest companies in the new field known as synthetic biology. “If you think of an iconic, Steve Jobs character in the life sciences field, he comes to mind,” says Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested in Synthetic Genomics. ...  But the path is long, with no guarantee of success. And as with DNA sequencing, Dr. Venter is stirring some unease in the synthetic biology field. Some competitors say designing entire cells is too far-fetched and that less flashy companies are ahead of Synthetic Genomics    [Andrew Pollack, New York Times, Sep 5]

Although exports make up a smaller share of our economy than in export-oriented Germany and China, our strength in high-quality services and high-value goods shows that we can compete in the fields where innovation matters most. The U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest rates of innovation (as measured by the number of patents issued per worker) are also the most export-oriented.  [Bruce Katz, Washington Post, Sep 5]

How do companies generate new ideas? And how do they turn those ideas into products? Hardly a week passes without someone publishing a book on the subject. Most are rubbish. [The Economist, Aug 26]

start by recognising that innovation is unnatural. Established businesses are built for efficiency, which depends on predictability and repeatability—on breaking tasks down into their component parts and holding employees accountable for hitting their targets. But innovation is by definition unpredictable and uncertain. Bosses may sing a pretty song about innovation being the future. But in practice the heads of operational units will favour the known over the unknown. [The Economist, Aug 26]  Which helps explain why DOD and NASA are so conservative in their SBIRs. Telling then you will change their world has to be done carefully since they care a lot more about next year's budget than a day's worth your your company.

Stanford researchers have developed a water-purifying filter that makes the process more than 80,000 times faster than existing filters. The key is coating the filter fabric – ordinary cotton – with nanotubes and silver nanowires, then electrifying it. The filter uses very little power, has no moving parts and could be used throughout the developing world. [Louis Bergeron , www.wateronline.com, Sep 1]

For a world fretting over Chinese economic competition, the entities to fear are not government-backed juggernauts, but enterprises that spring on the scene lean and mean, planned and financed by investors who want to make money quickly. -  TC Fishman, China Inc, 2005

Many high-tech companies are holding healthy piles of cash, and with low returns in the investment markets, it makes more sense to spend it on acquisitions, analysts say.  [Samantha Bomkamp and Geir Molson, AP, Aug 30] Are acquisitions good or bad for small company high tech, and US high tech in general.  If you listen to the SBIR advocates, you'll hear it's bad because the small entrepreneur loses control of his company and its technology.  But that's just encouraging life-style companies to think small and protective. And the federal agencies play into that by continually funding such companies for low risk R&D.  The result is less innovation than would result from full exploitation of our capitalism in which making big profits encourages new attempts at innovation. C'mon government, if you're going to hand out money, push it to the companies and ideas most likely to compound it to economic growth. Forget the companies that already have had $30M SBIR and are still doing the same stuff, however technically competent. 

American university biology departments exist to transfer knowledge from old Jewish men to young Chinese women. -- TC Fishman, China, Inc, 2005 

The technology sector's top eight companies sitting on $125 billion of net cash, deals look set to continue. ... In their most recent quarters, the top eight bought back $13 billion of stock. Some even pay decent dividends.  Still, with the sector generating tens of billions of dollars from operations each year, bank accounts should keep expanding despite buybacks and dividends   [Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal, Aug 25]

Italian ... seismologists, volcanologists, physicists and engineers are being threatened with charges of manslaughter for failing to definitively predict an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 in the city of L’Aquila on April 6, 2009, which took more than 300 lives and injured an additional 1,600 area residents. The scientists find themselves in legal peril even though anything other than a loosely probabilistic assessment of earthquake risk is currently impossible... The threatened researchers belong to the Major Risks Committee... Major risk number one: membership in the Major Risks Committee. [Steve Mirsky, Scientific American, Sep10]

Unfortunately, there are a lot of wrong ways to go about building the next Silicon Valley. ...  In a pattern that continues today, entrepreneurs who got rich in one wave of Silicon Valley innovation turned around and invested in the next wave. The venture-capital model was tailor-made for the Bay Area, which has been unusually risk-tolerant since the days of the California Gold Rush, with a community of investors willing to make bets on untested entrepreneurs, and to continue making such bets again and again. ...  isolated research parks can't lure talented people -- they've got to be someplace where the world's most talented people actually want to live. ...  The Valley came to be in good part because the people there didn't have to pay attention to much else other than the work itself. [Margaret O'Mara, Foreign Policy, Sep/Oct 10] And buzzword programs like Small Business Innovation Research run by federal agencies protecting their R&D interests could never foster a Silicon Valley world. It gets even worse when every two Senators from anywhere want a piece of the pie for their states. To keep the machine going, spread the money around and sponsor lemonade reports about how well it is going.

Small biz (under 50 employees) created 54.1% of new private sector jobs in the fourth quarter, and now for the rest of the news:   they wiped out 61.8% of all job cuts, says the Labor Department. Large firms added slightly more than they subtracted.  [Wall Street Journal, Aug 20] The SBIR advocates will be sure, as always, to trumpet the first number.

The other thirteen CNBC leading innovators are: Robin Li co-founder and CEO of Baidu; Christina Lampe-Onnerud founder and CEO of Boston Power; Allan Golston heads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Educational Development programs;  Achim Kopmeier co-founder of Epuramat;  Elisabet de los Pinos founder and president of Aura Biosciences; Kevin Czinger CEO of Coda Automotive; Miles Rubin founder and co-chairman of Coda Automotive; Rajiv Mehrotra  CEO of VNL;  Mark Palmer President of StreamBase; Stephen Quake is a Stanford biosciences professor;  former NASA scientist K.R. Sridhar  co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy; Kevin Surace CEO of Serious Materials; Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook.  [cnbc.com, Aug 4, 10]  For whatever reasons, no SBIR went to these fifteen top innovators. Where did all the money go and what economic gain is there to show for it?  We might conclude that there is plenty of private money for the best innovators and that SBIR's pleas of market failure should be seriously questioned.

A rare breed in San Diego just a few years ago, virtual companies now account for more than half of the biotech startups created in the region since 2005, according to some industry experts. ...  a handful of employees who manage contracts with outside service providers that do the heavy-lifting of drug development — operating labs, formulating and manufacturing the experimental treatment, and running clinical trials.  [Keith Darcé, San Diego Union Tribune, Aug 15] No SBIR for them unless and until Congress changes eligibility rules.

Passing of a pharma-era.  There is fresh evidence of the dwindling pipeline of new drugs from the pharmaceuticals industry in research today showing just 7% of sales come from medicines launched in the past five years.The report by CMR International shows that the bulk of sales at the world's leading pharmaceuticals is derived from an ageing portfolio of drugs, while the number of medicines failing during late-stage testing is sharply on the rise  [Julia Kollowe, The Guardian, Jun 28]

Even though the number of startups has grown in the major Texas markets, the main barrier, according to our panel, was the inability to get these companies over the startup hump, and onto the next level, which usually requires follow-on funding and access to venture capital. [Jason Myers, http://texasceomagazine.com/?p=451, Jul 30]  What's true in Texas is true everywhere, even in federal R&D programs. Single limited funding usually leaves a new tech a little head with economic expectations unimproved. Getting past the valley of death requires starting with the right kind of tech and entrepreneur and a way to get the help that the company needs to exploit tech success, even if that means new management to supervise the technical brilliance that got the company and idea started. And since the government is completely incapable of  managing a private company, it should require third party capital participation at an early stage. Throwing a new tech over the wall and declaring success doesn't work.

small business owners in Greater Boston are among the happiest in North America. So says TD Bank, which devised a happiness index, then set out to measure the happiness quotient of small business owners in a dozen metro areas in the United States and Canada. [Boston Globe, Aug 5]

After studying more than a decade of deflation in Japan, economists have slowly realized they have no idea how it works. - Wall Street Journal, Jul 26.  [The Capital Spectator blog]  And other than handing out money to a lot of small businesses, SBIR has no idea how it works either. Input is always a lot easier to measure than output.

Goodyear discovered a principle, undoubtedly useful, but there is little evidence that he brought the process to the point of manufacturing viability. Although the inventor enrolled more than eighty patents, they mainly covered ways of using vulcanized rubber- flocked fabrics, molding hollow-core objects, and producing imitation leathers, rather than improvements to the methods of changing natural rubber into its vulcanized form.  [Cai Guise-Richardson, Technology and Culture, Apr 10]

Why did Britain have an industrial revolution first?  in Britain ideas interacted vigorously with business interests in "a positive feedback loop that created the greatest sea change in economic history since the advent of culture." ....  Reduced to a thumbnail sketch, liberty and natural philosophy—a catch-all term for the study of "useful" knowledge— begat prosperity, which begat more liberty and useful knowledge, which in turn spread through Europe and the Americas. [Trevor Butterworth reviewng Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy, WSJ, Jul 30]  Is American polity smart enough to learn any lessons from industrial history?  Or will political slogans rule in a quest for power to reward contributors?

Tech and its practitioners not quite ready.  very different results that four major [genetic test] companies returned, based on samples from the same customers. New tech always sounds sweet, until it has to satisfy customers.

"The optimal response to uncertainty if you're a firm is to do nothing, but if everyone does nothing, the economy tanks."   [Nicholas Bloom, quoted in Business Week.com, Jul 22] That's conventional wisdom for real companies with uncertain markets.  SBIR junkies, fortunately for them and unfortunately for the US economy, don't have that problem; they just keep sending proposals to the government and getting free money to do R&D service that they know best.  And since the government agencies that fund SBIR proposals don't care about the economy either, the mill just keeps grinding.

The Germans just want to run surpluses—and if everybody tries to run a surplus, we end up in a depression. The other part of the story is frankly the hypocrisy of the Germans on the subject of the Greek crisis. The reality is that it was the German and French banks that got bailed out because they were the principal holders of all that dodgy Greek debt. [Niall Ferguson, Business Week, Jul 16]

A Pony in there Somewhere.   Computer and software stocks have slumped to their lowest valuations in two decades, a sign to some analysts that they are poised for a rebound. ... As a group, tech stocks trailed the S&P 500 for seven of nine years through 2008. This year they're down 4.6 percent, vs. the S&P 500's 1.8 percent drop [Business Week, Jul 16]

Wherever he looks in the past, Ridley finds that unencumbered commerce has sparked innovation and betterment, while bureaucracy and regulation have stifled creativity and led to stagnation. He ranges nimbly from the excesses of the Ming Dynasty to Walmart merchandizing to the business strategies of sardine fishermen of southern India, and each lesson points him to exuberant optimism about where human society is heading. [Wray Herbert reviewing Ridley's The Rational Optimist, Washington Post, Jul 18]

Tech companies of many different stripes are emerging as the business stars of 2010, reporting sharply higher revenues, thanks to customers who are either replacing old equipment or buying new products that do more. [Boston Globe, Jul 16]

Apple is shedding its conservative ways and is on something of a buying binge, reportedly notching its sixth buy in the last year. The latest pickup is a Canadian mapping startup called Poly9 Group, which creates 3-D global maps.  ...  Almost all of Apple's most recent acquisitions involve mobile technology and are presumably meant to help Apple outpace its rivals, most notably Google, which has been picking up companies at a fast rate. [Ryan Kim, SF Chronicle, Jul 16, 10]

General Electric announced that it will pledge $200 million to fund new research and development projects that can produce a more efficient electric grid. From now until Sept. 30, budding smart-grid entrepreneurs will be able to submit their proposals. GE and four venture capital firms will work together to evaluate submissions for technological savvy and commercial viability. [Investor Guide Daily, Jul 13]

TiE, a networking organization originally founded as The Indus Entrepreneurs, is expanding its mission to connect startup founders to potential "angel" investors. .... have formed TiE Angels, which intends to provide initial funding and advice on strategy and operations to promising entrepreneurs. [Frank M Russell, San Jose Mercury News, Jul 13]

Businesses [while loaded with cash] seem short of ideas about how to grow. Technology is not the must-have item it was during the last big investment boom in the late 1990s.  [The Economist, Jul 3]

"Search" funds, small pools of money that seek to buy and manage small companies, are drawing a record number of would-be entrepreneurs and a new crop of investors, though they have realized few successes.  Roughly 50 search funds were launched in the last three years  ...  One or two prospective entrepreneurs round up between $200,000 and $750,000 from friends, family and outside investors to finance the hunt for an attractive business, a process that typically takes 18 months. If a deal is reached with the owners, the search-fund principals seek second rounds of financing from their initial investors to buy the company—typically for between $5 million and $10 million.     [Kyle Stock, Wall Street Journal, Jul 12]

Portland ranks high nationally for its rate of entrepreneurship, as measured by things like self-employment and the number of small businesses. ... Oregon’s labor force grew because people kept coming. The livability crowd led the way: young, white, well-educated people drawn to an outdoor — and local — lifestyle. [William Yardley, New York Times, Jul 9]

Sweet technology, but..  It's all so familiar. A technological disaster, then a presidential commission examining what went wrong. And ultimately a discovery that while technology marches on, concern for safety lags. ...  The common thread — which the new presidential oil spill commission will be looking for — often is technological arrogance and hubris. It's the belief by those in charge that they're the experts, that they know what they're doing is safe. Add to that the human weaknesses of avoidance, greed and sloppiness, say academics who study disasters.  [Seth Borenstein, AP, Jul 11]

One of the world’s largest drug makers, Sanofi-Aventis SA, is planning a $65 million expansion in Cambridge that will create about 300 jobs, making it the latest foreign pharmaceutical giant to invest in Massachusetts. [Boston Globe, Jul 8] Enriching the nurturing soil for tech entrepreneurs.

businesses are holding back. Right now they are sitting on more cash than they know what to do with, thanks to strong profits, depreciation that exceeds new investment and meager spending on researching, developing and marketing new products. Business investment as a percentage of economic output is at its lowest level in more than 40 years, while hiring continues to lag behind growth in output ... financial markets have become particularly risk-averse, ready to punish any company that makes investments in long-term growth that might negatively impact short-term profits. ...  if corporate executives are looking for someone to blame for weak job growth, they should take their eyes off Washington and try looking in a mirror.  [Steve Pearlstein, Washington Post, Jul 7]

When in doubt, re-organize.  Glaxo has carved its research group into dozens of small units, with a goal to turn a sluggish, bureaucratic staff into specialized teams capable of discovering cutting-edge drugs  [Wall Street Journal, Jul 1]

Edison perfected the incandescent bulb and devised a system of electrical current to serve homes and businesses. Then came the hard part ...The invention of the phonograph made Edison world-famous--but it took him years to understand what it did best ... He and his talented team didn't just invent machinery for the movies--they invented the magic [Time, Jul 5]

Recycling. Chinese investment funds are tiptoeing into the U.S. stock market, raising their holdings of U.S. companies as they seek diversification from their volatile home market and see better prospects in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world. [Wall Street Journal, Jun 28] From you to Wal-Mart to China and back to buying US companies.  In the long run, who will own whom? Meanwhile, the USG puts its innovation money into companies that don't want to share any development risk. 

Cisco All In. Cisco Systems today announced a $1 billion initiative to drive entrepreneurship and innovation in Russia ..."Simply put, we're all in," Cisco CEO John Chambers told Medvedev. ... increase the number of Cisco networking academies in Russia to 300 ... make Skolkovo an advanced Internet-connected city using Cisco technology. ... a second global headquarters of Cisco's Emerging Technology Group ... $175,000 in prize money to winning entrepreneurial teams in Russia  [Pete Carey, San Jose Mercury News, Jun 23]  Cisco should consult BP about partnering with Russia.

In recent years, a lively environment for young companies has emerged in Europe, complete with serial entrepreneurs, experienced venture capitalists and the necessary supporting infrastructure, such as law firms and PR agencies. ... Granted, it is not yet clear whether Europe’s tech industries will become big enough to do the things that its entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and policymakers dream of: not just producing brilliant ideas, but turning them into lucrative commercial reality; creating a lot of jobs; and yielding the sorts of innovations that revolutionise old industries and spawn new ones.   [The Economist, Jun 12]

it took an outsider—Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has a Nobel Prize in physics—to come up with the idea of peering inside the malfunctioning blowout preventer with high-energy gamma rays. ... symptomatic of a problem that's bigger than London-based BP: Energy companies worldwide are far less science-oriented than one might expect from an industry that is heavily dependent on technology for safety and profit. ... The dearth of investment in energy R&D helps explain why the world is still getting its energy by punching holes in the sea floor  [Peter Coy, Business Week, Jun 17]

created by connected groups of smart people. I do not know if Watt learned anything from Adam Smith, who was there at the same time, but he certainly benefitted greatly from proximity to other academic luminaries such as Joseph Black and John Robison. Black not only influenced Watt’s understanding of latent heat, but also helped to finance Watt and connected him with John Roebuck, a student of Black’s who became Watt’s first large-scale investor. Watt and his steam engine were clearly children of the Scottish Enlightenment. [Edward Glaeser reviewing Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850, The New Republic, Jun 22] Innovation programs in isolated places, where two Senators are the major advantage, have little chance of lighting any disruptive revolution.

A new Georgia center features a variety of resources to assist life science entrepreneurs. The Georgia Bioscience Commercialization Center (GBCC), funded by Georgia Bio and the Georgia Research Alliance, offers incubation space, counseling for experienced bioscience executives, entrepreneur education, and connection to TBED organizations around the state. Visit the GBCC site  [SSTI, Jun 17]

the pace of merger and acquisition activity in the defense sector is quickening, with many smaller firms moving to put themselves on the block before valuations begin to erode.  Meanwhile, larger firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems Inc. are streamlining operations in anticipation of softening demand.  [Loren Thompson, Forbes, Jun 17]

specialists often have the most to lose from new technologies that displace the old ones they know so well, and may want to block innovation. Perhaps this is why many breakthroughs come from creative outsiders who combine technologies generated by different specialties. [New York Times, Jun 13]

As Groucho Marx is reported to have said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them ... well, I have others.” Truly presidential.  [Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, Jun 13]  But politicians cannot maintain principles that conflict with their duty to represent their constituents. When the constituents shift, the representatives must either shift or convince the constituents to re-consider.

Big Oil is fundamentally mismatched to the project of developing alternative fuels. The corporate culture and core competence of oil companies favor large, centralized investments; these conglomerates are skilled at building massive structures and investing enormous amounts of capital in pursuit of oil. Biofuels, by contrast, depend on vast amounts of land and relatively small, labor-intensive production facilities that differ fundamentally from the engineering-dominated oil business. Even the largest corn ethanol plants are a fraction of the size of fossil-energy facilities, for the simple reason that the resource is dispersed and expensive to collect in one large central location. That's not the case with coal or oil or natural gas. For the same reasons, other forms of renewable energy -- those derived from the sun, wind and water-- are equally unsuited to Big Oil's talents. The industry's enthusiasm for new fuels is further dampened by the fact that it has more than $1 trillion sunk in oil wells, refineries, pipelines and service stations in the United States alone. [Deborah Gordon and Daniel Sperling, Washington Post, Jun 13]

the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. ... formed Grasshopper Group seven years ago to offer phone and voice mail services to start-up companies. Today, the Needham company has more than 100,000 clients and has started Grasshopper Labs, a unit focused on developing other products and services to help entrepreneurs expand their businesses. [Dave Copeland, Boston Globe, Jun 7]

Lab space continues to outperform other commercial real estate property categories in Greater Boston such as office and industrial buildings, according to a new report from Richards Barry Joyce & Partners, a Boston commercial real estate firm. Lab space is especially tight in Cambridge, which has emerged as a biotech hub, said the report, which is titled “bioSTATus – Summer 2010.”  [Boston Globe, May 26, 10]

Small firms continue to spend a disproportionate share of their revenues on research and development, says a new federal report that provides the most comprehensive review ever of how much U.S. companies invest in innovation on a global basis. ...  In 2008, firms with fewer than 500 employees garnered 11 percent of total worldwide sales for all U.S. companies, but accounted for 19 percent of research outlays.  .... The preliminary report is available at links.sfgate.com/ZJSR. [Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, May 27]

Money seeking entrepreneurs. Like their drug company counterparts, many device manufacturers have amassed more products than they can develop. Instead of fearing a backlash if a spinout turns into a success, they are starting to see non-priority products as an opportunity to create value for patients and themselves, some investors say.   [Brian Gormley, Wall Street Journal, May 26]

In 2004, the device was approved for use by the FDA. “We had a better mousetrap, but no business or marketing expertise,” Dr. Westbrook said.  But there also wasn’t a real market, until the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved reimbursement for home sleep-testing in 2008. ... That was when two young entrepreneurs, Sean Heyniger and Charles Alvarez, who had recently sold PDSHeart, a remote heart-monitoring company, to a larger corporation, were looking for another opportunity. They researched the sleep market and found Dr. Westbrook, who is now Watermark’s chief medical officer.   [Steve Lohr, New York Times, May 23]

As Brian Arthur argues in his book "The Nature of Technology," nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.)  [Matt Ridely, Wall Street Journal, May 22]

The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work.  ...  innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”. ... provides ample statistical evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures.  ... provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” ... Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour. [The Economist reviewing Ridley's The Rational Optimist, May 15]

As costs climbed in Taiwan two decades ago, Ben Fan moved his lighting factory to take advantage of China's cheap labor. Now, with Chinese wages on the rise, he's moving again. ...  Vietnam, where wages are $100 a month, one-third what he pays in China. .... Chinese workers today "want easy jobs and higher pay," says Fan. "We can give them that if we make more expensive, higher-margin products."  [Dexter Roberts, Bloomberg Business Week, May 13]  Just like SBIR companies want more money and easier jobs. The difference is that the government doesn't have a profit motive to drive the investment toward the highest total return. Mediocre is good enough.

"It has been easy to vilify business," the head of the Business Roundtable, John Castellani, said in a TV interview earlier this year. "That raises questions and that inhibits investment." The rhetoric has been harsh at times, for sure. But politicians have acute antennae when it comes to the public mood; they are more likely reflecting public anger than stirring it up. ...  It's like watching the emergency room doctors save the life of the drunk driver who just plowed into the car in which your family was riding. The only surprise? That Americans aren't even angrier. [David Wessel,

Big companies are back on the prowl for start-ups and the IPO market has improved, providing some relief to the battered venture-capital industry that invests in young firms. [Wall Street Journal, May 12]

The US manufacturing sector expanded at the fastest pace in nearly six years in April.   [Investor Guide Daily, May 3]

Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania said that its board of directors has given it the go-ahead to invest a little more than $2 million in eight early-stage companies.  [Philadelphia Business Journal, May 10]  None had SBIR.

New incubator programs have been forming in the U.S. at an annual rate of 8% to 10% for the past five years, and today there are approximately 1,200, estimates Tracy Kitts, vice president of the National Business Incubation Association, ....  commonly funded by economic-development groups, government entities and academic institutions, and more than half support start-ups in a mix of industries.  ...  Start-ups that live in incubators stay for an average of three years and most—close to 90%— survive for at least seven years after they leave, according to the NBIA. One reason for their high success rate is that the programs tend to have strong ties to investors seeking promising young ventures to support.   [Sarah Needleman, Wall Street Journal, May 11]

More imperfect technology.  The stock market plunged Thursday in a harrowing five-minute selloff that appeared to be triggered by a breakdown of trading systems.  [Wall Street Journal, May 7] Another fat tail: tiny event probability of massive damage.

For the 12-month period ending March 2010, Alabama lost 21,132 industrial jobs and 306 manufacturers, according to the 2010 Alabama Manufacturers Register, published by Manufacturers' News Inc (MNI). That's a drop of 6.8% for the 12-month period and, MNI notes, the sharpest decline in 20 years. Those figures symbolize the worries many manufacturing proponents voice over employment trends in the U.S. industrial sector. [Steve Minter, Industry Week, May 5]  Looking for innovations from SBIR as part of the solution? Not unless the federal agency incentives change dramatically.

Before he invented the telegraph in 1844, Samuel Morse conceived of the New York Journal of Commerce, published by Arthur and Lewis Tappan which has published continuously from 1827 to the present.   [Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, The Transformation of America 1815-1848, OUP 2007]

Drain America First and Spend Your Reserves.  increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous and peaceful nation [Sarah Palin, May 3]

Is more better?  "The idea that more research will reduce health care costs is a myth," simply unsupported by the evidence. ...  Therefore, [Callahan] concludes, the greater good requires imposing restraints on technological advance.   ...  Americans use more—and more expensive—medical technology than any other country on Earth but, at least until the age of 80, have lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes than citizens of many countries that use and spend much less.  [Beryl Lieff Benderly reviewing Taming the Beloved Beast How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System by Daniel Callahan, Science, Apr 30]

Austin's growing medical device industry ...  being driven by new money and new companies, as well as expansion by existing companies. At least two dozen medical device and health care technology companies have operations in Central Texas, according to the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. ...  economic development experts say Austin has the right ingredients to build a strong, sustainable industry. [Lori Hawkins, Austin American Statesman, Apr 25]

The newton, named after the physicist Isaac Newton, is approximately the force exerted by gravity on an apple at the Earth’s surface.[The Economist]

Let's make stuff.  Faced with economic armageddon, and recognizing the origins of the crisis in bloated finance and real estate sectors, American business leaders are cooling their long infatuation with “post-industrialism.” Manufacturing is suddenly all the rage. After forty years of outsourcing and globalization, business leaders are beginning to understand that real, self–sustaining American recovery and prosperity require a manufacturing base that is not only highly productive and innovative but is a much larger share of gross domestic product.  [Alan Tonelson, Harper's Jan 2010]  And make it in America cheap enough that we can sell it a profit after paying decent wages. If only.   Is that too many degrees of freedom for the modern world?

Nearer, my God, to Thee. Defense contractor NorthropGrumman will move its headquarters cross country [from LA] to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to be closer to its key customers in the U.S. government, officials said   [Wall Street Journal, Apr 27]

the current amoral Wall Street culture in which impersonal trading is more important than personal service to clients, and in which any product you can sell to some poor sucker is deemed to be admirable and O.K.  .... as is traditional in our culture, the elected leaders of the clueless establishment have summoned the leaders of Goldman Sachs to a hearing so they can have a post-hoc televised conniption fit on the amorality of Wall Street.   [David Brooks, New York Times, Apr 27]

The Party's Over. To keep the global economy on track, people in the United States and the rest of the developed world need to work longer before retiring, pay higher taxes and expect less from government. And the cheap imports lining the shelves of mega-chains such as Wal-Mart and Target? They need to be more expensive.    [Washington Post, Apr 24] In IMF-speak, "rebalancing and consolidation," which also means fewer government handouts.

American consumers are willing to spend on innovations — products that were unknown only a few years ago. ... [Steve]  Jobs is promising “several more extraordinary products” this year. ...  It is a long time since John Maynard Keynes predicted that human wants would be more or less satisfied, and that leisure would become the dominant fact of life in most advanced economies.  [Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, Apr 25]

human beings have relied on other stores of value at other times — things like gold, silver, commodities and real estate. After relying on paper assets for more than a century, he suggests, we may be revising our notions of safe ways to store wealth. If he's right, we're heading for what some will call an "asset quake."  [Scott Burns, Austin American Statesman, Apr 25]

These profits were justified, we were told, because the industry was doing great things for the economy. It was channeling capital to productive uses; it was spreading risk; it was enhancing financial stability. None of those were true. Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage. [Paul Krugman, New York Times, Apr 23]  When capital is directed to casino-like ends other than economic return, the inefficiency hurts the economy. $600 trillion in cross-wagers on defective mortgages would be untroublesome if its impact would be only on the  bettors in some zero-sum game. But when the casino bust brings down the economy, we need restraint.

Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth. We cannot go on living like this.  [Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, Apr 29]

Emerging countries are no longer content to be sources of cheap hands and low-cost brains. Instead they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation, producing breakthroughs in everything from telecoms to carmaking to health care. They are redesigning products to reduce costs not just by 10%, but by up to 90%. They are redesigning entire business processes to do things better and faster than their rivals in the West. Forget about flat—the world of business is turning upside down. [The Economist, Apr 15]

The Chinese economy grew at 11.9% in the first quarter from a year ago, underlining the rapid recovery from the global economic crisis but raising fresh questions about the risks of overheating.  [Financial Times, Apr 15] Maybe. We shouldn't trust figures published by a one-party country.

Capitalism Has a Price.   [Felix] Rohatyn sees cash-rich Chinese companies buying up sizable stakes of U.S. firms. "Control will go with capital," he says. "On both sides of the world, we need to think about this and how it might work. It's very, very delicate."  ... he became Wall Street's leading investment banker, and an embodiment of Camelot-era cool.  [Dennis Berman, Wall Street Journal, Apr 13]  No, government subsidy is not a stable economic arrangement. If we want a stable capitalism, any government subsidy has to be small and temporary. One well designed Phase II SBIR, for example, is enough to tell whether the company and technology have a competitive future.

After a five-year hiatus the Venture Out program, through the Pittsburgh Technology Council, is coming back to the area to offer would be entrepreneurs a collaborative environment to seek networking and advice. ...  Pete DeComo, chairman and CEO of ALung Technologies Inc., said he attended a Venture Out event in 2001 when he first returned to Pittsburgh to start his previous company Renal Solutions Inc. He told the crowd that the connections he made through the local organizations were instrumental the eventual sale of Renal Solutions for $200 million in 2007. [Malai Spencer, Pittsburgh Business Times, Apr 1] No SBIR

The 204th birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built early railroads, bridges, tunnels, the first steamships and efficient steam engines, and the first iron propeller-driven ship.   [The Telegraph, Apr 9]

remember George Eliot’s image — that life is like playing chess with chessmen who each have thoughts and feelings and motives of their own. It is complex beyond reckoning. [David Brooks, New York Times, Apr 9]

For much of man's history, the best way to forecast the weather was to look outside. But that all changed on April 1, 1960 -- exactly 50 years ago to the day -- when the world's first weather satellite lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla. [WJ Hennigan, LA Times, Apr 1]

Recycling Dollars.  Chinese and U.S. officials and trade groups note growing interest among potential Chinese investors over the last 24 months, with oversubscribed attendance at investment fairs, increasing numbers of inquiries concerning U.S. investment opportunities, and more delegations visiting the U.S.  The trend could bring much-needed jobs and investments to states hit by the recession, and they are pulling out all the stops to attract Chinese investment. That includes opening offices in China, offering preferential tax policies and hosting Chinese delegations. ... Still, China accounts for only a sliver of overall foreign direct investment in the U.S.  ...  Rising labor costs in China are squeezing his companies' profits, he says, and Maryland offers an opportunity to tap new capital and innovations.   [Kathy Chen, Wall Street Journal, Apr 6]

Pioneer Passes. jcr writes "CNET and the Huffington Post both report the death of Henry Edward Roberts, best known to all of us as the inventor of the Altair computer, at the age of 68 from pneumonia. As it happens, I never got to use an Altair, but I did meet Ed once, back in the mid-1980s. Since that time, I've never referred to the Altair bus as the 'S100' bus, since I agree with him that an inventor is entitled to name his invention."  [slashdot.org, Apr 1]

Dangerous R&D. A former Pfizer scientist who claims that she has been paralyzed by inadvertent exposure to a virus engineered at the pharmaceutical company's laboratories in Groton was awarded $1.37 million Thursday by a federal jury in Hartford following a trial that raised questions about safety practices in the dynamic field of genetic engineering. [Edmund Mahony, Hartford Courant, Apr 2]  plus punitive damages TBD

Technology makes losers, too.  Elliott Bay Book Co. rang up its last customer in Pioneer Square, Seattle. ... founded 1973. [Melissa Allison, Seattle Times, Apr 1]  All the blather about high tech and job creation conveniently ignores the net gain or loss. After all, advocacy, especially in politics, is a one-way street. And in SBIR advocacy, most of the job talk is fantasy and creative accounting. 

General Electric Co.’s plan to establish a research and development center in the Dayton area for electric power systems for planes, ships and hybrid automobiles is an important step, industry analysts said.  .... It initially would employ 10 to 15 people, but that eventually could increase to 100 to 300 people if the company’s Electrical Power Systems unit approaches its goal of doubling annual sales to $700 million by 2019. [John Nolan, Dayton Daily News, Mar 31]  The presence of a large company R&D is a key requirement for a tech based economy with lots of small business innovation. If government tech enrichment programs are to succeed, they have to abandon the fair-share for the fly-over states mentality and invest in firms and ideas that can exploit tech success and get the qualified workers that progress needs. Otherwise, it is just funding life-style companies for votes.

Net Gain 0.33% The Kauffman Foundation sponsored a study recently to look at the source of job growth in the United States since 1980. The conclusion is remarkable, or at least I believe it to be. Since 1980 until the recession, all net new jobs—net meaning gross jobs minus layoffs — have been created by firms under five years old. Think about that. That means all existing firms as of 1980 have not increased their employment since that year. In fact, if anything, the firms that existed in 1980, as a group, have lost employees. Using these data, we have made a rough estimate that at least 1/3 percent of our employment and a somewhat smaller fraction of our GDP since 1980 is due to young new firms that have since grown. [Robert Litan, Innovation and the World Economy, Dec 09]

John Tamny, the editor of RealClearMarkets.com, a Forbes.com columnist and a monetarist in the fashion of Milton Friedman, thinks GDP is a flawed number. It's expressed in an unreliable measure--the U.S. dollar. Expressed in gold, GDP has been contracting for eight years. Richard Koo, chief economist for Nomura Research Institute, says the U.S. is in a balance sheet recession, marked by deflation and deleveraging that will crimp investing and spending for a decade or more. Look at Japan to see what could await the U.S., says Koo. ...  But wait, it gets worse. Harvard financial historian and author Niall Ferguson says debt-laden America is past its glory but will try to mask its decline by inflating away its debt problems. [Rich Karlgaard, Forbes, Apr 12] If the federal government is going to pretend it is helping grow new technology, it will have to ignore the pabulum of the SBIR advocates and re-invent SBIR to push the little money to companies with real prospects for big economic growth. But, unfortunately, Congress runs on pabulum and conventional wisdom with little knowledge of how to find and invest in the right firms and ideas. Which is why it needs a new paradigm.

Innovation Dividend - Unemployment. firms are now able to wring more productivity out of their workers ... Bureau of Labour Statistics reported fourth-quarter labour-productivity growth of 6.9%, after increases of 7.6% and 7.8% in the previous two quarters. That amounts to one of the strongest nine-month productivity performances America has notched up in the post-war period. [The Economist, Mar 13]

Whom are you kidding? says Harvard-trained minister.  "You're not going to get 1.3 billion Chinese to change by insulting them," he said  ... "That production isn't going to return to America, that's just not practical," he said. "Globalization has changed all that."  ... "We're a nation of 1.3 billion people. We graduate 7 million university students a year. We'll either make it ourselves or buy it from somewhere else," he said. ...  [Obama] said he wants exports to double in five years, but I don't know whom he is going to sell them to."     [John Pomfret, Washington Post, Mar 22] Respect any spokesperson who knows when to use "whom" and represents 1.3 billion people.

The new chief of Europe's top science policy office says she's "passionate" about using research and innovation to spur economic development and push governments to invest 3% of their gross domestic product on science. Ireland's Máire Geoghegan-Quinn thinks that not being a scientist may actually help her to "break down the barriers" to gaining greater public support.  [Science, Feb 19]

R&D Amid the Customers.  Companies — and their engineers — are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. ...  The country is also the biggest market for desktop computers and has the most Internet users. Intel has opened research labs in Beijing for semiconductors and server networks.  ...   the new Applied Materials complex here is the only research center that can fit an entire solar panel assembly line. [Keith Bradsher, Wall Street Journal, Mar 17]

A newly created economic innovation index [by Public Policy Forum, a nonprofit research group based in Milwaukee] has found that metro Milwaukee lags on many crucial metrics, including university research spending, business start-ups, generation of patents and the region's population of educated workers.  [John Schmid, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Mar 18]

Every company got two minutes to present Monday; the list was cut to 12 for Tuesday's final program.  More than 200 companies applied for a spot at Accelerator, which awarded winners in four categories. Winners receive an Xbox video game console from Microsoft, a hard drive from Seagate Technology, and legal and consulting services. [Lori Hawkins, Austin American-Statesman, Mar 17]

Biofuel Breakthrough of the Week. two Danish companies Genencor and Novozyme, [with different cost-cutting enzymes]  announced they had developed enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose into ethanol cheaply enough to produce $2-a-gallon gas. [Stewart Fox, Popular Science, Mar 17, 10]

Capital Factory, the tech incubator launched last year by a group of Austin entrepreneurs, has put out a call for startups for its 2010 program. Five companies will be chosen for the intensive mentoring program. In exchange for a 5 percent stake in each startup, Capital Factory will provide up to $20,000 in investment; in-kind services, including office space, legal counseling and public relations support; mentoring by Austin tech executives; and a 10-week summer boot camp. [Austin American-Statesman, Mar 12]

A handful of cash-rich companies are consolidating power in the technology industry, using their wealth to expand into new businesses and making it harder for small and midsize competitors to break through. Why the industry is evolving this way is rooted in balance sheets. Over the past two years, Apple, Oracle, Google, Microsoft and six other large tech companies have generated $68.5 billion in new cash, compared with just $13.5 billion for the other 65 tech companies in the S&P 500 Index combined, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data provided by Capital IQ.

The Big Short.  They "had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now they saw there was not."  [Steven Pearlstein reviewing Michael Lewis's THE BIG SHORT , Washington Post, Mar 14] The financial system is like SBIR - no adult in charge, only competing self-interests.

If You Were the Banker, Would You ...?  "Banks won't lend to businesses because they're afraid they'll go bad, but that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy."  The dearth of credit for small businesses could have a big effect on prospects for restoring the 8.4 million jobs lost since the recession began. From 1992 through the beginning of the latest recession, companies with fewer than 100 employees accounted for about 45% of net job growth, according to Labor Department data.  [Mark Whitehouse, Wall Street Journal, Mar 15]  The old saw says that bankers only want to lend to people who don't need a loan.

[IBM] Researchers are claiming an important advance that could change the way computer chips communicate, sharply boosting speed while lowering energy consumption. The goal is to use pulses of light rather than copper wires to exchange information between chips—and to build the needed components out of silicon rather than costly, esoteric materials. IBM's advance involves a key component called an avalanche photodetector, which converts light into electricity. The researchers say they used silicon and the element germanium to create a photodetector that is among the fastest and least power-hungry of its kind. They are publishing their findings in the scientific journal Nature.  [Paul Glader and Don Clark, Wall Street Journal, Mar 4]

strredwolf writes "Caltech has released a flexible solar array that converts 95% of single-wavelength incandescent light and 86% of all sunlight into electricity. Instead of being flat-panel, they stand thin silicon wires in a plastic substrate that scatters the light onto them. The total composition is 98% plastic, 2% wire — the amount of silicon used is 1/50th that of ordinary panels. So as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." [slashdot.org, Mar 1]

Revival in Tech Valley.  Applied Materials reported another quarterly profit and a 39% jump in revenue, as the Silicon Valley company continues to rebound from a steep slump affecting makers of computer chips. [Wall Street Journal, Feb 18]

much of the cutting-edge research and development in key areas such as renewable energy now takes place outside the United States. There's a real chance that the "green Silicon Valley" will take root in Germany or China. We can't afford to let that happen.  ... Show me a program with a 100 percent success rate, and I'll show you one with 0 percent innovation.  [Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WaPo, Feb 9] One serious problem with DOD and NASA SBIR, the Innovation seeks too much certainty. But then those mission agencies have no incentive to foster US innovation for economic progress. And a politically paralyzed Congress is in no shape to remake anything.

Josh Lerner has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. [SSTI, Feb 16]

The strengths of a region once known as the "machine shop to the world" helped set it apart from nearly 80 other cities considered by Spain's Ingeteam, which announced it will open its first U.S. factory in Milwaukee [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Feb 17]

If the US is to stop losing ground against other mature and developing economies, it is going to have to put money to work more effectively. We are still the leaders in technology and scientific research and we must continue to take advantage of the commercial possibilities of innovation.  ...  but in the first decade of this century capital productivity declined seriously ..  by the end of the decade it took six dollars of capital to produce a dollar of growth. The return on that would only be 5 per cent and few would put money at risk for that reward    [Byron Wein, Financial Times, Feb 16]  Just one more reason for government programs like SBIR to focus on serious capital investment in technology with a future.

Fear and overwork. productivity is soaring. The reading of better than 8 per cent growth is the highest in decades. Rather than applaud the efficiency of the American worker one should wonder if the numbers are too good. Are workers being driven to the point of exhaustion? There’s no sign that anyone’s complaining. Wage rates are barely increasing. Most of us with jobs are glad to have them and aren’t willing to make any waves. How much longer can this go on? Not much longer [Byron Wein, Financial Times, Feb 16]

Incubate elsewhere.   Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is closing its business incubation center, ending a program that helped develop some of the area’s most successful pharmaceutical, software and video game companies.  The school is phasing out its 30-year-old incubator by the end of the month and plans to replace it with a new virtual program focused on energy and environmental products, services and start-up companies. Rensselaer’s decision leaves its remaining 13 tenants scrambling to find new space off campus to ensure their businesses are not interrupted. [The Business Review (Albany), Feb 5]

Silicon Valley's economy took a big hit during the global meltdown and could have trouble climbing out, ... The 2010 Index of Silicon Valley said the region is entering a "new phase of uncertainty" where job losses, a shrinking foreign talent pool, a drop in investments and state legislative gridlock could put its standing as the center of technology at risk.  [Brooke Donald, AP, Feb 10]

Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Denniston advocated greater spending on green energy. "We can continue business as usual, and we'll be buying windmills from Europe, batteries from Japan and solar panels from China,"  ... Roger Martin, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, denounced what he called the self-serving myth that this nation lags in engineering and science. He said the key to creative thinking is the study of literature, history and other liberal arts.  We seem to be headed to a world where we're ever-exalting analytic thinking over creativity," Martin said. "If anyone here thinks we're going to fend off the challenge from India and China by being more analytical, then I have one thing to say to you: Good luck." [John Murawski, Raleigh News & Observer, Feb 9] reporting on Raleigh's Emerging Issues Forum

Banks say they are beating the bushes to find small companies that want to borrow, but can find few takers. [Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, Feb 7] Naturally, all observers with a political stem cell have an explanation that reinforces their own political opinions.

indispensable capitalist partner. China said it issued a record number of patents in 2009, [up 41% from a year earlier] but concerns are growing that new patent regulations and other initiatives may damp that growth. [Wall Street Journal, Feb 4]  Everybody worries about regulation.  The Chinese revitalization of Asian capitalism remains the most important positive event in the world in the last 30 years. Not only did it release a billion people from penury and oppression but it transformed China from a communist enemy of the U.S. into a now indispensable capitalist partner.  [George Gilder, Wall Street Journal, Feb 5]

eldavojohn writes "MIT researchers have built and demonstrated the first room-temperature germanium laser that can produce light at wavelengths suited for communication. This achievement has two parts: '[U]nlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data — and maybe even perform calculations — using light instead of electricity. But more fundamentally, the researchers have shown that, contrary to prior belief, a class of materials called indirect-band-gap semiconductors can yield practical lasers.' While these are only the initial steps in what may become optical computing devices, the article paints it as very promising. The painful details will be published in the journal Optics Letters."  [slashdot.org, Feb 5]

Business spending on technology goods and services is returning as the economy mends, pumping new life into suppliers such as Cisco, though it has been slower to reach other sectors. ... "This is one of the most robust positive turnarounds I've seen in my career," [Cisco CEO Chambers] added  [B Worthen and D Clark, Wall Street Journal, Feb 4]

Pfizer said that it plans to cut R&D spending by as much as $3 billion by 2012, in an attempt to wring efficiencies following its take-over of Wyeth without sacrificing future product development. [Wall Street Journal, Feb 4]

Nice Technology, Little Market. Martin Marietta Composites said it is closing its plant in Sparta [NC] that makes pedestrian bridge decks, commercial truck trailers and blast resistant panels. Chief financial officer Anne Lloyd says the company is dropping the product line because of a lack of demand. [AP, Feb 3]

America's industrial base is undergoing its most radical restructuring in decades as manufacturers rethink their businesses in the wake of the recession. ... shift away from heavy sectors, such as automobiles and basic chemicals, toward higher-tech products like super-fast computer chips. In some cases, as with auto makers, companies are stripping down to adjust to diminished U.S. demand or investing in smaller, more-efficient facilities.  [Mark Whitehouse, Wall Street Journal, Feb 3] Part of the solution is higher labor productivity which usually means capital investment in more efficient operation which also usually means improved technology.  A great objective for an innovative tech R&D program.  SBIR could be be such program if it could focus its energy on technology and companies with a future instead of spending a vast share on incremental technology useful only to government.   Of course a huge portion of the Republican supporters "know" that the problem is labor unions. They want cheaper and easily expendable labor which would lower their costs without raising productivity. In the need, that would do nothing other than reduce average wages and the national standard of living. Nor would it make a great difference since only 12% of manufacturing labor is unionized and only 7% for the private sector overall, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Shrinking Cradle. A study by the Shenzhen Academy of Social Sciences ... shows a precipitous drop in the fraction of the population involved in starting new businesses, from 12% in 2004 to 5% in 2009. .... Many laws have been enacted to protect workers and the environment, making it more costly and complex to start a business. As factories have moved away, so has low-skilled labour. ... Only 9% of the respondents said the technology they hoped to use in their new venture was truly innovative—less than one year old. [The Economist, Jan 23]

Good news is bad news. Stocks turned lower at the end of a disappointing January as investors questioned the economy's ability to sustain a big fourth-quarter growth rate. [AP, Jan 29]

When priced in gold, the US stock market has been in a bear market for the entire 21st century [Chart of the Day, Jan 29] 9 oz today vs. 45 oz in 1999.

BioTech Maturing. Ten years ago, big biotechnology stocks were at an age when anything seemed possible. Investors believed the companies would make their wildest dreams come true. These days, youthful exuberance has given way to middle-aged cynicism. Price-earnings multiples of major biotech firms, once in triple digits, recently slipped below the S&P 500 average for the first time.  ... And they already have learned acquisitions are no miracle cure. As biotech firms start to suffer from big pharma's ailments, they might simply have to accept lower valuations.  [John Jannerone, Wall Street Journal, Jan 29]

While the appetite for bandwidth increases, the network investment to provide it is not keeping pace. Similarly, semiconductor chip sizes continue to shrink, but investment in the new equipment to make smaller chips has fallen. According to Gartner Group, global semiconductor industry capital spending declined 32% in 2008 to $31 billion and further declined an estimated 43% in 2009. ... Confidence is returning to our economy. I expect 2010 to be a very good year for tech stocks, despite the run-up we saw in 2009. In particular, I'm betting on companies building the latest-generation semiconductors or facilitating greater network bandwidth. Gartner Group predicts capital spending in the chip business will increase 45% in 2009. [Jim Oberweis,  Forbes, Feb 8]

Love that lithium.  A key supplier of Toyota moved to secure a long-term source of lithium in Argentina, in one of the first global natural-resource plays of the electric-car age. ... secured low-cost loans from the Japanese government to take a stake in a lithium project that could begin commercial production by 2012. ... Japanese electronics makers already control a majority of the lithium-ion battery market for electronic devices such as laptop computers. [Ann Davis and Daisuke Wakabayashi, Wall Street Journal, Jan 20, 10]

last June, the company, which specializes in automated teller machines and other self-service devices, announced a “major investment in innovation and people,” though not the people of Dayton. NCR stunned the city of its birth with the news that it was moving its world headquarters to suburban Atlanta. ...  And attracting top talent was a struggle, he said. “We had a very difficult time recruiting people to live and work in Dayton.” ... in 2005, when its new C.E.O., Mr. Nuti, did not move to Dayton as was initially required by his contract. ... While civic leaders did not expect Mr. Nuti to make the Monday meetings of the Rotary Club, they soon came to see him as a brash New Yorker harboring disdain for the modest Midwest.  [Dan Barry, New York Times, Jan 24]  Should a gaining city trust the word or even a contract from an economic emigrant?

A new survey of small and mid-sized businesses in New England found that 42 percent of respondents are planning to make new hires this year, compared with 29 percent last year. [Boston Globe, Jan 21]

In intellectual terms, as Robert Skidelsky writes, the global financial crisis marked the collapse of the “efficient market hypothesis”, which said economic actors behave rationally and markets efficiently. In fact, the world discovered (again) that economic actors can behave irrationally and markets can be anything but efficient. [Lionel Barber, Financial Times, Dec 14] The inefficiencies, real or imagined, make a convenient basis for political meddling in the name of "market failure" in handout programs like SBIR that help buy votes from beneficiaries.

in search of a problem. It's hard to recall just how much hype surrounded the Segway when it was introduced in 2001. Some of the biggest names in tech predicted it would change the world. They were wrong. And as the company was quietly sold [to a British investor] last week, it was somehow comforting that even the best get it wrong sometimes. ...  "With a price tag that started around $5,000, the Segway PT pretty much doomed itself to a niche market: rich guys who aren't afraid to embarrass themselves in public."  ...  a classic case of a product in search of a problem  [Chris O'Brien, San Jose Mercury News, Jan 17, 10]

Over half the world's equity capital is now outside the U.S., and that fraction is growing. For the S&P 500, 40% to 50% of profits and revenues come from foreign sales, and that fraction will be rising.  [Jeremy Siegel, Fortune, Jan 10]

The U.S. remains the world's science and technology leader, but other countries are gaining ground, the National Science Board said ... nearly a third of $1.1 trillion spent on research and development globally in 2007, minted more science and engineering doctorates than any other country, and led the world in innovative activity ... awarded 22,500 doctorates in natural sciences and engineering in 2007, but more than half of them were awarded to foreign nationals ... 49% of patents granted, down from 55% in 1995 [Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal, Jan 16]

Worry about record profits. While Intel reported its most profitable quarter ever, analysts raised concerns about the coming year. Morgan Stanley said a peak quarter for Intel often puts an end to a chip-sector rally. [Wall Street Journal, Jan 16]

Japan is a poster child for the Great Reckoning. Asia's biggest economy has little to show for the 30 trillion yen ($329 billion) that the government has pumped into it since late 2008. Unemployment, already at a near-record 5.2%, is edging higher. Meanwhile, deflation is intensifying, wages are stagnant, and worried households are saving more and spending less. Worse, Japan's population is aging rapidly, reducing the tax base and raising social costs. [William Pesek, Business Week.com, Jan 14] For those advocating more government "investment" in their technology hobbies, the government can't afford it, particularly since it is hard to discern a definite payback for the R&D dollars already spent in an act of continuing faith.

China has replaced Germany as the world’s largest exporter. And it plans to continue feeding its products into world markets in increasing quantities so as to provide jobs for a workforce that is already sullen, and just might become mutinous. [Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, Jan 17]  And what has SBIR done to foster economic vitality that would contribute to America's competitiveness? Not a lot by any respectable economic measure. After all, why should a mission agency of the USG care about economics when there is no payoff to the agency for success?

At about this time last year, Intel’s board decided to invest $7 billion in new chip plants in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. ... a matter of faith — in an economic recovery and in the Internet continuing to drive a long-term increase in demand for computers, smartphones and other devices with chips inside. ... Today, Intel’s bet on the future is looking as if it will pay off big. ... Just as it has in past downturns, Intel has used its hefty pile of cash to advance its manufacturing prowess and technology while rival chip makers have struggled to stay afloat.  [Ashlee Vance, New York Times, Jan 15]

Demand creates supply.  An exchange at a financial hearing in Washington laid bare a truth about Wall Street: if there’s a buyer, no matter how sophisticated, there’s a seller. [AR Sorkin, New York Times, Jan 14]

Where's the cure? The pool of money for medical experiments is tight, which will affect the development of drugs, devices and other treatments. ... a [new] study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that the rate of increase in funding for biomedical research in the United States has slowed since 2005. ...  researchers are finding the competition for NIH grants especially fierce. [Janet Moore, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jan 13] Send more money?  From where? The tea-party demands less government finance although they can't agree just what that means in detail no matter how great it sounds in the abstract. Of course the tea-party  sees waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere except in the programs they champion, perhaps like more NIH research. More spending for us, less wasteful spending for "them", and no taxes to pay for anything. Where's the financial cure when we need it?

IBM researchers received 4,914 U.S. patents in 2009, more than any other company for the 17th straight year. ..  about 50 percent more than in 2004 [Austin American Statesman, Jan 13, 10]

350th Birthday. The first fellows of the Royal Society, as it is now known, were followers of Sir Francis Bacon, a 17th-century statesman and philosopher who argued that knowledge could be gained by testing ideas through experiments. ..  they invented the processes on which modern science rests, including scientific publishing and peer review, and made English the primary language of scientific discourse. [The Economist, Jan 9, 10]

Detroit Incubator. At five years old and covering a city block, the [Wayne State U] incubator, known as TechTown, describes itself as an “entrepreneurial school” that provides space for emerging businesses to grow. It houses 150 start-ups in areas like education, the creative arts and environmental sciences. ... “This is a city that is used to making things,” said Randal Charlton, TechTown’s executive director. [Susan Saulny, New York Times, Jan 10]

The investment arms of large Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers have created an investment network in Silicon Valley operating under the radar that pumps money into a variety of chip, software and services companies to gain the latest technology. As a result, some Asian manufacturers have proved more willing than entrenched Silicon Valley venture capitalists to back some risky endeavors.  [Ashlee Vance, New York Times, Jan 10] And what are the SBIR advocates doing about the competitive rise of Asian capital in US innovation? Practically nothing, pretending that any SBIR is better than no SBIR while making no constructive suggestions about how it could be structured to target real entrepreneurs. 

Genius and Opportunist? a passionate book that raises important moral questions ... focuses on the social and political context in Germany in order to illuminate the choices von Braun made. ..  Biddle argues that German rocketry was a form of technological Romanticism with strong cultural connections to right-wing politics. The United States, like the Soviet Union, built on what Germany had done. Did it inherit more than the technology?  [David Holloway reviewing Biddle's Dark Side of the Moon, New York Times, Jan 10]

users may quickly adopt an individual technology to replace existing devices, whereas new domains are "encountered" by potential users who must try to understand them, figure out how to use them, determine whether they are worthwhile, and create applications for them. Meanwhile, those developing the new domains must improve the tools in the toolbox and invent the "missing pieces" necessary for new applications. All this "normally takes decades," Arthur says. "It is a very, very slow process."  [David Rotman reviewing WB Arthur's The Nature of Technology, MIT Tech Review, J/F10]

I don't put much stock in predictions about the inherently unknowable future, such as the direction of stock prices and interest rates. No one consistently gets it right   [James Stuart, Wall Street Journal, Jan 6] 

Repurposed.  the home of one of the world’s biggest biotechnology hubs is also one of the greatest stores of high-tech hand-me-downs. It’s well known that the region’s universities and brainpower, and the flow of millions of dollars of investments, foster the vibrant life sciences community. But so do its failures. ... their discarded equipment - the incubators, robotic liquid handlers, and centrifuges that used to be working on the next big thing - is being repurposed for the next, next big thing.  [Carolyn Johnson, Boston Globe, Jan 4]

The economic downturn has dimmed many entrepreneurs' hopes of opening a small business, as sources of funding have dwindled or dried up completely. And while many hope 2010 will be better, the outlook continues to be bleak. ...  professional investors, stung by the financial meltdown, are meting out fewer capital infusions. ... Venture capitalists, too, are continuing to invest, but typically in later-stage companies already in their portfolios rather than new prospects  [Colleen Debaise, Wall Street Journal, Jan 5]

[Nobel economist Stieglitz] launched into a blistering attack on fellow economists for building models that rely on rational behavior when the financial crisis offers so much evidence of irrationality. [Wall Street Journal, Jan 4]

Norway's dirtiest hospitals are actually cleaner than most other countries', and the reason for this is that Norwegians stopped taking antibiotics ... the most MRSA free country in the world. In a country like Japan, where 17,000 die from MRSA every year, 'doctors overprescribe antibiotics because they are given financial incentives to push drugs on patients.'" [slashdot.org, Jan 3, 10]

Need Nd?  Western countries risk running out of supplies of certain highly sought-after rare metals that are vital to a host of green technologies, amid growing evidence that China, which has a monopoly on global production [whose mines account for 97 per cent of global supplies.. Nearly all of China's supply of rare earths comes from a single mine near the city of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia], is set to choke off exports of valuable compounds.   ... a market solution:  European and North American companies are meanwhile racing to open or re-open mines in Canada, South Africa and Greenland amid calls in the US for government-backed loans to secure supplies of some REEs which are used in the guidance systems of missiles and laser-guided munitions. [Cahal Milmo, The Independent, Jan 2, 10]

-----------  2010 --------------

Bubble Hangover. For stock investors, it was an especially grim 10-year span. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index (closely watched year after year here in tech-heavy Silicon Valley) was down a staggering 44.2 percent. (The Nasdaq, you might recall, and we're not at all bitter about it, peaked in March 2000 above 5,000 thanks to investors' mania over dot-com and other high-flying tech stocks.) ... For the year 2009, the Nasdaq gained 43.9 percent  [Frank Russell, San Jose Mercury News, Dec 31]

Waltham, MA, archetypical American industrial town that looked as if they were doomed a generation ago. But Waltham is now booming thanks to its proximity to the great idea factories of Cambridge and Boston. The city is home to dozens of high-tech and venture capital firms and houses the headquarters of Global Insight, a consultancy that sells a billion dollars of economic analysis a year to American companies  [Adrian Woolridge, reviewing Easterbrooks's Sonic Boom, Wall Street Journal, Dec 29]

U.S. investment in [R&D] is expected to rebound slightly next year as the economy gradually improves. Next year, after accounting for inflation, total U.S. spending on R&D is forecast to rise 1.7% [says]Battelle Memorial Institute, ..In 2009, U.S. spending on R&D fell about 3.8% after accounting for inflation, the first annual decline since 2002.  [Wall Street Journal, Dec 22]

Companies want more bang from their research buck. Executives are under pressure to cut costs, but need innovative products to fuel post-recession growth. So many are protecting research spending, but scrutinizing projects more carefully and reordering priorities to favor high-potential markets like Asia and health care.  .... Intel learned from a misstep in the 1970s not to skimp on R&D spending to manage costs. [Dana Mattoli, Wall Street Journal, Nov 30]

2010 is not the best year to go all-in [investing] on an industrial renaissance. There is still massive overcapacity in manufacturing in the U.S. despite plant shutdowns and layoffs. China made its own excess of productive capacity worse when it staved off an economic slump by building plants, equipment, infrastructure, and housing. [Peter Coy, BusinessWeek.com, Dec 17]  No matter; American manufacturing is still holy for politicians and they will keep pushing government programs to foster manufacturing [especially in their electorates] without much regard to world competitiveness and capacity.

For the first time in 2009, non-Americans were granted more U.S. patents than resident inventors, accounting for 50.7% of new grants, according to recent data from the Patent & Trademark Office. Moreover, for only the second time in the last 25 years, patent applications fell overall in the year ended Sept. 30....  The shift reflects in part moves by U.S.-based companies to offshore R&D.  [Michael Arndt, BusinessWeek.com, Dec 17]  Could SBIR help? Not the way it is currently managed with the big money agencies free to look solely to their own interests in which patents and American competitivness play no part. Innovation, patents, and economic gain need a focus on new and different and potentially disruptive, not on safe incremental development.

No one has built a new semiconductor plant in Oregon in six years, and there aren't any on the drawing board. The chip industry has largely shifted overseas and Oregon has lost a third of all its high-tech manufacturing jobs since the industry's peak early in 2001 [Mike Rogoway, The Oregonian, Dec 17]

One of Evergreen Solar’s top executives, vice president of finance Mark Fidler, told investors last week that all of the solar system maker’s future expansion will be in China to make the company more cost competitive with Asian solar companies. [Mass High Tech, Dec 10, 09]

In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says.  [David Leonhardt, New York Times, Dec 16]

Regardless of the dollar price involved, one ounce of gold would purchase a good-quality man's suit at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and today." - Peter A. Burshre

Both Microsoft and Google are hoping to entice scientists by offering cloud services tailored for scientific experimentation. Examples include Worldwide Telescope from Microsoft and Google Sky, intended to make a range of astronomical data available to all.  ... In essence, computational power created computational science, which produced the overwhelming flow of data, which now requires a computing change. It is a positive feedback loop in which the data stream becomes the data flood and sculptures a new computing landscape. [John Markoff reviewing The Fourth Paradigm by MSFT researchers, New York Times, Dec 15]

when your product is breaking new ground. Bo Fishback, of the Kauffman Foundation, a group dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs, [says] three steps. First, sit down with 10 potential customers and talk to them about the problem their business will untangle, to see whether they respond positively. Second,  assembling a wish list of 10 people who could make you successful—professional investors, role models with successful businesses or potential partners—and contacting them for tangible support. Third, put together an advisory board of people who have been down a similar path. [Dyan Machan, smartmoney.com, Dec 11]

newscloud writes "Tech writer Glenn Fleishman compares the arguments against affordable, high speed, broadband Internet access in each home to arguments made against providing for common access to electricity in 1900 e.g. "...electric light is not a necessity for every member of the community. It Is not the business of any one to see that I use electricity, or gas, or oil in my house, or even that I use any form of artificial light at all." Says Fleishman, "Electricity should go to people who had money, not hooked up willy-nilly to everyone...Like electricity, the notion of whether broadband is an inherent right and necessity of every citizen is up for grabs in the US. Sweden and Finland have already answered the question: It’s a birthright" " [slashdot.org]

After months of hunkering down, some small companies are finding themselves ill-prepared for upticks in business. Many are short on cash or lacking lines of credit; others have eliminated staff positions or gotten rusty at networking or hustling potential clients. [Emily Maltby, Wall Street Journal, Dec 8]

Capital is not Charity.  Myth No. 2: "I am going to retain control of my company." Entrepreneurs who are overly concerned about control will need to find a path to success other than venture capital.  [David Young, entrepreneur.com, Dec 1]  Good News: the government doesn't want any equity for its SBIR "investment"; Bad News: neither does it care whether you survive after your contract/grant.

Want Small Biz Job Creation?  First, we want to make it easier for science & technology graduates to stay in the country and create companies. Second, we argue that the U.S. needs to drive job creation by opening up and making it easier for small, growing companies around the world to relocate to this country. Given the fundamental role that Kauffman research shows that young companies have on job creation, both would have be big steps towards creating a more entrepreneurial U.S. economy with more jobs. [Paul Kedrosky, growthology.org, Dec 2]  Import entrepreneurs who have to sink or swim without government subsidies.  They would find here the world's largest internal market, oodles of venture money, a flexible and mobile labor market, and an enterepreneuring climate.

Myth: The best way to create companies that provide jobs and wealth is to encourage business creation of any kind. ... There is little relationship between places with high rates of firm formation and high shares of high-growth companies. Moreover, a large portion of high-growth companies are older ventures. [Scott Shane, businessweek.com, Dec 4] Not to worry, though, the politicians love myths because they don't have to contradict what most voters believe.

Find a Great Partner. Although the telegraph had been pioneered by Samuel Morse in the 1840s, the innovation didn’t really take off, economically speaking, until it partnered with the railroads, at which point it became the Victorian era’s version of our information superhighway. –“How Robber Barons hijacked the ‘Victorian Internet,’” Matthew Lasar, Ars Technica [Harper's magazine.com]

While fast-growing companies have long been the main source of new jobs and innovation, this country makes it outrageously difficult for immigrants to launch new companies here. ...  Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.  ...  rather than saying "Come and create jobs here" we, in effect, tell them to shove off. Come back when you have a few million in sales— at which point they will be rooted elsewhere and creating jobs somewhere else. [Paul Kedrosky & Brad Feld, Wall Street Journal, Dec 2]

Powerful Adopters. China's government declared two strains of genetically modified rice safe to produce and consume, taking a major step toward endorsing the use of biotechnology in the staple food crop of billions of people in Asia. ... the world's top producer and consumer of rice  [Andrew Batson & James Areddy, Wall Street Journal, Dec 1]

Efficiency and Profitability Matter.  Amid a world over-capacity, US steelmakers are shutting down plants that were spared in earlier recessions, looking to create a smaller, more efficient industry.  Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs upgraded the steel sector to attractive  [Wall Street Journal, Dec 1]

“Small-company activity according to the N.F.I.B. is still at deep recession levels.” ... they do contribute significantly to the overall economy. The tens of millions of people who work at small concerns are, after all, customers of those big, high-profile corporations like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Whirlpool. [Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times, Nov 29]

"Regardless of the dollar price involved, one ounce of gold would purchase a good-quality man's suit at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and today." - Peter A. Burshre  [thanks to Chart of the Day]

DeCode Genetics  (Iceland) , a pioneering company that used the Icelandic population as its guinea pigs in detecting disease-causing mutations, filed for bankruptcy. .. suggests that the medical promise of the human genome may take much longer to be fulfilled than its sponsors had hoped. ..  Whatever business errors deCode may have made, a principal reason for its downfall is scientific — the genetic nature of human disease has turned out to be far more complex than thought.   [Nicholas Wade, New York Times, Nov 17]

U.S. entrepreneurship has been fed by a science, technology, and innovation machine that remains by far the best in the world. While other countries increase their spending on research and development, the U.S. remains uniquely good at coaxing innovation out of its research and translating those innovations into commercial products. In 2007, American inventors registered about 80,000 patents in the U.S. patent system, where virtually all important technologies developed in any nation are patented. That's more than the rest of the world combined. ...  and  the U.S. has benefited historically from the deepest and most efficient capital markets of any nation, especially for risk capital. Only in America can young people raise millions, lose it all, and return to start another company.  [Michael Porter, Business Week, Oct 08]

ElectricSteve writes "Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway officially opened the world's first osmotic power plant prototype on November 24. The prototype has a limited production capacity and will be used primarily for testing and data validation, leading to the construction of a commercial power plant in a few years time. Statkraft claims that the technology has the global potential to generate clean, renewable energy equivalent to China's total electricity consumption in 2002 or half of the EU's total power production" [slashdot.org, Nov 26]

ElectricSteve writes "Scientists at Cornell University report they can now use a light beam carrying a single milliwatt of power to move objects and even change the optical properties of silicon from opaque to transparent at the nanometric scale." As the article says, such an advancement "could prove very useful for the future of micro-electromechanical (MEMS) and micro-optomechanical (MOMS) systems."  [slashdot.org, Nov 22]

Consider the world of "Makers," the latest by best-selling writer Cory Doctorow. This novel is set in a not-too distant future, when the creative destruction of technological change has created an economy so efficient, with profit margins so thin, that traditional companies can hardly stay in business. The inventor-heroes of "Makers" take technology to its conclusion ... They figure out a way to use three-dimensional printers to produce copies of machines and most anything else at close to no cost. [L Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal, Nov 23] 

Goldman Sachs, under heavy criticism in Washington for allocating over $16 billion in bonuses in the first nine months of this year, is preparing to team up with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway  — the largest shareholder in New York-based bank — to provide assistance to small businesses. .. a charitable effort from Goldman and Buffett, is designed to offer assistance — ranging from counseling to obtaining funding — to 10,000 U.S. small businesses.  [Wall Street Pit blog, Nov 17]

Fraying Faith. faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary. Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country’s dynamism. ...  It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. [David Brooks, New York Times, Nov 17]

One question that needs to be answered is, "Where will capital come from to finance America next year?" Mr. Fink said. [Daniel Maxsey, Wall Street Journal, Nov 11]

Recessions Speed Obsolescence . ... in the music business in both eras. In the 1930s record sales collapsed, partly due to the new format of radio. Today we see the CD market down because of the recession and the new format of downloading. [(historian)Elaine Tyler May, OAH newsletter, Nov 09]

We all know what happened next. Pretty much right out of Mises's script, overleveraged banks (including Kreditanstalt) collapsed, businesses collapsed, employment collapsed. The brittle tree snapped. Following Mises's logic, was this a failure of capitalism, or a failure of hubris?  Mises's solution follows logically from his warnings. You can't fix what's broken by breaking it yet again. Stop the credit gavage. Stop inflating. Don't encourage consumption, but rather encourage saving and the repayment of debt. Let all the lame businesses fail—no bailouts. (You see where I'm going with this.) The distortions must be removed or else the precipice from which the system will inevitably fall will simply grow higher and higher. [Mark Spitznagel, Wall Street Journal, Nov 7]

Merck is "actively looking" to buy biotechnology companies in the "single-digit" billions of dollars  [Jonathan Rockoff, Wall Street Journal, Nov 5] 

Look Around for Deadly Progress. Now that most cell phones provide navigation services, are GPS systems becoming something of the past ? ... Although more than half of the adults in North America who own a navigation device currently use stand-alone systems, Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin said that by 2013, cell phones will dominate the market. [Krystina Gustafson, CNBC, Nov 5]

The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007, two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly, without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have been negative for many years. [Schram, Litan, and Strangler, Wall Street Journal, Nov 6]  Such a truth should push SBIR away from established firms, especially the SBIR junkies, toward new firms and ideas.  But then, any economic gain as an SBIR criterion has also proven to be a myth.

Velcroman1 writes 'Taking a cue from the Terminator films, the US Navy is developing unmanned drones that network together and operate in 'swarms.' Predator drones have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the military arsenal. And now, these unmanned aircraft are talking to each other. Until now, each drone was controlled remotely by a single person over a satellite link. A new tech, demoed last week by NAVAIR, adds brains to those drones and allows one person to control a small squadron of them in an intelligent, semiautonomous network.'  [slashdot.org, Nov 3, 09]  If you are interested in swarms, Michael Crichton published a typical Crichton sci-fi novel "Prey". Of course, the science isn't yet real. 

Here's a riddle: If a scientist or engineer is laid off, does it affect gross domestic product? ... By overlooking cuts in research and development, product design, and worker training, GDP is greatly overstating the economy's strength ... There's ample evidence to suggest that companies, to reduce costs and boost short-term profits, are slashing this kind of spending, which is essential for innovation.  [Michael Mandel, Business Week, Oct 29]

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine approved $230 million in awards to fund 14 teams, typically spanning multiple organizations, as they seek treatments for specific diseases. [Thomas Kupper, San Diego Union Tribune, Oct 29]

Oregon technology enthusiast Hal Newton has a new tool for Oregon startups -- VentureMash, which begins a soft launch today. Hal's goal is to create a place where Oregon's disparate technologists can find one another and collaborate. Mash up skills, advice or funding resources. And the site also has a tool for embedding information about a startup in your site, or others'. Read more at the Silicon Florist Blog. [Mike Rogoway, The Oregonian, Oct 27]

As the industry continues to suffer from a lack of liquidity, many investment syndicates don't look as strong as they once appeared. Venture firms are under pressure to focus on the portfolio companies with the best chance of succeeding and to cut off the rest. [Wall Street Journal, Oct 28]  Should it be SBIR's objective to save market-dead firms that do standard R&D,  or to invigorate the young and interesting ideas? 

It’s been a long, hard recession, but for Massachusetts technology companies, the end may be in sight. ... Not that a boom will occur; instead, executives speak of slow, steady growth at best. “We still see a lot of businesses that are going to continue to manage costs very closely,’’ said Emily Nagle Green, president of Yankee Group, a Boston technology research firm. ... despite higher output, the state’s digital technology companies are expected to keep right on downsizing. The research firm Moody’s Economy.com of West Chester, Pa., predicts the Massachusetts technology sector will boost production by 2.2 percent in 2010 but eliminate another 2,600 jobs.  [Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, Oct 27]

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”  [Maureen Down, New York Times, Aug 09]

scientists at the Angstrom Laboratory at Uppsala University in Sweden have discovered green algae’s distinctive cellulose nanostructure can also provide an effective coating substrate for batteries. ... two advantages:  lighter weight and much more environmentally friendly when battery components are recycled.  [LARTA, Oct 21]

Bill Gates's SBIR. a growing number of young scientists, armed with ideas to fight infectious disease at the far edge of innovation, are now being rewarded in the search for a world-changing discovery. More than 70 grants awarded yesterday by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation showed a shift away from traditional hierarchies of science research, with graduates and post-doctoral researchers most likely to win support. ... initial grants of $100,000  from the Gates Foundation as part of its Grand Challenges Explorations programme, with the chance of follow-on grants of $1 million if their projects show success. [Sam Lister, The Times (London), Oct 21]

FORTUNE Small Business magazine and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today the 2009 list of the 50 best places in the United States to launch a business. Topping the list For metro areas with over 1 million population: Oklahoma City; Pittsburgh; Raleigh; Houston; Hartford; Washington; Charlotte; Austin; New York City; Baltimore. midsize cities:, Huntsville, AL ; Lafayette, LA ; Omaha, NE ; Clarksville, TN ; Peoria, IL; and small cities: Billings, Bismarck, Fargo, Rapid City, Sioux Falls. [Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Oct 13]

in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead. [John Markoff, New York Times, Oct 20]

Everyone talks about the need for innovation these days, but they especially talk about why businesses are so bad at it. Procter & Gamble recently reduced the washing power of Tide, labeled the new version "Basic," and trumpeted it as an innovation. [Adam Hartung, Forbes, Oct 16] Would DOD do the equivalent with some SBIR projects?

June 1896: A 32-year-old, having left his parents’ Michigan farm to become an engineer and go to work for the greatest inventor of the age — Thomas Edison — has gotten restless again. He has decided he wants to get in on the invention of the automobile, a new kind of machine most Americans have never yet heard of. He has been putting one together in the shed behind his house. ... Henry Ford, and his first automobile ride launched a career that rivaled Edison’s own.  [Frederick Allen, Saturday Evening Post, Se/Oc09]  When there were no government innovation programs.

“This will be a technology-led recovery,” said Edward Yardeni, an economist and investment strategist. “And the improvement we’re seeing from the technology companies suggests the recovery has legs.” [New York Times, Oct 16]

Think Hartford. Greater Hartford has scored a victory in the endless stream of best-this and best-that lists, coming in at No. 5 among large metropolitan areas in CNNMoney.com's ranking of 50 Best Places to Launch for small-business startups. The listing, led by Oklahoma City, followed by Pittsburgh, Raleigh and Houston, is based on a wide range of demographic and economic data, including the Hartford region's calling cards — wealth and education. The actual success of small firms is not among the measures.  [Dan Haar, Hartford Courant, Oct 14]

Fully Disinterested? Editors of some of the world's top medical journals will soon begin to demand more stringent, uniform reporting of conflicts of interest by researchers. The requirements will go beyond existing disclosure rules at many medical journals to include items such as financial relationships involving spouses, partners or minor children. Also required will be disclosure of nonfinancial conflicts, such as religious and political affiliations. Such disclosures are used in medical journals to alert readers to potential biases in research. [David Armstrong, Wall Street Journal, Oct 14]

In a telling comparison with the pharmaceutical industry, Daniel Kammen and Gregory Nemet of UCal, Berkeley, pointed out that in the early 1980s energy companies as a whole were spending more on R&D than drug companies; by the mid 2000s pharmaceuticals were investing 10 times more than the energy industry. [Clive Cookson, Financial Times, Oct 13]

Rather than steel or concrete beams, the [Maine bridge] structure consists of 23 graceful arches of carbon- and glass-fiber fabric. These are 12-inch-diameter tubes that have been inflated, bent to the proper shape and stiffened with a plastic resin, then installed side by side and stuffed with concrete, like giant manicotti. Covered with composite decking and compacted soil, the arches support a standard gravel-and-asphalt roadway. ... Little costly F.R.P. material is used — it serves largely as a shell for the concrete, which is cheaper. The tubes help protect the concrete from de-icing chemicals, potentially reducing maintenance costs, and no internal rebar is needed. “It’s exoskeleton reinforcement,” Dr. Dagher said.  [Henry Fountain, New York Times, Oct 13]

The Innovation Cure.  Despite seeing its revenues fall by 23% in the last quarter of 2008 compared with the last quarter of 2007, Intel is continuing to invest heavily in innovation. Craig Barrett, the company’s former boss, insists, “You can’t save your way out of a recession; you have to invest your way out.” P&G is launching its biggest expansion in its 170 years, opening 19 new factories around the world and investing heavily in new ideas, despite disappointing recent results. IBM is holding a series of “innovation jams” designed to squeeze ideas out of its employees.  [Schumpeter, The Economist, Oct 3]

Keynes’s disciples are right that their prophet’s visions go far beyond the stimulus packages with which his name is now associated. But it is much less clear how these ideas should be applied to the realities of contemporary economic policy. Beyond a broader faith in governments’ role, the question of “What would Keynes have done?” is surprisingly difficult to answer. [The Economist, Oct 3] As dozens of self-describer experts pronounce: the answer is simple just ..... blah, blah. blah. Unlike physics where a problem once solved stays solved, economics deals with adaptive players who make new rules as they go. Individuals, firms, financiers, and politicians all jockey for self-interest in ways that math modelers cannot yet capture.

Crusader for Syntactic Disambiguation Exprobrates Banks' Labored Locutions.    Over the years, Ms. Maher and her group have battled police agencies, expansion planners at Heathrow Airport, and the "frequently bizarre language" of the European Union. (At issue: phrases such as "unlock clusters," "subsidiarity" and "sector-specific benchmarking.") ...  Ms. Maher grew up poor and often hungry in Liverpool and didn't learn to read until she attended night school at the age of 15. ... a woman came up to her waving a letter "with minuscule print" about her mortgage and asked for help understanding it. Ms. Maher said it had so many footnotes, asterisks and crosses, "it looked like a game of snakes and ladders and you needed a magnifying glass."   [Sara Schaefer Munoz, Wall Street Journal, Oct 6]  Writers of bloated SBIR proposals could use some of Ms Maher's help. In general Anglo-Saxon words tell the story better than Latinate words:  "prove" beats "successfully demonstrate".

Underwhelmed by Internet companies at the recent TechCrunch50 bash, one Silicon Valley pundit posted a rant with this headline: "Memo to Startups: You're Supposed to Be Changing the World, Remember?"  My two cents: For world-changing potential, clean tech and biotech are the sectors to watch.  [Scott Harris, San Jose Mercury News, Oct 1]

Life-sciences companies face a funding squeeze as pharmaceutical giants consolidate and financial markets cool toward biotechnology start-ups, industry leaders said yesterday. ... In the past, drug development was funded by venture capital firms and other private investors in biotech and medical technology start-ups, but such backers have become discouraged by increasingly longer development cycles and a dearth of initial public offerings during the current economic downturn, executives said.  [Robert Weisman, Boston Globe, Oct 2]

Harvard professor Josh Lerner will join us to discuss his upcoming, provocatively titled book, Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed-and What to Do About It. Lerner asked: when has governmental sponsorship succeeded in boosting growth, and when has it fallen terribly short? In his presentation he will provide valuable insights into why some public initiatives work while others are hobbled by pitfalls and offer suggestions for how public ventures should be implemented in the future. A discussion of the implications and opportunities  [SSTI, Oct 1]

After struggling to sell cutting-edge products to utilities, technology companies are sensing better times ahead with the influx of $4.5 billion in federal stimulus funds for so-called smart-grid projects. ... That has opened up a sizeable sales opportunity for a host of tech companies, ranging from giant Cisco Systems Inc. to closely held Tendril Networks Inc. Some tech companies are beefing up staffs to pursue smart-grid projects, while others are helping utilities apply for the grants, the first of which could be doled out as early as next month.  [Rebecca Smith, Wall Street Journal, Sep 28]

InnoCentive was spun off as an independent start-up three years later. It is based on a simple idea: if a firm cannot solve a problem on its own, why not use the reach of the internet to see if someone else can come up with the answer? Companies, which InnoCentive calls “seekers”, post their challenges on the firm’s website. “Solvers”, who number almost 180,000, compete to win cash “prizes” offered by the seekers. Around 900 challenges have been posted so far by some 150 firms including big multinationals such as Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemicals. More than 400 have been solved. [The Economist, Sep 19]

The Lilly Endowment has awarded a $7 million grant to support the creation of the OrthoWorx initiative. ... based in Warsaw, will work to support the growth of the orthopedics industry through educational and community efforts in the Kosciusko County region. ...  Warsaw dubs itself the "Orthopedic Manufacturing Capital of the World." The city is home to leading orthopedic-implant makers Zimmer Holdings, DePuy Orthopaedics (part of Johnson and Johnson) and Biomet, as well as dozens of supporting businesses. Life sciences and orthopedics account for about 10,000 of the more than 40,000 jobs in Kosciusko County.  [Daniel Lee, Indianapolis Star, Sep 24]

Is Commerce just in time? Where will the next wave of interesting start-ups come from? For the past four decades, that answer has been a no-brainer. Past performance, however, is no guarantee of future results. Based on the competitiveness of companies playing the technology-driven innovation game, one could imagine an entirely different answer to the “next wave” question over the next half-century. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has released a report benchmarking innovation and competitiveness for 36 counties (pdf). While the focus of the report is EU/U.S. differences, I found two items of particular interest: first, while the United States leads the European Union in innovation-based competitiveness, it ranks sixth overall; and the U.S. ranks last in terms of its preparation to capitalize on the next wave. [Robert Wuebker, creative class blog, Sep 13]

this recession is taking a particularly heavy toll on business creation, as sources of small-business funding dry up and would-be entrepreneurs become more risk-averse. When entrepreneurs do launch businesses, they are hiring fewer employees on average. The trends threaten to damp growth in jobs and economic output for years. ... Businesses in their first 90 days of life accounted for 14% of hiring in the U.S. between 1993 and 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [Cari Tuna, Wall Street Journal, Sep 28]

[PNNL's Gary Yang and colleagues] have discovered that adding graphene to titanium dioxide for use as electrodes in batteries improves performance over standard titanium oxide by a factor of three. [Darren Quicj, gizmag.com, Sep 23]

The writers of the 18^th century, like our own, were apt to believe that if an assertion was repeated often enough, it would come to rank as a self-evident truth. – Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England.

Buy or be bought. That appears to be the new mantra for the Massachusetts life sciences industry, where the strengthening economy and rising stock market have sparked a small wave of acquisitions. Yesterday alone, Waltham’s Inverness Medical Innovations Inc. agreed to purchase a Seattle company, while Cambridge’s Biogen Idec Inc. launched a hostile tender offer for a California company. With another biotech company, Sepracor Inc. of Marlborough, agreeing earlier this month to be sold to a Japanese pharmaceutical giant, the scramble for merger partners is on.  [Robert Weisman, Boston Globe, Sep 22]

Call or write Starbucks, for example, to propose they use your patented robot barista, and you will be discouraged from submitting your proposal. If you insist on submitting anyway, you must sign an agreement that the idea belongs to them—with no compensation for you. Starbucks, like other companies with such policies, says it isn’t simply being standoffish. These firms are trying to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits, and they don’t want to hire staff to sort through proposals.  But in Cincinnati  Once cloaked in secrecy and suspicious of outsiders, P&G was formerly dubbed the Kremlin on the Ohio by its employees, but now “we want to be on your speed dial,” says Jeff LeRoy, external relations manager. It set up an external-ideas program in 2001: Last year P&G received 3,740 submissions, and it currently has 1,000 contracts under the program, some involving millions of dollars.  [Dyan Machan, Smart Money, Mar 09]

The luster is returning to Silicon Valley's economy even while much of California is likely to stay stuck in recession through next year, according to a report released today by a California economic research team.  [San Jose Mercury News, Sep 17]

According to the Fed, household net worth increased in Q2 mostly from increases in stock holdings [calculatedrisk blog, Sep 17] We should remember that valuation of wealth in stock, or home or any other marketable commodity, depends wholly on the assumption that no one except a tiny, tiny fraction tries to sell.

The good news is that the U.S. is at or near the cutting edge in most of the emerging product areas. Indeed, the new wave of high-tech devices hitting the market is the payoff from billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research at federal and university science labs stretching back to the 1960s, when the applications were but glimmers in the eyes of futurists. Now the bad news: Unless the U.S. can magically resurrect its manufacturing base, the good-paying jobs from these breakthroughs will be offshore. [Pete Engardio, Business Week, Sep 19]

Last spring, Capital Factory, a new tech incubator launched by a team of Austin entrepreneurs, chose five startups to take part in an intensive mentoring program. ...  On Wednesday, the five startups — chosen from a pool of 300 applicants — made their debut ... On the roster: Cubit Planning, which provides data services to engineering firms;  Famigo, which develops mobile games that allow families to play together.  SpareFoot, which offers an online marketplace for storage space; HourVille, which has created an online marketplace for services by the hour; PetsMD, a Web site with online services for pet health [Lori Hawkins, Austin American-Statesman, Sep 10]Not exactly a line-up of companies with tech ideas that could create new industries. But then, federal government programs that pretend to create new tech aren't doing much good either.

nuur writes "Researchers at the Australian National University have developed a new form of optical memory that allows random access to stored optical quantum information. Pulses of light are stored on a kind of 'optical conveyor-belt' that is controlled with a magnetic field. By manipulating the magnetic field, the conveyor-belt can be moved, allowing the recall of any part of the stored optical information. The research is published in Nature." You'll probably know after reading the abstract linked whether you'd be in the market to pay for the whole thing  [slashdot.org]

The United States has lost its place as the world's most competitive economy, according to a survey released Tuesday, falling behind Switzerland mainly because of the financial crisis and accumulated fiscal deficits.  The survey, which combines opinions of over 13,000 business executives with economic statistics and government regulations, put Switzerland in first place and dropped the U.S. to second place.  [Eliane Engeler, AP, Sep 8]

Oregon, facing the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the nation, has stepped up its campaign to lure clean-technology companies in an effort to pull itself out of the recession. The Oregon Business Development Department's network of about 45 economic-development officials has more than doubled the time spent reaching out to clean-tech companies since 2008, said Bruce Laird, clean-tech recruitment officer in the department.  [Ryan Knutson, Wall Street Journal, Aug 28]

Only on Subsidy. Spain's hopes of becoming a world leader in solar power have collapsed since the Spanish government slammed the brakes on generous subsidies. ...  Factories world-wide that had ramped up production of solar-power components found that demand for solar panels was plummeting, leaving a glut in supply and pushing prices down. Job cuts followed.  [Angel Gonzalez and Keith Johnson, Wall Street Journal, Sep 3]  SBIR mills are looking for the same sine qua non subsidy on the pretense that they are creating innovation. Wanna buy a bridge?

Need Rare-Earths?  Think Mongolia.  China's moves to tighten control on the mining and export of a class of metal ores called rare earth are aimed at attracting high-tech manufacturing to Inner Mongolia, and not at dominating the market, a senior Chinese official said. ... China produces more than 90% of the world's output of the metals.  .... the call for high-end manufacturers to set up shop in Inner Mongolia may raise many of the same concerns as export restrictions by signaling that China intends to keep more of its rare-earth resources at home.  [Chuin-Wey Yap, Wall Street Journal, Sep 3]

An employment report from Automated Data Processing showed the private sector shed jobs in August at a faster rate than economists had been expecting, hurting investors' willingness to buy small-cap stocks -- considered the equities market's riskier investment -- ahead of the government's monthly employment report due Friday. .... the ADP report showed small and medium-size businesses cut more than twice as many jobs as large businesses, [Donna Kardos Yesalavich, Wall Street Journal, Sep 3]  The convenient political myth that small business is a great job engine tells only half the story. Search the SBDC website, for example, for any recognition of the whole story. But then we don't hold lobbyists to a standard of the whole truth.

according to a study released Wednesday by Forrester Research, a marketing firm based in Cambridge, Mass., a shift has taken place. What used to be the pursuit of a few has become decidedly mainstream. We’re all gadget geeks now. ... “America is becoming a digital nation. Technology adoption continues to roll along, picking up more and more mainstream consumers every year.” [Jenna Wortham, New York Times, Sep 2]

Need an upbeat story of entrepreneuring?  See Julie and Julia even though the two entrepreneurs are both cooking and writing.

The University of New Hampshire has been seeding the local networking landscape with young workers for more than 20 years through its InterOperability Laboratory, but the network equipment testing facility has also influenced the launch of a handful of New Hampshire-based technology startups. [Rodney Brown, Mass High Tech, Aug 28, 09]

Price Matters. The biofuels revolution that promised to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil is fizzling out. Two-thirds of U.S. biodiesel production capacity now sits unused, reports the National Biodiesel Board. Biodiesel, a crucial part of government efforts to develop alternative fuels for trucks and factories, has been hit hard by the recession and falling oil prices.  [Ann Davis and Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal, Aug 27] 

The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council issued a snapshot of the Bay State's biotech industry and estimated that local biotech companies and research institutions employed nearly 46,000 people last year.  In 2001, that head-count number was just over 30,000, said the council  [Chris Reidy, Boston Globe, Aug 26, 09]

A new technique makes it possible to print flexible arrays of thin inorganic light-emitting diodes for displays and lighting. The new printing process is a hybrid between the methods currently used to make inorganic and organic LEDs, and it brings some of the advantages of each, combining the flexibility, thinness and ease of manufacturing organic polymers with the brightness and long-term stability of inorganic compounds. It could be used to make high-quality flexible displays and less expensive LED lighting systems. [Katherine Boruzac, MIT Tech Review, Aug 20]

a new glue, which has the sticking power to adhere to bone, could one day help orthopedic surgeons fix difficult breaks, researchers announced today at the American Chemical Society conference ... Russell Stewart, lead researcher and biomedical engineer at the University of Utah, found his inspiration for the glue in the tiny sandcastle worm.  [Lauren Gravitz, MIT Tech Review, Aug 18]

we expect smart phones, and iPhones specifically, to continue to drive the new technology secular growth cycle over the next five to seven years. Smart phones will drive new technology adoption and change user behavior around technology. Therefore, those companies that supply into smart phones are particularly interesting in this cycle.  A relatively less well-known company, TriQuint Semiconductor, is a supplier to Apple's iPhone. It makes Radio Frequency semiconductors for three markets: handsets, networks and military. The percentage of revenues earned in the handset market has been increasing sequentially, from 48% of revenues five quarters ago to 65% this past quarter, driven by the growth in smart phones and 3G.   [Darcy Travlos, Forbes, Aug 19, 09]

A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products. ...  Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.  [New York Times, Aug 19]

Researchers have demonstrated the smallest laser ever, consisting of a nanoparticle just 44 nanometers across. The device is dubbed a "spaser" because it generates a form of radiation called surface plasmons. The technique allows light to be confined in very small spaces, and some physicists believe that spasers could form the basis of future optical computers just as transistors are the basis of today's electronics. [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Aug 17]

Nanotechnology: Coming soon to a product you use. Long the stuff of hype and occasional hysteria, nanotechnology is quietly merging into modern life, its minuscule particles infused in an array of products, ranging from stink-proof socks to life-saving cancer medications.  [Boston Globe, Aug 18]

Long the stuff of hype and occasional hysteria, nanotechnology is quietly merging into modern life, its minuscule particles infused in an array of products, ranging from stink-proof socks to life-saving cancer medications. The technology today underlies some $200 billion worth of workaday items, some prescribed by doctors but most sold directly off retail shelves. From a gleam in the eye of a few far-seeing scientists, nanotech has leapt with little fanfare to shopping centers and workplaces.  [Boston Globe, Aug 17]

Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond. They can see results from in-store promotions, or efforts to boost process productivity, almost as quickly.  The result? Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents. ....  Companies will also be willing to try new things, because the price of failure is so much lower. That will bring big changes for corporate culture—making it easier to challenge accepted wisdom, for instance, and forcing managers to give more employees a say in the innovation process.   [ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON And MICHAEL SCHRAGE, Wall Street Journal, Aug 17]

A new type of nanowire electrode developed by materials science and engineering professor Yi Cui at Stanford is a step toward that goal [of litium ion batteries in electric vehicles]. ...  discussed in last week's Nano Letters, can store six times as much charge as the graphite electrodes in current lithium batteries  [Prachi Patel, MIT Tech Review, Aug 14]

self-healing paint coatings and polymer materials. Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have come up with a metal coating that may be able to repair itself after sustaining damage.  The self-healing metal can be electroplated, which opens up applications in construction, car manufacturing, and other industries that use or manufacture steel machines.   [Prachi Patel, MIT Tech Review, Aug 10]

Innovation Centers are where Big Blue reaches out to affiliated tech companies to find ways that they can expand sales together. ... IBM is pushing hard to strengthen its ties to smaller companies, including software developers, systems integrators and resellers, in a down economy. The giant computer maker says it will spend about $2.5 billion this year on such activity. [Kirk Ladendorf, Austin American Statesman, Aug 17]

Quicker access. “Metcalfe’s Law,” named for electrical engineer Robert Metcalfe, says that networks grow in value exponentially with each new user. The biggest network in the world is the Internet; and thanks to the advent of cheap, Web-enabled cellphones, the Internet is about to see its “jump point”: the arrival of two billion new users from the developing world, nearly tripling its size. Now consider what may happen with faster computation speeds and global broadband wireless coverage, which means full access from anywhere on the planet, anytime. What counts here is not the sheer size of the Internet, or the richness of the experience, but the life-altering access to any information we need, delivered with unprecedented sophistication, almost instantly.  [Tom Hayes and Michael Malone, WSJ, Aug 11]

Capitalism is the most open, creative, and dynamic economic system ever devised, and for over two centuries it has been successful in generating a long and sustained period of technology-driven economic growth, in the course of which a large and growing portion of humanity reached living standards beyond the wildest dreams of anyone alive even during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. But capitalism must always and everywhere be understood in a political context, because there never was or will be a politics-free system of markets and production, and politics remains central to capitalism’s development and survival. ...  Baumol, Litan, and Schram, much like Reich, worry about the power of bad entrepreneurs to defend their special interests and turn their energies and ingenuity into redistribution.   [Joel Mokyr, Technology and Culture, 2009]  Politics also remains central to government subsidies that pretend to foster capitalism while merely shoveling money to favored constituencies.  Don't we need more SBIR?  Or would less actually be more if the federal agencies could thereby be induced to actually devote a tiny SBIR tax to disruptive innovation? 

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have sealed silicon-nanowire transistors in a membrane similar to those that surround biological cells. These hybrid devices, which operate similarly to nerve cells, might be used to make better interfaces for prosthetic limbs and cochlear implants. They might also work well as biosensors for medical diagnostics.  [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Aug 11]

Good news! Corporations are wringing more out of workers! Productivity rocketed at US companies in the second quarter, hitting its highest point in almost six years. [Investors Guide Daily, Aug 11]

a new microfluidics chip, which mimics the actions of one of the cell's most mysterious organs, may help change that. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created the first artificial cellular organelle and are using it to better understand how the human body makes heparin.  [Lauren Gravitz, MIT Tech Review, Aug 5]

Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region's dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area's unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average. [Pui-Wing Tam, Wall Street Journal, Jul 31]

And [advocates say] small businesses create all the new jobs, ....  On closer inspection, however, most of that isn't true.  For starters, small businesses don't create all the new jobs. Job creation goes on at firms of all sizes, with much of it coming from relatively few companies that start small and get big rather fast. The percentage of Americans employed by small business has increased only modestly over time. [Steve Pearlstein, Wash Post, Jul 29]

An Oregon State University researcher who developed a non-toxic adhesive for kitchen cabinetry says he has found a way to use wood fibers to make car tires better for the environment.  Microcrystalline cellulose -- a product that can be made easily from almost any type of plant fibers -- can partially replace silica as a reinforcing filler in the manufacture of rubber tires, says Kaichang Li, an associate professor of wood science and engineering in the OSU College of Forestry. [Dylan Rivera, The Oregonian, Jul 21]

Cisco is feeling so confident that it is even planning a new integrated hardware/software platform (Cisco Unified Computing System) that puts it in direct competition with its former strategic partners, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, for control of the multibillion dollar business of equipping the thousands of data centers run by large corporations.  Meanwhile, Cisco has had no major layoffs during this economic downturn and made no salary cuts. ....  Now Cisco has kicked into high gear as the world enters what Mr. Chambers calls “Internet 2.0.”  This Internet 2.0, Mr. Chambers says, will be all about pervasive video and collaboration tools. It will power the social networking Web world to even greater heights. Much more importantly for our economy, it will “drive productivity by 2% to 3% per year,” he says. [Michael Malone, Wall Street Journal, Jul 25]

Silicon Valley's unemployment rate soared in June to a record 11.8 percent as the region was hit by a loss of 2,600 manufacturing jobs, at least half of them in the high tech industries that make up the region's core employment sector. [San Jose Mercury News, Jul 17]

The universities have been essential in this [nanotechnology] development process. In some cases, they make direct equity investments in start-up companies. Other times, universities grant licenses to their research and give small companies access to expensive laboratory equipment in return for user fees. And some universities have set up incubators where small companies develop technological products and processes.  [James Flanigan, New York Times, Jul 16]

Boston Scientific, St. Jude Medical, Medtronic and three smaller companies are accused of offering illegal kickbacks to encourage doctors to use their medical devices for unapproved uses. All of the companies market surgical ablation devices, which use extreme microwave heat to destroy diseased tissue.  [New York Times, Jul 16]

A standard bicycle pump is all that's required to power a DNA purifying kit, designed by Catherine Klapperich and her students at Boston University. The thermos-size device, dubbed SNAP (System for Nucleic Acid Preparation), extracts genetic material from blood and other bodily fluids by pumping fluid through a polymer-lined straw designed to trap DNA. A user can then pop the straw out and mail it to the nearest lab, where the preserved DNA can be analyzed  [Jennifer Chu, MIT Tech Review, Jul 10, 09]

The solar-power industry, which was flying high just a year ago, spent the first half of 2009 announcing layoffs. Some big solar-power projects were shelved. ... installations in California were down 60% in the first quarter compared with the year before. One reason for the pullbacks is the plunge in natural-gas prices. [Keith Johnson, Wall Street Journal, Jul 9, 09]

Regional Technology Development Corp. of Cape Cod is teaming up with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole to promote and create a market for the laboratory’s work. The goal is to translate scientific discoveries into business opportunities.  [Boston Globe, Jul 8]

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have made a new kind of solar cell by growing an array of upright nanoscale pillars on aluminum foil. They make bendable solar cells by encapsulating the entire cell inside a transparent, rubbery polymer. The design, the researchers suggest, could lead to solar cells that cost less than conventional silicon photovoltaic [Prachi Patel, MIT Tech  Review, Jul 6]

Cross-national evidence also suggests that investment in science, while often successful, is not a guarantee of short-term economic growth and job creation. The U.S. experience of the past decade, in which more than three quarters of post-1995 increase in productivity growth could be traced to science investments(10), was not duplicated in all other countries. ... massive investments in university and government research institutes had little short-term impact on Japan's economic growth and "demonstrates that science, technology, and innovation policy  cannot compensate for adverse framework conditions (e.g., dysfunctional financial systems)"   [Julia Lane, Science, Jun 5]

General Electric will build a $100 million manufacturing technology center in Michigan that eventually will employ about 1,200 workers. [AP, Jun 27]

UC Berkeley plant scientist Chris Somerville said it is already technically feasible to convert the entire cellulose content of perennial grasses into biofuels. ... at about $10 per gallon ... and it could be eight years or so before large-scale production becomes economical. [Tom Abate, SF Chronicle, Jun 26]

Cooley Godward & Kronish's John Hession: For those biotech companies who have the cash reserves to remain independent and self sustaining, licensing deals will continue to drive growth. For the less fortunate, “exits in extremity” may be the new watchword. [Mass High Tech, Jun 26]

Biotech firms need a new burst of innovation in fields like diagnostic testing and biofuels production to adapt to a changing marketplace, a veteran biotech financier said. .... "I'm afraid that innovation is declining. We're losing it at a time when we need it the most," Stelios Papadopoulos said in the opening address of the BioEconomy Summit. Papadopoulos, chairman of the Bay Area biotech firm Exelixis and one of the industry's original investment bankers, said biotech did well in the past by developing novel medicines. [Tom Abate, SF Chronicle, Jun 26]

Total Cost Matters. A growing number of companies are moving beyond the usual considerations of labor and raw material costs in deciding where to produce goods to calculate the "total cost of ownership." That means tallying expenses associated with things such as storage and delays. By this light, the so-called China price, which always seemed to be at least 40% below U.S. costs on everything from bedroom furniture to telecom gear, isn't so low. In fact, China's once-formidable edge in manufacturing has all but disappeared in some industries, according to a new study by Southfield (Mich.) firm AlixPartners, which researches and consults on outsourcing.  [Pete Engardio, Business Week, Jun 15]  NB: the same total cost criterion applies to sweet technology. No amount of government sponsored "commercialization" classes will make a too-dear technology competitive. We put technologies into a capitalist, profit-centered marketplace, not in an R&D contest.

there's growing evidence that the innovation shortfall of the past decade is not only real but may also have contributed to today's financial crisis. ...  With the hindsight of a decade, one thing is abundantly clear: The commercial impact of most of those [1990s] breakthroughs fell far short of expectations ....  the gains in health as a whole have been disappointing, given the enormous sums invested in research ... With far fewer breakthrough products than expected, Americans had little new to sell to the rest of the world. Exports stagnated, stuck at around 11% of gross domestic product until 2006, while imports soared. That forced the U.S. to borrow trillions of dollars from overseas.  [Michael Malone, Business Week, Jun 15] Borrow, spend, borrow, spend, borrow, .. crash.

On the one hand, it appears that the sky is falling yet again. Science is caught up in a competitive arms race for funding, universities are driven by internal and external forces to enter into questionable relationships with the for-profit sector, scientists’ integrity buckles under pressure and, in short, as Daniel S. Greenberg puts it, “much is amiss in the house of science.” On the other hand, despite this general mayhem, scientists as a group demonstrate altruism, work with the best intentions toward scientific progress, and maintain a collective sense of ethical responsibility. Such is the two-handed perspective that dominates Greenberg’s Science for Sale  [Melissa Anderson, Issues in S&T, Winter 09]

MIT chemical-engineering professor Karen Gleason and MIT postdoc Sreeram Vaddiraju have developed a process that aims to solve the problems of high fabrication costs and instability for OLEDs while still maintaining their flexibility. Gleason's solution is a hybrid light-emitting diode, or HLED. The device would incorporate both organic and inorganic layers, combining the flexibility of an OLED with the stability of an inorganic light-emitting material.  [Ann-Marie Corley, MIT Tech Review, Jun 15]

Society will never be able to control the large-scale consequences of its actions, but the realization of the imperative for sustainability positions us at a critical juncture in our evolutionary history.  [Michael Crow, Issues in S&T, Winter 09]

Private, federal and state investments at the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering have topped $5 billion, the college reported today.  Employment at Albany NanoTech, which is 10 years old this year, has also exceeded the 2,500-mark. That’s the number of scientists, researchers, engineers, students and faculty that now work at the 800,000-square-foot complex. With an average salary of $81,000, those numbers translate to an annual payroll of $202 million.  [The Business Review (Albany), Jun 9]

researchers at MIT have integrated a collection of light sensors into polymer fibers, creating a new type of camera. Yoel Fink, a professor of materials sciences and engineering and the lead researcher on the project, notes that a standard camera requires lenses that are usually rigid and heavy. A camera made from fibers, however, could be lightweight, robust, and even foldable. Although Fink admits that the applications aren't yet well defined, he suggests that such a fiber-based camera could be used in a large foldable telescope or integrated into soldiers' uniforms.  [Kate Greene, MIT Tech Review, Jun 17]

The U.S. needs a clear strategy to remain a competitive leader in industry and other sectors of an economy in crisis, business leaders told a national summit ... Although industrial policy is often equated with protectionism, Ford and other speakers said the U.S. needs to be tougher with trading partners to maintain prosperity.   ....  co-chair Andrew Liveris, chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical Co., called for "a modern-era industrial policy, one built for the 21st century  [Rob Lever, Industry Week, Jun 16]  Industrial policy usually involves subsidies to uncompetitive companies - aka corporate welfare. The SBIR world, of course, is calling for even greater subsidy than it already gets bacause any subsidy worth having is worth doubling.

IBM Research is beginning an ambitious project that it hopes will lead to the commercialization of batteries that store 10 times as much energy as today's within the next five years. The company will partner with U.S. national labs to develop a promising but controversial technology that uses energy-dense but highly flammable lithium metal to react with oxygen in the air. [Katherine Bourzac, M IT Tech Review, Jun 11]

A recent working paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia finds that local human capital is the most important variable in explaining why some regions patent at higher rates than others. Authors Gerald Carlino and Robert Hunt conclude that the education level of the local workforce is directly related to its innovative activity. While the paper itself does not connect patents to economic growth, it comes on the heels of another article, published last year by Carlino and Albert Diaz, that found a connection between local patenting activity to local employment numbers. Together, the articles suggest that investments in local human capital can be an effective strategy in spurring local innovation and creating jobs. [SSTI, Jun 10]  "What Explains the Quantity and Quality of Local Inventive Activity?" is available at: http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/publications/working-papers/2009/wp09-12.pdf

a business competition that will assist Massachusetts-based startups with a combination of cash and coaching from local technology industry professionals. ... the MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition, has been funded by a mix of public and private funds. Winners will be required to establish headquarters in Massachusetts and create at least five jobs in the state. Award recipients will receive approximately $50,000 cash prizes towards launching their businesses and will be authorized for additional seed money upon securing matching funds from outside investors.  [DC Denison, Boston Globe, Jun 11]

Pew researchers counted 68,200 businesses and 770,000 jobs across the United States tied to clean energy as of 2007, according to the most recent data. Texas ranked second to California in both jobs and clean-energy businesses. [Kirk Ladendorf, Austin American-Statesman, Jun 11]

Driven by advances in technology and increases in manufacturing scale and sophistication, the cost of PV has declined at a steady rate since the first solar cells were manufactured (3). For example, in 2000, solar cells typically used 15 g of expensive, highly refined silicon to generate 1 W of power. By comparison, SunPower Corporation's modules currently use only 5.6 g/W.  [Richard Swanson (SunPower Corp), Science, May 15]

Half a decade after its arrival on the scene, graphene is showing staying power. Last year, researchers churned out some 1500 papers on graphene. The number of Google searches on the topic rivals the number for carbon nanotubes.  [Robert Service, Science, May 15]

Now the chemical giant DuPont is reporting the development of long-lasting organic-display materials that can be printed cheaply over large areas, much like ink. DuPont says that these materials can be used to make cheaper high-end displays with existing equipment, and the company says that it is in talks with display manufacturers to bring them to market.  [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Jun 5, 09]

In his study, Dr. Kuklo, who has not responded to repeated interview requests, reported that a bone-growth product sold by Medtronic, called Infuse, performed “strikingly” better than the traditional bone-grafting technique used to heal soldiers’ shattered shin bones. ...  Medtronic financed some of Dr. Kuklo’s research and travel while he was at Walter Reed and hired him as a consultant in August 2006 ....  forged the signatures of Dr. Andersen and other Army doctors on his study and never showed it to them before it was published.  [Barry Meier and Duff Wilson, New York Times, Jun 6]

Millionth Word. It is not known which the millionth word will be, but those on the brink of entering the language as finalists for the one millionth English-language word include "zombie banks", or those banks that would be defunct without government intervention; the pejorative "noob", referring to a newcomer to a given task or community, as in "She's a complete noob to guerrilla gardening"; and "quendy-trendy", meaning hip or up-to-date.  [Simon Winchester, telegraph.co.uk, Jun 6] What an expressive language! Use a new word today.

The silicon chip, the Internet and global trade were accelerants to the renaissance of entrepreneurial capitalism that began in the late 1970s. Around the world the story line was familiar: New products, services, distribution paths and business models would appear out of nowhere. They would damage the old and slow.  The global consultant McKinsey & Co. summarized this effect in a famous 2005 paper called "Extreme Competition." This study suggests that top companies, across all industries, fall out of leadership at a rate that is three times greater than it was 30 years ago. [Rich Karlgaard, Forbes,

Jun 5 is the 50th anniversary of my graduation in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer in the dying days of charts, graphs, and slide rules.

One Price of Innovation.  "We should stop pining after the days when millions of Americans stood along assembly lines and continuously bolted, fit, soldered or clamped what went by. Those days are over. . . When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning--but new jobs will take their place. A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in 1967."  [Robert Reich, TPM Cafe blog  May 29]

Some 60% of new cancer drugs are developed in the labs of biotech firms, many of them startups. But this has been a year of living miserably for the biotech industry, and hundreds of these cancer-focused companies are close to folding as investors flee, stock prices sink to near-nothing, and operating cash dwindles. [Catherine Arnst, Business Week.com, May 28]  As many as half of publicly traded biotech companies have less than 12 months' worth of cash left, analysts say. Unless the capital markets free up soon, many won't survive. "It's more dire for many companies than we've ever seen," says Joseph Pantginis, a former drug researcher who is now a biotech analyst at Merriman Curhan Ford Group, an investment bank.  But amid the carnage are plenty of bargains for patient investors—companies that have advanced successfully through some or all required clinical trials to bring new drugs to market. The key is to find biotechs with products promising enough to attract funds from larger pharmaceutical companies or medical venture capital funds. [AAron Pressman,, Business Week.com, May 27]

 Schumpeter's Moment   We continue to be in the middle of a frightening economic drama, one that is putting the core tenets of modern capitalism at the center of the global debate. That is an important debate to have, considering that the fundamental assumptions of modern economics -- that governments have appropriately designed counter-cyclical tools, that central banks are omnipotent, that the business cycle has been tamed and that our securities markets have finally rationalized risk -- have been shattered. Is this the moment the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had envisaged when he spoke of "creative destruction"? (Source: Wall Street Journal) Click here to read the full article. [Investors Guide Weekly, May 29]

The role of economists is to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.  -- Milton Friedman 2002

Sweet Technology, Sour Price. Paul Yock, head of the bio-design laboratory at Stanford University, which develops medical devices, argues that medical-technology giants have “looked at need, but been blind to cost.” Amid growing concern about runaway health spending, he thinks the industry can find inspiration in India. .... Unlike the hidebound health systems of the rich world, he says, “in our country’s patient-centric health system you must innovate.” This does not mean adopting every fancy new piece of equipment. Over the years he has rejected surgical robots and “keyhole surgery” kit because the costs did not justify the benefits. Instead, he has looked for tools and techniques that spare resources and improve outcomes.  [The Economist, Apr 18]  One of the (many) problems with letting government mission agencies nakedly decide SBIR "investment" is that agencies ignore the technology's cost barrier to economic adoption.

The prototype OLED could emerge as an ultra-efficient light source for displays and general lighting, says Sebastian Reineke, who led the research at the Institute for Applied Photophysics, in Dresden, Germany. The long-term goal is to fabricate the device using conventional low-cost roll-to-roll printing.  [Duncan Graham-Rowe, MIT Tech Review, May 15]

Solution Becomes Problem. The bankruptcy filing last week by Texas’ largest ethanol producer deals yet another blow to the state’s struggling biofuels sector and is part of a broader industry downturn that analysts say may claim other victims before it is done. Dallas-based White Energy said a Chapter 11 filing became necessary after high raw material costs coupled with low ethanol prices led to “minimal or nonexistent profit margins.” It also blamed significant debt payments and an inability to raise capital from frozen equity markets. [Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle, May 12] In addition, Venture capitalists reined in spending on renewable energy to the begin the year, with funding for research and startup projects falling 63 percent through March, according to an industry report released today. [AP, May 11]   Mascoma  (Lebanon, NH; no SBIR) a cellulosic biofuels company, reports significant advances in its goal of simplifying the cellulosic ethanol process by skipping the use of costly enzymes, which could potentially reduce cellulosic ethanol's production costs by 20 to 30 percent.  [Jennifer Chew, MIT Tech Review, May 12] But none of the process efficiency improvements can fill the hole in food production displaced for the fuel biomass.

Conserve or Attack? many start-ups are finding themselves locked in boardroom dramas as they navigate the tricky tightrope between how much to cut and how much to grow. These debates have taken on new urgency because fresh financing is hard to come by and, for some, cash is running low. .. The issue is acute in Silicon Valley, where start-ups have typically burned through savings to chase growth. Google Inc., for instance, ramped up during the dot-com bust earlier this decade and ended up a behemoth.  [Pui-Wing Tam, Wall Street Journal, May 12]

With its famous brain trust, Massachusetts feels it should be the next Silicon Valley for startup tech companies. Brains, though, are only part of the equation, and perhaps not even the most important part. According to observers, Silicon Valley’s strength is the art of the deal; Boston’s strength is the art of innovation.  [Dann Maurno, Mass High Tech, May 8]  And an inquiring Congress were to ask what is SBIR's strength, what would the advocates answer?

Inventors Thomas A. Edison and Charles Steinmetz are [shown] in Steinmetz's Schenectady, N.Y., laboratory, in 1931. Last month, Robert Budens, president of the Patent Office Professional Association said "Innovation is the way America generally gets out of downturns." (AP)

Prizes vs. Funding.  Call it crowd-sourcing; call it open innovation; call it behavioral economics and applied psychology; it's a prescription for progress that is transforming philanthropy. In fields from manned spaceflight to the genetics of aging, prizes may soon rival traditional research grants as a spur to innovation. "... Critics, though, dismiss the newest trend in prize-giving as a form of advertising that masquerades as public service -- and a clever ploy to attract top research talent at a discount. [Wall Street Journal, May 8] Prizes do reduce the chances for pork funding at specified locations.

Less Silicon, Cheaper Solar. An improved process for making solar cells could allow manufacturers to cut the amount of silicon needed in half. Since silicon can account for about three-quarters of the cost of conventional solar cells, this could significantly lower the price of solar power. The technique can reduce the amount of other materials used and improve solar-cell performance. The process uses ink-jet printing to make electrical connections within a solar cell, replacing the existing screen-printing process. ..  uses an ink-jet printer built by iTi Solar, based in Boulder, CO, that was originally designed for printing electronics, such as the contacts on touch screens.  [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, May 7]

Got a bright business idea? Take a number. Americans haven't stopped dreaming up newfangled gizmos or sketching engineering marvels on the back of cocktail napkins. But tight credit and business cutbacks have slowed the pace of getting the latest U.S. innovations to market. ... Venture capital investments have plummeted. Lenders aren't lining up to fund business startups. New patent applications are down at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, creating a budget crisis at the agency, ... So far, companies that spend the most on innovation have resisted the temptation to raid their research and development budgets. They're opting to ride out the recession with an eye to future sales, according to Booz & Co., which surveys the world's 1,000 largest, publicly traded, corporate research and development spenders. [Dec Riechmann, AP, May 4]

we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good - Rupert Murdoch

"If you have a 150 I.Q., sell 30 points to someone else. You need to be smart, but not a genius." So said Warren Buffett, the world’s most famous value investor, [AR Sorkin, New York Times, May 4]

The nation's biotechnology industry, which has a large hub in the Triangle, is going through a "Darwinian moment" that probably will weed out some of its weaker players.  That's according to the authors of Ernst & Young's annual biotech analysis, released Tuesday. The report points to the global financial crisis as the top challenge that crimped the industry's growth last year.  [Alan Wolf, Raleigh News &Observer, May 6]   

It was the men and women of what Edmund Burke later called "life's little platoons" who gave Europe its energy and wealth. The big institutions -- the church and feudal monarchies -- merely cashed in. [Arthur Herman, reviewing Holland's The Forge of Christendom, May 5]

Shares of Silicon Laboratories  shot up almost 15 percent Wednesday after the Austin chipmaker issued a strong outlook for the second quarter.  The company eked out a small profit in a difficult first quarter but said all signs point toward stronger growth in orders for the current quarter.  [Kirk Ladendorf, Austin American-Statesman, Apr 30]

Certainly from an investor's standpoint, there's perhaps no better time to be investing in startups. The entrepreneurs doing it are pretty passionate about what they do. Companies raised with scarce resources tend to be more resourceful, right?  [Steve Jurvetson, VC]

according to a recent global survey of 2,700 senior executives ... 14% of respondents are planning to reduce their innovation investments in 2009. On the plus side, 58% said they would increase innovation spending this year, although that figure is down from 63% last year and 72% in the previous year. .... Among U.S. companies, 44% said they would increase their innovation spending in 2009. [Industry Week, Apr 21]

The decision to make large energy investments in hopes of realizing both immediate economic benefits and longer-term environmental dividends represents a "massive shift" in government policy, says Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts   [David Rotman, MIT Tech Review, Apr 21]  Of course, people who get the federal contracts and sub-contracts think that the value of such spending is obvious.  But, The concern over the stimulus bill's technology spending is not just that it offends conventional macroeconomic theory about the best way to boost the economy; it's that it might harm the very technologies it means to support. ...  [MIT economist] Daron Acemoglu suggests, "when you make investments in bad projects under the name of stimulus and in the name of technological investments, you're doing damage in a number of ways. First of all, you're not helping; second, you're confusing matters; and third, you're poisoning the well for the future."

Besides, the new emphasis on energy R&D is also a stark reminder that, almost 30 years after such funding peaked in the late 1970s, there are still no good or easy answers when it comes to replacing fossil fuels.  [David Rotman, MIT Tech Review, Apr 21]

It is no wonder that biotechnology companies like North Carolina. It has a high-powered university zone .... This has helped attract over 170 companies to Research Triangle Park, right in the middle of things. And the state has reached out to industry. North Carolina’s community-college system runs courses that prepare students for entry-level technician jobs. It also offers short courses in specific skills, such as micropipetting. [The Economist, Apr 16]

Advances in so-called “white LEDs” are driving the devices into the multibillion-dollar general illumination market, and a handful of New England companies are leading the way. .... According to a report released last month by market research firm Strategies Unlimited, the market for general illumination applications is expected to exceed $5 billion in 2012, with a compound growth rate of 28 percent between 2008 and 2012.  [Efrain Viscarolasaga, Mass High Tech, Apr 17]

Silicon Valley's jobless rate continued to soar in March, hitting 11 percent — nearly doubling in one year   [San Jose Mercury News, Apr 17]

San Diego's stem cell scientists hope they are closer to breaking ground on a new research facility now that the freeze on state bond money has thawed. The state Pooled Money Investment Board this week approved putting $43 million in an escrow account for San Diego's stem cell consortium  [Teri Somers, San Diego Union Tribune, Apr 17]

Biofuel Bubble. More than 200 companies, from 12-person startups to oil giants, are developing next-generation biofuels using a bewildering array of technologies. ...  Yet behind the very real innovations and investments, the brash claims and the breathless headlines, lies an inconvenient truth. Replacing petroleum with biofuels is a tough business. Even as the industry develops, many of the companies—probably most—will not survive. "We've seen a venture capital-led bubble," says Alan Shaw, CEO of Codexis, a Redwood City (Calif.) manufacturer of enzymes used to make drugs, chemicals, and biofuels. "I cannot see how the small companies can build a business and still get a return to their original investors. The numbers just don't add up." ...  [The announced goal]  would require not only building hundreds of fuel factories—at a cost of $500 million or more each—but also surrounding each one with thousands of acres of land planted with energy crops such as prairie grass.  [John Carey, Business Week, Apr 16]

Busy as Robots. Executives at the RoboBusiness Conference & Expo said that demand for military robots, combined with the likely effects of President Obama's economic stimulus package, is helping to offset a slowdown in commercial orders and difficulties in obtaining bank financing...."We almost didn't make it to the show because we've been so busy," said Will Pong, director of robotics for Segway  ...  Foster-Miller Inc. in Waltham, said he was seeing "very strong" demand for his company's machines. "Every developed country with a really strong military either uses robots or sees the need to use robots," Foley said.  [Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, Apr 17]

The state's biotechnology industry has grown significantly in recent years, though somewhat slower than hoped, according to a study released today by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. Massachusetts has more than 40,000 biotech jobs, according to the council's 2015 Strategic Plan, up from about 30,000 in 2002  [Boston Globe, Apr 15]

Ethanol derived from corn consumes up to three times more water than previously thought, according to a new study. ...  researchers at the University of Minnesota have concluded that the amount of water used in ethanol production varies hugely from state to state (much higher west of the Missouri R) , ranging from 5 (OH) to 2,138 (CA) liters of water per liter of ethanol, depending on regional irrigation needs. [Phil McKenna, MIT Tech Review, Apr 14]  ....  the story of ethanol. Consumers were asked to suspend disbelief as policy makers blurred the lines between economic reality and a business model built on fantasies of a better environment and energy independence through ethanol. Notwithstanding federal subsidies and mandates that force-feed the biofuel to the driving public, ethanol is proving to be a bust. ... For all the pain ethanol has caused, it displaced a mere 3% of our oil usage last year. Even if we plowed under all other crops and dedicated the country's 300 million acres of cropland to ethanol, James Jordan and James Powell of the Polytechnic University of New York estimate we would displace just 15% of our oil demand with biofuels.  [Max Schulz, Wall Street Journal, Apr 18]  Idealistic programs like ethanol get going when government subsidies drive economic decisions and encourage beneficiaries to lobby Congress for handouts. The same kind of blather with idealistic theory and fairy-tale economics  is used by SBIR advocates to keep a handout program going to a class of dependent beneficiaries.

In 2003, Surgenor became chief executive of Cyberkinetics Inc., helping the company raise more than $40 million, go public, and shepherd the technology he'd seen into human testing. Just last month, he finished shutting down the company, selling off the last of its assets to another local neurotechnology company for $350,000.   What happened in the intervening six years offers a glimpse of how challenging it can be even for a well-funded start-up to bring a breakthrough technology to market - especially in the regulated world of medical devices.   [Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe, Apr 12]

small businesses in general make 12 to 14 times the number of patents per employee as large companies.  This is where innovation comes from.  Over 50% of the SBIR phase II companies have a product that goes to commercialization, so how do we turn innovation into jobs? .... the great metric that says the SBIR companies do 4 times the number of jobs and grow 4 times as fast as in a comparable sample.  Said Karen Mills in her confirmation hearings for SBA Administrator.  

Sic Transit Gloria Silicon Graphics.  Died and sold its assets for $25M. Founded 1982 by Jim Clark, public 1986, Clark left to found Netscape 1994, market cap hit $7B 1995, begins to lose money 1997. [Don Clark and Jacqueline Palank, Wall Street Journal, Apr 2]

The synergy of the new industrial era was remarkable. As factories grew, so did the demand for labor. And the new agricultural machinery that was built in factories -- such as the reaper developed by the American Cyrus McCormick -- freed countless agricultural laborers for factory work. The collapse in the price of steel -- thanks to Henry Bessemer, the Englishman whose process allowed steel to be produced by the ton -- greatly increased the demand for iron ore and coking coal. That in turn spurred demand for steel railroad tracks and rolling stock. The new railroad routes proved the perfect place to string telegraph lines, which, in turn, fostered communication that allowed the trains to run more efficiently.  [John Steele Gordon, reviewing Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries, Wall Street Journal, Apr 11] Synergy and innovation: what SBIR should be fostering, instead of rocket plume models. But where would government find visionaries to invest small but critical amounts in ideas with great potential? SBIR's history shows little evidence in  that such vision resides (or is allowed to practice) anywhere in government. And why should government be doing such investment anyway when the private market is so much better at nosing out potential? Remember that the innovators who brought us the Industrial Revolution had no government funding for R&D. Nor can government claim much credit for the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor the PC, .....  No indeed, the SBIR advocates can only play a politics game in their quest for their "fair share".

researchers have combined a nanogenerator with a solar cell to create an integrated mechanical- and solar-energy-harvesting device. This hybrid generator is the first of its kind and might be used, for instance, to power airplane sensors by capturing sunlight as well as engine vibrations. [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Apr 9]

Researchers at NIST have made one of the most sophisticated nanofluidics device to date. They make it using a one-step process, as opposed to by using the multilayer lithography techniques employed to fabricate integrated circuits.  .... The new device, presented online in the journal Nanotechnology, is a chamber with 30 different depths. Its side profile looks like a staircase, with a depth ranging from 10 nanometers at the shallowest end to 620 nanometers at the other end.   [Pachi Patel, MIT Tech Review, Apr 8]

Is It Because They're Smarter, or Cheaper? Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs. ... “There are probably two billion people in the world who would like to live in California and work, but not everyone in the world can live here,” said Kim Berry, an engineer who operates a nonprofit advocacy group for American-born technologists. “There are plenty of Americans to do these jobs.”  [Matt Richtel, New York Times, Apr 12]  If all workers are equal, then natives are enough. And since politicians put a big discount on foreigners, especially when talking to unemployed voters, the burden of proof falls on the companies to establish the great technical advantage of the foreigner.  Tribes care for their own, almost no matter how inferior.

In a major blow to Applied Materials, [world's biggest manufacturer of equipment for making semiconductors] has disclosed that the $1.9 billion solar panel deal [which analysts speculated was for a solar-manufacturing project to be built in Suzhou, China, by Best Solar] it announced early last year — believed to be one of the biggest such agreements ever signed — has been trimmed back to just $250 million because of the soured economy.  [Steve Johnson, San Jose Mercury News, Apr 7]

It's hard for anyone who grows up in an industry to see fundamental problems in its culture. [Steve Pearlstein, Washington Post, Apr 8] Although Pearlstein was talking about Wall Street, the SBIR re-authorization debate has the same hallmarks. People getting an advantage don't want to admit that the ultimate customers are getting a bad deal. BTW: in SBIR, who do you think is the customer?

A new catalyst based on iron works as well as platinum-based catalysts for accelerating the chemical reactions inside hydrogen fuel cells. The finding could help make fuel cells for electric cars cheaper and more practical. ... researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Quebec have dramatically increased the performance of this type of iron-based catalyst. Their material produces 99 amps per cubic centimeter at 0.8 volts, a key measurement of catalytic activity. That is 35 times better than the best nonprecious metal catalyst so far.  [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, Apr 3]

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have synthesized DNA to detect trace amounts of lead, mercury, arsenic and other contaminants in water. The DNA sensors can be produced in the form of sophisticated testing instruments suitable for metropolitan water districts or in the form of strips - like a home pregnancy test - for households and other direct-source water users.  [Lee Bruno, LARTA, Apr 2]

in a Report in the 13 Mar 2009 Science, Ghosh and Urban describe the development of a new polyurethane material that can repair itself simply upon exposure to ultraviolet light and could thus be useful for scratch-resistance coatings for objects from cars to furniture. The new material is a network consisting of polyurethane and compounds called oxetane-substituted chitosan precursors. [AAAS, Apr 2]

Ewing Marion Kauffman. In 1950, he launched a drug company in the basement of his Kansas City home. Forty years later, when he sold the business to Merrell Dow, it had become a diversified health-care company with nearly $1 billion in annual sales and more than 3,000 employees. 

Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U.S. companies spent nearly as much on research and development in the dismal last quarter of 2008 as they did a year earlier.  [Wall Street Journal, Apr 6]

Speculation by Extrapolation.  With their jobs less secure, their houses worth less and their stock-market portfolios shrunken, Americans are saving more now. But will they still be thrifty when the recession ends?  No one will know for sure for years, but there's good reason to believe Americans will be saving more in the next decade than they did in the last one.  [Kelly Evans, Wall Street Journal, Apr 6]

In May, small companies focusing on security products will have the chance to show off their technologies for the chance to earn investment money and partnerships with a more established firm working with the Department of Homeland Security.  It's part of the American Security Challenge, which encourages universities, entrepreneurs and research labs to demonstrate their technologies. The inaugural challenge held last year awarded $100,000 to a company called TeleContinuity (Germantown, MD; no SBIR) that backs up communication networks in case of a terrorist attack. .... Chart Venture Partners of New York has agreed to pump between $200,000 and $2.5 million into a promising company. And another company will win the chance to team up with Alion Science and Technology, a McLean defense contractor.  ...  submit a summary of their product or company by March 31.  [Kim Hart, Washington Post, Mar 23]

The American Medical Association said it has asked an oversight committee to investigate charges that the top editors of its well-known medical journal threatened a researcher who publicly faulted a study in the publication. ...  A Tennessee researcher, Jonathan Leo, says top JAMA editors threatened him and his dean after he published an online letter earlier this month in the British journal BMJ that criticized how results were reported in a JAMA study last year that looked at the use of the antidepressant Lexapro in stroke victims. Dr. Leo also said JAMA didn't disclose the author of the study's financial relationship with Lexapro's maker, Forest Laboratories Inc. [David Armstrong, Wall Street Journal, Mar 28]

There are “only” four main problems that need solving, according to Khosla — oil, coal, cement and steel. Between them they are responsible for 75% of greenhouse-gas emissions. ...  For technology to save the planet it must reach what he calls the “Chindia” price — a level at which a new product can compete fairly with existing products and can be adopted without adding extra cost by India and China, two fast-growing countries whose energy needs rival those of America. No matter what the environmental costs, Indians won’t buy a $22,000 Prius hybrid electric car when Tata makes the Nano for $2,000. “Where is the electricity for those cars going to come from? Coal. Do we want coal-powered cars?” said Khosla. [Dominic Rushe, The Sunday Times, Mar 29]

the Nasdaq Composite Index burst into positive territory for 2009 ... The technology and consumer stocks that make up the bulk of the Nasdaq are thought to be "early cycle" stocks because they react more quickly to changes in the economy. [Rob Curran, Wall Street Journal, Mar 27]

MIT has made its scholarly articles available to the public on the Internet for free, according to the school.  Under the new policy, faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to publish their journal articles using DSpace, an open-source software platform developed by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Co. MIT can publish the material for any reason other than to make a profit. Authors may opt out on a paper-by-paper basis.  [Mass High Tech, Mar 25]

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.  [Duncan Graham-Rowe, MIT Tech Review, Mar 25]

Austin [despite its slipping Dellionaires] was the nation’s second-fastest-growing metropolitan area between 2007 and 2008, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. ...  second only to Raleigh-Cary, NC   [Austin Business Journal, Mar 19]

Scientists excited by prospect of stimulus spending. In a down economy, science is up. E-mails ping-pong back and forth late at night. Scientists click and re-click on websites to check for the latest updates on research grants. ...  a frenzy for "lab-ready" science, with a $21.5 billion investment in [R&D] [Boston Globe, Mar 23]

researchers at Stanford University and Samsung have developed a technique that allows them to precisely position organic microwires on a substrate and build complex circuits with relative ease. The new technique involves putting microwires in a liquid solution and filtering them through paper to form the circuit's transistors. [Kate Greene, MIT Tech Review, Mar 17]

The more important reason that it is difficult to guess where the economy is headed is that the decision will be more about politics than about the usual economic indicators. Power has moved from Wall Street to Washington. It is in the nation’s capital that plans to save the housing market are being considered  [Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, Mar 15]

Cells coated with sticky bits of DNA can self-assemble into functional three-dimensional microstructures. This bottom-up approach to tissue engineering, developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, provides a new solution to one of field's biggest problems: the creation of multicellular tissues with defined structures. Unlike top-down methods, in which scientists build cell structures on scaffolds, the new technique allows tissue engineers to dictate the precise geometric interactions of individual cells.  [Jocelyn Rice, MIT Tech Review, Mar 11, 09]

What Do Laws Mean?  In answer to the screaming (whineing?) about the Stimulus Bill (ARRA) exempting NIH from SBIR for the incremental $7.4B, two SB Senators wrote a letter saying that NIH was responsible for funding SBIR at 2.5% of its extra-mural R&D. In general, if a law recognizes and conflicts with a previous law, the new law governs on the principle that Congress knows what it is doing.

In what may be among the longest-running and widest-ranging cases of academic fraud, one of the most prolific researchers in anesthesiology has admitted that he fabricated much of the data underlying his research, said a spokeswoman for the hospital where he works. T.. Dr. Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist in Springfield, MA, never conducted the clinical trials that he wrote about in 21 journal articles dating from at least 1996, said Jane Albert, a spokeswoman for Baystate Health. ...  The drug giant Pfizer underwrote much of Dr. Reuben’s research from 2002 to 2007. Many of his trials found that Celebrex and Lyrica, Pfizer drugs, were effective against postoperative pain.  [Gardiner Harris, New York Times, Mar 11]

A sign of the times: investors are losing patience with biotech start-ups and want to cash out. Faced with a long and arduous regulatory process, medical device and biotech start-ups always needed lots of capital. But as the recession wears on, VCs are limiting new investments and concentrating on their existing portfolios.  [Thomas Lee, Minneapolis Star, Mar 9]

Biotech venture capitalists have generated some of their best investment returns in recent years by selling start-ups to Merck & Co. Inc. Now, some fear that Merck’s planned purchase of Schering-Plough Corp. will distract it from the smaller acquisitions that have fueled VC returns.  ....  Biotech concerns that survive this period could be in the driver’s seat in a couple of years as these drug titans strive to build from a larger base and compensate for patent expirations. [Brian Gormley, Wall Street Journal, Mar 10]

China takes charge. Industry sources believe that with China dramatically cutting its annual rare earth export quotas, the time may be rapidly approaching when it will be impossible for any company to produce a wind turbine or hybrid electric car outside the communist country. After a long, relentless campaign of price wars and export quota reductions, more than 95 per cent of the global supply of rare earth metals — a group of 17 “lanthanide” elements employed in hundreds of technologies ranging from mobile phones and BlackBerrys to lasers and aviation — is produced by China.   [The Times (London), Mar 9] Restricting the supply of any needed commodity charges up capitalism's incentive for users to find a substitute.

 As [physicist] Dr. Derman put it in his book “My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance,” “In physics there may one day be a Theory of Everything; in finance and the social sciences, you’re lucky if there is a useable theory of anything.”  [Dennis Overbye, New York Times, Mar 10]

On Wisconsin. Calling all entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs-in-the-making!  If you have a dream of starting a business someday, especially if it is a potentially high-growth business, new resources are coming on stream that will help you realize your goal.   BizStarts Milwaukee, a group I helped found and lead, is launching three initiatives that will offer tools and support to prepare you for pitching to investors about your venture. They are BizStarts Connect, BizStarts Learn and BizStarts Venture Track. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Mar 8]

Seeks Perspective, too. A taste for historic fiction.  >ceo watch: what they're reading: Dave King, CEO of medical testing leader LabCorp, favors fiction but recently made an exception for a book with powerful North Carolina connections. ... seeks compelling stories, well-written and without wasted words. He found that in Raleigh lawyer Anna Hayes' "Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp." In 1974, Sharp became chief justice of the state's Supreme Court, the nation's first woman to achieve that rank in any state.  [Raleigh News & Observer, Mar 10]

for entrepreneurs, optimism dies hard. Perhaps that's why – despite a deep recession – 36 percent of the county's small businesses forecast profits to increase this year. True, that's down from 51 percent who expected higher profits it 2008. [San Diego Union Tribune, Mar 6]

Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have found that coffee grounds can yield 10-15% of biodiesel by weight relatively easily. And when burned in an engine the fuel does not have an offensive smell—just a whiff of coffee.   [The Economist, Mar 5, 09]

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, in Livermore, CA, have created the first carbon-nanotube devices that can detect the entire visible spectrum of light. [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Mar 6]

Efforts to support new business creation are underway in Rhode Island, where 10.3 percent of residents were unemployed in January. The Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) and Brown University announced plans to open a Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the spring, leveraging the assets of the state's institutions of higher education, hospitals and the private sector. [SSTI, Mar 5]

Liquid Battery. The battery is unlike any other. The electrodes are molten metals, and the electrolyte that conducts current between them is a molten salt. This results in an unusually resilient device that can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity. The electrodes can operate at electrical currents "tens of times higher than any [battery] that's ever been measured," says Donald Sadow­ay, a materials chemistry professor at MIT and one of the battery's inventors. What's more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows for simple manufacturing.  [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, Mar 5]

innovation, like “change,” has no inherent value. It can be bad (the “liar” loans are a good example) as well as good.  [J Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, Jan 09]

Innovation may fuel economic recovery  When the economy finally snaps back, technology is expected be the catalyst that pulls Massachusetts out of its doldrums, just as it has done in the past. It may not be computers or the Internet this time, but according to analysts, entrepreneurs are likely to ride to the rescue in fields like cellphones, medical gear, and the batteries that power the cars of the future. ...  and  A new public-private effort, the Information Technology Collaborative, is funding a $150,000 study on the economic impact of technology, and the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative recently brainstormed about branding initiatives.  [Boston Globe, Mar 9]

Researchers have discovered a way to grow tiny micrometer-scale tubes from materials that act as catalysts and gas sensors. By making networks of these tubes, the researchers say that they could create compact lab-on-a-chip devices in which the channels themselves are made of the catalyst or sensing material. ... Lee Cronin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, U.K., who led the work. ... In a paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, Cronin and his colleagues report that they can control the diameters of the tubes and the speed with which they grow. What is more, by using simple tricks, they can control the tubes' direction of growth and can merge two tubes together to make different structures.  [Pachi Patel-Predd, MIT Tech Review, Mar 3]

Worldwide PC shipments are expected to plunge this year to 257 million units, a drop of 11.9 percent - the biggest ever in the industry, according to a new report. Mobile phone sales are also declining. [Deborah Gage, SF Chronicle, Mar 3]

Avouris's team found that when an electrical current is applied to a nanotube transistor, some atomic vibrations can produce heat of up to 1,000 °C, while other vibrations produce a relatively cool temperature of 400 °C. This is contrary to the behavior of most materials, which maintain a relatively uniform heat. .... understanding how nanotubes heat up when an electric current is passed through them has been a roadblock to building reliable nanotube circuits.  [Kate Greene, MIT Tech Review, Mar 2]

It Has to Do Something.  the new standard imposed [by the patent office]— that the invention must involve a machine or a physical transformation — threatens to put the brakes on the busiest area of patent application and analysis. Of the 13,779 "process" patents sought in 2008, just 1,643 were granted. [Carol Williams, LA Times, Mar 2]

When it comes to predicting the market's future behavior, it is said that there are two types of people -- those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know. [Bill Dix, Raleigh News & Observer, Mar 1]

A decade ago, it would have been difficult to staff and run a start-up drug development company in downtown Milwaukee - and local academic institutions generally didn't have the science or the will to transfer it to commercial ventures. But there's been a sea change here, and Lawton and his partners at Promentis Pharmaceuticals Inc. are in the thick of it.  They're among a small but growing number of people who are launching new firms focused on bringing drugs to market. In the process, they're giving the area's manufacturing-heavy economy a shot in the arm with technology-driven enterprise. So far, Milwaukee and Wisconsin remain a speck on the global drug development scene.  [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Mar 1]

researchers including Anastasios John Hart, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, are honing techniques for growing carefully structured forests of high-quality carbon nanotubes. Hart made these images with a scanning electron microscope; all show vertically grown nanotubes. [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, M/A09]

Late this year or early next, Intel plans to introduce a new line of chips that shrinks the components even smaller. ... Intel worked out a manufacturing strategy, and last year the company began shipping chips made with the new metal gates and HfO₂ insulator. At the time, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and eponymous drafter of the law, called the switch "the biggest change in transistor technology since … the late 1960s."

New products find markets regardless of circumstance. By 1937, more than 40 percent of DuPont’s revenue came from products that did not exist before the start of the decade. [R Cyran and R Beales, New York Times, Feb 26]

The competitive edge of the US economy has eroded sharply over the last decade, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group. ... the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that the United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness. They included venture capital investment, scientific researchers, spending on research and educational achievement. But the American economy placed last in terms of progress made over the last decade. ... The study’s specific recommendations include federal incentives for American companies to innovate at home, ranging from research tax incentives to work force development tax credits. Public investments and regulatory incentives can accelerate the use of information technology in health care, energy systems, transportation, government and education. [Steve Lohr, New York Times, Feb 25]

Will Intel Be the Last Man Standing? For any company trying to do business in 2009, it must feel like they’re standing on a gravel-covered slope, where any movement sends the very ground they’re standing on rolling even further downhill. It’s not a good feeling. In the CPU and GPU markets, that hill is crumbling fast and, there’s a possibility that, when all the gravel has rolled away, only Intel will be left standing. If you understand the market and what AMD, Nvidia and Intel have in the pipeline, then you know this isn’t heresy. [Lloyd Case, Extreme Tech, Feb 24]

Alexander Fleming was an accomplished biologist well before his famous discovery of penicillin, and his name first appeared in The New York Times on May 18, 1922, seven years before any news of the drug.  Fleming had discovered that human tears have an antibacterial effect, produced by a substance called lysozyme. Scientists now know that lysozyme is an enzyme, N-acetylmuramide glycanhydrolase, that destroys the cell walls of certain types of bacteria. The Times article led with a literary allusion that might seem unlikely for a science reporter today: “Tennyson, it appears, made a mistake in calling tears ‘idle.’”  [Nicholas Bakalar, New York Times, Feb 24]

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by DARPA.   [MIT Tech Review, Jan 30]

a Light-Guide Solar Optic (LSO)--is a new type of [acrylic] solar concentrator that could significantly lower the cost of generating electricity from the sun. Unlike existing designs, there's no need for mirrors, complex optics, or chemicals to trap and manipulate the light. "It's pure geometric optics," says Morgan, director of business development at Toronto-based Morgan Solar. [Tyler Hamilton, MIT Tech Review, Feb 20]

dozens of corporate professionals taking new ideas and dreams of entrepreneurship to regional technology incubators, which are seeing an explosion in demand. ...   Incubator managers in the life sciences say large pharmaceutical and biotech companies are backing away from heavily specialized research. This allows “the little guys” to create boutique research startups. It also allows contract researchers to fill in those gaps cheaper and more efficiently, said Kevin O’Sullivan, president and CEO of the nonprofit incubator Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, based in Worcester. Last year, 81 qualified prospects sought to lease space at MBI  [Marc Songini, Mass High Tech, Feb 20]

researchers at Harvard University have developed a simple way to [retrain the body's own defenders--the cells of the immune system--to recognize and destroy tumors inside the body]: a polymer implant attracts and trains immune-system cells to go after cancer.  [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Jan 28]

Applied Materials [the biggest seller of tools for making chips] predicted worsening conditions for semiconductor makers and their suppliers, including a 50% drop this year in spending on equipment for turning silicon wafers into chips.  [Don Clark, Wall Street Journal, Feb 11]  Meanwhile, Intel said it will spend $7 billion to upgrade technology at U.S. factories.

The Nightly Business Report and the Wharton school of business at the University of Pennsylvania complied the top 30 innovations over the past 30 years. (Sorry, the Post-It note, Spam, and honey crisp apple didn’t make the cut.) 30. Anti retroviral treatment for AIDS; SRAM flash memory; Stents; ATMs; Bar codes and scanners; Biofuels Gentically modified plants;  RFID;  Digital photography/videography;  Graphic user interface Social networking via Internet; Large scale wind turbines; Photovoltaic solar energy; Microfinance; Media file compression; Online commerce/retail/auction; GPS sytems; Liquid crystal displays; Light emitting diodes; Open source software and services (Linux, Wikipedia); Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery; Office software (spreadsheets, word proccessing); Fiber optics; Microproccessors; Magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs); DNA testing and sequencing (human genome mapping); E-mail; Mobile cell phones; PC/laptop computers; 1. Internet  [Thomas Lee, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb 16]  A question for the SBIR advocates; can any SBIR project claim an enabling contribution to any of these innovations?

Incision, Heal Thyself. in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Irene Kochevar and Robert Redmond have developed a method that has the potential to replace the surgeon's needle and thread. Using surgical lasers and a light-activated dye, the researchers are prompting tissue to heal itself. [Lauren Gravitz, MIT Tech Review, Feb 11]

The drastic drop in consumer demand for electronics has had a crushing effect on the semiconductor industry, and local chip equipment manufacturers are paying the price. Over the past four months, the region’s well-known makers of equipment used in the manufacture of semiconductors have released some shocking numbers.  [Mass High Tech, Feb 13]

Amid a global credit crisis, roughly 75 percent of the 400 US public biotech companies have one year of cash or less, according Burrill & Co, a specialist life