Universities could partner with outside entrepreneurs more often to bring new technology to market if the state provided some seed funding, researchers and business people told legislators Wednesday.

Patents and startup companies resulting from these joint ventures generate money for the schools and jobs for communities, said James McGinity, a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin.

One of the success stories of partnering with private businesses — cited during Wednesday's hearing — involved Enavail, a pharmaceutical company that plans to launch a manufacturing center in Abilene.

In a big philanthropic statement, venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said its six general partners intend to donate at least half of all their lifetime venture-capital earnings to charity.

Associated Press Marc Andreessen, left, and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz, who founded their own venture firm in 2009. To kick off that move, Marc Andreessen, a founder of the firm, said he and the five other general partners at Andreessen Horowitz—Ben Horowitz, Jeff Jordan, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss and Peter Levine—will immediately donate $1 million across six Silicon Valley-related non-profits. Those non-profits include the Second Harvest Food Bank, which aims to alleviate hunger, and The Shelter Network, which is tackling the issue of homelessness.

Andreessen said the charitable gesture is consistent with the venture firm’s philosophy to give back. He added that the move is “absolutely” influenced by his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who teaches philanthropy at Stanford University and recently published a book on giving called “Giving 2.0.”

University of Texas professor James McGinity has defied the odds as an academic entrepreneur.

In 1996, he and a colleague, Bill Williams, went in hock for $1 million to start a company, PharmaForm LLC, in a small building off Yager Lane. By the time they sold the company in 2007, it had 85 employees and annual revenues of more than $10 million.

More important to UT is another McGinity venture — a drug patent that accounted for about $11 million of the $26 million in last year's revenue for the university's Office of Technology and Commercialization. The patented process makes it more difficult to abuse the drug OxyContin by breaking it up and snorting it.

However, the patent — and UT's revenue stream — expires in 2016.

One of the things that made it through the governor’s approval of the budget April 17 was a $5 million allocation for the Central Florida Life Sciences Incubator Consortium.

Never heard of the consortium? That’s OK, they’re new. Here’s a look at what they’re going to be doing with the money.

The City of Orlando will be the government entity getting the check when the new budget comes online in July. According to a concept paper from the Florida House, the “next required ingredient for the advancement of the biomedical industry is the creation of adequate life sciences incubator space.”

Ever since the JOBS Act passed earlier this month, I've been inundated with PR pitches about new crowd-funding platforms. So many, in fact, that I'm surprised a crowd-funding platform hasn't been formed to help seed all the other ones.

To me, there are two big questions for this burgeoning boom:

1. How on earth are these platforms going to police fraud, as the JOBS Act requires them to do? Considering that we've seen fraud at start-ups backed by sophisticated venture capitalists (see: Canopy Financial, Terralliance), do we really expect crowd-funding platforms to have the capacity to dig into their clients' potential problems?

Moreover, what happens to trust in the broader movement if isolated frauds do occur? Will crowd-funding prove popular enough to withstand news stories about little old ladies who lost thousands of dollars to an unscrupulous "entrepreneur?" The per-deal investment limits may help mitigate the damage -- no accredited investors will lose their nest egg on a single company -- but each of these platforms should pay very close attention to the due diligence that their rivals are, and aren't, conducting.

One of the most noticeable changes to the VC business over the past decade is the movement of investment allocation from capital and time intensive sectors like biotech and clean tech to capital efficient and fast moving sectors like internet and mobile.

This makes total sense if you think about it. VCs are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is 3x cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1mm. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

Something funny has happened on the way to new patent legislation: For the first time, the US and EU systems are starting to converge. The new US patent law has moved towards a European, first-to-file approach to patent priority. The European Union is moving, ever so slowly, towards a unified patent system that operates in English with just a few other languages; and it is proposing a unified court system for IP.

As the business economy rebounds, many entrepreneurs are thinking that life will soon get easier, and their opportunity can only grow. In reality, the business world gets tougher every day, with new entrants, new technology, and competitors more easily entering the fray from around the globe.

Way back in 1979, Michael E. Porter proposed his Five Forces framework for analyzing the competitive environment which I think makes even more sense today. Every existing business, as well as every startup, needs to reassess their product or service in the context of these five forces:

Intensity of competitive rivalry. This is where most current business plan analyses focus today. These plans just list a few key competitors out there now, compare feature richness, quality considerations, and pricing. This is an important first step, but it’s only the beginning.

There is a chapter in the history of technology startups, or perhaps more a book, that will be dedicated to Berlin. As with other cities, but particularly those that, in 2012, are attracting what I like to call The International Brigade of startup entrepreneurs, Berlin is plowing its own path… its own, distinct, ecosystem. But there is something uniquely Berlin about how this history is playing out. For if this were the Middle Ages, we’d be talking that time when the villagers began demanding more rights from the feudal, Teutonic knights. Perhaps rising up to reclaim their destiny. Just as Berlin started out with a handful of entrepreneurs dominating the scene – sometimes unwilling to share the wealth with their serfs in the field – now a new wave is bringing a new, collaborative and organic approach.

America’s last competitive advantage — its ability to innovate — is at risk as a result of the country’s lackluster education system, according to research by Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner.

Taking the stage at Skillshare’s Penny Conference, Wagner pointed out the skills it takes to become an innovator, the downfalls of America’s current education system, and how parents, teachers, mentors, and employers can band together to create innovators.

American schools educate to fill children with knowledge — instead they should be focusing on developing students’ innovation skills and motivation to succeed, he says:

Right now Adderall is in short supply, which, according to some reports, is making it harder for pharmacists to fill prescriptions, driving up black-market prices on campuses, and perhaps forcing some students to rely on their native brainpower to write essays on religious symbolism in Billy Budd.

But take heart, unjuiced undergrads—there may be a solution on the way, albeit one that sounds dubious, even dangerous, at first. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves running a weak electrical current through your brain. While tDCS has been around for decades, in the last couple of years it’s been getting a lot of attention, thanks to research suggesting that it speeds up learning for certain kinds of tasks.

As an entrepreneur, new business owner, or investor, you understand your market, your customers, and your competition. But for many, the process of picking a business structure is an unfamiliar road to navigate.

The question whether to form an LLC or LLP doesn’t have to be complicated once you understand how these two entities are created, who can create them, and what legal protections and tax benefits they offer.

First, let’s start with the basics. An LLC is a Limited Liability Company. It’s a separate legal entity that protects owners from liability found with the company (similar to a corporation), while also offering the pass-through tax benefits of a sole proprietorship or partnership. The LLC is free of much of the legal requirements and red tape that govern corporations, such as director meetings, shareholder requirements, etc.

When I read this infographic about the death decline of the once all-powerful BlackBerry, my first thought was “Ag, shame.” Ever wondered how it all went from QWERTY happiness to US$15 a share for the crowd over in Canada? Here is the sad story, all neatly packaged into this infographic along with a progressively balding BlackBerry fan.

Ok, so opinions vary on exactly how ‘dead’ BlackBerry really is. There are still a fair number of loyal users and other human beings who are hoping they may be able to pull themselves out of this mess, and bring out a phone (or three) that really competes with the latest device the fandroids and iSheep are carrying around.

Like clockwork, there's usually a new batch of startups everyone is talking about every month or so.

Sometimes they're older startups that are finally finding their feet.

Sometimes they are just coming out of an incubator like Y Combinator. Either way, everyone is pretty excited about them.

Today, the Obama Administration announced its commitment to strengthening bioscience research as a major driver of American innovation and economic growth.  The National Bioeconomy Blueprint outlines steps that agencies will take to drive the bioeconomy—economic activity powered by research and innovation in the biosciences—and details ongoing efforts across the Federal government to realize this goal.

The bioeconomy emerged as an Administration priority because of its tremendous potential for growth and job creation as well as the many other societal benefits it offers. A more robust bioeconomy can enable Americans to live longer and healthier lives, develop new sources of bioenergy, address key environmental challenges, transform manufacturing processes, and increase the productivity and scope of the agricultural sector while generating new industries and occupational opportunities.

In a close finish, Lemonade Day Alaska won this year’s U.S.SourceLink Innovative Practices Challenge and the grand prize of $2,500. The winning entry was announced and featured at the U.S.SourceLink Power Up! Conference on April 23, 2012, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

U.S.SourceLink hosted the video contest among its affiliates and their resource partners to highlight the best economic development practices that support entrepreneurs in their local communities.

Four finalists competed for the $2,500 grand prize in the final voting round:

• Whitewater Incubation Program from Whitewater, Wisconsin
• Connect Arkansas Entrepreneur/eCommerce Education Program
• Operation JumpStart Missouri
• Lemonade Day Alaska

I was recently asked by master marketer Jay Abraham to be on his radio program, "The Ultimate Entrepreneur," along with several others, including Stephen Covey and Mark Cuban. In that company, I knew I had my work cut out for me!

Let's start with the basics. What better way than to create the ABCs of entrepreneurship? Over the past few years I have developed my version of the ABCs of selling, leadership, negotiating, networking and team-building, which are among my most requested columns.

“Need, Speed and Greed,” an exclusive interview with bestselling author, Vijay Vaitheeswaran

John Nyaradi: Hi, everyone, I am John Nyaradi, Publisher of Wall Street Sector Selector, a financial media site specializing in exchange traded funds and global markets. Today I am pleased to welcome our special guest,Vijay Vaitheeswaran. Vijay, welcome to Wall Street Sector Selector.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran: Great to be with you.

Venture capitalists invested $5.8 billion in 758 deals in the first quarter of 2012, according to a MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The report shows that after a strong fourth quarter 2011, VC investment activity for the quarter fell 19 percent in terms of dollars and 15 percent in the number of deals compared to the fourth quarter of 2011 when $7.1 billion was invested in 889 deals.

While the Life Sciences (biotechnology and medical device industries combined) and Clean Technology sectors saw decreases in both dollars and number of deals in the first quarter, there were double-digit percentage increases in dollars invested in the Consumer Products and Services, and Telecommunications industries. Additionally, investments into companies in the Later stage of development experienced an increase, rising 11 percent and accounting for 40 percent of total dollars invested during the first quarter of 2012.