A new IBM supercomputer opened at Brown University’s Center for Computation and Visualization in Providence, RI, today is 50 times faster than Brown’s next best machine and is the most powerful computer in Rhode Island, according to an announcement from IBM (NYSE: IBM). Researchers at Brown and other institutions intend to use the 1,440-processor machine to model subjects such as the genomes of ocean-going microbes, the mechanics of human and animal movement, and the topography of other planets. Brown ordered the multimillion-dollar supercomputer in June; its exact cost hasn’t been disclosed, but IBM and Brown are calling it “a shared investment.”

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In early 2002, a little startup named A123Systems was looking for a place to, well, start up. Even though the company had been formed to commercialize technology invented at MIT, the lithium-ion battery developer found just the space it needed across the river at Boston University, inside what’s now called the Photonics Center Incubator. The incubator occupied one floor of the 10-story BU Photonics Center, and held enough room to house up to 14 startups, which shared access to labs and equipment. A123Systems moved in with a handful of workers that March, according to a Harvard Business School case study on the company’s early history.

As best as I can determine, the company didn’t pay much (or any) rent in those early days. But now, nearly eight years later, the landlord is sure poised to collect. It looks like, according to several sources, that rather than collecting rent or fees from the young company, BU took equity. While school officials are not speaking publicly about the amount of stock the university now holds, sources at BU tell me that in the wake of A123Systems’s spectacular IPO on September 25—share prices climbed 50 percent the first day—the value of the university’s stake reached $10 million early this week or late last week.

Just guessing from the share price history, that would mean the school has approximately 500,000 shares. That’s less than one percent of A123’s stock, so it wouldn’t be enough to dictate that Boston University be listed by name in the SEC filings as a top shareholder. But it’s pretty good for any landlord. What’s more, given the rise in A123’s stock this week—which is at just over $26 per share as of this writing—the BU stock could be worth closer to $13 million today.

Ashley Stevens, executive director for technology transfer at BU, would not speak in detail about A123, but he did not deny that the university holds stock in the company. He did say, however, that the school previously took stock in at least some companies it housed, but has since stopped that practice. “We’ve moved away from that model of letting incubatee companies pay their initial fees in stock,” he says. “It was a controversial decision at the time.”

It also seems that BU isn’t the only university poised to reap the benefits of …Next Page »

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Len Schlesinger wryly refers to himself as president of the finest business school between Route 128 and I-495. And indeed, Wellesley, MA-based Babson College is, for many folks around Boston (and elsewhere), often over-shadowed by Hub institutions I don’t need to name.

Yet Babson is also one of the country’s top business schools. I’m not going to cite all the high rankings it gets from places that track B-school programs, because I don’t believe in such metrics. More to the point, Babson has a first-rate faculty, and we here at Xconomy seem to be writing increasingly about its graduates. Off the top of my head, I can reel off Jason Jacobs, who founded FitnessKeeper, maker of a highly popular run-tracking application for the Apple iPhone 3G called RunKeeper; Rush Hambleton, who founded Canditto, a Cambridge-based service that rents out photo-sharing kiosks; and Matt Lauzon and Jason Reuben, who launched Paragon Lake (the subject of a previous X Factor column), which is out to revolutionize jewelry design and sales, when they were mere undergrads at Babson.

This kind of evidence, not rankings, is what caught my attention. So I was pleased to be able to visit recently with the dynamic Schlesinger, who took Babson’s reins in July 2008 and wasted no time trying to lift the college’s profile.

The Babson president has a unique academic and business background that includes some 20 years at Harvard Business School and eight years as a top executive at Limited Brands, his most recent position before coming to Babson (full bio here). And he says the combination of business and academic experience gave him three sets of skills that serve him well in his new job. First, thanks to his development work at Harvard and, later, Brown University, he knows how to raise money. Second, he has been able to bring the perspective of a business executive to the management of Babson, which has helped shape his plan to strike partnerships with universities around the world (more on this below). And third, he is intimately familiar with the ways of academia, which has helped him understand the process of getting buy-in from Babson faculty.

Now, Schlesinger is an energetic and thought-provoking speaker—and he can be hard to keep up with when taking notes. (If you want to see what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube spot.)

What follows is a much-condensed overview of Schlesinger’s rapid-fire comments on innovation and entrepreneurship, and his ambitions for Babson, which was founded in 1919 as the Babson Institute (it became Babson College in 1959) and is now home to some 1,900 undergraduate and 1,600 graduate students.

1) Entrepreneurship rules—and it can be taught.

On this point, Schlesinger quotes or paraphrases the Bangladeshi economist and microlending pioneer Muhammad Yunus: “We’re all entrepreneurs, only too few of us get to practice it.”

Based on academic work at Babson and other institutions, Schlesinger believes that the principles and practice of entrepreneurship are “documentable, codifiable, and consequently teachable to anybody.” That is a tremendous opportunity for Babson, he says. “This is our time…and the world can benefit enormously from a much more expansive diffusion of what it is that we do.”

2) The underlying assumptions of most business plans, such as a skilled, abundant labor market, cheap energy, and easy access to credit, are things of the past. Outcome measures for businesses must be extended beyond the traditional profit and loss to embrace three categories of measures related to “people, planet and profit.

“The last year has just been spectacular in terms of demonstrating the limitation of the operating model that most businesses and most communities operate under,” Schlesinger says. “We need …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Maveron and Boston-based Spark Capital have co-led an $8 million Series A investment in Altius Education, based in San Francisco, according to a press release today. The Noah Fund also participated in the deal. Maveron was founded by Dan Levitan and Howard Schultz in 1998, and focuses on consumer and tech companies. Altius was born in 2007, and is developing online higher education programs through partnerships with nonprofit universities.

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[Updated and corrected, August 11---see below]
Anyone who has spent much time in universities knows that openness, teamwork, and collaboration are widely taught, but not always widely practiced. And when it comes to implementing entirely new models of education, well, let’s just say that institutional barriers, turf wars, bureaucracy, and tradition all too often derail significant change.

Better to start from scratch.

That, anyway, was the watchword of an experiment begun 12 years ago in Wellesley, MA, when the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering was created. Built on 70 acres purchased from Babson College next door, Olin was founded specifically to pioneer a new model of engineering education. It has no academic departments, and no tenure. The curriculum is designed to be retired after seven years. Students focus on real-world projects crafted around a commitment to design, functionality, and usability far more than an understanding of science. And, oh yeah, everyone who’s admitted in gets a full ride on tuition, or at least they did (more on that later). [The last sentence originally said Olin intended to offer students free tuition and room. Olin officials say that while free tuition was planned in perpetuity, the school only intended to offer room for the first class, which it did.]

Olin graduated its first class just four years ago, so the experiment is still an experiment-but one with encouraging early results and exciting long-term possibilities. I went out to Wellesley recently to learn more about Olin first hand from director of business development Ron Guerriero, VP for development J. Thomas Krimmel, and rising junior and entrepreneur Evan Morikawa. Not everything has gone as planned, according to this crew. But the upstart college has already produced a crop of Fulbright scholars and is finding ready jobs for its graduates at Microsoft, Google, Akamai, and a host of other leading companies. It even has a plan for introducing its model to more traditional schools.

Here are some highlights:

—About 300 total students, all undergraduates
—Three degree programs: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and a broad Engineering degree
— 9-1 student-teacher ratio
— 91 percent of students graduate (40-60 percent appears to be the norm for U.S. colleges, according to the statistics I found)
—42 percent of this year’s graduating class, and 54 percent of the incoming class, are women (the highest in the country for an undergrad engineering program, according to Olin) [An earlier version of this point said that 47 percent of the incoming freshman class were women. Women will be about 47 percent of the entire student population this fall. ]
—17 percent of the study body are alumni of FIRST Robotics, Dean Kamen’s popular student robotics competition

The overriding concept behind Olin is that to compete successfully in today’s global economy, American engineering students need strong technical skills coupled to a better understanding of business and entrepreneurial thinking and broad cultural experiences offered by the arts and humanities. The engineering coursework is geared at providing loads of experience in creating real-world products—with product teams, timelines, and all the rest.

The college was founded by the Franklin W. Olin Foundation, named for the early-20th-century ammunition magnate, in 1997. After purchasing land from Babson College and creating Olin College, the foundation then dissolved itself.

The first employee—Rick Miller, the only president the school has had—was hired in 1999. Initial faculty came the next year, from places like MIT, Harvard, and Vanderbilt, and the core of the first class arrived in the fall of 2001, roughly 30 of them. They are known as “the partners,” …Next Page »

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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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We are incredibly excited about XSITE 2009—The Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship happening next Wednesday at Boston University—and we are especially pumped today because we have just filled the last open speaker slot for the event.

The more than 50 organizations participating in the event, listed below in alphabetical order, come from all corners of the New England innovation ecosystem: universities, startups, large public companies, non-profits, research institutes, life sciences, computing, semiconductors, telecom, medical devices, energy, cleantech, you name it. We are extremely grateful to all the participants, who have jumped in to help make this one of the cornerstone events of New England Innovation Month.

See the agenda for a complete list of speakers and panelists, and check out www.xsite2009.com for all the updates as the event approaches. With just a week to go, and the Saver registration rate set to expire today, it’s a great time to sign up for XSITE, which you can do here. We hope to see you next Wednesday.

XSITE 2009 participating organizations:

Adimab
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Atlas Venture
Boston-Power
Boston University
Boston University School of Management’s Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization
CareGroup Health System
Cliniworks
Cloudswitch
Dartmouth University
DEKA Research & Development
EMC
Excel Medical Ventures
Extend Media
EveryZing
FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology)
Flagship Ventures
Flybridge Capital Partners
FloDesign Wind Turbine
Founder Collective
General Catalyst Partners
GlaxoSmithKline
GlycoFi
GreatPoint Energy
Harvard Medical School
Highland Capital Partners
IBM
IST Energy
Kepha Partners
Kiva Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Office of Business Development
Microsoft
NaviNet
New England Venture Capital Association
Partners Healthcare Center for Connected Health
Pulmatrix
Renewable Energy Business Network
Satori
Seventh Sense
SiOnyx
Sirtris Pharmaceuticals
Skyhook Wireless
Solventerra Energy
StyleFeeder
Terrafugia
1366 Technologies
38 Studios
Verenium
Visible Measures
Wakonda Technologies
WiTricity
Xconomy
Zafgen

Plus two unnamed stealth companies

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In football, the expression is “three yards and a cloud of dust.” But at Microsoft, it’s apparently “three screens and a cloud.” That’s according to chief software architect Ray Ozzie, who took part in a keynote conversation with University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska at today’s State of Technology Luncheon, hosted by the Technology Alliance at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle.

Ozzie was speaking about the evolution of cloud-based software to serve three key device categories: phones, laptops, and TV-sized monitors. He and Lazowska (an Xconomist) touched on many other aspects as well, including Microsoft’s leadership and culture, the past, present, and future of computing, and even Boston versus Seattle (which suits Xconomy’s mission particularly well since we’re in both cities). The event was a big deal, especially because Ozzie doesn’t make a lot of public appearances around town, but there was also plenty of other high-profile news and activity from the lunch. Here’s a quick recap, including an edited account of the Q&A with Ozzie.

Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance (also an Xconomist), made the opening remarks and introduced Gov. Chris Gregoire, who kicked things off with a few comments about the region’s technology leadership. “On a national scale, I’m very excited that science and technology is back in a big way,” she said. “The innovative spirit that is the lifeblood of the 21st century economy is going to happen in our state.” Gregoire cited the importance of such technologies as the smart grid, broadband access, and healthcare software, and stressed the need to improve education from early childhood through graduate schools. Lastly, Gregoire singled out a few Washington companies, including Modumetal, Insitu, and Verdiem, saying “This is the future of our great state…It is not going to happen without all of us working together. We will get through this terrible downturn in our economy.”

Next up, Marty Smith of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels announced his group had just closed a $4 million-plus seed fund yesterday, to make “sidecar-type investments.” The Alliance of Angels funded five companies that were acquired last year—Cleverset, Shelfari, Insitu, SnapIn Software, and Coffee Equipment Company. And one of these, SnapIn Software (acquired by Nuance for an estimated $180 million last August), was named the Alliance of Angels 2009 Company of the Year, Smith announced. SnapIn, based in Bellevue, WA, was backed by Frazier Technology Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Oak Investment Partners.

Jeremy Jaech, chair of the Technology Alliance and CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem, followed with an eye-opening rundown of benchmarking stats comparing Washington state with its top technology peers around the country: Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, California, New York, Colorado, and Utah. Jaech, who’s also an Xconomist, pointed out that Washington ranks 4th among its peers in terms of its share of total U.S. venture capital investment (behind California, Massachusetts, and New York), which is encouraging. Washington also ranks in the top 5 in the strength of its engineering workforce, but suffers in education rankings such as 8th grade math proficiency, high school graduation rates, number of bachelor’s and graduate degrees awarded, and state spending on academic research. The most urgent recommendation from Jaech’s team? Boost investment in undergraduate and graduate science and engineering education.

Then it was time for the keynote. The UW’s Lazowska introduced Ray Ozzie by telling the story of how the latter showed up in Seattle in 2005 (when his startup Groove Networks was acquired by Microsoft) and gave a three-hour lecture on collaborative software in Lazowska’s class on the history of computing. I’m not going to do justice to Ozzie’s background here—he’s the main creator of Lotus Notes, among other things, and was a developer at Data General, where Craig Mundie also worked—but let’s just say I’ve long been fascinated by his story of discovering the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois in Urbana. (In part because that’s where I did my first computer programming as a high-school kid in 1983. And also, props to a fellow Illini alum.)

Here’s a condensed and edited version of the Ozzie conversation:

Lazowska: In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he talks about the importance of serendipitous timing. What is it about people born in 1955 for computing—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and you?

Ozzie: Timing is a huge, huge factor. Something else in Gladwell’s book is pretty …Next Page »

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Three local venture firms put on what amounted to a university startup fair at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square yesterday. I went hoping for a peek at a few of the companies that could be pulling down Series A rounds a year or two from now.

Now in its second year, the invitation-only University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium was organized by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, and General Catalyst and sponsored by Boston-based law firm Goodwin Procter. The firms formatted the event so that university research teams with hot, potentially commercializable technologies had a chance to give their best 12-minute pitches to a large collection of venture capitalists and corporate representatives from all over the region. Attendees had one track to hear about nine companies in the life sciences industry, and other track for nine more infotech- and energy-oriented companies. The research teams weren’t just from places like Harvard and MIT, but represented 15 different institutions from around the country.

Eight of the presenting teams were from New England. One, Boston-based Novophage, is a company that Ryan already covered; it’s working on “engineered bacteriophages” to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA. I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I had to skip presentations by three of the remaining seven local teams. But the following is a quick rundown of the four local presentations I did hear. All of these groups are in the lab-bench or seed-funding stage, and are looking for venture capital to get to the next step in the commercialization process.

Making Ethanol from Soybean Hulls—Without Destroying the Protein

Jonathan Mielenz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, talked about a project with Dartmouth engineers John Bardsley and Charles Wyman to study soybean hulls as a potential raw material in the fermentation of ethanol.

Soybeans are used to make soy oil and other food products, and their hulls, which have a high protein content, are usually used as feedstock for cattle. That would seem to make them a bad choice as a source of biomass-derived ethanol; indeed, a lot of the effort in ethanol production these days is going into technologies, like ideas being developed at local firms like Mascoma and Verenium, that use non-food, high-cellulose sources such as wood chips or switchgrass.

But Mielenz said his group has come up with a simple way to ferment the sugars in soybean hulls without destroying the protein. The high-temperature pretreatment to which most other high-cellulose biomass is subjected before fermentation would break down the proteins in soybean hulls, Mielenz said. Simply by skipping this step, Mielenz says, his startup—which doesn’t have a name yet—found it was able to extract the sugars in the hulls without disrupting the amino acid sequences in their proteins, thus preserving their value as feed.

Selling the remains of the fermentation as feed could help bring down the net cost of ethanol production and make biofuels more competitive with fossil-based fuels, Mielenz argued.

Cheaper, More Powerful Methanol Fuel Cells

Nathan Ashcraft, a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Paula Hammond in the Chemical Engineering department at MIT, gave a talk about DyPol, a startup looking to commercialize a new, more efficient type of membrane for methanol-based fuel cells.

A methanol fuel cell works by exposing methanol on the anode side of the cell to a membrane where a catalyst such as platinum splits off protons and electrons. The electrons exit the cell to form an electric current while the protons travel through the membrane, meeting oxygen from air on the cathode side of the membrane to produce water as a waste product. DuPont makes the leading membrane material for methanol fuel cells, a polymer called Nafion. But Nafion has a few weaknesses, Ashcraft said; it’s costly to make; it depends a toxic fluorination process; and it’s easily permeated by raw methanol, reducing its efficiency.

Ashcraft and colleagues in the Hammond Lab, collaborating with a number of other labs around MIT, have devised a way to build polymer membranes layer by layer, allowing them to blend polymers that couldn’t otherwise be used together. The layers are less permeable to methanol, and can be created in a non-toxic, water-based solution. Prototype fuel cells built using the new membranes have 53 percent greater energy output than …Next Page »

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How should Massachusetts strengthen and grow its innovation ecosystem? What are the best ways to foster entrepreneurship, improve the high-tech work force, and entice companies, whether here already or thinking about a local presence, to expand in the Bay State?

Last month, after witnessing a flurry of talk focused on addressing such issues by rebranding the Bay State as an innovation hub, Wade weighed in with a thought-provoking column. Rather than worrying about branding, he suggested the state’s time, money, and energy would be far better spent helping innovators and innovative companies succeed. “Indeed, there’s so much amazing innovation going on in Massachusetts already that it seems superfluous to worry about better marketing slogans…” he wrote. “It would be far better for economic growth in the state if public-private initiatives like the Information Technology Collaborative focused on a few substantive policy reforms targeting the all-too-numerous obstacles to prosperity for local businesses, technology professionals, and entrepreneurs.”

He put forth a list of suggestions that included replicating efforts like MIT’s Desphande Center for Technological Innovation at other universities, getting rid of non-compete clauses, and promoting the Bay State’s gay friendly credentials (especially compared to California). His column attracted a slew of comments. But more than their number was the quality of the ideas put forth. Unanimously, as far as I could tell, commenters who weighed in on branding agreed that it should not be the focus of Bay State attention. “Creating a new slogan or tag-line is backward. Real accomplishments [are] the way to attract attention. Nicknames like ‘Silicon Valley’ appear after that, not before,” wrote Dan Weinreb.

Many readers put forth their own ideas for what should be done. Some came from well-known innovation leaders (including two Xconomists), others from voices I hadn’t heard before. But as a whole, their ideas and perspectives were so interesting that I wanted to round them up and draw fresh attention to them in hopes of evolving the discussing even farther—and faster. Indeed, we need to get this discussion more out in the open, and not leave it to committees alone—as important as those committees may be. Innovation comes from out-of-the-box thinking, and sometimes that can best be found through out-of-the-box outreach.

You can read all the comments here. But below are three ideas, or action areas, that particular jumped out at me.

• Improve student engagement and encourage young entrepreneurs—This was one of the most talked about areas. Alexa Scordato laid out a key part of this issue: “Boston does a crappy job of retaining the youth population that is drawn to the city. As an academic acropolis housing an undergraduate population of over 250K, Boston misses the opportunity year after year by failing to convince people to stay…I was recently told that if I ever want to have a shot at being innovative, that I MUST leave Boston because leaders here would never mentor or cultivate my professional interests.”

Those thoughts were echoed by Tim Rowe, president of the Cambridge Innovation Center, home to a constant stream of startups, who put forth some ideas for retaining students after they graduate and encouraging student entrepreneurship:

—Fund programs like MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service in every school.
—Expand efforts like Flybridge Capital Partners’ Stay in MA program that pay for students to attend conferences and other networking events.
—Create a grant program for helping startups hire interns.
—Replicate successes like Northeastern University’s internship program in other schools.

But as important as such efforts may be, at least one local entrepreneur, Xconomist Vinit Nijhawan, thinks you can only do so much to retain students in today’s world, where students who come to Boston from around the globe naturally want to (and now can) return home to pursue their dreams. “I believe it is ultimately futile to try to increase (from its natural rate) the retention of the hundreds of thousands of students who study here,” Nijhawan argued. “In the flat world let’s make Boston the hub that all these alumni communicate through and occasionally gather at. Let’s create an annual alumni gathering in Boston, coordinated by all colleges. We can have sub-fairs at this gathering with themes such innovation, arts, sustainability, healthcare, etc. Economic activity will naturally arise from making Boston the ‘knowledge hub’ of the flat world.”

• Create new sources of seed funding for entrepreneurs—Enrico Polazzo was blunt: “Disruptive innovation creates new markets, and enables radically new business models, and the seed money fuel for that type of innovation has always been way too limited in Boston – no doubt …Next Page »
  
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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/03/24/how-massachusetts-should-boost-innovation-a-compendium-of-reader-ideas-and-a-call-for-more/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/san-diego/2009/03/12/kauffman-seminar-asks-how-universities-can-improve-innovation/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:03:57 +0000 Bruce V. Bigelow http://www.xconomy.com/?p=15857 innovation, Entrepreneurship, Kauffman Foundation Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

  It’s taken as a given that universities are integral to the innovation process. Researchers create technology, the university finds a licensee or a startup company is formed to develop the invention, and products are created that drive growth in the economy.

  But that is a simplistic view of a complex system. And today, a select group of researchers from around the world is gathering at U.C. San Diego to help examine the process of university-industry interaction and technology transfer in more detail. Their focus is a series of questions—that have long been asked but have yet to be definitively answered and are of abiding interest here at Xconomy: What is the true connection between research universities and innovation, and how does it work? How does knowledge really move from the academic laboratory to industry? And are there new ways to improve and accelerate the process?

  Sponsored by the Kansas City, MO-based Kauffman Foundation, the seminar is intended to help analyze a global research effort focused on what industry wants from universities, and how those goals can be achieved. The research, part of an onging multi-year study, consists of interviews and other data drawn from more than 90 companies in four countries where innovation and new technologies play a key economic role: the United States, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

  “What we are trying to accomplish is for people to think about what incentivizes and supports a positive interaction between the university and industry,” says Mary Walshok, a UCSD Associate Vice Chancellor and a seminar host. The participants are “people who care about these things, and who are in a position to influence government policy in the U.S., Japan, Canada and the U.K.”

  The three-day event begins with a presentation this evening by Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which Walshok says operates as an example of university-industry “best practices.”  The invited participants …Next Page »

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/san-diego/2009/03/12/kauffman-seminar-asks-how-universities-can-improve-innovation/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/03/12/new-microsoft-board-member-maria-klawe-on-bill-gates-college-students-and-seattle-innovation/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:00:18 +0000 Gregory T. Huang http://www.xconomy.com/?p=15833 Software, Academia, people Gregory T. Huang wrote:

  On Monday, Microsoft announced it had appointed Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, to the company’s board of directors. Klawe’s appointment makes Microsoft’s board 10 members strong again, after longtime director Jon Shirley (a former Microsoft president and chief operating officer) stepped down last November. I had the opportunity to speak with Klawe yesterday about her new role, and what she brings to the Redmond software company.

  Klawe (pronounced “Claw-vay”) has been president of Harvey Mudd, an elite college in Claremont, CA, focused on science and engineering, since 2006. Before that, she was dean of engineering at Princeton University. She had previously spent 15 years at the University of British Columbia in various leadership roles, including head of the department of computer science and dean of science. For good measure, she also spent eight years at IBM Research. (And for any math geeks out there, her Erdős number is 1.)

  A highly respected mathematician and computer scientist, Klawe has done seminal research in areas like multimedia, functional analysis, human-computer interaction, and gender issues in information technology. University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska, who has known Klawe for 30-plus years, touts her smarts and leadership. “She’s impatient and persistent in the best senses—she wants things to be done right, and she wants them to be done right now,” he writes in an e-mail. “She’s very strong on gender equity, which will be good medicine for Microsoft—although she’s by no means a one-issue person. Her only idiosyncrasy is that she paints watercolors during meetings.”

  Klawe has a disarming modesty about her, though she says she was “difficult” and “arrogant” growing up (hard to believe now). Having followed her research over the years and talked with her a couple of times, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft is gaining a wealth of perspective on computing, basic research, and consumer-tech trends among young people—mainly through Klawe’s deep connections to student life at her school. She also has plenty of connections to Microsoft and the Seattle area, and some compelling thoughts on local innovation.

  Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

  Xconomy: So tell us about your new role as a board member of Microsoft, and what it means to you.

  Maria Klawe: I just started as a director. They voted me in on Monday, so I’m not assigned to any specific committees yet; it’s the middle of the year. So I have the generic responsibilities of a director. I attended my first board meeting on March 9. I’m absolutely thrilled about it.

  X: How did the board appointment come about? Who were your connections, and had you been thinking about this for a while?

  MK: Two things happened independently. I was thinking about the next role to play externally that would be a good learning opportunity for me, and good for the college. I discussed it with my board chair, and said, ‘I want to be on the board of a technology company.’ I made a list of three companies: Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel, in no particular order. Google already had two university presidents on its board. So that was on my to-do list for the next few years. I hadn’t actually told anybody else that was what I wanted to do.

  The next thing that happened: I know people at Microsoft Research, foremost among them Rick Rashid [senior vice president and head of research]. I got an e-mail from Rick in October asking if we could talk by phone. Given our schedules, it wasn’t until halfway through November that we talked. He said, ‘Microsoft is thinking about putting an academic on its board, and your name has come up.’ Rick thought for sure I wouldn’t be interested; he seemed sorry to be the one to have to ask me. I said, ‘Actually, it’s on my to-do list, to go on a corporate board.’ He said, ‘Really? If you are interested, you should meet with Brad Smith [senior vice president and general counsel for Microsoft] and Bill Gates.’ It just so happened I was going to be in Seattle the next week. Lo and behold, on November 19, I had a meeting with Bill Gates and Brad Smith.

  X: I’m guessing the meeting went pretty well. (No word on whether any watercolor paintings came of it.)

  MK: As a university president, you want to talk about your college. For the first 45 minutes, Bill just asked me about Harvey Mudd. Towards the end of the hour, he said, …Next Page »

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/03/12/new-microsoft-board-member-maria-klawe-on-bill-gates-college-students-and-seattle-innovation/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/02/17/mit-trained-entrepreneurs-create-businesses-with-2-trillion-a-year-in-sales-kauffman-report-says/ Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:00:15 +0000 Wade Roush http://www.xconomy.com/?p=12776 Entrepreneurship, Business, Universities Wade Roush wrote:

  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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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/02/17/mit-trained-entrepreneurs-create-businesses-with-2-trillion-a-year-in-sales-kauffman-report-says/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/01/15/harvard-touts-its-economic-impact/ Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:04:24 +0000 Rebecca Zacks http://www.xconomy.com/?p=8957 Harvard, Boston, Economy Rebecca Zacks wrote:

  Harvard University today released a report from New York-based research firm Appleseed detailing the university’s impact on the regional economy. The Boston Globe points out that the report, which credits Harvard with directly and indirectly accounting for some $4.8 billion in Boston-area economic activity in fiscal 2008, comes just as “Boston officials seek to squeeze more money out the city’s tax-exempt nonprofit sector to help offset a budget shortfall estimated at more than $100 million.” A pdf of the report is available here.

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/01/15/harvard-touts-its-economic-impact/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/24/take-an-innovation-tour-of-india/ Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:50:45 +0000 Robert Buderi http://www.xconomy.com/?p=7152 VC, innovation, India Robert Buderi wrote:

  The world might not be completely flat, but a bulldozer has been working overtime on leveling the global innovation playing field—and many previously emerging nations are establishing themselves as serious competitors to the U.S. India is near the top of the list. Previously known in the technology world as a place for cheap outsourcing of IT talent, it is now a hotbed of hypercompetition and entrepreneurial activity, even as it struggles with core issues of health, corruption, and an unfair legal system dogging emerging nations.

  For those of you who would like a personal, close-to-the-scene snapshot of India’s innovation landscape, I’d like to draw your attention to the still-unfolding series in our Forum penned by Xconomist Vinit Nijhawan, who is touring the country right now. In five short, easy-to-digest installments, Nijhawan takes readers on a fascinating journey, from New Delhi’s teeming cell phone (and cell phone unlocking) marketplace to Chandigarh, home to a great engineering college and a “nascent life sciences industry forming…around agricultural products” to his most-recent installment from Mumbai and the TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Entrepreneurial Summit.

  It isn’t all a pretty tour. Along the way, Nijhawan provides a view of India’s murky property situation, which he contrasts to its much more effective system of intellectual property protection; government corruption and ineptitude; and India’s problems with clean water, which he thinks might lead to a possible collaboration with Boston University, where he is a lecturer and executive-in-resident at the School of Management.

  There’s a lot more I haven’t mentioned, but you get the idea. You can take the tour below:

  Dispatch from India’s Innovation Front Lines

  India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 2: Of Industry-Targeted Degrees, Water, and Spinoffs

  India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 3: Of Property Markets, Both Physical and Intellectual

  India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 4: Of Hyper-Competition and Corruption

  India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 5: The Emerging Entrepreneurial Class

  India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 6: Return to Pune, the Boston of India

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/24/take-an-innovation-tour-of-india/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/16/flybridge-unveils-scholarship-program-to-help-students-network-and-stay-in-ma/ Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:30:43 +0000 Robert Buderi http://www.xconomy.com/?p=6946 Universities, innovation, Competitiveness Robert Buderi wrote:

  Massachusetts is home to perhaps the world’s greatest concentration of top colleges and universities, many of them rich in the science and engineering education that forms the backbone of our high-tech economy. But one rap the Bay State has taken is that many graduates leave for jobs on the West Coast and other places rather than stay here, where they might join or even form companies and fuel economic growth.

  One of the best ways to get students to stay in Massachusetts after graduation is to better connect them with ideas and job opportunities, local business proponents argue. One of the best ways for them to do that is to join industry associations or attend events where they can meet entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and company executives. There’s a catch, though: joining those organizations and attending those events often costs money—more than many students can afford.

  These problems just got easier for students in the Boston area to handle. Today, Flybridge Capital Partners is announcing Stay in MA, a scholarship program that provides up to $100 per student per event for students to attend the events of business and technology organizations in the state. Funds can also be used to cover the costs of joining trade associations and other organizations. The program, initially funded with $5,000 from Flybridge, is open to both undergraduate and graduate students at any university or college. It has the initial backing—sure to grow—of six other companies and groups. Xconomy, which has since September been offering steep student discounts to all our events, is proud to be a charter participant in the program—and starting today all of our events are eligible for Stay in MA scholarships. Other charter participants include: the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX), the New England Clean Energy Council, SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England), and TiE Boston.

  “We’ve just been reading about the tragedy in Massachusetts of all this fantastic talent graduating out of the state, and that is the talent we need to fuel our innovation economy,” says Flybridge general partner Jeff Bussgang. “And one of the claims is that students don’t know where to plug into the business community.

  “In this job environment in particular, no one’s going to get a job at a small company by sending out a blind resume,” Bussgang continues. “A student has to be in the mix, they have to be at the networking events, they have to show up.” But with tickets running $50, $100, and up, “it’s a real barrier” to attendance, especially if a student wants to attend several events a year, he says. The purpose of the new program, of course, is to eliminate or greatly reduce that barrier. “It’s about sending the signal to the student community, that the Massachusetts…business community really welcomes them, really wants them.”

  To apply, students fill out a simple form, providing basic details such as their contact information, the name of the event, and a few sentences about why they’d like to attend. If accepted, Flybridge will buy them the ticket they seek.

  One of the leading voices on the need to encourage students to stay in the Bay State is Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner—and Flybridge says his commentary played a role in its decision to launch the program. You can find one of his personal blogs on the subject here.

  Bussgang also says that while Flybridge is putting up $5,000 to start, he hopes other firms step forth to contribute. “We’ll see how that plays out.” Hopefully the pot will grow—and quickly.

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/16/flybridge-unveils-scholarship-program-to-help-students-network-and-stay-in-ma/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/12/11/how-to-invent-tips-on-global-technology-from-patrick-ennis-of-intellectual-ventures-part-1/ Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:00:34 +0000 Gregory T. Huang http://www.xconomy.com/?p=6821 Global Innovation, intellectual property, Invention Gregory T. Huang wrote:

  Why can’t big companies invent? How should inventors handle their intellectual property? And what are countries around the world doing on these fronts? I recently stopped by Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, to get the scoop from Patrick Ennis, IV’s global head of technology. Ennis was a venture capitalist with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle for 10 years before taking his current post in early 2008. (Between jobs, he took some time off and, among other things, chopped wood full-time for a week.)

  Back in October, Xconomy reported that Ennis is heading up Intellectual Ventures’ expansion in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Singapore. The invention company, which is led by founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, currently has some $5 billion under management, 450-plus employees, and 160 university partnerships around the world. I wanted to get a deeper sense of Ennis’s philosophies on invention and intellectual property on a global scale.

  Ennis organized his thoughts loosely around a talk he gave last month at the Ready To Commercialize 2008 conference, run by the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas (which happened to be IV’s 100th university partner). In Austin, he spoke on game-changing approaches to commercializing inventions. The conversation we had over lunch in Bellevue was free-flowing and touched on everything from anatomy and antibiotics to Sumerian culture and the Renaissance.

  I was particularly intrigued by Ennis’s take on the current state of global competition and its historical context. “It’s a complicated world,” he said. “Leonardo da Vinci could do what he did because the world was not as complicated. Leonardo could not be a Renaissance person today—there’s too much to know.”

  A few more highlights from Ennis, in his own words:

  —On doing business at Intellectual Ventures: “We want to create a market for invention. We want to reward inventors, perfect the process of invention, and make invention respectable…We don’t ask for exclusive deal sourcing agreements, we like to earn our business a deal at a time, the old-fashioned way. All organizations, if they succeed, have to fight the hubris thing. You see that with all big companies. IBM had it, Microsoft had it, and Google, quicker than any other startup, got it. It’s amazing how the hubris seeped into Google real quick. And the backlash is coming—you see it in the EU and, to a certain extent, in the States.”

  “We’re a collection of individuals, and business is always done personally, one on one, whether you work for a 10-person company, or 450, or 4,000,” Ennis says. “That’s when companies lose their way, …Next Page »

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/12/11/how-to-invent-tips-on-global-technology-from-patrick-ennis-of-intellectual-ventures-part-1/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/10/08/on-the-road-with-intellectual-ventures-global-head-of-technology-patrick-ennis/ Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:00:50 +0000 Gregory T. Huang http://www.xconomy.com/?p=5456 Invention, Global Innovation, Asia Gregory T. Huang wrote:

  It’s 10:15 pm, and Patrick Ennis is in a taxi bound for the airport in Delhi, India. He’s getting ready for a 1:00 am flight to Beijing. The streets of India are legendary for displaying 2,000 years of transportation history in one place—animals, pedestrians, carts, bikes, cars, buses, trucks—and it sounds like tonight is no different. “I learned to drive in New York, but this is much harder,” says Ennis. Though it’s late at night, he adds, “It’s still 10 times as much traffic as Seattle.”

  Ennis is the global head of technology for Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm focused on invention. He joined about six months ago; before that, he was a managing director at Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners, where he funded and built technology startups, many coming out of universities and national labs. And before that, he held senior positions in technology and business at Lucent Technologies, AT&T, and Bell Labs. He did his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, and did scientific research for about eight years before joining Bell Labs.

  As we reported last week, Ennis is currently part of a high-powered traveling team that includes Intellectual Ventures co-founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung. They are on a three-week, five-country tour of Asia to meet with the local communities and launch new offices there. I hope to sit down with Ennis for a more comprehensive discussion after he returns, but in the meantime here are some thoughts he provided by phone—through a dicey wireless connection in Delhi. He touched on some details from the tour, his impressions of the various Asian cities (including the food), and how the VC industry compares with the invention industry.

  Ennis said he’d been in Tokyo, Singapore, and Delhi so far, spending three to four days in each city. Next up: Beijing and Seoul. “We’re in the middle of our tour,” he says. “It’s going very well. Our focus on invention is being well-received here, it’s truly a global world now.” Ennis says that in each city, they’ve been putting on events where they have a reception and invite local inventors, university professors, and administrators of research institutions. They’ve also been meeting with local university officials privately. “We have an inventor network we’re building in Asia…We want to get to know the whole ecosystem…and we do presentations. It’s like in Silicon Valley, you invite people who are interested in what you’re doing, to mingle and network.”

  Ennis is no stranger to Asia. In the mid-to-late ’90s, he worked in optical networking and sold a lot of products to Asian national carriers like Korea Telecom. And when he was at Arch Venture Partners, several of the firm’s portfolio companies had partners in Asia. So Ennis has worked in places like Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore. “A trend you see more is VCs, even if they don’t have formal offices or deals in Asia, spend more time there,” he says.

  He didn’t give details of his meetings this week, but he provided some general impressions. “Asia is so dynamic in terms of growth, innovation, and optimism,” Ennis says. “The energy here is palpable, it’s similar to the energy that exists in places like Seattle and Silicon Valley, both in the technology …Next Page »

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/10/08/on-the-road-with-intellectual-ventures-global-head-of-technology-patrick-ennis/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/10/07/collegewikis-funded-by-two-new-england-groups/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:06:32 +0000 Wade Roush http://www.xconomy.com/?p=5437 deals, VC, Web 2.0 Wade Roush wrote:

  The eCoast Angel Network of Portsmouth, NH, and Boston Harbor Angels of Boston are among the participants in a $2 million funding round announced today for CollegeWikis. The New York-based startup, which provides e-mail lists and group-editable wikis for student-based organizations (and bears a passing resemblance to Cambridge, MA-based Wiggio), also attracted investments from HighBAR Ventures and Richmond Management.

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  ]]> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/10/07/collegewikis-funded-by-two-new-england-groups/feed/ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/10/07/harvard-banks-125m-donation-for-new-biomedical-engineering-institute/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:09:05 +0000 Ryan McBride http://www.xconomy.com/?p=5420 Harvard University, Hansjörg Wyss, Philathropy Ryan McBride wrote:

  Harvard University has received a gift of $125 million from billionaire philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss to support the formation of a new research institute for biological engineering, The Harvard Crimson reports.

  The Crimson called the gift the largest in Harvard’s history, topping what had been a record donation of $100 million in April from David Rockefeller to fund international programs and arts education. A Harvard News Office spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report in the Harvard student newspaper this morning, saying there would be more on the gift this afternoon.

  Wyss, a 1965 graduate of Harvard Business School, made his fortune as the long-time chief of Swiss medical devices firm Synthes (and his $6 billion net worth registers No. 164 on the Forbes list of the world’s riches people). His gift, according to the Crimson, will fund the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering over the next five years. The new institute is expected to be housed in Harvard’s new science complex, which is under construction in the Allston section of Boston and which will also be home to other research departments.

  Wyss is no stranger to the fundraisers at Harvard. He donated $25 million to Harvard Business School in 2004 to support doctoral programs.

  Update 1:05pm: Harvard has just released an official announcement confiriming the donation and describing the plans for the new institute.

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