[Updated: Noon, 1/21/12] UCSF could end up being a much more independent institution if chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann gets her way.

That’s according to a story today in the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported on a proposal Desmond-Hellmann put forward this week to University of California regents, who were meeting at UC Riverside. The plan would be to make UCSF more like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Those institutions contract with the UC for health and pension services, and are accountable to the regents, but essentially govern themselves with their own boards of directors, according to a report by the Chronicle’s Nanette Asimov.

If such a move were allowed, UCSF would be freed up from paying about $49 million a year to help support the rest of the cash-strapped UC system, the Chronicle said. The move is necessary, Desmond-Hellmann said, because costs of pensions and a new UCSF medical center are rising fast, meaning that even though UCSF’s research engine is growing, the institution will be losing money by 2015.

“What we have here is not sustainable,” Desmond-Hellmann said.

It’s a bold move from Desmond-Hellmann, the longtime Genentech executive who took over the top job at UCSF in August 2009. This week, UCSF released data showing it received $532 million in research funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2010, which was about $57 million more than the previous year, and the most of any public institution in the U.S. The university has also put together a string of high-profile collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech companies under the new chancellor, including deals with Pfizer, Sanofi, and Bayer Healthcare. The UCSF vision, Desmond-Hellmann said in a campus address last October, is to become “the world’s pre-eminent health sciences innovator.”

You can check the full account from the Chronicle here. [Update with video link] You can also see a short video of Desmond-Hellmann’s presentation to the Regents by going to the UCSF site or watching it below.

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In a grand test of whether the Silicon Valley startup accelerator model can help university scientists get promising new technologies to market faster, 21 teams hand-picked for the National Science Foundation’s new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program converged on the Stanford University campus last week. The goal: to review the progress they’d made during an eight-week crash course in entrepreneurship, and share the details of their newly battle-tested business models with a panel of NSF leaders and venture capital partners.

I sat in for the first half of the review session, which took place Wednesday at Stanford’s School of Engineering, and listened to presentations on everything from hydrophobic materials for preventing ice buildup on airplane wings to a method for growing transparent sheets of graphene that could be used in next-generation computer displays. It’s too early to say how many of these innovations will turn up in the marketplace—but it was remarkable to see how thoroughly the traditional walls between academia and business had melted away in the minds of the program participants.

It all made for an event unlike any demo day I’ve seen before. The I-Corps teams—who hailed from Seattle, Tucson, Pittsburgh, Boston, and everywhere in between—were the antithesis of the hip, young, polished entrepreneurs you see coming out of venture incubators like Y Combinator or TechStars. Instead, these were geeks on a mission: bench scientists who are convinced that businesses can be built around the technologies they’ve invented, and who’ve decided to take the leap themselves rather than wait for a corporate licensee to wander along, as in the old model of university technology transfer.

For most of these scientists, the I-Corps program was their first real exposure to the startup mindset, and they had plenty of self-deprecating stories to share about the lessons they’d learned while talking with potential customers. One University of Connecticut team developing a nanocomposite material for explosives detection had pivoted not once but twice—from a landmine-detector product to an airport security product, then back to landmines. “The most important thing we learned from I-Corps is how important getting out of the building is,” principal investigator Yu Lei said.

It was no accident that that phrase—”getting out of the building”—came up in every presentation I saw. It’s practically been trademarked by Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur famous around Silicon Valley for his “customer development” methodology, which says that the highest priority for any startup is to gather feedback from potential customers and continually refine its product or its target market or both until it finds a fit. NSF officials tapped Blank to lead the I-Corps program after watching him teach customer development to students in his “Lean LaunchPad” course at Stanford.

The teams chosen for the I-Corps program—each of which consisted of at least one principal investigator with a history of NSF grant-getting, one younger “entrepreneurial lead” (typically a graduate student or postdoc), and one business mentor—first came to Stanford in October for a few days of startup bootcamp. They were then sent home with instructions to get out, talk to customers, and, if necessary, throw out their original business models and start over. Last week’s session was both an opportunity to share what they’d learned and an audition for Phase II of the program, in which a few of the teams will be selected for NSF grants to help them continue their commercialization efforts.

How well did the teams adapt to customer-development thinking? “I think they hit it out of the park,” Blank told me at the review session.

The evidence was in the before-and-after “business model canvases” that each team shared during their presentations. An invention of strategy consultant Alexander Osterwalder, a business model canvas is a template that helps fledgling startup teams envision who their most natural customers are, how they’ll deliver value to those customers, and how they’ll manage costs, revenues, and partnerships. With help from mentors, and with feedback from the more than 2,000 prospective customers they interviewed during the eight-week program, the I-Corps teams redrew their canvases … Next Page »

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When last we checked in with Gordon Jones, it was six months ago and he had just been appointed the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab. It was May, the birds were singing, the Red Sox had pulled out of their season-starting slump, and anything seemed possible.

Now the cold, dark days are upon us, and we need a place to rejuvenate our spirits as we gear up for the holiday season. Students and young entrepreneurs especially need such a place. The Harvard i-lab, as it is called, might be that place—a $20 million center whose mission is to support all Harvard students interested in entrepreneurship. And it is officially open for business as of today, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, school administrators, and politicians.

The important news is that the i-lab is real, and it marks a serious and ambitious effort to foster entrepreneurship on a grand scale. The unstated goal is to keep the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg from leaving town (and Harvard) and building a multibillion-dollar company somewhere else. Will it work? Who knows, but you have to start somewhere.

Back in May, Jones talked with me about just trying to get his baby to first grade—the idea being, walk before you run. He has been heads-down since then, but I recently caught up with him about the i-lab’s opening, and the progress and challenges to date. (And yes, he hosted Zuckerberg’s recent visit to the lab.)

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far,” Jones says. “It’s genuine, the interest here, and the level of engagement across the Harvard schools is strong.” He says that the overall support from the university and the enthusiasm from the academic and business communities “exceeds what I expected.”

Jones adds, “When we first talked six months ago, there was this question of, ‘Is Harvard late to the game?’ I think this is a great time to be doing what Harvard is doing.” And that is, in his words, “trying to bring the best of Harvard’s knowledge and network and make it available to students. And being part of the Boston innovation community.”

Here are my takeaways going into the first day of school at the i-lab:

1. Jones isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he has an extremely challenging job. (You try being accountable to seven different deans across Harvard, for starters.) The fact that he’s still alive and kicking—not to mention attending lots of entrepreneurship events and getting to know students and the local business community at every turn—bodes well for the lab’s future. “You’ve got to pick your battles,” he says.

2. The lab is already active. It officially opens today, but stuff has been happening there for months already: a “startup weekend scramble,” guest speakers (the series includes Eric Ries, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Taylor), Harvard courses on entrepreneurship and global innovation, special panels, startup workshops (Alex Taussig led one about mistakes entrepreneurs make; Eric Paley did one on career choices), and one-on-one consultations with “experts in residence” and “innovation partners” … Next Page »

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Tech entrepreneurs are pushing pretty hard these days to improve education, from the Khan Academy to Codecademy to Altius Education to education-focused Startup Weekend events. And, of course, there’s the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made education its primary domestic policy initiative—something Bill Gates discussed in his recent wide-ranging lecture and Q&A session at the University of Washington.

Washington state’s two-year colleges are putting some of those ideas into practice with the roll-out of a new digital system called the Open Course Library. The coursework was developed with instructors to give students a low-cost alternative to expensive textbooks for the most common introductory courses, and is available to other schools on a Creative Commons license. The state legislature kicked in $1.2 million for the project a few years ago, and that was supplemented with a $750,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.

Eventually, the project plans cover the course materials for 81 classes. The courses themselves are all put together slightly differently—here’s an example chapter from a free introduction to calculus text, for example. Others are offered as downloadable e-books and tools from traditional publishers or other providers, but the price per text is capped at $30. Other courses link to wiki-based data from other colleges, or even Khan Academy videos to supplement the coursework.

The websites for the open-source coursework aren’t exactly state of the art, but the heart of the idea is certainly there. State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat and wireless industry veteran who spurred the project along, says K-12 textbooks may be next on the target list for an open-source, lower-cost makeover.

With the amount of education spending that’s been chopped by the state legislature in recent years, finding an innovative way to save money is probably welcome all around. Well, except in the offices of textbook publishers.

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These are hard times at universities in America. State support is dwindling, tuition is booming, and federal research dollars are in jeopardy. Morale has taken a beating.

But U.S. academic research centers are still the driving force for innovative new medicines, like always. And anyone who cares about U.S. universities should pay attention to what’s happening at UC San Francisco under the leadership of chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann.

Desmond-Hellmann, a biotech industry star from her days running drug development at Genentech, has her work cut out in her third year as UCSF’s chancellor. Like any executive arriving on campus, she’s had to learn a lot in a hurry. UCSF is a complex, 23,000-employee enterprise that does everything from studying the basic functions of stem cells to helping discover new drugs to treating patients. Starting in August 2009, she’s had the unpleasant job of overseeing furloughs, layoffs, and multi-million-dollar budget cuts. She’s said no, repeatedly, to promising new scientific initiatives.

But she hasn’t been stuck on the defensive the entire time. UCSF has struck a number of creative partnerships with companies like Pfizer, Sanofi, and Bayer, which are being closely followed at other universities. UCSF has also found a way, with the help of some big-time philanthropy, to break ground on two ambitious projects—a $1.5 billion hospital complex and a $200 million neurosciences research facility in the Mission Bay district. There in the same neighborhood, the university has also continued to support QB3, an incubator where academic scientists are starting companies that test whether their ideas just might have what it takes to become new drugs, devices, or diagnostics.

The Mission Bay cluster has been growing for years, and Desmond-Hellmann plans to describe her vision for what it can accomplish at noon Pacific time tomorrow in her “State of the University” address. I spoke with her about some of these themes in a wide-ranging interview at her office in UCSF’s Parnassus Heights a little more than a week ago. True to her disciplined business training, Desmond-Hellmann plans to outline a 3-year plan with measurable goals that she says will make her and her team clearly accountable for delivering what they promise. If all goes according to plan, she says UCSF will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2014 with a greater capability to advance health than it has today.

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, at her office

“I’m sticking my neck out there and saying the world is changing very quickly, and yet our aspiration at UCSF is to be a world leader in health science innovation,” Desmond-Hellman says. “If that’s our aspiration, what are we going to do to that end? At a terrible time, with a rotten California economy, a rotten national economy, a rotten state of the world, people will see there was a medical center, an academic center in California, that positioned itself to have its best days.”

To see how far UCSF can go in this mission to deliver better healthcare to people, Desmond-Hellmann and her team have been challenging a lot of basic assumptions about how things get done. The university has already been pushed to operate more efficiently wherever it can, like, say, sharing one shiny new gene sequencing machine instead of buying two. But trimming around the edges and wringing out efficiency gains will only go so far.

As Desmond-Hellmann puts it:

“When you look at times of enormous stress in the system, that’s a great opportunity for people to look at fundamental things like whether we have the right curriculum for students learning how to become professionals in life sciences. What about graduate training? Is it OK that the average age for a first [basic NIH grant] is 42 years old? If it’s not OK, what is UCSF doing to address it? How much does it cost to be taken care of in our medical center? Who cares for people? How do we track what happens to patients? How are we doing in terms of safety and quality? What is UCSF really doing to say ‘here’s how life should be better.’”

Working in collaboration with pharma companies is definitely … Next Page »

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Between the FutureM conference, Web Innovators Group, Mobile Monday, the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame, and the MIT tech festival t=0, there wasn’t a lot of time for Boston techies to breathe last week.

To keep you up to date, here are some high-level takeaways from FutureM, the sprawling MITX event that was really 50-plus separate events, focused on the future of marketing—and with a lot of Boston-area companies represented. This is just a small sample of what I saw and heard from a few panels and gatherings:

1. Ad tech sucks. For consumers, that is. Lots of startups and big companies are trying to make it suck less. That was the message from Sim Simeonov, the entrepreneur and angel investor behind Shopximity, a young Boston-area startup that’s trying to improve consumers’ shopping experience using display ads.

2. The frontiers of mobile marketing are automation, engagement, and transparency. Automating the marketing process is key in a world of near-unlimited Web content and cheap ad prices. So is getting (and keeping) people’s attention. “The trend we’re going to see is around making it more clear why [a consumer] would want to explore an ad,” said Lars Albright, a veteran of m-Qube, Quattro Wireless, and Apple. (His new startup is called Session M.) It remains to be seen whether a billion-dollar business can emerge from this sector, however. Albright would bet on Apple’s iAd network reaching $1B, while Paul McNulty of IBM’s enterprise marketing division (he’s from Unica) said, “I don’t know if [a marketing automation company] is the horse I’d bet on as the next EMC.” (I took that to mean because there are lots of different companies with complementary strengths, it’s hard to imagine one big category winner.)

3. “California is a one-night stand, while Massachusetts is a long-term relationship.” That was Senator Karen Spilka (D-Mass.) summarizing the views of a panel of entrepreneurs and investors on building companies in the Bay State versus Silicon Valley. “We’re still number one in education,” she said. “And number two in [venture capital] as a small state is pretty good.” (Alas, non-compete laws are also part of the long-term relationship here. Interestingly, Brian Shin of Visible Measures noted that his thinking on non-competes has changed, presumably from positive to negative: it sounds like he originally thought they would be helpful in retaining a core group of top employees in the state.)

4. Diversity in tech is a challenge and an opportunity. Investor Eric Paley of Founder Collective noted that young entrepreneurs in New York and Silicon Valley “can rattle off names of success stories.” Whereas in Boston, people don’t hear much about companies like EnerNOC, Acme Packet, EqualLogic, and Unica, “because we’re so distributed” across different sectors, he said. “It’s the diversity and the modesty.” Case in point: On the panel, Paley asked Brian Shin if he knew of Unica, the marketing tech firm that would be bought by IBM for $480 million last year, back when Shin was starting Visible Measures in 2005. “I didn’t know any company,” Shin said. On the other hand, he said that “because there is diversity, you can find [a mentor] who’s done something big in almost anything you want to do.”

5. Connecting students with startups, perhaps with VC or government support, is key to the state’s tech future. It’s a well-known issue: top kids go to school in Boston and then leave for the West Coast or New York to join hot startups, or they become business consultants. “We should be insanely aggressive about internships,” Paley said, for undergrads, grad students, and MBAs alike. That means championing broad efforts to get young people who are interested in entrepreneurship (there seem to be more and more lately) to work at local companies for the summer. That echoes something Jon Pierce told me a few months ago: “Working at a startup is the best education you can have as an entrepreneur.”

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Boston-based PeerTransfer, a developer of technology for more cheaply and efficiently processing college tuition payments from international students, has inked a deal itself. The startup announced today that it has completed a $7.5 million Series A financing, led by Spark Capital, and which included Accel Partners, Maveron, and Boston Seed Capital.

The new cash will go toward hiring new people and building up more company infrastructure to support growth as PeerTransfer expands the number of schools it works with.The company’s service is offered free of charge to colleges and universities and can save students upwards of $1,000 per year, by collecting their home currency, bundling purchases of U.S. dollars in the market, and then spreading the savings reaped from these wholesale exchanges back to the students. It also results in faster, more accurate processing of tuition payments for universities. PeerTransfer already works with about 30 schools, including Suffolk University, Wellesley College, Reed College, and Auburn University.

PeerTransfer nabbed $1.1 million in seed financing last October from Spark, Project 11 Ventures, and a crop of angel investors that included John Landry, Ken Morse, Roy Rodenstein, and Dave McClure.

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Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development has what it calls an “Accelerator Fund” that has been chugging along for four years now, and it has achieved some notable results. As of last month, the $10 million fund has given out $5.2 million in grants, which have supported more than 30 projects over five annual cycles. It’s still early to add up the returns on this investment, but already it has led to more than $10 million in partnership money for the university, and several startups that have received outside venture funding. (The Harvard office declined to give specifics on licensing revenues to date.)

What’s more, the model apparently has proven successful enough that the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund, in the $20 million to $30 million range. And unlike in the past, when Harvard developed a laggardly reputation when it came to commercializing its research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model for technology transfer and startup development practices.

The Accelerator Fund, which Xconomy wrote about in early 2008, was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting new companies, primarily in life sciences and biomedical fields. As technology development head and senior associate provost Isaac Kohlberg puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.” The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development,” he says.

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s tech transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined … Next Page »

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Incubator madness has reached all the way to Washington, D.C. The National Science Foundation announced today that with the help of private-sector partners, it plans to put at least $5 million per year into a new program, the Innovation Corps or I-Corps, aimed at helping university scientists and engineers build startups around their technologies. The centerpiece of the program: a $50,000 cash award for 25 teams each quarter, plus a nine-week crash course in tech entrepreneurship modeled on the “Lean LaunchPad” course taught at Stanford University this spring by author and retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank.

“Essentially, this is Y Combinator with a curriculum tailored for the best scientists and researchers this country has to offer,” Blank told me this morning, referring to the Mountain View, CA-based program that is arguably the country’s largest and most prestigious venture incubator. “The goal is, at the end, to have a Demo Day and see if these guys have learned anything, and if they are fundable.”

But on a higher level, the hope is to find way to help NSF-backed researchers with potentially commercial concepts get those ideas out into the marketplace, where they could become the engines for future job growth. “I-Corps will help strengthen a national innovation ecosystem that firmly unites industry with scientific discoveries for the benefit of society,” NSF director Subra Suresh said in a statement announcing the program today.

“I think lots of people—not just the current administration, not just one side of the aisle or the other—have concluded that in the 21st century, job creation is not going to come from existing industries,” Blank says. “We are going to have to create new industries, and the job creation is going to come from innovation and entrepreneurship.”

According to NSF’s announcement today, I-Corps is a public-private partnership with the NSF itself, the Deshpande Foundation, and the Kauffman Foundation as founding members. The program is accepting proposals starting today, and will name its first batch of 25 awardees on September 30. Teams must consist of at least one principal investigator—usually a university faculty member—to act as technical lead and project manager, and at least one postdoctoral researcher or graduate student to act as the “entrepreneurial lead.”

But the I-Corps program isn’t open to just anyone—the PI on each team must already have received at least one NSF grant in the last five years. And unlike most NSF grants, the I-Corps awards come with a big string attached: awardees are required to … Next Page »

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Highland Capital Partners has announced the 10 college startup teams participating in its 10-week Summer@Highland mentorship program in Cambridge, MA, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The venture firm provides coaching, networking, office space, and a $15,000 stipend; the teams don’t give up any equity stake and are under no obligation to Highland afterwards, the firm says. The teams based in Cambridge are: additup (Boston College), ByteLight (Boston University), Tivli (Harvard University and University of Michigan), and Type-U (Babson College). The Bay Area teams are: 27Bards (Stanford University), Adpop (Stanford), Clinkle (Stanford), Imprint Energy (UC Berkeley), Lemonwi.se (University of Pennsylvania), and Waddle (Northwestern University).

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It’s an idea people love the instant they hear it: movies stars have their Walk of Fame out in Hollywood, so entrepreneurs should have one, too—and what better place than right here in Kendall Square, the most fertile, concentrated ground for entrepreneurship in the world?

Last August, Xconomy was first to report on the idea for an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame—the brainchild of Xconomist Bill Aulet, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Now, almost a year later, I am pleased to report, the Walk has moved beyond the talking stage, it is walking the walk, so to speak. The idea has advanced in the Cambridge, MA, City Council, attracted at least one founding sponsor, nomination and selection committees have been formed—yours truly is an official curator, charged with nominating candidates for the Walk—and a launch date of September 16 has been targeted.

“The time has definitely come,” says Aulet. “The idea just resonates. Getting from idea to execution is always a challenge, but the idea has been so good that people have been lining up at all levels.” He says the first entrepreneurs selected would be given tiles in the plaza outside the Cambridge Marriott hotel, in the heart of Kendall Square.

There are still several moving parts to this, details being worked out (dare I say, nothing has been set in stone?)—including the definition of what, exactly, qualifies someone for the Walk, and how many inductees will be named this first year. But here are the key elements that appear to have been decided on so far:

—Each entrepreneur would get a tile, emblazoned with their name and a star. Aulet was vague about how big the tiles would be, whether the tiles would include a picture of inductees and what else would be listed—such as their company name, year it was founded, etc. One idea being considered, though, is that a QR code would be embedded in each tile, so that anyone with a smartphone camera and a reader app might be able to take a picture and have it open a web page with, say, the bio of the entrepreneur, videos of them in action, and other features. The design firm IDEO is working on the tile design now.

—The number of first-year inductees has not been set. But it could be as few as five.

—Aulet says 25 or so people have been named as curators, charged with nominating candidates for the Walk. I don’t have all their names, but here are some from the Boston area: Paul Maeder, general partner and co-founder at Highland Capital Partners; Joi Ito, the newly named director of the MIT Media Lab; Leon Sandler, executive director of the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT; John Harthorne, co-founder and CEO of MassChallenge, and Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group.

—The selection committee, which will make final decisions about those who have been nominated, to date consists of seven people: Aulet; Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks and chairman of A123Systems; Forester Research founder and CEO George Colony; Yankee Group chairman and former CEO Emily Green; Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; … Next Page »

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With a hot market for their skills and employers who offer top-notch salaries and benefits, should computer science students pay more for their bachelor’s degree than theater or history majors? In Washington state, the answer could soon be yes.

Historically, undergraduates in this state have paid flat tuition rates based on the number of credits they’re earning. For example, a Washington resident taking a full-time load of classes would pay $8,122 in tuition this year at the University of Washington, no matter which bachelor’s degree they’re pursuing.

Those flat rates were set under previous state law, which gave the Legislature the exclusive power to set tuition for in-state undergrads. But a new law approved this week by Gov. Chris Gregoire gives universities broad power to set tuition rates on their own for all students—opening the door for varying undergraduate tuition rates.

“I don’t expect the institutions to jump whole-hog into this model the first year. It will take a little bit of thought and study and reflection,” says state Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat who was the main sponsor of the tuition flexibility law. But he also says the old flat-rate model is “just wildly economically inefficient,” and doesn’t give policy-makers a good idea of what it will cost to improve education in particular disciplines.

“It’s extremely difficult from an efficiency point of view for us in Olympia to figure out how an institution should cross-subsidize programs,” Carlyle says. “One-size-fits-all, top-down, Olympia-centric is just not good policy anymore.”

With flat tuition rates, the less-expensive students are effectively subsidizing the education of their peers in more expensive fields. An English major, for instance, pays the same as a student studying engineering, chemistry, or computer science, which are much more expensive to teach because of higher faculty salaries, special equipment, and other costs.

Freshmen are also generally cheaper to educate than seniors, since the younger students take survey courses packed with other students, while the older ones are in smaller groups with more specialized subjects. It’s also assumed that the cost will be less of a burden for students entering higher-paid professions. Those factors already help drive the variability in tuition rates for graduate degrees in Washington.

While some university leaders have publicly discussed the issue, it doesn’t appear that any school is poised to imminently move to a “differential tuition” model for undergrads. Washington State University, for example, just announced that it was increasing next year’s resident undergradate tuition by a flat rate of 16 percent—the baseline rate assumed in the state budget.

But faced with back-to-back state budgets that were hammered by the Great Recession, it may be an attractive option to help sustain the highest-cost and highest-demand majors in the years ahead. The boards of Western Washington University and the UW are set to consider their new tuition rates later this week, although UW officials aren’t expected to make a decision until the end of June.

If Washington schools do eventually make the leap to differential tuition rates for undergrads, they would have plenty of company: One widely cited study found that more than half of U.S. public … Next Page »

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Commencement season is coming to a close, which means a lot of students and recent graduates are leaving town. That might be a good thing if you’re trying to get a seat at Crema Café near Harvard or Flour Bakery near MIT, but it ain’t good for local startups.

The brain drain of Boston-area tech grads leaving for the West Coast is well-worn territory. Talented developers, fresh out of school, are taking high-paying jobs with big companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Groupon, none of which are headquartered in Boston. Ambitious young entrepreneurs move to Silicon Valley to seek their fortunes—and are sometimes encouraged by their faculty mentors to do so. How can the local innovation community turn things around?

Cultivating local talent is, in fact, one of the main topics being covered at today’s “Building a Better Commonwealth” forum, organized by the Boston Globe.

A trio of leaders I’ve spoken with recently have also added their perspectives to the conversation. Each of them is tackling the startup brain-drain issue from a different angle. Yet they all agree local universities are the place to start, as the quality (and sheer number) of schools represents a competitive advantage for the Boston area over other parts of the country.

Jon Pierce is an unassuming guy who is trying to lead a grass-roots revolution—in angel investing. The techie/hacker/entrepreneur is organizing the second annual “Angel Bootcamp” in Cambridge next Tuesday, June 14. The goal is to get angel investors excited about pouring their hard-earned dollars back into the local startup community. Yet Pierce recognizes that the talent and idea spring lies further upstream, especially in the fields of consumer Web and mobile technologies.

Pierce says universities “are our best chance of improving things quickly.” That means finding new ways to harness the entrepreneurial talents of students and faculty; building stronger ties between schools and local tech companies; and encouraging students to do internships (and seek jobs) at Boston-area startups. “Working at a startup is the best education you can have as an entrepreneur,” he says.

Of course, all these things are already happening at local schools. But Gordon Jones, the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, slated to open this fall, represents a new effort to ratchet up the intensity of collaborations on campus. It may be unspoken, but the big idea behind the i-lab is to keep the next Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Bill Gates (Microsoft), or Tony Hsieh (Zappos) from leaving town.

“The promise is to be a home for entrepreneurs at Harvard,” Jones told me last month.

Which brings us to perhaps the most ambitious talent-building and entrepreneurship program in Boston today. MassChallenge, a nonprofit incubator in its second year, aims to run “the world’s largest startup competition” and prove that in Massachusetts, “you can make a startup machine that just produces startups,” says John Harthorne, who leads MassChallenge as CEO. (The program recently announced its 125 finalist companies, which have entered a summer mentorship program and will compete for substantial cash prizes in the fall.)

I asked Harthorne about the role of local colleges in fostering transformative new business ideas—and keeping them local, instead of encouraging them to skip town. “Universities are clearly the foundation of innovation for Massachusetts,” he says. In part through MassChallenge’s progress in attracting attention and resources, he says, “We’ve raised Boston and Massachusetts in the ranks of options. We’re in the top three [of places to recommend building a company] across all the professors and schools. It gives us an at-bat. We’ve demonstrated an incredibly collaborative environment.”

Harthorne was talking mostly about the MassChallenge program, but his comments might just as well apply to Boston’s broader ecosystem, especially for those coming out of school: “We’ve never been this well-positioned,” he says. “All the lights are green.”

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You might call it the perfect up-and-coming Boston tech startup. A mix of higher education, financial services, and a global market. The brainchild of an MIT student entrepreneur. A company with the support of a young, well-connected Boston venture capitalist and many notable angel investors.

I’m talking about Cambridge, MA-based peerTransfer, which has 17 employees split about half-and-half between Dogpatch Labs in Kendall Square and an office in Valencia, Spain. Founder and CEO Iker Marcaide, 28, started the company in part to address some personal pain he experienced as an international student. It all started when he had to pay his MIT tuition from a European bank, and got stuck with high transaction fees and a bad exchange rate that cost him thousands of dollars.

Inspired by that experience, his startup has zeroed in on its target market—helping international students make online payments to U.S. colleges through peerTransfer’s website. The company’s software plug-in is now being used by schools such as Suffolk University, Wellesley College, Reed College, Bryn Mawr College, and the College of Wooster. (PeerTransfer is demoing its technology at the Finovate conference in San Francisco this week.)

The first time I spoke with Marcaide was last June, almost a year ago. He was only a few hours removed from a late-night beach party in Barcelona, where peerTransfer had just won a 20,000-Euro prize at the HIT Global Entrepreneurship Competition. Marcaide, a native of Spain and the son of an astrophysicist, is an engineer by schooling who worked as a management consultant before getting his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Last fall, peerTransfer raised a $1.1 million seed financing round from Spark Capital, Project 11 Ventures, and angel investors including John Landry, Ken Morse, Roy Rodenstein, and Dave McClure. Spark Capital’s Alex Finkelstein, a general partner, led his firm’s investment in the startup. He recently told me about the first time he met Marcaide.

It was at a warm-up event for the MIT $100K Business Plan Contest, last spring. Finkelstein was there for a series of short meetings with entrepreneurs, and Marcaide wasn’t even on his schedule. But the young Spaniard (who comes across as quite friendly without being pushy) came in and started talking to the VC about his startup. The two hit it off, and Marcaide followed up with a phone call a few months later, after peerTransfer had hit some more milestones.

“We met on a Thursday and had a signed term sheet on Tuesday,” Finkelstein recalls.

What stands out to Finkelstein is that peerTransfer is trying to solve a problem that is “painful for the student and painful for the school,” he says. Marcaide says his service can save students on the order of $1,000 a year or more, and saves schools the time and hassle of dealing with unidentified wire payments and manual posting into student accounts. PeerTransfer says it saves students money by collecting their home currency, bundling purchases of U.S. dollars in the market, and then … Next Page »

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Quick, which Boston- and San Francisco-area venture firm has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the burgeoning—and controversial—market of intellectual property and patent protection over the past five years?

If you said Charles River Ventures, you are correct. In fact, CRV is the only big venture investor behind Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm known for its unique (and often criticized) approach to the business of invention. Charles River says that, together with its limited partners, it has poured some $300 million into the company since 2006.

That’s an astounding figure, and it shows that Charles River is betting on intellectual property in a huge way—perhaps more so than anything else in its portfolio. Besides Intellectual Ventures, the VC firm is also invested in RPX, a San Francisco-based defensive patent aggregation firm, which filed for an IPO in January and plans to go public today—more on that coming in a separate story. (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures are also investors in RPX, which was co-founded by two former employees of Intellectual Ventures.) Yet most venture firms still treat the field of intellectual property as a bit of a scourge—or, at best, a fringe area—even though it has great ramifications for VCs and their startups. So why did CRV decide to take the plunge?

The story goes back to 2001, the year after Intellectual Ventures was formed, when Nathan Myhrvold, the company’s polymath, founder, and CEO (and Microsoft’s former chief technology officer), came to Boston and met with Izhar Armony, a partner at Charles River Ventures. After some intensive Myhrvold-speak—for example, “invention is the essence of innovation”—he drilled down to his main point. Venture firms, Myhrvold argued, spend almost all their money on things that are essentially commodities—engineers, business people, infrastructure for startups—but what’s actually unique, and arguably most valuable, is invention.

Many would disagree—people and execution are pretty essential to businesses, after all—but the seed was planted. “Nathan helped open my eyes to the notion that IP [intellectual property] is a very important market—it’s actually a very big market in tech,” Armony says. He adds that there’s a $50 billion-plus market in IP rights and licensing, versus a $6 billion litigation market based on legal fees.

So in 2003 he led CRV’s investment in Intellectual Ventures’ “invention science fund,” which aimed to create new inventions across a wide range of fields, in part by bringing together renowned scientists and inventors and brainstorming ideas in a structured way. Such “invention sessions” have led to major projects and spinouts such as TerraPower, the Bellevue, WA-based nuclear-reactor firm (in which CRV also became an investor). In total, CRV committed $39 million to the invention science fund, co-investing with the likes of Bill Gates and Microsoft.

But the really big business opportunity came along in 2006, when CRV and its limited partners decided to commit an additional $300 million—I’ll say it again, $300 million—to Intellectual Ventures’ … Next Page »

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This morning I headed down to Palo Alto with iPad 2 in hand to check in with students and speakers at the Stanford BASES BT National Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. For this event, more than a hundred student delegates from campuses around the country gathered at Stanford for an intensive weekend of workshops and talks given by leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and and investors; the speaker lineup included such stars as Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, TiVo co-founder Jim Barton, and Twitter director of corporate strategy Elad Gil. On top of all that, students honed their own entrepreneurial ideas in a business plan competition.

I spent a couple of hours talking with student organizers and delegates at the event and listening to a keynote talk by Marissa Mayer, vice president of location and local services at Google. The video below includes interviews with six student teams, as well as an outtake from Mayer’s talk. (I shot and edited the whole thing on the iPad 2 using iMovie.)

I was extremely impressed by the poise, enthusiasm, and sophistication of the student-entrepreneurs, and I’d definitely want to use many of the products and services they’re proposing. BASES, by the way, is the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. It co-organized the event with Business Today, a student-run business publication at Princeton University. It’s the third time the two groups have mounted the bootcamp. Sequoia Capital and a number of other local sponsors picked up the check for the delegates’ travel expenses.

The students featured in the video are Ruby Lee, a sophomore at Stanford and director of BASES; Elizabeth Wessel, a student the University of Pennsylvania, whose entry in the competition was called My Virtual Dressing Room; Nikola Otasevic from MIT, working on a project called Prigli; Margaret-Ann Seger from Olin College, working on Spot; Lynn Wang from Yale University, working on GoodDollar; and John Horn and Wenny Ng of Stanford, working on EcoTrump. You’ll also see Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mark Dempster, marketing partner at Sequioa Capital.

[Update, Monday, April 11, 8:00 am] According to BASES organizer Ruby Lee, the finalists in the E-Bootcamp business plan competition on Sunday were Bookxor, Crowdstory, Didactica, Nuevo, PrintEco, SakDent, Spot, Surveylicious, and University Flex Force. The top three finishers were SakDent, Spot, and Surveylicious.

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Besides snow and rain (and other April Fool’s jokes), ‘tis the season for business plan competitions around Boston. You might know all about MIT’s $100K contest and Harvard Business School’s equivalent, but there’s a lot more going on out there—and a lot of talented young people vying for a taste of entrepreneurial success.

Here’s a quick sampling of five university-based contests going on around town, and their finalists (certainly not a comprehensive list):

—Tufts University is running its seventh annual $100K business plan competition. The final pitches are happening next week, April 6. Here are the five finalists in the social entrepreneurship bracket: Educate Lanka (student scholarships, Manjula Dissanayake), Give 2App (smartphone apps for nonprofits, Artem Efremkin and Shabazz Stuart), Kabuk (earthquake kits, Mustafa Tuzcu), Saathi (sanitary pads, Nithyaa Venkataramani), and Sanergy (green toilets, Gaurav Tiwari).

And the six finalists in the classic competition: InstaCard (cash in gift cards, Warren Davis), Rentcycle (local business rentals, Kevin Halter and Sean Zinsmeister), Roof For Two (motorcycle accessories, Andrew Altman), RxCap (smart pill containers, Nathan Scott), Salary View (college career services, Kenny Berlin), and Saves on a Plane (airfare deals, Ade Baptista).

—Babson College, which says it founded the first college business plan competition in 1984, is in the midst of its $100K+ undergraduate and graduate business plan competitions. The final round takes place on April 14. Here’s a rundown of the three graduate finalists: Atiken Renewables (agricultural waste to energy), Golden Health Guide (online reviews of home medical products), and SkyCrepers (fast-serve crepe franchise).

And the three undergrad finalists: Down to Earth Waste Solutions (small-business waste collection and composting), Nodes (online collaboration and group social networking), and Redeemr (business intelligence and customer retention for small to businesses).

—Boston University’s $50K “new venture competition” is down to its final four, just like March Madness. The BU finals are next week, April 6. Here are the four finalists: ACCEasy (accounting software for Russian businesses, Katsiaryna Akhlopkava), Handlebikes (better bicycles, Fredrik Fjellsaa), Nyumba (pneumonia diagnostics by cellphone, Andrea Fernandes), and RayVio (efficient ultraviolet LEDs, Yitao Liao).

—The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition’s $100K business plan contest is well underway. The semi-finalist teams (five teams in five tracks, plus wild cards) are currently in their mentorship program hurtling towards the finish line on May 11. You can see a full list of the semi-finalists, which were announced in early March, here. A few that caught my eye, mostly because they have interesting names: SaferTaxi (mobile track; cab rating and registration system), iHelmet (products and services; no idea what they do), Boss (life sciences; bone graft tool), Waste to Watts (emerging markets; sounds self-explanatory for power generation), and All Cows Eat Grass (music lessons) and VisualizeMe (social graph), both in the Web/IT track.

—Lastly, Harvard Business School’s business plan contest is just getting started. Business plan entries are due next week, April 7; there’s a “business venture” track and a “social venture” track. The whole competition is done by the evening of April 26.

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If your name is Borya Shakhnovich, people tend to make assumptions about you. One, they don’t want to play you in competitive chess. Two, they wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you introduced yourself by saying something like, “I am scientist.”

OK, I’m stereotyping here (a real time-saver, I know), but at least one of those assumptions has some basis in fact. Shakhnovich is the founder and CEO of Brookline, MA-based iAMscientist, a global community and resource site for researchers and institutions in science, technology, and medicine. He has raised $1 million in seed financing from angel investors including George Whitesides, the famed Harvard University chemist and co-founder of more than a dozen companies including Genzyme (which was acquired last week by Sanofi-Aventis for some $20 billion).

What iAMscientist does is give researchers and institutions some interesting new tools to connect with each other. The idea is to create an online community and directory of top-tier people so that research teams, companies, and other organizations can find the right person to answer a difficult question, decipher a new paper, or lead a research project. All of this is especially important for interdisciplinary ventures—like when biologists team up with physicists, computer scientists, or electrical engineers to model things like genetic pathways or disease mechanisms, and then someone wants to commercialize the findings.

“We provide an organization with the ability to find that one person who is the foremost expert in an obscure area—our value is in that matching mechanism,” Shakhnovich says. Some of the most valuable knowledge and experience that researchers have “isn’t really in their papers, it’s in their heads,” he says. “You want to get in touch with them and maintain a relationship.”

Academic social networks are not new, of course. Services like Academia.edu, Epernicus (Boston-based), Labmeeting (founded by a Harvard grad), Nature Network, Pronetos, ResearchGate (which started in Boston but recently moved to Germany), and, to some extent, LinkedIn, all help … Next Page »

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Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
—Attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and B.F. Skinner

There are 4633 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. This weekend I had dinner with one of them—a friend who’s now the president of Philadelphia University. He’s working hard to reinvent the school into a model for 21st century professional education.

The Silo Career Track

One of the problems in business today is that college graduates trained in a single professional discipline (i.e. design, engineering or business) end up graduating as domain experts but with little experience working across multiple disciplines.

In the business world of the of the 20th century it was assumed that upon graduation students would get jobs and focus the first years of their professional careers working on specific tasks related to their college degree specialty. It wasn’t until the middle of their careers that they find themselves having to work across disciplines (engineers, working with designers and product managers and vice versa) to collaborate and manage multiple groups outside their trained expertise.

This type of education made sense in design, engineering and business professions when graduates could be assured that the businesses they were joining offered stable careers that gave them a decade to get cross discipline expertise.

20th Century Professional Education

Today, college graduates with a traditional 20th century College and University curriculum start with a broad foundation but very quickly narrow into a set of specific electives focused on a narrow domain expertise.

Interdisciplinary and collaborative courses are offered as electives but don’t really close the gaps between design, engineering and business.

Interdisciplinary Education in a Volatile, Complex, and Ambiguous World

The business world is now a different place. Graduating students today are entering a world with little certainty or security. Many will get jobs that did not exist when they started college. Many more will find their jobs obsolete or shipped overseas by the middle of their career.

This means that students need skills that allow them to be agile, resilient, and cross functional. They need to view their careers knowing that new fields may emerge and others might disappear. Today most college curriculum are simply unaligned with modern business needs.

Over a decade ago many research universities and colleges recognized this problem and embarked on interdisciplinary education to break down the traditional barriers between … Next Page »

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Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures and Boston-based Spark Capital are the lead investors in an $18.6 million Series B venture financing round announced today by San Francisco-based online education provider Altius Education. The company’s premier project is Ivy Bridge College, a collaboration with Tiffin, OH-based Tiffin University. Spark and Seattle-based Maveron coinvested in Altius’s $8 million Series A round in September 2009.

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