By the end of June, Lita Nelsen will retire from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, where she has worked for 30 years. She has been director of the office since 1993 and has seen a lot of things. Nelsen recently sat down with Xconomy to talk about trends in tech transfer and entrepreneurship.

One timely issue: As universities try to figure out the most effective ways to nurture campus entrepreneurship—and reap benefits from it—more institutions are forming their own venture capital funds.

Cambridge Innovation Center has signed onto 127,000 square feet at UCity Square in Philadelphia.

Known as CIC, the Boston-based company will occupy space at 3675 Market St. in University City. It operates in a similar fashion as a co-working space and incubator, providing flexible space to entrepreneurial startups and other companies. Since its founding in 1999, companies that have been housed in CIC space have raised more than $2.5 billion and added an estimated 40,000 jobs to the economy, according to the company's website.

Listening to the music of Johnny Clegg on speakers mounted to his custom-built craft, the South African Chris Bertish began his attempt to be the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a stand-up paddleboard on Tuesday morning, gliding out of the Agadir Marina of Morocco, on the northwest coast of Africa, shortly before sunrise.

“I’ve been hearing that I’m nuts all my life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Bertish said in a phone interview before he departed on the solo voyage. “I’ve been proving people wrong all of my life. But I’ve always wanted to push the boundaries because that’s where the magic happens.”

Image: Chris Bertish off the coast of Morocco on Tuesday. He plans to make a 4,600-mile, open-ocean passage unsupported and unassisted in his 20-foot craft. Credit Alan van Gysen, courtesy of The SUP Crossing

You often hear the claim that all the climate scientists were worried about global cooling back in the 1970's. Now they're talking about global warming. They can't even make up their minds, so why should we listen to anything they say?  ClimateAdam explains that there are two reasons. First, they weren't all worried about cooling in the 70's. Some were, but a majority were more concerted about...you guessed it...global warming. Yes, even way back then. 

Image: NASA/Michael Studinger via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Russ Ramsey, Peter Scher and Ted Leonsis have joined with 14 other CEOs to create the Greater Washington Partnership to boost the regional economy and tackle transportation issues. It joins several other business groups with similar goals, though its focus will be on the broader region from Baltimore to Richmond.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Ramsey#/media/File:Russ_Ramsey_Headshot.png

Major industries from retail to aeronautics are leveraging big data. But despite the abundance of data in healthcare, and the clear promise of big-data analytics, the sector has been slow to put it to work. Among the obstacles to adoption are laws aimed at protecting patient information, and a shortage of technical talent; hospitals and clinics compete for big data engineers whose technical skills can be agnostically applied across industries.

Knowledge@Wharton: This book ties back to Moneyball. Tell us how it came about.

Michael Lewis: Moneyball led to this book in an odd way. Moneyball is, in my mind, mainly about the way markets misvalue people. It happens to be baseball players, but it’s a story about this team, the Oakland A’s, that has fewer resources than the competition. They have to find different ways, better ways to find baseball players. They discover in the process that the market for baseball players is not efficient. There are good baseball players who aren’t appreciated, and there are not so good baseball players who are over-valued.

Knowledge@Wharton: What made Pixar work so well at the outset and got this company going?

Lawrence Levy: Well, that took a while. At the outset, they were honing this creative process and honing their technology over a long period of time, but it had never really come together. They had tried to make different products, different technologies, so they were like an amazing technology without a market. That was what I found when I started there.

Looking for a new federal IT job?

The latest "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government" analysis from the Partnership for Public Service and Deloitte, released today, might be a good place to look.

The report is based off data from the Office of Personnel Management’s annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. It compares agencies overall by size—large, midsize and small—and breaks out its agency rankings in five mission-critical occupations across government, including IT.

President-elect Donald Trump could tap Silicon Valley companies to help eliminate government waste.

During a discussion with some of technology's most powerful chief executives—Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, Tesla's Elon Musk and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg were among them—Trump asked the group if data analysis technology could be used to identify government waste, The New York Times reported. (That report cited unnamed corporate executives and a transition official who described the scene after reporters were asked to leave.)

Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have collectively applied for 52,000 patents since 2009. Get insight into their corporate product strategy and innovation in our highly-anticipated patents report.

Total applications have steadily risen as each company diversifies its research activities, with annual combined applications nearing 10,000 in 2013. Among other things, we'll be looking at:

Image: https://www.cbinsights.com

New research suggests it is possible to slow or even reverse aging, at least in mice, by undoing changes in gene activity—the same kinds of changes that are caused by decades of life in humans.

By tweaking genes that turn adult cells back into embryoniclike ones, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reversed the aging of mouse and human cells in vitro, extended the life of a mouse with an accelerated-aging condition and successfully promoted recovery from an injury in a middle-aged mouse, according to a study published Thursday in Cell.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced today an award of $70 million to the new National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL), the eleventh institute in the Manufacturing USA network. This is the first institute with a focus area proposed by industry and the first funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC).

NIIMBL will help to advance U.S. leadership in the biopharmaceutical industry, foster economic development, improve medical treatments and ensure a qualified workforce by collaborating with educational institutions to develop new training programs matched to specific biopharma skill needs.

Nearly half of the U.S. states and the District of Columbia saw a 10 percent or greater increase in higher education R&D expenditures from FY 2010 to FY 2015 with five of those states (Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Utah) seeing at least a 20 percent change, according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey for 2015. Between FY10-15 overall U.S. research and development (R&D) spending at U.S. universities grew 12.1 percent, from about $61.2 billion to $68.7 billion. 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a new initiative this week to grow the life science research cluster throughout the state, pledging $550 million through a variety of programs including tax incentives, state capital grants, and investment capital with an expected match of $100 million from private sector partnerships for operating support.

The life science initiative includes $250 million in tax incentives for new and existing life sciences companies that are expanding research and development.

While technology is no silver bullet able to solve all that ails the healthcare industry, it has always been part and parcel of any revolution.

Think of the printing revolution and its influence of the Protestant Reformation that forever created a breach in the Catholic church.

At this moment in time, healthcare stands on the cusp of a fundamental reset itself and technology may as well lead the way to whatever system we end up with. A new report from PricewaterhouseCooper’s Health Research Institute, Top Health Industry Issues of 2017 predicts that these eight technologies will radically alter and disrupt the health industry over the next decade.

Funding of R&D has shifted dramatically. Support from the government has waned, from nearly 2% of GDP during the 1960s to 0.6% today. Corporate R&D has grown to 2%. (But) not all R&D is created equal. For companies, spending is speculative with an uncertain, far distant, payoff. “As we became more sophisticated in quantifying things we became less and less willing to take risks. The spreadsheet is the weapon of mass destruction against creative power.”

This is a special time for technology. Five of the world’s seven most valuable companies are U.S. tech firms. But the core innovations underlying Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. are decades old.

“They drove past the place where Wallander had run over the hare. A flock of crows took off as they approached. The hare was already dismembered to the point of unrecognizability. Wallander told Modin that he was the one who had run over it.

‘You always see hundreds of run-over hares along this road,’ Wallander remarked. ‘But it’s only once you kill one yourself that you really see it.’ “

Those of you with an interest in exceptionally well-written and clever mysteries recognize the name Wallander. He’s the Chief of Detectives in a small Swedish town created by award winning author Henning Mankell. The quote is from his book Firewall.

When President Lyndon Johnson spoke about creating a “Great Society” – laying the groundwork for the creation of EDA – he called on our country to “create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.”

No agency within the federal government better embodies this notion than EDA.

At EDA, we have been supporting economically distressed communities for more than 50 years. While EDA does not invest directly in businesses, the agency works closely with local economic development officials to support competitive, bottom up, regionally-owned development strategies focused on stimulating private investment and creating new jobs.

Every year, we reflect on the work we’ve accomplished in fostering economic development in communities across the country.

In 2016, EDA has invested close to $75.9 million in 102 Economic Adjustment Assistance projects and nearly $ 113.9 million in 75 Public Works projects. In total, EDA has invested an estimated $ 277.1 million in approximately 687 projects.