Lori Valigra

A Chicago merchant bank will take a new twist on selling intellectual property next week when it holds a live auction to sell 400-plus patents from some of the most valued technology innovators in the world. Lori Valigra looks at the list.

The competition to lure biotech investors and know-how is heating up in US states - and so are the legal battles between over fair and unfair incentives.

Tectonic shifts in the patent landscape could follow on from high-profile lawsuits challenging what can be protected by a patent and how patents are enforced that are due to be heard by the US Supreme Court this month.

Opening corporate innovation to outsiders is the new way to run a lab. In multinational R&D, the concept of "not invented here" is quickly giving way to "proudly found elsewhere".

There's nothing light about the scope and ambitions of the University of Manchester's new interdisciplinary Photon Science Institute. The £40 million institute aims to be world-class in pioneering light and laser technologies.

Venture capitalists are once again funding nanotech start-ups, but their overall investment is small compared with government funding and corporate R&D spending, says to a new report.

Researchers at the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey recently reported that they have shown and observed a phenomenon called negative differential resistance - holding out the prospect of a new generation of cheap and fast semiconductors.

A Swiss team has developed a reliable blood test for younger, live cows. Now it is looking for investment to develop a test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

Investing in technology that's a few years from commercialisation can be tricky. Lori Valigra finds out how some venture capitalists sort the wheat from the chaff.