For many people who want to solve pressing social and environmental problems, founding a social enterprise is the strategy of choice. The lure of establishing an organization that uses market mechanisms to achieve its mission is substantial. Our data show that MBA students are flocking to classes to learn the art of social entrepreneurship. Over the last five years there has been a substantial increase in the number of leading business schools offering courses to meet this demand.

But there is another way to tackle these problems and find meaning in work. Some innovative and determined professionals working in world's largest and most complex corporations are choosing to stay put and use their corporate platforms to lead change. They are a new breed of business professional — the social intrapreneurs. They are finding creative — and in many cases disruptive — ways to tackle some of society's toughest problems and create long-term value for their companies as well.

Effective January 28, 2013, the Small Business Administration ("SBA") significantly expanded the eligibility rules for Small Business Innovation Research ("SBIR") and Small Business Technology Transfer ("STTR") grants. Under new SBA regulations, firms that are majority-owned by Venture Capital Operating Companies ("VCOCs"), private equity firms, or hedge funds will be eligible to receive SBIR and STTR funding, provided they meet certain qualifying criteria. While there are many similarities between the SBIR and STTR programs and regulations, this note focuses on the SBIR program.

Background

The SBIR program provides federal funding to domestic small businesses engaged in Federal Research/Research and Development with the potential for commercialization. Each year, Federal agencies with extramural research and development budgets in excess of $100 million are required to allocate 2.5 percent of their R&D budget to these programs. Eleven Federal agencies currently participate in the program.1

Entrepreneur Jason Robotham knows an innovative technology and a viable product are great, but not quite enough for a successful business launch. There is one more essential to get things rolling.

The president and co-founder of BioFront Technologies, Robotham and his colleagues applied for and won a Technology Commercialization Grant from the Leon County Research & Development Authority last year. The infusion of much-needed financing helped move the company forward, he says.

Procter & Gamble Co. launched a website to link innovators with the company’s most pressing needs. P&G (NYSE: PG) is focusing on “strengthening areas of our open innovation work to deliver more discontinuous, breakthrough innovations,” Laura Becker, general manager of the company’s Connect+Develop program and global business development, said in a news release. “Part of that work,” she said, “means making connections both easier and more effective.”

Perhaps something like this has happened to you. Here's an annotated graph of what it's like to make a book, with 'joy' being the Y axis with time along the bottom (click to enlarge)...

1. The manic joy of invention. The idea arrives, it's shiny and perfect. I can't wait to share it.

2. The first trough of reality. Now that I've pitched the idea to someone (and I'm on the hook), the reality of what has to be done sets in precisely as the manic joy of invention disappears.

3. Wait! The epic pause of reality. It's not quite as bad as I feared. I can see a path here, maybe. I'm still in trouble, sure, but perhaps...

January's Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index survey has me more frightened than ever about America’s future.

I already knew that our GDP was stalling, if not falling. The Department of Commerce reported recently that GDP declined in the fourth quarter of last year, at an annualized rate of 0.1%. Meanwhile a minimum GDP of 2.5% is required just to tread water economically, in my view, though I think we really need GDP growth of about 4.5% to get the economy humming again.

And I already knew that unemployment was stuck at right around 8%; when you add in those who are “underemployed,” according to Gallup data, it jumps to 17%. These figures tell the story of what was a prosperous and stable democracy that’s now going nowhere.

THE Postal Service’s announcement that it plans to end Saturday mail delivery reminds us of its vulnerability to the technological convulsions of the information age. The agency lost nearly $16 billion last year; stopping Saturday delivery, starting in August, would save about $2 billion a year. To preserve the letter of the law, which requires six-day service, the agency would continue Saturday parcel delivery — a shrewd decision, since, thanks to booming e-commerce, the parcel business is one of the few sectors that is actually growing.

Polls suggest that 7 in 10 Americans support the change, but a predictable outcry has emerged from members of Congress, labor unions, periodical publishers and direct-mail marketers. Other critics warn that ceasing Saturday service will be the first step down an irreversible “death spiral.”

Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

How soon we forget what it was like to be a worker! The moment we become management, or worse, executive management, our focus has to shift from doing work to getting work done through other people. That’s when you need a new set of rules for the workplace. Try these on for size:

1. Make sure your people are aware of what it means to be serving the best interests of your team or organization. Then let them show you, by how they 'team', that they 'get it'.
2. Be forgiving, even when they make mistakes.
3. Be merciful when they make big mistakes.
4. Be compassionate: don’t place them in tempting circumstances.
5. Be gracious, even to those who don’t return it.

AN INVESTOR returning to Scotland from America has hailed the “beginning of the end” of the venture capital (VC) “gap” for Scottish life sciences companies after launching his £50 million fund.

Sinclair Dunlop – who has a track record of securing investments from Europe, the Far East and the United States – has opened his Rock Spring Ventures office in Edinburgh and will pump funds into firms throughout the UK.

About half of the cash – which has been raised from the European Investment Fund, Scottish Enterprise, the Strathclyde Pension Fund and Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities – will remain in Scotland.

Brian Wong is the CEO of Kiip (pronounced “keep”), a category-creating mobile rewards network that is redefining mobile advertising through an innovative platform that leverages “moments of achievement” in games and apps to simultaneously benefit users, developers and advertisers. Backed by Hummer Winblad, Relay Ventures, True Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and others, the company has raised $15.4 million in funding to date. Kiip has been listed by Forbes as one of the 4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Put on Your Watch List, and been named to the Dow Jones FasTech50 List.  

Called the youngest person to ever receive venture capital funding by TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal, Brian received his Bachelors of Commerce degree from the University of British Columbia at age 18, after skipping four K-12 grades. He has been recognized with many awards for his accomplishments and leadership, including: Forbes’ 30 under 30; the Top 20 Under 20 awards for all of Canada; Business Insider’s Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley and 18 Most Important People in Mobile Advertising; Mashable’s Top 5 Entrepreneurs to Watch; and the AdAge Creativity Top 50. Before starting Kiip, Brian led key publisher and tech partnerships at the social news website Digg.com, where he accelerated the company’s mobile presence by launching the Digg Android mobile app.

Lets collaborate on building a vibrant biotech (or any other) community! Nice chestnut, but how does one design a community that functions across industries, geographies, support organizations, academic institutions and federal labs, each with very different missions and views of their (and others’) roles? How do you find a shared vision for these variant groups, one that drives growth for the greater region and doesn’t cause the players for fight over each opportunity as if it is the last scrap of possibility we’ll see? How do you prevent such a vision from becoming another dusty whitepaper, where behaviors weren’t aligned to make it happen?  I had a chance to discuss how such a collaboration should be designed with Rich Bendis, President & CEO of BioHealth Innovation (BHI), an organization which spans from Rockville to Baltimore.

In the U.S., when we think of start-ups, we often think about high-tech. But in Hong Kong, when people think wealth, what comes to mind is real estate. And that’s what Edwin Lee has on his mind now after returning to Hong Kong following a post-9/11 Wall Street layoff.

In January, I took 26 Babson College MBA candidates to Hong Kong and our first meeting was with Lee in the headquarters of his company, BridgeWay Business Builder and Broker, it buys and sells restaurants, nail salons, and other retail stores in Hong Kong. That’s where he told his story to the students in a fashion that many of them told me was very compelling.

I am enjoying a rare moment of convergence between my two parallel worlds — university technology commercialization and 3D printing. By now, you’ve probably heard about 3D printing. 3D printing technology isn’t new — it’s actually been around for a few decades. What’s new is the fact that in the past few years, a “perfect storm” of converging technologies are rapidly opening up a lot of potential new applications.

Recently several leading Chinese universities and the government invested $80 million to form a Industry Alliance 3D printing innovation center in Beijing.  And, did you know that one of the most widely used 3D printing techniques was invented and brought to market by a University of Texas student and professor in the 1980s? Demonstrating the value of federally funded university research, the project was federally funded by DARPA.

On the face of it Apple has one innovation problem that it needs to overcome – find a new category-busting product like the iPhone. Not so easy, of course. But the intervention of hedge fund manager David Einhorn, mad at the company’s inability to leverage value from its $137 billion cash pile, tells us that its innovation problems are significantly bigger.

It needs to re-instantiate the idea that it could be worth a $1 trillion.

Instead Apple is a company whose current, core customer-centric mission has acted like a dehydrator in the company’s idea closet. Its insistence on a very narrow definition of what it does has made it impotent to use that money. It’s creativity is all but dried up.

In an era in which many businesses that pay high wages have been shedding jobs, the wide-ranging employment category of professional, scientific and technical services has been a relatively stellar performer, expanding some 15% since 2001. In contrast, employment dropped over 20% in such lucrative fields as manufacturing and information-related businesses (media, telecom providers, software publishing) over the same period, and finance and wholesale trade experienced small declines.

With an average annual wage nearing $90,000, this category — which includes computer consulting and technical services, accounting, engineering and scientific research, as well as legal, management and marketing services  — increasingly shapes the ability of regions to generate higher-wage jobs. In order to determine which metropolitan areas are doing best, Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group compiled rankings based on both long and short-term growth, as well as the extent and growth of each region’s business service economy compared to the national average.

Anyone on the tech startup scene will have at least heard mention of a Silicon Valley reality TV show. Well Brazil looked at that, called bullshit and produced a show about startups that looks like it’ll be worth watching.

The Silicon Valley show’s executive producer was Randi Zuckerburg (sister of Mark) and by all accounts, it was about as entertaining as getting hit in the head with a wet trout. Brazil’s Go For It by contrast follows a more documentary-style way of doing things to tell the story of a handful of startups.

The world has changed in the last 10 years. The rate of technological development has rocketed — in part due to the high number of working engineers, the boom of the internet and self-perpetuating human empowerment which has resulted. The outcome of this rapid change has caused a fracturing of the traditional business model and the rise of the niche mega-market solutions.

Conventional business has been a strong proponent of the idea of managing through processes and control in order to convert chaos into order. Historically this has been very effective as it allowed efficiency and overall risk management. In an environment which is “evolving” very slowly this works wonderfully. Add to this an overwhelming control that mass media has previously provided businesses and it becomes obvious why enormous corporations have the largest share of global wealth.

Silicon Valley continues the prodigious job growth that has made it stand apart from the rest of America, George Avalos of the Oakland Tribune reports. According to the annual 2013 Silicon Valley Index, produced by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a trade group, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, employment growth in the interconnected tech hubs of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. "Some might even say the job growth is cause for euphoria," Joint Venture Silicon Valley President Russell Hancock said in the report.

Entrepreneurs like to think they’re self-sufficient. That is, after all, one reason why they become entrepreneurs.

The truth is, however, that entrepreneurs can’t handle it all. We like to think that we have control over every aspect of our businesses. We set goals, create marketing campaigns, and do a little accounting—and publicity and admin and tech and legal and branding for our companies, too. But then work gets in the way. Retaining control over the most minimal aspects of any company is tough; we strive and strive to manage every last bit and it usually ends in serious frustration.

WHILE genuine immigration reform has the potential to fix a seriously broken system, four senators have introduced a bill to solve a problem we don’t have: the supply of high-tech workers.

The bill’s authors, led by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, argue that America would benefit from letting more immigrants trained in science, technology, engineering and math work in the country, with the sponsorship of high-tech companies like Microsoft and I.B.M.