Source: Mark Schwerin, Western Michigan University
Interest: Western Michigan and five other state universities are collaborating on a new way to connect businesses and the technical expertise found on campus -- the Instant Innovation Program.
It’s the latest offering of the Michigan Corporate Relations Network, an initiative to drive innovation and commercialization through the cooperation of six state universities.
Interest: Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) President John L. Anderson announced that IIT is building a 100,000 square-foot Innovation Center at the university’s south side campus. The state-of-the art building will house workshops and media labs and offer students and faculty a centralized facility with a singular purpose of promoting the basic elements of innovation and transitioning new ideas into products and processes.
Interest: Now, educators at UM and Georgia Tech will join Stanford in offering regular workshops for researchers and educators from across the country. UM received a $1.5 million grant to implement the program, which is beginning its second year of a three-year pilot. The grant provides an expansion over the initial training mission, and makes UM an I-Corps node, with the mission of expanding the I-Corps network to a broader community within Michigan, the Midwest and beyond.
Interest: The investment banking community is split on the impact of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, seeing both positive and negative implications, according to new research.
A telephone survey conducted by Market Measurement on behalf of leading accounting and consultancy firm BDO USA, asked executives at 100 US investment banks their views on the recently enacted legislation.
Interest: In April, US President Barack Obama signed a law to make it easier for small American businesses to raise capital. Many Indian startups are now plotting to take advantage of the so-called 'JOBS' Act and the looser regulations it has enabled to list on an American stock exchange.
Interest: Tiger Bioanalytics, a new company emerging from Clemson University research, aims to commercialize innovative genetic sensing technology, according to the university Research Foundation.
Led by Guigen Zhang ofClemsonUniversity, the company is developing a way to conduct gene sequencing that is both accurate and cost-effective. The goal is to sequence a whole genome using DNA from a single cell in a short period of time with high accuracy at a low cost.
Interest: For the second year in a row, Temple has set a new milestone for revenues received from licensing agreements for Temple-developed technologies, according to Temple’s Office of Technology Development and Commercialization.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, Temple received nearly $2.5 million from 24 licensing agreements with companies to develop and market technologies developed by Temple researchers. That amount is double the $1.2 million Temple received in fiscal year 2010-11.
Interest: During a freewheeling brainstorming session about how to get more of the research out of hospitals and universities, and into the hands of companies to make them into products, the senior vice provost for research from Drexel University, Deborah Crawford, put out a passionate idea: that a research university has a duty to its country to support aggressive technology transfer.
Interest: When Congress passed the JOBS Act early this year, included in the Bill was a mechanism to allow for funding of early start ups by Crowdsourcing. The Securities and Exchange Commission is charged with modifying the existing SEC regulations related to investing to allow Joe Public the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of start ups. Online sites will offer the general public the opportunity to buy shares in promising technologies and services.
Interest: The Crowd is on the loose. Thanks to the JOBS Act, mainstream attention came to crowdfunding this year, and platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been benefitting in kind. Kickstarter, in particular, has seen an exponential increase this year in how much capital its projects have been able to raise. The Crowd has pledged $275 million to some 63,000 Kickstarter projects to date, and companies of all breeds are now using these platforms as launchpads and for a little proof of concept.
Interest: There is a lot of talk about innovation today, and how it can be leveraged to promote economic and job growth. In Austin, Texas, it's more than just talk. Throughout the region, businesses are developing cutting-edge technologies, commercializing them, and-with the help of research parks, incubators, and other business support facilities-creating jobs.
Author: Singularity University Affiliate, Contributor
Source: Forbes Magazine
Interest: What can children teach MBAs about winning the innovation game? How is the new science of entrepreneurship transformingbusiness as usual in Silicon Valley and around the startup – and non-startup – world? After this exciting interview with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, we’ll show what kindergarteners beating b-school grads teaches us about the mindset needed to bootstrap success as an entrepreneur.
Interest: According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 520 out of every 100,000 adults in Arizona started businesses in 2011.
Most of the start-ups in Tucson fall under the aerospace, optical sciences, or bio industries. "Arizona has been really fertile, it's a comfortable place to do work and the community's really supportive and well-connected," Entrepreneur William Masson says.
Interest: Nonprofit B612 Foundation, a California-based research group comprised of former NASA astronauts and scientists, announced plans to use a privately funded space telescope to track the orbits of as many as 500,000 near-Earth asteroids, reports Reuters.
The project’s funding is “somewhere between angel investment and round one of venture capital.” The group has already received several hundreds of thousands of dollars in initial backing from venture capitalists and Silicon Valley enterprises.
Interest: Entrepreneurship is a struggle, a battle for success by an entrepreneur and his or her team. What’s not often appreciated, but is highlighted in Harvard University Professor Noam Wasserman’s hefty and sobering book The Founder’s Dilemmas, is the fact that most casualties in this battle often stem from friendly fire or self-inflicted wounds.
Interest: The JOBS Act, which President Obama signed into law in April, will ease regulations on securities in the United States, enabling small businesses to raise funding from non-traditional sources. This legislation, along with Kickstarter and others' accelerating growth, has opened the crowdfunding floodgates. According to a recent report, more than 400 crowdfunding platforms were operating at the beginning of 2012, and several hundreds more are expected to seek accreditation.
Interest: Nearly $1.5 billion was raised for over a million different campaigns around the world last year by 452 different crowdfunding sites, according to a recent industry report from research firm Massolution.
That number is expected to grow exponentially once US regulators approve a recently-passed law that allows regular people to buy stock in a startup company using crowdfunding.
This kind of equity-based funding is currently restricted to accredited investors, such as venture capitalists.
Interest: Crowdfunding allows the average inventor, entrepreneur or creative type to pitch projects on specialized Web sites and persuade total strangers to donate money to the cause.
For now, it is mostly limited to small projects that have progressed slightly beyond the hobby stage.
But a new law passed in April soon will remove regulatory barriers and allow larger ventures to sell ownership interest to investors through crowdfunding Web sites.
Author: Jerry Moran, U.S. House of Representatives
Source: The Emporia Gazette
Interest: Whether you are looking for a job, have the next “big idea,” or already own a business and are looking to grow, Startup Act 2.0 can help. Given that attracting investors and gaining access to sufficient capital is a significant challenge for new businesses, Startup Act 2.0 makes common sense changes to the tax code that will help facilitate investment in startups
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