Firms who want to revitalise their businesses to be ripe for export opportunities are being urged to make proposals for the €22m second phase of the Technology Transfer Strengthening Initiative.

The Minister for Research and Innovation Sean Sherlock, TD, today opened a call for applications for the €22m scheme which supports new company creation and the transfer of intellectual property between higher education institutions and industry.

Will the next Mark Zuckerberg please stand up?

What are the odds that another young student at a prestigious university will develop an Internet social platform to solve a campus problem, which will ultimately scale to become a national phenomenon? Ari Winkleman may have done exactly that. The Drexel University senior is the Founder and CEO of Involvio, a new social management platform that empowers students to know what's going on across campus anytime, anywhere.

Winkleman is just one of thousands of new high-growth entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to angel investors and venture capitalists at events across America designed to connect entrepreneurs and investors. Winkleman's pitch impressed judges at the Early Stage East pitch competition in Baltimore, Md., on Dec. 14, where Daymond John (ABC's "Shark Tank" and founder of FUBU) served as moderator. Nearly 30 entrepreneurs were given an opportunity to make their pitch for seed and early stage capital ranging from a couple hundred thousand dollars up to $2.5 million.

The last 12 months of scientific achievement are reflected in the researchers that made significant contributions to their fields. Here, The Scientist reviews some of the most popular scientists in this year’s headlines, recognized with prestigious scientific awards or remembered upon their passing.

Top Science Awards of 2011:

Nobel Drama

Three immunologist shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—Jules Hoffmann of the University of Strasbourg in France, Bruce Beutler of Scripps Research Institute in California, and Ralph Steinman of The Rockefeller University in New York. Hoffmann and Beutler shared half of the award for their discovery that the Drosophila Toll gene regulates the fly’s immune response against bacteria and fungi, while Steinman took the other half of the award for first describing the immune system’s dendritic cells and their role in activating and regulating adaptive immunity.

It’s clear that millennials will be a powerful generation of workers and that those with the right skills will be in high demand. They may be able to command not only creative reward packages by today’s standards, but also influence the way they work and where and how they operate in the workplace. They may also be one of the biggest challenges that many organisations will face.

An infographic from VentureBeat has been circulating around the web that cites the U.S. as atop the rest of the world in terms of innovative countries. This is shining hope for Americans looking for an end in sight to the recession. According to the Census Bureau, young businesses are some of the biggest drivers for job growth.

But, trouble arises when you consider that the bulk of innovative entrepreneurial ventures are in high-tech industries. Success in these industries is highly dependent on the scientific and mathematical aptitude of the available workforce. However, in comparison with their Asian and European counterparts, the U.S. commonly ranks poorly in these fields, according to The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This is a problem.

Yesterday was a busy day. Google announced at 3am EST their "GoogleGiveBack" program, listing grants they've made to support education, technology innovation, and the fight against modern-day slavery. Shona Brown, SVP of Google.org, posted on the company's official blog that "science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young people, so we've decided to fund 16 great programs in this area...providing enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students." We are included and are deeply grateful to receive a $250,000 Google grant to support the growth of the Globaloria learning network in San Jose/Silicon Valley. We've been working nationally and globally in the past five years, but the aim in Silicon Valley is to grow local talent by teaching kids game design and computer programming to cultivate a broad array of STEM knowledge and digital skills, improve community-wide civic engagement and regional innovation, and help ease Silicon Valley's talent crunch.

Why do some nations prosper while others struggle? Businesspeople, policymakers, and social scientists have sought to answer that question for centuries, starting as early as 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. A closely related question is, Why are some nations more innovative than others? Innovation is increasingly seen as the key to unlocking competitive advantage, as much for countries as for companies.

Comparing innovation on a nation-by-nation basis, however, is fraught with difficulty, given the diversity of national business practices, economic structures, and financial and economic reporting conventions. Resolving these difficulties is the main objective of the Global Innovation Index (GII), a research project conducted by INSEAD in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Company, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (a specialized agency of the United Nations). The research measures innovativeness for 125 economies. This year’s GII report (available at www.globalinnovationindex.org) ranked Switzerland as the world’s most innovative nation, followed, in order, by Sweden, Singapore, China, Finland, and Denmark — and the U.S., in seventh place.

Whenever I ask managers and business leaders about their most pressing problems at work, I’ve been a bit surprised to hear from so many who say they are struggling with a “bad boss” or a hopelessly toxic work environment.

A bad boss is a big problem, and not easily fixed. In fact, front-line leaders are the primary drivers of employee engagement (or lack thereof) and apparently there are a lot more of them out there than I realized. If you are working for a bad boss I suggest you try these tactics over a three- to six-month period.

A group of researchers at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo has developed a car seat (JP, PDF) that can identify drivers when sitting down. The trick is that the system measures the pressure people apply on the seat through a set of 360 sensors.

Each sensor is measuring pressure by its own and sends the information to a laptop, which aggregates the information to show key data like the highest value of pressure, area of contact on the seat (see below), and other factors. According to its makers, the system was able to identify drivers with 98% accuracy during experiments.

Our love letter to a favorite author and our partners in the region, wishing them the happiest of holidays. (And all it cost us was markers, poster board, $20 for a green drop cloth and a little of our dignity!)

We hatched in our region a wonderful plot to create, thriving young businesses where they were NOT!  We all came together! We all had to rally! We started from scratch . . . this wasn’t Silicon Valley. Civic leaders right off saw startups’ potential but capital, they knew, was super essential. And along with dollars, assistance was needed, to accelerate growth of the companies seeded. Since both were important: the help and the cash; the region dove in and made a big splash.

Thinking of giving your friend a call? Your smartphone will already have instantaneously placed the call in the world of tomorrow — it unlocked itself from secure mode as soon as it heard your name or recognized your face in its camera. That's the vision based on two of five technological breakthroughs which could revolutionize the world within the next five years, according to IBM.

The other three breakthroughs may sound both strangely familiar and also wildly ambitious. Emerging technologies can transform any movement or vibration into energy to keep devices such as smartphones charged. Junk mail could vanish once email programs learn to screen messages based on seeing what you do or don't read or delete. The spread of mobile devices in places such as Africa could even lead to the end of the digital divide that keeps many people from having basic access to knowledge.

1. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

2. "Change before you have to." - Jack Welch

3. "People don't resist change. They resist being changed!" - Peter Senge

4. "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy

5. "The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking." - Albert Einstein

The promise of better technology tools for the classroom, frustration over student cheating, and controversy concerning social-media on campus topped the list of popular topics here at Wired Campus in the past year.

We crunched the numbers and determined which stories scored the most readers. One thing is certain: The idea that Google might build a course-management system made people look. The story titled “Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System” set a record here at Wired Campus, with more than 100,000 views. Days after the story ran, a spokesman for Google clarified that the company is not helping to build the course-management system, though its developers at Pearson did make the software compatible with Google’s popular services.

First, for anyone unfamiliar with the Tim Tebow phenomenon, here’s the story in brief. Tebow is a college football Heisman Trophy winner who now plays quarterback for the NFL’s Denver Broncos. He wears his evangelical faith on his sleeve and wins in unconventional ways, both of which have created controversy and media buzz. But what’s really amped the buzz to a high pitch is his winning record since becoming the Broncos’ quarterback: six wins in the last eight games, all of them against improbable odds. (ESPN analyzed the team’s chances of winning those six games based on where they stood in the fourth quarter and found the odds to be 380,000:1) Now the media story has become: “What is it about this man that makes him a winner?”

Most entrepreneurs have learned that it’s almost always quicker and easier to get cash from someone you know, rather than angel investors or professional investors (VCs). In fact, most investors “require” that you already have some investment from friends and family before they will even step up to the plate.

You see, investors invest in people, before they invest in ideas or products. Since they don’t know you (yet), their first integrity check on you as a person is whether your friends and family believe in you strongly enough to give you seed money for your new idea. If they won’t do it, they why would I as stranger invest in you?

In recent months, I've met at least three people who have been the victim of hackers who've taken over their Gmail accounts and sent out e-mails to everyone in the address book.

The e-mails, which appear legitimate, claim that the person has been robbed while traveling and begs that money be wired so that the person can get home. What makes the scam even more effective is that it tends to happen to people who are actually traveling abroad—making it more likely that friends and families will be duped.

The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have feared that new technologies would permanently erode employment. Over and over again, these dislocations of labor have been temporary: technologies that made some jobs obsolete eventually led to new kinds of work, raising productivity and prosperity with no overall negative effect on employment.

It’s almost time to turn the page on 2011. But before you start thinking about your New Year’s resolutions, it’s a good time to take stock of various odds and ends that should be completed while it’s still 2011.

Perhaps you have been considering incorporating or forming an LLC for your business, but you haven’t yet made the time in your daily calendar or maybe you just aren’t sure when is the best time to do so.

After four successful books, the last of which, What The Dog Saw, is a collection of essays published in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is back at what he does best: gathering gripping stories and research that are linked and then providing an explanation for a certain phenomenon and some bursting of popular myths.

Like declaring that Steve Jobs was not a classic innovator. When Gladwel l recently used the platform of HCL Technologies' global customer meet at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando to throw some light on his new book, which will revolve around "outsiders" who take "social risks", he ruffled many Apple fanboys in the audience.

If your kids or you (I don’t judge) haven’t sent your letters to Santa Claus by now then it’s a little late (Christmas is only a few days away), I am afraid. Or is it? It seems the man in red really wants to be reached this year, so he has made it possible for good boys and girls who were too busy, say…chasing deadlines, to send in their requests.

It would be silly for the age of social media to truly say it had become fully immersive if Santa wasn’t on Twitter or a dedicated Facebook page. It is my duty, therefore, to help you send your wish list to the “old St. Nick”. I think the elves have just enough time to craft you an iPad 2 or Galaxy SII, it’s the little things.