Before the gale-force hurricane of Reaganomics swept through the United States in the 1980s, America very briefly entertained the adoption of a deliberate industrial policy. As in South Korea and certain European nations, the U.S. government would pick economic winners and losers and direct funds accordingly.

This was no utopian idea. After World War II, a number of European governments invested heavily in key sectors -- electricity, steel -- to close the technology gap with the United States. Similarly, the South Korean government built up a shipbuilding industry in the 1970s from nothing into the largest and more successful in the world. To a certain extent, the Pentagon accomplished something similar with the Internet (though no American would dare call such a thing "socialism").

Sometimes you sense that something isn’t right at work. You suspect that your finance colleague might be fudging numbers, your boss isn’t telling his manager the truth about an important project, or your co-worker is skipping out of the office early but leaving her computer on so it looks like she’s just down the hall. How do you know when it’s worth speaking up or not? Can you you protect yourself from potential consequences of calling out bad behavior? And when you do decide to say something, what do you say and to whom?

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/agree-terms.php?id=100297304

Early stage report 2015: Critical mass: At every part of the university innovation cycle, a university needs to consider whether there is substantial momentum behind an idea, project, or initiative to succeed. Collaboration: In order to create this mass, smaller universities need to collaborate on the innovation level. Industry-university relations: The other form of collaboration universities need to work on is building the bridge between academia and the corporate world through discussing what issues both have, and resolving those issues. Harnessing the student body: Students want value for the time and money they put into studying through hands-on experience, opportunities to well-paid jobs and, increasingly, it means the chance to explore the entrepreneurial side.

It’s no secret that women-owned businesses are seldom funded by venture capital investors.

Bias among male investors is a much discussed reason for the fact that less than 10% of venture-backed companies are led by women. But it doesn’t make good business sense, because women-led, venture-backed companies than those with men at the helm, according to research from Babson College.

Since the U.S. economy imploded in 2008, there’s been a steady shift in leadership in job growth among our major metropolitan areas. In the earliest years, the cities that did the best were those on the East Coast that hosted the two prime beneficiaries of Washington’s resuscitation efforts, the financial industry and the federal bureaucracy. Then the baton was passed to metro areas riding the boom in the energy sector, which, if not totally dead in its tracks, is clearly weaker.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Market_Street_San_Francisco.jpg

You can’t build a strong professional network if you don’t open up to your colleagues; but doing so is tricky, because revealing the wrong things can have a devastating effect on your career.

Sharing the right aspects of yourself in the right ways is an art form. Disclosures that feel like relationship builders in the moment can wind up as obvious no-nos with hindsight.

Tech founders stand to benefit enormously from the support, mentorship and even capital an accelerator can provide, and not surprisingly, many top accelerators and incubators are inundated with applications.

But not all are made equal. When looking for the right incubator or accelerator, you need to think long term.

Cancer is not just a physically devastating diagnosis, it can be a very expensive one. Cancer patients are more than 2 and half times more likely to go bankrupt than people without cancer.

And the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center says young cancer patients have 2 to 5 times high bankruptcy rates than those 65 and older. Those numbers are why more and more patients and families facing cancer are turning to crowdfunding to help pay their bills. The internet is making it possible for these people to tap into the kindness of strangers and friends to help them in truly desperate times.

Turns out, it's not as easy at it looks.

Driving a tricked out BMW motorcycle with a refrigerated compartment attached like a sidecar, Simon Anguelov earns money to pay for community college in San Diego as a mobile ice cream vendor. The 20-year-old MiraCosta College student took out $30,000 in bank loans to create the customized bike with help from his sister, who cosigned for him.

Since my wife, Geri, and I founded Smile Squared in 2011, we have donated more than 125,000 toothbrushes to children in need all over the world. It's our small way of helping improve the oral health of children who, because of where they live, low socio-economic status, lack of access to health care or other circumstances, are unable to properly care for their teeth.

You're all about thoughtful solidarity. Your favorite word is "problematic." You're constantly on that social justice grind. I mean, come on, you even clicked on this article to better your ally skills.

You're a pretty darn good ally, if you do say so yourself.

If you’re like most people, you probably think that emotions should leave the room when key decisions need to be made. But, sometimes your gut instinct pokes and prods at your reasoning until you either listen to it — or do a good enough job pouring over reams of data to justify ignoring it.

Like a sports coach, Dwight A. McBride studies his "win-loss data." As the dean of Northwestern University’s graduate school, he closely tracks his wins, when a graduate student with competing offers chooses his institution, and his losses, when that student goes somewhere else.

Earning a Master of Business Administration has long been a rite of passage on Wall Street. Most firms consider it necessary for employees to advance their careers.

But some experts are starting to wonder whether the end is coming for business schools. Now it looks like a new subset of Wall Street is turning away from the MBA tradition.

An amazing corporate culture can be a company's most powerful weapon, making it more competitive and helping to retain employees. Mashable's latest #BizChats on Twitter drew together experts to talk about the tricky work of creating a great corporate culture.

If we are to make research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3) a success in our regions we must be led by three clear principles. First, RIS3 is above all a process - an economic transformation using innovations for the wellbeing of a region. 

Currently, high priority actions focus on a few crucial political and industrial business areas defined by regional decision makers.

Few people ever need to deal with a stricken nuclear reactor, but that skill could turn out to be important for the evolution of smarter robots.

In Pomona, California, this week, 25 of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots will take part in a contest inspired by the challenge of stabilizing a nuclear reactor that’s leaking dangerous radioactive material. Teams from universities across the U.S., as well as Japan, China, and Europe, are bringing robots that will try to walk across piles of rubble, climb ladders, operate power tools, and drive buggies, among other chores. Each challenge is inspired by something that might have helped stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan after it was damaged by an earthquake in 2011.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Sam Altman, the head of the super successful and prominent Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator — where Airbnb, Dropbox, and others got their start — has an unconventional take on whether the tech industry is experiencing a bubble.

"What about this mega bubble that we're definitely in and that won't last forever?" Altman said.

The best part of being an entrepreneur is having the independence to make your own decisions, the flexibility for a better work/life balance, and personal satisfaction from driving change. But nobody said it would be easy. The road to business success is filled with challenges and frustrations that most aspiring entrepreneurs never even imagined.