How firms can maximise the impact – and profitability – of in-house management training.

Last year marked the 60th anniversary of the U.S.’s first corporate university, GE’s Crotonville. Although the paradigm is nothing new, only in recent years has it been seriously suggested that firms’ in-house training and development offerings could supplant traditional business education. Corporate universities (CUs), some say, are better suited than academia to deliver the targeted, strategy-focused programmes today’s executives need.

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

On January 20, Kansas City Southern, which runs railroads that facilitate Mexico–U.S. trade, said that changes in the geopolitical environment have made it difficult (pdf) to forecast results for the coming year. “Looking ahead to 2017, the company is aware of both economic and political uncertainty,” Kansas City Southern’s president and CEO Patrick J. Ottensmeyer said in a statement.

Indeed, uncertainty seems to be breaking out all over the place. Given the political earthquakes we’ve witnessed in the U.K. and the U.S., “you need to prepare yourself for several years of uncertainty,” my colleague David Lancefield warned businesses late last year.

Global recruitment and talent solutions company Hudson and SEEK, a global leader in online employment marketplaces and synergistic education businesses, will join Corporate Startup accelerator Slingshot to lead Australia’s first HR-tech Startup accelerator.

Human Capital is the first of its kind in Australia and will help progressive corporate leaders reinvent the human capital elements of their businesses by connecting them with the best disruptive HR/tech Startups.

CONNERSVILLE, Indiana—Ashley Gabbert and Dan Dark are both white Indiana residents in their early 30s, but their lives look nothing alike.

Gabbert, 32, lives in this town in one of the poorest counties in Indiana, where she works the night shift—10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.—for an automotive parts manufacturer. Her life now is a step up from the decade she spent working in fast food, which wasn’t “much of a career,” she told me at the local Walmart, where she was shopping for groceries. Working in fast food, she’d frequently encounter drug users as they pulled up to the drive-in window, needles alongside babies in the backseat of their cars. Like 80 percent of people in rural America, Gabbert doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

The U.S. copyright system has been a fundamental pillar of our innovation-based economy, and Congress should continue its efforts to maximize its benefits for consumers and creators alike. Unfortunately, the U.S. Copyright Office—the organization within the Library of Congress in charge of administering the Copyright Act—has been unable to keep up with the demands of the digital era where businesses and consumers expect swift and reliable access to information. ITIF welcomes the House Judiciary Committee’s recent policy proposal to modernize and restructure the Copyright Office to meet the needs of the 21st century digital economy. 

If one thing should be clear in the wake of the election, it is that President Trump is serious about growing U.S. manufacturing. But while he has dominated the economic news with his comments warning companies about offshoring jobs and his involvement in the deal that led Carrier to retain about 800 manufacturing jobs that were previously headed to Mexico, his words and actions have largely elicited derision from economic commentators and analysts. Their dismissive responses have ranged from “this is totally trivial” to “it will never work,” “picking winners only reduces economic welfare,” and “we shouldn’t care about manufacturing, anyway.” Emblematic of this widespread pundit opinion that the president’s pronouncements have been nonsense, or worse, business school professor Stephen Kobrin writes, “What happens when people realize they’ve been taken?” In other words, the consensus among elites is that the president is pulling a fast one on ignorant and gullible voters. 

The business model of research-based pharmaceutical companies is under significant pressure. Their return on R&D investment has dropped to its lowest levels in decades, and their public reputation in the United States and abroad is worse than ever.

One antidote to these problems is to transform “access to medicine” from a relentless activist slogan to a fully-fledged business strategy. By that I mean that pharma companies should develop innovative treatments for pervasive unmet medical needs; avoid corruption, collusion, and other unethical marketing practices; and make sure that their products reach as many patients around the world as possible.

Nestlé announced last week it is moving its US headquarters from California to Arlington, Virginia. We see similarities to other recent headquarters moves, yielding lessons for communities seeking to attract or retain these high profile activities.

Corporate strategy and talent are more important than incentives

Incentives are meaningful but they rarely drive the decision to make an expensive and disruptive corporate headquarters move.

Xconomy Boston —  Dean Kamen is, among other things, an inventor, entrepreneur, and leader in the technology and nonprofit fields.

The products he and his company, Manchester, NH-based DEKA Research & Development, have helped create over the years include the first portable insulin delivery system, an electronic wheelchair that can climb and descend stairs, a robotic prosthetic arm, and the Segway.

In 1995, some 40 million people all over the world were connected to the Internet. By 2000 that had grown to around 400 million, and by 2016 it reached 3.5 billion. That means almost half the global population is connected to a single technology.

That’s an extraordinary statistic and one that raises an interesting possibility. With so many people connected in this way, it should become possible to use this technology as a kind of demographic sensor that measures human behavior on an almost unimaginable scale.

A humpback whale may be a huge creature to the human eye, but they're still tough to spot from space.

Until recently, the necessary high-resolution satellite technology wasn't readily available, but researchers in Western Australia are beginning to use satellite imagery to check on the size of local populations.

The aim of the project is to keep tabs on Western Australia's humpback whale numbers, explained Curt Jenner, managing director of the Centre for Whale Research.

Optimism among small-business owners has soared as entrepreneurs hope that President-elect Donald Trump will enact policies aimed at helping them.

Trump has promised to ease regulation. While some on Main Street cheer the goal, changing anything substantial about regulation is easier said than done.

But there are other ways that a Trump administration can make life easier for small businesses. Consider this five-step plan his first 100 days agenda for Main Street.

Image: Official portrait of President Donald Trump - public domain.

Technology-driven trends will revolutionize how industry players respond to changing consumer behavior, develop partnerships, and drive transformational change.

Today’s economies are dramatically changing, triggered by development in emerging markets, the accelerated rise of new technologies, sustainability policies, and changing consumer preferences around ownership.

To complement their efforts to build innovative customer experiences, companies should consider ways to digitize back-office functions and optimize company performance.

Over the past few years, companies have taken many routes to digitizing the front ends of their businesses to create seamless customer interactions—for instance, building mobile apps that make it easier for customers to, say, order clothing or open a bank account.

More than 30,000 people are killed by cars in the U.S. each year, and people working on autonomous-driving technology at companies such as Google and Tesla say any technology that can significantly reduce that figure deserves serious attention.

But even if automated cars can be much safer than conventional ones, they will still be involved in accidents. No software can be perfect. And as self-driving technology matures, regulators and society as a whole will have to decide just how safe these vehicles need to be. Indeed, it has been argued that in some situations autonomous vehicles must be programmed to actively choose which people to harm.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

President Donald Trump wants to remake the Food and Drug Administration. And he happens to have a “fantastic person” in mind to do it, he said Tuesday — someone who will turn the agency into an industry-friendly shop that cranks out new cures on the double.

But does anyone really want a deregulated FDA? STAT canvassed biopharma insiders, physicians, Wall Street analysts, and FDA veterans. Their verdict: Trump’s plan sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

Every presidential transition creates uncertainty along with a certain amount of turmoil, especially when a new political party comes to power.  In this eBook, the staff at Government Executive offers insight into what managers can expect over the next few months, and how some of Trump's proposals on everything from personnel changes, the regulatory process, outsourcing and more could play out.

Collaboration is crumpling under the weight of our expectations. What should be a messy back-and-forth process far too often falls victim to our desire to keep things harmonious and efficient. Collaboration’s promise of greater innovation and better risk mitigation can go unfulfilled because of cultural norms that say everyone should be in agreement, be supportive, and smile all the time. The common version of collaboration is desperately in need of a little more conflict.

In the past election cycle, the term “sanctuary cities” was used quite a bit, often without defining it or providing an objective view of the advantages or disadvantages of adopting these policies. Cities considering adopting these policies should consider both their values and the economic costs or benefits of implementing sanctuary policies and what is entailed in enforcing immigration policy on a local level.

What's this? Oh nothing, just some images that make it look as though jellyfish are plotting an overthrow of the human race.

The Sunshine Coast in Australia, specifically, is being blighted with a huge number of beached, blobby jellyfish invaders. 

Facebook user Charlotte Lawson captured some creepy shots of the mass beaching that look a little like an alien takeover.

Image: http://mashable.com