Monday, March 23, 2009

Entrepreneurship Opportunities through Science

I have been digging through my older and almost forgotten pending draft posts and found some that I still think worthwhile posting. Sometime ago, November 2, 2008, JANET RAE-DUPREE wrote in the Unboxed feature of the New York BUSINESS section Times warning us that It's No Time to Forget About Innovation. The main point of the article and the book is that we need to do some long term thinking. This blog allows me to do some meta-thinking about many of the issues discussed in my Milestones for a New Millennium, as well as those being dealt with in my real life/day job such as economic, entrepreneurship, social-entrepreneurship and innovation.

The sour economy is bad news for corporate innovation and technology, and it could spell trouble for years to come.
“We’re focusing on the short term and we’re not planting the seeds for the future,” says Judy Estrin, former chief technology officer at Cisco Systems and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap.” She suggests instilling five core values to entrench innovation in the corporate mind-set:
  1. questioning,
  2. risk-taking,
  3. openness,
  4. patience and
  5. trust.
All five must be used together — risk-taking without questioning leads to recklessness, she says, while patience without trust sets up an every-man-for-himself mentality.

That still leaves open the question of how do we take the innovative idea on the napkin to commercialization in the market place? These video from MIT World » : Innovation to Commercialization: Using Government Funding to Kick Start Your Start-Up provide some possible pathways.

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION: Hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum, moderator Bruce Gellerman elicits some key dos and don’ts from a National Science Foundation small business program officer, and from tech CEOs who have benefited from the government’s programs.

The MIT Enterprise Forum, Inc. builds connections to technology entrepreneurs and to the communities in which they reside. The Enterprise Forum produces a series of educational programs about entrepreneurship through a network of 24 worldwide chapters. Anyone interested in or involved with technology entrepreneurship is welcome to participate and join together to form the Enterprise Forum community.

The primary objective of the NSF SBIR/STTR Program is to increase the incentive and opportunity for small firms to undertake cutting-edge, high risk, high quality scientific, engineering, or science/engineering education research that would have a high potential economic payoff if the research is successful.

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