I CAN attest that it’s not just our inner city suburbs that are crawling with budding entrepreneurs and the new tech wunderkind.

Who knew?

I certainly didn’t, but making the move to Wagga Wagga I have seen first-hand that genuine innovation is alive and thriving in our regions.

As one of the newest members of Wagga Wagga’s business community, it is easy to see the drive for innovation and creating solutions through technology that will overcome challenges and create opportunities.

Market research is a crucial part of any business plan, which is why it is widely utilized by startups and early stage businesses. While existing, established businesses may not traditionally look to market research to influence their decisions, second-stage companies facing difficulties while trying to grow can benefit greatly from accessing strategic research.

Something about March brings out all the best rivalries . . . and we’re not talking about the basketball teams for Duke and North Carolina. No, we mean business rivals like Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey or even Mr. Monopoly vs. Scrooge McDuck.

While the NCAA is in the process of crowning a national champion, we want to know who you think is the world's greatest entrepreneur.

We increasingly see the world and much of its innovation through the lens of cities not countries, but there is little clarity around where the true innovation hotspots of today, let alone tomorrow, are to be found. While there is general agreement around which are the most innovative countries, the lack of consensus around the criteria used to identify an innovative city has produced multiple views and varied answers. If we want to understand more about the approaches that are the most effective in leading locations, we must decide on the best way to assess which cities are the most innovative.

Remember back when “VUCA” (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) only really applied to companies? Those were the days, huh? Lately, with geopolitical discord abroad, political tensions here at home in the U.S., and all manner of policy shifts that could impact U.S. businesses, plenty of entrepreneurs may be wishing for steadier leadership. I know I am.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your job search started and stopped with the company you’re already interning for? Sometimes, it happens. If there’s a role available, and the position and company are a good fit, you could find yourself sitting behind the same desk you’re at now after graduation.

But while the internship-to-job track is no guarantee, those hours spent getting professional experience can help you find gainful employment.

There has been a lot written about the impact of next-generation transportation technologies over the past year. From concerns over driverless trucks during the election to debates over regulation and policies, this booming growth area of technology is becoming unstoppable.

We recently sat down with Elliot Katz of DLA Piper, an attorney in the firm’s Connected and Self-Driving Car practice, to talk about the impact of this new technology. Elliot is also a mentor in the new transportation program at Comet Labs, a VC fund and startup lab focused on AI and robotics

THE WOODLANDS, Texas—More than a decade after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to officially reclassify Pluto as a “dwarf planet,” scientists and the public are still hotly debating the decision. Some staunch supporters of Pluto’s full-fledged planethood are renewing calls for the IAU to reverse Pluto’s demotion. Their opponents insist the decision should stand.

Image: Composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), as viewed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Breakthrough products now emerge in places where people working in different sectors meet and chance encounters spark creative ideas. "Eureka" moments are nurtured in the heart of cities. Find out what these trends mean for Canada in our new white paper.

Although the notion that entrepreneurship benefits society has attained broad currency in Latin America and elsewhere, confusion reigns: Latin America’s leaders variously promote entrepreneurship as “self-employment”, and regularly talk of “start-ups”, “disruptive business”, “small businesses” and “micro-enterprises”. No wonder a recent World Bank article on Latin America bemoans that “entrepreneurs’ lack of innovation curbs creation of quality jobs”. Even respected institutions like the World Bank confuse small business, innovation and growth.

Aging can seem like a scary prospect, but a wealth of scientific studies have found that youth isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are plenty of cases in which human beings peak well into middle and old age.

Teenagers, for instance, may have vitality on their side, but older people are generally more psychologically stable. And so it goes with several phenomena people experience as they age.

America has long led the world in innovation and technological advancement.  American ingenuity has launched industries, created jobs, and improved quality of life at home and abroad.  To ensure that America remains the global innovation leader, I hereby direct the Senior Advisor to the President to head an office in the White House dedicated to American innovation.  This office will bring together the best ideas from Government, the private sector, and other thought leaders to ensure that America is ready to solve today's most intractable problems, and is positioned to meet tomorrow's challenges and opportunities.  The office will focus on implementing policies and scaling proven private-sector models to spur job creation and innovation.

ReadWrite sat down recently with Robinson Hernandez, Executive Director of the Urban Tech Hub at Grand Central Tech — an innovative workspace dedicated to smart cities technologies — to get his thoughts on the role of startups in government and how they can successfully navigate working with the public sector.

ReadWrite: Tell us about yourself, your background, and your current role at Grand Central Tech (GCT).

Millions of hearts around the world beat with the help of a pacemaker. Candles are lit with the help of safety matches. Ball bearings make our machines work smoothly, whilst we instantly recognise Samuelson's iconic Coke bottle design. We depend on Bluetooth to connect our devices, and innumerable lives have been saved with the help of the three-point seatbelt.

Elon Musk has launched a company dedicated to linking human brains with computers, The Wall Street Journal's Rolfe Winkler reported Monday.

Internal sources told The Journal that the company, called Neuralink, was developing "neural lace" technology that would allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface. Neuralink was registered as a medical-research company in California in July.

After your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic who's spent years under the hood. When you build a home, you choose an architect who's constructed entire subdivisions. But what about when it comes to venture capital? When you hand a VC money to invest, don't you want him to have been in the business for decades?

Surprisingly, no. In fact, when the Kauffman Foundation analyzed its own venture portfolio in 2012, its 2006-2010 vintage funds — its newest class — performed better than the 2001-2005 or 1996-2000 vintages. Over 38% of its youngest funds beat public markets by 3% or more, compared to just 9.5% of the 2001-2005 crop and 16.6% of the 1996-2000 group.

There's always a lot of discussion around pros and cons of state-sponsored venture capital funds. A recent Kauffman Foundation white paper even postulates that states should avoid state VC funds.

The suggestion is that state-sponsored funds don't match private VC funds when it comes to return on investment, aren't up to the challenge of selecting and supporting winning new companies, and therefore, don't have much of an impact on a state's entrepreneurial growth.

Fundraising is brutal. Actually, according to Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame, “Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want.” More startups may fail for that reason, but a close second is the difficulty of raising money.

A while back, I outlined “10 Tried-And-True Strategies For Funding New Ventures” for startups, listing angel investors as alternative six. I still get a lot of questions on these mysterious and often invisible investors, so here is another attempt to bring them out of the ether.

Last week on our tour through elements the Houston tech startup scene needs to grow, we covered access to capital. Today, let's take a closer look at another essential ingredient: Institutions that host and nurture startups, like the rocks that anchor shellfish in turbulent seas.

"Entrepreneurship is a very lonely activity," says Hesam Panahi, a professor of entrepreneurship at Rice University. "And you need to be around that energy and that buzz."

When I was a kid, my parents told me “you should never talk to strangers.” While this was a common refrain among parents worried about the safety of their kids, it is a very bad life philosophy to learn, particularly if you want to become an entrepreneur or investor in start-ups. Networking and being able to talk to people you don’t know is one of the most valuable skills you can have in the world of entrepreneurship. Social psychologists and sociologists have demonstrated repeatedly the power of networking and social interaction in a variety of settings from selling products to raising money to managing employees.