MTI will invest £950,000 while Spark will provide the remainder to Ai2, which is based in a University of Manchester laboratory.

MTI manages the £32m UMIP Premier Fund investing with spin-outs from the University of Manchester, while Spark manages the £25m North West Fund for Biomedical, part of the state-backed £185m North West Fund.

In 2010, Ai2 signed its first major license deal with contact lens manufacturer Sauflon Pharmaceuticals.

A year earlier, in December 2009, Ai2 raised £250, 000 from MTI, which then became "a substantial shareholder".

The European Union-funded Vico Project found public sector-backed venture capital (VC) funds, of which universities were a subset, made up 19% of investments* in the 759 venture capital-backed companies in the study of 8,370 European high-tech entrepreneurial firms.

However, the report from the research, Venture capital: Policy lessons from the Vico project, said: "University VC in­vestments appeared to have a negligible impact regardless of the age of recipient firms. In other words, public sector VC plays a significant financing role for very young firms - those aged less than five years, when it is provided from government funds as contrasted to university funds. This re­sult questions the creation of a large number of university VC funds in Europe in the last decade."

The VCs that added the most value were independent, which as they tended to invest in later-stage companies meant public funds contributed to the health of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The report looked in more detail at France and the UK and found there had been some efforts to support university venturing.

In France since the second half of the 1990s, the emphasis has gravitated from supporting large companies towards the promotion of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures and the emergence of a VC industry. The report said: "There have been many measures to support the creation of university spin-offs and other technology-in­tensive firms. These have been fairly successful and have promoted the creation of a fair number (100-150) of new high tech firms annually.

"However, in terms of the promotion of a VC industry, the measures have been less successful. Especially private seed and ear­ly stage investments have virtually disappeared and overall, a large part of VC investment in the country is supported by public schemes."

In the UK, regarding high-tech, capital intensive start-ups, there was a need for funds able to support these firms in multiple rounds, the Vico report said. It added: "This does not appear to have been the case so far: multi­ple schemes have been implemented, but some of them have not been cost-effective be­cause they lacked further rounds of public support (University Challenge Funds, for ex­ample)."

*There were a total of 3,475 investments - events in which one VC invests in one company in a given point in time - in these 759 VC-backed companies. For example, a syndicate of three VC investors involved in two rounds of financing generates six investments.

And it certainly seems most universities are better at teaching people how to be entrepreneurs than in supporting and funding them once they leave the faculty or student ranks.

Universities provide "negligible" impact when it comes to trying to help turn these ideas into entrepreneurial businesses through providing venture capital, according to an extensive survey for the European Commission.

The European Union-funded Vico Project found public sector-backed venture capital (VC) funds, of which universities were a subset, made up 19% of investments* in the 759 venture capital-backed companies in the study of 8,370 European high-tech entrepreneurial firms.

The report from the research, Venture capital: Policy lessons from the Vico project, said this university funding added little to entrepreneurs: "University VC in­vestments appeared to have a negligible impact regardless of the age of recipient firms.

"In other words, public sector VC plays a significant financing role for very young firms - those aged less than five years, when it is provided from government funds as contrasted to university funds. This re­sult questions the creation of a large number of university VC funds in Europe in the last decade."

However, the report has yet to slow the creation of university venturing programmes, with two Welsh universities launching a £2m ($3m) fund in July to support local start-ups.

The same plethora of university venture funds have also been started in the US, from Case University's Case Technology Ventures to The Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School moving from pilot to full implementation of its Minimum Viable Product Fund, which offers $100,000 to student entrepreneurs to develop their business ideas.

Most of the programmes provide relative little follow-up capital and have limited teams, although a few have turned to public markets to help and an increasing number are developing sophisticated programmes. Last year, Imperial Innovations, which was formed to help incubate and support entrepreneurs from the Imperial College, London, raised $140m on the public stock market and now has 50 people looking at businesses developed from four UK universities from the early to later stages of development.

Though Imperial Innovations' successes are notable, such as the initial public offering of renewable fuel cell developer Ceres Power, they have yet to match the scale of US peers at Stanford, which made a reported $336m from the flotation of search engine Google in 2005, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But to see the true potential of the role of universities in supporting entrepreneurs you have to turn to China.

According to Atsushi Sunami, a Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy Trade & Industry, in an article in 2002: "China has a long history of university-affiliated enterprises (xiaoban enterprises), dating back to the ‘qingong jianxue' philosophy in the 1950s that called for studying while working.... Then, in the 1980s, following the government's launch of reform policy, a number of university-affiliated enterprises began to sprout. Facing dire fiscal straits, universities wanted to pull themselves away from budgetary difficulties and improve the poor living conditions of professors and university staff by commercializing research and development achievements."

By 2000, 364 universities - dominated by Peking and Tsinghua around the capital, Beijing - operated 2,097 high-tech enterprises to earn three-quarters of their total revenues, employing 230,000 employees and with a further 780,000 students engaged in research activities in those enterprises, Sunami said. A decade later and at least 40 university-owned enterprises were listed in China from a pool of more than 5,000 profitable businesses backed by the institutions, according to the China Papers series.

However, part of the reason for universities' importance in China was the under-developed state of research and development at companies, which has been gradually changing as state-owned and private enterprises continue to expand.

But what China's experience and the best examples from Europe and the US all have in common are a sizeable commitment, support at the highest levels and talented teams of people that are able to identify how to best help portfolio companies in a way appropriate for the market conditions they face.

It is this potential others are seeking to emulate, with one eye on the consequences for budgets and resources if they fail. In a globalised world for capital and people, innovation is a comparative advantage.

Universities - whether through faculty or students - are one of the two primary sources of business innovation, the other being companies themselves. Applying a successful university venturing programme, therefore, offers them money to support budgets under pressure from falling public funding and often-capped tuition fees. It also offers better links to business with the insights from technology back to research and jobs and work experience for graduates that helps attract the brightest minds.

To re-work Bernard Shaw for the new world, perhaps we can say: "Those who can, must teach as well they do."

It is to better understand these issues and help share the best practices around the world that Global University Venturing was set up to complement the existing title, Global Corporate Venturing. I welcome all feedback and support at the start of this course - please email me at jmawson@globaluniversityventuring.com.

*There were a total of 3,475 investments - events in which one VC invests in one company in a given point in time - in these 759 VC-backed companies. For example, a syndicate of three VC investors involved in two rounds of financing generates six investments.

At Three Arch, Harrington led investments in and served as a director of nearly 20 healthcare companies, a number of which had their origin as university/research centre spin-outs, such as Nevro (formed at Mayo Clinic).

Prior to entering venture capital in 1999, he spent a decade as an interventional radiologist, working with imaging technologies, medical devices, and minimally invasive surgical procedures.

Robert Adelson, managing partner at OUP, said: "Bill has over a decade of partner-level experience at a top-tier venture fund managing over $1bn in healthcare investments. Bill combines his extensive investment experience with a strong clinical background, which will be critical in evaluating university life science opportunities. We anticipate that healthcare investments will represent half of Osage University Partners' portfolio."

OUP is a multi-stage fund that invests in start-ups from more than 40 universities and in January last year held its final closing on its inaugural fund at $100m having already invested in 16 companies. Of its portfolio, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, a diagnostic company focused on Alzheimer's disease, has been acquired by drugs company Eli Lilly and Gevo, a biofuels company, completed floated on a stock exchange last year.

The firm manages the co-investment rights held by its affiliated universities and so gives Osage contractual access to invest in the future financings of companies that have licensed technology from those universities. Affiliate universities then share in Osage's profit if any is made. Universities nationwide collectively create about 600 new start-ups each year based on their research discoveries and have created nearly 5,000 start-ups over the past 10 years.

Harrington said: "Osage University Partners provides a new approach to investing in the venture capital asset class that offers many advantages over historical models and affords our university partners a means of unlocking an otherwise untapped opportunity."

Kenneth Carter has joined NexImmune as its executive president and Jonathan Schneck has become chairman of the company's Clinical and Scientific Advisory Board.

Previously, Carter was also chief executive for 10 years at Avalon Pharmaceuticals until its merger with Clinical Data.

Prior to Avalon, Carter directed the gene mapping initiative at Human Genome Sciences, which discovered, cloned, and chromosomal mapped dozens of novel human genes and he is also on the advisory council for the Center for Biotechnology Education at The Johns Hopkins University, where he also holds an adjunct faculty appointment.

Schneck is a professor of pathology, oncology and medicine and director of the Human Immunology Program at the Institute for Cellular Engineering at John Hopkins.

His and Mathias Oelke's laboratory at Johns Hopkins University has also created the Artificial Immune (AIM) nanotechnology for immuno-therapy, which involves engineering artificial cells to stimulate specific immune responses (pictured). This work was awarded a $12m grant in 2009, the largest basic science immunology grant in the history of Johns Hopkins University.

This AIM nanotechnology has just been licensed by Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer office to NexImmune.

In related news, Carter is also now chairman of Noble Life Sciences, a provider of preclinical research services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries set up by five healthcare entrepreneurs that were involved in NexImmune's formation. He stepped up from president of Noble at the start of January to take his new role at NexImmune.

The move follows its first bootcamp to encourage start-ups in Vietnam's capital (pictured) last year with people going on to competitions in the US and Singapore through the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students and Start-up@Singapore respectively.

Alongside Stanford Technology Ventures Programme in backing VYE are Vietnam's HCM City National University, US publisher International Data Group (which operates a corporate venturing affiliate in Vietnam) and venture capital firm VinaCapital.

InnoSpring, which is also backed by China-based property company Shui On Group and Northern Light Venture Capital, will provide incubation services and physical space to technology start-ups wanting to expand into China.

InnoSpring will provide the winning start-ups of the Second Annual North American Start-up Contest Summit six months' complimentary office space and incubation services. For companies that have the intention to expand business to China, InnoSpring will help in fundraising, business development and gaining support from relevant Chinese entities.

Wanfeng Liu, senior vice-president of TusPark, which was founded in 1994 and has 30 university science parks in China, said: "The creation of InnoSpring is to support several emerging trends: the rapidly rising number of Chinese returnees starting their own companies as well as American entrepreneurs seeking to enter the lucrative Chinese market."

The report, Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States, said: "By the late 1980s, university patenting, licensing of technology to industry, and the proliferation of university‐linked startup companies all began to accelerate, reaching especially high growth rates in the late 1990s.

"However, the pace of these activities slowed starting in 2000, a slowdown that persisted after the brief recession of the early 2000s."

It then quoted as the footnote, a 2007 study by non-profit entrepreneurs group Kauffman Foundation, The University As Innovator: Bumps in the Road, that expressed concern about the commercialization focus of technology transfer offices (TTOs), rather than their desire to see ideas utilized.

The Kauffman study had in turn quoted University of Georgia research that the principal mechanism favored by most TTOs was licensing for cash (72%), with licensing for an equity stake and sponsored research being less popular at 17% and 11%, respectively.

The US Commerce report said reforming the corporate tax system so there was a lower headline rate and fewer exemptions would be beneficial along with changes to the intellectual property system. However, news provider Intellectual Property Watch warned there was a tension in the report between the need for innovators and entrepreneurs to have fewer restrictions and the need to protect IP rights holders.

US universities own the rights to IP developed even with government money, after the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, but Federal money has become relatively less important over the past 30 years.

In 1980 the Federal government provided 70.3% of all dollars spent on basic research, most of which went to universities and university‐based Federal research centres.

Since then, the Federal government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57% and its share of funding of basic research at universities has fallen to about 60%, largely due to increased funding from the private sector, the report said quoting National Science Foundation statistics for 2010.

Rick Silva, director of the University of Colorado Technology Transfer Office (UCTTO), said: "Private investment is waning for early stage investment. Universities have been pulled into the realm of technology maturation to fill a void in early stage investing."

Since 2004, UCTTO has deployed $11.5m to fund 139 projects, of which eight have become companies and 44 licensed or optioned by investors, according to Silva. These eight start-ups include healthcare company Taligen Therapeutics, which was seeded by UCTTO before receiving $70m in venture capital funding and exiting to peer Alexion Pharmaceuticals last year for $111m.

Cowen Royalty will target investments between $20m and $100 in US, Europe and Asian passive royalties, synthetic royalties and structured financings.

The main categories for capital investments include commercial stage biopharmaceutical and medical device companies in need of growth capital, and universities/inventors looking to monetize product interests.

Todd Davis, founder of Cowen Royalty, said: "Increased demand for alternatives to traditional debt or equity by both companies and royalty owners will continue to drive this finance category."

Credit Suisse was financial adviser and placement agent and Goodwin Procter legal counsel for the fundraising.

The AIE2012 will be the most comprehensive conference focused on the various aspects of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It provides an open platform to bring together scholars worldwide to present research and to stimulate discussions on new developments in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Submission of Papers

Authors are invited to submit completed papers. Papers will be selected by the Program Committee consisting of a panel of international scholars. Please submit the paper in electronic format (PDF files only) to: http://www.aieconference.org/

Program Topics

The conference focuses on discussions mainly covering the following topics of interest but is not limited to:

• Innovative and entrepreneurial strategies for firms in global markets
• Industrial focus in innovation and entrepreneurship
• Management of technological innovations
• Patenting and licensing management
• Innovation and corporate venture
• New business creation process
• Technology-based venturing
• Venture capital and entrepreneurial finance
• Creation and management of family business
• Entrepreneurship environment and policy
• Business model
• International entrepreneurship
• Moral risk in Entrepreneurship
• The Gender and Diversity in Entrepreneurship

More Information Visit http://www.aieconference.org/ for information about registration, schedule, hotel reservations, the latest list of topics and more. For general help contact AIE Support at aie@sem.tsinghua.edu.cn

Bambang Soehendro, a former director general of higher education at Indonesia's Education and Culture Ministry, said the need for higher education institutions aiming to achieve research university status while having to finance  at least 25% of their needs through their own activities, such as research, industrial partnerships and intellectual property rights, was difficult, according to news provider www.kompas.com.

He said at a discussion on research held by University of Gadjah Mada (UGM): "Universities bear heavy burdens to self-finance a minimum of 25% of their financial needs. It is not logical and is unfair."

Other countries, such as the UK, are discussing bringing in the need to self-finance 10% of universities activities and Soehendro said the average was less than 10% in other developed countries.

The A round included venture capital firms Social+Capital Partnership, IA Ventures and other angel investor Joel Spolsky alongside Kearns.

In partnership with the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in Beijing and including Chinese teams from Tianjin and Zhejiang Universities as well as the Technion, which is the Israel Institute of Technology, the top prize went to EWalking.

The plan by a team from Zhejiang University is for an electronic cane designed for the visually impaired which detects and alarms obstacles in three dimensions. The Live-a-betes team from University of Maryland came second with a plan for a educational learning platform for diabetics, pre-diabetics, and caretakers.

Hongbin Cai, dean of Guanghua School of Management, said: "This competition is a key component in fostering awareness of innovation and entrepreneurship and we hope that all participating student teams benefit immensely from this opportunity."

G "Anand" Anandalingam, dean of the Robert H Smith School of Business, added: "We are grateful to the Guanghua School of Management (Peking University) for partnering with us on the competition and sending students to our programs in the US and Israel, which are the cornerstone to a top-tier international business education."

Each year the Smith School brings students to Israel and China and brings students from both those locations to the US. Smith also brings Israelis to China and Chinese students to Israel.

Asher Epstein, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, said: "Our unique global triangle promotes economic growth by linking three institutions in separate nations defined by their economic strengths: top tier US management, which is our MBA students; partnering with high-level global innovation, which is what we've found in Israel; and focused on the best markets in the world, which are in China."

On this week’s episode of the Talking Tech Transfer podcast, we welcome Christy Wyskiel, the executive director of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV), the tech transfer office of Johns Hopkins University, and the senior adviser to Johns Hopkins’ president for innovation and entrepreneurship.

She reveals why she is so passionate about the Baltimore ecosystem that she goes above and beyond her day job and she talks about why having run her own startups gives her a real appreciation for the hardships of first-time entrepreneurs.

She also discusses what JHTV is doing to support diversity, why the Johns Hopkins Covid Dashboard is a true example of research for the world and why JHTV has a clause in its licensing agreements that requires spinouts to inform the office of every funding round they raise.

On this week’s episode of the Talking Tech Transfer podcast, we welcome Itzik Goldwaser, president and chief executive of Yissum, the tech transfer arm of Hebrew University.

Of the total, £8.3m was returned to Cambridge University after a 22% rise from the previous year.

Last year, 116 licenses and 183 consultancy contracts were completed and more than £468,000 returned to CE´s evergreen seed funds through equity transactions. CE holds equity in 68 companies, including Plastic Logic, a flexible semiconductor company, and organic solar panels maker Eight19, both from its Cavendish Laboratory.

Tony Raven, who took over as chief executive of Cambridge Enterprise last year, said: "The growth enjoyed by Cambridge Enterprise this year [2011] demonstrates the value that industry attaches to Cambridge research, and the contribution the University is making to our national economic recovery.

"Universities such as Cambridge have an important role to play in supporting an innovation-led economic recovery, through collaborative research, technology licensing, consultancy projects and new company formation."

Melba Kurman (pictured), who did the research for the report Best US Universities for Innovation Transfer?, said most metrics counted contractual units of knowledge, such as patents, rather than how effectively universities translated federal research funding into new knowledge and new technologies.

Kurman gathered 2010 data on numbers of publications, numbers of inventions disclosed and industry research funding.

Canada-based Enobia developes therapeutics for serious bone disorders and the deal includes a $610m initial payment and up to $470m in performance fees. Enobia has raised more than $145m from universities seed fund T2C2 (Technology, Transfer, Commercialisation, Capital) and venture capital firms CTI Life Sciences Fund, Desjardins Venture Capital, Kirchner Investment Management (which manages the Lothian Partners fund on behalf of Coller Capital), OrbiMed Advisors, and Solidarity Fund QFL.

Founded in 1997, Enobia raised $40m in August, two years after the $50m series C round and the C$40.1m ($40m) B round in August 2007. Data provider Crunchbase also said Enobia had raised $15.6m in 2005.

Included in the reauthorisation of SBIR, which started in 1982, is the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, launched a decade later to target university start-ups, and what is now to be called the Commercialization Readiness Program (CRP).

SBIR spends $2.3bn per year in grants of up to $1m per start-up while STTR provides $275m. The money comes from bodies spending more than $100m on research and development per year. The latest reauthorisation, however, will see the percentage paid to SBIR and STTR increase from 2% and 0.3% respectively.

The SBIR set-aside will rise to 3.2% and STTR to 0.45% in a series of increases by 2017, or about an extra $750m in total. The US Department of Defense provides about half of the total from the 11 federal agencies, followed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In December, however, a coalition of 100 universities and professional societies repeated their concerns about the mandatory increase as it "would necessarily result in funding cuts for other peer-reviewed research". In July 2009, scientific and professional societies, higher education associations, and research institutions had initially written to the US government asking that a planned increase in the set-aside to 3.5% be scrapped.

But Senator Mary Landrieu, (D-LA) chair of the Senate's committee on small business, controversially used the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 to encompass the reauthorisation at the reduced set-aside after the failure to pass the Enhancing Small Business Research and Innovation Act of 2009.

IPXI said it would issue its first Unit License Right (ULR) contract offerings this year so private licensing of technology can be more easily traded.

Each ULR Contract purchased gives the buyer the right to use the intellectual property (IP) offered for a pre-established number of instances in the manufacturing and/or sale of a product or service. The exchange then allows prices to be market-based and a secondary market to form so investors can speculate on the value of technology before it comes to fruition.

Gerard Pannekoek, executive president of IPXI, said: "The initial commitments from ULR contract issuers have an aggregate targeted market value in excess of $250m with numerous additional company portfolios in various stages of the submission process."

Ruud Peters, chief intellectual property (IP) officer of Philips, has joined IPXI's board and said: "ULR contracts enable IP holders like Philips to more efficiently monetize patents and other IP brought to the market through non-exclusive licensing, while also allowing buyers to purchase at market-established prices."

Philips has committed to issue one or more ULR Contracts having an aggregated target market value of $50m or more.

Other founding members are packaging manufacturer Com-Pac International, Rutgers University, Northwestern University and the University of Utah.

Caisse des Depots and Propriete Intellectuelle said they would try and sponsor or purchase ULR contracts but not necessarily issue them.

Ian McClure at IPXI said: "The market size for IP licensing through one-off transactions is enormous at about $500bn but the potential is even bigger."

However, McClure warned the market would take time to take off but IPXI would be profitable within 12 to 24 months.

Richard DuFour, executive vice-president of CBOE, in an interview with news provider John Lothian News said: "The IP space has changed dramatically over the past few decades and now represents a significant asset class.

"The changes have a number of facets: the role of IP in the economy, the laws governing IP, the digitization of products, etc. These changes have focused attention on the inefficiencies inherent in the traditional ways in which IP was transferred. IPXI recognized the need for standardization and transparency in this process."

The iBridge Network now has on its website Easy IP Access, which connects researchers and industry partners at no cost and using agreed licensing agreements. Katie Petersen, director of iBridge, said: "The collaboration with the Easy Access IP community will allow the partner universities to become part of a global marketplace of ideas and collaborations."

UNSW, which has also set up a Venture Incubator Space in its School of Computer Science and Engineering, is the first Easy Access university in Australia after starting the programme last month so the majority of its IP is available for free. Kevin Cullen became head of New South Innovations, the university's commercialisation company, having pioneered Easy Access while director of research and enterprise at the University of Glasgow. As well as UNSW and Glasgow, the members of the Easy Access university group include the University of Bristol, Kings College London, University of Copenhagen and Ottawa University.

Separately, Dave Waddell has left after eight years managing technology transfer and research systems at University of Edinburgh to set up a company, Licensable Technology, which provides users with regular statistics detailing click through rates on each of their technologies from the http://www.LicensableTechnology.com database.

The database currently hosts more than 5000 technologies from over 50 research organisations world-wide.

Waddell said: "The LicensableTechnology.com site is now indexing and providing search on over 12,000 technologies from 120 organisations, quite an increase in only 4 weeks since the initial release went out.

"Within the next few days, InnovationBulletin.com will go live which does the same indexing and search provision on innovation news from TTO's and other relevant sources from around the world."

The EMC Innovation Network's India Center of Excellence will fund research in the country through collaboration with universities to see technologies shaping the information infrastructure of the future. India joins initiatives in the US, China, Ireland, Russia, Israel, Egypt and Brazil.

The Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania has sued Craig Thompson (pictured) and healthcare companies Agios Pharmaceuticals and Celgene, in Federal Court, according to news provider Courthouse News.

The Abramson Center alleges Thompson, who was its scientific director from 1999 until October 2011, "purposely concealed his formation of Agios Pharmaceuticals, because he knew his research was rightly the intellectual property of the institute," according to the news provider.

The Abramson Center was created by an agreement between the Abramson family Foundation and the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Since its founding, the institute has been housed at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center.

The family foundation said it donated more than $100m "with an ironclad condition that the money was to be utilized to revolutionize the medical treatment of cancer by exploring only new and different approaches to cancer treatment.

"Another fundamental condition of the agreement was that the Institute would own all or part of all discoveries and developments occasioned or fostered by Institute-funded work," according to the complaint reported by Courthouse News.

However, the institute alleged Thompson "discovered that cancer cell growth requires an enzyme not previously implicated in cancer" and in 2007 incorporated Agios in Delaware under the name Cancer Therapeutics, Inc.

In 2010, Celgene formed a global strategic collaboration focused on targeting cancer metabolism with Agios and provided $130m in upfront payments in return for some equity and a period of exclusivity, Courthouse News said. A further $78m was invested by Celgene and venture capitalists in November.

Thompson terminated his employment relationship with the institute and the university on October 31. Through his attorney, Thompson declined to comment to news provider Science Insider beyond giving it the following statement: "The allegations in this lawsuit are unfounded and without merit. It is unfortunate that the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute has chosen to go down this path."

The institute is represented by Robinson Brog Leinwand Greene Genovese & Gluck, and Science Insider posted its complaint. Agios and Celgene were unavailable.

[Editor's note, this story was backdated to the 5th from posting on 16 January.]

US-based Plum District's series C round was led by VC firms General Catalyst Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Comcast Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US cable company Comcast.

KCPB and General Catalyst were previously the investors for Plum District's $8.5m series B round in January, while Plum District's series A round raised $2.1m in July 2010.

Plum District offers a daily deal service that is similar to Groupon's, but aimed at mothers. The deals are negotiated with outside merchants by the company's ‘mom consultants'.

The equity will be invested in enhanced customer services and technology, as well as in expanding Plum District's span from the 27 US markets in which it currently operates.

Tallman Trask, the university's chief administrative and financial officer, told news provider Herald-Sun  the only place that investments are made out of at Duke is DUMAC, the limited liability company that manages the university's $5.7bn endowment, and he'd be "astonished" if it came out of anywhere else.

News provider TheStreet said in October, the University of Michigan announced an initiative, Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups, to invest up to $500,000 directly in companies created by faculty and students to a total of $25m within the next few years.

The University of Michigan's Tech Transfer Office, helped 11 start-ups form in fiscal 2011, 10 in fiscal 2010 and eight in fiscal 2009, with an aggregate of 104 in 11 years.

Other universities that have invested directly in start-ups include the University of Rochester and the University of Texas, TheStreet added.

Bryan Allinson, executive director for technology commercialization at the University of Texas, told TheStreet: "Universities have taken more ownership over start-ups and that's increasingly another tool in our toolbox versus direct licensing to industry."

Students from four universities, the University of Tokyo (UT), Keio University, Waseda University and National University of Singapore (NUS), were asked to come up with a socially responsible business or charity to help the people of northern Japan recover from the March 11 earthquake.

The plan Obachyan no Bentoya (Grandma's Lunchbox Delivery Van) won based on a business model that would enlist older women to cook, then deliver lunch and dinner boxes (bentos) initially to temporary housing, and then later throughout Northern Japan.

The winning team members were: Arjun Arora (NUS), Xin Qian Ho (NUS), Mayumi Morita (UT), Jialei Huang (Waseda)

Shigeo Kagami, head of entrepreneurship at the University of Tokyo and adviser to the Akamon Entrepreneurship Club and lead judge, told the winning team: "We were impressed with your thorough coverage of a wide array of issues. You showed the dual social benefit of building community and providing meals to people during a difficult time, while also creating a sustainable business model."

A follow up to the Tokyo business events will be held in Singapore this month as BizAsia Japan is a newly established annual exchange program between the University of Tokyo and National University of Singapore focusing on entrepreneurship.

Vikram Gupta, former head of corporate venturing at India-based healthcare company Piramal, founded IvyCap last year. He said by email the initial commitments had come from four leading Indian financial/government institutions with the alumni from the IITs and other angel investors also joining.

His other colleagues at the firm include Ashish Wadhwani, partner, Norbert Fernandes, co-founder and principal, and Sonia Sharma, vice-president.

The first deal is expected to be in technology to help farmers.

IvyCap also offers a share of any of its profits - called carried interest - from the first fund to the IITs. The 5% carry for the Give Back programme comes from the fund manager's share of profits but other investors as well as the entrepreneurs are also given the choice to Give Back a small part of their profits to the education system of the country for encouraging incubation level businesses.

Gupta said: "We are seeing tremendous response from investors and entrepreneurs who would like to give back a small part of their profits to their alma maters."

The partnership won the Applied Sciences NYC initiative against competition from Stanford University, which dropped out at the last minute, Columbia University and groups led by Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. This is the first selection announcement for the Applied Sciences NYC initiative with additional science and engineering partnerships expected.

In addition to the Roosevelt Island site 99-year lease, New York City will also provide $100m to assist with site infrastructure, construction, and related costs.

Prior to commencement of construction on Roosevelt Island, Cornell/Technion plans to open in an off-site location in 2012, with the first phase of their permanent Roosevelt Island home expected to open by no later than 2017. By 2027 the campus will have expanded to over 1.3 million square feet and ultimately culminate in the completion of a 2 million square foot build-out housing for up to 2,500 students and nearly 280 faculty members by 2043.

The campus is expected to generate nearly 600 spin-off companies over the 99-year projection period, which are expected to create up to an additional 30,000 permanent jobs. The NYC Tech Campus will host entrepreneurs-in-residence, organize business competitions, provide legal support for start-ups, reach out to existing companies to form research partnerships and sponsor research, and establish a pre-seed financing program to support promising research, according to New York Times.

The Cornell-Technion bid was helped by a gift of $350m to Cornell for the venture from Atlantic Philanthropies, whose founder, Charles Feeney, is a Cornell alumnus who ran the Duty Free Shoppers Group and previously given $600m to the university, according to news provider New York Times.

In the past five years alone, Cornell alumni have created more than 2,600 companies around the world -- employing some 34,000 people and raising more than $10.6bn - while Cornell's technology commercialisation arm, CCTEC, has provided Cornell technology to 10 start-ups in the past year, and 35 in the in the past five years.

Technion's tech transfer arm, Technion Technology Transfer (T3), has filed an average of 300 new patents each year and, as of November, 59 of 121 Israeli companies on Nasdaq stock exchange were founded or run by Technion graduates, Inside Higher Ed said. Israeli newspaper Haaretz said there were about 4,000 start-up companies located around the Technion's home campus.
As Peretz Lavie, Technion president, said in an interview with news provider Inside Higher Ed: "If you are looking for innovation, you come to Israel."

Lavie said Technion has a culture - similar to those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University - that encourages the combination of research and entrepreneurship.

Previously, the Penn State university owned the intellectual rights and controlled the use of technology that came from faculty research but in the future negotiations about ownership will take place with consultation from the involved faculty, according to news provider Centre Daily.com.

The IP rules don't apply to government-sponsored research. Penn State had $785.3m worth of sponsored research in its 2009-10 academic year, according to the Fiscal Year 2010 US Licensing Activity Survey, which was released last month by the Association of University Technology Managers.

The University of Minnesota has also changed its rules to allow companies sponsoring research to prepay a fee of 10% of the contract, or $15,000, whichever is highest. And, if sales from the licensed IP are greater than $20m, the company will pay a 1%royalty fee, Centre Daily.com added.

Under its Minnesota Innovation Partnerships programme, companies that sponsor research at the University of Minnesota will also be able to pre-pay a fee and receive a worldwide patent on the intellectual property.

The new firm, Boardman & Clark , has as its clients the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which is the University of Wisconsin-Madison's technology transfer office, and spin-off companies created by university research.

Tech Launch Arizona will take on much of the university's existing Office of Technology Transfer and is expected to help bring together the academic and private sectors using an advisory committee made up of business leaders and entrepreneurs, according to news provider Arizona Business.

UA spent more than $586m on research in 2010 and formed six start-ups, issued 64 licensing agreements and was awarded 16 patents.

Its neighbouring Arizona State University's spent more than $329m on research and its Arizona Technology Enterprises helped issue 55 licensing agreements and formed four start-ups.

The programme offers up to $1m in funding, business and technical development resources.

Multimedia projects accepted under this program are university invented, scalable to the consumer electronics market, fit with a licensing model, and require a budget of no more than $1 Million to develop a commercial prototype.
Deadline for applications is January 20: http://www.tandemlaunchtech.com/proposals.php

The team that submits the best app using the company's OpenTok's online face-to-face technology will be invited to work out of its San Francisco headquarters for eight weeks and get a $2,500 living allowance per team member for up to two people.

The team will also retain full ownership of any intellectual property created and have a launch party at the end of the IncuBox programme to pitch to potential funders.

Ian Small, chief executive at TokBox, which is funded by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Youniversity Ventures, said: "We see so many great ideas from students, but some don't get the proper support from industry or mentors that they deserve. IncuBox is our way of reaching out to support these ideas and these developers and helping them create something real and sustainable."

The W Fund is expected to open next month with about $25m in commitments, according to news provider GeekWire. The W Fund plans to invest $250,000 to $500,000 in about 25 to 30 early-stage companies over the next five years, focusing efforts on upstarts that have strong ties to research universities in the state, GeekWire added. The university students will do the initial due diligence on potential deals before a 20-person committee makes the final investment decision.

Among those participating in the W Fund's investment committee are Madrona Venture Group's Greg Gottesman and Tom Alberg; OVP Venture Partners' Chad Waite and Lucinda Stewart; former Microsoft vice presidents Brian Arbogast and Will Poole; Arch Venture Partners' Steve Gillis; biotechnology entrepreneur Bruce Montgomery; Cardiac Science chief executive Dave Marver; Intellectual Ventures' Patrick Ennis; and former GE executive Lonnie Edelheit.

The university retains 5.2% of Tissue ahead of the placing after the company was incorporated in May 2006 to commercialise the academic research of its professors, Eileen Ingham and John Fisher.

Tissue joined the Alternative Investment Market in June 2010 through the reverse takeover of listed Oxeco.

The VC firm, Access BridgeGap, will back three to five early-stage therapeutics companies per year.

Blavatnik said: "Access BridgeGap is an important part of Access' growing interest in life sciences and, specifically, therapeutics.

"Access BridgeGap will pursue the commercialization of academic and entrepreneurial innovations that possess the potential to make a major impact on disease treatment and prevention."

Daniel Behr (pictured), who previously worked at Harvard University's Office of Technology Development and university spin-out investment firm Allied Minds, is head of the new VC firm, Access BridgeGap Ventures.

Behr, who set up BridgeGap in July, said: "With Access' support we have the resources and flexibility to span all investment stages and build fully independent companies, either alone or with other investors."

Ben Bronstein, former chief executive (CEO) at Neuron Systems, is the other partner at BridgeGap, with Jess Barnes, director of new ventures having previously been senior science officer at Summer Street Research Partners.

Advisers to Access BridgeGap include William Koster, former senior vice-president for worldwide drug discovery research and early clinical development at Bristol Myers Squibb; Manuel Navia, former founder and CEO of Althexis; and Isaac Kohlberg, chief technology development officer at Harvard University.

Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur and lecturer at Stanford University, leads the I-Corps programme that had 21 teams in the final.

The fund will focus on partnering with universities to develop innovative higher education programs across the US and Europe, particularly those which address pressing social and economic needs.

The fund is planning between six and ten investments over the next three years, some of which are already underway, and hopes to provide educational programs that facilitate better outcomes for a lower cost.

Bertelsmann is looking at the fund as a vehicle for its early entry into collaborative private/educational programs, an industry it expects to see grow significantly as digital technology becomes more widespread and fiscal concerns mean universities will need to restructure their prospectus, partnering more widely with private institutional investors.

Thomas Rabe, chief executive officer of Bertelsmann and chairman of the funds' investment committee, said: "Bertelsmann chose to work with University Ventures because the team has a demonstrated track record of envisioning new business models and building successful education ventures while respecting traditional academic institutions. In combination with Bertelsmann's profound media and services expertise, this leads to a real win-win situation."

Thus far, University Ventures has established a company in Europe, known as Higher Education Online, that will provide degree programs and support online in partnership with European universities. Projects also include a dual-language, Hispanic-focused college in California, to be set up in collaboration with Brandman University.

The round was co-led by venture capital investment partnership CTI Life Sciences Fund and regional government-backed investment unit the Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund.

Xagenic previously raised a $2.2m seed round in October 2010, led by MaRS Innovation, a commercialisation agent for the intellectual property developed by its academic and healthcare institutional members.

Xagenic is developing an automated technology platform that uses nanotechnology to perform a wide range of diagnostic tests in clinics, hospitals and physicians' offices, as opposed to in clinical laboratories. The financing will be invested in improving and building on Xagenic's molecular diagnostics platform.

In addition to the funding, Richard Meadows and Shermaine Tilley, managing director and partner at CTI, respectively, will join Xagenic's board of directors.

At the core of the debate is the question of whether people expect innovation to come about as the result of institutional order and control, or from individual initiative and diversity. It's Keynes vs Hayek! The great challenge is that this debate in general has no black and white--not because there isn't any to be had, but that different societies have different needs, and a chaotic society recovering from upheaval might desire Keynes as a kind of orthodontics to hold things together, provided it can avoid corruption, maintain stability, and not find itself given over to autocracy, as we have seen in Russia and what hangs in the balance in countries involved in the Arab spring. But for innovation, Hayek is the critical piece where there is established government.

Personal initiative has to be cultivated, then celebrated, with all its vulnerabilities and exposures.  Innovation is not centrally planned, and the status quo can act as a filter on new things but not the generator or discoverer of such things.  Not because the status quo merely represses stuff--it does that too--but because, in university settings, it defines even what the problems are supposed to be and where to seek solutions to them.  Innovation often rejects not only the prevailing ideas on solutions, but where to look for them, and even the claim to know the problems!  Innovation just as often makes the status quo's problems obsolete as it provides a new solution.  While one person tries to get Windows to boot faster, another is creating a new version of Linux, and another is working on an entirely different way to design a computer, without an operating system, and another is going, well, how could we live without computers?  Is that possible?  Has it ever been tried?

My own experience from working in university intellectual property and innovation for 20 years, as a former director of university technology licensing offices at the University of California and at the University of Washington, including directing technology transfer offices and working with industry on research and affiliation contracts, is that even a little bit of institutional order and control is an entirely different world from none.  The controls that the institution can productively provide are those requested by its creative personnel, not ones imposed with the approval of an administrative committee.  If there is to be a trial it must be after the event, not in anticipation of it!

The moment the institution is self-interested, it has an organizational conflict of interest that shapes the entire activity--worries about risk, desire for profit, desire to take credit, demand for respect, properness and review for everything--and when this happens, the university has compromised its role as a public arbiter of invention development activities--looking out for public safety, governance (not ownership) of requests for resources, independence in reviewing claims for efficacy.

As Chris Anderson underscores in his book Free, there is a huge difference between free and even paying a penny for something.  Free is fundamentally a different transaction, financially and socially.  Once something is not free (even if it is owned), one has a sale or license or lease, and with that come obligations that are imposed, often with the implied involvement of a government to enforce the terms of the agreement.  If the government is one that everyone participates in and accepts, even if with quibbles, then perhaps the differences can be smoothed over.  But if the government itself is conflicted, that one tribe or religion or party controls and the others distrust, then justice itself is suspect, not merely in the courts, but in government policies and regulations, in funding, in rapidity of action, in expectations.   Thus, even a sale for a penny can trigger accounting and tax requirements, which even if only selectively enforced change a transaction from private to of state interest. 

Even where established government is generally acceptable, the institutional overhead in a transaction for sale or license of inventions and other creative works is much higher than that of an individual or a private concern such as a small company.  The institution has its entire operations and assets to consider, for impact and liability, for possible dissent, for differential benefit, for consistency not only with past deals but with imagined future ones--even if there never will be another one like one under consideration!

Imagine that institutional administrators, faced with an amazing new invention licensing deal, might try to invoke the principle of "precautionary consistency" and try to structure the deal so that it would appear to be repeatable in the future.  "If we did this deal again and again, that would be inappropriate.  So we cannot do this deal."  The fallacy, of course, is that one does not have to do the deal again and again.  It is like marriage--one can vow to do it only once and get on with it, rather than imagine repeated marriages, each one undermining the previous one. 

The overhead of transaction is actually not directly related to prudence.  In an odd way, the mere fact of an institution's involvement increases risk, slows pace, and increases costs.  People sometimes mistake this for increasing the "value" of the technology and ensuring a deal is done "properly".  Xerox's Palo Alto Research Park, or PARC, produced some of the most important tools we use today on computers--the graphical user interface, the mouse, ethernet (for network communications), and postscript (for computer typefaces).   Xerox has a policy of classifying research ideas and inventions into "strategic" and "non-strategic".  Those that were "strategic" were given Xerox's full attention--start a new division as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox, staff it with experienced senior Xerox leadership, and give it a budget to work with.  A recipe for disaster.  The burden of Xerox's reputation and management style and remaining consistent to Xerox's branding and contracting requirements were enough to swamp any such initiative.  Researchers hoped Xerox would not find their work "strategic".  It is the non-strategic work at PARC that has shaped the world of computing in such significant ways. 

For institutions, this is a tough lesson.  Even a university's demand that all inventions be disclosed for institutional review is chilling on free.  The difference between an offer to review and a demand for review is everything.   Imagine if all email had to be reviewed.  All phone calls pre-screened.   Every trip off campus had to be pre-approved because something might be created, or invented, or discovered there, and the university demands the first right to decide if it is strategic.  Well, that would be the end of an open, independent university, wouldn't it?  But this is exactly what administrators at the University of Washington are trying to do right now.   They have imposed a requirement that a form must be submitted to their Center for Commercialization in advance of any outside professional work, including work that is for free, if the university thinks that one could have charged a fee for the work but declined to do so.   This demand then captures all such informal interactions and makes them subject to an ethics violation if pre-approval has not been received. 

But it's even worse than that, because the University of Washington administrators have inserted into the approval form a present assignment for future inventions, works of authorship, and even "know how".   If you learn something in the outside work, the university can claim it--not after review and a request for assignment, but outright, at the time the know-how comes into existence! 

The use of an expansive present assignment requirement, considered prudent, is in reality devastating to the sources of innovation.   There are various rationalizations in a university for using a compulsory approach to ownership of intellectual property. One common rationalization is that an employer should have a right to the work of the employee (even when that work is "non-strategic").  Another is that a university's facilities are provided for public use, not for private profit-making (and thus, for institutional self-interest, not for the benefit of others, including when others are faculty or students).   A third is that a university has more resources and expertise, and therefore it can do a better job of developing an invention and securing partnerships, than can any mere individual faculty member or student.  These are all reasonable claims, from the perspective of institutional self-interest.  If an institution is in the business of discovery for itself, then it will feel justified in making one or more of these claims and seek to go about its business of claiming all the worthwhile intellectual property that it can from its employees (and anyone else who might use facilities or collaborate on a sponsored project, even informally). 

This is just what the University of Washington is doing.  It has in essence declared its nearly $1bn per year research enterprise is dedicated to producing materials that its Center for Commercialization will attempt to sell to industry and withhold from the public to increase its value (to the institution).   The entire research enterprise is given over to institutional self-interest.  It has reasoned its way to an organizational conflict of interest that has been made so plausible and attractive that administrators are willing to sacrifice academic freedom, diversity of action, and the entire creative output of the institution in vain attempt to make money.  As the experience of Xerox PARC shows, it will not happen.  Even the track record of the Center for Commercialization, which has spent more than $20m in just under three years, is dismal.  The number of start-ups is flat, it has stopped reporting license transactions, and it has told the state legislature that it is not doing this for the money.  What then?  Why the ownership claims?  Why the requirement to pre-approve all outside work? 

No, this is a subversion of Keynes and a failure by an institution to set the appropriate limits to its own powers and self-interest.  If one wants innovation to prosper in a university environment, it cannot be under a Geneva Convention that sets standards for the treatment of captured things.  It must be a form of Bill of Rights, that limits the power of the state, the institution, the status quo, so that innovation has room to operate, below the radar of strategic planning, without the requirement to use the orderly assistance of experts selected by the institution.   This approach has risk and disorder and uncertainty, but it is in these very things that innovation prospers.  The business of the institution is to be ready to assist when asked, and to prepare the capabilities to assist in unexpected ways, at inopportune times, and to guard against things that would disrupt academic commitments while celebrating creative initiative.

Can such a thing be done?  Is not autocracy with a comprehensive claim to ownership a stronger, more confident approach?   For a university, which is itself an ancient form of innovation governance, the answer is:  yes, universities can be tremendous sources of innovation if they have the courage to limit their own powers and remain institutions of independent inquiry and initiative within a world of state, religious, corporate, and social interests that would own and suppress or co-opt innovation arising from scholarly inquiry.  Autocracy is not a solution for universities.  The only way is voluntary ownership of inventions and other creative works.   That is what enables economic impact and positions the university to serve as a steward rather than self-interested competitor to the needs of its creative personnel.  That was the way of the past for higher education, and that also its future.

* This guest comment is a version of an Op-Ed published in GEN - click for link

The author is also an adviser to IP Advocate, which has an education campaign, Stanford v. Roche: University Ownership versus Stewardship.

The education campaign, Stanford v. Roche: University Ownership versus Stewardship, will examine the implications of the High Court's ruling handed down in June, which found that universities could not use the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act to claim ownership of inventions made with federal support when the ruling went in favour of Switzerland-based pharmaceutical group Roche rather than the US university.

The IP Advocate campaign will focus on the theme of "freedom to invent" that underlies research innovation and is advised by Gerald Barnett, a former senior technology transfer officer at the University of Washington and in the University of California system.

Rhaz Zeisler, executive director at IP Advocate, said: "The Supreme Court decision gives us a mandate to have a public discussion.

"We're delighted to have the support of the Kauffman Foundation in this important work. The opportunity to educate academic researchers on their rights and responsibilities is fundamental to our shared mission of fostering innovation and entrepreneurship.'"

The IP Advocate campaign will focus on the theme of freedom to invent that underlies research innovation and is advised by Gerald Barnett, a former senior technology transfer officer at the University of Washington and in the University of California system.

Barnett said: "Bayh-Dole is an important law governing federal agency interest in inventions made with their support.

"In recent years, however, it has been portrayed as stripping university inventors of their rights in favor of university bureaucrats. The Supreme Court flatly rejected this portrayal in Stanford v. Roche. University administrators have used their misinterpretation of Bayh-Dole to force assignment of inventions to their universities."

IP Advocate said since the ruling university administrators were trying to claim exclusive title to all inventions made by faculty and other university research personnel. Renee Kaswan, founder of IP Advocate, said: "We are now in a worse situation than before Bayh-Dole existed.

"Bayh-Dole freed university inventors from the compulsory ownership claims of federal agencies. Now, universities are making their own compulsory claims on all faculty and student inventions. Our campaign aims to restore in universities the freedom to invent, which is at the heart of Bayh-Dole and American university innovation."

Senator Maralyn Chase from Washington State has proposed the bill, Regarding the assignment of intellectual property rights at institutions of higher education, following a decision by the US Supreme Court - Stanford v. Roche - on an interpretation of whether federal money conferred the IP to the university or inventor.

The 10-week programme, Summer@Highland, offers university-affiliated start-ups office space in California and $15,000 in funding but Highland does not take an equity stake. 

Summer@Highland  has been going for five years and this year the VC firm said it was "especially interested" in scaleable business plans beyond the initial idea stage in technology-focused areas, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), internet/digital media, e-commerce, mobile, payments, social media, infrastructure, energy efficiency, robotics, healthcare IT, advanced materials & semiconductors.

There are two application deadlines this year: Early (March 1, 2012 at 11:59pm PT) and Regular (April 5, 2012 at 11:59pm PT). If you apply Early are not selected for some reason, your application will automatically roll into our Regular review process.


The program is open to teams with co-founders that are current undergraduate or graduate students, post graduate docs, as well as recent grads (must not have graduated earlier than December 2011).

At least one participating member of the team must meet this criterion.
Teams need to consist of at least two co-founders and preferably aren't larger than four members.
Each selected team will receive $15,000

Click for form.

The incubator is based at the University of Canterbury (UC) and Lincoln University.

PowerHouse has helped raise $3.1m over the past year to create five start-ups, such as Invert Robotics, from the universities, which employ graduates to run them.

UC Research and Innovation director Nigel Johnson said in most cases the intellectual property is owned by the university where it was developed and would either license the technology to the company and receive a royalty or take an interest in the company.

The building will be based in 4 to 5 Bonhill Street near London's technology cluster "Silicon Roundabout", according to UK news provider the Evening Standard yesterday.

 The so-called "Campus" will provide more than 100 desks for aspiring entrepreneurs to help build "an entrepreneur community", the Standard said. Google was encouraged to open the building by government plans to create a "Tech City"in London's East End, the Standard added.

The move follows Google's corporate venturing unit, Google Ventures, hiring Rick Klau, previously product manager at US-based video website YouTube and an ex-Google executive, to join to run its Startup University.

Durham Graphene Science will use the money from Northstar's Finance for Business North East Proof of Concept fund to develop its patented method of manufacturing graphene on a large scale.

Graphene is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, whose conductive, thermal and mechanical properties have seen it talked about as a replacement for silicon in products such as transistors.

Durham Graphene Science filed a patent 18 months ago on a new method of creating graphene by assembling atoms within a reactor.

Durham Graphene Science won the Knowlege Transfer award at this year's Blueprint Awards, which celebrate the UK region's most promising university spin-outs.

Founder Dr Karl Coleman, who is employed as a reader in Durham University's department of chemistry, forecasts that the business aims to reach turnover in excess of £4m in five years and amass a workforce of 12 to 15 people. He told news provider The Journal: "The composite market is enormous. In the UK alone it is worth close to half a billion pounds. It's a lot more in the US. There are companies that make composites and carbon fibre that make several billion. You see it everywhere you want a lightweight, high-strength material."

Scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, of the University of Manchester, won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene, which could have a range of uses, including TV screens and fuselages on planes. Dr Coleman said the company is especially interested in providing companies with material to use as a strengthening filler in polymers and plastics.

He said: "What's holding graphene back is there wasn't really a decent way of producing it before. There are two ways of making the material. One is to take the larger material and make it smaller, in this case by stripping layers off graphite. Our approach is to assemble atoms into a graphene sheet. The reason we do this is that it's more scaleable and we can produce larger amounts more easily."

The company is currently operating out of the university.

In September, Samsung Venture Investment Company, the corporate venturing unit of the eponymous South Korea-based conglomerate, was revealed by Global Corporate Venturing to be the sole investor in the €8.25m ($11m) round for Novaled, a Germany-based organic light-emitting diode (OLED) maker. In its regulatory filing, Novaled said Samsung owned 9.84% after this September round.

Samsung Ventures had joined the portfolio company's other investors, which in April had included venture capital firms ECapital, Crédit Agricole Private Equity (Cape), Zweite TechnoStart, TechFund and CDC Innovation, having invested in primary shares and buying out others.

The regulatory filing said Zweite TechnoStart owned 16.2%, Cape owned 15.1%, TechFund 13.4%, Ecapital 10.9%, state fund BFH also 9.8% and CDC 9%. Novaled said it was founded in 2001 as a spin-off from the Technical University and Fraunhofer Institute in Dresden, Germany, both of which are leading German research institutions in the field of materials science and technology, and they remain shareholders.

In January 2009, Novaled had raised €8.5m in its series C round from existing shareholders ECapital, TechnoStart, KfW and Tudag, Credit Agricole Private Equity, TechFund and CDC Innovation. State bank KfW has subsequently started to cut its direct and indirect venture investing. The B round closed at €15m in January 2005 and the first round at €5.75m in May 2003.

Novaled opened its second representative office in Korea in July, six years after Samsung first began testing its OLEDs, as the country is a centre for flat panel display, low power lighting and efficient and flexible solar cells. The company reported net profit of €3.6m on €17.4m in 2011 revenue, 60% of which came from Samsung.

Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank are serving as co-lead underwriters.

Linkage Ventures will identify, evaluate and invest in early stage technologies. Linkage itself will be a source of dealflow and run the Ventures unit while CincyTech has access to public and private funding.

Linkage has hired investment banker and former technology company executive John Hopper as managing director of Linkage Ventures.

Scott Collins, chief executive of Linkage Ventures, said: "We have got the domain expertise internally, and we can do quick beta testing that marries well with the CincyTech network and expertise."

CincyTech is a public-private seed-stage investor that has invested since 2007 in 35 startup companies in information technology and bioscience. Mike Venerable, CincyTech's managing director of digital software and health tech, said: "We can quickly validate the economics of a product or idea through their population."

Mike Morris, executive president of Seaforth, said: "This investment will allow us to accelerate our pursuit of export market opportunities in countries such as the UK, Italy and Greece, and scale up production capacity accordingly."

Innovacorp has previously invested $550,000 in Seaforth and runs the Early Stage Commercialization Fund (ESCF), Dalhousie University's corporate residency Masters in Business Administration programme.

The line was used to justify paying $20 for a hot dog but it could also be applicable to what could be applicable to Samsung Venture Investment Company, the corporate venturing unit of the eponymous South Korea-based conglomerate's, first potential exit from its European team set up two years ago.

Novaled, a Germany-based organic light-emitting diode (OLED) maker, plans to raise $200m in its US flotation and, as revealed by Global Corporate Venturing in September, Samsung was the sole investor in the last round for Novaled. In its regulatory filing, Novaled said Samsung owned 9.84% after this September round of €8.25m ($11m).

Samsung Ventures had joined the portfolio company's other investors, which in April had included venture capital firms ECapital, Crédit Agricole Private Equity (Cape), Zweite TechnoStart, TechFund and CDC Innovation, having invested in primary shares and buying out others.

If the IPO gets away - an achievement for anything other than sexy consumer internet plays - then Novaled will validate a wider group of industrial tech companies thinking of listing, such as fuel cell group Intelligent Energy, and be a welcome boost to venture investors looking for returns.

That venture investors sold shares to Samsung so soon before its planned IPO is on the one hand surprising as valuations should be better - pricing yet to be disclosed for Novaled - on public markets than the last round of private capital. The company had already been trading more than a decade, which is longer than the hold period for most limited liability partnerships making venture investments, since spinning out from the Technical University and Fraunhofer Institute in Dresden, Germany.

That the two research institute remain shareholders is positive for the company as well as potentially a source of profits back to the academics.

The cost of selling in September, therefore, has provided value to those willing to stay the course and Samsung that leveraged its relationship as Novaled's biggest customer.

Finland-based phone maker Nokia, which uses software group Microsoft's mobile operating system, will both fund the programme, AppCampus, over the next three years.

Will Cardwell, head of the Aalto University Center for Entrepreneurship, will run AppCampus. He said: "Through our technology transfer and Aalto Venture Garage activities, the Aalto University community has been able to help catalyze the creation and growth of more than 30 companies during the past two years, with a number of them having mobile applications."

Abingdon will buy 50.1% of Molecular Vision, another Imperial Innovations portfolio company, as well as use the money for other projects, including those from its Bioscience Ventures joint venture with the University of Birmingham.

A spinout of Imperial College in 2001, Molecular Vision is developing a diagnostic test for kidney function and cardiovascular disease called BioLED, which will complement Abingdon‟s existing technologies. Molecular Vision has issued equity to Imperial Innovations and Switzerland-based life sciences investor Acrongenomics in return for £2.17m and gained nearly £3m in non-dilutive funding from government bodies. 

Bioscience Ventures is developing diagnostic tools for conditions such as oncology, genetic diseases and platform technologies with applications in infectious diseases, drug testing and veterinary and has one wholly owned subsidiary, Alta Bioscience, which provides speciality chemicals, reagents and services to the life science sector.

Chris Hand, Chris Yates and Brett Pollard founded Abingdon in 2008. Hand is both chief executive (CEO) of Abingdon and Molecular Vision and was the ex-founder and CEO of Cozart Bioscience, which sold for £65m to Concateno in 2007 and non-executive director of Concateno until its sale to Inverness Medical Innovations for £147m in 2009.

Imperial Innovations has invested £2m in Abingdon alongside £1.02m from private investors, including the founder directors. Following the investment, Imperial Innovations will hold a 28.6% stake in Abingdon, with Rebecca Todd, director of healthcare ventures at Imperial Innovations, on its board and will retain 36.4% stake in Molecular Vision.

Susan Searle, CEO of Imperial Innovations, said: "We are pleased to back a proven entrepreneur and are confident this portfolio approach, combining complementary technologies to form competitive diagnostic products represents the optimum route to market."

High-Tech Gruenderfonds has backed SocialMeme, an application which is run by Germany-based application company Media Metrics. Media Metrics was founded in the spring of 2011 as a spin-off from the Humboldt University in Berlin. It employs eleven staff based in Berlin.

Christine Schmidl, a High-Tech Gruenderfonds investment manager, said: "Media Metrics provides corporate communications in various industries to overlook in a simple and professional way the media flow and it enables the successful management of social media activities from today's marketing mix. With this initial investment, the software socialMeme can be brought to market."

Novartis Venture Funds was joined in the oversubscribed series A round by Merieux Developpement the healthcare investment company of Institut Merieux, a French industrial holding company, and venture investors Nextech Invest and Cycad Group as well as existing seed investor Momentum Biosciences, which is formed by faculty at US university UCLA.

Imaginab's technology re-engineers antibodies into smaller proteins suitable for diagnostic imaging. It is working with more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies to develop imaging agents to accompany therapeutic antibody drugs - with a focus on types of prostate and pancreatic cancer. Imaginab was founded in 2007 by UCLA Faculty, Robert Reiter, Anna Wu and Christian Behrenbruch. Behrenbruch, Imaginab's chief executive was a managing partner of Momentum from 2007 to 2009.

Campbell Murray, managing director of Novartis Venture Funds, said: "Imaginab's strategy of harnessing the explosive growth in the antibody space to build an in vivo diagnostics program is best in class and has yielded product pipelines that will have major impact on the clinical management of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The company also has the potential to profoundly change the way companion diagnostics are used in drug development and patient selection."

In October last year Imaginab received $2.3m in funding from the National Cancer Institute's Small Business Innovation Research programme.

The accelerator is set to be located in the Govans community of North Baltimore, east of Loyola's campus.

Brian Linnane, Loyola's president said: ""This initiative allows us to advance two priorities deeply important to the University. First, it creates new opportunities for our students to think creatively about new products, new markets, and the types of business, marketing, and expansion plans that will help young companies grow, and to apply these ideas to real-world organizations and the entrepreneurs behind them. For those with an entrepreneurial spirit of their own, it can give them a chance to get their own businesses off the ground. Second, it offers Loyola a new way of continuing to contribute to the revitalisation of the Govans commercial corridor. Loyola is committed to contributing to projects that help improve the quality of life for all those living, working, and learning in this community, and helping to revitalize its businesses is a key part of that effort."

Karyl Leggio, dean of Loyola's Sellinger School of Business and Management, said: "The University and its students, and those in the Sellinger School in particular, are already making contributions to the local business community through classroom service projects, independent studies, and internships. The accelerator and its resources will allow Loyola to contribute to the entrepreneurial growth in Maryland, will crystallize the work being done, and increase the scale of our efforts."

Kuegler said: "In the last three years, Wasabi Ventures has provided experiential learning experiences to more than 100 Loyola students at companies in our portfolio. By partnering with Loyola on the accelerator, we expect to expand these efforts, while also participating more actively in the broader emerging start-up community of Baltimore."

Venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Artiman Ventures and Northern Light Venture Capital led the series B round for Crossbar.

Launched in October, the $25m Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups (MINTS) fund invests in companies built from its academics' research as long as an independent venture capital firm leads the round.

Wei Lu, associate professor in UM's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and co-founder of Crossbar, which is developing a non-volatile memory technology, said: "Investment from the university is a clear indication of their continued commitment to our technology and its potential impact of changing the future of the silicon industry. It also demonstrates the university's commitment to advancing new disruptive technology."

UM Tech Transfer has helped launch 100 start-ups during the past decade.

The partnership will see Bessemer, which was effectively formed as a family office in 1911 out of Henry Phipps's share of the proceeds from the sale of Carnegie Steel and named after a process for making steel, invest $20m in Skolkovo-resident companies over the next two years.

The deal is part of a visit by Skolkovo Foundation to California, US, which includes a visit to space agency NASA and several research centres, including those of computer group Cisco. On Wednesday, Skolkovo expanded its relationship with Cisco to support its research.

This followed Skolkovo gaining political support for Russia's 47 biggest state-controlled companies, including Gazprom, Russian Railways, RusHydro, and Aeroflot, to transfer 1% of their innovation budgets, about R10bn ($340m) to Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (SkTech).

Set up by Skolkovo Foundation and US university Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, SkTech will effectively become Russia's biggest endowment fund, projected at R16.5bn ($560m) this year, with private partners of the Institute donating the remainder.

CRT and the European Investment Fund (EIF), a state-backed organisation that is the largest investor - called limited partner - in European venture capital funds, will equally split the commitments for the £50m fund, called CRT Pioneer fund.

The money will be committed in two tranches of £25m - now and in two years' time - and managed by Sixth Element Capital, a new, independent general partner set up for the purpose and run by Robert James, Ian Miscampbell and Ralph Villiger. Law firm Reed Smith advised on the fund's formation.

The CRT Pioneer fund will take potential cancer drugs from discovery through to entry to phase II clinical trials by licensing potential treatments to exisating pharmaceutical groups rather than creating separate companies that would then have to be sold to generate a return for the fund.

In a typical licensing deal, half the money is paid to the research institution and individual that made the discovery with the fund then paid as milestones are reached. This provides a potentially earlier and more long-term stream of payments back to the CRT Pioneer fund than waiting for a sale or flotation and so the fund is set up to run for 15 years rather than the traditional 10.

At least two thirds of the CRT Pioneer fund will be used for discoveries made by Cancer Research UK scientists at its own CRT Discovery Laboratories and Paterson and Beatson Institutes, the Institute of Cancer Research and Newcastle University. The remaining projects may come from other academic groups or industry in the UK.

Keith Blundy, chief executive (CEO) of CRT, said: "Investment from industry has moved away from early stage discovery and there's less funding for small biotechnology firms [which] previously helped bridge the gap between academia and pharmaceutical companies." 

CRT's last spin out was in January, with Acublate developing a high intensity focused ultrasound surgery device to treat a range of solid tumour types. Cancer Research UK, Imperial Innovations and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust funded the original research to develop the technology while CRT owns the intellectual property to the technology and is Acublate's largest equity holder.

Richard Pelly, CEO of the EIF, added: "This investment [in the CRT Pioneer fund] now becomes the largest technology transfer operation partnered by EIF to-date." 

The EIF is also expected to commit to a €10m ($13m) tech transfer fund in France for digital investments and seed funds in Bulgaria and Greece later this year. In the UK, the EIF has already committed to the £32m UMIP Premier Fund to commercialise research from the University of Manchester, the IP Venture Fund working at 12 British universities and is expected to support the Enterprise Capital Funds, according to government officials.

Across the European Union, the EIF said it would develop its tech transfer to cover royalty funds, intellectual property funds, corporate venturing and a larger number of university seed funds. Its model for corporate venturing partnerships, called Bio-E in healthcare, has already been taken up by drugs companies GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson with venture capital firm Index Ventures to create the Life VI fund last month.

The past few weeks has seen indications for how corporations will work with venture capital peers, charities and endowments, government-sponsored funds and others, including secodnaries and family offices, to create syndicates that can support the next generation of entrepreneurial ideas and companies.

Europe has been a testing ground for many of these diverse syndicates needed to fund healthcare entrepreneurs - click here for a nice slideshow of some of the biggest by news provider PEHub.

And the diversity is increasing. Cancer Research Technology (CRT), charity Cancer Research UK's subsidiary to commercialise academic research into oncology treatments, has set up a £50m ($80m) fund in partnership with the European Investment Fund (EIF), a state-backed organisation that is the largest investor - called limited partner - in European venture capital funds.

The fund aims to fill a gap as Keith Blundy, chief executive (CEO) of CRT, said there was less funding for small biotechnology firms, which previously helped bridge the gap between academia and pharmaceutical companies.

The CRT Pioneer fund will join UK-based medical endowment Wellcome Trust £200m investment company for healthcare, as well as the Index Ventures-managed fund half-sponsored by drugs companies GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson and modeled on a plan devised by the EIF last year revealed at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium in May.

But the trend is not confined to Europe. As Cyril Schiever, president and managing director of Merck in Canada, said when the US-based drugs company committed to a new fund:  "The Merck Lumira Biosciences Fund represents a collaborative approach to research between government, academia and industry."

Also in North America, elderly association Linkage Ventures started a fund to invest in early stage technologies and Cleveland Clinic continued building its innovation alliance with a partnership with North Shore-LIJ's clinical facilities. (Cleveland Clinic and Merck will be discussing these trends at the annual Global Corporate Venturing Symposium on May 15.)

But Asia could see some of the biggest changes as governments, particular in China, Korea, Singapore and Japan, suport healthcare industries for their ageing populations. China's RMB856.7bn ($136bn) National Council for Social Security Fund, China's largest limited partner, has only invested 2.2% of its money into the venture capital and private equity sectors but has an allocation of up to 10%, according to news provider China Daily.

Healthcare also represents an industry experiencing rapid cross-sectoral and regional innovation and partnerships. Technology company Qualcomm set up an advisory council for its Life division, Japan-based electronics group Sony is reportedly setting up a team to review the Israeli market to seek out healthcare companies for investment or acquisition and Netherlands-based industrials group DSM has invested again in "super-bug" treatment company IQ Therapeutics, chocolate company Nestle's Inventages unit has based Phosphate Therapeutcis and Germany's Siemens joined America's ViewRay's third round.

The attraction for all groups is the chance to heal people or keep them well as well as reap some of the enormous profits the healthcare industry throws up. But given the pluarality of syndicates being formed by investor objectives, managing the consortia so the entrepreneur can actually deliver on the potential discovery will be challenging.

As Blundy said, only one in 20 discoveries become an accepted drug but managing a mix of investors that potentially joined at different times and enterprise valuations and with difering societal, financial and strategic aims will be a headache. These challenges are starting to creep out into other areas, such as education/media and clean-tech, where the line between society good and profit maximisation are also blurred but will affect all parts of the economy - companies and the profits they return to managers and shareholders are only tolerated by people as long as the trade-off in terms of there being an efficient allocation of resources to productive areas and benefits to countries and their inhabitants.

The growth in social enterprises, venture philanthropy and impact investing show the corporation share value-only model is not the only one people can choose to work in or support.

BioMarCare is a portfolio company of Hadasit Bio-Holdings, a publicly traded holding company for businesses using intellectual property developed and owned by Israel's Hadassah University Hospital.

Ophir Shahaf, chief executive of Hadasit Bio-Holdings, said: "The investment validates the technology and research behind BioMarCare's diagnostic kits.

"Not only will the agreement secure funds to advance the research and development of its kits, but more importantly, it will allow for collaboration between the companies with significant synergies utilizing resources, expertise and knowledge that the companies have acquired in the field of cancer diagnostics."

The deal is part of a share crossholding in Israel.

In September, BioLight Israeli Life Sciences Investments, a company currently chaired by Israel Makov, former executive president of Israel-based drugs group Teva Pharmaceuticals, and managed by Suzana Nahum acquired 21% of Micromedic Technologies to gain control as part of its plans to build a biotech cluster in the country.

Under the agreement, BioLight subsidiary Zetiq was transferred to full ownership of Micromedic, and, in exchange, BioLight received 21% of Micromedic, plus options on a further 5% for five years.

Two months earlier, Dilip Shanghvi, chief executive of India-based Sun Pharmaceuticals Industries, through his private company, MJ Pharmaceuticals, invested NIS10.5m ($2.8m) in BioLight for an 11% stake.

The largest of these efforts, a $760m partnership between Russia's Rusnano and the US venture capital firm Domain Associates, will invest in emerging life sciences technology companies, foster the transfer of technology into Russia, and establish manufacturing facilities in Russia for production of advanced therapeutic products. As part of the effort, Rusnano and Domain expect to co-invest in about 20 US-based healthcare technology companies.

Other initiatives include an effort by the Welsh government to create a biotech hub through an $80m commitment to what is targeted to be a $375m fund; a $100m research and development fund backed by Merck Canada, Lumira Capital, and other venture capital firms to attract pharmaceutical companies to Quebec; and a Wellcome Trust project to invest $317m in emerging healthcare and life sciences businesses and technologies in Europe in early-stage development with significant potential to grow.

Among the most unusual efforts is a $250m initiative from Cleveland's University Hospital, which is establishing a non-profit entity to fund and advise physician-scientists on translational research and a related for-profit accelerator that will develop selected compounds to proof of concept.

Steven Burrill, chief executive of Burrill & Company, said: "These efforts reflect broad attempts to forge creative new models for funding translational research and spur development of important new therapies.

"It also demonstrates that governments across the globe, despite facing fiscal pressure, see the importance of investing in the life sciences to build innovation-based economies that can provide high quality jobs."

The development of new funding and business models to accelerate the commercialization of innovation at a time traditional models are failing to produce adequate returns on investment is a focus of the just published Biotech 2012: Innovating in the New Austerity, Burrill & Company's 26th annual report on the life sciences industry (http://www.burrillandco.com/resources.html).

Though 2012 got off to a solid start in life sciences financing, activity has slowed in March. M&A, partnering, and initial public offering activity have been lackluster. With the exception of debt, financings across all types of public and private deals fell from the previous month. For the first quarter, total global financings for the life sciences fell to $12.5bn from $29.2bn during the same period a year ago. A large portion of the drop reflected a $15.9bn drop in global debt offerings.

Life sciences stocks posted solid gains in the first quarter with the Burrill Select Index rising 20.7%. That bested the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 8.1% gain and the Nasdaq Composite Index's 18.7% rise. Threshold Pharmaceuticals outperformed all other life sciences stocks during the quarter as it rose more than 622.9% to close the quarter at $8.82 on a co-development and commercialization agreement with Merck KGaA for its experimental cancer drug TH-302 and the strength of mid-stage data. Cardiome Pharma posted the biggest loss for the quarter, falling 73.2% to 71 cents after it reported Merck would discontinue a deal to develop the company's oral formulation of Vernakalant, a treatment for maintenance and prevention of atrial fibrillation recurrence.

Venture capital financings in both the United States and globally rose in the first quarter of 2012 as compared to the first quarter of 2011. In the US, venture funding rose 22.1% to $2bn, thanks in large part to a 63.4% increase in capital raised by medical device companies. Globally, several large private equity investments in private companies drove the venture number up 35.4%.

On initial public offerings (IPO), Merrimack Pharmaceuticals was the only company to go public in the US in March. The cancer therapeutics developer raised $100m, less than the $150m it had hoped to raise. The company sold 14.3 million shares at $7 each, below its initial $8 to $10 per share target. The JOBS Act, legislation designed to lower barriers to going public for emerging growth companies and exempt them from the need to comply with burdensome requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for up to five years, won rare bipartisan support and is awaiting US President Barack Obama's signature. Passage of the law is expected to improve the ability of biotech companies to access capital through the public markets.

M&A activity slowed in March with the two top deals during the month involving medical device companies. Asahi Kasei is acquiring Zoll Medical, a maker of resuscitation and critical care devices, for $2.2bn in cash. Boston Scientific said it would buy privately held Cameron Health, developer of a leadless defibrillator, for $150m in cash and milestone payments that could increase the total deal value to nearly $1.4bn.

The most interesting M&A activity continues to be the deals yet to be consummated. Roche increased its hostile bid for Illumina by $1bn to $6.7bn. Amylin reportedly spurned a $3.5bn offer from Bristol-Myers Squibb. And Mylan and Watson Pharmaceuticals are both said to be bidding for generic drugmaker Actavis Group in a deal that could fetch nearly $7bn.

"All of this is setting April up to be potentially a big month for M&A activity in the sector," says Burrill.

The US Supreme Court took center stage in March for the life sciences industry rendering one decision that could significantly alter the ability of diagnostics companies to patent their tests and hearing oral arguments on the 2010 healthcare reform legislation. Though there is much speculation that the court may throw out part of the Affordable Care Act, the outcome of the case will not be known until June.

In a unanimous decision, the court in Mayo v Prometheus ruled that a Prometheus test for determining optimal dosing for a given patient of certain gastrointestinal drugs based on levels of metabolites in the blood is not patentable because it relied solely on laws of nature. In another closely watched patent case, the Supreme Court has now ordered a Federal Appeals court to review its decision in a challenge to patents held by Myriad Genetics on two genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer and apply the Prometheus decision to that.

March also saw the Indian government take the unusual step of ordering a compulsory license of Bayer's patented kidney cancer drug Nexavar. The government ordered Bayer to license the drug to Natco Pharma, an Indian drugmaker. Natco will pay Bayer a 6% royalty and sell the drug for $176 a month. That compares to the $5,600 a month Bayer charges for the drug in India.

Burrill said: "As pharmaceutical companies turn to emerging markets as bright spots of growth, the action by the Indian government should prove quite sobering.

"Companies will need to think carefully about strategies for protecting their patent rights in these markets and may need to turn to partnerships with local companies to provide them with a solid footing."

Life Sciences Scorecard in $m, First Quarter 2012                                                                    

Finance Type                           Q1 2012  Q1 2011  Change        

Global Venture Capital              2,990    2,207        35.5%        

US VC                                       1,956    1,602        22.1%                  

IPOs (13 in 2012 v. 20 in 2011) 884    1,787          -50.5%        

Global PIPEs                            1,257    1,031    21.9%        

Global Follow-ons                    2,098    2,292    -8.5%        

Global Other Equity                  517       N/A         U

Global Debt Offerings               6,300   22,162   -71.6%        

Global Other Debt                     1,482    1,958   -24.3%

Total Global Public Financings  12,538   29,230   -57.1%

Global Partnering                      10,175   11,943   -14.8%

Global M&A                               16,570   49,533   -66.5%        

Source: Burrill & Co.

The companies were joined in the series B round for the Belgium-based cell therapy company, on Wednesday, by Belgium-based venture capital firm SambrInvest.

The Walloon Region, which has backed the company since it was founded, has also provided a loan of €6.6m to support its clinical development for its cell therapy product, HepaStem, which is a treatment for severe liver defects.

In October 2009 the company raised €5.3m in series A financing, in the year the company was founded

The company said it had "successfully transferred and scaled up its production process developed at Université Catholique de Louvain into a larger-scale pharmaceutical operation."                                                                          

The five investors joined the investors in the company's A round, venture funds Vesalius Biocapital, Vives-Louvain Technology Fund, Life Science Research Partners, Luxembourgeoise, SRIW, a development agency,  and Sopartec (Université Catholique de Louvain 's technology transfer company), as well as several business angels.

Etienne Sokal, chief scientific officer at Promethera Biosciences and director of Université Catholique de Louvain's cell therapy research lab, said: "There is a real need for medical innovation to treat metabolic diseases in children; too many diseases are still intractable. The first HepaStem studies represent a major step towards, we hope, eventually transforming the prognosis of these diseases."

Ilka Wicke, director at the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture fund, said: "We believe that Promethera HepaStem has (even though early in development) significant potential to treat metabolic liver diseases and we are looking forward to working with the company now and in the future."

The company's series A was co-led by Seventure, part of France-based bank Natixis, and venture firm Lundbeckfond Ventures.

It previously raised €1.5m from Seventure Partners and Inra Transfert,  the French National Institute in Agronomic Research's tech transfer organisation.

Gérard Jacquin, president of Inra Technology Transfer organisation, said: "We are particularly pleased to see one of our main research assets being translated into a company and financed by an international group of investors. Enterome is a key element in our Metagenopolis organization, a centre for excellence in metagenomics of the human gut microbiota developed at Inra."

Isabelle de Cremoux, chief executive of Seventure, said: "I am particularly proud to see Enterome developing, helped by the strong and longstanding relationship Seventure has established with INRA."

Johan Kördel, from Lundbeckfond Ventures, said:  "We are impressed by the Enterome leadership and are very confident that Enterome will translate this very innovative platform into valuable diagnostic and therapeutic tools."

Emmanuelle Porte and Sylvie Hamel, from law firm Nixon Peabody, advised Enterome.

The series A financing round was led by venture firm Pittsburgh Equity Partners and was joined by investors including angel groups BlueTree Allied Angels and the Innovation Works.

Voci said it has produced "the world's first commercial speech recognition appliance". The business' technology is based on work on accelerated speech recognition done at Carnegie Mellon, it said.

Voci says on its website: "Collaboration with speech experts at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois ensures that Voci continues to lead the cutting-edge in speech recognition."

Voci was founded in 2008 and is based in Pittsburgh, "steps away from the Carnegie Mellon campus".

The InnoSpring Seed Fund is backed by venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Northern Light Venture Capital , TEEC Angel Fund, which is founded and funded mainly by entrepreneurs and executives graduated from Tsinghua University of Beijing, GSR Ventures, and China Broadband Capital.

InnoSpring is a joint project between Tsinghua University Science Park, Shui On Group, Northern Light Venture Capital and venture debt provider Silicon Valley Bank. It is based in Santa Clara, California and was launched in January.

To see a list of the companies it has incubated, click here.

The company raised $7.6m from undisclosed investors last month.

Bullock was chief executive of Atritech, an electrophysiology company bought by Boston Scientific in 2011, and Endocardial Solutions, a catheter-based cardiac mapping company bought by St. Jude Medical in 2005.

CardioInsight added Steve Arless would step down Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. The company added Charu Ramanathan, co-founder and chief scientific officer, would become interim President.

The company is focussed on getting regulatory clearance for its electrocardiographic mapping technology from US regulator the Food and Drug Administration, it said. The company has already secured CE Mark certification allowing it to sell its product in the European Union.

In January 2011 CardioInsight raised more than $10m from Japan-based distributor of cardiovascular devices DVX and venture capital firms Draper Triangle Ventures, which led the financing, and Case Technology Ventures, which makes pre-seed stage investments out of Case Western Reserve University. The company raised $750,000 in 2006, when it span off from Case Western Reserve University in a round also backed by Jumpstart, an accelerator.

CardioInsight has put in place commercial installations at St. Mary's Hospital in London, England, the Kerckhoff Clinic in Bad Nauheim, Germany and the Hopital Cardiologique du Haut-Leveque in Bordeaux, France.

Imaxio said the funds would be used for the clinical development of its vaccine-carrying protein platform, designed to improve the efficacy of vaccinations against human and animal diseased.

It added the funds would also be used to also commercialising its vaccine against human leptospirosis, Spirolept, which is already marketed in France.

Imaxio was created by the merger Diagnogene and Avidis, a spin-off from the Medical Research Council and Cambridge University in the UK.

"As a historic shareholder, it is important for us to support Imaxio's development strategy, which it adopted a year ago," said Doctor Christian Pradeyrol, chairman of Pradeyrol Développement.

Pradeyrol added: "The vaccine market is consistently growing, having increased by 21 per cent between 2006 and 2010, which makes it a very promising sector, especially for Imaxio and its carrier protein technology."

The company owns intellectual property and collaborates with numerous academic partners, including the Jenner Institute at Oxford University.

Imaxio is based in Lyon and at Saint Beauzire, near Clermont-Ferrand in France.

It has 24 employee and made €2.4m in revenues in 2011.

A number of smaller existing shareholders also invested.

Arvia has commercialised its technology to destroy organic substances that are either dissolved or dispersed in water. 

Jim Totty, from Sustainable Technology Investors, and Gordon Lawson will join Mark Rahn, from MTI, as investor directors on the Arvia board. 

MTI backed Arvia Technology through its UMIP Premier Fund in September 2008, and it was joined in the £800,000 round by investment managerAlliance Fund Managers' Merseyside Special Investment Fund and private individuals.

MTI's managing partner, David Ward, commented "Arvia was the first spin-out investment from the University of Manchester that MTI invested in from the UPF.  The company has been a fantastic role model, using MTI's initial series of investment monies to expand and professionalise its management team and to gain revenue traction by delivering commercial solutions to market.  A more substantial funding round to support and accelerate growth was the next logical step and we are delighted to welcome the new investors that have joined us in putting together this new investment and share our view of both the substantial progress the company has made and its future potential".

Totty said "One of the biggest challenges of industrial energy efficiency and waste management is to find an alternative solution to energy intensive, high cost, high temperature, and environmentally unfriendly waste incineration processes. Arvia offers an ambient temperature and energy efficient disposal solution for toxic organic wastes in many industrial sectors, and in particular solves a key unmet market need globally for the disposal of radioactive oils. We are delighted to be backing Martin Keighley and his team as they continue to build Arvia's business in its target industrial markets."

Alastair Kilgour, of Parkwalk, said "We believe Arvia is developing a unique breakthrough technology which will help speed up the destruction of difficult to treat oily wastes from nuclear plants and could have significant benefits in eliminating certain wastes in the Water Industry. Arvia Technology will enhance the portfolio of companies Parkwalk Advisors is building in the UK University Technology Spin-out companies through its series of specialist venture funds with EIS tax benefits."

The legal advisors on the deal were 3volution , based in Leeds, and Laytons Solicitors in Manchester.

Innovacom, which invests in Europe and the US, had been part of phone operator France Telecom for more than 21 years and the move to independence was designed to reassure its new limited partners for the €30m ($40m) Technocom II fund.

Innovacom's independence also follows the parent group's Orange mobile phone subsidiary's decision to commit to venture capital funds in transport and teleocms managed by third parties, Ecomobilite Ventures and Iris Capital, respectively, earlier in the year.

Orange, however, retains its Asia-focused corporate venturing unit and is a limited partner (LP) - investor - in the Technocom II, which will invest in about 15 start-ups from French public, academic and industrial research in materials and components, embedded software systems, machine to machine and machine to user communication, data management and high-speed broadband connectivity.

Aside from Orange, the other industrial partners in the fund are communications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, electronics provider Groupe SEB and energy firm Soitec.

The largest LP with a €18.7m commitment is Fonds National d'Amorçage (FNA), a state-backed €400m fund of seed funds managed by CDC Entreprises, an affiliate of financial services provider Caisse de Dépôts.

Denis Champenois, managing director of Innovacom and chief executive since 1993, said Technocom II would benefit from "the energy of entrepreneurs in good co-operation of the large players backing the fund".

The four corporations committed to the fund will give their technological and business points of view to the portfolio companies and effectively sponsor ones in their areas of interest but Innovacom will manage the sourcing and investment process.

This means that Innovacom has final say on which deals are done but will take into account its LPs' views through a strategic committee - whose members have no vote on investments. In addition, usually at least one of the four corporations will co-invest alongside Technocom II in a start-up as part of sponsorship of the idea. Champenois said: "We will favour deals that have a strong positive opinion of at least one willing sponsor."

Technocom 2's strategic committee includes representatives from each of its LPs, the research department of Sorbonne Paris Cité, as well as the director of telecom school, ParisTech.

Champenois said its deals would come from three main areas, or circles: first, the industrial LPs; second, universities, such as the Sorbonne and ParisTech; and, third, seven incubators around the country, including ones in Rens, Grenoble and Montpelier.

These sources are expected to deliver about 300 projects to evaluate each year, with three to four deals struck every 12 months. However, while Champenois said Technocom II would have a traditional venture capital fund's life of about 10 years, there was flexibility to extend this if necessary. But he said its analysis of Innovacom's early-stage deal flow over the past 20 years showed this might not be necessary as the average investment period had been five to six years.

Champenois started the first Technocom fund in 1997 as the first fund dedicated to spin-offs from a corporate research and development centre - in this case France Telecom. Innovacom added to its team last year with the hire of verteran France Telecom researcher and entrepreneur Jérôme Faul, who had started Algety Telecom, a fibre optic transmission company and winner of the first French National Prize for the Innovative Start up.

Technocom, the predecessor seed fund, raised €15m in 1998 and made nine investments with a net 2.3 times and 22% internal (annual) rate of return.

Innovacom, which manages more than €300m, has invested in more than 20 early-stage deals "with a better track record than our later-stage deals," Champenois said.

He added that the firm would look to raise a new later-stage fund next year.

For US-listed IBM, which coined the term era of smart, its own value will be created from amplifying innovation and creating technology and a platform for others to help increase the abilities of individuals and institutions.

The ideas have already helped turn IBM over the past 100 years from a maker of meat slicing equipment to a information technology group with $106.9bn in turnover last year and 433,000 employees round the world, according to Claudia Fan Munce, managing director of IBM's venture capital group and vice-president of its corporate strategy.

Fan Munce, who last month was picked to join US trade body the National Venture Capital Association's main board as its first corporate member, was talking as part of a webinar series co-hosted by Global Corporate Venturing and its sister title, Global University Venturing, and academia organisation the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) - click here to hear the webinar replay and full presentation pack.

The next two webinars are Cisco and Takeda in May and June respectively (and please drop me an email if you want to be considered for the series or have ideas for our new website on university venturing and want to register for the forthcoming magazine).

Alongside Fan Munce in Friday's webinar, was James Spohrer (pictured), 
director of 
IBM's University Programs World Wide. They described how IBM was managing its innovation pipeline (here's a powerpoint slide of the matrix) by working with its staff, external partners, such as universities, and venture capital-backed start-ups (often by being a limited partner in the VCs' funds) and entrepreneurs directly, through the SmartCamp* (see footnote) and broader Global Entrepreneur programme started in 2010 (click here to learn more).

As Fan Munce said: "At IBM, we are technology integrators not a provider of black boxes ourselves. This means we have a huge appetite to bring new partners into our ecosystem."

These partners include 934 participants of its Global Entrepreneur programme and more than 10,000 independent service vendors in 170 countries.

Fan Munce said the Global Entrepreneur programme had been "successful beyond imagination" in reaching entrepreneurs earlier and not necessarily through VCs, partly because it had brought in strategic partners, such as universities.

Spohrer said university start-ups and incubators were a growth area for IBM's partnership model - click here for the methodology behind how 400 people at IBM are approaching more than 5,000 universities around the world.

Building on a quote by John Sexton, president of New York University, about how to build a world-class city through creating a top university, Spohrer said: "More than ever, universities will generate and sustain the world's idea capitals and, as vital creators, incubators, connectors and channels of thought and understanding, they will provide a framework for global civil society."

Spohrer said of the 144 acquisitions made by IBM over the past dozen years (of which more are understood to have come from venture capital funds than even serial acquirer Cisco), 50 had been started by people at university and more than 50% still had connections to academic institutes.

But if a university-based entrepreneurial ecosystem is a necessary factor for regional success, then the example of social network Facebook's development is a chilling example.

Spohrer said that while Harvard University contributed $4.8bn and 44,000 jobs to the Boston and Massachussetts region in 2008, the fact Facebook was started on campus but then moved to California (and the school's endowment had no stake directly or indirectly) he asked how did the region benefit?

The Facebook example is helping spawn a wave of university venturing funds around the world to take and manage equity stakes in student and faculty businesses while on campus and longer-term.

By keeping close to both universities and VCs and entrepreneurs in all guises, IBM is positioning itself to respond to future technology waves.

As Fan Munce said: "Five years ago, we did not expect social media to blow up into such a large market so quickly [but by being close to entrepreneurs] we have been very aggressive in acquiring companies in that space; 17 in 2011, [such as] Coremetrics in analytics."

That IBM is the only large technology company from the mainframe era to have thrived through the personal computer and into the so-called SoMoLo (social, mobile, local) internet era shows how they have been prepared to disrupt their own business lines and jump on trends not invented inside Big Blue.

To this end, IBM's personnel strategy is one of the main reasons behind its success. With more than 55% of its staff having less than five years' employment at the company, the company attracts talented people but as business units mature there is also a steady transfer of individuals to new, faster-growing areas as they build out or back into entrepreneurial ventures - click here for slide.

The insights from the webinar and the work the company is doing to integrate a complete and integrated innovation toolkit makes IBM a very impressive case study in next-generation corporate venturing in its widest sense. It is one where universities are playing an increasingly central role.

*Martin Kelly, a partner of IBM's venture capital group reporting to Fan Munce, is shortlisted for the Global Corporate Venturing Personality of the Year Award to be presented on May 14 at a sold-out Gala dinner at the Royal Exchange, London, UK. Kelly, who was nominated for his role in setting up Smartcamp with an initial $10,000 budget, will also be speaking at the following day's Symposium - click here for full agenda and shortlisted nominees - at Centre Point, alongside Profitero, winner of the most-recent Smartcamp - click here for more details on IBM's programme.

• Please note, applications for the Global Corporate Venturing Tech Scout Challenge on May 14 has now closed and the reviewers are whittling down the huge number of entrants to the final shortlist to be presented in front of investors controlling more than $10bn of venture capital assets under management. Thank you to all that applied and the reviewers and our partners for the day: American Security Challenge, UKTI and Baker Botts.

Eucalyptus was originally started as a project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It became a private company in 2009. 

BV Capital was joined in the C round on April 18 by venture firms Institutional Venture Partners, which led the round, Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

Eucalyptus has now raised $55m. Steve Harrick, general partner at Institutional Venture Partners, has joined Eucalyptus' board.

The foundation was joined by US-based non-profit corporation i2E, which invested $500,000 through the Oklahoma Seed Capital Fund, a state-backed fund.

The Glioblastoma Project is exploring a treatment for Glioblastoma, a type of brain tumour.

Coursera said universities including Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, would be offering web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free.

John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell, general partner at New Enterprise Associates, have joined Coursera's board.

Daphne Koller, one of the founding computer science professors, said: "We see a future where world-renowned universities serve millions instead of thousands, allowing many more people to live their dreams."

Andrew Ng, the other founder of Coursera, said: "Students learn best not by passively watching video, but by thinking, practicing and doing. Our education technology is developed around these concepts, and helps busy students quickly master material."

The pair developed the university's first online education platform in the Autumn 2011 and had 200,000 students enrolled on two courses. The university now has more than one million enrolments across multiple courses.

Symena was founded in 2002. It was a spin-off from the Mobile Communications Group of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. Its work started in the mid-1990s.

Aircom is a portfolio company of private equity firm HIG Europe.

The company added it had invested £10.4m in 14 companies, in the six months to the end of January.

It said it had made investments in University of Cambridge-linked companies Mission Therapeutics and Cambridge Communications Systems.

Imperial Innovations added it had invested £5m in biotechnology company Autifony Therapeutics, a spin-out from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) collaborating with the University College London's Ear Institute.

The company added it had invested in biopharmaceutical company Circassia of £11.75m, after the period's end, taking its investment in the company to £72m, up from £60 million.

It added in March 2012, it led a £3.3m round for medical diagnostics company Abingdon Health, investing £2m.

Martin Knight, chairman of Imperial Innovations, said: "We have invested over £25m in our portfolio companies already this year.  Significantly, we have over £100m available to back further our top companies, as well as maintaining our very active programme of investing in new enterprises from the fourleading research-based universities."

Knight added: "At a time when energy storage and power capacity is so critical in a number of consumer and automotive markets, Nexeon's battery technology couldn't be better positioned.  Meanwhile, Circassia's novel approach to the huge allergy market is making excellent progress with its proprietary ToleroMune technology which tolerises the body to the allergen, such as cat, ragweed, house dust mite or grass.

"Behind these two front runners, we have another eight exciting and fast developing businesses, encompassing a wide range of healthcare and technology markets."

Remeditex was joined in its series B round by Amgen Ventures, the corporate venturing division of biotechnology corporation Amgen and venture peers Atlas Venture, Boulder Ventures and Broadview Ventures.

Miragen picked up an initial $4m of funding for its 2009 series B round, which also included charitable foundation Peierls Foundation.

William Marshall, executive president of MiRagen, said: "This funding strengthens our ability to advance novel microRNA-based therapeutics [master regulators of gene expression] that may address areas of high unmet medical need and improve the lives of patients."

The round followed an $8m series A round the year before in which VCs Atlas Venture and Boulder Ventures were the investors. Miragen was founded in 2007.

In October, France-based pharmaceutical company Les Labartoires Servier, backed by biotechnology company Amgen, signed a research collaboration agreement with Miragen Therapeutics to advance three drug candidates for treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Miragen will receive $45m upfront from Servier, as well as research and milestone payments in the next three years which could potentially total $352m while Servier will obtain worldwide rights for the drugs, excluding in Japan and the US, in return. The firms estimate that possible milestone for the three drugs could collectively reach as much as $1bn.

Separately, George Rathmann, former chief executive of Amgen and a pioneer of biotech, has died at the age of 84. 

Rathmann previously worked at Abbott Laboratories before joining Amgen, the largest independent biotech company, and agreeing the $5m corporate venturing investment by Abbott that generated a $250m return.

Dignity Health Arizona, the parent organization of local St Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, has joined AZ Furnace.

AZ Furnace said technologies from its university research would form the basis for start-ups even if it was open to external parties with no university connection. Arizona Board of Regents already has a small interest in these companies through the licensing arrangement to the start-up but  ASU does not take additional interest through the company's participation in the programme, the university said by email. 

In partnership with the University's Technology Transfer Office, Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), the accelerator will offer a six-month incubator programme with funding, space in the ASU SkySong facility and access to mentors.

Charlie Lewis, vice-president of venture development for AzTE, said: "ASU Venture Catalyst and AzTE are taking a proactive step to ensure that ASU's most valuable technologies are given all the assistance they need to realize their full potential. We are excited to be partnering with Venture Catalyst on the Furnace Accelerator and anticipate some very promising companies getting launched as a result."


ASU has spun-out more than 50 ventures based on university intellectual property, with eight having been acquired and two having had an exit via an initial public offering.

The first close of the round also included venture firms Vesalius Biocapital,  and Fidimec, the daughter company of Imec.

Stas was previously chief executive of Algonomics, a Belgium-based biotech service provider.

Todd Headley, CSU Ventures president, said: "This partnership symbolises the nationwide movement toward pooling academic and business community resources, regionalizing entrepreneurial support networks, and preparing university students for today's globally competitive workforce. The continuing build-out of Colorado's entrepreneurial ecosystem of university research, industry leadership and venture investment is a big win for everyone."

ICR executive director Tim Bour said: "Our partnership with CSU Ventures will match top faculty and graduate researchers with our network of more than 1,000 mentors and advisors, one of the largest entrepreneurial support systems in the country. This agreement represents a major milestone in forwarding ICR's statewide mission to match technology to markets and turn invention into new Colorado businesses through our commercialisation process."

The partnership is designed to develop Yale's work on "proteolysis targeting chimeric molecules", which help the body destroy disease-causing proteins. The two institutions are looking to show these molecules can be turned into medicines.

The pair said in a statement: "GSK will then have the right to use this technology for multiple disease-causing proteins across all therapy areas.  For each protein-degrading drug that is discovered and developed, Yale will be eligible for milestone and royalty payments."

Kris Famm, head of GSK's Protein Degradation effort will lead the programme with Craig Crews, the Lewis B. Cullman Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale. 

Crews said:  "The relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and academia is changing and this collaboration offers a new paradigm for how pharma companies and academic researchers can benefit from working more closely together."  

Famm said: "This partnership is exploring a new way for promising, but unproven therapeutic approaches to jump from the academic lab more quickly into the early stage pharmaceutical pipeline. The ground-breaking work Craig and his team have done may allow us to tackle a whole host of disease-causing proteins that were previously out of reach for medicines, and it is exciting to work together to try to realise that promise." 

Brookhaven National Laboratory's Walter Copan, managing director of technology commercialisation and partnerships, said: "Developing technological breakthroughs into successful businesses requires at least three key components: technology, management, and capital. BNL and LICA believe that BNL can supply the technology, and LICA in partnership with Accelerate Long Island, can assist with the other two. LICA has a long and impressive track record that we will leverage for the good of the community and the spread of our research."

LICA and Brookhaven National Laboratory are hosting a Technology Transfer Capital Forum on June 8, 2012.

Carnegie Speech uses speech recognition and artificial intelligence technologies licensed from Carnegie Mellon University. The company's series A-2 financing raised $2.2m in 2009, with the company announcing a strategic partnership with the CIA's quasi-corporate venturing unit In-Q-Tel at the same time.

The company raised $1.7m of a planned $1.8m round last year, according to a filing.

In 2007 the company raised $6.4m, according to three filings.

Musselman joined Intel Capital in 1997, according to his LinkedIn profile. He subsequently led IBM's Europe, Middle East and Africa corporate development team. He is also a twelve year veteran of the US Army Special Forces.

The company's series B round of funding was led by investment firm Golden Seeds and venture firms Osage Venture Partners and New York Angels.

 Joining Musselman on the company's board are Stephanie Newby of Golden Seeds, Nate Lentz of Osage Venture Partners, Al Zollar, formerly of IBM, who becomes lead independent.

 The company's other investors include Carnegie Mellon, Innovation Works, Lore Associates, Mid-Atlantic Angel Group, Angel Investor Forum, North Texas Angel Network and Wisconsin Investment Partners.

The company is on course to raise $3m, having raised a $2m A round and is set to close another $1m investment by the end of July, Sustainable Business Oregon said.

The company is working from the Portland State University Business Accelerator, and the round was led by venture firms Oregon Angel Fund and Pivotal Investments.

In January Pacific Light acquired the quantum dot intellectual property from SpectraWatt, which filed for Chapter 11 last year. Pacific Light has a $250,000 research and development grant from the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute.

The competition was sponsored by Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs. An interdisciplinary education and research initiative, Venture Labs promotes new venture creation at The University of Texas at Austin.

The site has launched an online career development community which connects students with employers.

Greg Phipps, Innovacorp's director of investment, said: "Equals6 has developed a compelling offering that leverages the power of social networking with the very real challenge companies face in finding and engaging the best and brightest graduates looking to start a meaningful career. The platform bridges a gap between the purely social engagement offered by Facebook, and the more experienced, professional communities leveraged by LinkedIn."

More than 13,000 students in North America have joined the Equals6 network, and the company now has 125 employers registered, while universities and colleges looking to attract students to their programs are also using the site. The site is free to students.

Dysonics has secured $750,000 in under a year of  incubation.

Harris Lewin, vice chancellor of research at UC Davis, said: "We are very pleased to see Dysonics, our first ‘graduate,' exit with a solid financing round under its belt. We are proud of the pioneering research conducted by Professor Ralph Algazi and his colleagues in the College of Engineering that made this successful spin-off possible. UC Davis has a long track record of translating cutting-edge research into technologies with strong commercial potential, and we expect to see many more such new ventures being formed from the quality research being pursued by our faculty."

Bruce White, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, said: "Within the incubator, professors can stay close to their research and teaching while they develop their ideas, and students can get experience in translational technology research. The center identifies and nurtures promising research in the college, then supports faculty in the early stages of turning their academic research into commercial products."

Dysonics was founded in 2011 by Algaz, who is from UC Davis' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Robert Dalton, who holds a master's degree in engineering from UC Davis, and Richard Duda, a former research scientist at UC Davis.

The fund said on its website: "Looking for seed funding for your startup? Cfund backs driven, talented startup founders from the greater Columbia University community (alums, students, faculty). The principals and advisors are all Columbia alumni/faculty as well as tech founders and investors."

The fund had an application deadline of May 1 for its initial wave.

The fund lists venture firms RRE Ventures and NYC Seed on its website, as well as listing Alessandro Piol of Vedanta Capital and Amol Sarva, chief executive of US-based cloud company Peek and formerly an executive at Virgin Mobile USA, the US mobile business of the Virgin Group, as investors and founders.

Western Michigan University Research Foundation and Biosciences Research and Commercialization Center, both of Western Michigan University, were joined in the $2m seed round on 10 May by Southwest Michigan First Life Science Venture Fund and Ann Arbor Spark, a development agency for the Ann Arbor region.

Axonia was founded by Douglas Smith from the University of Pennsylvania.

John Swartley, deputy executive director of the center for technology transfer at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "As one of the earliest participants in the Upstart Program at Penn, we are extremely proud of the progress that Axonia has made to date. They are establishing a clear example and path that we are actively encouraging other Upstart companies to follow."

Not everywhere, however, is equally attractive for these assets, creating clusters that attract international inflows and areas reliant on their own resources. This process is undergoing changes with Greece's potential exit from the eurozone (see two nice $$ pieces by news provider Financial Times on bank lending and bonds) but has been a battle throughout the ages, from the intelligentsia diaspora (John von Neumann, et al) leaving Europe for the US in the 1930s and 1940s to London tapping financial markets through the Rothschilds to effectively fund the later stages of the Napoleonic war.

But whereas foreign direct investment (FDI) was the goal of the 1980s government policies in many countries, the requirements to attract the brightest people, use information most effectively and supply the funds to fuel growth mean corporate venturing has become a crucial guide that signifies whether a region is advancing or retreating in attractiveness. In effect, corporate and university venturing is the 21^st century equivalent of FDI.

For, if a country or region cannot attract the only significant sources of cross-border venture capital (independent VCs for the most part are too small and parochial), then it is a good sign there is a lack of soft power networks and historical ties as well as a more fundamental lacunae of basic and applied research, government support, communications infrastructure, talented entrepreneurs and ambition to tackle big markets.

US-based technology equipment provider Cisco calls the inter-connectiveness of industry, university and government the "triple helix model" and one where collaborations between all parties are increasingly important and undergoing substantial changes.

Anne Lange, director of the global public sector at Cisco's internet business solutions group, in the second (see related content below for the first one with IBM) of a Global Corporate Venturing webinar series hosted by the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2), said the knowledge-based economy and need to create clusters meant there needed to be "the virtuous cycle of triple helix collaborations"

She said: "The knowledge-based economy puts a stronger emphasis on the value of knowledge capital and access to primary sources of innovation. It forces acacdemics, politicians and businesses to shape new collaborations and decrypt, together, these complex ecosystems. The substantial increase in university-industry partnerships is a visible output of this shift [and] global clusters are best positioned to address this new challenge and accelerate new partnerships."

As each insitutional sphere "takes the role of [an]other" and so perform new roles as well as their traditional function, Lange said it meant universities were forming firms, governments were acting as venture capitalist and industry was raising training of employees to higher levels. Clusters will do well where all these areas are thought through and supported.

The consequence of the evolution in the triple helix model was, according to Lange, that "innovation policy is increasingly an outcome of interaction rather than a prescription from government", exemplified by the US's Silicon Valley in California with its culture of networks, international connections and sustainable innovation as locals focus on emerging business areas.

Cisco sees information technology as being a bridge between the "real" world of a physical cluster and the virtual links required by international business and networks.

While this is an opportunity for Cisco to sell its teleconferencing equipment, the company has developed interesting and joined-up policies under its Global Exchange for Growth (GXG) programme to follow and benefit from the disruption and insights thrown up as the model works itself out. Click here for Lange's slide showing the macro-economic study with Stanford University, the I-Centrum Alliance, the International Investment Forum and the InnovationX knowledge transfer pillar.

Russell Craig, manager of the global public sector at Cisco's internet business solutions group, then gave the example (click here for the slide) in the webinar of how Cisco was applying the programme in the UK through the British Innovation Gateway (BIG).

Craig said $500m was nominally to be invested in the UK and, as revealed by Global Corporate Venturing, the group has just hired Frederic Rombaut from Qualcomm to head up its corporate venturing efforts as "Cisco anticipates making significant UK investments as a consequence of BIG".

This is similar to the $1bn Cisco is investing in Russia's Skolkovo project and the billions going to China from numerous other companies to support its burgeoning cluster. China has also rapidly expanded its projection of soft power itself as it is the largest supplier of overseas students and its companies and venture capital firms target entrepreneurs in other countries - see related content on China rising.)

The relative disparity between investment flows is indicative of importance. And, as someone fortunate enough to see first-hand the policies in China (at the Corporate Venturing conference in Shanghai last month hosted by CEIBS) and Singapore (at this October's TechVenture event) among others, the complacency and myopia of much of continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world is a recipe for future underperformance for them - nemisis follows hubris, after all.

(Next month's Global Corporate Venturing webinar hosted by NCET2 is with Japan-based drugs maker Takeda so do tune in or drop me a note if you want to present your company's approach to university and corporate venturing.) 

In the week of social network Facebook's $104bn flotation the statistic was a timely reminder of how far the Valley has moved from its hardware origins forty years earlier towards internet services, according to Timothy Barnes, director of UCL Enterprise Operations and UCL Advances at UK-based University College London, at a Start-Up Britain panel on corporate venturing.

What hasn't changed over this time is the feeling that venture capital in the Valley is the only legitimate form of insider trading in the US. The original regular angel lunches saw "the group" based around Reid Dennis (who later founded Fireman's Fund - now American Express' - corporate venturing unit) come together to share technology dealflow. This led to professionals, such as Franklin Johnson, from VC firms coming together to support Stanford University's sports teams by giving up selected deals to a university venturing fund.

This collegial feeling is in part a reflection of the aligned motivations for participants to help others and in return be helped when opportunity strikes or bad deals need to be passed on to dumb money. A social network, therefore, is no new thing but the spectacular returns on Facebook for its employees, as well as VC and corporate backers, show how aligned and complementary relatively disparate shareholders can be when a start-up is growing and its share price is increasing.

But as Matthew Mead, head of Nesta Investments, said at our sister paper Global Corporate Venturing's Symposium panel on how to manage the disparate syndicates of the future, when things struggle diverse shareholder types can be a recipie for complications.

The only solution to managing shareholders with different exit and return horizons, as well as the differing added value they can bring to a business at different points in its life, is to build trust and communicate - something the titans of the industry have always realised.

And while social networks and electronic communications can spark ideas and new friendships, trust is usually only built through repeated interactions and a working relationship built at least in part in meetings.

The social and mobile space makes the potential contacts more geographically and sectorally dispersed, which, in turn, encourages the occasional need to meet up and swap ideas and business.

It was in this spirit of openness, differing viewpoints and connectivity that more than 200 corporate venturing executives attended our Tech Scout Challenge, Gala Awards and Symposium this week - for which thank you.

Or, as David Hume put it: "Truth spings from argument among good friends."

The $10m will be used to develop Regentis's European presence and expand its ongoing clinical efforts of GelrinC, a biodegradable implant that enhances growth of articular cartilage in damaged knee joints.

Also in the syndicate are venture capital firms Crossroad Fund, Medica Venture Partners, SCP-Vitalife and the Technion Investment Opportunities Fund, the investment fund of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

In April 2008, Regentis won the Best Incubator Company of the year award having been established at Technion Seed and subsequently raising $7.5m from Vitalife - one of Technion Seed's partners, which had invested the initial funding in the company - and other investors.

Technion Seed is a seed-stage investment firm, owned jointly by four top-tier Venture Capital funds - Vertex Venture Capital, Battery Ventures (US-based), SCP-Vitalife and ProSeed - and the Technion Research & Development Foundation.

InstaMed previously raised $6m in September 2010 to take its then-total to $22m.

Those backers include Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners, NJTC Venture Fund, US Bank, Ashby Point Capital and Osage Ventures, which backs university spin-outs. Earlier in the month, Osage backed Carnegie Speech's $3.4m series B round.

The InstaMed Network powers healthcare payments for over 200,000 providers nationally with tens of billions of dollars in healthcare payments processed.

Ghent University (UGent) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), in collaboration with the University of Antwerp, set up the inter-university seed capital fund earlier in the month. The fund will also support industrial spinouts if they are based on substantial cooperation with the universities.

Gonnissen had spent two and a half years as manager of corporate venturing at Bekaert and was at the company since 1999 before leaving with Nuno Carvalho as the new head of Bekaert Corporate Venturing.

The inter-university venturing QBIC Fund is the successor of the Baekeland II-Fund of UGent and the BI3-fund of VUB. The fund was raised from the university associations, investment banks and public companies. ARKimedes, a Flemish government organisation, through the Participation Company Flanders (Participatiemaatschappij Vlaanderen (PMV)), also committed €12m.

 The fund, which was set up in 2002, has £10.25m under management and supports seed investing from De Montfort, Derby, Leicester, Loughborough, Lincoln, Northampton, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities.

Braveheart Ventures will partner with Advantage Early Growth, a government and European Regional Development Fund-financed venture capital fund, to provide support, mentoring and business development services to the Lachesis portfolio companies as well as providing fund administration services. 

The contract is for a minimum of two years and Braveheart will be partly incentivised on results. 

Geoffrey Thomson, chief executive of Braveheart, said: "We are delighted that the universities have selected us as their preferred partner for this role.  Over the years we have worked with many university spin-outs and we look forward to assisting the Lachesis portfolio companies with their growth aspirations whilst providing the required governance for the Fund." 

The Lachesis fund was formerly managed Spark Ventures, according to news provider GrowthBusiness.

Indiana University and IU Research and Technology Corp. are looking to identify both private sector and university collaborators to transfer technology to and from the Crane federal laboratory.

Indiana University president Michael A. McRobbie said: "This is an exceptional opportunity to promote entrepreneurship, product development and transfer through an agreement that recognizes the importance of collaboration in creative, scientific and technical discovery. As the largest employers in the region, IU and Crane make perfect partners as we continue to use our joint resources and expertise to grow economic development opportunities across Indiana."

Duane Embree, Crane technical director, said. "This new agreement will allow all parties to focus on the challenges and solutions of deriving the maximum benefit from a collaborative effort focused on developing emerging technology solutions for issues facing government and industry."

Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane is a federal laboratory of the US Navy about 25 miles southwest of Bloomington.

Juan Harrison has moved from Takeda Ventures (TVI) to head up New Frontier Science (NFS), a new unit that aims to build relationships with academics and entrepreneurs developing disruptive ideas to improve patients' lives. He reports to Tadataka Yamada, who became Takeda's first chief medical and scientific officer after the role was created in November following the company's completion of the Nycomed acquisition.

Harrison's director colleagues at NFS include Hiroshi Maeda and Kevin Haug and the group could number 10 to 12 after launching in offices in Germany, Japan and the US. 

Harrison said TVI could then potentially take on these ideas and relationships from NFS through buying minority equity postions as part of a syndicate in a company, or they might be taken on by another part of Takeda's business development units, if appropriate.

Harrison was replaced earlier in the month by Ilan Zipkin, former chief executive of venture capital firm Prospect Ventures, which is managing out its first three funds with an aggregate $1.5bn under management rather than looking to raise a new vehicle following the death of co-founder Alex Barkas.

Ziplin is senior investment director at TVI, under head Graeme Martin (pictured), and will shortly be joined by Gordon Wong, former vice-president at drugs company Biogen Idec's corporate venturing unit. Biogen last year said it would no longer make external corporate venturing investments.

The other member of TVI's investment team, Yuji Iizawa, is a secondee from Takeda in Japan.

Paul Stoffels, currently chairman of J&J's pharmaceutical group research and development and chairman of the Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (JJDC) board of directors is expected to help lead this shake-up of the company's innovation teams.

By creating centres of excellence around the world, J&J is expected to gain the flexibility and resources to invest from early to later stages and work with different types of entrepreneurs - whether from academia, venture capital-backed companies or incubating ideas internally.

Sources close to J&J said the four centres would allow the venture team to be "immersed in hot regions" and with the flexibility, agility in deal structure and resources to support innovative ideas. J&J declined to comment, although more details could be announced formally as early as next month.

The company now has JJDC, Corporate Office of Science and Technology (Cosat) and RedScript Ventures.

J&J has also committed to independent venture capital funds, including Index Ventures' $200m Live VI fund where Stoffels joined the advisory board, and has supported new models of innovation, such as the Atlas Venture Development Corporation, which develops drugs from pharmaceutical companies, biotech start-ups and academic centres through proof-of-concept clinical trials and then considers various deal structures to profit from these products.

David Binns, from the Silicate Research Unit, said: "We are delighted our innovative research is being taken out into the wider world. Our new products have the potential to make a real difference in the sustainable use of previously problematic waste materials."

Professor Margaret Bruce, from UCLan, said: "By working together we will be able to bring innovative products to market."

Neil Crabb, chairman of Frontier IP, said: "This collaboration with the University of Central Lancashire represents an exciting new opportunity for Frontier IP. We have in-depth experience in commercialising university IP and we look forward to working with UCLan to maximise the potential of the Silicate Research Unit's cutting-edge product.

Into this (mine)field is stepping Japan-based drugs company Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which could launch its early-stage development initiative as early as next month.

Takeda New Frontier Science (NFS) aims to build relationships with academics and entrepreneurs developing disruptive ideas to improve patients' lives.

Juan Harrison has moved from the drugs company's US-based corporate venturing unit, Takeda Ventures (TVI), to head up NFS. In a Global Corporate Venturing webinar hosted by US-based academia organisation National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2), Harrison said the aim of NFS was to "position Takeda as a most-favoured innovation partner" so it could gain insights into new technologies and access data.

For this to happen, he said the "relationship to innovator is key" and so Takeda could provide funding through grants or other finance, advice "through active engagement" and assets, including scientific support and databases.

As the relationship is important, Harrison said Takeda would not seek to have intellectual property rights first as "shame on us" if Takeda cannot negotiate before its rivals a commercial partnership if the ideas develop into something the company is interested.

He said TVI could then potentially take on these ideas and relationships from NFS through buying minority equity postions as part of a syndicate in a company, or they might be taken on by another part of Takeda's business development units, if appropriate. (See chart.)

This model of building relationships with top academics and entrepreneurs rather than funding specific projects has been taken on by Europe's largest medical charity, Wellcome Trust, as one way to liberate innovation.

By looking round the world for the best 10 to 15 ideas per year (it will likely have 10 to 12 staff in Germany, Chicago, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco and Japan), Takeda is also prepared to look outside of traditional pharmaceutical faculties in case the ideas from, say, biofuels, might be applicable to treating patients, Harrison said.

But while NFS is focused on the so-called far adjacencies, ie helping Takeda enter new industry spaces, it is all designed to treat patients rather than enter new economic sectors because change is increasing in healthcare.

Harrison listed the main changes as coming from: increased costs while reimbursement budgets are constricting; precision medicines increasingly demanded, such as patient-specific drugs and combinations; multi-disciplinary treatments from combining drugs with diagnostics and devices; and demographic and economic trends, including ageing populations and developing market needs.

As Harrison said in the NCET2 webinar, held in conjunction with our sister paper, Global University Venturing: "Healthcare demands are changing faster than ever before [and] pharma is becoming ever more dependent on innovation to advance its business."

Given Takeda sources half its pipeline of future drugs and the sources of alternative funding - such as venture capital and government money - are shrinking, the company is trying to step into the breach.

The US-based Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology said the American government made 1,600 fewer awards to support healthcare innovation last year compared to its year-2003 peak while the current budget was $4bn less than a decade earlier.

There has been an implosion of healthcare VCs over the past few years. Takeda has just hired top-tier VC Prospect Ventures' Ilan Zipkin as senior investment director at TVI.

Corporate venturing, by contrast, has been increasing by at least 18% over the past two years, according to US trade body National Venture Capital Association, or to more than a fifth of healthcare venture rounds using global data from Global Corporate Venturing in this month's magazine.

But the approaches taken by firms are starting to overlap as firms join up the vaious items in their innovation toolkits. For example, Johnson & Johnson is wrapping its Development Corporation (JJDC), Corporate Office of Science and Technology (Cosat) and RedScript Ventures under a new framework led by Paul Stoffels based round innovation centres in Boston and southern California in the US; Shanghai, China; and the UK (see profile in related content).

And where healthcare leads, other sectors follow.

Giovanni Anelli, head of Cern's Knowledge Transfer Group, said: "CERN Easy Access IP joins existing technology transfer opportunities offered by CERN. It is an additional tool to maximize access to our technologies and know-how. Sometimes our technologies are too early stage for a company to risk investment. By offering free access, we aim to encourage our partners to evaluate and commercialise those technologies, thus making it easier for CERN and industry, both spin-off companies and established ones, to work together."

Enrico Chesta, head of the Technology Transfer and IP Management Section, said: "We strive to be as flexible as possible when it comes to dissemination of our intellectual property. The technologies licenced under the Easy Access IP scheme will be royalty free and shared with qualified companies willing and able to take them to the market with clear benefits for the economy and for society. The return for us is the establishment of strong, lasting relationships with external partners."

Easy Access IP was first tested by Easy Access Innovation, a collaborative project of the University of Glasgow, King's College London and the University of Bristol.

The European Technology Transfer Office Circle is an initiative of the European Union's Joint Research Council aimed at connecting the technology transfer offices of large European public research-performing organisations.

Stephen Caddick, VP Enterprise at University College London, said: "Now, more than ever, it is vital that universities collaborate with each other and with businesses on projects such as this. Delivering research which can be taken out of the lab and onto the market will create new business opportunities and jobs, and contribute to the growth of the UK economy, which we so urgently need."

Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer and director of Intel Labs, said: "In 2050, most of the nine billion people in the world will live in cities. Therefore the demands of cities will be highly representative of the demands of humanity. Addressing these demands will be at the heart of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities, driving the development of new services to enhance people's quality of life."

Puan Juniwati Rahmat Hussin, chairman of the Institute of Technology Petronas officially opened the centre.

The university said: "ATIC is established in line with the government's policy that encourages transfer of knowledge and technology between universities and industries.  It functions as a ‘one-stop centre' for UTP to provide for the needs of industry and a ‘shop window' to display UTP's expertise and facilities worldwide."

The breakdown of start-ups coming out of universities was 2771 set up by graduates, 87 set up by staff, 233 formal spin-offs with some high education ownership and 27 formal spin-offs which were not backed by the institution, the Higher Education and Statistics Agency said on May 25.

Starting June 1, 20 entrepreneurs will participate in the two month scheme, attending classes for 140 hours in the evenings and at weekends. The programme will be funded entirely by fees paid by the students.

Lawrence Wright, start-up projects director and professor for entrepreneurial leadership at Moscow School of Management, said: "In addition to business theory we will also be providing shared services,  mentoring and help with opening doors to useful contacts." About 60%  of the start-ups are in IT, two are in biotech and two are lifestyle and the age of students ranges from 22 to 44.

The programme is slated to run again from October and Prof. Wright hopes to raise a seed fund to invest in some of the businesses. "We are also looking for scholarships and sponsorship. It would be a good way for multi-national corporates and others to get involved in the Russian enterpreneurial ecosytem and have an early look at some interesting projects."

Salesforce, a New York-listed software provider, is reportedly about to buy advertising agency WPP-backed Buddy Media, a US-based social enterprise software, according to news provider All Things D (and referred to in KBS+'s Darren Herman's great blog on advertising trends).

The deal would be valued at more than $800m, All Things D added, compared to the about $85m raised by Buddy since its launch in 2007.

While Salesforce might only indirectly have had an interest in Buddy - one of the reported target's early venture capital backers, Bay Partners, had run a developers fund for Salesforce at about the time Buddy was being started - the informal links between the two companies have been good.

In March, Buddy hired Susan St. Ledger as president after more than seven years with Salesforce, most recently as senior vice-president of industry verticals, where she focused on the largest clients within technology, financial services, insurance, media and telecommunications.

Michael Lazerow, founder and chief executuve of Buddy Media and serially-successful entrepreneur behind University Wire and Golf.com, said at the time of St Ledger's recruitment: "It's clear that organizations which power connections with their customers will create shareholder value, and those that don't will lose.

"Susan's unparalleled experience in enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales shows her commitment to our company mission and helps us to successfully scale and serve the largest brands and agencies around the world."

The new world order aspect comes from how these connections are powered.

There has been a shift in the past few years of academic research into what are loosely called behavioural sciences into mainstream application by companies to influence people's decisions.

Or, as Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman at WPP advertising subsidary Ogilvy & Mather, which set up OgilvyChange behavioural sciences practice in the firm earlier this year to apply the techniques across its clients, puts it: "Although they don't have much else in common, marketers seem to have made the same mistake as neo-classical economists.

"They have become so preoccupied with a model of ‘how people should decide' that they have completely neglected to ask the question 'how do people actually decide'."

This approach to understanding the heuristic patterns and shortcuts the brain takes in making decisions* is becoming more readily understood just as the scale of opportunity thrown up by online social and business networks and always-connected devices become near-ubiquitous.

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers's Mary Meeker's latest stunning opus on 2012 internet trends - see table below and link - describes how the "magnitude of upcoming change will be stunning....

"This cycle of tech disruption is materially faster and broader than prior cycles [and affecting the 3000 public companies that have a $36 trillion market capitalisation, according to investment bank Morgan Stanley]."

Buddy Media has proved effective at helping eight of the top 10 largest global advertisers influence how they are perceived and used by consumers through tools built on Facebook - a client list that helps explain why WPP invested $5m into Buddy in late 2010. One of Buddy's case studies shows how its understanding of social networks led to an increase in a so-called Bogof (buy one, get one free) with a usage rate in the 90^th percentile (ie very high).

Whereas the techniques of good salespeople to prime, frame or take advantage of people's overconfidence have always been around and marketers and advertisers have since the days of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Edward Bernays tapped into people's system one and basic desires the media of communication has either been limited in audience size or opportunity to implement the message quickly. The internet and mobile devices changes this.

This opportunity to nudge people through changing the environment they make decisions in - versus the science fiction ideas of mind control directly, such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series - utilising knowledge of behavioural science that people are explicitly unable to affect themselves or realise is happening puts enormous ethical responsiblities in the hands of those making decisions about how to use these tools.

Often the industry leaders, such as Sutherland and the leaders at Buddy Media, are very bright and educated to know how to use the tools for public good - Sutherland gave the example of encouraging people to complete their course of prescription drugs - but most of the account decisions and clients requests are made by more junior people with more limited understanding and experience as well as the occasional amoral or sociopath who create pernicious subliminal messaging, such as the so-called "hell-sell". A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Governments and the media have always known tools and techniques to control and manipulate people in order to drive an agenda, nominally at least in the public's "best interest".

But with the magnitude of change hitting societies and the pressures on entrepreneurs to disrupt and incumbent businesses to respond and innovate there is probably a greater case for thinking about the ethics of an action or investment before it is done rather than apologise for it afterwards.

In this area, the US intelligence services' quasi-corporate venturing unit, In-Q-Tel, has taken a notable lead by sponsoring California Polytechnic State
University's Patrick Lin to look at the ethics of drones and robots (see The Atalntic article).

It is an example of hiring ethics advisers that corporations and venturing units in general would be wise to follow.

Table: Mary Meeker's magnitude of upcoming change:

• Nearly Ubiquitous High-Speed Wireless Access in Developed Countries
• Unprecedented Global Technology Innovation
• Ultra Competitive Markets for Mobile Operating Systems + Devices
• Broadly Accepted ‘Social Graphs' / Information Transparency
• Fearless (& Connected) Entrepreneurs
• Difficult ‘What Do I Have to Lose' Economic Environment for Many
• Available (& Experienced) Capital
• Fearless (& Connected) Consumers
• Inexpensive Devices / Access / Services (Apps)
• Ability to Reach Millions of New Users in Record (& Accelerating) Time
• ‘Social Emerging as Starting Distribution Point for Content,' (Brian Norgard, Chill)
• Aggressive (and Informed) ‘On My Watch' Executives at ‘Traditional' Companies
• Unprecedented Combo of Focus on Technology AND Design
• Nearly ‘Plug & Play' Environment For Entrepreneurs - Marketplaces / Web Services /Distributed Work / Innovative Productivity Tools / Low ‘Start Up' Cost

• Beautiful / Relevant / Personalized / Curated Content for Consumers

Source: KPCB

 *One helpful way for the non-academic to look at this question of how decisions are made is to use the approach laid out by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winner for behavioural finance in his latest book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Kahneman talks about system one analysis for the ability to answer questions such as what is two plus two or the capital of France versus the system two analysis needed to work out, say, 24 times 17.

Kahneman himself, in his book and in a webinar hosted by Ogilvy last week, is pessimistic about the ability to change people's system one or make yourself aware of the biases and heuristic problems that can arise but was more hopeful that knowledge about the dynamics of psychology and the way the mind works would make more "educated gossip" as it became easier to see flaws in others and allow organisations to design procedures to limit the issues that can arise.

The syndicate was joined by several new international investors including Korys, the Colruyt's family office, and existing investors, including venture capital firm Gilde Healthcare Partners, family office Van Herk Group, Dutch bank ING Corporate Investments and Breedinvest, the holding company of the Blokker households goods stores.

David Macdonald, chief executive of Agendia since his promotion from chief operating officer in October when Bernhard Sixt moved to an advisory capacity, said: "We will use these funds to expand commercialization of our current breast cancer suite of tests, as well as for development of our personalized medicine pipeline.  We have recently launched our Symphony suite in a Formaldehyde Fixed-Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) format and we are preparing to launch our ColoPrint recurrence test for stage II colon cancer prognosis and prediction." 

In January, Peter Wulff joined Agendia as chief financial officer after holding the same post at peers Alphatec, Artes Medical, CryoCor, Natural Alternatives International and Epimmune over the prior 25 years.

Agendia was founded in 2003 as a spin-off of the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI)/Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam where it had access to the world's largest frozen tumour bank. Original shareholders include the founders of Agendia and Stichting Fondsen Nederland that originated from NKI, while Gilde joined in the A round in 2004. Its series E round closed at $23m in September 2009, with its D round at $34m two years earlier.

The third round in mid-2006 raised an undisclosed amount from Van Herk, Gilde, NKI and private equity firms AXA Private Equity and Global Life Sciences Ventures, a year after the B round (of also undisclosed size).

The incubator is expected to attract up to 30 battery companies in California who can tap researchers and use equipment at Berkeley Lab and other research institutions, participate in seminars and forums, recruit engineers and other employees and network with each other to trade information.

Dan Adler, CalCEF's president, said: "To broadly scale renewable energy requires tackling the challenges of energy storage, and no technical community is better suited to those challenges than California's battery engineers and scientists."

California has more than 30 start-ups and large companies concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area and the state had 258 battery technology patent registrations from 2008 to 2010-more than the next three leading states combined, according to the 2012 California Green Innovation Index, an annual economic filing published by Next 10.

Last year, venture capital investment in energy storage grew 13-fold over the previous year, making up 11% of the total VC investment in clean technology for the state.

Venkat Srinivasan, head of Berkeley Lab's energy storage research program, said: "The Berkeley Lab battery program, long known for its deep expertise in solving the problems in advanced batteries, is ideally positioned to work with battery companies in the region. We look forward to building this ecosystem with CalCharge."

US-based chip company Silicon Labs acquired Ember for $72m.

Founded in 2001 by ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, Ember helped build a low power wireless standard and chip technology to create sensor networks and the internet of things, ZigBee, which is also the dominant wireless tech for smart meters and home energy devices.

US-listed industrial conglomerate General Electric (GE) provided $63m to 15 partner technologies in June last year, including Ember and SunRun, which has separately raised $60m from VC firms Madrone Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital.

Ember's VC backers included Polaris Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, DFJ New England, WestLB Mellon Asset Management (formerly West AM).

BVM Capital is a local venture capital firm that invests in life science opportunities from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, the world's leader in diabetes, nutrition and obesity research.

Pitchford is managing director of healthcare investments at Imperial Innovations Group, a UK-listed venture capital firm that primarily supports spin-outs from British universities after its own spin out from Imperial College London.

Lundemose is co-founder of several companies including Symphogen, Santaris and Prosidion, a UK subsidiary of OSI Pharmaceuticals where he had been a managing director of OSI's corporate venturing unit. 

PolyTherics has raised £7.45m ($10m) and is backed by Imperial Innovations, Proven Health VCT, The Capital Fund (managed by YFM), and a number of high net worth individuals with funds managed by Longbow Capital.

PolyTherics' last round raised £2.15m in September last year.

The money came from venture capital firms NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures, a seed- and early-stage venture capital fund that invests in companies from the University of Pennsylvania ecosystem. 

In June 2010, Palantir raised $90m in its series D round at a $735m valuation, according to news provider TechCrunch.

Existing shareholder Founders Fund led the round, and was joined by US-based venture capital firms Youniversity Ventures, which primarily backs students and first-time entrepreneurs, Glynn Capital Management, Ulu Ventures, Jeremy Stoppleman and Ben Ling.

US government-backed venture fund In-Q-Tel and Reed Elsevier Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier, had led Palantir's $34.9m series C round in November 2009. The company, founded in 2004 by a group of Stanford computer scientists and former PayPal employees, including Peter Thiel, previously raised about $45m.

Alongside Uni Venture, a venture capital arm of Bawag that works closely with Innovationsagentur, in the round were Buschier, Fides and Hybag.

In September 2010, Innovacell raised €4.3m from undisclosed investors.

Stas, who previously held the same role at Algonomics, a Belgium-based biotech service provider before its sale to Lonza Group, succeeds Marc Zabeau, who remains on the board of directors.

Trinean raised €2.7m in a first closing led by its current investors: venture capital firms Vesalius Biocapital; Baekeland II Fund, an €11.1m fund backed by Ghent University Association, Fortis Private Equity Belgium, KBC Private Equity, Ethias, Volksvermogen and the ARKimedes Fund; and Capital-E and Fidimec, which have relationships with IMEC, the largest independent research centre in micro- and nanoelectronics in Europe.

Cathryn Potter, associate provost for research at DU, said: "The University of Denver has a talented faculty and rich culture of research innovation. We are looking forward to working with the ICR to take our commercialization process to the next level."

 The Innovation Center of the Rockies [ICR] has existing relationships with the University of Colorado, the Colorado School of Mines and Colorado State University.

Tim Bour, ICR executive director, said: "DU's specialized research strategy provides high-calibre undergrads tremendous career and business opportunities in a wide variety of markets including diagnostics, drug development, electronics, robotics, energy and aerospace. We are looking forward to working with DU to further expand what has become one of the nation's largest entrepreneurial support networks within Colorado's academic and research communities."

Alcatel-Lucent Ventures had focused on internal incubation of ideas within the company's Bell Labs after spinning off its external equity investments to venture capital firm New Venture Partners in 2002.

A source inside Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) said the Ventures unit had been closed earlier this year and Bart Shigemura, vice-president of Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, had left. A source source inside the company confirmed: "The internal ventures (those initiative[s] that came out of Bell Labs and other parts of ALU) have been absorbed into the relevant business units. External investments will be monitored by corporate."

Shigemura and Alcatel-Lucent were unavailable but the company's website said he "manages an internal incubator of portfolio ventures that enable the company to enter profitable new markets with agility".

The other named member of the team, Sudhir (Sid) Ahuja, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures' joint ventures vice-president, is also still listed on the company's website and active in the company according to his LinedIn business network profile. An internal source said he was still involved with his joint ventures initiative between ALU/Bell Labs and the University of Pittsburg Medical Center.

Last year, Alcatel-Lucent hired Max Straube as a vice-president of its corporate venturing unit ahead of making its first deal since effectively relaunching the team late last year.

Straube has subsequently moved over to looking after the company's intellectual property strategy, according to his LinkedIn page.

"I never expected this to happen in my lifetime."

In this poignant piece of reportage by the Financial Times, the news provider summed up what an astonishing age of change and innovation we are living in.

From the most basic and absolute research into the nature of the universe to iterative and incremental improvements of ideas and existing products and services - what author Malcom Gladwell calls tweaking - the world around us is being remade.

This spawns an endless wave of opportunity. And corporate venturers are perhaps uniquely positioned to see these changes and shape them by their connections both to the entrepreneurers and researchers and to the larger businesses that have already shaped the past and have the resources to fund the future.

The question is, what future is to be made? Do the venturers' visions soar as high as the entrepreneurs, or what are the factors holding them back?

UniversityNow is also backed by venture firms including Kapor Capital, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. The deal has taken the total raised by the company to $21.5m in its history.

Daniel Pianko, partner at University Ventures, and David Meyer, vice president of product at UniversityNow, have joined its board.

Launched earlier this year, UniversityNow is building a network of accredited, affordable universities, using an online teaching model.

Daniel Pianko, partner at University Ventures, said:  "Higher education is the key to the economic success of nations and individuals. In the US, the system is beginning to undergo a radical transformation due to the competing pressures to reduce costs while satisfying the rapidly increasing demand for college degrees. Low-cost models, such as those offered by UniversityNow, will reshape the system by making higher education accessible and affordable for everyone."

In its latest annual report for the 10-year period from 2002 to 2011, training provider PraxisUnico* said there were less than 40 spin-outs last year, compared to nearly 50 for the two prior years.

This decline, however, it added, has been counterbalanced by "the increased survivability of spinouts [of at least 60%] and a continuing level of successful exits".

There have been 10 flotations in the past five years, led by Oxford Advanced Surfaces raising £44.5m ( $69.4m) on the Alternative Investment Market and retroscreen Virology's £32.8m valuation during its May initial public offering, and 32 trade sales between 2009 and 2011, including Amgen's £1bn purchase of Biovex and Baxter International's purchase of ApaTech for $330m.

The time taken from spinout to exit has averaged eight years since 2008.

Over the past decade fewer than 20 spinouts gained external investment in any one calendar year.

The life sciences sector makes up between a third and a half of all spin-outs over the past decade, the report added.

Oxford University had the most spinouts - 47 - in the 2002-2011 period, followed by Imperial College London (41), Edinburgh (39) and Cambridge and Warwick in equal-fourth with 30 each. However, Oxford fell to second behind Edinburgh during the past three years, the annual report said.

The PraxisUnico Spinouts UK survey used the Young Company Finance database of 1,680 businesses formed since 2000 based either on intellectual property owned by one of the 150 universities and higher-education institutions (890 companies) or start-ups by members of staff or recent graduates (790 companies).

*The writer was a speaker at PraxisUnico's latest Impact to Innovation conference in June, with acommodation paid.

Abound, formerly known as AVA Solar, had also closed $400m in loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy (DoE) to expand its manufacturing to a second plant making thin-film, cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar photovoltaic modules. However, Abound said it had collected only $70m of the DoE's loan but had "not drawn down any further DoE funds since August of 2011 when the DoE determined that challenging market conditions in the solar industry did not merit additional funding risk".

The company effectively said these challenging market conditions were a result of Chinese competition. Its statement said: "Abound believes that, at scale, its US-made CdTe panel technology has the ability to achieve lower cost-per-watt than competing crystalline silicon technology made in China. 

"However, aggressive pricing actions from Chinese solar panel companies have made it very difficult for an early stage startup company like Abound to scale in current market conditions. 

"According to the US Commerce Department, the US solar market has seen the prices for panels drop by more than 50% in the past year at a time when the value of imports of Chinese-made solar cells nearly quadrupled from $639m in 2009 to $3.1bn in 2011. 

"Abound supports recent initiatives to enforce fair trade with import tariffs, but this action is unfortunately too late for the company."

In December 2010, BP's corporate venturing unit had joined the consortium investing $110m in Abound.

Alongside BP Alternative Energy Ventures, the other new investor in the series C round at the end of 2010 was West Hill Companies, a family office in Wyoming.

The remaining consortium members, which had previously invested in Abound, were: Invus Group, a $4bn evergreen investment company backed by undisclosed European families through their Artal investment vehicle; Bohemian Companies, a family office in Colorado; and venture capital (VC) firms DCM and Technology Partners.

Abound was founded in 2007 after 15 years of development at Colorado State University and with support from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and raised $104m in its second round in August 2008 and $300m of equity over its lifetime.

John Hill, founder of VC firm Hill Carmen Ventures, said in 2007 when he was chairman and angel investor in the portfolio company's seed round said: "AVA Solar is the most exciting startup I've been a part of in almost 30 years of investing in technology-based companies."

Trevor Mundel, the Gates Foundation's recently appointed head of global health, told news provider Financial Times (FT) he hoped to oversee a series of investments in companies each likely to be worth several million dollars.

The Gates Foundation gives out about $1.5bn a year in grants to academics, non-profit groups and companies working on global health and last year made a $10m investment in Liquidia, a US-based company which has developed the print technology for precision moulding of nano- and micro-particles that could help produce a range of more affordable vaccines and drugs.

The equity stakes will be accompanied by a non-executive directorship or observer status would give the organisation influence over decision-making and the option to negotiate affordable access to technologies relevant to the diseases and low income countries which are its priorities, the FT said.

The state-backed Food and Environment Reseach Agency remains a shareholder in Forsite having taken a stake when the portfolio company was spun out from the UK's agriculature department in 2007.

UK-based Abingdon Health commercialises a portfolio of novel clinical diagnostics technologies and in March took a similar controlling stake in Molecular Vision after raising £3m from a consortium led by Imperial Innovations.

In November 2010, Abingdon set up a joint venture, Bioscience Ventures, with the University of Birmingham, which last year led to a urine test for adrenal cancer being developed.

Jim Breyer, whose personal stake in social network Facebook has been estimated at about 1%, has joined Xfund through his personal investment vehicle, Breyer Capital, as well as venture capital (VC) firm, Accel Partners. Along with VC firm Polaris Venture Partners, they join peer New Enterprise Associates as partners of Xfund.

The new advisers include John Palfrey, former Harvard Law School professor, and Andrew McCollum, a co-founder of Facebook, and Hugo Liu, an MIT researcher.

Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, launched Xfund in January and its "experiments underway" include Rock Health, Tivli, Omada and QED.

James Golubieski, president of Foundation Venture Capital Group, said it invested in GeneAssess because the FRY gene it has identified appears to be found in breast cancer, but also shows potential for other cancers.

Helmut Zarbl, founder of GeneAssess and a professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, said: "Our findings suggest that FRY could potentially be used as a platform to develop cancer gene-based susceptibility tests, for disease progression and for tumor grading," explained Dr. This tumor suppressor gene could be useful for developing new targeted drugs, especially for the treatment of aggressive and/or advanced breast cancer."

George F. Heinrich, chief executive of Foundation Venture Capital Group, said: "We see great promise in Dr. Zarbl's discovery of the FRY gene and how it might be used to affect the diagnosis and treatment of aggressive breast cancers. We are looking forward to working with him to advance his work and help to bring his ideas to commercialization."

The company is a spin-out from the University of Bath. The deal follows an initial £600,000 investment between IP Group and its fund, the Finance for Business North East Technology Fund.

The following two investments are of a similar size and are dependent on certain milestones.

Glythera has also relocated to the North East of England, appointing David Simpson as chief operating officer.

Duncan Lowery, senior investment manager at IP Group, said: "As David has mentioned, the North East has a real strength in biomanufacturing and the fact that Glythera is relocating here demonstrates that the industry continues to develop and expand apace.

Lowery added: "The technology being developed is highly innovative and could transform the use of vaccines and therapeutics. With a revolutionary product and extremely experienced management team, we're confident that Glythera will hit its targets and continue to build a reputation as a rising star within the pharmaceutical industry."

Anthony Baxter, Glythera's chairman, said: "We are obviously delighted to close this funding round in what remains a challenging environment. Our ability to do this is testament to the strength of the Glythera technology, combined with the leadership and technical skills of our team."

Smith added: "Relocating to the North East makes a lot of sense for us, due to the region's strong pedigree in biomanufacturing, giving us the ideal base from which to partner with leading companies and attract a skilled workforce."

The fund is set to deploy the money over the next four years.

Among those participating in the W Fund's investment committee are Madrona Venture Group's Greg Gottesman and Tom Alberg; OVP Venture Partners' Chad Waite and Lucinda Stewart; former Microsoft vice presidents Brian Arbogast and Will Poole; Arch Venture Partners' Steve Gillis; biotechnology entrepreneur Bruce Montgomery; Cardiac Science chief executive Dave Marver; Intellectual Ventures' Patrick Ennis; and former GE executive Lonnie Edelheit. 

It was joined in the round by UK-based pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline's corporate venturing unit SR One, fund manager Invesco Perpetual and Lundbeckfond  Ventures, which is owned by Denmark-based science research body Lundbeck Foundation. Invesco is the largest shareholder in Imperial Innovations, with a 23% stake, according to the Financial Times' website.

Susan Searle, chief executive of Imperial Innovations, said, "Invesco do not have any right to invest in our companies but are one of a number of investors that we talk to with regard to our portfolio.... We are very pleased to have established a great syndicate behind the company including Invesco."

PsiOxus was formed to commercialise technologies from UK Universities, which were originally seed funded by Imperial Innovations and the Mercia Fund, a venture firm.

Matthew Foy, a partner at SR One, said: "We believe that true scientific and medical breakthroughs come from novel approaches. PsiOxus is taking a unique path to the development of cancer and cancer-related therapeutics."

Searle added: "PsiOxus continues to make great strides in translating its truly novel science into therapies that address major unmet medical needs for patients. We believe that ColoAd1 can represent a significant breakthrough in oncolytic vaccines and has the potential to open an entirely new approach to cancer therapy."

Mette Kirstine Agger, managing partner of Lundbeckfond Ventures, said:  "We are truly excited by the potential of ColoAd1 within the global cancer market where there is still significant unmet medical need."

Imperial Innovations led a £5.6m funding round for PsiOxus, then called Myotec Therapeutics, an Imperial College spin-out, in 2010 with an investment of £2.8m. Invesco Perpetual also provided £2.8m.  Myotec was renamed PsiOxus later that year, when it merged with Hybrid BioSystems, and it raised an additional financing round of £3.6m led by Imperial Innovations, with participation from all of the major investors from both companies.

The Mercia Fund was the founding investor in Hybrid and had backed it, since its spin-out from the University of Birmingham, according to news provider Birmingham Post.

Sonitus Medical raised $25m in its series D round led by venture capital firm Abingworth.

Sonitus said all other current venture backers joined the D round. Its website lists its investors as including Novartis Venture Funds, the CIA's quasi-corporate venturing unit In-Q-Tel, and venture firms Aberdare Ventures, Arboretum Ventures and RWI Ventures.

The Wolverine Venture Fund first invested in Sonitus in March 2011. A regulatory filing said Sonitus raised $22m at that C round following $13.5m in September 2008.

Amir Abolfathi, chief executive of Sonitus Medical, said: "The Wolverine Venture Fund is part of a strong group of investors with an impressive track record. I was amazed with the trust the University places in the students to make these investments and consider it a model more business schools should embrace to foster entrepreneurship and smart investing."

The Wolverine Venture Fund was the country's first student-led venture fund and has invested in more than 20 companies across information technology, life sciences and alternative energy.

Erik Gordon, associate director of the Zell Lurie Institute and managing director of the Wolverine Venture Fund, said: "This round has also been a tremendous experience for the students who oversaw the process. They were not only able to see the rapid progression of a portfolio company in the past year and participate in its latest financing, but they also got to collaborate on the deal with some very good, well-established venture capital firms from around the world."

The programme will be led by entrepreneur-in-residence Brian Ardinger, and Nutech fellow Luke Smith.

Nutech Ventures is designed to build partnerships between the University of Nebraska and the private sector.

David Conrad, Nutech Ventures's executive director, said: "Under this new program, NUtech Ventures marks a new focus on technology-based companies originating at the university. Nutech has concentrated on licensing technologies to existing businesses, along with a handful of startup companies each year. The new program will bring increased attention and expertise to university startups, better preparing them for investment, market penetration and overall success."

Ardinger is former chief marketing officer at Nanonation, a US-based software company creating kiosks, digital signage, and mobile solutions. He is also co-founder of The Big Plate, a member network for entrepreneurs and startups.

Michigan eLab said it is a" full venture capital fund that can support a startup beyond the seed round and all the way through to final liquidity. eLab also provides formal training in entrepreneurship and shared resources to improve capital efficiency for young companies."

The company was set up by Rick Bolander, Scott Chou, Doug Neal, and Bob Stefanski . Bolander and Stefanski are University of Michigan alumni, Neal has been the executive director of the University of Michigan Center for Entrepreneurship since 2009, while Chou has been focussed for the last ten years on spinning innovations out of research organizations including the University of Michigan.

Intelligent Ultrasound has raised £610,000 ($953,000) to develop software to reduce the risk of incorrect or missed diagnoses.

Tom Hockaday, managing director of Isis Innovation, said: "This is a University technology which will have a positive impact for clinicians, patients, and the taxpayer, as well as investors."

Intelligent Ultrasound's software products are based on research from Professor Alison Noble of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, part of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science.

The company has also been backed by the NHS National Innovation Centre, which has given a development award to the company.

The company's other investors include the firm's founders and the Oxford Invention Fund.

Professor Noble, the Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering, said: 'We are combining conventional ultrasound scanning with advanced automated image analysis post-processing to improve the diagnostic quality of scans and ensure that the doctor has the best ultrasound-based information to make a clinical decision. It is perhaps the most exciting time in over 20 years to work in ultrasound research due to the rapid developments in 2D and 3D imaging. My laboratory at Oxford is responding to the clinical pull to dramatically reduce healthcare costs by using cost-effective technology such as ultrasound as an alternative to more costly MRI and CT scanning.'

Colin Callow, head of the NHS National Innovation Centre, said: 'By creating the right environment and infrastructure for collaboration and partnership between industry, academia and the NHS, the National Innovation Centre can provide access to the expertise necessary to support the rapid development of exciting innovations so that they are truly 'NHS Market ready', identifying and solving adoption barriers both technical and organisational - before the product hits the market."

Australia's National Science Agency, Csiro (an acronym standing for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), has an enviable track record in innovation and working with corporate partners to commercialise and deliver the ideas into something useful for people.

Whereas corporations have increasingly taken to outsourcing research and development to start-ups and academia, research institutes have been looking to the marketing and distribution skills of companies to make their ideas live and provide iterative feedback for further studies about what works rather than remains theoretical.

Csiro's 900 scientists are supported by nine business developers and a 40-strong intellectual property (IP) management and strategy team run by Jan Bingley, general manager of IP, licensing and technology transfer.

In a Global Corporate Venturing webinar hosted by the US-based National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) earlier this month, Bingley said the business development unit was a relatively new area of development for Csiro.

However, she said Csiro had more than 20 years of working with industrial partners and spun out more than 150 small and medium-sized enterprises and earned more than $200m per year in IP licensing, much of it from its patents in wirless local area networks for computers.

Csiro has equity stakes in 34 spin outs with market capitalisation of an aggregate $1bn and it is prepared to follow-on invest in these businesses and co-invest alongside industrial partners with money as well as access to its scientists or other non-monetary forms of help.

Bingley said its attitude to commercialisation and working with industry had evolved and now was about being "flexible in being open for business".

She added: "Our attitude to licensing versus spin-outs has evolved. In the mid-1990s commercialisation was done to Csiro and we were not proactive. Now we are proactive, look globally for partners and are flexible in the model of transfer technology so there is a path to market. Licensing often selects itself after analysis of the opportunity but for spin outs we have a high tolerance with failure and go down the route if it breaks new markets or new products."

Such breakthrough technologies developed by Csiro and industrial partners include polymers and Csiro has been successful in looking across sectors for their use.

Donald Loveday, business development manager for Csiro's Raft project focusing on the chemicals and materials markets, including polymers, said in the same webinar it was looking across the biomedical, industrial chemicals, personal care, agrochemical and energy sectors, having already had success in using polymers for banknotes.

And given chemicals are the basic building blocks for organic and inorganic matter it is proving a fruitful area of research by linking it to manufacturing, computing, networks and biology.

Talking to news provider Financial Times this past week, Craig Venter, founder of Synthetic Genomics, said the marriage of computing and biology represented by synthetic genomics means "digital life and actual life are getting closer and closer together.

"We can digitise a genome and transmit the information down the internet to a digital-biological converter, which can turn it back into DNA in a real cell."

Which, given how far Australia is from most places could eventually help speed up travel to the continent for its increasing numbers of partners.

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has also offered $15.3m to back Cell Medica's cancer immunotherapy technology licensed from Baylor College of Medicine.

Thomas Hecht, the former vice president of marketing in Europe for Amgen is becoming chairman and UK-based foundation the Wellcome Trust is converting its investment in the company into equity.

Chris Coburn, executive director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, said: "There really can be no more significant alliance than this teaming of our two institutions up and down I-71. We will help to change the face of innovation in the state."

Dr. Ali Rezai, director of OSU's Center for Neuromodulation, said the innovations under development could transform Ohio into a hub for neuromodulation -- much like Minneapolis has become renowned for cardiac pacemakers. That type of recognition would help spur economic development by attracting to Ohio companies with high-tech jobs.

Rezai, who worked at the Clinic until he left for OSU in 2009, said neuromodulation can treat a range of problems, from Parkinson's disease and asthma to obesity and obsessive compulsive disorder.

One technology under development is a neurological pacemaker the size of a Tic Tac that can be inserted in your cheek and activated with a cell phone, Rezai said.

Attercor, a therapy company for adrenal disorders, CytoPherx, a manufacturer of medical devices to treat inflammation-based diseases using a cytopheresis system, NanoBio Corp., which focuses on developing products to prevent and treat infectious diseases using nanoemulsion droplets and Tissue Regenerative Systems a bioresorbable implants for skeletal reconstruction applications in development, could all receive funding of up to $2.5m each, the university said if the fund's managers approve the deals.

In December, Regents approved creating the fund, which will invest up to $25 million from the $7.7 billion long-term endowment fund over 10 years in companies using intellectual property licensed through the Office of Technology Transfer.

Technion was joined in the series C round by venture firms Accel Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, ProSeed Venture Capital Fund and eXeed Technology.

Correlsense was founded in 2005.

The RBS EnterprisingU competition picked SalesGossip for the £25,000 ($40,000) top prize and the company also received venture capital backing from Find Invest Grow (FIG).

FIG, an incubator and investment firm that focuses on the student and recent graduate market, had worked with Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) and business network LinkedIn to run the competition, which had more than 1,317 entrants, as well as an accreditation scheme to boost entrepreneurship in student societies.

Elisabetta Camilleri, co-founder of SalesGossip (pictured, centred, with the prize), said: "We are thrilled with the endorsement of our hard work to date and the prize will help us make the online and mobile service even better."

University of East London's Thomas Lipinksi of Ventive, a company that plans to use recycled hot air as ventillation in buildings, was second, winning £10,000, while Windows Phone Geek, a marketplace for software provider Microsoft's Windows phone application developers, started by Boryana Miloshevska and Yordan Pavlov from University College London, took £5,000 for third place.

The other finalists were Bertie and Bean, a children's clothing exchange, Chadex, a marketplace providing charities with access to donated premium online advertising space, and Unisport, a sports media company focused on university sport.

The competition is the second project RBS Group, LinkedIn and FIG have collaborated on. The three firms have run an, sponsored by RBS Group and LinkedIn, the RBS Enterprising Student Societies Accreditation (RBS ESSA) that.

Adrian Clark, one of the judges and director of New Model Venture Capital, said "The quality of the competing businesses was fantastic.  Our partnership with FIG means we hope to invest in the sort of young businesses they support and this evening showed just how much potential those businesses have."

The company also said California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, UC San Francisco, University of Edinburgh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto, University of Virginia and University of Washington have all signed agreements with Coursera to put their courses on-line for free.

The company was also endorsed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who said on Twitter: "Terrific progress getting college courses online http://b-gat.es/NCf56D. Technology is game-changing here - need more pioneers like @Coursera."

The company also secured further investment from existing venture backers New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In April Coursera, which was set up by two Stanford University computer science professors, raised $16m from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates.

Coursera said universities including Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, would be offering web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free.

John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell, general partner at New Enterprise Associates, joined Coursera's board in April.

Trevor Parsons and Vilaim Holub founded LogEntries from UCD after incubation at @dogpatchlabs Europe, which is backed by Polaris.

Noel Ruane, European Venture Partner with Polaris, said: "For a seed-stage company to have such rich IP [intellectual property] manifested in a product so much more mature than the company itself, and this level of traction, is testament not only to the tech smarts of Trevor and his LogEntries team, but to their street smarts too."

Revolymer makes polymers for consumer products, including chewing gum that is easier to remove from streets and pavements.

Revolymer was listed with a market capitalisation about £53m. It was listed on 10 July at £1.00 per share last month and was trading yesterday at £1.015 per share.
Its trading subsidiary was founded by Dr Roger Pettman and Professor Terence Cosgrove, and was based on technology developed by Professor Cosgrove at the University of Bristol.

The company received £750,000 in 2006 from investors including the SETsquared Partnership and IPGroup . Further rounds of funding secured £2m, £10m and then £5.8m.
Graham Harrison, partnership director at SETsquared, said: "Revolymer is a great example of a UK company that's used innovative technology to create a product with real market potential. Nearly 90 per cent of companies supported by SETsquared are still in business three years later - way above the UK average - and Revolymer shows just how well some of them are doing."

The Maryland Innovation Initiative Fund will be run by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (Tedco). The state is providing $5m with the remainder coming from five local universities.

Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland College Park and University of Maryland, Baltimore, are each committing at least $200,000 per year, while the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Morgan State University will contribute at least $100,000 per year.

Rob Rosenbaum, Tedco's president and executive director, said: "We have so much research but commercialization is needed. We have to stimulate that activity."

Rosenbaum said the 40 projects will lead to 12 to 15 new companies.

The supplier's Beijing Origin Seed subsidiary and HAU have jointly established the SK Wu Corn Research Institute for this research exchange.

Origin has exclusive rights for the first genetically modified corn seed product for China, Phytase corn, which was approved in November 2009.

Venture capital firms FirstMark Capital (formed out of hedge fund Pequot Capital's ventures unit), Harrison Metal, Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners reinvested in Lumosity's D round.

Lumosity's brain exercises are based on neuroscience research conducted at Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other academic institutions and its membership has doubled to more then 25 million people over the past year.

Jean-Briac Perrette, chief digital officer at Discovery since October, said: "As Discovery focuses its digital strategy around strengthening its position as the number one non-fiction media company across all screens, we also see strategic growth opportunities in select investments in the next generation knowledge space."

Lumos Labs said it had raised more than $70m since its foundation in 2006 by neuroscientists from Stanford University, including a $32.5m C round in June last year and $3m in 2008.

The compound was developed in partnership between University of New Mexico (UMN) and the University of Florida and Oligocide licensed it in June and received $175,000 in seed funding from angel investors the following month.

Tom Brennan, partner at venture capital firm Arch Venture Partners, which helped launch BVB Solutions last year before it changed its name to Oligocide, said he was working on a multimillion-dollar round of funding with investors that could include chemical companies Dow and BASF's corporate venturing units, according to news provider Albuquerque Journal.

The co-founders of Michigan ELab are Rick Bolander, who launched Blue Sky Ventures; angel investor Scott Chou; Bob Stefanski, a co-founder of software company Tibco; and Doug Neal, a serial entrepreneur behind UM's Center for Entrepreneurship.

Bolander, Chou, and Stefanski are all based in California while Neal will oversee the day-to-day operations having moved to Michigan from Silicon Valley in 2007.

Ashwin Raguraman, vice-president of IIF, will join the board of IKen, which was started in 2005 and has developed Mooga as an analytics tool to understand consumer behaviour and allow firms to personalise their service to them.

Power Heart Consortium, a Korean private equity group, invested in Cleveland Heart, which is a joint venture between Cleveland Clinic and medical technology company TransWorld Medical Devices.

The $30m is the largest amount that a Cleveland Clinic Innovations spin-off has received from a single investor, while Cleveland Clinic remains an investor in Cleveland Heart having founded the company in 2008.

Thomas Graham, chief innovation officer at Cleveland Clinic Innovations, said: "Cardiovascular disease continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the world and the No. 1 killer in the US.

"Developing innovations to treat patients who are living with heart failure is an imperative, and this investment will enable Cleveland Heart to further develop and extend its research." 

Since it was established in 2000, Cleveland Clinic Innovations has filed over 1,600 patents, has more than 300 active licenses and has 48 spin-off companies that have received more than $600m in equity investment.

Alongside GM Ventures as lead investor in the C round were venture capital firms EnerTech Capital and Fairhaven Capital Partners and and five existing investors. NanoSteel's website lists its previous backers as Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, Cycad Group, EnerTech Capital, Ervin Industries, Fairhaven Capital Partners, Milicom Technologies and Octane Venture Partners.

NanoSteel was founded in April 2003 with $3m from investment group Milicom Technologies, which also manages the US Army's OnPoint Technologies venture investment fund, as its first partnership with INEEL before raising $17m in October last year, according to a regulatory filing.

Jon Lauckner, president of GM Ventures and the car maker's chief technology officer, said: "Over the next several years, light-weighting of vehicles will be a major focus area to improve fuel economy. NanoSteel's nano-structured alloys offer unique material characteristics that are not available today, making them a potential game-changer."

Dave Paratore, executive president of NanoSteel, added: "With the support of General Motors' automotive expertise and technology leadership, we can accelerate the final phases of development of our nano-structured AHSS [advanced high-strength steel] in the quest to economically lightweight vehicles."

Venture capital firm OrbiMed Advisors led the C round, with Intercept's majority investor, Genextra, also participating. Genextra was created in 2004 by a group of Italian entrepreneurs and financial institutions in partnership with leading scientists from the European Institute of Oncology (IEO) and has €96m in funds.

Founded by Dr. Mark Pruzanski in 2002, Intercept had previously raised about $45m from private investors, including Italy-based Genextra, US-based venture capital firm Visium and Jafco Life Science Investment, which raised about a quarter of its latest near Y240bn ($3bn) fund from corporations.

Intercept plans to use part of the money to fuel its phase III study in which its oral obeticholic acid (OCA) drug is under investigation as a second-line therapy for primary biliary cirrhosis, a rare condition that afflicts mostly women and can lead to liver failure.