Just came back from the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association’s annual meeting in downtown Seattle, where 500-plus biotechies and distinguished guests (including more than a few local politicians) gathered for a quiche-and-berries breakfast and some keen networking.

The keynote speaker was Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and now a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Just a few highlights from his talk here:

Zerhouni laid out the top five challenges in public health, as he sees it. Nothing too surprising, but a good way to frame the whole healthcare discussion:

1. The shift from acute to chronic conditions. (“This is a worldwide issue,” he emphasized. “This is the new global health horizon.”)

2. Aging population.

3. Health disparities.

4. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. (Pandemics, for example.)

5. Emerging non-communicable diseases. (Things like obesity and depression, the latter of which the World Health Organization predicts will be the No. 1 cause of disability and dysfunction for people aged 25-44.)

As a world-class radiology researcher, Zerhouni also spoke to the scientific challenges the industry faces. He said the fundamental scientific barrier to doing “translational” research—that which leads to new products like drugs or devices—is the complexity of biological systems involved in diseases. “The explosion of data does not equate to explosion of knowledge,” he said. (This is a common theme across all fields of science and technology.)

On this front, Zerhouni stressed the importance of both external and internal sources of innovation. Meaning, the state of Washington should “find ways of bringing in collaboration on the translation or creation of knowledge.” He pointed out that “building relationships with the Asian Rim is probably your strategic advantage.”

For the politicians in the audience, Zerhouni noted, “Today when you get elected or not elected, the main driver is jobs, jobs, jobs.” He said his dream is that in a few years, biomarkers and healthcare stats will impact political campaigns, to the tune of, “In my district, Body Mass Index has dropped from X to Y.” (Luke previously reported on the issue of jobs being the driver of public support for biotech.)

The last issue Zerhouni addressed was a particularly interesting one: culture wars around science and technology. “Don’t be oblivious to the political, cultural, and moral aspects” of biotech and biomedical work, he said. “Be careful to not assume that everyone in the world believes what you do is holy and good.” Having dealt with the profound issues of evolution vs. creation in Washington DC—most notably in the context of stem cell policy—Zerhouni was sharing some hard-earned wisdom that everyone in the room could take home with them.

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TEDMED had Martha, Goldie, and other celebrity speakers, but San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals broke this week’s big news when it signed up a big Japanese partner to develop its line of obesity drugs. It’s all part of your regular dose of San Diego biotech news, and it’s ready now:

—Amylin Pharmaceuticals, the San Diego-based diabetes drug specialist, announced that it has formed a partnership with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which agreed to carry most of the development costs for Amylin’s weight-loss drugs. In return, Takeda gets a worldwide exclusive license to eventually commercialize Amylin’s experimental obesity drugs, including the combination of pramlintide and metreleptin, and davalintide.

—After a five-year hiatus, TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and president, Marc Hodosh (who also is an Xconomist), brought the conference on medical technology, entertainment and design to San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. TEDMED announced during the conference, which included presentations by Boston Scientific co-founder (and Xconomist) John Abele, Martha Stewart, and Goldie Hawn, that the conference will return to the same location next October.

—I only had time to attend a fraction of the presentations at TEDMED last week. One of my favorites talks, though, was delivered by Bill Davenhall, who leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the Redlands, CA, giant in geographic information systems. Davenhall talked about the importance of including patients’ “place histories” as part of their medical records and raised an interesting question: Will the electronic health record systems being created today have the capability to add data in new categories—such as “geo-medicine”–that aren’t typically included in today’s patient records?

—New York-based Xenomics filed a lawsuit against San Diego-based Sequenom that alleges Sequenom misrepresented the progress in its development of a prenatal test for Downs syndrome. Xenomix says it would not have licensed its patents to Sequenom had it known the truth.

—Denise profiled San Diego-based Sirigen, an early stage medical diagnostic company that is developing technology that uses light-emitting polymers to detect bits of DNA. Sirigen founder Brent Gaylord developed the technology at UC Santa Barbara, extending the significance of UCSB physicist and Nobel laureate Alan Heeger’s discovery of conductive polymers.

—The FDA told San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) and its partner Eli Lilly the companies can now market exenatide (Byetta) as a frontline, standalone therapy for diabetes. The drug was previously approved for use with other drugs, or as a fallback option when other tretments failed.

—Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX), the Cambridge, MA, biotech with operations in San Diego, said the latest trial of its telaprevir treatment for hepatitis C was able to attain the clinical definition of a cure in more than 80 percent of patients who got the drug. The finding is part of the mounting evidence Vertex is gathering on its quest to develop the first-of-its-kind protease inhibitor for the chronic liver disease.

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There were deals to report in San Diego last week. Not necessarily big deals, but even little deals are a big deal these days. Read all about it in this week’s BizTech roundup.

—The V-Vehicle Co. operated in stealth mode in San Diego for three years before it surprised many in June, when the startup automaker announced plans to build a new line of fuel-efficient cars in northeastern Louisiana. Now the story is unfolding a bit more. A regulatory filing that reveals V-Vehicle has raised nearly $63 million in venture capital also shows that Google Ventures is an investor in the company, along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the prominent Silicon Valley VC firm.

—San Diego’s Senomyx (NASDAQ: SNMX) said last week it could get as much as $34.5 million through a new collaboration with Switzerland’s Firmenich, the largest private flavor and fragrance company in the world. The deal gives Firmenich rights to compounds that Senomyx has developed to enhance the taste of table sugar and two other sweeteners. The money will come in handy for Senomyx, which expects total 2009 revenue to fall between $18 million and $22 million, while total expenses are projected to range from $46 million to $49 million.

—San Diego Internet startup KidZui, a San Diego Internet startup for children that has raised almost $12 million in startup venture capital since 2006, launched ZuiTube—an online video site with almost 60,000 kid-friendly videos. ZuiTube uses 200 part-time editors, who are mostly parents and teachers, to pre-screen the videos—just as KidZui prescreens websites to make sure they’re age-appropriate. KidZui is aimed at children from 3 to 13 years old.

—The San Diego-based IPS Group, which previously specialized in providing cellular networking equipment, has raised more than $1.3 million from individual investors to turn itself into a specialized maker of high-tech parking meters. The privately held company’s parking meters are solar-powered, wireless, and Internet-enabled. The technology enables motorists to use a credit card to feed the meter, and it enables municipalities and other customers to use the Internet to monitor their meters.

—The San Diego News Network, which operates a website that provides news and information about the San Diego community, has raised more than $707,000 from its individual investors, and plans to raise about $2 million in the current round. SDNN CEO Neil Senturia told me the online news operation, which was launched five months ago, is growing rapidly and is expected to hit breakeven by the end of this year.

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It’s a good day for Vivek Bhaskaran. The co-founder of Seattle-based Survey Analytics, a marketing and customer relations startup that has been bootstrapped since 2004, has just scored a big win with the White House. The company’s software platform for hosting and managing feedback communities (engaging customers and gathering unsolicited feedback), called IdeaScale, is being used to power the U.S. government’s Open Government Dialogue site. Financial terms of the partnership were not announced.

Today, the National Academy of Public Administration, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and IdeaScale launched the site to solicit ideas from the public on how the federal government can become more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This online brainstorming session will enable the White House to hear people’s most important ideas on open government—including innovative approaches to policy, specific project suggestions (including government-wide or agency-specific ideas), and any examples and stories relating to law, policy, technology, culture, and practice.

Using this Web platform, people can share their ideas and recommendations for how to make government more open, as well as vote on others’ proposed ideas. Originally designed for companies to engage with their customers, IdeaScale has gotten “a ton of traction,” Bhaskaran says. “With collaboration feedback, people and customers can hear each other while they give feedback.”

Back on January 21, President Obama issued the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, stating his goal of implementing sweeping changes in the level of participation and openness in government.

Last July, IdeaScale powered AskTheSpeaker.org, a crowdsourcing application used at a political conference in Austin, TX, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was presenting. That led to the White House contacting Survey Analytics about using IdeaScale to help with the open government directive. “Their job is to come up with directives to be more open and transparent,” Bhaskaran says.

The current brainstorming session will provide ideas for two more stages of collaboration, Bhaskaran says. Next, a discussion phase will occur where the top-rated ideas will be explored further. Finally, a draft phase will be started, where anyone in the public can help edit the language for the final recommendations.

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Southborough, MA-based uTest, a Web-based service that helps software companies crowdsource their quality assurance processes to freelance testers, relaunched its website today with an emphasis on collaboration tools for its community of more than 16,000 testers. A new forum area allows testers to create personal profiles, exchange private messages, and share their best practices, while a “Meet our Testers” application shows the locations of testers on an interactive global map. “Collaboration has always been critical to successful software testing, as the process often involves multiple teams and multiple projects,” Doron Reuveni, CEO of uTest, said in a statement. “uTest is excited to further extend our leadership in human software testing by facilitating the free exchange of ideas.”

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Darkstrand, a Chicago firm that provides industry with access to an ultra high-speed fiber optic network, says it has reached a collaboration agreement with Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, based at UCSD and UC Irvine. Under the collaboration agreement, Calit2 will become a provider of specialized expertise to Darkstrand’s business customers on the National Lambda Rail, which transmits data at rates of 10 gigabits per second or faster. The network is a 15,000-mile loop created in 2005 to connect academic research centers and national laboratories in 30 U.S. cities, including San Diego, Seattle, and Boston.

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Bellevue, WA-based Onehub, a maker of collaborative software for businesses, has raised about $600,000 as part of an ongoing $1 million fundraising round, according to Northwest Innovation, which cites a regulatory filing. No other terms were disclosed. A Onehub spokesperson said the company is not discussing its funding publicly yet.

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As we hurtle headlong toward the second decade of the millennium, the lines between traditional scientific disciplines become blurrier each day. The high school standards for chemistry, biology, physics and math have been refined by modern scientific theory and super-charged by advances in technology, spawning myriad sub-disciplines and off-shoots that are highly interrelated and interdependent. Engineered algae used to fuel jet planes, microprocessors modeled after the human nervous system used to drive computers, anti-collision devices modeled after the locust’s visual system—these are but a few of the growing multitude of examples of the frequency and efficacy of cross-collaboration in contemporary science.

Unfortunately for America, an alarming trend has arisen in the past few decades: a dearth of home-grown scientists to advance the national and global scientific agenda. Would-be domestic organizations are increasingly being forced to turn their collective institutional eye toward Asia for qualified researchers and innovators. This begs the question: What went wrong, and how do we fix it?

In reflecting on my own academic and professional pursuits, as well as those of my broadly-defined “scientist” colleagues, a common theme that resonates is one of “passion, stoked by curiosity and delight.” My initial interest in science arose because the subject matter was both intriguing and—quite simply—fun, resulting in my participation in helping to spawn 40+ high tech and life sciences companies such as Illumina, Neurocrine, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals,Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Nanosys. The old adage about aspiring to have one’s work be play is nowhere more evident than in the sciences. It is only in this spirit that an American scientific revival will ignite and gain momentum, and it is up to us in the scientific community – both its academic and business members – to ensure that this occurs.

It is in this vein that the San Diego Science Festival was hatched. Planned as one of the largest multi-cultural, multi-generational, multi-disciplinary celebrations of science ever seen on the West Coast, the festival will descend on San Diego with more than 500 activities across the county, beginning this weekend and continuing through March. From the science of earthquakes to the physics of skateboarding to the mathematics of juggling, the San Diego Science Festival promises to make science accessible, interactive and fun, highlighting the impact of science and innovation on our daily lives. You can find our schedule of events here.

The grand finale will be the Science Festival’s all-day expo in Balboa Park on Saturday, April 4, 2009. This free event features hands-on science for everyone, from the smallest child to even the most established scientist. Expo-goers can learn the latest ways to conserve precious water resources one drop at a time, discover how the cars of tomorrow will resemble Cuisinarts, test their abilities operating a da Vinci surgical robot, or immerse themselves in a virtual reality environment. In addition, scientific comedians, magicians, authors and stage shows will captivate and excite any aspiring scientist from 9 to 99 years old.

The San Diego Science Festival is partnering with more than 350 organizations – leading businesses and organizations in the community that wish to offer their guidance, financial support and time to help teach the scientific leaders of tomorrow. Our collaborators range from LegoLand California to the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and include many of San Diego’s eminent universities, museums, libraries, and research institutions, as well as the aerospace, life sciences, and advanced technology companies that bring scientific research to life as innovative products and technologies. In addition to the funding I have provided as festival co-host—and despite the down economy—we have been able to raise more than $600,000 from co-host Lockheed Martin and others to fund this month-long celebration of science. The complete list of our generous sponsors is here.

Inspirational fun and learning for the participants, collaboration by a wide variety of organizers, participants and sponsors, a showcase for San Diego’s finest scientists and scientific organizations – if we mean to achieve the essential goal of reviving American Science, the San Diego Science Festival is poised to provide an important start.

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Portland, OR-based Jive Software, which makes social-networking and communication tools for businesses, announced it has signed up Bewag, the Austrian electric utility, as a customer. Since laying off a third of its staff in October, Jive has signed a number of new customers and partners, including United Business Media, Portland Energy Conservation, and Premiere Global Services.

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I’m attracted to the market opportunity within large, established markets. These markets already have huge spend, they have established dominant players with an inertia resistant to major change, most of the innovative talent and money is off in new market spaces, and innovation within these spaces tends to be evolutionary in nature and follow predictable paths.

Identifying a large market that can serve as an appropriate target is often as simple as listening for the drumbeat of consistent comments like:

— “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
— “I wish there was a…”
— “Why doesn’t somebody invent a…”

The revolutionary innovation that occurs in many of these markets is often serendipitous. That means someone isn’t looking to solve the end problem, but something they did is applicable to it. See, for example, Viagra or Post-Its.

More often than not, however, the real revolutionary innovation is in line with the evolutionary. Therefore, pick a really big market and do something revolutionary within the natural evolution of the space.

So the key question becomes: what is it that successful inventors do to be revolutionarily successful within an evolution?

The current modern wonder of revolution within evolution is the Apple iPhone. Apple’s formula for innovation in mature markets is the gold standard. How do they do this? My assessment is that they follow two simple principles:

—Design for how people work.

—Consolidate and reduce core concepts to a ridiculous minimum; a core concept is anything the customer has to learn or understand in order to successfully use your product.

Mobile phones, e-mail on Blackberries and Treos, MP3 music players—all of these existed separately and with ever-expanding feature sets. The race toward consolidation had been going on for some time; but it carried with it the complex, rich feature sets of each independent device.

Apple, with its special magic, stuck with the less-is-more approach and let’s make the …Next Page »

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When I was in college in the late 1980s, the apex of communications technology was the answering machine. Nobody had a mobile phone. Nobody even had an e-mail account, aside from a few computer-science majors. (And since there was no data connectivity in the dorms, even the geeks had to go to the computer room in the campus science center to read their e-mail.) If you wanted to contact a fellow student to set up a lunch date or a study group meeting or a band rehearsal, you had to call their dorm room and leave a message. And if you wanted a friend to edit your term paper, you had to hand it to them on a floppy disk.

So when Dana Lampert and Lance Polivy, two 22-year-old Cornell graduates, came by Xconomy’s office last week to talk about their Cambridge, MA-based startup, a student-oriented groupware provider called Wiggio, I listened with growing bemusement. It seems that kids these days are on the go so much of the time, and have so many clubs and groups and friends to keep up with, that they want help from the same kind of scheduling and collaboration software used inside many Fortune-1000 companies today. “Dana and I both had summer internships on Wall Street, working for big banks, and we realized that there are all these great collaboration tools, but we didn’t have any of them back at school,” says Polivy.

Nor could students afford these tools, even if they were available on campus. Microsoft’s Groove, a desktop program that teams can use to create online workspaces, costs $229 per copy—and even no-frills, Web-based alternatives like Basecamp, a popular collaboration suite from Chicago’s 37signals, can come with steep monthly fees ($24 to $149 per month, in Basecamp’s case). So Lampert and Polivy and their software-engineering colleagues, brothers Rob and Derek Doyle, built a system that lets students share files and calendars, set up group conference calls, and exchange mass text messages, voice messages, and e-mails—all from a free, advertising-supported Web interface.

Students at Cornell and other campuses have been testing Wiggio since last spring, and the startup will open the site to the general public on Monday. Lampert and Polivy say they plan to start marketing the system this fall on 40 select campuses around the country, including Boston schools like BU, Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts.

The pair of young entrepreneurs say that Wiggio—the name is a takeoff on an acronym for “Working In Groups”—was born from their own frustrations at Cornell, keeping their busy student lives in order. “We were in many different business organizations, bands, sports teams, fraternity councils, and living in apartments with different housemates, and we found that each group was using different tools,” says Lampert. “Some were using Google Calendar, others were using Yahoo’s calendars. Some just sent e-mails out, others used listservs. For polls, they’d go to Survey Monkey, and for conference calls they’d use free apps like FreeConference.com. When Lance and I put our heads together, we thought we could put all these things in one place.”

Almost every function on Wiggio duplicates something that’s also available from some other service or platform. But the key to building Wiggio, Lampert says, was making things simple. Setting up a group is quick, easy, and free, and groups can use as many or as few of the communications options as they need. Each task, from creating an event on the Wiggio calendar to sending out a mass text message, is boiled down to …Next Page »

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In high-tech fields such as nanotechnology and “smart” devices, breakthroughs increasingly demand the integration of multiple technical fields. Knowing how to achieve real collaboration will make the difference between success and failure. But many people are very skeptical when asked to join collaborations, because the majority of these end up being dominated by the same voices, so it’s a waste of time for others to make much effort. Either that, or the group stays split into the original camps that were supposed to be brought together. Either way, there is no true benefit gained by working “together.”

One reason real collaboration is so rare is that few people have paid much attention to how to achieve it. In fact, many executives mistakenly believe that to lead they must dominate and control every activity, which discourages others from collaborating. But if you’ve ever worked with an expert collaborator, you know that quite the opposite is true. To get a diverse crowd to work together, the leader actually has to give up a certain amount of control, take some risks, and encourage creative thinking. By doing this, the leader creates an atmosphere of trust and openness. He or she proves that they really want to hear all opinions, and that everyone will be treated fairly, but with accountability.

Many people can’t even recognize real collaboration when they see it. But a few people seem to naturally excel at it. They take the time and effort to set the stage properly and get the right people working together. The goal is to make each participant feel comfortable offering honest opinions and their best ideas. The key is to create a balance between respect for each other’s contributions and an appreciation for every idea being constructively challenged.

The best examples that I have seen of this “collaborative state” are in some surprising places. I first witnessed it while helping to develop a new type of medical meeting in the 1970s: the live demonstration course. Such meetings were, and still are, controversial because they telecast real-time surgical procedures on actual patients—a daring technique, but one that seems to have a lot of advantages as well. These meetings were also unusual when they started because they included commercial, academic, and professional presenters, which was very different from the academically focused society meetings.

Live demonstration meetings like TCT, the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics symposium, and ISET, the International Symposium on Endovascular Therapy, have since become very popular because they facilitate more learning than typical society meetings do. Done correctly, a live demonstration course showcases “peak collaboration.”

The key to these meetings’ success is having an adept moderator, who sets the stage and expertly manages the participants. The sessions feature diverse views, experience, and culture. It is a much broader range of views than you see at a traditional academic meeting, and here, each comment is judged by its content, not by the speaker’s “credentials.” And while the discussion is often quite candid, there is little or none of the pontification and bullying that is so common in most boardrooms or at academic meetings. Everyone feels comfortable speaking, but the level of the discourse is also very high.

During the actual live demonstrations, an expert panel with contrarian views comments, questions, and advises the procedure in real time to yield a rich synthesis of opinions, expertly shaped by a skilled moderator. The audience may even help direct discussion through audience response systems. The audience gets an extraordinary learning experience, while the patient has the benefit of a whole panel of experts’ opinions.

There’s a wide range of ideas constantly flowing, and the best ones tend to rise above the others much more easily here than in other settings. In my opinion, the live demonstration meeting has been the most significant factor in accelerating the advancement of medical technology. Much of that success is due to the way the meeting moderators bring the audience and other participants to a “collaborative state.”

Another example of true collaboration occurs at FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a student competition in which teaching collaboration is a specific goal, so it becomes ingrained into student behavior. The way the game is designed, teams cannot win without collaborating—not just among themselves, but with competitors, judges, and observers as well. On top of that, the contestants learn “gracious professionalism,” which obliges everyone to behave in a fair and polite manner. FIRST brings participants to a collaborative state.

These examples show that the roots of real collaboration are openness, creativity, and …Next Page »

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Last Thursday, April 24, nanotechnology entrepreneur Anita Goel, founder of Medford, MA-based Nanobiosym, testified on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Innovation. Following is an adaptation of Goel’s testimony.

Nanotechnology to me is the ability to probe and control matter and systems on increasingly finer scales, at the nanoscale and smaller. This is important because it gives us a new level of control over matter. Nanotechnology is a platform science which combines several traditional fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. The applications that stem from these capabilities likewise cut across several different sectors from medicine and energy to the environment and materials science. For example, the ability to control the assembly and arrangement of atoms and molecules in a nanomaterial could give it the durability of steel and the weight of plastic.

Nanotechnology provides a platform for innovation across conventional boundaries of science, technology, and commerce. Furthermore, by its intrinsic multidisciplinary nature, it fosters collaboration across conventional political and economic boundaries.

Nanobiosym was founded as an idea lab and research institute to innovate at the convergence of physics, medicine, and nanotechnology. Nanobiosym, and its commercial partner Nanobiosym Diagnostics, have been privately developing Gene-RADAR, a portable nanotechnology-enabled platform that can rapidly and accurately detect genetic fingerprints from any biological organism. The company’s vision is to give patients worldwide real-time access to their own diagnostic information via low-cost handheld devices.

Nanobiosym has been the direct beneficiary of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. We have received multiple rounds of competitive funding grants as some of our technology platforms transitioned from the pure R&D stage to the more applied or prototyping stage. Without the resources that the Initiative brought to bear—not only funding, but also coordination and a sense of national priority—Nanobiosym would not be where it is today.

As the Subcommittee considers how best to update and improve the Initiative, I hope that our experience as an emerging nanotechnology company (in moving across the gamut from science and technology innovation, to proof of concept development and developing commercial products for global markets) will help identify what has worked well and what could be improved to encourage other companies like us.

A Roadmap for Harnessing Nanotechnology to Drive the New Global Economy
The 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act focused primarily on basic research. This led to dynamic growth in America’s nanotechnology research infrastructure primarily in academic settings, and sowed the seeds of nanotechnology commercialization throughout the country.

Today, five years later, we are beginning to see the results of this initial investment, as nanotechnology-enabled products start to enter the marketplace across the spectrum of industry sectors, from water purification to materials engineering to healthcare. The growth of the next five years could be exponential. The United States has a historic opportunity to drive nanotechnology to maximize its impact on global challenges, including health, environment, energy, and even building the new global economy.

The reauthorization of the National Nanotechnology Initiative should focus on four new areas in addition to basic research:

1. Nanotechnology Education

If America is going to compete effectively in the global nanotechnology revolution, we need a highly skilled and qualified workforce. We need scientists, engineers, and technicians who have a vision for nanotechnology, seek to innovate with it, and are capable of working at the nanoscale. We need professors and teachers who can educate about the nano world, and we need business professionals who can turn the scientists’ work into useful products. It is already difficult to meet the demand for PhDs with nanotechnology backgrounds, and that demand will only increase in the coming years.

Nanotechnology education, like nanotechnology research, is necessarily multidisciplinary. Because nanotechnology spans physics, materials science, chemistry, and biology, it needs to be taught throughout the science curriculum. And like other subjects, nanotechnology is best learned by doing. Programs that improve access to basic nanotechnology tools will help inspire a new generation of students to pursue careers in science because they will be able to see firsthand nanotechnology’s potential.

Our education system must start transcending conventional boundaries between academic disciplines, between academic and corporate training programs, and between U.S. and international training experiences. I would suggest the creation of more international exchange programs. Just as other countries send their students here, we should start sending our people around the world to be trained not only in nanotechnology but its broader international context.

The reauthorization bill will be an excellent investment in America’s future if it promotes nanotechnology education from grade school through graduate school. If it does not, we will continue to rely in the short term on foreign science students who will often end up returning to their home countries to compete against us after completing their studies.

2. Bridging the Gap Between Nanotechnology Research and Commercialization

America’s competitiveness in the global market is being tested in the field of nanotechnology, where Russia, China, Japan, the European Union, and other nations are making major investments in translating basic research into …Next Page »

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Collaborative online workspaces for business people—a fringe concept just a couple of years ago—is now a hotly contested market, with WebEx launching WebOffice, Adobe’s Acrobat gaining Web conferencing features, Yahoo integrating Zimbra, and Microsoft pushing Office Groove (the legacy of its 2005 acquisition of Beverly, MA-based Groove Networks). And that’s just the beginning of the list. Now Waltham, MA-based Novell is solidifying its own presence in presence, so to speak. The business infrastructure software provider announced that it’s acquiring Maynard, MA-based SiteScape, which makes an office collaboration suite called SiteScape Forum and an open-source Web conferencing platform called ICEcore.

The basic concept behind all of the collaborative workspace platforms is the same, although the list of components differs from product to product. Most combine a range of disparate tools that office workers tend to use anyway— e-mail, instant messaging, message boards, shared calendars, secure document sharing with version control, and live multimedia Web meetings—into a single package accessible via either a downloadable client program or a Web browser. Some, like SiteScape Forum, add additional features borrowed from the Web social-networking world, such as wikis and blogs.

Increasingly, providers of business-communications and productivity software feel they must offer all of these real-time collaboration features to stay competitive. Novell formed a partnership with SiteScape last year, using its open-source ICEcore platform to create a workspace service called Novell Teaming + Conferencing that complemented the company’s existing GroupWise product. Given that partnership, plus Novell’s heavy investment over the last several years in other open-source systems such as SUSE Linux, the prospect of owning the ICEcore code base made SiteScape into a logical acquisition target.

At least, so says Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s president and CEO, in the press release announcing the purchase, the financial details of which were not disclosed. “The acquisition of SiteScape fits squarely into the corporate strategy we have laid out,” Hovsepian said. “It extends our leadership in promoting open source in the enterprise market and is a key technology addition in an area where we see great growth potential. Most importantly, it allows us to move aggressively to give customers a new, open option for collaboration, helping them escape vendor lock-in and offering easy integration across platforms, whether Linux or Windows.”

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With the wrong visualization tools, data can be deathly boring—just think of all the dry, meaningless PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets you’ve endured in darkened lecture halls and conference rooms. But with the right tools and context, data can come alive, as Yale information designer Edward Tufte has famously argued and you’ll understand yourself if you’ve seen the inspiring 2006 and 2007 TED videos of Swedish researcher Hans Rosling using his Trendalyzer software to illustrate global demographic trends.

The folks at IBM’s Lotus division also seem to understand the power of good data graphics, and last week I had the opportunity to walk across Rogers Street from the Xconomy world headquarters to the division’s Cambridge lab to talk with the brains behind Many Eyes, the company’s grand experiment in collaborative data visualization.

At the Many Eyes portal, anyone can register for a free account, upload a data set, and select one of about 16 ways to display it, from a traditional bar chart or fever chart to a sophisticated scatter plot, tag cloud, or treemap. For example, here’s a tag cloud I created in about 15 minutes, by pasting the text from last week’s Xconomy blog posts (excluding news briefs) into the Many Eyes upload page.

Click on this graphic to go to a live version of the tag cloud, where you can mouse over individual words to see how many times they turned up in our stories. Be sure to try visualizing using both the one-word and two-word modes by clicking the radio buttons. In one-word mode, you’ll see that the most common word in Xconomy stories last week—and probably every week—was “company,” followed by “Taylor” (Eons CEO Bill Taylor was the subject of a long profile by Bob on October 30) and “EMC” (which has captured a lot of mindshare recently due to a string of acquisitions and the mind-boggling rise of share prices in its subsidiary VMware). The most common two-word phrases were “Virtual Iron” (a VMware competitor), “gene therapy,” and “operating systems.”

None of that is particularly earthshaking, of course. But it’s fun. It’s the kind of information that would have been hard to obtain before Many Eyes came along without resorting to specialized software. And most importantly, it’s shared. If you clicked on the tag cloud graphic above, it took you to a public Many Eyes page, where anybody can view it and opine upon it.

“The traditional view of data visualization is that it’s solitary, like looking through a microscope,” says Martin Wattenberg, leader of the Visual Communications Lab at IBM Lotus’s Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group. “But really, it’s the stories people tell around visualizations that make them interesting. We wondered if that is something you can design around. And we decided the best way to test that was to build a site and deliberately design it around collaborative visualization.”

Wattenberg’s group launched Many Eyes in January as part of IBM’s Alphaworks, a Web environment where early adopters can test specific IBM software innovations before they get incorporated into products (and 40 percent of them do). Since then, users have uploaded more than 8,700 data sets and saved more than 6,000 visualizations based on them.

Often, the conversations about the visualizations are as interesting as the visualizations themselves. That’s partly because of the community customization features built into the Many Eyes interface. Even if someone else uploaded a data set, for example, a visitor can select a customized view of that data, then save and share a snapshot of that view for discussion. For one dataset, giving a breakdown of federal spending from 1962 to 2004, a visitor isolated a view showing a huge spike in spending on “deposit insurance” from 1987 to 1992 and asked what had caused it. Within days, other visitors had provided an answer: “Appears to be the savings and loan bailout cost,” one wrote. Wattenberg calls this exchange an example of “social data analysis in motion.”

But as any veteran Washington watcher knows, quantitative data can be fuel for political as well as social discussion, and Many Eyes has seen its share of polemics. The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization in the nation’s capital devoted to using technology to ensure greater transparency in government, has made extensive use of visualizations from Many Eyes to illustrate the epidemic of congressional earmarks. For fun, in September Wattenberg posted Alberto Gonzales’s testimony to Congress regarding the firings of U.S. attorneys. Users immediately used the data to create word trees, which showed that the word “don’t” in Gonzales’s testimony was most frequently followed by the word “recall,” giving a rather blunt illustration of the former attorney general’s self-serving memory lapses. But within 90 minutes, Wattenberg says, someone else (presumably a Republican) published an equally damning word tree of Bill Clinton’s testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Of course, new tools are always vulnerable to abuse. Many of the thousands of visualizations published by Many Eyes users are mystifying, nonsensical, or just plain painful. “We definitely see people make visualizations that just aren’t the right type for their data,” says Wattenberg. “But I make an analogy to the early days of the Macintosh and desktop publishing, when people would use twelve different fonts in the same document, just because they could. Nowadays most people are very typographically literate. I think we’re likely to follow the same course with visualization tools.”

I asked Wattenberg what unexpected findings were emerging from the Many Eyes experiment so far. Most important, he said, was the way Many Eyes visualizations have become part of a larger conversation going on across the Web. “Most of the conversation is happening on blogs around the site, rather than on the Many Eyes site itself,” he says. That’s still important data for IBM, Wattenberg says, because the company is interested in helping people use data in the ways that feel most natural to them. “These are all cases of people talking about numbers—which people do in business all the time.”

“We had expected to create a conversation” within the Many Eyes site, Wattenberg says. “But at this point we feel like it’s enough to be a component of the larger Web community.”

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This morning, MIT announced the creation of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. David Koch, a co-owner of Koch Industries with his brother Charles (both are graduates of MIT), made a very generous gift to the university to establish the new Institute. The word “Integrative” in the name of the Koch Institute is the key to the vision of its establishment. It speaks volumes about where cancer research is heading, and I’m really excited to be a part of it.

The Koch Institute is committed to integrating engineering and cancer research to create new methods to understand, diagnosis, and treat the disease of cancer. At MIT, as is the case in most of the country, engineering has not extensively interacted with the segment of cancer research that is focused at the cellular level. This is not to say that there has not been outstanding engineering at MIT and other places addressing cancer. For example, my MIT colleague Robert Langer has designed novel materials to allow the slow release of drugs for treatment of brain cancer and has fashioned nanoparticles that can carry drugs to specific tumor cells. Engineering researchers have also developed nanoparticles called quantum dots that are being used to image tumor cells. These exciting developments are but early indicators of a much larger range of possibilities if engineering becomes more closely aligned with research into the genetic, molecular, and cellular changes now known to cause human cancers.

All 12 current members of the Center for Cancer research at MIT, which is led by Tyler Jacks, will join an equal number of engineers, including Robert Langer, in a new building that will house the Koch Institute. In fact, engineers and cancer biologists will jointly occupy each floor in the building in order to maximally stimulate interactions. The most valuable collaborations arise when students and fellows in laboratories meet informally, frequently in the wee hours of the morning, waiting for experiments to end.

The Center for Cancer Research—of which I have been a member since 1974—has a great tradition of breakthrough discoveries about the molecular and cellular processes that cause cancer. Many of these discoveries have subsequently generated new treatments. For example, the first oncogene was isolated from a human cancer cell in the Center. A gene now targeted by the antibody Herceptin to treat breast cancer was identified as an oncogene in the Center. And Center researchers also discovered the leukemia-causing enzyme that is targeted by the drug Gleevec, one of the new generation of oncogene-specific cancer drugs. Over the short three decades of the Center’s existence, five of its associated faculty members have received Nobel Prizes.

The new Koch Institute represents what some have coined the “third revolution” in healthcare research—the combination of engineering technology and methods with rapidly expanding research on the molecular and cellular processes causing disease. The previous two revolutions are the development of molecular biology, beginning with the discovery by Watson and Crick of the structure of DNA, and the genome revolution capped by the completion of the sequence of the human genome. The promise of this third revolution is the rapid translation of new molecular and cellular knowledge into diagnosis and treatment through engineering approaches—and the more rapid advancement of cellular research through new nanoscale quantitative methods and measurements developed by engineers.

It is interesting to think about these two cultures, cell biology and engineering. Historically, the former has continued to seek new insights about the fundamental workings of normal and cancer cells. The search was focused on new knowledge because it offered new possibilities for disease prevention and treatment. The examples I cited above confirm the validity of this great tradition. In contrast, engineers commonly focus on more short-term objectives, often solving a problem with the knowledge at hand. Thus, they are comfortable working with partially defined systems and using empirical but quantitative models to design new means of modifying the system. The modern tools of engineering—including computation, nanoscale fabrication, high-resolution imaging methods, and an ever expanding set of materials—offer the promise of transforming the future of cancer research to both expand its power and shorten the time between discovery and new treatments. This is a major objective of the new Koch Institute. It is a worthy objective and will generate future generations of young scientists and engineers trained in the best tradition of cellular research and engineering.

The Koch Institute joins a number of other Institutes associated with MIT and located in Kendall Square. These include the Whitehead Institute, McGovern Institute, Picower Institute, and Broad Institute. The Koch Institute will be located immediately next to the Department of Biology in the Koch Building—named for the same generous alumnus—and across Main Street from the Broad Institute. The Koch Institute is another important commitment by MIT to the future of the vibrant environment in Kendall Square.

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Boston University recently announced plans to enhance its technology transfer efforts. I have worked constructively with BU’s Office of Technology Development on a number of start-ups, including Afferent Corporation, a medical device company based in Providence, RI, and applaud the plans for expansion. As BU and other universities ramp up their efforts to commercialize technology, I have a couple suggestions to offer.

First, it is critical for universities to reach out to experienced entrepreneurs, who can act as advisors, teachers, and management leaders in new startups. While novel technology typically serves as the catalyst for a new venture, it is usually not the most important element of the venture (even though founding scientists, like myself, would like to think otherwise). The management team is the most critical element for a new start-up, and we academic scientists typically do not have the skills, experience, time, or focus to serve in such a capacity.

Universities need to find ways to get entrepreneurs involved with their academic communities. This could be through advisory committees, adjunct faculty positions, and entrepreneur-in-residence programs. These interactions would enhance the educational experiences of science, engineering, and business students, and substantially enhance technology-transfer efforts.

Additionally, universities should consider evaluating their IP portfolios as collective opportunities, and not simply as isolated cases arising from faculty laboratories. Too often university start-ups are one-trick ponies based on a new technology coming out of a professor’s lab. Academia encourages research independence, which leads to silos.

Tech transfer offices need to break out of this mold, and consider how different technologies can be combined to create strong, exciting new companies. Professor egos will need to be massaged, and the founding scientists will need to divvy up the founders’ equity, but in many instances these integrated efforts could enhance chances for success.

Along similar lines, universities should look to other universities, and consider creative ways in which their technologies could be combined in start-ups or existing, young companies. We need to establish new mechanisms that can facilitate these types of interactions and relationships.

Jim Collins is a University Professor, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Co-Director of the Center for BioDynamics at Boston University. A 2003 MacArthur fellow, he is a scientific co-founder and chair of the scientific advisory board of both Cellicon Biotechnologies and Afferent.

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Get this—Silicon Valley is thinking too small. Web 2.0? Small. Social networking? Small potatoes. Google, Yahoo, YouTube, iPhone—all too small, at least in Frank Moss’s view.

A little over a year ago, Moss took over as director of MIT’s Media Lab. He had some big shoes to fill. Moss’s charge was to return the lab to the lofty heights it had enjoyed under its founder, Nicholas Negroponte (now the lab’s chairman emeritus). It was a challenge Moss gladly embraced. The energetic former entrepreneur (and member of Xconomy’s editorial advisory board) has a penchant for challenges: he has founded and/or run several successful IT companies and a biotech firm. At the Media Lab, he has worked to build the framework to pursue a far grander vision, though, one that has Boston leading the world in high-tech innovation. All the area’s people and institutions have to do, he says, is embrace their strengths and work together better—and, of course, learn to think big.

I met with Moss in his corner office at the Media Lab, where his seriousness about this vision was plain. “I think we’ve got all the pieces,” he says. “If you were to draw a circle of radius 10 miles around Kendall Square, I think you’d find within that, between the universities, the venture community, the biomedical community, the business community here, you’d find all the ingredients to really have the Boston area lead in a way that it has never led before. There’s more opportunity within that than anywhere else in the world.”

It’s not that the area hasn’t done well. By most yardsticks, it is second only to Silicon Valley in high-tech innovation—although it has been slipping by some indicators, such as venture funding. But that’s not enough, says Moss. “I view the Boston area just as basically underperforming relative to its assets,” he says. “Yes, it performs well in some areas. But to whom much is given, much is expected. If you look at the assets we have available, we should be outstripping every other area in the world.” He adds, “The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, it’s less.”

“I personally would point as an example to the Media Lab,” he says. The lab, in Moss’s view, has not been as vital to the innovation ecosystem as it could have been. “Within the four walls there are an incredible number of great ideas generated,” he says. “But if you measure how that all has integrated with the ecosystem here in the community, the results are not nearly as good as they might have been.”

Okay, so what is missing, both at the lab and in the greater Boston region—and what should be done? For starters, says Moss, “What is missing is collaboration.” Other areas that don’t “have nearly as much to offer” make up ground by being much more collaborative, he says. “If we find new and creative ways of collaborating, we can be the leader.”

Also hindering the area is a somewhat risk-averse attitude. Although great startups have long been formed and funded in the Boston region, Moss says, “the willingness to take risk on new and kind of crazy ideas is greater in other parts of the country.”

Moss is working to change that. For starters, at the Media Lab, he is looking to get venture capitalists “in the front door rather than the back,” to give ideas and technologies more of a chance to be commercialized. This will require re-thinking some of the basic founding precepts of the Media Lab, and its relationship with its critical industrial sponsor base, he says, but times have changed for them as well as the Lab. Second, Moss is laying out a vision for taking on much grander challenges—with the help of other groups around MIT and in the community at large.

Web 2.0 is great, he says, but let Silicon Valley own it. “I think that’s small, compared to ‘Human 2.0,’ or ‘Democracy 2.0,’ some of the huge challenges facing society today—dealing with the problems of the disadvantaged, the disabled and the disenfranchised of the world. Not just inventing the future, but inventing a truly better future. Searching, socializing, and shopping online is fine, but we can and must do much better than that. We must look for a deeper, more profound connection between people and technology.”

“Let’s not be too conservative here,” Moss says. “It’s time to say, ‘What’s to lose?’ There’s a huge amount to gain. We can really knock the cover off the ball.”

Coming next week in Part 2: Moss’s grand challenges

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