Initial public offering activity among venture-backed companies has fallen off a cliff. That’s a top problem facing the venture capital industry right now, and, as can be imagined, the hot topic of discussion in the early hours today at the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) Annual Meeting in Boston. The mood here at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel can be summed up by the comment of one member of the venture community to his counterpart near the registration desk: “These are certainly interesting times.”

Indeed, the venture industry is, to say the least, struggling. A chief concern is that the steep drop in IPOs—not only in the past year, but over the past decade—has forced venture firms to hold onto their shares of private portfolio companies longer than they would like. So the day here began with a press conference where the VC honchos (including new incoming NVCA chairman Terry McGuire, managing general partner at Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners, and Paul Maeder, general partner at Highland Capital Partners in Lexington, MA,) and others discussed their recommendations on how to improve the climate for venture-backed companies to go public. Before this month—when San Diego-based online education firm Bridgepoint Education, Chinese gaming company ChangYou, and language education software provider Rosetta Stone of Arlington, VA, all completed IPOs—there hadn’t been a single venture-backed company IPO for eight straight months.

For sure, venture firms can also get big returns on investing in companies when those companies are acquired. In fact, last year 87 percent of venture exits were via a merger or acquisition, according to the NVCA. Yet to hear Dixon Doll, outgoing chairman of the NVCA, the concern is that only 13 percent of venture exits last year stemmed from company IPOs. “The question that always comes up is that if you have a thriving M&A environment, why isn’t that good enough to have a flourishing VC industry,” said Doll, who is also a general partner at Menlo Park, CA-based venture firm DCM. “In order to have really successful M&A exits, the M&A buyers have to know that the company really can go public, or much of the leverage is lost and the value creation that we’re so concerned about is stifled.”

Thus, the NVCA is offering four main areas in need of change in order to improve IPO activity. Here they are:

—Improve the IPO ecosystem. This one involves …Next Page »

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(Updated listings — see below) Back in his Navy days as a Top Gun pilot, Jim Matheson of Flagship Ventures—call sign Fuzzy—burned his share of jet fuel. But now that he’s a cleantech investor, he’s more careful about his carbon footprint, tooling around in his red Toyota Prius and buying carbon offsets for his Cirrus SR22-G2.

When Matheson happened to park in front of me on Memorial Drive a little while back, I joked that driving hybrids must be part of the job description for cleantech VCs these days. “You might be surprised,” Matheson replied (or words to that effect). Which, especially as we chatted about it a bit more, made me curious to find out just which cleantech VCs are walking the walk when it comes to energy efficiency and alternative energy.

To that end, I began e-mailing and calling everyone I could identify in the Boston area who’s investing in energy, asking what car they drive and what other evidence they could provide of their personal greenness. Most folks responded to my e-mails or calls, though seven, roughly a third of the list, did not. Some answers were far more complete than others, as you might imagine, and some VCs were far greener than others, as you might also expect. But I have to credit even those who fall toward the brown end of the spectrum for responding, and having a sense of humor about it. Take Chuck McDermott of RockPort Capital Partners, who offered, perhaps a bit sheepishly, “I don’t let the water run while I brush.”

So, with the caveat that this is a work in progress, and with the suggestion that folks whose answers were absent or incomplete might want to submit more details to green up their names, below is my color-coded list of the cleantech VCs in the New England area.

All told, seven out of the 20 people on my list reported owning hybrid cars—only one eschews car ownership entirely—and two have high-gas-mileage conventional vehicles. Several have done energy audits and installed energy-efficient light bulbs and home appliances, though no one is living off the grid (one tried, kind of, read on).

Greenest of all are Dave Danielson, founder of the MIT Energy Club and now a senior associate at General Catalyst Partners, and Rob Day of @Ventures. Danielson not only doesn’t own a car, he also buys 100 percent wind power from NStar for his home and is on the hunt for environmentally low-impact beer! Day, meanwhile, is a veteran of environmental causes—and in his pre-venture days led the World Resources Institute to carbon neutrality. I colored them forest green. Just a shade lighter (jade) are Jay Fiske, formerly of the Mass Green Energy Fund, and Paul Maeder of Highland Capital Partners, who wins points for his handyman skills (installed his own insulation), as well as his prose: “I turn out more lights every night than Churchill during the blitz.” And Andrew Friendly would have scored a greener tint if only he could have talked his wife, Kelly (who’s marketing director for Flagship Ventures), into living off the grid. But then he wouldn’t be a VC in Cambridge if he had.

A methodological note: I also asked for any clean-energy anecdotes people cared to share, many of which made their way to the bonus section of each entry below. If the stories were especially interesting, such as Mark Modzelewski’s tale making of environmentally friendly surfboards, well, I probably bumped them up a hue or two.

New England Energy VCs, Across the Spectrum

FOREST GREEN

Dave Danielson, senior associate, General Catalyst Partners
Car: None. Takes Zipcar when he feels the need for speed.
Home life: Buys 100 percent wind power from NStar through its NStar Green program, which adds 1.4 cents/kWh to monthly bill. Used only about 150kWh last month in his two-bedroom apartment. “I only spent an extra $2.10 last month for 100% wind power. What a bargain! Everyone should do it.” Of course, not everybody is as frugal with energy as Danielson is to begin with—the U.S. residential average monthly electricity usage in 2007 was 936kWh/month, he says.
Bonus thought: “As soon as there is a cellulosic ethanol based beer, that will be my beverage of choice.”

Rob Day, principal, @Ventures
Car: Used Honda Civic hybrid
Home life: Day and his wife are veterans of an environmental non-profit, the World Resources Institute, so he reports that they have long instituted energy efficiency improvements …Next Page »

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Xconomy had the great privilege last week of hosting energy guru Amory Lovins, the cofounder, chairman, and chief scientist of the famous Rocky Mountain Institute resource think tank in Colorado, for a “fireside chat” with local venture community leader Paul Maeder of Highland Capital Partners. There was no real fire or other unwarranted carbon emissions, of course—it was all part of Xconomy’s latest forum event at the British Consulate General in Cambridge, MA, focusing on the role of technological innovation in rebuilding the U.S. energy economy.

We published a summary of the forum’s opening panel on Thursday, and today we wanted to bring you a transcript of the conversation between Maeder and Lovins. Energy has been on Maeder’s mind a lot lately: he’s leading his firm’s effort to branch out from healthcare, consumer, Internet, and communications investments into the world of energy efficiency technologies. And he quizzed Lovins—who was on his way to the other end of Cambridge to give a speech as part of the “Future of Energy” series at the Harvard University Center for the Environment—on a dizzying variety of issues, from the role of oil prices in energy innovation to the inefficiency of today’s building and construction industry and the best way to resurrect U.S. automakers.

But while the discussion was wide-ranging, Lovins returned over and over to the message that is at the center of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s advocacy and of his own consulting work for automakers and companies in other industries: that tapping market mechanisms to bring about the more efficient use of resources isn’t simply a good thing for the global environment, it generates greater employment, wealth, equality, and national security.

Paul Maeder: Let’s begin with how you got here. You grew up in Washington, D.C., and went to Harvard and Oxford. Neither school is known as an energy powerhouse.

Amory Lovins: Neither was any other place. There was no university in the world where you could study energy. It was always the engineers, the lawyers, and the accountants who created energy policy. Just two years before the Arab energy embargo, schools were still saying “Energy, what’s that? It’s not a real subject. We don’t have a chair in it.”

PM: How did you come to the conclusion, even before the first oil shock, that energy was the crux of so many issues?

AL: From reading books by John Holdren and others, it was pretty clear that energy was as close as anything to being the master key that would teach us about other issues like water and climate and minerals. And that turned out to be true. Then I wrote a paper that was published in Foreign Affairs in 1976 ["Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken"], and I’ve been real busy since then.

PM: In Europe, which has a culture of doing more with less, there has been sensitivity to energy prices for a long time. Here, the acuteness of the problem only jumped to the forefront when gas prices were starting with a 4. Now they’re back to starting with a 1. Where are we now? Was this just a flash of awareness, or was it a secular change?

AL: I think there is a secular change, because we still have acutely the security and the climate problems around energy. And those will be with us for quite a while, and that will help us to keep our eyes on the ball in a way that didn’t happen after energy prices crashed in the late 1970s. That said, oil is a commodity and its prices have been perfectly random since 1859. There is no reason to believe they won’t …Next Page »

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The role of technology entrepreneurs in rebuilding the U.S. energy economy was the main theme at Xconomy’s latest forum Tuesday night. Topping the agenda was an all-star panel of local entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and academic analysts, who shared their thoughts with a sold-out crowd of some 125 attendees at the British Consulate General in Cambridge, MA. The program climaxed with an intense, fascinating chat between Highland Capital Partners general partner Paul Maeder and energy-efficiency expert Amory Lovins, co-founder and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

If there was a single takeaway message from the evening, it was that new technologies being developed by venture-backed energy companies—along with the smart application of some old ideas, like efficiency—have the potential to generate significant investment returns, while slowing climate change and helping to lift the U.S. economy out of recession in the bargain. But taking full advantage of these technologies, all of the speakers agreed, will require some major political, cultural, and regulatory changes. As a new administration in Washington begins to confront the economic crisis and the ongoing national-security vulnerabilities created in part by U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Boston-area innovators and entrepreneurs are clearly looking for opportunities to contribute.

The Maeder-Lovins conversation was so idea-rich that it deserves a post of its own, which we’ll bring you in a day or two. But the panel discussion, moderated by Xconomist Bill Aulet of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, produced its own wealth of worthwhile insights. The panelists included Christina Lampe-Onnerud, CEO of lithium-ion battery maker Boston-Power; Jim Matheson, general partner at Flagship Ventures, which has investments in local energy startups Ze-gen, Mascoma, and Novomer; Bill Wiberg, general partner at Advanced Technology Ventures, which has investments in Great Point Energy, Coskata, and Rive Technology; and Donald Lessard, Professor of International Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-chair of the MIT Energy Education Task Force.

Aulet kicked off the discussion with the assertion that energy innovators have not established a lustrous record over the past few decades, with new technologies typically taking 10 to 40 years to reach the market. But Wiberg immediately disagreed with that premise, saying that “It’s not innovation that’s been lacking, it’s commercialization.” When energy prices waver, as they are now, investors’ confidence about putting money into alternative energy schemes often wavers as well, Wiberg pointed out.

Lampe-Onnerud countered that Aulet was correct, in a sense, in that many energy technologies are so complicated that it really does take decades to work out all of their kinks. In her own field of battery chemistry, Lampe-Onnerud pointed out that lead-acid and then nickel-metal-hydride batteries dominated from the 1850s all the way up to the 1990s, when the first lithium-ion batteries were commercialized—and that lithium-ion technology is still only beginning to show its potential. “Energy storage devices are like little chemical factories,” she said—and many other energy technologies are equally complicated. “It’s not a one-component problem,” Lampe-Onnerud said. “If we could have one resolution tonight, I’d want to inspire people to work more collaboratively, because these things are really hard.”

Lessard argued that the pace of energy innovation is limited by existing models for regulating and investing in energy technologies. “Anything that requires behavioral change or regulatory change is going to be hard,” he said. “It’s very hard to bank on regulatory reform.” The energy business involves such complex politics and extensive regulation, in fact, that “it’s an environment where if you were a smart startup, you would never go,” Matheson chimed in. “Which is why the venture industry has shied away from it. But now we’re all trying to go there together.”

Wiberg pointed out that in certain venture-funded areas, such as biofuels and coal-to-gas technologies, there is already “a lot of pilot activity for large-scale production.” But the financial crisis means there’s going to be a period of uncertainty for many of these companies, he said, as the hedge funds and private equity firms that were active in early-stage energy investing fall out of the market. “How do the companies that were planning on raising hundreds of millions of dollars on the private and public markets adjust their business plans and still get the capital they need? That’s incomplete,” said Wiberg. “But we’re optimistic, even in this environment. These are enormous markets, and there is a lot of innovation going on, and an increasing number of great entrepreneurs are getting involved.”

Matheson faulted venture investors for focusing too heavily on the “black boxes,” the core technologies at their portfolio companies, and too little on “how you add unique value in a value chain.” Many first-generation alternative energy projects will fail, Matheson predicted, because they’re producing commodities for which there is no market, or no sustainable price. Matheson cited Flagship portfolio firm Novomer (profiled here and here) as an example of a company that has only expanded as fast as it is able to find markets for its products (in this case, alternative polymers synthesized from carbon dioxide).

Provoked by the panelists’ comments about the limits of new technologies and the importance of market factors, Aulet asked, “Is technology overrated when it comes to energy innovation?” Lessard answered more or less in the affirmative, saying rebuilding the nation’s energy economy “is going to require as much regulatory and ‘mechanism’ engineering as …Next Page »

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With the Xconomy Forum on Energy Innovation fast approaching (the event will be held on December 2 at the British Consulate in Cambridge), I want to give a quick update on what’s shaping up to be an exciting—and sold out (see below)—evening. I also want to put out the call to anyone who might want to take part in the Energy Burst portion of the evening, in which presenters give 30-second pitches about their energy-related projects or startups.

The Energy Bursts will cap a spectacular agenda that features a panel on energy innovation led by Xconomist Bill Aulet of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and a keynote chat between Highland Capital Partners general partner Paul Maeder and Rocky Mountain Institute founder, chairman, and chief scientist Amory Lovins. Our hope is that the Energy Burst will help, um, spark lively discussions during the networking reception that immediately follows the program.

We’ve also finalized the lineup for Aulet’s panel, which will probe the intersection of venture capital, policy, and entrepreneurship. Joining Bill at the table will be Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud; Jim Matheson of Flagship Ventures (Jim shared the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Investor of the Year award last month); Bill Wiberg from Advanced Technology Ventures; and Donald R. Lessard, co-chair of the MIT Energy Education Task Force.

The chat between Maeder and Lovins promises to be equally insightful. Maeder is the most recent recipient of the MTLC’s prestigious Commonwealth Award; we profiled his approach to energy investment here. The pithy, sharp-witted, MacArthur Prize-wining Lovins, who lives in Colorado, is one of the world’s leading thinkers on energy matters—and his message on the business imperative of energy efficiency is one you should not miss.

To register go here—but do it fast because there are only a handful of tickets left. To apply for an Energy Burst slot, write to editors@xconomy.com.

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The Mass Technology Leadership Council gave nods to cleantech and gaming investors, inkless printing technology, and Web innovators with its 2008 Mass Technology Leadership Awards, according to the industry group. Over the last year or so, Xconomy has written stories that capture many of these award-winning accomplishments. Here’s a complete list of this year’s winners with links to those tidbits from our archive:

Commonwealth Award — MIT

Yep, there’s no doubt that MIT is a centerpiece of the Massachusetts innovation economy. We’ve got about 150 stories’ worth of clues about why the technology powerhouse nabbed this award.

Emerging Innovative Company of the Year — Zink Imaging

Wade profiled this Bedford, MA-based firm and its inkless printing technology, which has its roots in Polaroid. Polaroid’s new PoGo printer, which uses the Zink technology, launched this summer.

Company of the Year — Constant Contact

It’s no surprise to see that Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm Constant Contact (NASDAQ:CTCT) has won this award. The company’s $107 million initial public offering last year seems like a reminder of a bygone era, given the current chaos on Wall Street.

Public Sector Organization of the Year — UMass Online

UMass Online has advanced the University of Massachusetts’ online education and distance-learning programs since launched in 2001. The organization says its online system supports nearly 80 degree programs and more than 1,500 courses a year — which sounds like an awful lot to me, and it beats taking the bus.

And the technology leadership awards for individuals go to…

Commonwealth Award — Paul Maeder

Maeder, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners, is leading efforts at the venture firm’s Lexington, MA office to invest in energy. Bob wrote earlier this year about how Maeder is recharging the firm’s focus on energy investments after a three-year hiatus from the sector.

Innovator of the Year — Paul Graham

Like MIT, Graham and his early stage investment firm Y Combinator get a lot of ink in Xconomy. Here’s one of our more popular stories on Y Combinator, which Bob wrote this summer.

CEO of the Year — Robert Keane

Keane is the founder and obviously chief executive of VistaPrint (NASDAQ:VPRT), a Bermuda-based online provider of marketing products for small businesses with offices in Lexington and elsewhere around the world. Here’s Keane’s biography.

CIO of the Year — Rebecca Rhoads

Rhoads has the huge responsibility for the information technology backbone of Waltham, MA-based aerospace and defense company Raytheon (NYSE:RTN).

CTO of the Year — Paul English

English is in charge of technology at Norwalk, CT-based Kayak.com, which provides a search engine that enables people with travel bugs to scour more than 140 vacation and travel sites for the best deals.

CXO of the Year — Jon Pilkington

Pilkington is the vice president of marketing for semantic Web firm Metatomix, of Dedham, MA, which Wade wrote about with some rich historical context earlier this year.

Investors of the Year — Jim Matheson and John Simon

Matheson, a partner of Cambridge, MA, VC firm Flagship Ventures, has also increased his focus on the hot clean energy area. Here’s the first of a series of posts he wrote for Xconomy during a clean energy fact-finding and information sharing mission in the U.K. this summer.

Simon, a managing director and co-founder of General Catalyst Partners, is a veteran entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He has lead Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst’s investment in Seattle-based casual gaming firm Big Fish Games, which hooked an $83.3 million round of venture capital announced last month.

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Three or four years ago, Highland Capital Partners made one cleantech investment—in Amp Resources, a Nevada geothermal company that was sold last year to Italian power company Enel. That’s been it for Highland’s cleantech or energy deals.

But all that is about to change: Highland general partner Paul Maeder, who traditionally has focused on information technology and communications investments, has been studying the energy space for months, and in June decided to shift his focus almost exclusively to energy investments—and the firm is right now recruiting a new senior associate to help him. Maeder says the time is right for investing in energy. But you aren’t likely to see Highland joining the ranks of other venture firms that have done deals in solar, geothermal, biofuel, and other alternative fuels. Rather, Maeder’s focus is efficiency, which he calls an area overlooked “not just by venture capital, but by society.” Says Maeder, “They light up the whole Prudential Center so the janitors can clean one room.”

In some senses Highland is way behind the legions of other top venture firms—from Polaris to Flagship to Khosla to KPCB—who began investing seriously in energy—most visibly on the cleantech front—several years ago. But the Lexington, MA-based firm may be also leap-frogging its counterparts by focusing intently on the efficiency space.

“I’ve always been interested in energy. I wrote my senior thesis in college on energy. It was just that nobody else cared about it,” Maeder told me last week. At the time of the Amp investment several years ago, however, he says the firm made a study of the space, “and we came to the conclusion then that it was still a bit early for cleantech.” Meanwhile, investments on the power production side (wind farms, geothermal, ethanol, and nuclear plans, for example) were dominated by huge projects that took $500 million and up—too rich, and with time frames too long, for Highland’s blood.

But several months ago, Maeder began looking into the field again. “I came to the conclusion back in June that there were opportunities in specific sectors, and I’ve been building up that practice. I haven’t made any investments yet, but I’m going to look at two companies today.”

The biggest opportunity, Maeder says, is efficiency. “We waste so much power in this country and we’re so unaware about it,” he says. By contrast, he notes, Europeans are far more energy conscious than Americans. Maeder talks, for instance, about visiting his grandmother in Switzerland: If you left a light on in her place, he says, “you might as well have just shit on the carpet.”

Today, he says, European hotels have card keys that must be used to lock your door when you leave a room, automatically turning the lights out in the process. “We don’t do minimal stuff like that in this country, and that’s good news because it means there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, a lot of room for improvement,” he says.

Maeder says that you save three units of coal for each one unit of energy you conserve. “There’s a big multiplier effect in conservation…and there’s not a lot being done with it.”

One area he mentioned specifically is better monitoring and sensing. Maeder points to a number of studies around smart metering that show if you give people real-time feedback on how much power they are using and what it’s costing that it results in a significant—10 percent or so—drop in their consumption. “Imagine if people had really good information about what’s used…” he says, “it would make a huge difference.”

In what types of companies, and at what stages, is Maeder hoping to invest? Well, he …Next Page »

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A basketball hoop in the Museum of Science lobby, teams of entrepreneurs playing 3 on 3. Boston Celtics cheerleaders rooting them on. A rockin’ band. Shots of blueberry martinis doled out in test tubes. A contortionist—yes, a female contortionist in a skin-tight body suit.

Did I just go through a time warp, I wondered? This was 2008, not 1998, wasn’t it? Bill Bulkeley of the Wall Street Journal was standing next to me and put it best: “A pre-bubble party in a post-bubble economic environment.”

Welcome to Highland Capital Partners’ 20th anniversary bash. It was held last night—pre-debate—and it truly would have impressed even Silicon Valley firms. Scores of representatives from Highland’s past and present portfolio companies were on hand—some taking part in the 3 on 3 tourney (owater edged City Sports in the championship). To inspire them perhaps, Highland venture partner Wyc Grousbeck, who’s also managing partner, governor (yes, governor), and CEO of the Celtics, even brought over the C’s championship trophy and put it on display next to the court.

But whether you like hoops or not, it was a wild, impressive, crazy, head-shaking affair. And the crowd clearly loved it. “I heard this is the greatest concentration of Boston entrepreneurs ever,” one person told me. There was no way, of course, to verify this. But hats off to Highland for shaking us, at least for an evening, out of our economic doldrums.
The only pall over the bash might have been the fact the vice presidential debate was closing fast, causing me, for one, to forego the blueberry martini shots and head home early. But I spoke to a lot of great people, including Highland general partner Paul Maeder and Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples and managing general partner of Highland’s consumer fund. Another great new face for me was Sallie Shuping Russell, now of BlackRock in Durham, NC, and previously the superstar head of the private investment portfolio for Duke University, which invested in one of Highland’s funds. She said she could get me tickets to a Duke or North Carolina basketball game—but that might have been after I mentioned Xconomy might some day open in Research Triangle Park (in any case, I think I’ll have to go down and evaluate our expansion soon). [Editor's note: Bob is of course joking here, and would never accept an extravagant freebie from a source or potential source. Right Bob?]

Here are notes from some of my conversations, most of them having to do with the current financial muck:

—From John Landry, CEO of Lead Dog Ventures, an Xconomist, and former CTO of Lotus Development: “The venture business is potentially turning into not that great a business, because there aren’t that many places to sell their businesses.” (Well, that was the amended version …Next Page »

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We got an interesting note this week from Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Boston’s Spark Capital who’s been on a campaign to get rid of non-compete agreements, the clauses in many employment contracts that prevent people who’ve left their jobs from engaging in similar businesses for a certain period. We interviewed Bijan on the subject back in December, and now he sends word that Spark and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School are organizing a debate on non-competes and how they affect the innovation economy in Massachusetts. Bijan’s note follows:

“My position on non-competes is pretty well-known: I don’t like them. I believe that innovation comes from interaction—and that for Massachusetts to thrive as a hub of innovation, we must follow Silicon Valley’s model where non-competes are not enforceable and entrepreneurs are free to innovate without fear of litigation.

“But I can also admit that the issue is not a simple, cut-and-dried no-brainer. That’s why my firm—Spark Capital—is teaming up with the Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for the upcoming panel discussion on the merits and drawbacks of non-competes—the contracts routinely used in Massachusetts (and many other states) by employers that force employees to sign away their rights to engage in any business of a competitive nature when they leave their present jobs.

“The Berkman Center’s Executive Director John Palfrey, a clinical professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will be moderating the discussion, which in addition to myself, will include Brightcove founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire, Akamai general counsel Melanie Haratunian, Harvard University associate professor Lee Fleming, and Highland Capital general partner Paul Maeder. That’s a good mix of opinions which should make for a lively and intelligent conversation.

“It’s an important topic. Ask anyone who isn’t free to accept an ideal job offer because of a non-compete. Or who essentially can’t work in their field of expertise at all for a year or two, since it’s so specialized that every company in the market segment is considered a competitor. Or, who has a great idea for a totally new business, but worries that the non-competes hammer will smash them if they try to make it real. (Those are the ones that we in the VC business come across most frequently.)

“Of course there are arguments for the other side as well: Have you heard about key members of a company’s engineering department leaving en masse to start at a new company? Or a talented employee who created an innovation only to leave his present job to bring that innovation to market? There are legitimate issues of protecting intellectual property and trade secrets at stake.

“If innovation is truly the engine of our ongoing economic growth and well-being—and I believe it is—then we need to take a hard look at this issue, and come with something better than what we have now.

“Here are the full details:

Employee Non-Compete Agreements: Protecting Innovation or Stifling It?

Thursday, June 19th, 3:00-7:00 pm 4:00-8:00 pm

Ames Courtroom, 2nd floor of Austin Hall, Harvard Law School

There will be a panel discussion, followed by a cocktail reception. Anyone is free to attend. You just have to register by June 12 (a week before the event) by emailing your name, title and company to Amar Ashar at the Berkman Center: ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu.”

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Editor’s note: Massachusetts, in the eyes of Highland Capital Partners co-founder and general partner Paul Maeder, has three problems with its startup engine. That’s okay, because Maeder has three solutions.

Maeder outlined both the problems and the solutions in a talk at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s annual meeting on Feb. 27—providing a slide-by-slide analysis of the Bay State and how it can best compete with archrival California. He didn’t write up the talk, which brought to light several factors that have often gone undiscussed or at least are under appreciated in all the recent arguments and angst surrounding the Massachusetts vs. Silicon Valley question. But he agreed to share his PowerPoint.

Here’s a quick peek at what it contains:

Problem No. 1: California Always Outperforms Massachusetts
Problem No. 2: Is Everyone in the Game? (Hint: Think Harvard and this piece by Xconomist Chris Gabrieli)
Problem No. 3: What’s Government Doing?

You’ll have to view Maeder’s presentation to get the solutions.

Maeder, who also addressed much the same subject at Xconomist Vinit Nijhawan’s recent workshop on Exploring Regional Venture Capital Models, welcomes your views in the comments section below.

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