Happy Friday! The Commerce Department will establish a new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to help small businesses grow faster, part of the Obama administration's new $100 billion innovation agenda announced earlier this week. The administration is especially interested in helping small businesses and entrepreneurs as statistics suggest businesses less than five years old accounted for nearly all private sector employment growth from 1980 to 2005.

The new office will report directly to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and help coordinate the federal government's efforts to help entrepreneurs turn their ideas into actual products, companies and jobs. It will also focus on education, training and mentoring issues; improving access to capital for small businesses; and help create government-backed incentives for entrepreneurs and potential investors.

Locke will also lead a new national advisory council on entrepreneurship and innovation, stacked with various experts in the field.

The quick news is the informal conference committee hasn't done its job and no SBIR Reauthorization compromise was produced. SBIR (this time along with STTR and the DOD's CPP) has been extended again -- a mere month to October 31st. Gee. Is anybody surprised? We have a do-little-but-argue-and-sling-mud Congress. Maybe Dr. Dolittle is in charge.

Remember the Dr. Dolittle story? In the charming Hugh Lofting series of children's stories he was a doctor who eschewed human patients for animals, and he spoke their language. He lived in a fantasy world. Sort of like our Congress. But that's not why I'm raising this metaphor.

I have two reasons, actually. The first is his name -- irresistible!

It’s rare that a venture-backed startup in cleantech these days doesn’t have an eye on government funding opportunities via the stimulus package. As Battelle Ventures’ General Partner Kef Kasdin told us in an interview, “Why rob a bank? There’s money there Because that’s where the money is.”

But startups, for the most part, haven’t been big winners in stimulus awards so far. A123Systems, a later-stage battery startup based in Massachusetts (which went public on Thursday) snagged one of the largest grants in the first round of funds allocated under the Department of Energy’s highly competitive battery manufacturing program, but many more smaller companies didn’t make the cut, at least in that round. Kasdin thinks startups can do better.

The idea of small, capital-efficient venture funds is resonating so strongly among technology investors that it has spawned a support group.

Operating largely under the radar, about 30 small, up-and-coming venture firms have been meeting annually for the last four years to discuss matters of mutual concern.

The latest of these invitation-only events was last week in New York. The conference was called VC2.0, which pretty much sums up how members think their philosophy relates to venture investing, at least on the technology side.

Venture-capital firms remain on the prowl for new businesses, but it's more of a stroll than a hunt.

Venture-capital investing fell to $3.7 billion in the second quarter, down more than 50% from $7.6 billion in the year-ago period, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Although that second-quarter sum represented a 15% jump over the prior quarter, the number of deals remained flat at 603, PwC said.

Twitter, the fashionable microblogging service, is set to close a round of financing of around $100 million that values the three-and-a-half-year-old start-up at $1 billion, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans.

The investors include Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company, and the current Twitter backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Pro Mujer, an organization that funds microcredit cooperatives in Latin America, also provides women’s health screenings, using a special van retrofitted with medical consultation rooms and staffed by a nurse and doctor. The vans travel into remote parts of southern Peru, combining financial help with preventative health care and education.

Women in Peru get health care during meetings of their microcredit group in a program of Pro Mujer, a non-profit supported by Seattle-based Global Partnerships. The van combines mobile banking with health services to rural areas.. It’s based on a simple fact that people who are poor tend to get sick, and people who are sick easily become poor, or deeper in debt.

More than 50 years ago, noted economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, "The resistance which comes from interests threatened by an innovation in the productive process is not likely to die out as long as the capitalist order persists." He might have been more prescient if he had said that such resistance would actually strengthen over time.

IBM keeps pushing into emerging markets in an effort to encourage startups and technology adoption around the world. Today, it is announcing it has opened a Linux innovation center in Kazakhstan, the nation made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy movie, Borat.

Sep 23, 2009 (Congressional Documents and Publications/ContentWorks via COMTEX) -- SBCOE | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- H.R. 3614 Passes and Extends SBIR and other SBA Programs to Small Businesses

WASHINGTON, DC - Today Ranking Member Sam Graves (R-MO) of the House Small Business Committee spoke on the Floor in support of H.R. 3614. The bill will extend all of the Small Business Administration (SBA) programs currently scheduled to expire on September 30, 2009 through October 31, 2009. Included in the extension is a correction to the America's Recovery Capital (ARC) loan program giving small businesses that qualify for a 7(a) loan and ARC loans more flexibility in the use of the funds. Changes to these programs will require no additional funding and are designed to increase the flow of capital to small businesses. The measure passed by a vote of 417 to 2.