[Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Peter Rothstein, President of the New England Clean Energy Council.]

Over the next 10 years, over $1.7 trillion will be invested in clean power projects across the globe, according to recent projections from the Pew Charitable Trusts. That estimate is if nothing changes to strengthen our clean energy policies. Under a more aggressive policy scenario, Pew projects global investment of $2.3 trillion in this decade. Clearly, the clean energy industry is poised for tremendous growth.

New England has emerged as an early mover and hotbed of clean energy innovation, and is well positioned to grow into a global leader in this industry. This success is owed in large part to the strength of our universities, which serve as an incubator for tomorrow’s technologies. For the technologies of the future to become the technologies of the present, they must be shepherded into the market by experienced entrepreneurs and executives as innovative as the technologies themselves. There is often a gap, however, between innovative and early-stage clean energy companies and the executives who have both knowledge of the industry and seasoned experience to raise financing, scale the product, and take it to market. Even established clean energy companies and investors cite top-level recruitment for executive positions as an on-going issue.

Our region—and the greater Boston area in particular—is the home for world-leading research institutions and has no shortage of talented, experienced entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. The trick is helping these successful innovators transition from sectors like IT or biotech into clean energy.

To that end, the New England Clean Energy Council (of which one of us is President) has partnered with the Boston University School of Management (of which one of us is Faculty) to offer a certificate program entitled Leading Clean Energy Ventures which offers a deep dive into the technologies and business of clean energy, and which begins this month. To address the lack of repeat entrepreneurs and seasoned executives in the clean energy sector, this program targets successful individuals who are eager to transition into the clean energy sector. We based Leading Clean Energy Ventures on the Clean Energy Council’s signature Fellowship program. Combining the Clean Energy Council’s knowledge of the sector with the world-class faculty and resources of Boston University, we have evolved that novel education model into an effective and timely program.

Clean energy is our future. If our region and our nation hope to capitalize on the massive opportunity represented by clean energy—and to do so in time to save our climate—we must embrace new means of attracting and developing truly innovative clean energy executives and entrepreneurs. In the face of accelerating climate change we simply do not have the luxury of doing it any other way. To fuel a robust New England clean energy economy that can compete with global leaders like China and Europe, we must build a skilled workforce well versed in clean energy. Our aim is to offer a new generation of clean energy capitalists the knowledge and the tools they need to capture a $2.3 trillion opportunity.

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This could be huge for Michigan’s economic future. No, I’m not talking about today’s gubernatorial election (though that’s important too). I’m talking about something Nathaniel Borenstein told me last week.

Borenstein, for those who don’t know, is one of the fathers of modern e-mail (an original designer of MIME, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), and currently chief scientist at Mimecast, an e-mail management software company based in the U.K. But Borenstein lives in northern Michigan, a few hours’ drive from Detroit, and he was speaking to me not only as a software pioneer, but as a 16-year resident of the state.

I asked him for his ideas on how to promote high-tech growth in Michigan, and I got that and a whole lot more. He shared his thoughts on the role of big tech companies in reviving Michigan’s economy, the future of autoworkers, and an interesting take on history.

Borenstein’s main suggestion is to “create an enterprise town” in Detroit, and to include incentives for people coming from outside (underemployed Midwestern technologists), to achieve a critical mass of companies and concentrate talent and opportunities in the city. But why Detroit instead of, say, Ann Arbor?

“Historically, the place is Ann Arbor. Five years ago, I would have said that’s the place to concentrate it,” he says. “But Detroit has this big empty space emerging, perfect for a tech campus.” As he explains it, “Detroit is ground zero for everything going on in Michigan. Around half of the land area around Detroit is vacant. They tore down houses that weren’t being used. It’s an improvement, and necessary for a city that’s lost half its population…The mayor is trying to concentrate the population in big contiguous areas that are vacant. This is a huge opportunity.”

Indeed, the combination of strong talent from nearby university towns (Ann Arbor, Lansing), vacant land, cheap real estate, lower cost of living, and business tax cuts (if Rick Snyder wins the governorship), makes it “only a matter of time before some company, probably a foreign company wanting to make a splash in the U.S., sets up shop there,” he says.

Big tech companies like Google, IBM, and Compushare already have a strong presence in Michigan. But that hasn’t been enough to keep the young talent from local universities from leaving the state after they graduate. (Case in point: Google co-founder Larry Page grew up in East Lansing, went to University of Michigan, left for Stanford grad school, and promptly changed the world.) Not that it’s a unique problem for Michigan—other Midwestern college towns like Champaign-Urbana, IL, West Lafayette, IN, and Columbus, OH, have similar issues, as does Pittsburgh, PA.

Partly as a result, Detroit “doesn’t have anything close to approaching critical mass in the tech industry,” Borenstein says. “The big difference between trying to do a startup in Silicon Valley and doing it in Michigan is lack of so-called smart money—money that comes with industry expertise and connections…The best bet is someone from the outside bringing resources.”

I asked him for perspective on the future of the auto industry. In fact, Borenstein blames the car industry for something most people don’t mention. In the 1960s, he says, “white flight” from … Next Page »

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If you’re feeling squeezed by the recession, you’re obviously not alone. Since the bottom fell out of the economy in 2009, the Detroit metro area in particular has been struggling to regain its footing when it comes to jobs and wages. Now, after a promising start to 2010, things might be heading downhill again.

That’s according to a national survey this month conducted by PayScale, a Seattle-based firm focused on collecting and organizing salary and compensation data across companies, geographies, and industries.

The Detroit numbers indicate that the region trailed significantly behind the national trend in wage growth between 2006 and the first quarter of 2008. Then, from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2009, the average wage in Detroit fell by 3.1 percent (see chart below). Wages improved somewhat at the end of 2009 and through the first quarter of this year, but have fallen again for the past two quarters.

The PayScale Index: National (US) vs. Detroit Metro Area

The PayScale Index uses 2006 average total cash compensation as a baseline.

National (US) Detroit Metro Area

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Compensation Data Provided by PayScale, Inc.

The above curves were calculated in terms of PayScale’s “index” (see the methodology here, which involves tracking total cash compensation for full-time, private industry employees). So the absolute wage numbers aren’t as important as the trend—or the comparisons among different regions of the country (which you can see and interact with here).

Bottom line: Wages might get a little worse before they get better, or at least stabilize, in Detroit.

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Famed robotics expert Rodney Brooks, the former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is retiring from academic duties at MIT as of this week. The co-founder and former chief technical officer of Bedford, MA-based iRobot will be focusing full-time on his newest company, Heartland Robotics, based in Cambridge, MA. Brooks’s new role as professor emeritus at MIT will be effective this Thursday, July 1. He is 55.

There is some question as to whether Brooks will be the youngest professor emeritus in the history of his department (electrical engineering and computer science). Reached by e-mail, Brooks confirms he is the youngest of the current crop of MIT professors who are retiring this year—at least those on a list announced at a faculty meeting last month. And current regulations at MIT say a professor must be at least 55 to achieve emeritus status, so he is probably among the youngest, at least in recent history. “It may be that come this Thursday I will be the current youngest emeritus professor at MIT, but I can’t say that for sure,” Brooks says.

Brooks is widely known for his scientific contributions to computer vision, mobile robots, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. He did postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT before becoming a professor at Stanford University (where he had done his PhD in computer science) and then MIT in 1984, where he has stayed as a full-time faculty member until now. Brooks was director of the MIT AI Lab before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL in 2003. He stepped down as director of CSAIL in June 2007 to dive deeper into science and, as it turns out, to try to create a new industry.

“I spent my career at MIT developing new ideas for how to make robots intelligent. Through iRobot I have been very successful at getting robots out in the world based on those ideas. In terms of raw numbers the majority of robots that are sold today are behavior-based, and follow the ideas I worked on in the eighties,” Brooks says. “Now I am trying to develop a new class of robots for deployment in the real world that are based on the work that my students and I did during the nineties and later.”

In September 2008, Brooks announced he was leaving iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), the consumer and defense robotics firm he started in 1990, to build a new company. Heartland Robotics, which is backed by Charles River Ventures and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is looking to bring intelligent, dexterous robots to industrial workplaces in order to boost productivity and revitalize U.S. manufacturing. It’s still very early, of course. But given Brooks’s recent advances in robots that can manipulate … Next Page »

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A $4.95 million grant from the federal stimulus package will be used to boost education, training, and placement services for people who are seeking jobs in San Diego’s life sciences and health care professions, according to local biotech and education leaders.

The grant is part of more than $225 million in stimulus funds awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor to create jobs in health care and related high growth industries. About $100 million is intended to help train health care workers throughout California, according to a statement issued by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. In addition to providing training and certification, the governor says the funding is intended to help health care providers adopt and expand the use of health information technology.

In a statement, Schwarzenegger says, “The health IT grants will help California build a world class system to promote and expand the way information is shared, protecting medical privacy, promoting efficiency, and will ultimately help reduce health care costs.”

The three-year grant allotted for the San Diego region will be used to boost a collaborative education and training program for more than 1,000 incumbent and unemployed workers in the life sciences, according to an announcement issued by San Diego State University, Biocom, the San Diego Workforce Partnership, and the Southern California Biotechnology Center at Miramar College.

Known as the BRIDGE, (Biotechnology Readiness, Immersion, Certification, and Degrees for Gainful Employment), the collaborative education and training program is focused on the critical need for clinical laboratory scientists, medical laboratory technicians, medical physicists, and scientists. The program also is intended to help military veterans find employment opportunities in the life sciences and health care.

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We are increasingly a knowledge-based economy in the U.S., and work can be delivered digitally from anywhere. Take NightHawk Radiology in Coeur d’Alene, ID, for example—they are providing radiologists to any hospital that needs real-time availability and lower costs. They work online from Switzerland and Australia, but it could just as easily be Wenatchee or Usk, WA. These are often the jobs that create other jobs. An Amazon, Microsoft, or RealNetworks software technician for example, creates two to four other jobs within the communities they live.

This has all been made possible by the following 5 trends/innovations of the past decade:

1. Expansion of broadband throughout the U.S. and abroad.

2. Maturing of Web development tools and standards.

3. Usable Web access via handheld devices.

4. General acceptance of financial transactions over the Web as being safe and secure.

5. Emergence of online work and worker marketplaces.

I believe that a huge portion of the highest paying jobs in the next 10 years will be served across the wire, with less and less dependence on physical location. [Disclosure: The author is the co-founder of Smartsheet, an online collaboration and work management firm---Eds.] Small towns across the Northwest are currently growing with telecommuting professionals moving toward lower costs, higher quality of life, and less city hubbub.

The past decade’s innovations coupled with the increasing base of knowledge workers leads to my predictions for the coming decade:

1. Migration of professional people from high tax & regulation states to low tax & low regulation states.

2. Explosive expansion of work marketplaces and paid crowdsourcing for all kinds of jobs.

3. More productive people will work for themselves by shopping their considerable talents around the world via work marketplaces.

4. Job performance and work quality will become transparent as people’s work is reviewed online much as products are today.

5. Average earnings for high performers will be more than double the average earnings in their category.

Virtual assistants, a job category that is growing 50 percent a year, is already demonstrating these trends. More and more people are timesharing executive administrators. Most are home-based women (98 percent of V.A.s are women) who are now picking up extra income, or building full businesses.

I expect that we’ll look back in 10 years and wonder why we spent over $4.2 billion to move a relatively small amount of Washington state’s population less than 10 miles through a new tunnel [to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle---Eds.]. Had we spent half that much on schools, high-speed Internet access, and infrastructure across the whole state, it would have been a much bigger boon for the state’s economy.

Ten years from now, where you live will be a matter of lifestyle choice, not proximity to work.

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SolarWorld Industries, whose parent company is based in Bonn, Germany, is cutting 63 positions from its Vancouver, WA facility, according to the Washington State Employment Security Department. SolarWorld says the move is not a reduction in total staff, but rather a transfer of operations to its new manufacturing plant in Hillsboro, OR (which Xconomy reported on here).

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2009 is barely a week old, and already the Washington and Oregon tech industries have seen massive new layoffs in the struggling economy. A quick recap of the latest bloodletting (see the updated Xconomy Seattle layoff litany here):

—Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A) cut 120 jobs at its plant in Liberty Lake, WA. The Santa Clara, CA-based maker of instruments for electronics and life sciences companies has nearly 20,000 employees worldwide. The layoffs are effective January 30.

—Seattle-based software firm Attachmate has laid off 120 employees, or 10 percent of its staff, as reported by TechFlash. It is not clear yet how many jobs are being cut in Seattle. Attachmate is a Seattle-area icon that helps businesses manage and deliver IT services. It has some 65,000 customers, according to its website.

—Intermec (NYSE: IN), an Everett, WA-based maker of technologies for radio frequency identification and mobile computing, has laid off 7 percent of its global workforce, or about 150 people. The cuts are mostly in sales, general, and administrative areas.

—ON Semiconductor (NASDAQ: ONNN), which operates a 500-person chip manufacturing plant in Gresham, OR, is laying off 10 percent of its worldwide staff, or about 1,500 jobs. The Phoenix, AZ-based company is reportedly closing its Oregon plant for at least four weeks in the first half of this year.

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Wilsonville, OR-based InFocus (NASDAQ: INFS), a maker of digital projectors, announced today it is reducing its global workforce by 30 percent, as part of a company restructuring that will span all of 2009. The staff cuts will be effective next month. InFocus president and CEO Bob O’Malley cited the economic downturn and reduced demand for projectors as reasons for the restructuring. The company says it is spending around $1.3 million on severance payments and some $4 million to vacate facility space in Wilsonville. No word yet on exactly how many jobs will be cut.

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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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We’re Number Four. That is, in terms of concentration of technology-based employment and R&D activity in the state, Washington ranks fourth in the nation (after Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia), largely on the strength of its aerospace and software publishing industries. The concentration is defined as the number of jobs in a given sector relative to all jobs.

This stat, and many others, come courtesy of the Technology Alliance, a statewide organization of tech and business leaders based in Seattle. Yesterday the organization released the final version of its 51-page “economic impact” report—its first since 2005 and fifth overall documenting the impact of the tech industry on the state’s economy. The report was prepared by William Beyers of the Department of Geography at the University of Washington.

Before we get to the rest of the stats, I found it interesting how the survey defined the “tech industry” in the first place. For a sector to be considered high-tech, at least 14.6 percent of its workforce had to be engaged in R&D occupations—double the percentage for the state’s overall workforce.

This seems arbitrary to me (though well-defined), and it raises the question of what “tech” even means anymore. It’s getting harder to draw the line, as almost every business uses technologies such as computers and the Internet to develop or push its products. But the survey’s focus on R&D speaks to the importance of driving the next generation of technologies, and the criterion leads to such familiar tech sectors as the following (with Washington-state workforce size in 2007):

—Aerospace (78,667 employees)
—Software publishing and computer systems design (75,638)
—Business services (82,519)
—Computer and electrical equipment manufacturing (26,862)
—Internet publishers, service providers, and wireless (19,128)
—Scientific R&D (18,765)

A few more highlights, based on the 2007 stats:

—There were a total of 343,371 tech jobs, representing 11.8 percent of all employment in the state.

—The income, measured in salary and benefits, per job in technology industries averaged $117,691, as compared to the state average of $54,097.

—The tech industry generated $112.6 billion in sales, and 80 percent of those sales came from out of state (versus 40 percent of sales from all businesses).

—Taking into account “indirect impacts,” such as the purchases of goods and services related to the industry, the tech sector helped support some 40 percent of all jobs in the state.

—In terms of “technology-intensive” industries, defined as those in which more than 30 percent of employment is in R&D (e.g., aerospace and software here), Washington ranked second in the nation after Virginia. Just goes to show how arbitrary rankings can be.

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