Innovation Pipeline

The road to commercialization is riddled with danger, risks and failed companies. In venture capital circles, people like to quote the ratio of successful startups to failures as roughly one in 10. But news is worse if you count spinoffs just coming into formation. And finding capital for very early-stage companies is increasingly difficult.
For those [...]

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There are a lot of big ideas in the field of alternative power, from massive solar arrays to fields of wind turbines stretching toward the horizon. And then there are microbes.
Scientists are hoping that some sophisticated bioengineering on their part can leverage billions of years of bacterial evolution to combat our growing energy crisis.
Single-celled bacteria [...]

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Water is usually an underappreciated and neglected resource. Until a city, community or village finds it depleted or contaminated.
Similarly, the energy involved in transporting and treating water is obscured, particularly its economic and environmental implications. But as developed countries come to grips with these issues, there’s an awakening about water management much different from its [...]

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Drinking water supplies around the world are in desperate straits, as illustrated in a recently released report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.
The 196-page report was a collaborative effort of 13 federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center and Jerry [...]

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Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported recently that the production of ethanol fuelstocks may consume as much as three times more water than previously thought, depending on where they’re grown.
They found that ethanol fuelstock grown in Iowa uses the least water — about 6 gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol. [...]

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There’s no better way to take the pulse of innovation than to survey R&D spending. And there’s no better time than during a downturn, because history tells us that this is the opportunity for businesses to gain advantage by investing and growing.
Two recent R&D surveys, one from the Wall Street Journal and the other from [...]

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Looking back on the historic computer collaboration demonstration in 1968, it was as if a time traveler from the future had returned to San Francisco to share a glimpse of the future. There were other major technology milestones achieved that year with the first man walking on the moon.
The assassinations of Martin [...]

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You’ve no doubt heard of a carbon footprint. Now people are talking about a water footprint.
But what is a water footprint? It’s the total amount fresh water required for a human activity. It’s a way to measure water consumption.
One of the champions of this concept is Professor John Anthony Allan of King’s College in London [...]

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Ask anyone about the role of innovation in today’s economy and you’re sure to hear a unanimous endorsement of innovation’s function as a fundamental driver, delivering competitive value and new opportunities.
The dirty little secret is: the practice of innovation lacks discipline and process in the large majority of today’s established public companies (tech included) and [...]

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California’s water infrastructure has been suffering from years of neglect and investment. Federal and state leaders have finally seen the writing on the wall and they’re trying to pull themselves out of denial.
On July 11, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sen. Dianne Feinstein took the wraps off of a $9.3 billion bond proposal designed to [...]

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