Microsoft start-up programme Idées is going local in Lille – a prelude to going local globally.

Financing high-tech start-ups is not getting any easier, but a pioneering UK biotech may have an escape route

Inward investment and high-tech start-ups are seen as key ingredients of the knowledge economy. But the two are not compatible, says new research

A shortage of later stage projects is forcing companies hunt further down the drug discovery ladder. Now the Wellcome Trust is injecting charitable money to fill the holes.

For European tech start-ups, 2006 was the year that the traffic lights for money switched from red to yellow. Yet to be seen is whether they finally go green next year.

Microsoft France's support scheme for start-ups has begun its second year, with success at just one of the 25 companies it has helped covering the costs of the programme over two years. And now Microsoft’s subsidiaries in Germany and the UK are joining in.

Who should profit from cutting-edge academic research: the scientists or the institution that funds them? Both, in a new biotech company launched by one of Sweden’s leading researchers.

It has been six years since a French biotech company made a stock market debut – and now two, BioAlliance and ExonHit, are doing so. Is the European market reawakening?

The pace of forming academic spin-out companies picked up in the US in 2004 after a two-year slump, according to a survey released today.