Want to improve your leadership skills? Well, you can start by talking less and listening more. While your oratory skills may impress some, your ability to listen will impress even more. Great leaders understand the importance of surrendering the floor. Unfortunately, most leaders choose to dominate the conversation with rhetoric and fail to engage in proper communication, which requires listening.

Think about it: the smartest guy in the room is almost never the one doing all of the talking. Rather, it’s the person who engages by asking a few relevant questions and then actively listens to what others have to say. While action lies at the core of leadership, leaders who act without listening and understanding rarely achieve their desired outcomes.

Newswise — BALTIMORE, MD (April 26, 2017) – The Johns Hopkins University announced today the opening of its state-of-the-art innovation hub, FastForward 1812. The 23,000-square-foot space near Johns Hopkins’ flagship hospital and schools of medicine, public health and nursing provides Baltimore’s burgeoning innovation ecosystem and area startups sought-after office, co-working and wet lab space to accommodate a variety of startups.

FastForward 1812 features 8,000 square feet of office, co-working and meeting space and 15,000 square feet of lab space, including private biosafety level 2 (BSL2) wet labs and BSL2 wet lab benches that can accommodate a broad range of biological and chemical work. The innovation hub currently houses 19 startups developing an array of innovations, including telemedicine platforms, treatments for type 2 diabetes and cell therapies for oncology indications.

Image: Credit: Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures The FastForward 1812 innovation hub provides 23,000 square feet of office, co-working, meeting and wet lab space in East Baltimore. 

Entrepreneurs Arthur Camara and Benny Giang would love to get into Y Combinator, but even if they got through the exclusive Silicon Valley startup accelerator’s competitive application process, they’d still have one big problem: they live in Vancouver, Canada, which is not exactly a short commute to Mountain View, California.

Over the past month, though, they’ve been getting a taste of Y Combinator life from home. Since early April, Y Combinator has been running a free, 10-week online course called Startup School: it’s meant to replicate a bit of the accelerator experience by combining online lectures from tech-world luminaries about starting a company with online mentoring from past Y Combinator participants and support from fellow Startup School students.

A billion-dollar fund has been launched to groom high-growth companies to take on the world while using Singapore as a regional base. The initiative was one of several announced by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (Ipos) yesterday, as part of efforts to drive innovation and help more companies turn their intellectual property (IP) into assets.

These moves come after the Committee on the Future Economy recommended in its report in February that Singapore tap IP as a key driver of economic growth.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is looking for bold ideas and "uncommon solutions" to entrepreneurship barriers. And it's ready to award as much as $7 million in grants to help organizations level the playing field for entrepreneurs.

Although there's a resurgence of business activity in the U.S., entrepreneurship has remained in a long decline, Philip Gaskin, director of entrepreneurship communities for the foundation, told the Kansas City Business Journal.

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Patrick Bet-David explains the five different levels of entrepreneurship, from having an interest in something to becoming a mogul. Which level best describes your current status, and what is the ideal end goal for you? Do you want to make your side hustle into a full-time business, or would you prefer for it to be a relaxing break from work?

More importantly, how do you take your passion, hobby or profession to the next level?

Image: https://www.entrepreneur.com - From Video

Engage in meaningful conversation surrounding this year's theme, Stronger Economies through Licensing: Is IP Making or Breaking Your Deals? You will benefit from this noteworthy event by networking with your colleagues in the Nation's Capital. Take advantage of the educational line-up ranging from Life Science Funding and Industry Research Partnerships to Building Brands and Maximizing Value and more. We invite you to register, join us, and plan on a dynamic week full of informative discussions about the ever-changing IP landscape.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Jack Ma said society should prepare for decades of pain as the internet disrupts the economy.

The world must change education systems and establish how to work with robots to help soften the blow caused by automation and the internet economy, Ma said in a speech to an entrepreneurship conference in Zhengzhou, China.

Image: World Economic Forum at en.wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)), via Wikimedia Commons 

Altruism perfectly fits in with inclusive prosperity. Open innovation (OI)-driven growth with knowledge, competencies, and skills freely exchanged across cultural groups is the zeitgeist of the 21st century, characterized as it is by its emphasis on the widest possible access to new knowledge and resources, producing beneficial effects in new entrepreneurial ventures. Emerging from this is a hybrid culture reflecting various strands of OI, in which altruism can be included together with open experimenting that can be unconventional.

Kickstarter made it easy to support an aspiring entrepreneur. Now Americans can take it one step further: Don’t just support an entrepreneur, invest in them. In May of 2016, Title III of the JOBS Act went into effect, making it legal for anyone to invest in a private company, opening up investing in willing startups to any American. Now, you don’t need a million dollars to join a fundraising round, you can help a company you believe in–and get a small ownership stake–for just $500.

The secrets of fonts–and the subtle differences between them that can make or break a project–have long belonged to type designers. But one designer at Ideo recently decided to use machine learning algorithms to visualize the nuanced relationships between hundreds of fonts.

The tool, called Font Map, is an interactive that lays out the letter “A” from more than 750 typefaces from Google Fonts. Clumps of black letters populate the light gray backdrop of the map, which shows how the typefaces are related visually.

Image: https://www.fastcodesign.com 

Artificial intelligence is disturbing the workforce, and will continue to do so as its capabilities increase. Inevitably, “artificial intelligence will soon be able to do the administrative tasks that consume much of managers’ time faster, better, and at a lower cost.” But, when it comes to more complex and creative tasks such as innovation, the question still remains whether AI can do the job better than humans.

Plans for the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor are nothing if not ambitious. Eight new industrial “smart” cities will link New Delhi, India’s sprawling capital, with Mumbai, its premier business and financial center nearly 1,500 kilometers (about 900 miles) to the south — and that’s just in Phase One of four scheduled development stages. The mammoth endeavor, which the sponsoring state governments hope to complete in 2040 at a projected cost of US$100 billion, promises state-of-the-art technology, transportation, and infrastructure, all designed with environmental sustainability in mind. The largest of the satellite cities, Dholera, is expected to house 2 million inhabitants and employ 800,000 people by the time it’s completed.

Australia’s first sharing economy accelerator, The Sharing Hub, was recently opened by government official Matt Kean, Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation, to drive this rapidly growing sector to boost jobs across Australia.

The hub, which is based in Pyrmont, NSW, is a vibrant community of Australia’s leading sharing economy startups housed under one roof, which will be working with government and policy makers to share key insights about the industry, which is helping to make Sydney a hotspot for innovation in the sector.

Image: http://anthillonline.com 

Organizers of Saturday’s March for Science hailed the global event as a success — but they didn’t stop to celebrate for long.

Here in the nation’s capital, the site of the weekend’s main march, organizers met on Sunday with partnering organizations at the Carnegie Institution for Science to discuss their next steps for the effort. The meeting was closed to the public, but attendees said that participants were resolved to keep the momentum up. And though an exact plan hasn’t been formulated, there’s no shortage of ideas for what form the movement could take.

Image: Julia Schmalz for The Chronicle - Thousands of scientists and their supporters gathered for rallies on Saturday in Washington and other cities around the globe. Organizers of those events now are seeking to capitalize on the enthusiasm of participants, and have no shortage of ideas for the future of science advocacy. 

First, the bad news: GDP is slowing all over the world because productivity has been in decline for two decades. The result has been higher unemployment (especially among young people) and economists talking about 20 more years of slow growth. According to new numbers from Oxfam, just eight people are as rich as half the globe. In addition to this unprecedented inequality, we face climate change that’s taken us into the sixth extinction wave in the history of the planet, and the last time that happened was 65 million years ago. To turn things around before it’s too late, we need a plan that’s both compelling and doable

Syracuse, N.Y. -- New York's 10 regional economic development councils will compete for more than $800 million in state economic development aid in the latest round of an initiative launched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo six years ago.

The application process for a piece of the $800 million will begin Monday, May 1. Businesses, municipalities, not-for-profits and members of the public can begin applying through a single application for assistance from dozens of state programs for projects that create jobs and help revitalize communities.

Growing up, I was unbeatable at H-O-R-S-E, the basketball game kids play when there’s just a few of them around and only one hoop on hand. Basically, everyone gets a chance to skin a basket from a certain spot or in a certain way, then each subsequent player’s got to follow suit. I’d invite friends to come play in my driveway after school. When the game got close, I’d pretend to have a new idea: “Hey — I wonder if I can make a shot from way back on the grass off one bounce? Ha! Wouldn’t that be crazy?!” I’d really sell it.

With US$500 million at its disposal, the Global Health Sciences Venture Fund is the largest entity in Canada investing in life sciences firms.

But Quark Venture CEO Karimah Es Sabar is quick to note this is a “transoceanic” fund intent on making its mark across the globe even if it calls Vancouver home.

The fund, backed by Quark Venture and Chinese investment bank GF Securities Ltd., has offices sprinkled across North America and Asia.

Image: https://www.biv.com 

If there’s one topic that gets entrepreneurs going, it’s the difference between those talking-the-talk about entrepreneurship and those who are walking-the-walk.

Rightfully so. The people who have gone years without taking a night off -- let alone a vacation -- in the name of building a successful company, are not amused when “thought leaders” who have barely built anything themselves are giving advice.