Funding; Research; Innoation; Brad Feld; 3/31/08 - PHOTOS & Events

461_ Leadership and the Culture of Commitment and Sustainability
There are a lot of people doing a lot of work, more of an engineering process perspective. That is where do things come from, how do they get used, what happens when we’re done using it. So there’s a lot of good work going on at the material level," explains Dan Montgomery, Marpa Center for Business & Economics. What we are emphasizing is what kind of state-of-mind, of leadership, of organizational culture goes with creating a sustainable world. It’s the kind of inner dimension and the social dimension that supports being more responsible in the way that we use the earth’s resources. When we look at business decisions we have a much longer and broader view of the impacts we are having. It’s allowing more stakeholders into the picture, having a longer timeline, thinking about what happens to your product when people are done using it. Business schools 25 years ago taught that business decision making was a zero sum game. There were tough trade-offs involved. The ultimate rationale was shareholder value. Today, other groups that we would call stakeholders such as the communities in which we operate, the communities in which our supply chain operate, were really not a concern before, because they weren’t in the decision making equation. If you talk with today’s business students, they’re starting off with the idea that sustainability is a value that’s just table stakes to be in the game. Collaboration is where we get into talking about culture and commitment. The cycle of commitment, helping people look at this area of agreements and commitments. People are not operating in corporate silos anymore. We’re all dealing with a lot of lateral pier relationships, joint ventures; the business environment is much more complex now than it was a generation ago. What we’re doing in this seminar in June at Naropa, is introducing some methods for looking at that entire web or network of stakeholders and understanding what all the trade-offs and value exchanges are. It gives us a better way of to think about the environment that we operate in. LISTEN Bytes: 25760812 - 3/24/08
Related Links: Business Sustainability || Business and Economics || Leading Through Conflict || Authentic Leadership || Blue Opal Strategies || Keywords: Dan Montgomery, Marpa Center, Business, Economics, Sustainable, Blue Opal Strategies

459_ Software as a Service (SaaS) Meets Software for Security (SfS)
Gerhardt Eschelbeck is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering, at Webroot. Gerhardt is one of the first in the country, maybe the world, to deal with the SaaS model. That’s Software as a Service. This has been a significant transition which has been driven largely by the threat landscape. Today’s threat is fairly stealth and designed to stay undetected for as long a time as possible. The purpose of the thieves is financially motivated. Today’s threats are fundamentally designed to steal information from the user’s computer, the banking information, financial, health information and what not. Therefore, we clearly have to look at this from a protection standpoint. I think the technologies that we developed 10 and 15 years ago which were very effective when applied to the virus threat, are not as applicable for today’s threat. What the industry requires is an approach that is much more sophisticated. We have moved from a purely desktop approach to a multi tiered defense model. I think the goal here is that you need to use a leverage similar to what the bad guys are using to actually detect those spyware technologies. This is where Webroot has been pioneering and working as an organization over the past four years. We have been able to protect, prevent and detect infections for our customers; this is certainly our top priority. Steps that an organization can do to stay clean and healthy from a computer hygiene perspective are; First make sure you update your systems whenever patches become available. “Microsoft Tuesday”. Missing patches are very frequently used within the first 24 – 48 hours by hackers to take advantage of those security holes. Not just the Microsoft programs, but all of the other programs and systems that you use, be it iTunes or Adobe, etc. The Second Recommendation: Make sure that your malware protection is the latest, state-of-the-art, and is updated to the minute. Thirdly, there are typically areas of very sensitive data that you have on your computer. Take a look at that from an encryption perspective, to make sure it is protected properly. 3/24/08 Bytes: 21176636
Related Links: Webroot || E-Mail Security || On Demand Software || Cyber Security || Podcast Directory || Keywords: Gerhardt Eschelbeck, Webroot, SaaS, SfS, user’s computer, banking information, financial, health information, computer virus, malware

462_ Commercialization of Innovative Ideas - Far Reaching and Profitable
Eltron Research & Development is one of the largest SBIR companies in the country. Paul Grimmer came out of big business; he worked for Conoco and Conoco Phillips for almost 30 years, and never dealt with SBIR, because it’s for small businesses. About 2 ½ years ago Paul and his wife bought Eltron Research. “Eltron had developed over 100 technologies that we thought had commercial value”, Paul said. But the focus was, ‘let’s get the next project’, not taking the one you finished and going to the market place with it. The big challenge is, there are very few projects ready to go to market after completing a phase two SBIR program ($850K). Some of them may require ½ million, a million, some may require a hundred million dollars, but the key is, there’s no more money from the feds. You’re too early for the VCs, less for the angels who generally don’t understand a lot of the technologies. So, how do we get all this, or at least a significant fraction of these technologies to market? This is really what the SBIR program is all about, to help the small businesses get a jump start in getting their innovations to the market. Classically most SBIR companies are focused on science and maybe to a lesser degree engineering. So, we’ve added engineers, business developers, and of course all this costs money outside of SBIR. So that’s a challenge, just getting the right skill sets in there to help analyze and develop things, and so forth. So how do you bridge that gap? Well, we’ve elected to go down two routes, one (longer term) is to find larger companies in the industry that have deeper pockets that might be interested in forming a new product line or enhancing a product that they’ve got. You work a deal with them and in return for them funding additional development they retain the rights to your technology. Some of that can take a long time. The other thing we’ve done, since I’m not interested in giving away huge chunks of our technology, at least until we get them into the market place, has been to do some things so that we can continue the development ourselves.
Related Links: Eltron Research & Development || SBIR Sources of Info || Looking for Money || w3w3® Blog || Keywords: Paul Grimmer, Eltron, Research, Development, SBIR, Research, Commercialization, Innovative, Grants 3/24/08 - Bytes: 25745766