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News and Analysis of the Global Innovation Scene [Research Technology Management]
[September 22, 2014]

News and Analysis of the Global Innovation Scene [Research Technology Management]


(Research Technology Management Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Administration Unveils Plans for Supporting Federal Technology Commercialization Innovation has been a priority of the Obama administration, as evidenced by the President's proposal to establish of a network of 15 innovation manufacturing hubs, as well as a range of other initiatives. However, garnering the maximum return from the government's $130 billion annual R&D investment remains elusive-in part because federal research remains largely locked away in federal and university labs. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy convened a Lab-to- Market Summit in May 2013 that came up with a collection of concrete recommendations for smoothing the flow of innovation from the federal labs to the open market. The administration responded to those suggestions in its 2015 budget proposal, which specifies investments to support commercialization of federally funded research.



The Lab-to-Market-Summit, which invited non-government business experts to offer input on the government's commercialization processes, produced some specific ideas to improve federal technology transfer. Most notably, participants called for the establishment of a federal Office of Innovation and Federal Technology Partnership to streamline processes and tackle a range of improvements that panelists believe could lead to significant increases in federal technology transfer. These other improvements included recommendations that the government create commercialization tax incentives for businesses; craftmentoring and entrepreneurial business development programs; develop innovation and partnership training for federal tech transfer administrators and researchers; institute programs to team public-sector researchers with technology translators who can move discoveries to market; and leverage SBIR/STTR programs to provide assistance with a broad range of commercialization activities, such as intellectual property protection, marketing, and business development.

The White House's first response to the issue came in the form of its 2015 budget recommendations, which included $6 million to "support greater interagency collaboration on lab-tomarket efforts" and $25 million to "expand the National Science Foundation's I-Corps program." I-Corps teaches scientific entrepreneurs how to present their NSF-funded work to investors and take it to market in an eight-week course. NSF spent $19 million on the program's pilot run in 2013, in which more than 50 teams participated.


Soon after the budget was released, the administration issued announced further efforts to address commercialization. On http://www.performance.gov/ , a website that provides details about agency and cross-agency priority goals in the 2015 budget, the administration promised a series of actions "to accelerate and improve the transfer of new technologies from the laboratory to the commercial marketplace." Among the changes promised: * Adjustments to the patent application and publication process to ease the management, discoverability, and licensing of federally funded patents; * Efforts to increase entrepreneurs' access to federally funded research facilities; * Measures to ensure that federal institutions and employees are appropriately incentivized to prioritize commercialization of government research; * Work to identify ways to develop and capitalize on technology transfer expertise; and * Changes to maximize the economic impact of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

A March 14 White House press release claimed that "these actions promise to significantly increase the American people's return on investment in Federallyfunded research by ensuring that more discoveries in the laboratory make the leap to the marketplace-creating more effective drugs, more resilient crops, and more powerful clean energy solutions." Technology transfer experts are less optimistic. The co-chair of the Lab-to- Market Summit, Joe Allen, who is a veteran of Capitol Hill, federal agency, and nonprofit institutional technology transfer efforts, says the details behind the bullet list outline a plan that is anything but transformational. According to Allen, the idea for improving the licensing of federal inventions is nothing more than a list of inventions in a government database; a similar approach is taken for alerting industry to federal research facilities they can use. Other measures would be addressed through some new language related to technology transfer that would be included in federal performance reviews for researchers and administrators. "Regarding the development of federal entrepreneurs," Allen added, "they propose expanding existing programs. In short, these actions are a process person's idea of change." Allen regretted the lack of urgency to the Administration's plan. "Until we inject a sense of urgency into the federal technology commercialization system with real rewards for success and consequences for resistance we will continue to see much of the marvelous creativity arising from agency-supported research going unused," he said.

The innovation proposals earned little more than a shrug from Matthew Stepp, executive director of the Center for Clean Energy Innovation and a senior policy analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Stepp, who was a member of the Lab-to-Market Summit panel, said the proposals "sound good on paper, but there is very little tangible change here." The actions suggested by the White House, he said "won't move the needle much, in my opinion." In particular, Stepp said, he believes the $25 million for I-Corps is a good idea but too modest. He says there are ambitious ideas to create I-Corp-like programs at each federal agency but the White House "chose to go small." "The Summit's work aimed to propose transformational change because the entire federal research enterprise is bureaucratically and culturally not set up to facilitate significant tech transfer," Stepp says. "The agencies and labs don't view it as a priority, federal research appropriations don't incentivize tech transfer work, and there is very little incentive/ funding/staffsupport for tech transfer at the research office level. None of the changes proposed by the White House aim to fix this; rather it perpetuates it." He suggested that a better start would have been to implement the OMB-level innovation and tech transfer office that the Summit proposed, which is something the White House could do on its own. "The tech transfer problem in the United States will take big changes and the White House is not proposing the level of changes needed," Stepp concluded.

Indeed, the White House's plan may be limited by the administration's ability to act independently. As with other policy areas, the development of President Obama's agenda has been hobbled by Congressional opposition. As yet, Congress has taken no action on the President's plan to establish innovation hubs. The four hubs that have been established-in Chicago; Detroit; Youngstown, Ohio; and Raleigh, North Carolina-have been created by executive order using available funding. The budget proposal that included the increased funding for I-Corps and the other measures was defeated in the House 413-2 on April 9.

Congress is divided over support for the I-Corps idea. Dan Lipinski (D-IL), a member of the House Science Committee, told Science Magazine in 2012 that, "NSF spends all of this money on basic research. So let's try to teach some of these grantees how to be successful entrepreneurs and see if it winds up producing new products." However, committee chairman Mo Brooks (R-AL) took the opposite view. At a July 2010 hearing of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee that considered the I-Corps program, he wondered if NSF has the expertise to make decisions about entrepreneurship and if it should even be funding such activities in the first place.

With the weak reception of its general proposal and the larger defeat of its budget proposal, the administration's plan to boost commercialization of federal research seems uncertain, at best. That could mean continued difficulty for private industry leaders interested in accessing federally sponsored research results for commercialization.

Gerrill Griffith , Contributing Editor Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [email protected] Breakthroughs Lead to New Talk of a Hydrogen Economy As the fuel that powers the sun, hydrogen is, indirectly, the source of all energy on the Earth. But accessing its power directly as a source of energy has proven to be problematic and, in some experts' views, a lost cause before it starts. However, recent breakthroughs may be changing that equation, bringing the dream of a hydrogen economy much closer to reality.

The advantages of a hydrogen economy are almost self-evident: used in a fuel cell, the only byproduct of energy production from hydrogen is water. Although handling hydrogen comes with its own dangers, it doesn't come with the wider environmental risks of petroleum-based energy sources.

But science hasn't been able to figure out how to harness the power of hydrogen. In the words fuel-cell expert Ulf Bossel, "More energy is needed to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds than can ever be recovered from its use." A kilogram of hydrogen can release about the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline so on its face hydrogen would appear to be a viable alternative fuel. But, Bossel told PhysOrg.com in 2006, the amount of energy required to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds and compress or liquefy it for transport and distribution, plus leakage and other losses, adds up to around 75 percent of the potential energy. In contrast, for a gallon of gasoline, deducting the energy cost of refining gas from crude oil and supplying it at the pump leaves nearly three-quarters of the potential energy to fuel a car. Other alternative fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, actually yield 35 percent and 220 percent of the energy required to produce them. (Biodiesel provides slightly more energy per gallon than gasoline; ethanol yields about twothirds as much.) Furthermore, since most electricity in the United States is generated by burning fossil fuels, the process of generating hydrogen itself adds to the environmental burdens created by petroleum energy. Ironically, the cheapest way to produce hydrogen at present is from natural gas, making the $100 million commercial market for hydrogen a contributor to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. These realities have dulled the enthusiasm for fuel cells and other hydrogen-based energy solutions as alternative energy sources.

Three recent breakthroughs in hydrogen production may help shiftthat picture, though, by reducing the costs associated with isolating hydrogen and by creating new sources for it. One is a process that uses molybdenum sulfide instead of platinum to liberate hydrogen from water via electrolysis. A second replaces platinum with iron at the other end of the hydrogen fuel-cell system in the most common type of fuel cell, the proton membrane exchange (PEM) cell. The third breakthrough is a new method of extracting hydrogen directly from plant waste- bio-hydrogen, if you will.

One of the primary drawbacks of fuel cells is the platinum they require to catalyze the electrolysis of hydrogen from water. Platinum is extraordinarily expensive; its use dramatically increases the cost of accessing hydrogen. Two research teams have found ways to substitute other, cheaper substances for platinum at various points in the process, reducing the cost of generation hydrogen.

Researchers from the United States and Denmark, led by Jens Nørskov of Stanford University, used a bio-inspired molybdenum sulfide catalyst coupled with a light-absorbing electrode to make hydrogen fuel from sunlight and water. Using a theoretical approach developed by Nørskov's group to describe catalyst behavior led the scientists to a 30-yearold recipe for double-bonded molybdenum sulfide. Using this recipe, moly sulfide nanoclusters were deposited on a graphite sheet to produce an inexpensive electrode. The scientists added a chemical solar cell consisting of silicon semiconductors arranged in closely packed pillars, dotted with tiny clusters of molybdenum sulfide, which harvests red photons. When the cell was exposed to light, hydrogen gas formed as quickly as in a platinum-based system.

Researchers at two centers in the United States and Canada, working separately, have produced breakthroughs using iron as a substitute for platinum. A pair of University of Calgary researchers, Curtis Berlinguette and Simon Trudel, have patented their production method to extract hydrogen and oxygen from water using iron, cobalt, and nickel compounds as catalysts. The process, which doesn't require high temperatures, treats the metals with light, according to a recent article in MIT Technology Review . Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers in Richland, Washington, have also come up with an iron-based catalyst in a fuel cell that converts hydrogen directly to electricity. According to PNNL, chemists R. Morris Bullock, Tianbiao 'Leo' Liu, and Dan DuBois tweaked the shape and the internal electronic forces of a group of candidate compounds to produce their iron-based catalyst.

The third new development represents a fundamental shiftin that it opens up new sources for hydrogen, making a hydrogen economy a real possibility. The synthetic enzyme process developed by Y. H. Percival Zhang of Virginia Tech, with colleagues from the United States and Mexico, produces large quantities of hydrogen from plant matter at relatively low temperatures, without costly metals and releasing almost no greenhouse gasses.

Generating hydrogen from biomass has traditionally relied on microorganisms that produce the catalytic enzymes that react with the sugars in the plant walls, like xylose and cellulose. But microbes work in a fairly narrow temperature range. Zhang's team created a synthetic enzyme cocktail that works in a wider temperature range. When the enzymes are mixed with xylose and polyphosphates at 122 degrees F under normal pressure, they produce three times as much hydrogen as the typical microorganisms. The waste heat generated by the process is used to heat the reactor, making it 100 percent energy efficient.

"It really doesn't make sense to use nonrenewable natural resources to produce hydrogen," says Zhang. "We think this discovery is a game changer in the world of alternative energy." Zhiguang Zhu, Chief Technology Officer for Cell-Free Bioinnovations, a Virginia Tech spin-offformed to commercialize the enzyme-based system, agrees. "Conventional hydrogen production by using natural gas are nonrenewable," Zhu said. "By using water to actualize it, the energy input is too high. By this [enzymatic] process, it is highly efficient. . . . We can store the hydrogen in the sugar and when we need it we can produce some of the hydrogen out. We have the high efficiency and eventually we will have the low cost that will be competitive with current technology." The process has not yet reached a cost that will match current hydrogen prices. Joseph Rollin, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech and CEO of Cell-Free Bioinnovations, acknowledges that the company is still at a disadvantage with regard to the production cost of hydrogen. "The price of natural gas hydrogen is extremely cheap right now, so that's a very difficult competitor for us bio-hydrogen producers. Certain applications, they're willing to pay for the lack of carbon and the emissions associated with it and that's definitely a part of our business plan." However, the process offers other advantages that may play a role in creating a hydrogen infrastructure. The biomass converters the company plans, Rollin says, will be set up on site, eliminating the costs and complications of compressing and shipping hydrogen gas."The thing that we're gaming most would be a distributed hydrogen producing station. Those would be about the same capacity as a gas station. It would have some bioreactors on site and those bioreactors would be producing hydrogen continuously on site," he says. "We've done the numbers and we can be cost competitive for distributed hydrogen.

"We're definitely taking the initial steps," Rollin says. "Especially for hydrogen we're talking longer term. If you're talking the hydrogen economy, no matter how good the technology is, it's going to take a little while. And there are a few challenges that we have to solve still. We think they're solvable." Recent developments would suggest he may be right.

Manny Frishberg , Contributing Editor Federal Way, Washington [email protected] Singapore's R&D STAR Perched at the tip of the Malayan peninsula, Singapore has little in the way of natural resources. Its 276 square miles contain no oil, gas, minerals, or other basic components of industrial production. Nevertheless, as it approaches the 50th anniversary of its independence next year, the city-state has a gross domestic product of more than $60,000 per inhabitant-third in the world behind only Qatar and Luxembourg. That success owes much to the one resource that Singapore possesses in abundance: its population of 5.4 million, which made it one of the four "Asian tigers" in the 1980s and now has it leading the world in advanced R&D and innovation.

As a fellow Asian tiger with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, Singapore made its mark on the world economy by offering low-cost manufacturing facilities and business-friendly tax policies. But when other Asian nations began to offer manufacturing facilities at cheaper rates than Singapore could, the government took its growth pattern to a higher level. It began to develop its own science and technology capabilities by advancing a national R&D agenda.

The vehicle for that process is the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). Created in 1991 as part of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, A*STAR consists of half a dozen basic units, devoted to biomedical research, science and engineering research, interdisciplinary collaboration, graduate work, intellectual property, and general support services. It also oversees 14 research institutes in a diversity of disciplines and half a dozen consortia and centers. As its website notes, A*STAR "is the lead agency for fostering world-class scientific research and talent for a vibrant knowledgebased and innovation-driven Singapore. It supports Singapore's key economic clusters by providing intellectual, human and industrial capital to its partners in industry. It also supports extramural research in the universities, hospital, research centers, and with other local and international partners." The agency has three "strategic thrusts" in its effort to build Singapore into a global research hub: It builds human capital through manpower training in science, technology, and engineering. It develops intellectual capital by overseeing and carrying out research and development in science, engineering, and technology in its research institutes. And it fosters industrial capital by promoting the application of knowledge gained from fundamental research through collaboration with industry and commercialization of its intellectual property. That three-pronged approach, strengthening and maximizing the value of the state's only available resource, provides a lesson for other nations. So does the Singapore government's unbroken belief in the value of basic and applied science in growing the national economy, illustrated by consistent increases in support for R&D even during difficult economic times.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong outlined the government's strategy for R&D in general and A*STAR in particular in 2009, immediately after the dip in the global economy otherwise known as the great recession. "We must expect slower growth and greater uncertainties at least over the next year, maybe longer," he said. "But our R&D program takes a longer-term perspective. It will proceed despite immediate ups and downs. The funding will not be affected. The government remains fully committed to investing in R&D, in order to develop a key capability that will keep our economy competitive in the long term. Our steady commitment will continue to draw researchers to set up and root their research activities in Singapore, and give investors the confidence to establish high-tech industries and corporate R&D centers here." Indeed, a key feature of A*STAR's activities has been tight collaboration with industry-both Singaporean and foreign-in the development and commercialization of intellectual property created in the institutes and centers.

That collaboration rests on a foundation of research. The latest National R&D Survey of Singapore, issued in late 2013, made that point powerfully. "As Singapore matures as a knowledge-based economy, there needs to be a sustained investment in R&D and a continued supply of high-value researchers to meet the growing demand," it states. "Singapore's Research, Innovation & Enterprise 2015 plan targets to develop Singapore into one of the world's leading researchintensive, innovative and entrepreneurial economies. Developing deep R&D capabilities continues to remain a key priority for Singapore." The government set the stage for its research agenda more than a quarter century ago by soliciting advice from high-profile overseas experts, among them Nobel laureates Sydney Brenner and David Baltimore, who provided input on science policy. As a result of their advice, the country focused its efforts on life science. In 1987, that resulted in the opening of the government's Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology. Fifteen years later, work started on Biopolis, a 2 million square foot biomedical complex under the aegis of A*STAR that consists of government agencies, governmentfunded research institutes and laboratories, and corporate labs. The second phase of the project, completed in 2006, added a complex devoted to research in neuroscience and immunology.

The lasting impact of those early consultations is evident in the balance of research expenditure. In 2012, biomedical sciences received at least 50 percent more public support than electronics, which in turn accounted for more support than any other field.

That doesn't mean that A*STAR has little regard for non-life science fields. In 2008, it opened Fusionopolis, a new complex intended to encourage R&D collaboration among the information, communications, media, physical science, and engineering industries. Now midway through its second phase of development, the complex houses the Institute of Microelectronics, the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, the Data Storage Institute, and the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, along with several companies and corporate research organizations.

Meanwhile, industry stands to benefit from A*STAR's most recent major initiative. Late last year, it launched a new development program devoted to industrial additive manufacturing. The program will focus on emerging techniques that have particular relevance to the aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, marine, and precision engineering industries. The program "aims to develop innovative additive manufacturing technologies and capabilities to transform the manufacturing landscape of Singapore," said Tan Geok Leng, director of A*STAR's Science and Engineering Research Council.

A*STAR chair Lim Chuan Poh outlined his agency's broad philosophy, speaking in the context of Fusionopolis. "Ultimately [it] is really about the people," he said. "It is about the community of scientists working together across disciplines, from physical science and engineering to biomedical sciences. It is about the partnerships between public and private sector research to develop innovative solutions to benefit society. It is also about the integration of public sector agencies' efforts and resources to tackle complex societal challenges." That combination of effectively trained and directed human resources and public-private collaboration provides a model for the innovation process in the 21st century.

Peter Gwynne , Contributing editor Boston, Massachusetts [email protected] Europe's Tech Startups Take Off Silicon Valley may still be the world's mecca for high-tech startups, but it's not the only place where pedal-to-themetal innovation is happening. Europe is now home to a number of thriving technology hubs-many of them named to indicate their Silicon Valley ambitions, including Silicon Fen, Silicon Glen, and Silicon Roundabout. The region has yet to produce a tech company the scale of Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple. Nor does it have a stream of capital as deep and free flowing as that of Silicon Valley. And its crushing financial and economic crisis has leftdeep scares in the local business community. Yet the outlook for European tech startups, insiders say, is brighter than ever.

The optimism stems in large part from the emergence of a European startup ecosystem centered on a handful of thriving tech clusters in cities such as Berlin, London, and Stockholm. Various factors have fueled their development and continue to drive their growth. Government support is one of them. While various state funds exist to help startups, most European countries have shied away from large statesponsored direct investment programs, which can crowd out private-sector capital, instead offering tax incentives aimed at stimulating investments in startups. Many hubs are also benefitting from a vibrant angel-investing scene fueled by the wealth generated from exits-sales of startups to larger companies or lucrative initial public offerings that allow investors to harvest gains and channel them into new startups. Mobility of labor is playing an equally important role. New free movement of labor laws enacted by the European Union and extended to new member states in the eastern region allow cities like Dublin and Amsterdam to attract talented and ambitious founding teams from across Europe.

So where are Europe's new Silicon Valleys and what makes them stand apart? The United Kingdom is clearly fertile ground. London hosts several high-tech zones. Silicon Corridor, also known as the M4 Corridor for the highway along which it runs, stretches from London to South Wales. The area has long been home to tech companies and startups of all flavors, and it remains a breeding ground for startups today. Silicon Roundabout is a concentration of more than 100 high-tech firms located in an area around the Old Street Roundabout in London. The area has recently morphed into what is now known as "Tech City"-the two names are used interchangeably-following focused interest and some state investment from the government of Prime Minster David Cameron. Skype, the Internet telephony pioneer, has developers working there. London even has its own incubator, Level39, exclusively dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs developing disruptive financial services. Elsewhere in the country, the Silicon Fen cluster around Cambridge leverages the worldclass scientific expertise of Cambridge University; Silicon Glen, in the central belt of Scotland, is clustered around a number of universities and large tech companies. Amazon rolled out its first development center outside the United States there in 2004.

Ireland is attracting tech entrepreneurs from across the globe for a number reasons: a low corporate tax rate, a government-sponsored venture fund said to be the largest of its kind in Europe, good access to seed capital, and a large pool of young, bright, and ambitious workers. In fact, Dublin has topped Citibank's annual list of most competitive cities in the world for human capital. It is also home to a wealth of universities and colleges, such as Trinity College and the Dublin Institute of Technology, that are top addresses for fostering talent and breeding innovation.

Like Great Britain, Germany has given birth to several clusters, with Berlin arguably drawing the most talent and attention these days. A hotbed of startup activity in the early 2000s, the city lost some of its enthusiasm in the dotcom bust but is thriving once again. Engineers and designers have flooded into Berlin in recent years, attracted by relatively cheap rents and the city's status as a gateway connecting eastern and western Europe. Local authorities are working to make it easier for international workers to get visas by fasttracking applications from technology professionals and other workers. Berlin also is trying to overcome its reputation for copying US business models rather than developing innovative ideas. With the city's startup incubator Rocket Internet, the Samwer brothers-Alexander, Oliver, and Marc-have developed and sold German versions of eBay and Groupon to their more famous competitors. One of their latest projects, a German rival to the online retailer Zappos, is valued at $3.7 billion.

Germany has some other significant tech clusters as well. The Rhein-Main- Neckar region, which runs from the financial center Frankfurt to Walldorf, home of business software giant SAP, has become a powerful software hotspot. Numerous startups also dot the city map in Munich, where German tech giant Siemens is based and the Technical University of Munich has proven to be an attractive springboard for researchers to spin offtheir ideas into startups of their own. And with plenty of state aid after German unification, Dresden-the capital of the state of Saxony-has lured numerous tech entrepreneurs to its cluster, known as Silicon Saxony.

Elsewhere in Europe, some observers claim France has seen its best days, not least because the country's insular environment and punitive tax system has sent many entrepreneurs packing in the past. But startups are sprouting up in the country nevertheless, especially in Paris, and some have already gone big in areas such as media, e-commerce, and wireless. Criteo, DailyMotion and Kelkoo are among them.

Tiny Netherlands is another European country with a comparatively big entrepreneurial ecosystem. One city particularly stands out: Eindhoven. In 2013, Forbes magazine named it the world's most inventive city with 22.6 patents filed for every 10,000 residents. The ideas for many of those patents, and new ones still to come, stem from the High Tech Campus (HTC), a research and development hub. Once a laboratory for Dutch electronics giant Philips, the campus today houses more than 100 companies employing 8,000 researchers, developers, and engineers. Philips opened the facility in 2003, after the company went through a round of layoffs, to offer former employees a place to launch startups and use their knowledge. The campus now forms part of Einhoven's broader Brainport initiative, which the Dutch government launched in 2004 to corral high-tech knowledge after several big companies laid offa swathe of highly skilled workers.

The Nordic region, dubbed the Silicon Fjörd in the late 1990s for breeding so many technology startups, has bounced back as one of Europe's most thriving incubators. The region once again is abuzz with new Internet business models.

Sweden is viewed by many as the most digitally connected economy in the world and, as such, an ideal test bed for tech companies. Stockholm is where the action is today. Startups like the music streaming service Spotify and the payments platform Klarna were conceived there, following in the footsteps of pioneering ventures like Kazaa and MySQL. The country also likes to stake partial claim to Skype-one of its founders, Niklas Zennström, is a Swede.

In Finland , the loss of Nokia, once the darling of the mobile phone industry and now a near-invisible entity within Microsoft, may just end up being the country's gain. The imploded mobile giant has released batches of smart, skillful entrepreneurs. Over the past couple of years, Helsinki has burst onto the scene as a major global hub for mobile gaming. The city is now home to more than 50 mobile gaming startups.

Norway , too, has nurtured a burgeoning tech startup scene, though with fewer participants than its Scandinavian rivals. WeVideo, a cloud-based collaborative video-editing platform, and FriBi, a mobile-local marketplace, are among several ventures that have secured venture capital support. Beta- Factory, a startup accelerator, has been relatively successful in plugging experienced mentors across industries into the early-stage entrepreneurial ecosystem. But there is some criticism of government funding, which some view as a "sleeping pill" for many entrepreneurs. Funding critics argue that entrepreneurs end up spending too much time hunting funding instead of pursuing customers.

Whether Europe's startup hubs will ever produce winners to match Silicon Valley's industry giants is anyone's guess. What is evident today, though, is that the region's startup culture is changing for the better, with its blend of distinct regional tech hubs, each with its own vibrant environment and area of specialization.

John Blau , Contributing Editor Düsseldorf, Germany [email protected] DOI: 10.5437/08956308X5704001 MaryAnne M. Gobble , Editor (c) 2014 Industrial Research Institute, Inc

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