Innovation and entrepreneurship have been a major part of my life. As a student at MIT, and later as a faculty member, I was constantly immersed in both. In 1982, I started a small software-systems development company with a $1,000 investment, entering an innovation and entrepreneurship vortex that carried me through the dot-com explosion. In 1999, Kenan Systems was purchased by Lucent Technologies, and I became an executive there, charged with advancing "Bell Labs innovation." After leaving Lucent two years later, I formed Tiax, which acquired the assets, contracts, and staff of Arthur D. Little's Technology and Innovation business, with its own legacy of helping commercialize innovations, from synthetic penicillin to advanced battery technologies.

Being part of such premier idea engines as MIT, Bell Labs, and Tiax has given me a rich perspective on the innovation landscape. What I see concerns me, because we are on the verge of losing a major source of growth. While many feel that innovation has slowed along with our economy, I perceive that the flow of new innovations has remained strong and unabated over the past few years. It's the mechanisms for implementing them that have eroded. I call the problem the innovation backlog. Unquestionably, the solutions to many current problems, the treatments for many illnesses, and the pathways to new businesses have already been invented, but they are waiting on the sidelines.