Ms. Chen has managed to place a tissue-engineered human liver into a mouse. Into more than one mouse, in fact, and nearly 100% of the mice live. This is so innovative because drug companies the world over want to test how a drug candidate is absorbed, distributed, metabolized and excreted, and to date they’ve been hamstrung into using non-human models to do this before they get into clinical trials, which are toxically expensive and often dangerous. And though we’re genetically similar to mice, our livers work very differently.

So Ms. Chen had the idea, God bless her, to engineer a human liver in a lab mouse, since the liver is where so much of the body’s dealing with a drug works or doesn’t. I felt like Homer Simpson hearing about it. Doh! Why the heck didn’t I think of that? In retrospect it’s so stunningly obvious. And it’s going to be huge.

No big surprise that Alice is sinking her $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize money into a start-up company she’s formed with some colleagues. It’s called Sienna Labs. Sounds to me like a decent investment.

Clearly, we need innovative thinking like this all over America, in technology, medical devices and life science.

Yet even in 2010, the channel remains the ugly stepchild of direct and inside sales. Even as office overhead and direct sales salaries continue to rise and companies are in search of more highly efficient ways to burnish their brand equity and market share out in the world, value-added resellers and distributors remain an afterthought for too many companies.

If it seems like there’s an internal contradiction going on here based on the benefits the channel can offer, there is: most channel marketing managers and channel sales managers report to, wait for it, the corporate Sales Manager, who controls both direct and channel sales. Channel sales managers often have to fight harder for budget, are expected to tell the partners to sell identical solutions faster than direct sales, and are often directed to survey (and re-survey, and re-survey) their partners every six months, and yet provide only the barest sustenance of marketing support.

What kind of marketing support do channel marketers need? Here’s a short list we commonly use:

* Well-constructed pull campaigns versioned for the channel to establish the value proposition to end users and build demand for the channel partner

* An implementation guide to help channel partners identify and quantify how various marketing materials work

* Counsel on how to write a great marketing plan at the local and regional level

* Ideas and training on how to frame technologies as solutions to business challenges and brand yourself as an industry expert

* Steps on how to incorporate social media into a marketing mix

* Instruction on how to tell the difference between marketing leads and sales leads

* A process to put together effectiveness metrics and track a campaign, including what the metrics should be capturing and recording

This is not an exhaustive list, but it should get any channel marketer started. And if you’re looking for a best practice, look no further than Cisco. They know how to treat their channel. For validation, see under “Generating 80% of your revenue with the channel.”

To keep it simple, we asked only 3 questions: which technology brands do you love, which drive you nuts, and what’s your biggest IT challenge today? This post will cover the first two questions, and a follow-on post the third question.

Although only directional (our panel is just moving off the launch pad with three dozen members), the data are still pretty fascinating.

A few themes rise out of the results:

1. Big IT brands, while admired for depth of features, often get dinged for losing their way, for charging too much and for careless, sloppy customer service.

2. Smaller IT brands (perhaps we should call them pre-acquisition) often generate amazement and admiration for their vision, attitude, service,  and ability to deliver as promised.

3. Open Source IT continues to bubble up as the next wave and the natural evolution of proprietary software. To quote one Honduran support consultant (for Oracle, no less): “From OS to office tools, from antivirus to Web browsers, open source and open standards are the future of IT, and changes the vision from a tool sell to a service and personalization of that tool, which is pretty cool.”

Now for a little detail:

IT brands that IT loves:

Apple is frequently called out for its “persistent innovation,” the fact that its products are “reliable and user-friendly,” and as a company that “provides a goal we should all aim for in simplicity and interoperability and cool hardware.” Ah yes, the aspirational power of a strong brand…

Dell gets the nod for being “reliable and affordable,” “reliable and easy to support,” and for “excellent support and good performance.”

Novell “provides so many enterprise products” and RedHat brings together a great “culture, community and product offerings.” Oracle is “reliable and keeps adding features just as we need them” and “really seem to have their act together,” while with SAP “the information-sharing possibilities are amazing.” And as for Linux, which IT brand wouldn’t strive for this response from a UK manager of IT operations: Just love

IT brands that drive IT crazy:

No big surprises here, either: SAP and Oracle are “complex to implement” and Cognos has a “lot of bugs.”  Neither is it shocking that the majority of the vitriol is directed at (wait for it) Microsoft: “does so many stupid things,” “so proprietary and self-centered,” “so many errors,” “too many costly mistakes, and almost impossible to ignore,” “complex licensing and configuration,” “virsues,” “world domination leading to arrogance and complexity,” and my favorite, “enough said.”

Although not a BtoB brand, Sony is buffeted by complaints of “poor quality” and being “under-engineered and over-priced,” while HP takes hits for “reliability, build, support,” “prices,” and especially customer service, which is called “impossible” because “they make changes so often and don’t support older equipment.” And in a reminder of how hard old brands die, one IT development manager still calls HP out eight years later for “taking over Compaq and killing the competition.”

Most opinions, of course, are mixed. My favorite in the Damning with Faint Praise department is one Web application developer’s opinion of IBM: “Occasionally the best, often the worst, usually the most expensive.” Sounds like a lot of brands I know…