An "elevator pitch" is a concise, well-practiced description of your startup and your plan, delivered with conviction and enthusiasm, that your mother should be able to understand in the time it would take to ride up an elevator. Everybody knows about these, but few people seem to deliver a good one.

A good elevator pitch is not just for an elevator discussion. Use it in every networking situation and business conference introduction. The elevator pitch should be the first few paragraphs of your business plan, your executive summary, your investor presentation, and the first page of your web site. A different message everywhere is no message.

The University of Massachusetts placed in the top 15 nationally in generating income from the licensing of faculty-derived discoveries and products, UMass President Robert L. Caret said in remarks to the Board of Trustees Committee on Science, Technology & Research on Thursday, Jan. 26.

“Our ability to generate $40 million from faculty discovery and innovation is a testament to the great quality of the UMass faculty on all five campuses and also shows that the University is extremely focused on obtaining its fair share of the proceeds when products reach the marketplace,” President Caret said.

Licensing data for fiscal year 2010 is available through STATT 3.1 (Statistics Access for Tech Transfer). STATT 3.1 is a searchable, exportable database that contains data collected by AUTM over the last 20 years and allows for individualized searches of information about U.S. and Canadian institutional research expenditures, patent filings and expenditures, licensing activities, and startup creation. This new version also features improvements to the way exported data is organized.

All members whose institutions participated in the 2010 survey receive a free annual subscription to STATT. Members from nonparticipating institutions can purchase an annual subscription for $100. The annual subscription fee for nonmembers is $450.

IRISH BUSINESS funding for research and university technology transfer offices (TTOs) fails to give Irish start-up companies the support they need when they need it.

Instead, TTOs tend to take large chunks of company equity in exchange for funding, exactly when the companies are most vulnerable, or drown them in bureaucracy, according to UCD School of Business lecturer and researcher Dr Rory O’Shea.

But new models of operation could free up stale university intellectual property (IP), and rejuvenate how research is done and transferred into companies both inside and outside the university, to benefit society and the economy, he says.

In 2010 the British government launched a novel approach to promoting innovation and economic growth – and it worked. Instead of funding top-down projects to support its East London Tech City initiative, it simply invited business leaders and university officials to connect and brainstorm at regular high-level meetings in the prime minister’s office. The government’s goal was to act as matchmaker, triggering projects that would accelerate the growth of a promising new technology cluster.

Imperial College London, University College London and Cisco Systems Ltd. were among the first to get involved in the meetings, and one year after the launch of the initiative the match-making clicked. On 10 November, they announced a three-way collaboration to create a joint innovation hub in Shoreditch called Future Cities Centre, focusing on intelligent, sustainable cities of the future, and mobility research.

Apple’s contribution to the digital age is a noticeable one. It’s hard to argue with virtually organised music and the contribution of a unified application ecosystem. But are these innovations sizable enough for people to think Steve Jobs was the second greatest innovator ever?

A recent MIT poll surveyed 16-25 year olds in an attempt to identify attitudes towards the world's greatest innovators. Jobs scored noticeably well in second place, with 24% of those surveyed believing his contributions are worthy of the number two spot.

WE ARE ALL photographers now, creators of instantaneous nostalgia with our digital cameras and smartphones – maintaining a visual record of our lives has become second nature to most people. There was a time, of course, when the process of instant photography was synonymous with Polaroid, a brand and a technology that always managed to seem vaguely magical – capturing an image on to paper in mere moments.

The magic was all the work of Edwin Herbert Land, one of the most inspired, and inspiring, inventors of the 20th century. Born in Connecticut in 1909, Land had an early fascination with optics and enrolled in Harvard in 1927, studying chemistry, but after his first year he became a member of that vaunted club of inventors who dropped out of college – for the inspired few, it seems, the rigour of formal education doesn’t have much to offer.

In October of last year, Interbrand released its annual report of best global brands. IBM came out on top as the most valuable tech brand, with Apple making the biggest jump from #17 to #8.

Facebook doesn’t appear on the list since its not a public company, but with Facebook’s IPO looming, one wonders where it would place.

The report’s methodology takes into account the ways in which a particular brand affects its organisation and it focuses on three key aspects namely: the financial performance of the branded products or services, the role the brand plays in the purchase decision process — the effect of branded versus non-branded –, and the measure of a brand’s ability to secure the delivery of expected future earnings.

"...most often the very skills that propel an organization to succeed in sustaining circumstances systematically bungle the best ideas for disruptive growth. An organization's capabilities become its disabilities when disruption is afoot." – Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Solution

In November 2005, Paul Graham wrote an essay titled "The Venture Capital Squeeze." It had been over five years since the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, and it was becoming apparent that VC firms were having trouble deploying the tens of billions of dollars they raised during the boom years. Graham argued that the proliferation of money combined with the decreasing costs to start a business were making the VC job more difficult, prophesying significant changes for the industry. He was right.

Massachusetts had its best year to date for venture capital in 2011, beating the 2010 historic high, the head of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council told attendees at its policy leadership breakfast in Boston Wednesday.

“We believe Mass.-based companies raised more than $1 billion in VC funding last year. Massachusetts companies are now getting one-quarter of all biotech venture dollars in the country,” said Robert Coughlin, president and CEO of MassBio. He said the council still is reviewing the numbers. MassBio supplied a written copy of his remarks to Mass High Tech.

A recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association found that Massachusetts had $740.7 million in 91 deals in the fourth quarter of 2010, higher than the $541 million invested in last year’s comparable quarter, with the same number of deals.

HAVING A TALENTED TEAM ON BOARD IS CRUCIAL. BUT SO IS A PROCESS THAT ALLOWS THEM TO MAKE THE MOST OF THEIR ABILITIES. AND GOOD INNOVATION CONSULTANTS CAN TAILOR THE METHOD ACCORDING TO AN ORGANIZATION'S STRENGTHS, WRITES DOBLIN'S BRIAN QUINN. 3 NOTES 159 TWEETS 1 LIKES

As an innovation consultant, I found the recent Co.Design post “Do Innovation Consultants Kill Innovation?” troubling. Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen are right to castigate much of the innovation consulting industry, which is unfortunately full of firms that have rebranded themselves as innovation experts. Just peruse the website of any large consulting firm. Yesterday’s management, brand, or operations consultant is today’s innovation guru.

You need a good idea. Startup cash can make a real difference. Business experience and savvy also help, of course. But to take advantage of the most powerful weapon an entrepreneur can have, find a mentor.

A good mentor helps you think through a business idea, suggests ways to generate that startup capital and provides the experience and savvy you’re missing. You’ll get praise when you deserve it and a heads-up when trouble comes -- probably long before you would have noticed it yourself.

I was listening to a sports call-in show the other morning and the host made an interesting point.

In the NFL, the coaches pick the players.  In college, the players pick the coaches.

He tried to generalize and say that's why all the college coaches are the fresh-faced energetic types and why the NFL coaches look like they've been doing nothing but pouring over video at a desk for 90 hours a week with coffee and a donut.

I don't have the stats to prove or disprove that particular point, and I try to avoid generalizations, but what is certainly clear to me that the most important thing in college football as a coach is being able to recruit the talent.  You have to be able to walk into someone's house, meet mom and dad, garner trust, and shake hands to close the deal and bring a wary high school kid to your program.  If you can't recruit, you're dead--because at the end of the day, the best kids are choosing the schools, not the other way around.

KANSAS CITY, KAN. (Jan. 26, 2012)— The PIPELINE entrepreneurial fellowship program unveiled its first Regional Class of entrepreneurs (“Innovators”) tonight at its capstone event “Innovator of the Year.” The Regional Class of 12 includes entrepreneurs from Kansas City, Wichita, Lincoln, Omaha and St. Louis. The class includes the following high-potential entrepreneurs:

Mark Allen, Wichita (Enertech); Pierre Barbeau, Kansas City (Moblico); Nathan Benjamin, Kansas City (InvenQuery/Planet Reuse); John Carpenter, Omaha (BastLab LLC); Miranda Coggins, Kansas City (The Lano Co.); Justin Graves, Kansas City (Infegy); Blake Lawrence, Lincoln (Hurrdat Social Media); Matthew MacEwan, St. Louis (NanoMed LLC/Retectix LLC); Ben Pankonin, Lincoln (Social Assurance); Brandon Shuey, Wichita (FlipHound.com); Xandra Sifuentes, Olathe (Metactive Medical LLC); and, Ben Vu, Omaha (SkyVu Entertainment)

PIPELINE also announced its 2011 “Innovator of the Year,” Kyle Johnson, Audio Anywhere, Lawrence. He was selected after a competition that included a refined business plan, a pitch to an expert panel and a score carried over from performance during the fellowship year.

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On popular tech startup fundraising site AngelList, Massachusetts has the second-lowest average amount raised of the five big startup markets and the lowest average startup valuation among the markets, according to data from new site Startup Data Trends. The site launched Thursday, a project of Cambridge VC firm Atlas Venture    and Boston development shop Bocoup LLC. The service pulls trends out of data from the angel investment tracking site, AngelList.

Running a tech company and looking for Ruby developers? Got a “great idea” for a startup, and all you need is a programmer? Congratulations! You’ve just joined the 10,000 other geeks in the same coder-starved boat, especially if you live in a technology hub like Silicon Valley or New York City.

Many founders mistakenly believe money or perks are the answer to hiring programmers. Fortunately for the cash-strapped startup, that’s not the case.

Hunch founder Chris Dixon (one of the investors in my company, Contently) writes that the most important thing about recruiting programmers is understanding what motivates them: interesting challenges, talented coworkers, and working on software that gets used by a lot of people. Money and free Cheetos are great, but they come last.

“Hi” in its cheery logo—was dedicated November 18. Located in Allston, it is adjacent to Harvard Business School (HBS), which not only paid to renovate and staff the former WGBH building at 125 Western Avenue, but is making the entire lab available to users throughout the University, and opening part of it to the surrounding community. The lab occupies the building’s first floor; the two upper floors have become team-based classrooms and project spaces for HBS’s new first-year field-immersion course (which involves students in hands-on business challenges and visits to host companies around the world this January). Harvard Magazine

Maybe this rings a bell for you: You want to launch an innovation program at your company but you can’t get any support.

I talk all day to people who are interested in innovation. They know in their hearts that embracing innovation is the only way their organizations will flourish. They know the only way their company can compete in the difficult economic climate we face is to adopt an innovative approach. These people I talk to fall in love with the idea of collaborative ideation; assembling all of their smart people while they share ideas and other information of interest. They yearn to allow their cohort to find others within the company who are like minded; with common areas of interest.

“Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in a safe place?”

These words, famously uttered by the late entrepreneur Robert Noyce, sprung to mind this week when I saw the results of GE’s second annual Global Innovation Barometer, which raised some interesting questions around the role of optimism in spurring innovation and which makes me wonder how businesses and governments can better harness the power of positive thinking to drive positive change.

The Barometer sheds new light on how companies around the world are approaching innovation, and how executives are feeling about their ability to innovate. Just in time for the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, this temperature check on the business community’s “innovation mood” is particularly timely given 92% of the survey’s 2,800 respondents name innovation as the main lever to create a more competitive economy. Some surprising findings between levels of optimism, levels of growth and confidence in competitiveness across the 22 markets surveyed are certainly deserving of a closer look by world leaders trying to propel the economy forward.

Pick-up nearly any business book and the recommendation is likely to be the same: when building a team, hire for attitudes and train for skills. In fact, my Forbes.com colleague Dan Schawbel has just written a posting with that very title: Hire for Attitude in which he interviewed Mark Murphy, author of Hiring for Attitude. It’s everywhere, and it  sort of makes sense, doesn’t it, because every day we have to get up and go into work, and if the team is a difficult one to be around — if their attitudes are bad — then it’s going to be another day of “no fun,” and our motivation will begin low before anything else even has a chance to frustrate us.

But, attitudes will only get you so far, and when real change is needed — innovation, for example — then attitudes are not likely to be enough to get you to where you want to go. In such situations, you need skills, and lots of them.