It was a little over a year ago that Xconomy broke the news that a movement was underway to bring an Entrepreneur Walk of Fame to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, modeled after its Hollywood namesake.

The idea makes a lot of sense: If we celebrate movie stars and athletes, why not the top innovators and business leaders of all time? The goal is to inspire young people to make a big impact on the world. As for a location for the Walk of Fame, why not historic Kendall Square, which arguably sits in the densest cluster of technology and life sciences organizations and companies in the world?

Lo and behold, it’s really happening. Today the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame will be unveiled at a 1 pm ceremony in the newly paved plaza in front of the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square. To get to this point took the collaborative efforts of a lot of people from MIT, the City of Cambridge, the Kauffman Foundation, and several community and private organizations.

Here is the inaugural class of seven inductees (and who will present the awards at the ceremony, which is almost as interesting):

—Thomas Edison (1847-1931), founder of General Electric. Probably America’s most famous inventor, he is credited with pioneering the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the commercial light bulb. But it’s his contributions to industry that got him in here. (Presented by David Edison Sloane, Edison’s great-grandson.)

—Bill Hewlett (1913-2001), co-founder and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. He was a Stanford and MIT grad. (Presented by Howard Anderson of MIT Sloan School of Management, formerly of Yankee Group and Battery Ventures, and an Xconomist.)

—David Packard (1912-1996), co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Hewlett-Packard. A Stanford grad and General Electric veteran who supplied the garage that housed the early HP. Rumor has it they called it “HP,” rather than “PH,” based on a coin flip. (Also presented by Howard Anderson.)

—Bob Swanson (1947-1999), co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Genentech. He was an MIT undergrad and MIT Sloan grad, as well as a founding board member of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. (Presented by Tyler Jacks of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.)

—Bill Gates (1955- ), co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Microsoft; co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is probably Harvard’s most famous dropout, and one of the world’s richest men. (Presented by Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the PC spreadsheet.)

—Steve Jobs (1955- ), co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Apple. On his resume: the Apple II, Mac, Pixar, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad…need we say more? (Presented by Dan Lyons, better known as Fake Steve Jobs.)

—Mitch Kapor (1950- ), founder of Lotus Development, creator of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kapor is the one inductee who will be present at today’s ceremony and will speak for himself. Rumor has it there will also be lots of ex-Lotus employees on hand wearing vintage Lotus 1-2-3 shirts.

“This is a hall of fame” for entrepreneurs, says Bill Aulet of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, who spearheaded the overall effort. “The event itself is kind of like The Breakfast Club. These people are coming together who fought at different times.” (He was talking about Gates, Jobs, and Kapor in particular.)

Each inductee gets a granite star on a 4-foot by 1.5-foot tile that has the entrepreneur’s name, title, and one of his inspirational quotes inscribed. (See photo, left, of the Steve Jobs tile, next to an MIT beaver mascot.) The tiles sit in the plaza next to the Kendall T stop, close to the sidewalk, on either side of the new grassy knoll. As of yesterday morning, about a dozen workmen were sweating to put the finishing touches on the construction in the plaza.

Of course, with any list like this, it’s easy to nitpick or ask why someone is or isn’t on the list. The whole selection process was probably subject to all the usual politics that plague any … Next Page »

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What time is it? Time to start looking forward to September events in the Boston tech world.

Xconomy has been hearing rumors about a big festival happening around Kendall Square next month. t=0, as it is being called, will kick off on the afternoon of September 16 and last through the 18th. We don’t have many details yet (like the exact venue), but t=0 sounds like it will be a celebration of technology, entrepreneurship, and business innovation meant to inspire a new generation of students and entrepreneurs around Boston.

According to the event’s sparse website (which includes a teaser video and preliminary schedule), the sessions will cover Web technologies, clean energy, and healthcare and life sciences. There will also be an MIT startup showcase and a “hack-a-thon” competition.

What we do know is the festival has attracted some heavy hitters from the national tech world. Computing pioneer Mitch Kapor is slated to give the opening keynote on the 16th. Kapor, for those who don’t know, is the founder of Lotus Development, creator of Lotus 1-2-3, and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; he has been involved with a number of startups over the course of his career. And giving the closing keynote on the 18th will be venture investor and entrepreneur Brad Feld, the co-founder of Foundry Group and TechStars.

Interestingly, the Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame, a major Boston-area community project that Bob reported on here and here, has targeted September 16 as its launch date—meaning that the first group of inductees (who will each get a tile with a star in Kendall Square, like their Hollywood counterparts) would be named on that day. So it sounds like the Walk of Fame announcement could be part of t=0.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Center, HubSpot, and Skolkovo (Moscow School of Management) are involved as sponsors of the festival, according to the website.

More details as they become available… Let the countdown to t=0 begin.

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Foreign competition is rising, and U.S. consumers haven’t departed from their penny-pinching mentality of The Great Recession, and behind this double whammy the cleantech industry is feeling the squeeze. That’s one of the big impressions I came away with after polling a crop of cleantech experts from Xconomy’s network of advisors and op-ed contributors for their predictions for 2011. But take heart; there’s plenty of room for optimism, especially in the fields of energy efficiency and monitoring, where the U.S. may be leading the way to a greener future that’s much more achievable—at least in the short term—than through any form of alternative energy.

One sub-theme was pretty overwhelming among the responses I received: the actual materials manufacturing side of cleantech (i.e. the production of components for generating solar and wind energy, efficient batteries, and LED chips) is struggling, but energy-focused software and services are rising to the occasion. A number of Xconomists and contributors have pointed out that the U.S. cleantech manufacturing base is weakening due to competition from countries like China, which offer cheaper production and strong government incentives (or mandates) for adopting the new technology.

“It’s a rapidly commoditizing good,” Ray Demeo, VP of worldwide sales at Marlborough, MA-based Coolcentric, says of solar equipment. “The price that China can produce the product at is lower than U.S. manufacturers.”

Additionally, consumers and investors are nervous about spending upfront on things like efficient appliances, electric vehicles, or solar power, to get cleaner sources of energy into their homes (or cars), and would rather find ways to save. Makes enough sense. That’s actually the silver lining for the cleantech space, though, several experts say.

“The fundamental business proposition is we will go in and evaluate some aspect of your energy utilization and we will cut your cost—-I won’t be surprised to see those kinds of business models continue to thrive,” says Tom Ranken, president and CEO of the Washington Clean Technology Alliance. “Ten to 15 years from now, people might be slapping themselves upside the head saying, ‘how did I miss that?’”

Here’s a roundup of some specific predictions we gathered from our network of cities:

—Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology and a professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Molecular Biology, said we can expect to see a slew of biofuels advances this year:

• The first synthetic algal genome.
• The first significant scale-up of

… Next Page »

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What happens when entrepreneurship meets politics? A task force forms and an idea inches its way forward.

The idea I’m talking about is an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame, akin to Hollywood’s celebration of movie stars, in Cambridge’s own Kendall Square, a proposal that Xconomy’s CEO Bob Buderi first wrote about last month. MIT Entrepreneurship Center managing director Bill Aulet and others in support of the walkway hashed out the idea last night in a meeting of Cambridge’s Economic Development, Training and Employment Committee. The meeting was headed up by councilor Leland Cheung, who’s working to spearhead the Walk of Fame plans at the city level.

I had to miss the end of the meeting, but Aulet tells me that the walk of fame proposal passed through the committee to a task force, which is slated to bring the idea before the full Cambridge City Council by December 1st. So expect more meetings before anything official happens.

Personally, I got a taste of what it might have been like to start my journalism career at a local newspaper, where covering committee meetings on local infrastructure decisions seems to be the chief role of the entry-level reporter. (Thanks, Xconomy, for saving me from that fate. Or not.)

Like a true academic, Aulet made his case in a PowerPoint presentation to the committee. He posited that of the seven main elements seen as fostering innovation in a region, such as government support, infrastructure, and funding, an entrepreneurial culture is the piece that could use the biggest boost in the Boston area. The Walk of Fame is an answer to building a sense of cultural pride in our area’s entrepreneurial accomplishments in technology, he said.

I had to leave just as the group started to discuss the logistical concerns surrounding the Walk of Fame. That segment of the meeting kicked off pretty late, after it took an hour for the roughly 30 people in the room to introduce themselves and their stake in the Walk of Fame idea. Bob has outlined some of the devil-in-the-details issues before, like how to pay for the walkway and additional stars, and how to get around Cambridge’s moratorium on naming public spaces like street corners. Apparently some politicians have gone a bit overboard with that in the past. Let’s hope well-meaning innovation enthusiasts won’t have to suffer as a result.

A couple other takeaways from the meeting:

—Don’t go too local with this, said Paul Bottino, the executive director of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. “Anything that we do to celebrate should not have a parochial feel to it,” he said, “We have to create something here that resonates.” (They’ll have to keep that in mind when picking the entrepreneurs to honor in the walk, if it ever gets that far.)

—”This notion of celebration… we just don’t do a good job of this in Boston, Cambridge, and New England” said Gus Weber from Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center. Celebration of entrepreneurial accomplishments, that is. Having grown up in New England, I think the area does a pretty good job of boasting loud and proud about other things, like its cultural history and sports accomplishments. My Yankees fan of a brother would agree. We’ll just have to wait and see if an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame will create Fenway-like fervor for local startups.

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It’s a big day for U.S. innovation strategy. The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship is holding its first official meeting at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, today—and Xconomy has some exclusive details.

The council, made up of 26 national leaders in business, technology, and academia, is charged with helping the Obama administration “develop a broader strategy to spur innovation and enable entrepreneurs to develop breakthrough technologies and dynamic companies, and to create jobs all across America,” according to a statement made earlier this summer by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

In July, Locke, the former Governor of Washington, announced the members of the advisory council at a forum held at the University of Michigan. They include Tom Alberg, co-founder of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group; Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI International; Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution and co-founder of AOL; Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and GoLoco; Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan; Desh Deshpande, chairman of A123Systems, Sycamore Networks, and Tejas Networks; Ken Morse, former head of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center; Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and former president of MIT; and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. (Carlson, Chase, Morse, and Vest are “Xconomists,” informal editorial advisors to Xconomy.)

Group members reported that Steve Case, co-chair of the council (along with Coleman and Deshpande), hosted a dinner for the group at an area restaurant last night. Xconomy also has it on good authority that Case went to high school with President Barack Obama at the Punahou School in Honolulu, HI, back in the day.

Robin Chase, who’s based in Cambridge, MA, says she recently took part in a small pre-meeting of council members from her region to discuss ideas they might bring to the meeting today. Some ideas that came up included: having a program where university students who want to start a company could have an advisor and get credit for it; and giving students work-study pay for working on their startup ideas.

“As I think about my recommendations, the things that have come up, they’re almost all about reducing impediments,” says Chase. Some people, she says, feel that the best way to help entrepreneurs is to provide more money. Her view is different. “Those that will be successful are the ones who will have to scramble. It’s evolution. It’s Darwinian,” she says. “Money isn’t the impediment, but there are other impediments.”

Curt Carlson of SRI wrote in an e-mail: “Major improvements in innovation outcomes are possible…Innovation is an essential element of the solution, if we are to address our debt and job creation problems. Many/most areas of America must be improved: taxes, regulations, R&D, government services, university education, K-12, etc.” Asked what he hoped would be discussed or accomplished at the council meeting, Carlson wrote, “I always point to treating new companies differently—and better—than big ones. That is where the jobs are created.”

Today’s meeting wasn’t a secret, but it doesn’t seem to have been promoted in any way. To help prepare for it, members of the council received a copy of President Obama’s September 2009 whitepaper on national innovation policy, which talks about promoting competition, strengthening the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and pushing such areas as clean energy, advanced vehicles, and healthcare, among other things. We might have more to report after the meeting, so watch this space.

Robert Buderi contributed reporting to this story.

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Bill Aulet, an Xconomist and active innovation advocate, has been appointed managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, which seeks to work with MIT students, faculty, and others outside the school to foster entrepreneurship. Aulet is an MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer who began his career at IBM, ran two private companies, and helped turn around biometrics company Viisage Technology as its CFO. He has served as acting director of the Entrepreneurship Center since August. “With his depth of experience and dedication to entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet will be a great asset to the Center as it continues to develop and support MIT’s many entrepreneurial programs and activities,” said Sloan dean David Schmittlein in the university announcement of Aulet’s appointment.

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[Updated and corrected, May 9, 2011--see below] We just came back from spending a week with 95 MIT students in Silicon Valley drinking from the West Coast Fire Hose of Entrepreneurship. Our theme was “East meets West: The Unification Study Tour.” For us, the theme worked well. But some of those out west, as well as some back in the east and in the press, preferred to pursue a competitive approach, which I find not only unattractive and destructive but also incorrect.

Most people love a competition with winners and losers where we can track them as they race along. We certainly love our rivalries: Red Sox vs. Yankees, Celtics vs. Lakers, and Patriots vs. Colts (oops—scratch that last one now). Some rappers had their own version of East Coast vs. West Coast. But these sorts of rivalries are not exactly how it works—especially with regard to innovation.

In 1980, Bob Metcalfe (esteemed MIT graduate & co-inventor of the Ethernet) came up with his now-famous Metcalfe’s Law. The essence of his insight is that the value of the network to each user is exponentially related to the number of nodes on the network. So rather than there being a zero-sum game with “competing” innovation ecosystems, in many aspects the opposite is in fact the case, especially in the new digital “flat world.” That is, the success of one area should enhance the success of another.

At MIT, we train our students to be great entrepreneurs globally, not just in Massachusetts. In fact, according to the widely cited report on the economic impact of entrepreneurship at MIT, written by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Ed Roberts and Charles Eesley, MIT alumni start 850-950 companies annually. Of those companies, an estimated 26-28 percent will be started in Massachusetts this year. In addition, an estimated 26-28 percent will be started in California. The punchline of this story is that these are not two competing ecosystems, but really one large, connected-at-the-source entrepreneurial ecosystem.

[Editor's note, May 9, 2011--Due to author error, the original version of the above paragraph stated that MIT alumni start 200-400 companies annually. The figure was changed to 850-950 companies, accurately reflecting the figures in the report by Roberts and Eesley.]

Rather than spend our time and efforts arguing about winners and losers, or us vs. them, we at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center are focused on leveraging Metcalfe’s law through our second principle of operation: “collaboration.” We will spend our time and efforts to build connective tissue between East and West…and other areas, too. There are very interesting things happening outside Route 128 and Silicon Valley that we could all learn from and gain from by working together. So next time someone starts talking about Silicon Valley vs. Route 128 or Boston, ask them to “stop the noize!” We can all gain by a mindset of working together. Let’s spread the love around and innovation will flourish…and then we all win. Leave the score keeping to the sports page.

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Bosses come and bosses go. Great bosses can inspire and mentor and lead through the toughest times. Really bad bosses can poison and divide an organization, and lead it to ruin even if things aren’t that bad.

In the course of my career I’ve come across many a successful person with a bad-boss tale to tell. Which means that bad bosses have mentored numerous entrepreneurs and future leaders—though maybe not in the way they intended. So what do these awful managers have to teach us? I asked a few leaders in the Boston innovation community for their best worst-boss stories, and the lessons they learned from the experience.

My own “worst-boss” is really an amalgamation of several bosses rather than a single person—and includes traits I sometimes observed in a boss’s boss, rather than someone I reported to directly. But I was watching.

These Worst Bosses Ever did several things I vowed never to do. First, they pointed fingers at others when problems arose rather than look at their own management or strategy. Second, and even more insidious, they would bully subordinates by pointing to the successes of other companies—sometimes competitors, sometimes not—as proof that their reports were not successful, without taking into account the fact that ours was a totally different organization, with far different (and usually much more modest) resources. They even would sometimes employ the dark art of “lying with statistics” to make it look like people—their own colleagues—weren’t performing. But when you examined the facts behind the stats, it was clear that oftentimes people deemed to have failed actually had succeeded stupendously given the resources at their disposal or the time they were given for a project. These kinds of practices created a huge atmosphere of distrust inside groups or companies—and many good people either left or did not feel at all motivated to do their best work.

One big lesson I learned from these various “un-mentors” was to take into account the whole picture of a group or organization as best as possible—its role in the company or world, its resources, and so on—and to set goals and expectations based on that, not what others are doing. Another was to play absolutely fair with metrics. Lastly, I vowed to take responsibility when bad things happen, and to try to find a constructive solution, rather than blaming colleagues.

What follows, then, are My Worst Boss Ever stories from five leading members of the innovation community—two CEOs, two venture capitalists, and a member of academia. They aren’t intended to embarrass anyone. We don’t name names, and we have tweaked descriptions to protect people’s identities. And I would stress that these are perceptions and opinions that are colored by specific circumstances, the employees’ own makeup, and other factors—and that bosses sometimes make decisions based on factors that employees can’t be privy to, or can’t fully appreciate because they aren’t the boss. Indeed, one person’s worst top dog might well be another’s best.

The point isn’t to condemn the bosses—it’s to provide some insights and lessons that might make us all better bosses, and maybe even better employees who can help our bosses! See if these experiences ring true with you.

Bill Aulet, Xconomist and Acting Managing Director, MIT Entrepreneurship Center: “It’s not obvious, because you’d think it is the most incompetent one—but the worst boss I ever had was smart and political, but lazy.”

“If they’re incompetent, then you don’t have to worry—you just go do your thing. When they’re smart, political, and lazy it just drives you crazy. They’re capable of being helpful and they … Next Page »

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MIT is planning to launch a student-led online publication focused on entrepreneurship by the end of the year, a leader of the effort tells Xconomy. The fledgling publication will be called the MIT Entrepreneurship Review (MITER) and will aim to serve as a resource for entrepreneurs and to raise the already high profile of the prestigious school in the business world.

The publication is being organized much like a law review, seeking student editors, based on merit, to provide editorial content, said Eduard Viladesau, a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who is one of the founders of MITER. The plan is to have weekly columns that focus on entrepreneurship issues in the energy, life sciences, and IT sectors. The publication’s editorial review board currently consists of several MIT faculty members such as Bob Langer and Michael Cima who have experience in inventing technologies and founding numerous startups. (Our own Bob has also agreed to serve as an advisor to MITER.) It’s also expected that other entrepreneurs and business leaders who are affiliated with MIT will contribute articles to the publication.

While academic publications such as the Harvard Business Review cover entrepreneurship as well as other business issues, Viladesau said, the MIT Entrepreneurship Review plans to have an exclusive focus on entrepreneurship. The content of the online publication—which will include case studies, startup profiles, and analyses of major trends or problems facing entrepreneurs—is expected to be more technical and analytical than, say, stories in the popular press. But the articles will not be peer-reviewed or as elaborate as those found in a traditional academic journal. The Web-based publication will be available for free on the public Internet.

“We have three main missions,” Viladesau said. “One is to build and promote the thought-leadership brand of MIT.” The other two goals of the publication are to serve as a resource to entrepreneurs and to attract top students to the school.

The concept of a Web-based and student-run entrepreneurship publication was previously adopted at Stanford University. Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner, or ECorner, is a free online publication that features videos, podcasts, and written resources for entrepreneurs. Viladesau told me that MITER will initially have mostly written articles, but future plans include videos and other multimedia offerings like those found at ECorner.

Viladesau told me that the idea to found the publication came from Bill Aulet, acting director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center (and an Xconomist), who recruited Viladesau to help transform the idea into reality. Aulet is now advising Viladesau and two other Sloan students who are managing the development of the publication. (MIT professor Ed Roberts, the chairman and founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, is on the editorial advisory board of MITER.) The group is expected to hold a competition to select student editors for the publication, and each of them will receive a $1,000 cash prize for winning a slot on the editorial team. The publication could launch as early as November.

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Bill Aulet, an Xconomist and one of the most energetic advocates for entrepreneurship and innovation in the Boston area, has been appointed acting director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, according to an announcement made internally yesterday by MIT Sloan School of Management Dean David Schmittlein. Aulet takes the reins from fellow Xconomist Ken Morse, the dry-humored, quick-witted head of the center since 1996.

Morse told Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe he is going to write a book on global entrepreneurship. Aulet took time to praise Morse as a “fantastic” colleague he had worked alongside of for several years while serving as a senior lecturer at the Sloan School and entrepreneur in residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Still, he says, “Anytime there’s a change of guard then there’s a chance of revisiting things” and doing new things.

“I’m real excited about this. We’re going to implement, basically, the philosophies I espoused in my Xconomy article.” (I didn’t ask him to say that). He was talking about a piece last fall in which he explained his philosophy of “educate, nurture, network, and celebrate,” which he has used in talks and workshops around the world to try to spur energy innovation. “We did that for energy and it’s worked really, really well,” he says. “I want to do that for all of entrepreneurship at MIT.”Aulet says that involves building ties both within the MIT community and between it and the outside word, in order to “smooth the glide path for our entrepreneurs from the idea through getting it funded.”

While he remained vague about any forthcoming partnerships, Aulet says he has been visiting or has planned visits with Stanford, Babson, the Cambridge Innovation Center, and other institutions to build new relationships and collaborations “consistent with Metcalfe’s law that the power of the network is exponentially related to the number of nodes on it.” He also says he will look at Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and beyond to examine “what new ideas can we implement to make it a more dynamic place for students to foster more entrepreneurship and nurture it.”

The MIT Entrepreneurship Center will continue to be chaired by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Ed Roberts, who founded it. MIT also named Sloan associate professor Fiona Murray as associate director of the Entrepreneurship Center.

You can read Aulet’s bio here. He has long experience at IBM and has subsequently been both an entrepreneur and an executive of a public company, biometrics firm Viisage Technology, where he was chief financial officer. Aulet and I played basketball together in Ireland as part of the World B. Tour in 1990. That’s not in his bio.

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While traveling the world over the past dozen years on behalf of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, I have spoken with hundreds of entrepreneurs in virtually all major business centers of the world, both developed and developing. I would like to see more of our regional entrepreneurs take a big leap by establishing early international relationships and recruiting operations with foreign companies.

While the lack of VC funding and investment capital in general is on every entrepreneur’s mind, being globally competitive with effective sales and sales management is “mission critical.” The importance of sales — one of the most important life lessons — usually comes late in the career of most entrepreneurs.

I’ve seen the benefits of going global. I was a founding member of 3Com Corporation, actually employee No. 8. As the first head of sales, marketing, and planning, I helped 3Com raise its initial venture funding and bring its first three products to market. After a successful launch, I returned to the Boston area where I co-founded several MIT-related startups. These opportunities came after my five years in Beijing under the aegis of Chase Manhattan Bank. I formed a trading advisory company there to assist IBM, General Motors, Gillette, Hughes Aircraft and other pioneering companies enter the China market.

While these large companies knew they needed to grow globally, they also realized they needed outside assistance to build new markets in foreign countries. Many start-up companies may see international markets in their future, but they don’t always hire their initial management team with international sales in mind. Instead, they hire at levels below their growth objectives and then get frustrated when they cannot succeed. Start-ups that aren’t thinking internationally need to think again.

San Diego startups may be at a disadvantage when it comes to having the necessary passion and tenacity for executing a successful global sales strategy. That’s because today’s bright young entrepreneurs may not have been raised to think about the importance of global sales. Have they ever been forced to compete for funding? Where did their sales mentors come from? Most importantly, how does entrepreneurial training in San Diego differ from that offered by our most successful global competitors?

In a startup’s strategic planning phase, it is critical to think globally about the “go to market” strategy, and to identify exactly which markets to enter. If there is an international market for a startup’s product or service, it makes sense to plan an early entry—not only to differentiate their revenue streams, but also to capture market share before their competitors do.

Improving the effectiveness of the sales force in globally ambitious companies, large and small, is consistently cited by business experts as one of the highest priorities. In the current economic climate, every purchase by any prospective customer must be triple-justified at all levels of management. Thus, having the best ROI-based sales approach is essential to shortening the sales cycle across borders and, therefore, to the survival of San Diego’s young companies.

So what are global tech entrepreneurs saying?

—In today’s tough environment, high tech companies must be excellent at sales and customer acquisition or else they will not survive.

—Sincere commitment to solving customer problems is key. If the CEO is not passionately committed to delivering significant value to customers, then either he/she should leave the company, or the employees should find another place to work, because the company will not succeed.

—Loyal long-term customer relationships can provide a key, dependable source of sustainable competitive advantage for growing companies.

Good selling is not an art; it is a science. Effective sales and customer relationship management can be both learned and promulgated throughout the organization. San Diego’s successful regional companies can realize the benefits of global funding, sales, and economic significance by going global. The best way to learn how to do it is from the teachers who have been entrepreneurs themselves. Programs such as the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and Connect’s Springboard program are international and regional assets that excel at teaching sales skills and how to turn concepts related to innovation into profitable business realities.

Editors Note: Ken Morse is scheduled to speak today at the San Diego MIT Enterprise Forum. Details are here.

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It’s no secret that the Massachusetts economy benefits from the presence of large, prestigious, star-studded universities and the companies started by their faculty and graduates. In fact, these universities take every opportunity to remind people of their importance: Just a few weeks ago, Harvard put out a report
taking credit for nearly $5 billion in economic activity around the Boston area in fiscal 2008.

But it turns out that area universities may not be tooting their own horns loudly enough. Companies founded by the alumni of a single university—MIT—are responsible for more than a quarter of all sales by Massachusetts companies, or some $164 billion per year, according to a report released today by the Kauffman Foundation. If the revenues of all active companies around the world formed by MIT graduates were aggregated, the study estimates, they’d surpass $2 trillion a year—which is more than the gross domestic product figures of all but the 10 largest nations in the world.

The study, which will be released in full this morning at a briefing in Washington, D.C., was conducted by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Ed Roberts and doctoral candidate Charles Eesley. The point wasn’t just to cheer for the home team, but to build a detailed, quantitative picture of how one university’s entrepreneurial alumni—especially those in technology fields—contribute to regional economic growth. “We found that the MIT alumni-founded companies have a disproportionate importance to their local economies because so many of them are manufacturing, biotech, software or consulting firms that sell to national and world markets,” Roberts said in a statement.

The Kansas City, MO-based Kauffman Foundation, which focuses its spending on programs that foster entrepreneurship and innovation, paid for the study in part because it needed more ammunition in its fight to get more universities and state and local governments to support university-industry exchanges, says Lesa Mitchell, a vice president at the organization.

“Though everyone might tire of hearing about MIT, the reality is that they continue to encourage the things in terms of university-industry collaboration that we fear are really getting broken in other places,” Mitchell says. She points to efforts such as the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, which provides seed grants for proof-of-concept work by MIT faculty and graduate students and matches MIT innovators with experienced business mentors.

“There out outcries in Washington about too much interchange between universities and industry,” Mitchell says. “But in fact, it’s industry that is leading the idea process, and it’s the relationship between universities and industry that allows that to happen, because as ideas get funded and supported in the university they will spill over and land either in small companies or big companies. Having that porous boundary, we think, is unbelievably critical.”

On average, MIT graduates form just under 1,000 companies every year, according to an executive summary of the report shared with the media before today’s announcement. Massachusetts is home to some 6,900 alumni-founded companies, while another 18,900 are scattered around the world, including 4,100 in California. MIT alumni-founded companies employ just under a million people in Massachusetts, 526,000 in California, 231,000 in New York, 184,000 in Texas, and 136,000 in Virginia, the study found.

The study expands on a similar report about MIT’s economic impact published in 1997 with funding from BankBoston (now part of Bank of America). The earlier study was apparently far less thorough: it turned up only 4,000 companies founded by MIT alumni, with annual world sales of just $232 billion. The new study was based on … Next Page »

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Last week, I was honored to give a keynote speech in Dublin, Ireland, at an international symposium marking the launch of the nation’s ambitious new R&D program in energy by its NSF equivalent, the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI). The Symposium on Science and Engineering Underpinning Sustainable Energies and Energy-Efficiency was an excellent opportunity to reflect on what I think is one of the key elements to successful regional economic prosperity—the development of a vibrant innovation ecosystem.

With my colleague, Ken Morse (Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and an Xconomist), we have been involved first hand in the successful and unsuccessful development of over a dozen such ecosystems, and we have seen what has worked and what has not worked—with often-surprising results. Ireland provided an exciting clean slate platform to apply the framework for success and get feedback for refining the frameworks (based on the initial feedback, our ideas are clearly resonating). For if we are to succeed in optimal fashion in energy innovation, it is essential that we develop regional innovation clusters. Towards this end, we should make use of historical lessons to accelerate our success—and the good news in this regard is that there are some relatively simple leverage points that can be deployed which will have significant impact.

Like many Americans, especially in Boston, I have roots in Ireland. Distant as they are, Ireland has always held some magic for me. That magic was further catalyzed 19 years ago, when I visited with an American basketball team and we traveled that beautiful country playing games and then drinking Guinness from Cork to Galway to Dublin to Donegal to Belfast and a number of places in between. I don’t remember the scores of any of the games, but no one on our trip can forget the legendary memories we took back, which were later written up in a Sports Illustrated article that I keep framed on my wall at home. [Editor's note: that article was written by his teammate, backup shooting guard Bob "Danger" Buderi, founder of Xconomy.] The parade through Donegal with the mayor and the town’s children was one of the most priceless moments of our lives.

The people and the land exceeded the expectations we had—and yet all of this was in the context of an economic situation that we could not fathom at the time. There was little economic vitality, and we met a number of people who had been without work for over a decade and had little hope left on that front.

Last week, I returned to see the “Irish Economic Miracle” first hand. It is truly amazing and a shining inspiration for others throughout the world. I know, because I have been asked about it in places such as the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Pakistan, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. Leaders in those countries thirst to have a similar scenario in their lands and want to know how Ireland was so successful.

Well, now the question I posed at the aforementioned speech in Ireland is, “How do you keep it up and keep the economic renaissance moving forward as the global economy undergoes a metamorphosis of galactic proportions?”

The answer, and it doesn’t just hold true for Ireland, is energy innovation. There is no bigger challenge than to help transform our energy position—no bigger responsibility and no bigger opportunity.

So what I offer now is my perspective, based on our deep experience, on how regions can seize this opportunity, and more specifically how organizations like Science Foundation of Ireland can become leaders and full participants in the transformation of the world’s largest industry.

First, by providing leading-edge science, engineering, and mathematics research, SFI and other similar government agencies will help to produce the innovation needed, thereby putting their nations front and center as a role model for others.

But to understand how to most effectively achieve this, I believe it is essential to take a systems view to provide a broader context for the role of research and invention—hopefully in order to alter the traditional mindset so organizations such as SFI can be more effective going forward.

For example, using SFI as our test case, I would like to start with the first line of the organization’s objectives: “Science Foundation Ireland supports science, engineering and mathematics research with consequences in Ireland.” I will focus on three key words in this statement “research with consequences.” Trying to connect with my distant Irish roots, I could not help but have this translated to Gaelic—”taighde le torthai”—which means “research bearing fruits.”

It is these fruits that I will focus on, because to the degree that SFI can ensure that the research breakthroughs developed in Ireland are put to effective use, the organization will gain relevance.

So it is “torthai,” or consequences, that we seek. That being the case, a closer definition of consequences is merited.

At MIT, we love equations. They are simple and crystal clear. So, in that vein, let me take a minute to drill down on what consequences really are and how they relate to the research done at SFI.

Consequences are what we refer to as innovation. Innovation is something that generates value. For example, innovation helps companies make more money; it can materially reduce greenhouse gases; and it can materially enhance energy security for countries through greater independence.

As Ed Roberts, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, so aptly described it in a simple equation: … Next Page »

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What will be the next great Internet company? Will it be a firm developing technology for online video guides, or one with a new way to assess and manage Web security risks? Maybe it will be a company mining customer data for small and medium-sized businesses, one building an online ad management system for Chinese video publishers, or one with a way to make clothes shopping more appealing for men.

The team behind that last idea, Project Einstein, claimed their venture really was the “next great” one when they pitched it in the Web track finals of the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which will announce its overall winner tonight. But, of course, picking out one winning team isn’t the point. The real aim, and this sometimes seems to get lost in the competition hoopla, isn’t to spur the one next great company (or even a few), but to produce scores of great future entrepreneurs by introducing them to the entrepreneurial process—including focusing on market opportunities, forming teams, developing business plans, and pitching before real VCs and other experts. As Ken Morse, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, poetically puts it: “It is an educational process which infects hundreds of students and faculty with the entrepreneurial virus. The virus takes hold at different times for different people…[and] for every successful company there are a hundred teams born with deep-fired burnings, waiting to be launched at the right time in the future.”

This year, for the first time, contest organizers opened some of that process—the finals of a few tracks—to journalists. Om Malik from GigaOm sat in on the Mobile track, and a reporter from Technology Review observed biotech while I was watching the Web 2.0 pitches (Erik, meanwhile, visited the semi-finals of the 200K Energy Prize competition, a close affiliate of the 100K event).

The Web 2.0 finalists made their pitches in a conference room at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, MA, where the group of judges was chaired by Polaris general partner Sim Simeonov (who has his own blog here and will no doubt soon be writing about the 100K as well). The other judges present were: Stan Fung, managing director of FarSight Ventures; Jon Gworek of Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton; John Pyrovolakis, of the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship’s Innovation Network Initiative; and entrepreneur Marcus Ruark, founder of Optiant.

To protect confidential team information, I am keeping my comments high-level, but here are the main things I took home:

My first impression was a reinforcement of what I had already thought—the contest is a great training ground, as opposed to a proving ground. People seem to want to view the winners as real businesses, and the losers as falling short of this goal. In truth, the teams are mostly all pretty raw, and not as close to real businesses as they might think. But just because only one wins doesn’t mean the runners-up aren’t in the end more viable enterprises.

Simeonov explains that judges can’t even attempt to judge 100K teams by the same standards they would use to evaluate a real business. By the time of our session, judges had only seen the teams on paper, and had provided some written feedback in advance of the finals. Now was their first time to see a live pitch. Teams had far less time to make their pitches—20 minutes each (including answering questions), in contrast to maybe an hour in a real VC meeting. All told, Simeonov says, he normally spends 10 hours or more with entrepreneurs and another 40 to 50 hours in due diligence before picking a “winner” to fund. For the 100K, judges had more like 40 to 50 minutes.

A couple other thoughts I jotted down during the presentations:

—While I probably wouldn’t invest in any of the company ideas if I even had the money and wasn’t a journalist who doesn’t make any investments in what he covers, I would invest in every person I saw. (Anyone need a job?).

—The judges were far kinder than they would be in a real venture setting. For starters, not a one noticeably looked … Next Page »

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Sure, they might be technological visionaries, multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, imposing CEOs, legendary venture capitalists, and the like. Everyone around them knows what they do professionally. But did you know one of them was also a Top Gun fighter pilot? Or that another accompanied Yo-Yo Ma on piano at the wedding of Bill Nye the Science Guy? And then there’s the wealthy investor who endowed not a classroom or a laboratory—but a men’s room.

Here at Xconomy, we’re all about telling the story of the Greater Boston innovation community—and let’s face it, we have a taste for the offbeat. So we’ve been hanging out at water coolers, listening in on the rumor mills, and pumping folks for information to get at those juicy details about the innovation elite that usually don’t show up on a company’s executive bio page.

So who endowed that men’s room? Read on to find out. And if you know something we don’t know about one of this area’s key tech players, by all means pass it along (self-disclosure welcome) by e-mailing us at editors@xconomy.com. We plan to share the information bounty at irregular intervals.

Here’s our inaugural installment:

David Aronoff, general partner of IDG Ventures Boston, was a ski jumper from age 5 through high school. He grew up in Lyndonville, VT, home of “Bag Balm,” a lubricant that helps cows avoid chapped teats.

Xconomist Bill Aulet, Entrepreneur in Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, played professional basketball for the Colchester (UK) Moels (it was the 1980-81 season, so anyone can take him now) and was player-coach for the second half of the season.

Many people know that Jonathan Bush, Jr., chairman and CEO of Athenahealth, is related to the President, but did you know just how cheeky he is about that fact? “The President is my cousin, and he lobbied hard for the role and succeeded in the end. We took him. Sometimes we think about putting him back,” says Bush.

John Chory, WilmerHale partner and chair of the firm’s Venture Group in Waltham, graduated as a distinguished cadet from West Point (top 5 percent of his class). He served five years as an active duty intelligence officer, including time in Korea’s DMZ, achieved the rank of major, and is Airborne qualified.

MIT grad and venture capitalist Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital in Colorado, recently paid $25,000 to endow a men’s room at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Feld blogs that despite having bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT, that school rejected his offer to do the same. “No such challenge at CU Boulder,” he writes. … Next Page »

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Energy is hot, as you might have noticed—especially clean energy. In fact, so many new energy companies are sprouting up—we like to call this the dot-clean era—that it’s tough to keep track of them all. It’s like the venture folks got hold of some sort of cleantech Miracle-Gro.

But people are trying to follow the action. The folks over at the New England Clean Energy Council (the result of a merger between the Massachusetts Clean Energy Council and the New England Energy Innovation Collaborative) have a nice map of the New England energy cluster that was assembled by the collaborative before the merger. It shows some 200 energy companies and institutions and energy-related venture or financial firms in the area.

But that, it turns out, is just a warm-up act. Our friends over at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, home to Xconomists Ken Morse and Bill Aulet, have assembled a map that dwarfs the one offered by the Clean Energy Council. It shows some 725 companies, with another update still due. The main page shows a mostly alphabetical listing of the firms the center has identified. On the same page, though, you can download a great PDF map.

The map provides an overview of all New England—actually, it reaches to parts of New York as well (You’ll see clusters around Boston, in Connecticut, and around Albany). And there’s an inset of the Greater Boston area that’s especially cool. Be warned, this is a honkin’ big file (7 megabytes), so it might take a minute to download and you will have to zoom in to really see. But if you have the energy, it’s worth it.

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