It might not be completely definitive, but it’s pretty close. Let’s just say we’ve got the most-definitive list of health IT companies based in the San Diego area, compiled form a variety of trade groups and other sources. Not all of the businesses on this list are well known, which is one reason why I decided to compile the list.

In collecting the names of health IT companies, I decided against including most of the medical device companies, engineering consulting firms, and others that have not focused their core business more or less entirely on health IT. I also decided against including SAIC, the government contractor. SAIC has been a longtime health IT information systems integrator and EMR system developer, and there’s tremendous expertise there. But SAIC’s headquarters is no longer based in San Diego.

So here’s my list of health IT companies that are based in the San Diego area. Such lists may never be complete, but if you know of a company that you think should be on the list, drop me a line with the pertinent details. Or if you want to say hello, you can stop by the Xconomy Forum on Health IT tomorrow evening. (More information is available online here, and there’s still time to register.)

—A-Life Medical (San Diego)

—Anvita Health (San Diego)

—Asteres (San Diego)

—AutomatedTeleMedicine (San Diego)

—Aventyn (Carlsbad, CA)

—Benchmark Revenue Management (San Diego)

—Brainlike (San Diego)

—CareFusion (San Diego)

—CliniComp (San Diego)

–-Concerro (San Diego)

–-CortiCare (San Diego area)

—EA Health (Solana Beach, CA)                      … Next Page »

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We took a long Columbus Day weekend here at Xconomy, but it didn’t shorten our roundup of life sciences news much. Here’s your latest update.

—Healthcare venture capital deals continue to climb back from their first-quarter plunge during the three months that ended September 30, according to the latest report from CB Insights, a New York firm that tracks investments in private companies. Venture firms invested $1.75 billion in 184 healthcare deals during the quarter, which sounds good, but it’s below the $1.9 billion that went into 192 healthcare companies during the same quarter of 2009.

—San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics and the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute are forming a new company called Synthetic Genomics Vaccines that will use the latest advances in synthetic biology and genomic sequencing to develop next-generation vaccines. The Venter Institute is contributing science and scientists, but no money.

—Albuquerque, NM-based Exagen Diagnostics is buying the San Diego-based diagnostics business of Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: CYPB) for as much as $8 million in upfront and milestone payments. Cypress also hopes to get additional future payments in the form of royalties on product sales.

—San Diego’s VentiRx, which also has operations in Seattle, said its lead drug candidate for nasal allergies helped to relieve common allergy symptoms in a clinical trial of 80 patients who were exposed to allergens in a scientifically controlled environment. The VentiRx drug is intended  to be the first once-weekly nasal spray for allergies.

—Luke found the geography of biotech has … Next Page »

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EvoNexus, the free incubator launched last November by San Diego’s CommNexus telecom industry group, is preparing to send its first fledgling startups into the wild—and to choose a few new startups to replace them.

The comings and goings are taking place as both EvoNexus and CommNexus are settling into new office space themselves, just months after the privately held Newport Beach, CA-based Irvine Company took both organizations under its wing. The nonprofit telecom group and its EvoNexus incubator moved rent-free into the fourth floor of an Executive Square office building in San Diego’s University City neighborhood about two months ago, according to CommNexus officials. The arrangement is part of a broader initiative by the Irvine Company to renew the area as a center of innovation for technology startups, which were priced out of the market during the go-go years of Southern California’s combined tech and real estate booms.

“We’re trying to bring the idea and brand back,” says Doug Holte, president of office properties at the Irvine Company. The real estate developer and property management company owns more than half of the office buildings near the upscale University Towne Center shopping mall, which serves as the de facto center of the area also known as UTC. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the community also is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Triangle,” because the Interstate 5, State Route 52, and Interstate 805 form a triangle around the master-planned mix of condos, apartment buildings, hotels, shopping malls, hospitals, and office buildings.

Holte says the Irvine Company, which owns about 33 million square feet of office space from Silicon Valley to San Diego, has been working to “re-introduce UTC” as a tech hub on the strength of its original concept as a commercial and residential center for UC San Diego, a few miles to the west.

CommNexus has been helping the Irvine Company promote the area, and last night the industry group hosted an invitation-only “open house” for the local tech community. In an interview yesterday, CommNexus CEO Rory Moore told me, “We look at UTC as a new convergence tech cluster,” with the EvoNexus incubator as a key source for the innovation. The nonprofit telecom industry group founded EvoNexus in mid-2009 as a way of keeping the flame of innovation flickering in San Diego amid the Great Recession’s capital crisis and a dearth of … Next Page »

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The defense and aerospace industries dominated San Diego’s economy for decades after World War II. General Dynamics was the region’s largest private employer, accounting for about 15 percent of the county’s workforce (with about 46,000 employees) in the early 1960s; its workers built commercial aircraft, Atlas rockets, and cruise missiles.

When General Dynamics began pulling up its stakes almost 25 years ago, the San Diego economy went into a tailspin, and local leaders focused on finding ways to diversify. Many smaller defense contractors shifted from manufacturing to the defense technologies that remained in high demand—especially military IT (which includes communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Some pursued similar opportunities in the commercial sector for wireless communications, IT, sensors, and systems integration. A small consulting company Linkabit, started by two UC San Diego professors, paved the way for San Diego to become the wireless center of the world. Similarly the founding of a successful biotech startup called Hybritech by UC San Diego professors became a paradigm in our efforts to broaden and diversify San Diego’s life sciences industry.

So what have we learned?

—Analyze what you do best and do that. During the recession that hit 25 years ago, San Diego decided to focus on commercializing discoveries from our local academic and research institutions. Local research institutes have expanded from 10 back then to 50 today. Michigan has great research institutions as well, so focus on them for inspired innovation.

—Don’t minimize the importance of small companies. You have to start somewhere. San Diego isn’t particularly well-known for its large corporations, but we are really good at starting hundreds of small high-tech, high-wage companies. Last year was not a great year for job creation anywhere, yet San Diego added 1,100 new technology-related jobs. And the salaries in those jobs are nearly twice the average wages in the area. I recommend a recent column on “Just Doing It” by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.

—Cultivate technology clusters. In 2004, the Milken Institute published a report that ranked San Diego as the nation’s No. 1 biotech cluster. The report says “Clusters of existing and … Next Page »

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Biomedical employment has held remarkably steady in San Diego and throughout California, even though other parts of our economy saw steep declines and the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression. That was the top-line finding of the 2010 California Biomedical Industry Report, just released by the California Healthcare Institute (CHI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

San Diego saw the strongest employment growth among the state’s main biomedical clusters. Despite the recession, biomedical jobs here grew 2.5 percent—from 23,545 in March 2008 to 24,123 in March 2009—expanding faster than in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles or Orange County. Statewide, the biomedical industry puts nearly 274,000 Californians to work in jobs that pay an average of nearly $75,000.

Biomedical jobs are a critical part of economic recovery, not only regionally but also statewide. Factoring in the multiplier effect—the additional employment in firms that provide services and supplies to life sciences companies—the biomedical industry accounts for more than 750,000 direct and indirect jobs statewide. The biomedical industry is the second largest sector of California’s high-tech workforce, after computer and Internet-related services.

So why have biomedical jobs been so recession resilient, particularly in San Diego? In part, the answer lies in the relative youth of the industry. Biotechnology was born in San Francisco in the late 1970s. And many companies are just now bringing their products to market, adding manufacturing, sales and marketing staff to support their launch. Meanwhile, the demand for new medicines and treatments is strong and growing. Aging populations around the world mean the need for innovative technologies will only increase. San Diego should remain a magnet for jobs and funding, with its leading biopharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, top universities and world-class research institutes.

According to a survey of the top 200 biomedical employers in California commissioned by CHI and PricewaterhouseCoopers in November 2009, the industry is positioned for robust growth. Yet how much of this takes place in California remains to be seen. Over the next two years, 81 percent of biomedical companies expect to maintain or increase their workforce in California. At the same time, though, two-thirds of them also expect to increase their out-of-state manufacturing workforce over the next two years, while more than half (58 percent) anticipate expanding their research and development workforce outside of California.

Biomedical innovation delivers not only global advances in healthcare, but the jobs that drive our economy. While the biomedical industry is weathering the recession, it faces unprecedented challenges – access to capital, the educational funding crisis and uncertainty surrounding healthcare reform. Now more than ever, the sustainability of California’s biomedical industry depends on decisions made in Sacramento and Washington.

If we want to keep high-quality biomedical jobs, we need to create an environment that rewards companies and research institutes for growing and hiring here. At stake is not only the economy, but also our promise of scientific innovation that benefits patients around the world.

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Economic downturns often light the fuse of revolutionary change. And one key change is becoming apparent now in San Diego’s life sciences community—which has been hammered by the 2008 capital markets collapse and plunge in VC funding.

Unable to raise capital, many biotechs and medical instrument makers were forced over the past 16 months to slash their budgets, lay off employees, and look for easier and less expensive ways to carry on the process of bringing drugs and devices to market. In some cases, that has meant outsourcing research, clinical trials, and other work to overseas labs. But many San Diego life sciences companies also are turning to local consulting firms, biomedical research laboratories, and a variety of specialized service providers. Collectively, they are known as CROs, or clinical research organizations—and in San Diego, at least, they are proliferating. (CROs are alternately known as contract research organizations)

At Xconomy’s request, San Diego-based Assay Depot, an online marketplace for CRO services, conducted a survey of CROs in the greater San Diego area. To our mutual surprise, Assay Depot found 144 companies providing a variety of contract services for local life science companies. Assay Depot’s Christopher Petersen plotted these companies on a Google map, below; you can scroll and zoom the map and click on each pin for the name and URL of each company. We also have provided a complete list of all the companies, with links to the websites of all-but-one CRO, at the bottom of this story.

Is 144 enough to count as a new technology cluster in San Diego?

If so, it is a hub that has been 15 years in the making, according to Joe Panetta, CEO of Biocom, the nonprofit industry group that represents San Diego’s biotech and biomedical instrument companies. Panetta says that Biocom was formed in 1995 to help local biotech startups connect with local business, law, and scientific service providers.

In recent years, though, there has been an explosion in the number of local companies that provide specialized biomedical research, from matching molecules with targets for drug development to recruiting patients for clinical trials.

The CROs “create efficiencies and cost-savings and a level of expertise that biotechs would not otherwise have,” Panetta says. The proliferation of CROs has accelerated in recent years because of the weakened economy, he adds. With waves of layoffs sweeping through the upper echelons of many biotechs, Panetta says, “A lot of experts are moving into consultant roles. So over the last year, we have seen a real buildup in the numbers and depth of CROs.” With the venture-backed model for life sciences startups stalled by the weak economy and uncertainty over the outcome of health reform in Congress, Panetta says CROs represent “a different model in which [life science] companies can succeed by relying on outside expertise that they previously would have relied on internally.”

View San Diego CROs in a larger map

Kevin Lustig, Assay Depot’s CEO, cites a variety of other factors for the growth of CROs, including great academic centers, San Diego’s high quality of life, lack of large pharmaceutical employers, and cheap lab space close to academic centers. “As always, the actual reason is likely some combination of these factors,” Lustig says.

As he puts it, many outstanding researchers come to work at one of San Diego’s renowned biomedical institutes (which include UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute, The Salk Institute, and recently renamed Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute)—and they stay for the balmy coastal lifestyle. “Since we have relatively few large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in San Diego, these researchers tend to work at smaller companies,” Lustig says. And perhaps because they work … Next Page »

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As if it wasn’t already hard enough to be an entrepreneur in San Diego. A recent survey suggests that San Diego entrepreneurs are the least likely to succeed in their startup ventures—while Seattle’s entrepreneurs are the most likely to break through to the other side.

The survey, which was first reported by VentureBeat last week, was based on information provided by the aspiring founders who have enrolled in the business coaching and startup incubator programs that the San Francisco-based Founder Institute has launched so far in five U.S. cities, including San Diego and Seattle. (The Seattle program begins on December 7.)

In order to process hundreds of applications by aspiring entrepreneurs (who are not required to disclose their idea for a startup venture), the institute uses a blended personality and aptitude test that takes just over an hour to complete. The Founder Institute has enrolled 100 students from 263 applications in programs established so far in five metro areas, so it’s not a big sample. A social science researcher in Canada created the admissions test, according to Adeo Ressi, the Founder Institute’s founder. Besides requiring a full LinkedIn profile, the admissions test asks applicants to answer questions like, “Why do you think you can be an entrepreneur?” and “What are you passionate about?”

As VentureBeat reported, Adeo Ressi says he worked with the social science researcher to develop a system that could be used to predict the success of student founders in the program. As the data accumulate, Ressi says it can be used to look at the attributes of aspiring entrepreneurs on a regional basis.

Here’s how the average scores compare among the programs. (We’re unsure exactly how to read the numbers, but guess it’s based on a normalized scale from 0 to 5.):

—Seattle (2.72 / 5.00)

—Silicon Valley (2.66 / 5.00)

—New York (2.54 / 5.00)

—Washington DC (2.42 / 5.00)

—San Diego and Orange County (2.26 / 5.00)

Ressi told VentureBeat the test can predict two things with greater accuracy than 95 percent of published social science research. (Hmmm. Was he perhaps speaking sardonically about the quality of research in the social sciences?) One is to rank the quality of the idea that Founder Institute students will develop while they’re in the program. The other is how the student will perform at building a business during the four-month program.

When I asked Ressi to elaborate on why San Diego’s showing was weakest, he replied by e-mail: “‘Weakest’” is all relative, of course. Part of the situation in San Diego is that it had the lowest number of applicants, but everything was proportional to the relative market sizes. Silicon Valley was largest, followed by New York, Washington DC, Seattle (which is almost tied with Washington DC), and San Diego in terms of applicants.”

(Ressi did not respond when I asked if he could elaborate any further on why San Diego and Seattle were at opposite ends of the scale.)

The San Diego Founder Institute had 42 applications and enrolled 22 students in its program, which began in November and has scheduled its graduation for Feb. 23. “The class just finished the third class last week so it is hard to give an assessment,” writes Jeanine Jacobson, a San Diego partner of the Founder Institute. “December 7 is the first investor session where the Founders will be pitching to investors. At that time, we will be able to provide more feedback.”

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San Diego serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is going to have to find something else to do now that Gizmo5, the VoIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) company he founded in 2003, has become part of a certain search giant to the north. We have that news and more.

—Google confirmed that it’s buying San Diego-based Gizmo5, a six-year-old company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. The service will become part of the Google Voice number-unification service. Google did not disclose the purchase price, which media reports put at about $30 million. Gizmo5’s 6 million users will still be able to use the service, according to a statement. But Google is suspending new Gizmo5 signups, and existing users can no longer sign up for a call-in number.

—Platformic, a Web-based startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites, said it is adding social media capabilities. The two-year-old San Diego-based company, which has targeted broadcast companies, says its expanded software-as-a-service product will help a broadcaster’s audience share photos, create their own user profiles, and create personal blogs on the broadcaster’s Platformic-powered website.

—Qualcomm’s No. 2 executive opened a regional mobile technology conference in San Diego by providing an overview of steps the chipmaking giant is taking to help ease the pressure on wireless network bottlenecks as mobile data traffic soars. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer told the 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference that in the year 2014, worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

—Technology innovations that help companies optimize their profitability will likely lead to the next wave of analytics-based software startups, according to Stephen Coggeshall of San Diego-based ID Analytics. Another hot area will be analytics that can help forecast consumer behavior, said Coggeshall, who was participating in a discussion about new opportunities in analytics during the San Diego Software Industry Council’s annual forum on analytics.

—Israel’s Panoramic Power won $250,000 and became the first winner of the top QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power is developing energy-monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy so-called “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities.

—The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group said is getting $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a giant wind farm in eastern Washington state, about 110 miles east of Portland, OR. The $1 billion Windy Point/Windy Flats project is expected to generate enough electricity for 250,000 homes.

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When Tom Clancy introduced a panel discussion yesterday at a forum on analytics software, the founder of San Diego’s Tao Venture Partners said the forum was “founded four years ago by people who had an interest in seeing San Diego get established as a leading cluster in the analytics space.”

The forum, which is sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council, offers an annual snapshot of local developments in a booming industry that has become crucial to business intelligence, data storage and management, and complex decision-making.

Since Robert Hecht-Nielsen founded HNC Software here in 1986, the number of companies that focus on analytics software in San Diego has mushroomed, with more than 100 companies specializing in neural networking, data mining, pattern recognition, and related algorithms and technologies for analyzing data. Yet Clancy and local experts who discussed “opportunities in analytics” lamented that San Diego’s standing as the birthplace of some key companies and technologies has gone largely unrecognized. Among the examples cited:

— HNC, which specialized in technology to analyze credit card transactions, was acquired for $810 million in 2002 by Fair Isaac and Co. and integrated with the Minneapolis, MN-company’s credit-scoring business.

—Urchin Software, a suburban San Diego Web analytics company that developed an assortment of tools for measuring website usage, page views, and other statistics, was acquired by Google in 2005 for an estimated $30 million. Seven months later, Google renamed its Urchin business Google Analytics, and made analytics tools available to Web users for free.

—WebSideStory, a San Diego company that developed website traffic analysis tools, rebranded itself as Visual Sciences in 2007 and was acquired later that same year for $394 million by Utah-based Omniture. (Last month, Omniture was itself acquired by San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems in a $1.8 billion deal.)

—Carlsbad, CA-based analytics software developer Keylime Software was acquired for $9.5 million in 2003 by Pasadena, CA-based Overture, an advertising distribution network that was later acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion.

Such deals reflect a surging awareness of the value of data, says Stephen Coggeshall, a co-founder and chief technology officer for San Diego-based ID Analytics, which uses advanced analytics to search credit databases for telltale signs of identity theft. In terms of technology innovations that will likely lead to forming new companies, Coggeshall says … Next Page »

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Dueling reports on venture capital activity came to contradictory conclusions last week when the numbers came in for the three-month period that ended Sept. 30. Catch up on that and the rest of San Diego’s technology innovation news:

—New York-based ChubbyBrain says $6 billion in venture capital was invested nationwide in 680 deals during the third quarter—a 14 percent gain over the previous quarter and a sign that VC funding is improving. But Dow Jones VentureSource says just $5.1 billion was invested in 616 startups—a 6 percent decline and a sign the nation’s slow economic recovery is faltering. The two groups use different methods to count VC investments, and it’s not yet clear which one is more accurate.

—Skeptics made a strong showing at the 3rd Annual Algae Biomass Summit held recently in San Diego. Among the critics was John Walter of San Antonio-based Valero Energy, who urged the algae biofuels industry to “get away from some of the outlandish claims that are out there.”

— Skype is in negotiations to buy San Diego-based Gizmo5, a much smaller competitor with similar peer-to-peer technology, according to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, who cited multiple unnamed sources familiar with the matter. Michael Robertson, the serial entrepreneur who made his fortune starting San Diego’s MP3.com, is the founding CEO of Gizmo5.

—Connect, the San Diego non-profit that supports technology and entrepreneurship, is working with BIO, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, to support a recently introduced bill to provide $250 million to revive SBICs, Small Business Investment Companies. For those who think the government should stay out of the venture capital business, consider a post written last week by PE Hub’s Dan Primack. He says, “you can’t separate government from venture capital.”

—After identifying a mini-cluster of algae technology companies in the San Diego area last December, we decided to update what the local industry looks like today. Denise found at least a dozen companies in this area are now developing deep technical expertise in various aspects of algae-related R&D, production, and processing.

—We also noted several new rounds of venture capital investments in mid-stage technology companies last week:

—Oak Investment Partners of Palo Alto, CA, and New Enterprise Associates of Menlo Park, CA, were among the investors that put another $12 million into SmartDrive Systems, a San Diego company that uses video recording technology and web-based services to reduce the costs of operating motor vehicle fleets.

—ABS Ventures of Waltham, MA, Dolphin Equity Partners of New York, and Whelan Capital Management of Palo Alto, CA, participated in $2.5 million in venture funding for Overtone, a company based in San Diego and San Francisco that provides Web-based analytics. Overtone’s software-as-a-service enables its corporate customers to monitor what people are saying on the Internet about its services and products.

—Venrock Associates of Palo Alto, CA, RRE Ventures of New York and Palo Alto, CA, and VeriFone Holdings of San Jose, CA, have invested more than $6.7 million in San Diego’s Semtek Innovation Solutions. Semtek is commercializing technologies for preventing the theft of credit card data and identifying counterfeit credit cards.

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Xconomy Seattle’s editor Greg Huang got this idea going last month when he conducted an informal and wholly anecdotal survey about the startup culture in the woodsy Pacific Northwest. His premise was that you can tell a lot about a company’s corporate culture from its chief executive.

Within a couple of weeks, Xconomy’s founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi followed suit with a survey of corporate culture in Boston’s startup community (and based on Bob’s endorsement, may I just take this opportunity to say this is terrific idea!)

To make this a trifecta of corporate culture insights, I followed the examples set in Seattle and Boston by contacting some San Diego CEOs to ask them to describe the corporate culture at their companies in a single word. In a variation on a theme—what I like to think of as a fugue in our continuing coverage of technology innovation—I chose San Diego CEOs whose business is focused on digital television and video. It is an industry that has been subject to fast and furious changes, which will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

In another twist, I asked each CEO if they think there are enough TV-and-video technology companies in San Diego to constitute a cluster or even a mini-cluster of innovation. Technology clusters, defined by Harvard University’s Michael Porter as geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, and associated research institutions, have become a touchstone for promoting prosperity as well as advancing innovation in specific fields.

Packet Video (San Diego)

CEO: James C. Brailean
Culture: “Innovative.”
Comments: Brailean responded to my journalistic lob with a volley of innovations that Packet Video has introduced since 1998, when he says the software developer for wireless media was the first to demonstrate video on a handset. “PV has been out in front of several of the key trends in mobile multimedia over the last decade.”

“We do have a significant cluster,” Brailean says. “It may not seem like it, since we are focused on different aspects of digital video. However, we all have compression, transmission, and managing digital video at our core…The move to digital video was driven by … Next Page »

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Lots of people have been saying the VC model for funding technology innovation is broken. Now San Diego’s Duane Roth has some ideas for ways the regional technology community can try to do things differently.

Roth, who is chief executive of Connect, the non-profit organization that helped create San Diego’s innovation economy, laid out some proposals embodying his ideas a few weeks ago, when I was out of town. So I sat down with him recently to discuss what he calls “five new initiatives in support of the San Diego innovation economy.”

Roth contends that the single most critical factor that has contributed to San Diego’s rise as a regional capital of innovation are specialized research institutes—and he contends that we need more of them. Roth says at least 50 such institutes have been established within a mile of the University of California, San Diego, in the vaunted Torrey Pines zip code of 92037. As examples, Roth listed the five newest ones, all created in the past year or so:

Duane Roth

—The Scripps Translational Science Institute, created to encourage multi-disciplinary research, such as identifying genes that underline susceptibility to disease and conducting clinical research that will lead to the translation of such discoveries into new medical therapies.

—The Institute of Engineering in Medicine, established at UCSD to bring diverse fields of science together to develop new and unconventional approaches to clinical medicine, such as creating nanoparticle “bombs” to kill cancer and molecular-sized bridges to repair damaged hearts.

—The J. Craig Venter Institute, based in Rockville, MD, the non-profit institute’s second center in San Diego for continuing research on the structural, functional and comparative analysis of genomes and gene products.

—The West Wireless Health Institute, dedicated to advancing health and well-being through the use of wireless technologies.

—The Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, formed to combine the stem cell research efforts of San Diego’s four largest and most-prominent biomedical research institutes: The Salk Institute, The Burnham Institute, UCSD, and The Scripps Research Institute.

In creating such institutes, Roth says San Diego has been able to recruit prominent scientific leaders in a process that builds upon itself: “They keep clustering, and they bring talent, and the talent gets money, and they just keep doing it.” Roth contends … Next Page »

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Against the backdrop of a worsening recession, San Diego’s innovation community came together for the 21st annual “Most Innovative Products” awards luncheon today in La Jolla. The event is intended to showcase new products introduced over the past year in eight categories that reflect technology clusters, such as wireless communications, medical devices, and aerospace and security technologies that are concentrated in the region.

“Whenever I think of these communities of innovation, I think we’ll come out of this okay,” said Connect CEO Duane Roth, referring to the economic downturn that has dominated recent headlines. Connect, the non-profit organization that has organized the awards since 1987, promotes innovative technologies by helping provide entrepreneurs with the information and resources they need to build a business.

More than 800 people registered for the event at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, in the heart of San Diego’s technology center. This year’s winners were culled from 24 finalists, which were selected from more than 100 nominations, and included the first tie in the history of the award—for Aerospace and Security Technologies.

The nine categories and the companies that received Connect’s most innovative products award are:

—Action and Sports Technologies: The “Direct Drive” surfboard design … Next Page »

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