Yesterday, I participated in a very exciting event that culminated with the announcement by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick of an important funding program—a $1 million annual business plan competition called MassChallenge.

The essence of this announcement is to match the next generation of young aspiring entrepreneurs with numerous sources of capital, most likely local venture capitalists. The Governor has committed the State to match dollars committed by private sector investors to the top entrepreneurs who survive the MassChallenge screening process.

During the course of the events yesterday, my good friend Andy Ory (CEO of Acme Packet) and I moderated a panel stocked with local success stories: Desh Deshpande, Paul Sagan of Akamai, Bob Hower of Advanced Technology Ventures, Scott Savitz of Shoebuy.com, and Brian Shin of VisibleMeasures. We explored what was and was not working in the region as we try to build great venture-backed companies.

One consistent theme that the panel identified was the lack of broad-based mentorship to help this next generation of great entrepreneurs get started. So here is the commitment that Andy and I made to the audience: we will recruit 12 great successful CEOs to work with 12 VCs to mentor 12 promising young entrepreneurs to launch 12 new companies over the next 12 months. (Admittedly, I stated to the audience that it would be 20 companies in the first year, but upon reflection the alliteration of “12″ worked much better).

Office Hours: So what I will pursue over the next few months with Andy Ory is to see if we can establish “office hours”—that is, can we get a dozen successful CEOs in town to commit to open up their calendars and Rolodexes to a dozen promising entrepreneurs. Ideally these CEOs would serve as non-executive chairpersons and possibly provide some initial capital, but more importantly, they would provide guidance and advice. VCs get paid to see new opportunities, so it should be reasonably straight forward for me to line up the investors (maybe I will lean on the board of New England Venture Capital Association, which I happen to chair). And working with organizations such as MassChallenge, as well as our own deal flow, we should be able to identify a dozen great opportunities that merit funding.

I will keep you posted on our progress.

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Massachusetts bested many of its rival states in research and development funding and maintaining a healthy supply of college graduates, but the Bay State is falling behind in several key areas of its innovation economy, according to a new index released today by the quasi-public nonprofit Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC).

The annual report, dubbed the 2008 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, compared the commonwealth with nine other U.S. states with leading high technology and life sciences sectors such as California and Minnesota. The John Adams Innovation Institute, the research arm of the MTC, based its scores on 20 innovation indicators with data from 2003 through 2007—so we’ll have to wait until next year to see how the economic meltdown impacted the state in 2008.

The index has the attention of some of the top executives and investors in Massachusetts, setting it apart from many of the national indexes compiled outside the state without local input. In fact, this year’s index includes insights from seven figures well known to many Xconomy readers, including Bob Higgins, founder and general partner of Lexington, MA-based Highland Capital Partners and Henri Termeer, the CEO of biotech heavyweight Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ), headquartered in Cambridge, MA.

I reached venture capitalist Higgins after he finished teaching a class on entrepreneurship in life sciences at Harvard Business School this week. Without talking about specific findings in the innovation index, he shared some of his thoughts about the state’s economy, focusing on the fortunes of individual firms.

“I think the best measure of the health of the innovation economy is the success of companies,” Higgins says. “That is a tough measurement tool in the current environment, but I think it’s the right one. In other words, how many companies have been successfully sold, how many companies have become successful public companies—and how does that compare to other regions.”

Indeed, the index has some data on M&A and initial public offerings. We at Xconomy have already covered some of the most recent reports on those topics—including our story about the IPO drought in Massachusetts and nationally last year—but there were some new findings in the MTC’s index about sector growth and the health of the state’s workforce.

Here are some of the highlights and low marks culled from the MTC’s 62-page report:

—Sales skyrocketed for Massachusetts’ biotech and medical devices firms from $18 billion in 2003 to …Next Page »

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[Updated Feb. 18 with newly confirmed panelist Linden Rhoads of UW TechTransfer:]
Cleantech and renewable energy are rare examples of fast-growing areas of investment and entrepreneurial activity—but the Northwest is behind the curve in these emerging arenas compared to Silicon Valley, New England, and some other parts of the country. The Northwest, however, is developing nearly unrivaled expertise in key areas like the intersection of cleantech and information technology. Whether it’s energy efficiency, green buildings, or smart-grid infrastructure, the tools and technologies coming out of this sector will go a long way toward determining our region’s growth and competitiveness. Xconomy Seattle has recently reported on several efforts to build regional leadership in cleantech, such as a Washington state-appointed task force and a national R&D network.

So what are the most promising areas of commercialization in cleantech and computing, and how big are the opportunities? Are other areas of the energy economy (e.g., biofuels, solar) also poised for growth that the region can take advantage of? What kinds of companies are VCs and investors looking to fund? And what should business and policy leaders in the Northwest do to allocate resources, maximize competitive advantages, and accelerate economic growth?

We will pose these questions, and more, to some of the world’s leading authorities at an upcoming Xconomy Forum on The Rise of Cleantech in the Northwest. This evening panel discussion and networking event will take place from 6 to 8:30 pm on March 26, at the law firm K&L Gates in downtown Seattle. The event is sponsored by Climate Solutions, an environmental nonprofit, and will bring leaders in energy, technology, finance, and policy together with C-level executives, venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, and other leaders in the innovation community.

Now, a bit about our distinguished panelists:

—Michael Butler, chairman and CEO of Seattle-based Cascadia Capital, brings a wealth of experience in cleantech finance and investment banking. Most recently, he spoke with Xconomy about the need for the Northwest to get organized around its strengths in alternative energy and software, and the importance of public- and private-sector partnerships.

—Jesse Berst, managing director of Redmond, WA-based Global Smart Energy, will speak about why the U.S. needs a smart energy grid, what it will take to achieve that goal, and how the Northwest—and the nation—will fare in the emerging “electricity economy.”

—Jeremy Jaech, CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem, will talk about the convergence of energy innovation and information technology in the current economic climate. The co-founder of Aldus and Visio will discuss business opportunities in software-meets-cleantech, as well as the competitive strengths of the Northwest and how they can be maximized.

—Mark Aggar, director of environmental technology strategy at Microsoft, will talk about sustainable computing and the role of big companies in advancing green IT, power management, and environmental policy.

—Linden Rhoads, vice provost, UW TechTransfer, will discuss the role of research, startups, and venture capital in the cleantech revolution. She recently spoke with Xconomy about VCs and tech transfer.

The event will begin with registration at 6 pm, with the panel to follow 30 minutes later, and plenty of time left at the end for networking. You can find details about how to register here. We hope you will join us, and look forward to seeing you there.

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Here are seven key questions and answers about the electricity economy and smart-grid technology.

1. What is “electronomics” and where does it fit in today’s energy world?

One of the best ways to understand the new electric smart grid of the 21st century is by applying electronomics, which helps you analyze the rapidly emerging electricity economy. Electronomics means jobs, progress and prosperity; but it also spells huge financial opportunities and brand new companies and industries that will be created on a vast scale, a scale we haven’t seen in the United States for many decades or more.

Electronomics is also one of the key underpinnings for the stimulus package currently being shaped and fashioned in Washington DC. There are lots of stimulus ideas that create jobs for a year or two and that refurbish aging infrastructure. That’s really important. We need new bridges and roads and highways.

But the smart grid infrastructure that we’re talking about is much more lasting in its impact. It is the development of a new infrastructure that will permit new forms of commerce to take place. It is akin to the transcontinental railroad, the phone system, the interstate highway system and the Internet in the way that it will help enhance new fortunes and spawn new Googles and Microsofts.

Building out this grid will also allow us to remain competitive in a world that is rapidly moving from a petroleum economy to an electricity economy. Right now, we’re falling behind. Many of the most exciting and aggressive smart grid initiatives are coming from overseas. Much of the Middle East is using its oil money to create a state‐of‐the‐art smart grid along with sustainable cities. Europe spends 10x what we do on smart grid research. And China is leading the world in high‐voltage transmission and next‐generation grid efforts. If we want to keep pace, we have to master Electronomics and really dig in here.

2. What is the current state of the U.S. electric infrastructure?

The electric infrastructure in the United States has been called the most complex machine on earth, and with good reason. There are so many moving parts. For starters, the system has 14,000 transmission substations and 4,500 large substations for distribution. And, just as importantly, there are over 3,000 entities—each with a competing agenda—that own a piece of this national electric infrastructure. Actually, it’s not a truly cohesive infrastructure at all. Many countries around the world have one national electric grid. We don’t. Ours is fragmented, to say the least, and this makes it hard to implement technical and political “repairs.”

In addition to being fragmented, our electric infrastructure today is aging, outmoded, underfunded and overstressed. Basically, we’re talking about a 19th century system from the days of Edison and Westinghouse that uses 20th century equipment in an effort to keep up with a 21st century economy. This is the digital age and our electric grid is using electro‐mechanics from the 1960s and 70s rather than microprocessors. Approximately 70 percent of the transformers and transmission lines are 25 years old; and 60 percent of the circuit breakers are 30 or more years old.

We are paying the price for this. Congestion within our current electric infrastructure costs ratepayers $2 billion a year, and commercial ventures are losing more than $100 billion to outages. That’s not all, though. We’re simply not investing in our electric infrastructure. In fact, when it comes to our electric grid, we have an embarrassingly low R&D rate—about 1/20th the average of all U.S. industries.

No wonder that communities with decaying electric infrastructure lose jobs that shift to places with low‐cost, high‐quality power; and no wonder that our country is losing clean‐technology jobs to other nations around the world. The regulators are well intentioned, but they are out of touch. They are still rewarding utilities for installing instantly obsolete equipment, and they are still allowing utilities to sell more power at a time when we need to use less. This is a demand issue—not a supply issue.

The bottom line is that the electric system, as it’s currently configured, is out of sync. Wholesale power transactions jumped more than 300 percent between 2000 and 2005; near misses in terms of outages skyrocketed by 1,000 percent between 1997 and 2002; and there’s no way we can release the pressure by using alternative energy like solar and wind because they require intermittent bursts of power that today’s infrastructure just isn’t capable of providing.

3. What should / could the U.S. electric infrastructure look like if we really focused our energy and resources?

Infrastructure has always been the key to prosperity in the United States—whether it’s been the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, rural electricity, or the telephone or Internet network. And building a smart electricity grid for the 21st century is no different. What we need to aim for is pretty clear. Our goal should be one vast, interconnected, intelligent system that is …Next Page »

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[Updated Jan. 28, with information on Intellectual Ventures' patents (see below)]
If its volume of new patents is any indication, Microsoft is going to be just fine. The Redmond, WA, software firm blew away the rest of Washington state in terms of the number of patents it was granted last year. That’s according to IFI Patent Intelligence, based in Wilmington, DE, which recently released a national survey of patent grants for 2008. Xconomy obtained the figures for Washington state, as well as Massachusetts and California. (See the list of Washington’s top 25 patent winners below.)

Patent awards are, of course, just one measure of an organization’s competitiveness and inventiveness. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions about a company’s ability to innovate based on its number of patents, say—imagine trying to compare a biotech company with an electronics firm, or a young software startup with an established powerhouse. But it’s still a key measure of an organization’s investment in its intellectual property.

Microsoft’s tally (2,030) is greater than the rest of Washington’s top 25 combined. It was good enough for fourth place nationally, behind IBM (4,186), Samsung (3,515), and Canon (2,114), and ahead of Intel (1,776). In Washington state, Sharp Laboratories and the University of Washington were a distant second and third, respectively.

A few other notables. Boeing is fairly low on the list (16th), in part because the figures only count patents awarded to each organization’s operations in Washington; patents awarded to offices or operations outside the state are not included in this list. Amazon ranks pretty low as well (12th), and Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company, is in 8th place, listed as “Searete.” Lastly, there was a seemingly random tie for 5th place between forestry firm Weyerhaeuser (which just closed two of its Washington mills this week) and biotech company ZymoGenetics (which just bought back the rights to its lead cancer drug candidate today).

Without further ado, here’s Washington state’s top 25 patent winners in 2008:

1. Microsoft — 2,030
2. Sharp Laboratories of America — 144
3. University of Washington — 47
4. Battelle Memorial Institute — 33
5. (tie)
Weyerhaeuser — 28
ZymoGenetics — 28 …Next Page »

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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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In a report released Tuesday, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation named Massachusetts the nation’s leading state when it comes to the structural economic factors that make the state’s businesses competitive in the “New Economy”—defined as global, entrepreneurial, knowledge-based, rooted in information technologies, and innovation-driven.

Massachusetts hung onto its #1 ranking from the foundations’ 2007 report, with a score of 97 on an index aggregating some 29 measures, from the educational attainment of the workforce to the quantity of exports, the amount of job churn, the penetration of broadband Internet access, venture capital activity, and the number of patents issued to local inventors.

Washington state, meanwhile, climbed from the number-four spot in 2007 to the second-place spot in this year’s report, with a score of 81.9. Maryland (80), Delaware (79.3), and New Jersey (77) were close behind.

The top-ranked states, according to an announcement from the Kauffman foundation, are rich in “knowledge jobs” requiring at least a two-year degree. They all show above-average levels of entrepreneurship, have large numbers of citizens who use the Internet, and benefit from large numbers of skilled immigrants, both from other states and from other countries.

Massachusetts’ New England neighbors Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont fared well in the rankings, placing 6th, 11th, 13th, and 19th, respectively. Washington’s neighbor Oregon came in 15th. The five lowest-ranking states were, in reverse order, Mississippi, West Virgina, Arkansas, Alabama, and Wyoming.

“To succeed in the New Economy, states face a new imperative to boost the competitiveness of their economies—not just relative to each other, but to other nations,” Robert Atkinson, president of ITIF and primary author of the report, said in the announcement. “If they are going to meet the economic challenges of the future, states will need to overhaul their familiar approaches to economic development.”

Of course, having picked Boston as our first home city and Seattle as our second, we here at Xconomy could have predicted the study’s results. But California, home to our third bureau in San Diego, may have some catching up to do. It dropped from 5th place in the 2007 report to 8th place this year, with a score of 75.

Here’s the complete rundown:

* Rounded to nearest integer.

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The nascent New England Biotech Association, an umbrella group comprised of trade associations from all six New England states, held its first board meeting yesterday, the Boston Globe reports. The group is chaired by Paula Newton, President of the New Hampshire Bio/Medical Council. According to its website, “NEBA is committed to ensuring the region remains a global leader in biotechnology and the life sciences.”

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Heartland Robotics, the two-month-old industrial robotics startup MIT computer science guru Rod Brooks envisions as an engine for revitalizing the American workforce, has ramped up its own workforce while making some key changes at the top, Xconomy has learned. Founding CEO Ken Zolot has departed and will no longer be involved in company operations. Meanwhile, the company has hired veteran technology company executive Patrick Sobalvarro, who founded surveillance video analysis software company IntelliVid, as President.

“I’m running the development team, and he’s running everything else I guess is the way to describe it,” founder, chairman and CTO Brooks told me yesterday when speaking of Sobalvarro. No one holds the CEO title, at least for the time being: “Title, schmitle,” Brooks quips. “We’re a team.”

Xconomy got the inside scoop on Heartland’s creation from Brooks and Zolot (both Xconomists) back in early September. So it was something of a surprise when Zolot informed me this week he had stepped down. Neither he nor Brooks, both of whom are true professionals, would comment on whether there was any split between them. Zolot merely said he felt he had done his job by helping get the company off the ground. Meanwhile, about all Brooks would say was: “Ken wanted to move on.”

As far as the rest of Heartland’s progress goes, Brooks was pretty tight-lipped—but did shares a few details. The company, headquartered on Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of Cambridge’s Central Square, only had one or two employees when we spoke in September—and they were telecommuters. As of October 20 (the day that Sobalvarro started), that has changed, says Brooks. “The office got real on the 20th, and people have been filing in the door ever since. Today there are nine of us there,” says Brooks. “We’re working hard, and things are going well.” There are even a couple of robots to be seen, as employees get various systems up and running.

For his part, Sobalvarro is a veteran executive who got his undergraduate, master’s, and PhD degrees in computer science from MIT, where he met Brooks. “I’ve known Patrick for a long, long time,” says Brooks. “He was at the AI Lab [MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory] way back in the early 80s.” In fact, Sobalvarro temporarily dropped out of MIT as an undergraduate to work as a research staff member in the AI Lab, when Brooks was there as a post-doc. A few years later, he joined Lucid, a Silicon Valley startup Brooks co-founded with some Stanford folks. The work he did for Lucid gave him enough money to return to MIT.

Since that time Sobalvarro has held management roles at a host of technology companies, including Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems, as well as several startups. He also worked at Boston Consulting Group and served as a senior principal at Flagship Ventures before founding (in 2002) IntelliVid, which was sold to Tyco International for an undisclosed sum in July. Sobalvarro was working at Tyco until joining Heartland.

And he sounds pumped. “I worked for Tyco for about three months, and when …Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MIT roboticist Rod Brooks, one of three co-founders of iRobot and mentor to the other two (chairman Helen Greiner and CEO Colin Angle), is stepping down from his role as the company’s CTO in order to launch his own robotics firm, iRobot announced today. Brooks’ startup, called Heartland Robotics, will focus on industrial and workplace robots with the aim of boosting U.S. competitiveness. It will not, however, compete with iRobot—indeed, Brooks will act as a special consultant to the Bedford, MA-based firm and remain on its board of directors. IRobot said it will begin the search for a new CTO in 2009.

IRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), whose stock is down some 40 percent from its 52-week high despite winning a series of government contracts (including a new $200 million Army contract announced this morning) and a big trade secrets lawsuit in the past year, made it clear that the partial parting with Brooks was amicable. “Rod has been an integral part of iRobot over the years, playing a large role in the company’s success,” said Angle in a statement. “We are fortunate that he will continue to be a part of the company, lending his expertise and knowledge to our roadmap forward.”

Brooks was also named chair of a new technical advisory board that iRobot will soon be forming. In a phone call, Greiner said the purpose of the board is “to make sure iRobot stays on top of robot technology and make sure that we’re a leader in getting technology into the field and into homes today—and make sure that we stay in that leadership position from a technology point of view. It could [also] be seeing what else is going on out there and determining the direction of which technologies we choose to develop here.” She described Brooks as “a wonderful person to run our tech advisory board. He’s one of the top robotics researchers in the world today. You really can’t do better than Rod Brooks.”

Little information was given in the release about Heartland. The company’s website is essentially a splash page bearing the message: “Heartland Robotics is combining the power of computation—embodied in robots—and the extraordinary intelligence of the American workforce, to rehumanize and revitalize manufacturing.” It also offers visitors a chance to sign up for a mailing list and inquire about jobs.

However, Xconomy was able to reach Brooks (an Xconomist) this afternoon by phone. He said he will also be taking a leave from his position at MIT, where he is Panasonic Professor of Robotics, to work full time on the new venture, which has already rented space on the second floor of 485 Massachusetts Avenue—the same building that houses design firm IDEO—in the heart of Cambridge’s Central Square. He will be joined there by Ken Zolot (also an Xconomist), a serial entrepreneur who has guided a slew of MIT spinouts through their early business plan development phase, among them Arch Therapeutics, Myomo, and A123 Systems. Zolot founded and has been directing MIT’s Innovation Teams program, where students spend a semester working in MIT labs evaluating strategies for bringing lab discoveries to market. Like Brooks, Zolot will leave MIT to work full-time at the robotics startup. Brooks will serve as Heartland’s chairman and CTO, Zolot as the company’s CEO.

Zolot, reached first by e-mail and then in the call with Brooks, said that Heartland is actively recruiting employees and has already closed …Next Page »

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In terms of eco-friendliness, the Pacific Northwest and New England—Xconomy’s two homes—are both sitting pretty. In terms of education, however, one of them is not.

That’s according to the 2008 Business Facilities rankings report, released this week. The annual survey, which compares different business environments around the country, ranks cities and states based on everything from air pollution and renewable energy incentives to K-12 spending and graduation rates. The report covers a wide range of topics, but I want to highlight two lists that caught my eye.

First, the good news. Washington, Oregon, and five New England states made the list of top 20 greenest states, with Oregon and Massachusetts leading the way:

1. Oregon
2. Massachusetts
3. Colorado
4. Washington
5. California
6. Connecticut
7. Minnesota
8. Arizona
9. Vermont
10. New York
11. Maryland
12. Hawaii
13. New Mexico
14. Rhode Island
15. Wisconsin
16. New Hampshire
17. Texas
18. Iowa
19. New Jersey
20. Florida

That’s based on pollution levels, financial incentives and policies for energy efficiency and renewable energy, number of hazardous waste sites, percentage of people who use public transit, and a couple of other metrics.

The “greenest” rankings by city are a little less meaningful, as they are based solely on data from the U.S. Green Building Council—basically a measure of the number of “green” buildings in town. Nevertheless, Seattle tied for first place with Chicago. Portland, OR, was next, and Boston and Cambridge, MA, placed 7th and 9th, respectively.

Now for the bad (or at least mixed) news. Although Seattle and Portland ranked #1 and #4 in …Next Page »

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Steve Leonard’s schedule for the next two weeks or so goes like this: Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai, Bangalore, Singapore, London, Paris, London, Singapore, Australia. And for him, that’s not even that unusual—Leonard logs about 30,000 miles a month on airplanes, sleeping on a plane once or twice a week. “That’s part of being in APJ,” he explains with a smile.

“APJ” is shorthand for Asia Pacific and Japan. And Leonard ought to know something about the region. As an executive for EDS, Veritas, Symantec, and, now, EMC, he’s lived there for some nine years. In his eyes, there’s nowhere else to be than what he calls the most exciting, fastest-growing region on earth. As he puts it, “Where else can you be where you’re watching the evolution of, or the transformation of, a country?”

Leonard was named president of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC’s (NYSE:EMC) Asia Pacific & Japan operations two years ago, because, he says, “Joe [CEO Joe Tucci] and the executive leadership team said we’d like to change our trajectory in Asia.” And so far, so good. Last year, EMC’s APJ operations—which span some 17 nations, from India to The Philippines, Korea to New Zealand—enjoyed 24 percent growth over 2006—after just a 6 percent rise the year before that—accounting for about $1.5 billion in business, about 11 percent of the company’s total revenues. “We were the fastest growing part of EMC,” Leonard says. “We came from being the slowest growing part of EMC.” And things didn’t stop there. The first quarter of this year saw another 18 percent surge in revenues over the same period a year earlier, and, says Leonard, “you’ll be reading about Q2.” (The numbers aren’t due until late July, and he can’t talk about them now).

So how did it happen, and what’s in store for the region going forward? I asked these very questions when I sat down with Leonard in a corner of Cafe Fleuri when he was in Boston last Friday—before he embarked on the whirlwind itinerary outlined above.

Not surprisingly, the first question Leonard asked when he took the reins was, “What is the team?” “Some companies say it [APJ] would be a good place for Johnny to go get some experience, which would be the wrong approach,” he says. “Asia is the most complicated and difficult set of markets of anywhere in the world.” It’s a place, he adds, for people who already have lots of experience—the ones, he says, “with the most scars on their back.”

Leonard says his prime goal was to put in place key managers who …Next Page »

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By now you’ve seen the 2008 Milken Institute “State Technology and Science Index.” Washington ranks fifth, behind Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, and California. Not too shabby? Let’s take a look under the covers.

At the outset, it’s important to acknowledge that all such rankings have a huge bogosity quotient—they’re highly sensitive to the precise criteria that are evaluated, and they’re subject to gaming. Still, there are probably some things to be learned.

The Milken index has five components:

—Risk Capital and Entrepreneurial Infrastructure, where Washington ranks 4th.

—Technology and Science Work Force, where Washington ranks 4th.

—Research and Development Inputs, where Washington ranks 8th.

—Technology Concentration and Dynamism, where Washington ranks 8th.

—Human Capital Investment, where Washington ranks 16th.

Each of these, in turn, has between 10 and 21 sub-components, listed at the bottom of the Web pages. There’s a huge wealth of detail available—I urge you to take a detailed look.

For now, though, let’s not spend any time on the first and second components, where Washington ranks 4th among the states (in both cases, up several notches from the most recent previous ranking, carried out in 2004). Or even on the third and fourth, where we rank 8th.

Instead, let’s focus at the other end—”Human Capital Investment”—where we rank 16th, by far our worst performance.

Don’t take solace in the fact that we’re in the top third of the states. Yes, we beat out North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Arkansas. But that’s not the competition. Every state that you’d think of as a tech competitor—and many that you wouldn’t—dominated us.

Here is our ranking on a few of the sub-components:

—Average Math SAT Scores: 25th among the states
—Average Verbal SAT Scores: 25th among the states
—Recent degrees awarded in science and engineering per 1,000 civilian workers: 35th among the states

Here’s the message, in a nutshell: Our state is doing an outstanding job at competing nationally and globally in the 21st century economy. But we’re doing it by importing talent from elsewhere. This includes me, and it probably includes you.

Our K-12 system is failing our kids—it’s not preparing them for, or teaching them to aspire to, 21st century careers. And our higher education system also is failing our kids—there is insufficient investment in bachelors-level education, and even within that, insufficient investment in science and engineering.

In other words, we’re failing our kids. We’re creating 21st century jobs, and they’re going to other people’s kids.

Ask your state legislator what he or she is planning to do about this. If you don’t, who will?

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So to bastardize an expression of one of my forefathers, Horace Greeley, everyone should at some point in the near future “go (to the) Far East.” I am traveling through the region as I write this and am constantly amazed by the vitality and energy in all of my meetings. This enthusiasm is present even in the face of what are clearly signs of turbulent economic times ahead.

I grew up for a number of years in Hong Kong, which is where I started my trip earlier in the month. For all its chaos and over-crowding, the former British colony “just works”—and perhaps even more so now that the Chinese have reclaimed this gateway city into the mainland. The level of entrepreneurial activity is overwhelming—everyone I spoke to wants to start a company, has a brother/uncle/grandparent/niece/roommate who has/is/will start a company. Even the expat spouses are starting companies—and these are people living the charmed life of deep-pocketed expense accounts. What is so extraordinary is that the people of this generation of Asians are doing things that their parents could not have even understood—much less fathomed—only a few generations ago.

I had the great fortune of meeting a handful of other regional country investors the last few days as well. It is clear that the broader economic issues—energy prices, commodity prices, broader inflation, extraordinary weakness in the U.S. dollar, volatile interest rates, credit and liquidity concerns—are having profound impacts on the near-term public investment climates throughout the region. As I write this, the Shanghai stock exchange is down nearly 8% for the day. New investment pace has slowed, broader growth rates are off measurably, IPO activity is nonexistent, regional M&A volumes are way down.

But the entrepreneurial enthusiasm appears unwavering. It is clear that people here feel they are establishing the next generation of great companies that will go on to be local and regional winners—much less companies that will compete aggressively on an international scale. And the private investment markets still are showing great fortitude: in Vietnam alone $5.5 billion dollars was raised by 50 new private equity and venture capital funds established last year—this for a country which has only 200 public companies listed on the local stock exchange.

It is not just the regional pride of hosting the Olympics in a matter of weeks which is getting them through the turbulent economic conditions—or the unfathomable devastation caused by the earthquake in Sichuan province or the typhoon in Myanmar—but the sense that Asia is coming of age. I tell my children constantly that although we today think of the centers of the world to be Boston/New York/San Francisco, the centers when they come of age will Beijing/Shanghai/Bangalore—and it takes being here to realize that.

So as Xconomists, what are we to do? Well, in this case, ignorance is not bliss. We risk being eclipsed in a very real and painful way if we continue to be complacent about our competitive position. We are not just competing with the Valley to build the next great Web 3.0 or medical device companies, but a whole host of cities many of us have never seen—much less are able to point out on a map.

I did not set out to develop a set of “cure all” strategies—maybe in my next posting—but rather share my observations from the economic front-lines. And it is rather scary…

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