Venture capital deal volume in the healthcare industry continued its downward trend in the third quarter, according to the latest report from a venture research firm.

The number of third-quarter healthcare venture deals stood at 143, the lowest in at least five quarters, according to New York-based CB Insights. The number represented a decline of 22 percent from the year-ago quarter, but a drop of just 3 percent from the second quarter.

“With chatter about an unfriendly regulatory landscape getting louder and a generally uncertain exit environment, healthcare venture capital continued its consistent trend downwards,” the report said.

Indeed, industry complaints about regulators — never the most popular people with the business community in the first place — have only seemed to grow louder this year.

Oct. 14--The venture capital industry will continue to shrink, putting pressure on local start-ups hoping to raise money to grow their operations, investors said during a conference Thursday.

As more venture firms close amid the struggling economy, there is less money to invest. At the same time, existing firms are struggling to raise funds, which will stifle innovation among budding entrepreneurs.

Last year, there were 462 active venture firms that managed $177 billion. That's compared to 1,022 firms that managed $220 billion in 2000.

During a presentation at the Minnesota Venture & Finance Conference, Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said the entrepreneurs getting money today have the strongest ideas and execute their plans.

Most research universities have technology transfer offices to help researchers transfer their ideas to the private sector. But those partnerships are good for more than transferring intellectual property. Sometimes they yield a talent transfer as well: It's not unusual for young researchers involved in those projects to join the companies that sponsored their academic pursuits. That kind of transfer benefits both companies and researchers, say experts from both sides: Emerging scientists gain access to plum jobs right out of school, while companies cultivate promising employees with the specific skills they need to compete in their industry.

In highly technical fields like semiconductors, there's a very large pool of scientists and engineers to hire from, says Celia Merzbacher, vice president of innovative partnerships at the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), which is based in Durham, North Carolina. But it's not always easy to find candidates with the skills to become effective workers right away. "When I ask companies, 'Do you have trouble hiring people?' they often will say, 'No,' " she says. "But if I ask, 'Do you have trouble hiring people with the right skills who are really good?' then they acknowledge that, yeah, sometimes they settle for less."

The past year seems to have yielded various waves of content celebrating making mistakes. Advancing the “failure at the heart of innovation” theme seems to have become a cause célèbre for the creativity and innovation set. Celebrating mistakes as part of innovation was the topic of a July Innochat on Twitter on innovation failure and, most recently, a Wall Street Journal article on “Better Ideas through Failure.”

I grew up with a clear perfectionist streak (or whatever term you would use to suggest whatever is deeper, wide, and more permanent than a “streak”), I wrestle with a gleeful attitude toward failure.

1. "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -- Goethe

2. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller

3. "It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult." -- Seneca

4. "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far it is possible to go." -- T.S. Eliot

5. "What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter." -- Peter Drucker

The European Union is currently engaged in the fight of its life: a fight for jobs and prosperity during a severe economic and financial crisis. At the heart of the Europe 2020 Strategy adopted last year by the EU Member States is the conviction that we need to innovate to get Europe back on the path to growth. We also need Europe to innovate in order to tackle our major societal challenges such as sustainable mobility, climate change, energy security, health and our ageing population. These ideas are at the core of Innovation Union, presented a year ago today by the European Commission. It is urgent that we all do everything we can to achieve Innovation Union.

There is a commitment to act, and act together. This is clearest in the strong backing of the strategy and its goals by EU Heads of State and Government and by the European Parliament. Even in times of hard choices for governments, there is agreement that investing in research and innovation is essential for Europe’s future. This is why we have worked so hard in the first year since the launch of Innovation Union.

South African job listing site JobVine compiled the following chart of the top ten salaries at Google, compiled from Glassdoor.

The top pay is for contract positions leading software development. It's not uncommon to see contractors earn more salary than full-time employees at big tech companies, because they're often not able to get stock options and perks.

Rome, as the old saying goes, wasn't built in a day. Likewise, open innovation is not something you can achieve overnight. It is not a single event, but a process and a culture that must grow over time.

Rome did not build itself, either, and similarly, open innovation won't just happen. It takes work, commitment and patience to cultivate an effective program. It is a major initiative requiring focus, investment and time.

But the rewards are great. Open innovation takes a company beyond its own R&D capabilities. Through this strategy, a company reaches out to access innovation resources that expand internal capabilities and become an asset for the company.

Set of Interconnected computer networks linked by electronic, optical and wireless technologies and catering to the global citizens through the technology of World Wide Web (www) defines Internet (acronym for Internetwork). Internet-Redefining the concept of Business Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship means starting one’s own business. Have you ever imagined you can strike a business deal or accomplish a business transaction without any F2F communication with prospective clients and customers? To top it all you can send in commercial correspondences through email and even deal with monetary transaction through e-payment modes like PayPal.

In response to concerns about the sustainability of US drug-development efforts, FDA has released a report, titled Driving Biomedical Innovation: Initiatives to Improve Products for Patients. The report outlines several steps that FDA will take to spur biomedical innovation and ensure that such innovation can be quickly translated into safe and effective therapies. Input used to compile the report was obtained from a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including members of large pharmaceutical companies, small biotech companies, academic researchers, and patient advocacy groups.

The report outlines major areas in which FDA will be launching initiatives to address feedback obtained from stakeholders. They include:

• Rebuilding FDA’s small business outreach services: FDA will establish a FDA Small Business Liaison program and a Young Entrepreneurs program, as well as establish a new partnership with the US Small Business Administration.

The Chinese government's stated ambition of turning the country into a global R&D center has aroused a fair bit of skepticism. Innovation, after all, is not something that can be conjured out of thin air at the whim of a bureaucrat. Scratch the surface of China's impressive metrics, such as patent filing data, and there is often less genuine innovation there than meets the eye.

Last night I gave a talk hosted by SVB at their Palo Alto office. It was part of the “Never Ending All Old Is New Again Venture Deals Book Tour.” I had a ton of fun talking to and answering questions from about 75 entrepreneurs who – at the minimum – enjoyed eating the great food and wine that SVB provided on a luscious evening in Palo Alto. Oh – and I signed a bunch of copies of Venture Deals.

Several questions came up about Convertible Debt. We touch on it in Venture Deals but realized that we didn’t cover it in enough depth so Jason recently wrote a Convertible Debt series on Ask the VC. The series is now complete – here are the links to the posts in order.

Be willing to change your vision.

Corwin Hardham, who co-founded the energy company Makani Power, created a new kind of wind turbine that swoops high above the Earth. He says that the inspiration for his design came from the first time he kite surfed, when he realized that the wind that sent him sailing through the air could also power a turbine modeled after a kite. "The design is very different now," he laughs. In fact, the airplane-robot-helicopter hybrid looks nothing like the original kite inspiration.

Break the rules.

Tod Sizer from Bell labs created a cube that fits in the palm of your hand and can replace a cell phone tower. At a panel at PM's home base today, Sizer said, "I've been sitting here through these panels today, and literally everybody decided that they were going to break the rules." He's is no exception: He handed his team a square of wood six centimeters wide and told them to fit all the technology of a cell phone tower into it. No one thought it could be done. "Three months later, we had it," Sizer says.

How do women-owned businesses differ from companies owned by men? Not as much as they used to, according to a recent study from the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. “Business ownership no longer can be analyzed simply on the basis of the owner’s gender; businesses owned by women and men more and more share the same general development patterns,” write the authors of “Developments in Women-owned Business, 1997-2007.”

Between 1997 and 2007, the report found, women’s share of total U.S. firms increased from 26 percent to almost 29 percent; during the same time frame, men’s share dropped from 55 percent to 51 percent. As of 2007, the top four revenue-generating industries were identical for businesses owned by women, men, and by women and men together; they were construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, and retail trade.

The NIH initial peer review process involves the consistent application of standards and procedures that produce fair, equitable, informed, and unbiased examinations of grant and cooperative agreement applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The process, defined in regulation at 42 CFR Part 52h, is extended by policy to other types of applications submitted to the agency.

This announcement provides revised policy for managing conflict of interest (COI), the appearance of COI, prejudice, bias, or predisposition in the NIH initial peer review process.  Given the increasingly multi-disciplinary and collaborative nature of biomedical and behavioral research, the revised policy is intended to facilitate reviews that involve multi-site or multi-component projects, consortia, networks, aggregate datasets, and/or multi-authored publications.

From time to time Federal employees participate in the NIH initial peer review process as part of their official duties.  At all times, these Federal officials are subject to the comprehensive body of law governing the conduct of Federal employees.  The applicable statutes and regulations include 18 U.S.C. §§ 201-216, the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, 5 C.F.R. Parts 2634, 2635, and 2640, and agency-specific regulations such as the Supplemental Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, 5 C.F.R. Part 5501.  A Federal employee serving as a member of an NIH Scientific Review Group (SRG) is responsible for complying with all applicable ethical conduct rules and obtaining any clearance for his/her SRG service required by/in his/her employing institute, agency, or office.

Educational technology startup Knewton has raised $33 million in a fourth round of funding as it rolls out an online learning platform that can be adapted to each student’s needs.

Knewton’s Adaptive Learning Platform can dynamically and automatically remix a school’s online educational materials to match every student’s strengths, weaknesses and unique learning style. It is part of a larger trend of “big data,” or using a large amount of feedback to analyze and then adjust to a user’s individual needs. And it is believed to be the largest funding round ever for an education technology startup.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that web startups are hitting a cash crunch. Based on anecdotal evidence of this “nascent” trend, the publication said that strains are starting to show for startups seeking money.

In Silicon Valley, money has been flowing like rivers into web startups. But now some investors and entrepreneurs say it is getting harder to raise money. Some entrepreneurs are turning to bridge financing or are beginning to accept lower valuations in exchange for funding.

The story ignited a debate in the Twittersphere among a number of angel investors. Some agree there has been a modest drop in valuations, but there is plenty of cash available and it isn’t clear if the small or the large deals are being affected the most.

Everybody knows that when you raise money at a startup your ownership percentage of the company goes down. The goal is to have the value of the startup go up by enough that you own a smaller percentage of a much larger business and therefore your total personal value goes up.

The simplest way to think about this is: If you own 20% of a $2 million company your stake is worth $400,000. If you raise a new round of venture capital (say $2.5 million at a $7.5 million pre-money valuation, which is a $10 million post-money) you get diluted by 25% (2.5m / 10m). So you own 15% of the new company but that 15% is now worth $1.5 million or a gain of $1.1 million.

Governing and others often discuss a city's economic success by considering metrics such as median income, unemployment rate, or job growth. But a new measure offers a different perspective by analyzing residents' credit scores.

Experian, a credit information company, sampled its data to determine the average credit scores of residents of 143 U.S. cities. The data (see the full set here) reveals clear geographic trends: cities with top scores are almost entirely clustered in the Midwest; those with the worst are in the South and Southwest.

With ever more programmes offering enterprise education, Donata Huggins asks whether a university can teach you to build a successful startup business Donata Huggins DO not let Steve Jobs’s gown fool you in this photo. The recently departed, near-legendary founder of Apple and Pixar never finished his undergraduate degree, let alone got an MBA. In this picture, he is giving Stanford University’s 2005 commencement address. In the speech, he told his audience that he “couldn't see the value” in doing a degree and that the dropping out allowed him to follow interests that led to his eventual success. He’s not the only one either. Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg are all university dropouts too.

This is not exactly the best advert for MBAs. Yet many of the UK’s most prestigious institutions are now offering courses or facilities for building startups. Cass Business School, for instance, is investing in a business incubator and the London Business School is offering electives in new creative ventures.