Flow Vision News is the newsletter of Flow, an organization founded by educator Michael Strong and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. The current edition interweaves the story of Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade-Marchand, founder of the beverage company Adina for Life, with a discussion of the difficulties involved in fostering entrepreneurship and building up the economy in Senegal.

A report by the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (FESTA), the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) and The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE) urges UK universities to take entrepreneurship education beyond business school startup courses and integrate it more deeply into university life so that the country can remain economically competitive. As Keith Herrmann, Deputy Chief Executive of the CIHE puts it: “Pure business skills are no longer sufficient. To add value to the workplace, graduates will need to distinguish themselves by developing entrepreneurial skills that enable them to seize and exploit opportunities, take risks, think strategically, work flexibly, manage complexity, and acquire the more generic employability skills needed for the workplace, such as team-working, communication skills, and commercial awareness.”

Technology Review published its annual “Young Innovators under 35” list. JB Straubel, who designs electric cars for Tesla Motors, ranks at the top, while Aimée Rose was named “Humanitarian of the Year” for her work on developing and commercializing explosives detection devices. Also on the list: Andrew Ng who develops household robots, Hossam Haick who created an electric nose that “sniffs out” cancer, and Michelle Chang who genetically engineers microbes to produce fuel and medical drugs.

Of related interest: Two studies on immigrant patenting. Harvard Business School’s William Kerr study “The Agglomeration of US Ethnic Inventors” (PDF) found a substantial increase in Indian and Chinese inventors. Between 1975 and 2004, the share of Chinese inventors rose from 2% to 8%, and the share of Indian inventors increased from 2% to 4%. The study also revealed that ethnic patenting is concentrated in major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Between 1995 and 2004 the share of patents by ethnic inventors in these cities was 19%, 10% and 8%, respectively.

And, “How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?” by Jennifer Hunt and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle shows “that immigrants patent at double the native rate, and that this is entirely accounted for by their disproportionately holding degrees in science and engineering. These data imply that a one percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the population increases patents per capita by 6%.”

A study (PDF) by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association surveying the opinions of 400 venture capitalists worldwide found that European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom are emerging as leaders in the life sciences and clean technology fields. Ranking second behind the United States are Japan in telecommunication technology, Taiwan in semi conductor innovation, and India in software development.

A great story of international entrepreneurship: At Risky Business, Matt Bandyk writes about how one entrepreneur used his time working in China after college to establish connections with Chinese artists. Back in the United States, he founded Photolimn, a service that lets customers submit their favorite photographs online and have them transformed into paintings by Chinese artists.

In the journal Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, an essay by R. Duane Ireland, Laszlo Tihanyi, and Justin W. Webb examines the continuing challenges of developing an entrepreneurial culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Here is the abstract:

“Following the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, Central and Eastern European countries initiated attempts to adopt capitalist economic frameworks and promote entrepreneurship. However, persistent economic difficulties and high levels of unemployment have led to dissatisfaction with political parties favoring capitalism. We integrate identity, institutional, and social movement theories to describe the emergence of four competing social movements (capitalist democracy, socialist command, social democracy, and populist command) that are undertaken to pursue politico-economic reforms. We discuss the implications for developing an entrepreneurial culture in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Donald McFetridge, in an April 2008 report (PDF) for Canada’s Institute for Research on Public Policy, offers a series of analyses and reflections upon Canada’s relative sluggishness in innovation.