THE other week I was working in my garage office when my 14-year-old daughter, Olivia, came in to tell me about Charles Darwin. Did I know that he discovered the theory of evolution after studying finches on the Galápagos Islands? I was steeped in what felt like the 37th draft of my new book, which is on the development of scientific ideas, and she was proud to contribute this tidbit of history that she had just learned in class.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com

What does is take to be as innovative as legends like Steve Jobs or Larry Page?

According to Hal Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, "all of us were quite good at (innovation) when we were 4 years old." The problem is, without cultivation, these skills are often lost by adulthood.

 

More than 30 local innovators who developing some of the world's most impactful and forward-looking technologies will be celebrated Wednesday at a first-of-its-kind event in Wilmington.

The 2015 Top Technology Trends reception in the newly renovated Capital One lobby and cafeteria will combine networking opportunities with interactive demonstrations of the products and services being created by some of the newest Delaware firms, as well as familiar tech leaders like DuPont, Nemours and the University of Delaware.

Image: http://www.delawareonline.com

“After board dinners, we inevitably sit around and talk about our kids and their careers,” Dave Calhoun recently told me. “Frankly, we’re often at a loss with how to help them.” If someone with Calhoun’s experience has trouble with this – he’s chairman of Nielsen’s board, sits on boards of Boeing and Caterpillar, and is on the management committee at Blackstone – I know he can’t be alone.

Fostering a workplace environment that’s conducive to creativity is a top priority for many companies—and it’s no surprise why. The companies dubbed most creative actually outperform their counterparts in revenue growth and market share, and they’re 50% more likely to be market leaders.

Some companies attempt to inspire bursts of creativity using crazy perks (for example, Google regularly invites famous people like Lady Gaga to the office for lectures), but there’s an often-overlooked strategy for fueling long-term inspiration: creative discomfort.

Human beings have unique voices — from the deep, resonating bass of James Earl Jones to the raspy melodies sung by Broadway star Carol Channing — and we routinely recognize individuals based solely on the way they sound, for example over the telephone, on a music CD or in an animated film. The same theory that explains individual differences in human speech has recently been applied to other members of the animal kingdom, including dogs and deer. Now researchers from Syracuse University in New York are working to understand whether individually distinctive vocal characteristics of North Atlantic right whales could be used to identify and track individuals — a potentially useful tool for studying an endangered species that spends much of its life hidden under the water.

Neat rows of trees line the road cutting through the center of the Iowa State University Research Park. Large lawns and parking lots surround single-story office buildings. Employees come and go in their cars, leaving campus to run errands or grab lunch.

It's the picture-perfect model of the suburban office park — a model that a growing number of research institutions are trying to change.

Image: Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register

For decades, the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s Economic and Employment Projections have been the bellwether for predicting what the hottest jobs up to a decade out would be. But with the rapid pace of technological change disrupting industries faster than ever before (think: robotics, 3-D printing, the sharing economy), it’s becoming obvious to many futurists that past trends may no longer be a reliable indicator of future job prospects.

The college experience has been roughly the same for the last 100 years: You pick a major, find a school, buy the books, attend the lectures, write the papers, take the tests, get the grades, graduate, work to pay off debt.

For years, college was the best pathway to a job. But as costs continue to rise and the percentage of graduates finding work falls, students are beginning to wonder: What’s the real value of a college education?

Bengaluru: Wipro Ltd will open a technology innovation centre in Mountain View, California, by the end of December as it seeks to build products on automation and artificial intelligence technologies in partnership with innovative start-ups nested in the Bay Area, thereby strengthening its offerings to clients when competing for large outsourcing orders.

Wipro’s new facility—the firm’s first outside its headquarters in Bengaluru—will have to compete with global software giants, including Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. for talent and partnerships with start-ups, and comes after local rival Infosys Ltd decided to shut its research and development wing and merge it with other business units within the company earlier this year.

How many types of cells are there in the human body? Textbooks say a couple of hundred. But the true number is undoubtedly far larger.

Piece by piece, a new, more detailed catalogue of cell types is emerging from labs like that of Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which are applying recent advances in single-cell genomics to study individual cells at a speed and scale previously unthinkable.

“The last five years have seen a sea change in how research is done,” said Professor John Wood, secretary general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, or ACU. Major trends include clustering, international engagement and a move towards ‘open science for open innovation’.

Wood has been an advisor to the European Commission on research for many years, and said a key current activity was looking at the ways international research will change. “Funding streams in the next two or three years will start to reflect that,” he said.

As consumers we are told that we live in a world of innovation. New technology is released everyday, the next generation iPhone is always just around the corner and each new device that enters the market is packed with the latest ground-breaking innovative technology. Today ‘innovation’ is the buzzword that has us all, consumers and businesses alike, reaching for our wallets. Today’s products will be archaic by Christmas, we accept this as an inevitable outcome of a non-stop innovation process. But how true is this and, for that matter, what does innovation truly mean?

Europe’s sluggish economic growth of recent years has been reflected in some surveys about entrepreneurship. The percentages of adults engaged in early-staged entrepreneurial activity, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Model, ranged (as of 2010) from 4.2% in Germany to 5.8% in France—compared with 7.6% of Americans, 14% of Chinese, and 17% of Brazilians. A year later, an EY report found European entrepreneurs less confident about their countries as places for startups compared with adults surveyed in the U.S., Brazil, or Canada.

HOW DO SOME OF THE TOP HEALTH IT EXECUTIVES IN THE FIELD REMAIN FOCUSED AND SUCCESSFUL?

Technology is taking center stage in key hospital initiatives. This focus on technology as an integral part of the overall care delivery system creates a new level of demand on high-level IT experts with increasing workloads and more complex challenges.

In this eBrief we explore how some of the top healthcare IT leaders are successfully navigating this changing landscape.

In the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities, he writes:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”

The two cities he was referring to were London and Paris during the turmoil of the French Revolution. For the oppressed citizens of 18th Century France, the revolution’s proclamation of the rights of man was a “spring of hope.”

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

Recommendations, either from our colleagues, friends, family and even strangers plays a crucial role in the decisions that we make on a daily basis. This is also happening online where we look for recommendations or reviews within our social circles before trying out a new product, service, restaurant or even the next book we are going to read. It’s natural and human as we are more likely to trust a recommendation from a real person than from someone hiding behind a brand or a logo we cannot interact with.

During my HR career, it's been difficult to ignore the uptick in managers complaining about the still (relatively new) challenge of managing Millennials, a generation often perceived as markedly independent and stubborn. If you Google "managing Millennials," you'll find a slew of tips for handling this "difficult breed" of employees. YouTube has a ton of hyperbolic videos. While many are tongue-in-cheek, they speak to the miscommunications that can occur across a multi-generational workforce.

With all the hype on what successful people do in the first few hours of their days, it's no wonder that we're associating mornings more and more with productivity. (Hint: A simple search of "morning productivity" on Google will swamp you with more than enough results.)

After all, if there are people out there being extremely efficient before breakfast, squeezing in 11 to-dos before going to work, and, dare I say, getting 90% of their tasks done before noon, surely we can be just as productive, right?

Sharks are the natural-born rulers of the ocean, so as the inferior species, humans sometimes need a helping hand to keep out of their way.

First the facts: Shark attacks are rare. In Australia in 2014, there were only 11 reported cases of unprovoked shark attack according to data collected by the Australian Shark Attack File.