A deal to reauthorize the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, which were set to expire this Friday, is close to being approved, according to the House Small Business Committee. The two popular programs each set aside government research and development money for small businesses to create and commercialize technology innovations that benefit federal agencies.

The agreement would gradually increase the annual set asides for the programs and extend them through Sept. 2017. Congress could approve it this week and tack it onto the fiscal 2012 defense budget bill.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

There is no hard and fast rule for working out the value of a business. Some industries base the value on the turnover, such as professional practices like accountants, while others have established valuation methods that are peculiar to their industry, such as newsagents.

Greg Cangialosi, a Baltimore entrepreneur who sold his email marketing company this year after a 10-year success streak, is hoping to help jump-start the next big startups in Baltimore.

Cangialosi is teaming up with Sean Lane, chief executive of BTS Corp., a fast-growing software company in Locust Point, to launch what they're calling a hybrid accelerator. Their goal: Make small investments in several startups, germinate their own ideas, and help nurture the city's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

"We want to bring in bright people who are running companies, to help give them a shot in the arm," Cangialosi said.

Vision is the ability to plan for the future based on everything that you have learned so far. But if you don’t know what you want, then it’s hard to plan for it — regardless of intellect or ability.

What do you want?  We’re facing the new year, again. And I can’t help but wonder – are you any closer to that dream?

Simple Questions

• Did you hire the people you thought you needed? Did you train or retrain the team that you already have?

Meetings, travel, Le Web and pitches from countless startups have left me exhausted. I have hardly slept for nearly a week. I am tired and a little irritated and in need of a pick-me-up. An espresso shot isn’t enough. What I need is a conversation that would sharpen my senses dulled by repetitiveness of ideas and marginality of ambition.

And in the nick of time (pun intended), enter Nick D’Aloisio — founder and for now chief executive officer of a London-based company, Summly. (Download the app) On paper, it is yet another start-up with yet another iPhoneapp. Summly essentially looks at the content of a web page and creates a quick summary of that web page, then formats it nicely for the iPhone screen.

As long as most voters avoid reading the likes of Bloomberg and Business Insider, then life science startups – and, more directly, the investors enriched by the good ones – are going to be OK.

But coming under increasing attack from millionaires, billionaires and media types is the concept that rich people and entrepreneurs create jobs.

I participated in a panel last week at the IMPACT 2011 conference in Philadelphia. The panel was all about the technology exit environment and VC’s perspective on how their companies are getting to their desired exits.

The one key point I tried to drill into the audience was about the need to proactively architect your exit.  There are several reasons why I stressed this point:

1. “Companies with great exits are bought, not sold.”

Which means that you need to find a way to get a strategic buyer to notice your company, to see the opportunity in acquiring it, to want your company bad enough, and to make a great offer.  It takes a lot to get an acquirer to that point. And you can’t bank on building one relationship. You need to build the relationship with several potential acquirers in order to even hope of landing one.  These types of relationships take 12-18 months to build. Unless, that is, you get lucky. You could build something that is so obvious and strategic, that you wouldn’t have to lift a finger to pursue an acquisition.  The rest of us have to work a bit harder than that.

If you you think you want to be a CEO, what should you do?

I was talking to a former CEO who had a very successful exit almost two years ago. This a good friend who I have known for over 20 years now. I first met him when I interviewed him to take my job when I was being promoted in 1990 at Oracle.

He worked for me for seven years before he left to take his first role outside of Oracle as a president of a startup. I enjoyed working with him, mentoring him and learning as much from him as he learned from me. We have stayed close professionally and personally, as we both enjoy the outdoors.

The global recession hasn’t changed our consumer culture all that much, but just wait a few years. Increased resource scarcity, population growth, and climate change have the potential to reshape the entire consumer supply chain.

The brands that succeed will be the ones that are the most adaptable to whatever nature throws our way. The Consumer Futures 2020 report, developed by the U.K.'s Forum For The Future, takes a stab at imagining what consumer culture will look like nearly a decade down the line.

Americans are getting fatter every year, and weight-related diseases kill us at a rate second only to tobacco. There's been lots of proposed solutions to that problem--rejiggering the food pyramid, advertising campaigns, soda taxes. But the simplest of all might just be bikes. Yes, bikes.

If you live in the suburbs where any bike trip would be riding along a highway, that probably sounds totally insane. But this infographic produced by Healthcare Management Degree actually provides several data points that suggest that bikes might not be so ridiculous after all.

Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) December 14, 2011

Realism, rather than optimism, abounds for the venture capital and start-up economies in 2012, according to the results from this year's Venture View predictions survey conducted by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Dow Jones VentureSource. When compared to last year's survey, forecasts from venture capital professionals (VCs) and venture-backed CEOs are less confident and more measured for the coming year, with few notable bright spots. There is considerable enthusiasm for information technology (IT) investment, particularly on the consumer side, as well as start-up company momentum, especially job growth. Yet, predictions in critical areas such as IPOs and venture fundraising are tepid at best, reflecting ongoing, unavoidable challenges faced by VCs and entrepreneurs alike.

A new report says the sector is growing - but not as quickly as it could if more investment was found. Commissioned by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the report shows New Zealand is creating new bio-tech companies in line with the OECD average.

I recently participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Economist Corporate Network in Singapore about innovation in Asia.

I started my portion of the discussion by sharing three observations about what I had found unique about innovating in Asia: its unbelievable diversity, both between and within countries (and sometimes even cities); the historical focus of many Asian organizations on replication and cost reduction; and Asia's inconsistent infrastructure (Singapore is amazing, but don't try to schedule more than two meetings a day in Mumbai).

But what I really wanted to discuss were the three biggest trends I see affecting innovation in the region.

Grabbing market share through muscle, not innovation, has served Microsoft and other leading enterprise behemoths well: they play in a $250 billion-plus industry that asymmetrically favors a few vendors. But not surprisingly, this model has not been particularly effective in producing technology breakthroughs -- rather, it has stifled innovation within incumbents' organizations, as well as the broader industry by making the barrier to entry impossibly high. And it has certainly hasn't served customers well. For decades, they've dealt with complicated integrations, infrastructure that's too hard to maintain, overwhelmingly expensive technology, and services and support that overpower the price of the original system by a factor of five to ten.

DES MOINES, Iowa — A statewide program launched Tuesday that is meant to give a boost to Iowa startup businesses by linking entrepreneurs with the people and resources that could help them succeed through professional and networking organizations and events.

StartupIowa will create a network of organizations meant to make it easier to connect startups to resources, the Des Moines Register reported (http://dmreg.co/slvS1p ).

Debi Durham, the director of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, said StartupIowa "will connect the dots and bring all the resources entrepreneurs need to bear.

Another startup accelerator is debuting in LA today—Amplify. With the backing of some well-known Hollywood and Silicon Valley names, the Venice Beach-based incubator is launching a $4.5 million incubator and fund. Investors include Mark Burnett (Apprentice, Survivor), Brian Grazer, Jarl Mohn, Accel Partners, BV Capital, Greycroft Partners, Rustic Canyon, Tomorrow Ventures (Eric Schmidt), Tim Draper, Gordon Crawford, Vivi Nevo, Paige Craig, Diego Berdakin and Tom McInerney.

The accelerator, which is being managed by Paul Bricault and Richard Wolpert, will be looking to incubate and invest in companies at the intersection of technology and entertainment.

How many of us have dreamed of leaving our current jobs to do what we really want to do? And yet, not many of us have actually left the safety of what we do daily unless forced out by layoffs and downsizing.

Why is that? I would argue it’s due to one or more of these reasons:

• We haven’t taken the time to identify a vocation that would serve our passion.
• We lack a plan to make a successful exit.
• We are paralyzed by a combination of our workload, fear of leaving the world we know, and concern about how we will do financially.

President Obama today announced that Commerce Secretary John Bryson would join National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling as co-chair of the White House Office of Manufacturing Policy. The Office of Manufacturing Policy is part of the National Economic Council in the White House and works across federal government agencies to coordinate the execution of manufacturing programs and the development of manufacturing policy.

Since the bottom of the recession in 2009, manufacturing production has grown 14 percent while real goods exports have grown 29 percent. Over this same period, U.S. manufacturing has added over 300,000 jobs, the first time the sector has experienced sustained job growth in over a decade, but more must be done to revitalize American manufacturing.

"Supporting the manufacturing sector will further our ability to innovate at home and compete around the world while generating more high-wage American jobs," Secretary Bryson said. "Since day one, President Obama has been focused on supporting the entire United States manufacturing sector but especially small and medium sized businesses on the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing. We are introducing an 'all hands on deck' approach that coordinates all of our assets - public and private, federal, state, and regional."

To read the full White House announcement, please click here.

Asian is moving towards the remaking of the innovation landscape, I have no doubt about that. Over the next ten years or so, along with a number of other wealth generating activities, the centre of gravity for innovation will shift increasingly towards the East.

I have been lucky to see part of this taking shape in my 15 odd years being based in Asia until recently. For twelve years I was based in Singapore and it is still, like all of Asian, on my advisory radar. Innovation in Asia is quite different; here are some of the dynamics. Others will follow.

Lehigh University, Philadelphia University and Thomas Jefferson University were each awarded $200,000 in the fourth round of the University City Science Center’s QED Proof of Concept Program, the Science Center announced Dec. 12, 2011. It was the first time any of the three universities have received a QED award. The QED Program is designed to facilitate commercial investment in early-stage life science technologies with high potential in the healthcare industry.

The projects receiving awards include a fabric that resists bacterial contamination developed at Philadelphia University, a portable device for delivering oxygen to critical care patients developed at Lehigh University, and a breakthrough diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer developed at Thomas Jefferson University. The projects were selected from 10 finalists by an independent group comprising industry and investment professionals.