NORMAN — Public investment in science and technology will pay rich dividends down the road in terms of new products, better treatments, job growth, higher per-capita income and better quality of life. That’s the message being delivered around the state in recent weeks by C. Michael Carolina, executive director of the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology.

The little-known state agency provides funding for scientists, researchers, small businesses, manufacturers and organizations.

“It’s about competing in the innovation economy,” Carolina said. “Our mantra now is ‘how do we compete in the innovation economy.’”

So you've got an idea for a small business. Congratulations! Now, it's time to figure out how to make it one that survives and even thrives.

Many would-be entrepreneurs are held back by fears of failure due to the risks of starting a business. But there are ways to lessen those risks -- by taking a sane, step-by-step approach to getting ready to launch.

Here are seven fundamental steps for planning a low-risk launch:

1. Know how you'll fund it. There are many costs to starting a business, even if it's an online one. Do you have money saved up, or access to a credit line you could tap? Will you work a side job? Get relatives to help you? Have a strategy for how you will pay for business expenses.

Entrepreneurs don’t always think of the government when they think of financing their startup, but you might want to in the future.

Region 3 Acting Regional Administrator Bridget Bean from the Small Business Administration came to Wharton last week for a roundtable discussion with Wharton students and Philadelphia entrepreneurs to discuss how the SBA could help their business.

“SBA’s real mission and passion right now, in large part, is to work with young entrepreneurs and many of them are in the tech industries,” said Bean. “So what we need to do is figure out, are our products and services, are they relevant to today’s tech startups? If they are great, how can we enhance them? If they’re not, what do we need to find a better ecosystem of support?”

“Fostering the U.S. Competitive Edge: Examining the Effect of Federal Policies on Competition, Innovation, and Job Growth”

By Richard Bendis

Chairman Quayle and Ranking Member Edwards, thank you for the opportunity to testify before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation on the important topic of “Fostering the U.S. Competitive Edge: Examining the Effect of Federal Policies on Competition, Innovation, and Job Growth.”

My name is Richard Bendis and I am the President and CEO of BioHealth Innovation Inc., (BHI). BHI is a private-public partnership that is predominantly funded by the private sector to foster biohealth innovation-based economic development, which is a unique cluster-based model for regional economic development. This initiative could be used as a model program regardless of industry or cluster strength.

BHI is the first regionally focused innovation intermediary created to connect the university and hospital biohealthresearch strengths of Baltimore with the bioscience industry and federal laboratory strengths of Montgomery County. It has entered into a Partnership Intermediary Agreement with the National Institutes of Health's Office of Technology Transfer and has created the first private-sector funded Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program to identify commercializable science in the 27 institutes of NIH. This program will create new project-based companies and high-paying life science jobs. BHI believes this EIR program is applicable to many federal agencies that have technology transfer offices and support SBIR programs.

BHI has designed a potential national pilot, the Health-Regional Innovation Cluster (H-RIC) model, which will incorporate the best innovation-based economic development practices in the United States and integrate them into one region in Central Maryland. BHI is currently seeking federal financial support from several relevant federal agency partners to accelerate the creation and implemention of this innovative biohealth H-RIC model.

This article attempts to describe the contemporary landscape of University Technology Transfer:

Part 1 presents a brief history of the field

Part 2 summarizes the Litan-Mitchell model of university tech transfer and licensing optimization

Part 3 augments this optimization model

Part 4 supplements the licensing gap with entrepreneurial considerations

I.  University Technology Transfer: An Historical Primer

Universities did not always hold the property rights to the innovations of their faculty. Not until the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 did the federal government, which funds the “overwhelming bulk of university research,” grant these rights to the University itself (Ives, 2012). The grant was, however, conditioned upon a government, non-exclusive license to the invention, the restriction of sale of the invention abroad, and a right of entry for the public interest.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced on March 21 that USDA is seeking applications for grants to help rural businesses create jobs and spur economic development.

USDA Rural Development’s Rural Community Development Initiative (RCDI) program will fund up to $8.6 million to “foster regional innovation, create sustainable jobs and help ensure long-term prosperity.

Intros.They’re the lifeblood of networking – the currency of mavens. They are your route to angel money. Your entrée to sales meetings.

We couldn’t live without them.

But when misused, overused or abused they can diminish your personal brand, consume your valuable time and waste that of the relationships you value the most.

Bottle the following ingredients: the electric buzz of a Red Bull fueled hackerspace, the interpersonal caterwauling of a reality show and pressure, loads of pressure. Now, let it loose on a bus travelling at 60 miles an hour and you get StartupBus.

StartupBus has been around for over two years now and it continues to bring together intrepid tech entrepreneurs, designers and developers who present ideas and develop working prototypes while in transit. Buses carrying these enterprising tech geeks meander towards a final destination, at which time a judging ceremony is held, recognising the best prototype. This all happens in the span of three to five days. It’s like a Startup Weekend on wheels and presents participants with unique time and resource constraints.

Nanotechnology and its use in drug development has been a growing area of investment in the U.S. and that growth has been mapped in an interactive infographic by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.

The map lists nanotechnology companies and organizations across the country by specialties, such as medicine and health, materials, imaging and microscopy, electronics, tools and instruments, academic and government research, and associations.

A California brand monitoring agency called Heardable published a report last week on "The Top 50 Leading Brands in Venture Capital," based on their social media activity and their online presence. The report will set you back $3995, but a reader was kind enough to share his copy with me.

Just one Boston firm shows up in Heardable's overall top 10: OpenView Venture Partners, at #6, which just announced a fresh $200 million fund this week.

A shortfall in computing and IT skills in young people could hurt Europe's ability to compete and worsen youth unemployment, European policy makers have said.

While young Europeans may be good at using mobile smartphones and playing video games, they lack basic digital skills that could make them more easily employable in a rapidly digitising economy, research from the European Commission shows.

Who should be the new president of the World Bank? To replace Robert Zoellick, who leaves in June 2012, the US has nominated Jim Yong Kim, an international health specialist and the head of Dartmouth University. Several African countries have nominated Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian Finance Minister and a former managing director of the World Bank. Brazil has nominated José Antonio Ocampo, an economics professor at the Columbia University in New York.

An intelligent decision on who should be president of the World Bank requires an understanding of what the job involves. With its still talented staff, the World Bank remains the world’s premier source of development expertise. It fosters economic policy, banking, human development (e.g. education, health), agriculture and rural development (e.g. irrigation, rural services), environmental protection (e.g. pollution reduction, establishing and enforcing regulations), infrastructure (e.g. roads, urban regeneration, electricity), and governance (e.g. anti-corruption, legal institutions development). Over the last 65 years, it has made a major contribution to policies that have led to rapid economic growth of countries like India and China, which were once regarded as economic basket cases.

Most of us walk and carry items in our hands every day. These are seemingly simple activities that the majority of us don’t question. But an international team of researchers, including Brian Richmond at the George Washington University, have discovered that human bipedalism, or walking upright, may have originated millions of years ago as an adaptation to carrying scarce, high-quality resources. This latest research was published in this month’s “Current Biology.”

The team of researchers from the U.S., England, Japan and Portugal investigated the behavior of modern-day chimpanzees as they competed for food resources, in an effort to understand what ecological settings would lead a large ape – one that resembles the 6 million-year old ancestor we shared in common with living chimpanzees – to walk on two legs.

We want to create a better future – for consumers, for the environment, and for our business. To achieve that vision, we need to innovate – to improve existing products and create new ones.

We have world-class research and development facilities, making breakthroughs that keep Unilever at the forefront of product development.  But we know that the world is full of brilliant people, with brilliant ideas – and we are constantly looking for new ways to work with potential partners. These ideas could come from individuals, businesses, existing suppliers, universities or NGOs – anyone who has a fresh, serious approach to new thinking.

It’s a phenomenon that has become increasingly apparent over the last five years: for many people, the ideal job has morphed from one that offers lots of money to one that offers meaning--and a competitive salary doesn’t hurt, either. It isn’t just that people are rejecting jobs at large financial institutions with questionable morals (see this New York Times article on Wall Street’s campus recruiting crisis). Jobseekers today want a position that makes them feel good inside.

ReWork, a startup that came out of the 2011Unreasonable Institute, may be the first company that places young professionals directly with "disruptive, world changing organizations"--including non-profits and all manner of triple bottom line businesses. Anyone interested in getting a job through ReWork fills out an application on the website. When a company that has signed up needs employees, they send their job openings over to ReWork before anything is posted to the public. ReWork in turn sends over a list of qualified candidates. If the company selects a candidate from the pool--as opposed to a headhunting firm or somewhere else--ReWork gets a payment.

One of the least discussed elements of a Board of Directors is the chemistry among the Board members. It is critical to a well functioning Board but not always considered in Board construction.

Like a well functioning startup or a top flight sports team, the chemistry between the participants on a Board must be strong. That doesn't mean they need to be best friends who hang out with each other outside of the job. It does mean they must respect each other and lean on each other's strengths to get to the right decisions.

When you are building a Board, you must think about chemistry as much as you think about it when you hire a team. You want to have a Board that can work well together.

Crowdsourcing and the world of medicine are already proving strong bedfellows with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca, who are using open innovation to fund academic research for new treatments and medicines.  However, such ventures are only beneficial as the resources and funding are being made readily available to them, leaving many other research and development projects without the means to get started.

Crowdfunding has already provided a lifeline to charitable, creative and entrepreneurial projects and looks set to offer the same support to medical research, development and provision.

Only a small percentage of medical research projects result in a new product on the market. If Ron Marchessault has his way, the U.S. military will see more and more promising technologies put into use to improve the care of our service members.

Marchessault is the director of technology transfer and commercialization for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center. TATRC's goal is to translate research into new products to advance the care of the nation's warfighters.

TATRC is deeply aware that it must encourage that next breakthrough that will enhance military health -- while making the most effective use of the federal funds that it stewards.

So-called “green technology” is now a major feature of the Rio+20 “green economy” vision. G-77 countries are, understandably, focused on facilitated access to useful technologies that can contribute to sustainable development; the best way to make sure the right technologies are transferred to the right places in the right way is to subject them to meaningful assessment. An emphasis on the positive potential of new technologies requires a concomitant emphasis on a strengthened global, regional and national capacity to monitor and assess technologies. Anything less will incite distrust and invite disaster. Powerful new technologies (such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology and geoengineering) are being proposed and promoted without prior evaluation and no regulation. If technology assessment is deemed too costly or time-consuming, we are likely to find that the cost of not assessing technologies is even greater. Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal in the UK and past-president of the Royal Society, estimated in 2003 that the odds of a technological disaster wiping out at least 1 million lives by 2020 are 50-50. If he is right, history will consider a failure in Rio to commit to technology assessment an egregious negligence.

Searching for a new job while you’re still employed can be tricky — and almost two-thirds of employed individuals are open to looking for a new job. While you certainly want to leverage social media as much as possible, you don’t want to jeopardize your current job by making it obvious that you’re looking for a new position.

However, that doesn’t mean you should avoid social media during your job search. In fact, 54% of social media users employed Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter in their hunt for work in the last year, according to a recent infographic by Jobvite, and one in six found his last job through an online social network.