Interest: Despite the fact that the United States has historically been a "leader in green technologies" we have failed in bringing these technologies into the commercialization arena.
Interest: According to Bacaj, "After one of the worst years for venture-capital investment in a decade, the first half of 2010 closed on a positive note, signaling recovery for the industry."
Interest: This article suggests that the "standard route for academics starting their own business: disclose an invention to the university, get it patented and venture forth into the spin-out world" is no longer the best approach.
Tags: University Startups,Universities,Research Commercialization
Interest: Article about "Dr. Hofstein, the chief executive officer of MaRS Innovation, a new entity charged with turning Toronto scientists’ ideas into products and profits." Dr. Hofstein is from Isreal, where he pioneered a funding model by placing multiple startups in an umbrella holding company.
Tags: Government Policy,Research Commercialization
Interest:The Department of Commerce holds forums on innovation across the country to discuss the role universities should play in economic development and job creation... “Universities have long been a critical driver of innovation in the U.S.,” Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke said. “We are committed to working with university leaders to increase the economic impact of our nation’s investment in research and development to help drive economic growth and job creation.”
Interest: NYU created $20 million fund to spur the commercialization of select technologies developed at NYU and to provide seed funding for startup companies based on those technologies.
Interest: Article on DOE's "National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap", which aims to summarize the state of technology today and point to directions for future work, dives into great detail on the biology of various kinds of algae, means of cultivating and harvesting them, and how they can be processed into fuel.
Congresswoman Doris Matsui and UC researchers on Thursday announced a $600,000 federal grant for University of California Davis to speed the route between medical research and commercialization.
The Partnerships for Innovation Program grant from the National Science Foundation is intended to encourage collaboration between scientists, educators, students, community and business leaders to develop new medical technologies that advance health care and stimulate the local economy.
Local research with commercial potential includes a biological “bandage” — a wound dressing made from stem cells that could improve health from burns and chronic ulcers.
LA JOLLA ---- UC San Diego received a $37.2 million grant Wednesday as part of a federal initiative to make medical research more productive.
The new push is funded with $255 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health. Its goal is to hasten moving discoveries from the laboratory to patients, a field known as "translational science" or translational medicine.
With Wednesday's announcement, UCSD joins the top ranks of an NIH-supervised national network to advance translational science. UCSD's grant goes to its Clinical and Translational Research Institute, part of its health sciences division.
The rest of the $255 million in what are called clinical science and translational awards goes to eight other institutes, including $56.8 million to the University of Southern California and $20 million to UC Irvine. That amounts to 45 percent of the total for the three Southern California universities.
Governor M. Jodi Rell today announced that a state initiative to spur the development of high-tech start-ups, foster additional economic development and stimulate job creation is expanding to a third location: the University of Connecticut Health Center campus in Farmington.
CTech at the UConn Technology Incubation Program is a joint initiative of Connecticut Innovations (CI), the state’s quasi-public authority for technology investing and innovation development, and the University of Connecticut’s Office of Technology Commercialization.
“New businesses will benefit from a full range of resources provided by CI and UConn,” Governor Rell said. “We are putting a major emphasis on speeding the start-up and commercialization of innovative technology-based companies. Small and mid-sized businesses create the vast majority of jobs in our state and our state is leading the way in a number of high-tech fields.
Tags: Government Policy,Universities,Research Commercialization
Area business leaders, University of Michigan officials and members of the U.S. Department of Commerce met in Ann Arbor today to discuss the university's role in innovation, economic development, job creation and commercialization of federally funded research.
The Commerce Department's Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which hosted the event at the Michigan League on UM's campus, designed the forum to generate incentives to spark commercialization at research universities throughout the U.S.
“Higher education is what is driving our local, state and national economies,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the invited attendees. “We need to focus on active funding for our universities.”
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - (Business Wire) Microarrays, Inc. (MI), an innovator of array-based technologies for biological research, detection and diagnostics, today announced that the company’s management team and a group of independent investors have purchased MI from Vanderbilt University. The new company structure will allow MI to more quickly and nimbly respond to client’s rapidly expanding needs, especially within the diagnostic and health care arenas.
MI uses proprietary robotics to manufacture microarrays, orderly arrangements of capture probes usually made of DNA, proteins or other complex organic molecules. These probes are able to “capture” biological information from experimental or clinical samples, allowing researchers to rapidly sort through complex samples and identify the presence or absence of targets of interest, whether for basic research or disease detection. Array-based tools accelerate the rate of discovery by allowing scientists to better understand the fundamental aspects of molecular biology and explore the underlying aspects of human disease. The technology has promising applications in the field of diagnostics, such as sub-typing cancers in an effort to better direct therapies, identification of viral and bacterial pathogens within a patient sample, and personalized medicine.
Washington state’s Life Sciences Discovery Fund said it’s awarded a total of $600,000 to four state research teams.
The four researchers who will each receive $150,000 include: Julie Brown, Seattle Children’s Hospital; Rodney Ho, University of Washington; Eric Seibel, University of Washington; Harlan Robins, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Here’s more information on the awards:
Washington State Life Sciences Discovery Fund Announces Commercialization Grant Awards And A Follow-On Competition
SEATTLE, Washington, July 20, 2010—The Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) today announced $600,000 in awards to four Washington state-based research teams to support commercial development of health-related technologies. The funded projects will concentrate on improving the success rate of lumbar punctures (spinal taps) in children; developing a safer and more effective magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agent; enhancing a DNA sequencing technology to profile T cells within the immune system; and developing a device to detect early stages of tooth decay.
MIDLAND, Mich. & TOLEDO, Ohio, Jul 20, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Researchers at Dow Corning and The University of Toledo (UT) announced today that the organizations have signed a memorandum of understanding to engage in collaborative discussions on photovoltaic (PV) solar research and development efforts to help reduce the cost of solar energy to make it a viable and economically competitive energy option globally.
"Both Dow Corning and UT want homes and businesses throughout the world to take advantage of clean, renewable energy from the sun," said Gregg Zank, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Dow Corning. "It is essential that businesses, academics and the government collaborate in order to accelerate the advancement of solar technologies."
The auto industry is moving forward. Just look at the successful public listing last week of the electric carmaker Tesla Motors, Breakingviews says.
General Motors wants to innovate, too. It’s plowing $100 million into a venture capital fund to create new technologies and add to the bottom line. Corporate venture capital can be a creative way to outsource research and development. But the odds of spawning anything more look long.
Like other big companies, G.M. has carrots to entice start-ups. It can offer quick access to potential markets in everything from batteries to entertainment systems. And it has already invested in equipment like wind tunnels, which may be a nice perk for some new thinkers.
The Economic Development Administration is in. So is the Agriculture Department. Now, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has entered the clusters game too. Last week, the agency begun accepting applications for two new grant programs focused on accelerating small business growth and job creation through existing regional industry clusters. The SBA’s initiative is yet another example of the current administration adopting the clusters paradigm as a general organizing principle for economic development and innovation investments, and follows on such efforts as the multiple-agency effort to spur a regional building energy efficiency cluster and the explicit prioritization of “collaborative regional innovation” in EDA grantmaking.
Office of Technology Transfer Partnership Intermediary Network (OTTPIN) is a web portal deal management tool for Technology Managers that provides a single location for viewing patents, leads, and the deals and opportunities managers currently have in progress.
OTTPIN is a web portal that specifically fosters interactions between Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Partnership Intermediaries (PI), facilitates Patent Pipeline Reload Meetings, and assists PI employees in tracking technology transfer and transition agreements, leads, and deals. In addition to viewing patents and leads, OTTPIN is particularly useful in helping managers document leads, upload documents, assign and track action items, set and receive reminders, and share information.
Angels know that the CEO is critical to the success of any startup company. ACEF asked Tom LeFevre, a twelve-year member of The Angels' Forum in Palo Alto, CA and co-founder of Intuit, to share his perspective on assessing startup CEOs.
ACEF: The Angels' Forum has invested in about a hundred startups over the last ten plus years. You've had a lot of experience with CEOs. What have you learned?
TL: We know that the CEO is the single most important person when we consider an investment in a startup. We've also learned that when Angels' Forum tried to talk about and assess CEOs, there was a problem in just having the discussion. CEOs are critical to a company's success and yet we had no good way to gauge in advance whether a CEO would be good or not. There wasn't a quantitative way to assess them, and when it came to qualitative measures, the words we were using didn't have a common meaning.
Summary of "The Consequences of Entrepreneurial Finance: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis" Published: April 15, 2010 Authors: William R. Kerr and Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and Antoinette Schoar of MIT
This working paper published by Harvard Business School quantifies the positive impact of angel investors on the new ventures they fund. A firm's survival, growth, and access to follow-on capital are considered.
A central question in finance literature is whether or not angels or venture capitalists have a real impact on the companies in which they invest. Anecdotal information about the angel effect on portfolio companies exists, but the impact of angel investors has been far less researched and studied quantitatively than the effect of venture capitalists-even through angel groups are a significant a source of capital for seed, startup, and early stage firms.
While most college students scramble to find summer jobs, a handful of students at the University of Virginia will spend their summer trying to create some. This summer, the Darden Business Incubator will host 18 entrepreneurship ventures as MBA students -- and others in the U.Va. community -- bring early-stage business ventures to life.
Highlighted among this year's ventures are a "socially impactful private equity and economic development fund" in Africa as well as a business based on individualized print media. Others mentioned include an online medical supplies company, a geriatric consulting business, an event-based social networking website and a wholesale plant nursery.
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