A furor broke out last week after it was reported that the uniforms of U.S. Olympians would be manufactured in China. "They should take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile, and burn them," said an apoplectic Sen. Harry Reid. The story tapped into the anger — and fear — that Americans feel about the loss of manufacturing to China. Seduced by government subsidies, cheap labor, lax regulations, and a rigged currency, U.S. industry has rushed to China in recent decades, with millions of American jobs lost. It is these fears, rather than the Olympic uniforms themselves, that triggered last week’s congressional uproar.

Image: http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/gallery/C8AB-RedBarn.html

The vast majority of business leaders are looking for innovation in all the wrong places.

In the 20th century, a CEO could command his employees to, ‘produce 10 times as many widgets as you did last month,’ in the same way that a general might have told a soldier to, ‘Take that hill.’ You could measure such progress easily.

But today’s organizational goals—engagement, innovation, collaboration—cannot be achieved via dictate or commandment. Imagine asking two employees to go into a room and not to come out until they have learned to communicate with each other effectively, or telling one employee, ‘I’ll give you an extra $5,000 if you come up with our industry’s next great idea by Friday.’

In 2011, a supercomputer won $1 million on Jeopardy! In 2016, that same supercomputer is tackling a challenge quantified not in millions of dollars but in millions of cancer patients. The goal is to use Watson’s natural language processing to mine the medical literature and a patient’s records to provide treatment advice. And this month the Watson computer system is drastically expanding its reach—from one hospital in Thailand to six in India and a planned 21 more in China.

“He can’t learn what he doesn’t know because he doesn’t know he doesn’t know it.”

Reading this quote got me thinking how people with less knowledge and expertise in a field tend to be more confident in their opinions about this field than true experts. True experts realize that their knowledge only goes so far. They realize how much more there is for them to know and so become less confident in their opinions and more open to additional information.

How new tech ventures become successful is pretty much alchemy, but how they start has followed two relatively common patterns for over 75 years. The first is the story of two people in a garage or a dorm room. Think Hewlett Packard or Apple; Facebook or Google. The other is when defectors from a large company go off to found a startup. Think the Traitorous 8 leaving Shockley Semiconductor to create Fairchild and eventually Intel.

In the early days of my career, I wasn’t enthusiastic about structured mentoring programs. I appreciated the advice given to me by more experienced co-workers and managers and was happy to help my peers when I had the time, but formal mentoring seemed to be taking it a step too far. What could it give me that my everyday interactions with my coworkers couldn’t?

Hoosic River Hydro, LLC, Pownal tannery dam. hoosicriverhydro.com (link is external) photo.

Vermont Business Magazine The Vermont Economic Development Authority (VEDA) has approved financing of $7.8 million in financing for economic development projects throughout Vermont totaling $16.8 million.

"VEDA is so pleased to be able to provide growth financing to several start-up and early-stage businesses," said Jo Bradley, VEDA Chief Executive Officer. "In addition, VEDA is helping a long-dormant hydroelectric production facility in southern Vermont once again produce renewable energy." 

Image: Hoosic River Hydro, LLC, Pownal tannery dam. hoosicriverhydro.com photo.

The answer to excessive micromanaging, we’re often told, is to learn to trust our reports, empowering them to make decisions for themselves. Yet that sounds far easier than it actually is. In practice, many bosses fail to delegate because they haven’t cultivated a set of underlying mindsets and practices.

Over the past decade, I’ve studied the world’s greatest bosses, extraordinarily successful leaders who have also unleashed vast pipelines of talent. These “superbosses,” as I called them, spanned dozens of industries and included legendary figures such as fast casual restaurant magnate Norman Brinker, packaged foods titan Michael Miles, tech mogul Larry Ellison, hedge fund pioneer Julian Robertson, media icon Oprah Winfrey, and a host of others.

Really Bad Powerpoint

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use PowerPoint.

Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter Powerpoint.

When Kobe Bryant was playing basketball, he says his focus was almost always winning. Now, he, like a growing field of celebrities, has found a second career in another industry where the stakes are high and the competition is fierce: Venture investing.

Bryant announced Monday he would launch a $100 million investment fund, alongside former Web.com CEO Jeff Stibel, that focuses on funding technology, media, and data companies. In doing so, he joined ranks with celebrities from Lupe Fiasco to Robert Downey Jr. that have said they would dedicate money to finding the next big win.

Image: Lucy Nicholson | Reuters - Former NBA star Kobe Bryant, CEO of Kobe Inc,

More and more big firms are bringing young talent in-house in the hope that they will bring fresh ideas along with them and infuse new vigor into their companies. German pharma giant Bayer is also following this trend.

The 26-year-old Ghanaian entrepreneur, Raindolf Owusu, recently received a prize - endowed with 50,000 euros ($56,300) - from the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, to develop his innovative app even further.

Image: http://www.dw.com

Each year, the Intelligent Community Forum presents an awards program for Intelligent Communities and the public-sector and private-sector partners who contribute to them.  The awards program has two goals: to salute the accomplishments of communities in developing inclusive prosperity on a foundation of information and communications technology, and to gather data for ICF's research programs.

The process begins with communities filling out the ICF Awards Program Nominations Form. In the autumn, ICF's team of analysts reviews the forms submitted, evaluating communities based on the Intelligent Community Indicators, and announces its Smart21 Communities of the Year. These Smart21 are the initial group of honorees that are semi-finalists for the Intelligent Community of the Year. 

During a week when private university graduate research and teaching students have been deemed “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), entitling them to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protection from employer violations of the multiple employee rights conferred thereby, it is now necessary that private universities build into their research and tech transfer budgets the costs of ensuring NLRA compliance.

Scrolling through my social media feed, I noticed a college friend’s photograph of his son’s dormitory. My friend and I had been thick as thieves during our undergraduate years, and now his son was leaving home, and roughly the age his father was when he and I first met.

Suddenly, I was hit with a wave of regret.

Image: Flickr user micki.

This fall, colleges across the country will enroll roughly 3 million new students. For many of these students and their families, college will represent a tremendous expense—among the largest of their lifetimes. By the time they graduate, they can expect to have spent more money on their degree than many households in the United States earn in an entire year. And many will have accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

Last November we published an assessment on HBR.org to help readers diagnose the extent to which their organizations create conditions that favor successful innovation. About 1,500 people completed the assessment, representing organizations across industries at different stages of maturity. Despite enormous attention placed on improving innovation effectiveness, 80% of participants thought their companies were underperforming on this front. Unsurprisingly, those working for older, larger businesses scored lowest in all four innovation conditions: constant energy, creative friction, flexible structure, and purposeful discovery.

A UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow hoping to develop wearable sweat sensors for better health monitoring and a young assistant professor who helped pioneer “deep learning” to create more dextrous robots are among this year’s top innovators under 35, a list compiled each year by MIT Technology Review.

Wei Gao, 31, a postdoc in the lab of Ali Javey, and Sergey Levine, 29, a newly arrived assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and a former postdoc with the department’s Pieter Abbeel, were among 35 innovators announced today.

Image: Wei Gao (Photo courtesy of MIT Technology Review)

On October 8, 1871 Chicago’s dry weather, high winds and abundance of wooden buildings were no match for a small barn fire, rumoured to be sparked by a cow knocking over an oil lamp.

That small fire raged through the city, burning four square miles of the downtown core, $200 million in damage and 300 lives lost. What seemed an insurmountable tragedy triggered an entrepreneurial, innovation and economic boom so large that the city’s present day success is still attributed to the Great Fire of 1871.

Image: https://techvibes.com

In just a couple of weeks students from universities across the country will vie for scholarships (and attention from a potential employer) in the latest Deloitte Foundation Cyber Threat Competition. The program is designed to give people exposure to both the technology and business aspects of cyber risk.

Participating institutions include Georgetown and the University of Southern California, both of which took first place in similar competitions last year, as well as Virginia Tech, Penn State and Purdue.

Here’s a not-so-shocking newsflash: nobody wants to fail.

While I don’t know them personally, I’m pretty sure that none of the hundreds of American athletes traveled to the Olympics with the “F word” on their minds. There is absolutely nothing emotionally pleasant about failing, because it makes you feel like, well, a failure!

But if you want to be an entrepreneur, you’d better suck it up and get used to it.

Last month, I sat down with Forbes’ 30-Under-30 Creator, Randall Lane, to discuss the entrepreneurial honorees for this year (check out our full video interview here on The Unicorn in the Room).