SSTI Digest

James DeLong is the new vice president of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association.

Rob Monsees left his position as Gov. Matt Blunt's deputy chief of staff-policy to become the executive director of the Missouri Technology Corporation.

Effective in May, Ken Janoski will be the president and CEO of BioGenerator, a nonprofit in St. Louis that helps scientists commercialize their discoveries.

Dennis Cheek is vice president of education with the Kauffman Foundation.

Not all of the pieces critical to building an innovation-based economy have to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as might be suggested in the Florida and Pennsylvania stories above. Gov. Matt Blunt's Feb. 2 call for the state to provide $2 million for a new Missouri Life Science Incubator - designed to help researchers move their science from the laboratory to commercial businesses - provides a case in point. The proposed facility would be located on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus.

To help entrepreneurs start and manage businesses, the Kauffman Foundation recently launched Kauffman eVenturing™ ( www.eVenturing.org). Designed for growth-oriented entrepreneurs, the new website provides access to current information, organized around key subjects such as finance and accounting, people and human resources, sales and marketing, products and services, operations, and the entrepreneur. New collections of articles will be featured monthly, including original material and an aggregation of “the best of the best” existing articles. Fresh content also will be added through a link-blog to articles and tools on a variety of subjects. Visit the website at http://www.eVenturing.org.

Warren Erdman, formerly vice president of corporate affairs at Kansas City Southern, is the newly selected chairman of the board of the Economic Development Corp. of Kansas City.

Designed to ease the transaction burden on university technology transfer offices and encourage more open and efficient access to research, the Kauffman Foundation recently unveiled iBridge, a web-based platform under the Kauffman Innovation Network.

Between 1996 and 2004, an average 0.36 percent of the U.S. population created a new business each month, representing approximately 500,000 new businesses per month, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.

John Gardner has been named the first vice president for research and economic development for the University of Missouri system.

Pat Snider, the first CEO for BioGenerator in St. Louis, announced her departure from the two-year-old organization by the end of the year.

Randa Hayes is the new director of the business development and trade division of the Missouri Department of Economic Development.