For many American millennials, buying a new home in a city like Los Angeles or Washington DC can seem like a pipe dream. 

According to a recent survey by Apartment List, 80% of millennials — defined as those born between 1980 and 1995 — say they want to buy a home, but most have less than $1,000 saved a for a down payment. 

Meanwhile, buying a house in America's largest cities is more expensive now than ever. A severe housing shortage in LA, for example, has led over 400,000 households to spend more than half their income on housing.

Image: A rendering of a Fundrise development. Fundrise

After 11 years developing and growing commercialization, investment, and business acceleration programs at Philadelphia’s University City Science Center, Christopher Laing, MRCVS, Ph.D. has been tapped to lead the effort to establish a new healthcare-focused innovation zone in Austin, Texas. Dr. Laing will become the first Executive Director at the newly formed Capital City Innovation effective September 1, 2017. He has served as the Vice President, Science & Technology at the Science Center since 2010.

Image: http://www.prweb.com

Business school and formal education can be great for some people. But, whether you dropped out of high school or graduated from Harvard Business School, there are some things you just can't learn in a classroom.

As Entrepreneur Network partner Patrick Bet-David says, there are some lessons that can't be taught -- they can only be caught through experience. Some skills can only be practiced, not preached about.

Collaboration is a key theme in the success of any innovation ecosystem. Collaboration across industry, university and government all contribute to the development and prosperity of a city, region or nation. But cross border-collaboration between hubs is also important, and it was very evident in the recent London Tech Week event that took place in London, UK.

During this week, I met with government representatives and trade delegations from the USA, Brazil, India, China, Turkey, Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay, Canada, Middle East and North Africa, South Africa, Singapore and many more. There was certainly plenty of talk of collaboration, partnerships and business between all.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

On a recent visit to a former client’s workplace I noticed a poster entitled “I’m Not Changing!” I’d seen it elsewhere, and I’m sure you’ve seen it as well, or something like it. This time it gave me pause, perhaps because we’re now starting the second half of the year, and calendar milestones tend to trigger the “fresh start” effect. We stop, take a breath, reflect, and start anew.

American leadership in technology innovation and economic competitiveness is at risk if U.S. policymakers don’t take crucial steps to protect the country’s digital future. The country that gave the world the internet and the very concept of the disruptive startup could find its role in the global innovation economy slipping from reigning incumbent to a disrupted has-been.

Turning a startup dream into a full-fledged business is no walk in the park. It takes an amazing product-market fit, a solid team and the kind of charisma that can move mountains. Oh, and luck never hurts either.

Better understanding the unique formula that helps companies grow is at the heart of Masters of Scale, a podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and partner at Greylock. In each episode, Hoffman chats with big-name leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Brian Chesky to explore what went right -- and wrong -- with their companies.

In the past few years we organized several successful hackathons for various Fortune500 companies. Collected from our experience, we have the golden rules and no-goes for you to organize a fruitful event, resulting in implementable projects and an inspired team.

When you hear "hackathon", what do you imagine?

Image: https://blog.be-novative.com 

The above chart actually understates how lousy official US productivity numbers have been in recent years. Since the Great Recession, productivity has pretty much flatlined, up just 0.5% annually.

But how do you sync those numbers with what’s been happening in Silicon Valley? One theory is that we’ve been mismeasuring the digital economy and thus overall productivity and economic growth. I’ve written much about the version of this argument coming from Goldman Sachs. Yet respected new research from both the San Francisco Fed and the University of Chicago make a strong case that mismeasurement cannot explain the productivity slowdown.

Image: https://www.aei.org 

This week, Garry Kasparov, former Russian chess champion and perennial critic of Vladimir Putin, tweeted about what autocrats do when caught: “1: Deny, lie, slander accusers. 2: Say it was a misunderstanding. 3. Boast & say ‘What are you going to do about it?’” The day after that tweet, Donald Trump stood on a dais in Paris beside the French president and said of his son’s now-confirmed willingness to receive campaign help for his father from Russia: “I think it’s a meeting that most people in politics probably would have taken.”

Leaders of some of the world’s biggest organizations share which books will keep them occupied in the weeks ahead.

Whether you’re heading to a Northern-hemisphere beach or hunkering down for a Southern-hemisphere winter, take inspiration from this eclectic and inspiring mix of fiction and nonfiction books, dog-eared and new. Find picks from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, the Dow Chemical Company’s Andrew Liveris, Maria Ramos of Barclays Africa Group, and General Sir Nick Carter, head of the British Army, among others.

As its economy bounced back from the Great Recession, California emerged as a progressive role model, with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman arguing that the state’s “success” was proof of the superiority of a high tax, high regulation economy. Some have even embraced the notion that California should secede to form its own more perfect union.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com 

The most successful large organizations never forget their startup roots. Instead, they find ways to preserve their entrepreneurial mindset, even in the face of growing scale and maturity. I’m honored to work for Comcast, which is such a company, surrounded by leaders who are driven by a collective passion to create innovative experiences that change customers’ relationship with technology.

There are a handful of oft-cited, number-based theories around the ideal size of well-functioning collectives. Among them include:

The Dunbar Number named after a British anthropologist who proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable social relationships, which represents the cognitive limit given the average human’s brain size.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would see its budget rise by US$1.1 billion in 2018, to $35.2 billion, under a spending proposal released on 12 July by lawmakers in the House of Representatives.

The legislation explicitly rejects a plan by the administration of President Donald Trump to cut the NIH’s budget by 18% in 2018. The president’s proposal would achieve that largely by reducing how much the agency pays to reimburse its grant recipients’ institutions for “indirect costs” — expenses such as administration and facilities maintenance. Instead, the House bill includes a provision that directs the NIH to compensate institutions for those expenses, although the materials released today do not include full details of the requirements.

NASA runs a child-slave colony on Mars! Photos taken by a Chinese orbiter reveal an alien settlement on the moon! Shape-shifting reptilian extraterrestrials that can control human minds are running the U.S. government! What drives the astonishing popularity of such stories? Are we a particularly gullible species? Perhaps not—maybe we’re just overwhelmed. A bare-bones model of how news spreads on social media, published in June in Nature Human Behavior, indicates that just about anything can go viral. Even in a perfect world, where everyone wants to share real news and is capable of evaluating the veracity of every claim, some fake news would still reach thousands (or even millions) of people, simply because of information overload.

I was watching a private-equity exec speak, but it wasn’t easy—imagine following a ping-pong ball with your eyes as it bounced back and forth for three minutes straight.

When he finally stopped, I asked him, “Why do you pace?”

“Pacing helps me control my anxiety,” he said. “And it really works! As long as I keep moving, I feel good.”

At first glance, the organization chart for the maker of True Story, a card game and mobile app in which players trade stories from their daily lives, resembled that of any company. There was a content division to churn out copy for game cards; graphic designers to devise the logo and the packaging; developers to build the mobile app and the website. There was even a play-testing division to catch potential hiccups.

Image: Minh Uong/The New York Times

After nearly a decade of research on the business uses of social technologies, executives say these tools are more integrated into their organizations’ work than ever before—and that the most sophisticated of these tools, message-based platforms, are gaining traction. At the companies where messaging platforms have taken hold, respondents to the latest McKinsey Global Survey on social tools report that their fellow employees rely more often on social methods of communication than on traditional methods in their work.

As a journalist who frequently reviews and edits submissions, I often find myself switching between writing and reading follow-up emails. And if there’s anything that being on the sending and receiving end of these have taught me, it’s that many of the tactics people use aren’t very effective (and are really annoying at best).

As a sender, I’ve learned that it’s best to work from the assumption that whoever I’m writing to probably has more pressing matters to attend to than answer my emails.