One of the most interesting topics of the evening was reverse innovation. Radjou explained that traditionally, new technologies and gadgets were produced in the developed world, and then exported and adapted to developing markets. Now, that is changing. Because the growth potential for lots of industries is now in developing countries such as India and China, innovation is shifting: new things are now invented for developing markets, and then imported and adapted to the quirks of developed nations.

Radjou used GE as an example to explain the reverse innovation phenomenon. When he explained the concept, the first thing that came into my head was… mobile, of course.

Following quickly on the heels of its $43 million grant to the Teacher Quality Partnership program, the U.S. Department of Education announced this week the launch of a $650-million innovation competition aimed at closing the achievement gap in the U.S. educational system.

The competition, called the Investing in Innovation fund (i3), falls under the $5 billion investment in school reform from the America’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

OLATHE, Kan. — The Kansas Bioscience Authority took bold action today to significantly increase the amount of venture capital available to innovative Kansas bioscience businesses — and to lead the state’s economic recovery — approving a commitment to invest $50 million in eight private venture capital funds. The KBA investments will create a powerful magnet for private capital investment from around the country in Kansas bioscience companies.

To qualify for KBA investment, the eight funds are required to have a substantial presence in the state, including establishing Kansas offices. Additionally, the fund managers must each raise a minimum of $25 million from private and institutional sources, effectively leveraging the KBA’s investment to $250 million.

Just like their portfolio companies, venture capital firms continue to find it difficult to raise funding compared with last year.

Through the end of the third quarter, 83 venture funds raised $8 billion, a 58% drop from the $18.9 billion raised by 141 funds at this time last year. In the third quarter, 26 funds raised just $3.5 billion, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

The weakness came even as a boost in public markets provided some respite to limited partners’ liquidity issues. But many LPs remain capital-constrained, or are being cautious about committing to venture firms until they’re sure the funds can hit a certain minimum level.

Ten firms have been named finalists for a venture capital program run by the state of Tennessee. Six will be chosen for the TNInvestco program, in which the state will offer tax credits to insurance companies that invest in their business plans. The winners will be announced in about a month, after a round of interviews.

More info on the 25 applicants to the program can be found here. The six finalists follow:

Council & Enhanced Tennessee Fund, LLC
Innova Fund II, LP
Limestone Fund, LLC
Memphis Biomed Ventures Tennessee I, LLC
NEST-TN, LLC
Solidus-TNInvestco LLC
Tennessee Angel Fund
Tri-Star Technology Fund, LLC
XMi High Growth Development Fund, LLC

In an industry often vilified for putting profits before patients, Daniel Vasella, chairman and chief executive officer of Novartis, the $40 billion pharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, sits in a special spotlight. A physician grounded in science and clinical practice, Vasella is determined to put medical advancement before short-term shareholder returns. Rather than following the more traditional model of channeling R&D budgets into searches for new blockbuster drugs, he focuses instead on drugs that will treat patients with rarer ailments. If those drugs later prove to cure other diseases as well, thereby enlarging their commercial footprint, then so much the better. But potential market size is not what drives him, he says; using science to improve the lives of patients is.

While these are challenging times for the global economy, the energy industry is thriving as federal agencies and investors seek out technologies and opportunities with promising futures. In the coming decades, the five pillars of clean energy — solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass technologies — are intended to form the cornerstone of many U.S. economies.

Highlighting renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies, the 2009 National SBIR/STTR Conference will bring together federal agencies — U.S. Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Education, Department of Transportation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Small Business Administration (SBA), Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Agriculture — as well as venture capital and angel investors, large companies, small businesses, lenders, researchers, university and federal laboratory representatives and other experts who provide assistance to or are interested in doing business with early-stage and advanced-stage ventures.

For more information, visit the conference website.

LOS ANGELES--(Business Wire)-- Beginning with the lack of pre-startup customer response research, and extending to a poor use of their seed capital, two Southern California entrepreneurs have pinpointed three key reasons many new business ventures fail. As reported in their new book, "Successful Startups" (VentureCritical.com), veteran venture founders Bill Benjamin and Jason McDowall point to their own experiences with nine different ventures in setting tighter priorities for new, and more successful startups.

Reviewer DuWayne Peterson, Chairman Emeritus, Pasadena Angels, termed the new guide a must read for both the entrepreneur and the early-stage investor. He commented: "Benjamin and McDowall have written the perfect book for the current investment climate for startups. It provides a straight forward set of steps to build a solid foundation of success for the entrepreneur and the startup venture."

RA Mashelkar, former head of India's CSIR [see IPBiz post Dr. R.A.Mashelkar of CSIR ] is now working on an innovation team of Ambani's Reliance Industries directed to "extreme innovation." Mr. Ambani notes: "What's needed is extreme innovation. Twenty years from now, people will not talk about garages in Silicon Valley, but projects in Indian villages and rural areas that will be scaled up."

Inmelt of General Electric pushes "reverse innovation"—the flow of knowledge and products from the developing world to the developed world. Inmelt also noted: ''The next generation of BPO jobs should be in the US,'' he said, and asked Indian businesses to see the world "from (US President Barack) Obama's eyes." Emphasising the importance of ensuring that politicians come on board, he said, "If globalisation is put to vote today in the US, it will lose 70:30."

While even small businesses now have global market opportunities, they now also have a whole world of competitors, he noted. They also face a product cycle in IT especially that has shifted from years to months.

"It's changed the rules, but it doesn't mean we can't learn those new rules," Bendis said.

The need to adapt readily was also echoed by a local voice. "If intelligent communities around the world share one thing, it's that we're dedicated to constantly re-inventing ourselves," Moncton Technology Group head Doug Robertson said.

Energy entrepreneurs are developing new technologies for generating, storing, and conserving power. Cleantech investing is beginning to recover from the hit it took last year. But changing the underlying energy infrastructure from a one-way power grid to a smart two-way grid could open the gates for more energy entrepreneurs, at different scales.

If the grid is something more like an open network, small producers can sell energy back to utilities. So maybe local farmers have an incentive to generate their own power with solar panels or wind turbines. As King notes, smart meters create opportunities for new technology as well: Software that helps households and businesses reduce their usage at peak times, for example.

CLEVELAND, Ohio – At their annual innovations summit in 2008, Cleveland Clinic doctors, researchers and other professionals announced their third annual list of medical technologies they thought would be hot in the coming year.

According to the Clinic’s own accounting, let’s see how the prognosticators did:

Canadian scientists and inventors have no problem coming up with discoveries and new technologies that should have the world beating a path to their door. Unfortunately, many valuable Canadian innovations end up gathering dust because entrepreneurs can't find the money they need to successfully bring them to market.

Turning an idea into a successful business takes patience, excellent management skills, specialized knowledge and a great deal of money. It's a risky, complex business but absolutely vital to Canadians' standard of living.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- United States Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chair Mary Landrieu, D-La., today held a hearing to evaluate if small businesses were getting greater access to capital and contracts because of the small business provisions within the Recovery Act.

"In the past year we have seen the worst economic conditions since the great depression, making it more critical than ever for small business owners to have greater access to capital and federal contracts to help small firms increase sales and keep Americans employed," Sen. Landrieu said. "While it is clear that most of the small business provisions within the Recovery Act are working, we certainly still have our work cut out for us. With small businesses making up the largest source of employment in this country and the national unemployment rate now almost 10 percent, we need to figure out what else we can do to build on and maximize the provisions in place."

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — NASA selected 152 proposals for negotiation of Phase 2 contract awards in the Small Business Innovation Research program, or SBIR. The selected projects have a total value of approximately $91 million. NASA will award the contracts to 126 small high-technology firms in 27 states.

The SBIR program works with NASA’s mission directorates to competitively select ventures that address research and technology needs for agency programs and projects.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says investing in science and technology is more essential to the nation's health and prosperity than ever before.

The president spoke at a White House ceremony honoring the winners of the National Medal of Science and Medal of Technology and Innovation. With the country facing economic and security challenges, Obama said Wednesday that the winners are a reminder that the U.S. must continue to invest in "the next generation of discoveries and the next generation of discoverers."

Among the award recipients are Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and the IBM Corp.

George Lucas, the film-maker behind such hits as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, shared some uplifting thoughts on artistic passion and technological invention at the World Business Forum in New York on October 6. Tracing his career to its beginnings, he modestly said that it was the pursuit of art, not profit or invention, which fueled the many innovations he can be credited for, from early movie-merchandise strategies to the realistic computer-generated effects pioneered by Lucasfilm and featured in movies such as Jurassic Park.

Art is about communicating emotion via technology, he said. So it fuels creative thinking not only in terms of content, but also execution. It’s been the case since early cave paintings and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. To achieve stunning effects, an artist often needs to push the boundaries of current technologies, and then discover a new way of doing things. And that very artistic process can lead to tech that can be highly monetized; in other words, innovation.

- Clinton was asked yesterday “Is Bill Bernanke correct when he says the recession is over?” His answer was: Yes, No, and Maybe. His explanation: Yes if you’re a professor of economics, since technically the recession is over after two quarters of growth. No, because hiring is a lagging indicator, and it can take a year after the stock market starts recovering for jobs to recover. Maybe, because people can be easily spooked by events and the market can easily fall back due to our concern and fear.

- Interdependence: This is the one word Bill Clinton believes describes the 21st century world. He also stated that the world faces 3 persistent challenges: inequality, instability, and unsustainability.

- Clinton: Solving the climate crisis through innovation would be the #1 best thing we’ve done since entering World War II. We cannot have a new source of jobs, and thus a new wave of economic prosperity, without it.

Popular Mechanics magazine on Thursday will unveil its fifth-annual Breakthrough Award winners, an august collection of designers and products that could do much more than their share to change the world for the better.

From famous inventors like Dean Kamen to a flying car for the Third World to bacteria-powered batteries--and much in-between--the awards are meant to highlight technologies that will shape the way people around the world live and how they interact with everyday products.

Along with sustainability and green living, social entrepreneurship is quite a hot topic. One way people can recognize their own potential for social entrepreneurship is by reading and following the works of those who are at the forefront of the movement. Social entrepreneurship is a grassroots effort that has picked up steam with the help of blogs and bloggers all over the world. By using their resources – the Internet and various social media platforms – they’re spreading the word in a way that stays true to their convictions, and still getting the message across to millions. These leaders are smart, successful, and have a great deal of insight into the constantly changing world around them. In this week’s top five, we’re exploring some of the best blogs for budding social entrepreneurs. These blogs help inspire other entrepreneurs to make a difference