Factories play a central role in President Trump’s parade of American horrors. In his telling, globalization has left our factories “shuttered,” “rusted-out” and “scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

Here’s what you might call an alternative fact: American factories still make a lot of stuff. In 2016, the United States hit a manufacturing record, producing more goods than ever. But you don’t hear much gloating about this because manufacturers made all this stuff without a lot of people. Thanks to automation, we now make 85 percent more goods than we did in 1987, but with only two-thirds the number of workers.

Grown to one of the largest in the country, the Be Your Own Boss Bowl Competition started in 1997 at Temple University as the “Business Plan Competition.” The name changed to “Be Your Own Boss Bowl” in 2007, the year of the 10th Anniversary of the competition.

Developed by the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute, this innovative business plan competition encourages Temple students, alumni, faculty and staff to discover all aspects of entrepreneurship, networking and how to write strategic business plans.

Image: http://www.fox.temple.edu 

On 12 January 2016, nearly half a century after humans first set foot on the lunar surface, a president and a billionaire each announced a new moonshot. In Washington DC, US President Barack Obama described the establishment of a government-led Cancer Moonshot to accelerate oncology research. Across the country at a press conference in California, billionaire entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong announced Cancer MoonShot 2020, an industry–academia collaboration.

Amy Chang is just one of those people. You know the kind. You meet them in passing at an event and immediately feel like you’ve known them for years. They surprise you with kindness and generosity upfront. They seem to have some secret that lets them to talk to anyone with an openness and humor that makes them magnetic.

Knowledge@Wharton: Please explain the premise behind your book.

Edward Hess: We human beings are going to be in a frantic footrace with smart machines to stay relevant. (What) we’re going to have to do well are those things which are uniquely human, such as our ability to create, innovate and relate at the highest emotional levels with other humans. In order to do that, we have to basically overcome our humanness. That’s the counter-intuitive part of this. We can’t stay relevant by trying to outthink Watson. Watson can process, remember, and recall much more information than us.

Transitioning to the future of work and the workplace Embracing digital culture, tools, and approaches A Deloitte survey (sponsored by Facebook) asked C-suite executives for their perspectives on the future of work. Their responses reveal six themes about the future workplace—and six lessons to help leaders ease the transition.

Consumers want more variety than ever before. This means product design needs to be rethought to avoid multiple and costly production lines.

In any supermarket or retail store these days, the amount of product variety is tremendous, nearly overwhelming. What is the cost of our need for choice and how can it be mastered?

In our paper, The Impact of Product Variety on Logistics Performance, the late Professor Xavier de Groote and I found when a production line must incur non-negligible set-up time switching from one product to another for a given amount of products, the lead time to bring the product to market increases significantly, adding to costs and making products less profitable.

A new study of 177 publicly-listed biotechs found just 10.9 percent of board seats are occupied by women. Perhaps more shocking, 98 percent of the companies had a male chairman of the board of directors, not a chairwoman.

The report, titled ‘A Public Reality for Women in Biotech Boardrooms,’ was conducted by the executive recruitment firm Liftstream. It looked at biotech companies that underwent an initial public offering (IPO) between 2012-2015.

More than a year after Facebook CEO and Cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician  Dr. Priscilla Chan, set up a philanthropy to support healthcare, social justice and other issues, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has acquired Toronto-Canada-based startup, Meta. The goal of the business is to harness artificial intelligence to improve the speed at which scientists and clinicians gain access to research relevant to them.

 Image: Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan - http://medcitynews.com

Jan. 23 is National Handwriting Day, invented by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association in 1977 and pegged to John Hancock's birthday. On this day, Big Pen encourages you to "use a pen or a pencil to rekindle that creative feeling."

The following interactive tests your handwriting by challenging you to draw cursive letters on the screen and comparing them to the standard version that was taught in elementary schools for decades. Remember, lowercase letters sometimes dip below the bottom of the composition lines, while uppercase letters (and a few lowercase ones) go above the dotted middle line, like so:

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—Craving some silence? Head (quietly) toward the blue regions on the map above. Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day

Image: http://www.sciencemag.org

TechCrunch is pleased to offer Microsoft Accelerator’s London Demo Day today at 4:00 p.m. GMT, 8:00 a.m. PST.

The Microsoft Accelerator is a six-month program aimed at helping entrepreneurs scale to global markets. There are seven accelerators located around the world, from Seattle to Beijing, from London to Tel-Aviv. The Microsoft Accelerator in London has a diverse mix of companies across various industries in batch 6.

At the start of 2016 Google announced that it had discovered the secret ingredients for the perfect team. After years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the drivers of effective team performance are the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members. Google’s recipe of being nice and joining in makes perfect sense (and is hardly counterintuitive).

In 2016, the Defense Office of Hearing and Appeals held 1,142 security clearance appeals hearings. They made decisions on security clearance eligibility, placement into public trust positions and Common Access Card denials. If you are denied a security clearance or your security clearance is revoked due to adverse information that has been discovered or self-reported, you have the right to appeal the decision before DOHA. A study of the cases and their outcomes offers a good chance to see the trends in security clearance denials, and what issues are likely to cause issues in your own background investigation.

EVERY year about 120,000 organs, mostly kidneys, are transplanted from one human being to another. Sometimes the donor is a living volunteer. Usually, though, he or she is the victim of an accident, stroke, heart attack or similar sudden event that has terminated the life of an otherwise healthy individual. But a lack of suitable donors, particularly as cars get safer and first-aid becomes more effective, means the supply of such organs is limited. Many people therefore die waiting for a transplant. That has led researchers to study the question of how to build organs from scratch.

Image: http://www.economist.com

The issue of internet of things (IoT) botnets is a security issue that has already surfaced in 2016, and will likely only grow in severity as different actors in the cyber realm leverage the technology for their own purposes. While, at this point, IoT botnets have primarily been used by low-level actors for the purpose demonstrating their capabilities or testing out the tool, it is only a matter of time before cybercriminals and hacktivist groups adopt the tactic to carry out politically or financially motivated large-scale attacks.

Image: http://www.americansecurityproject.org

Making accurate predictions based on historical precedent is flawed, but thinking in scenarios reduces uncertainty.

This month, as forecasters predict what the new year will bring, many of them will reflect on how tough a year 2016 was for forecasts. Based on what was considered most likely to happen, most didn’t expect Brexit or a Donald Trump presidency in the United States, nor even Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. As is typical for forecasters who focus on predicting one outcome, the majority went with the most likely case based on what they’d seen before.

The geographic footprint of innovation is changing dramatically as research and development programs become more global. An overwhelming 94 percent of the world’s largest innovators now conduct elements of their R&D programs abroad, according to the 2015 Global Innovation 1000 study, our annual analysis of corporate R&D spending. These companies are shifting their innovation investment to countries in which their sales and manufacturing are growing fastest, and where they can access the right technical talent. Not surprisingly, innovation spending has boomed in China and India since our 2008 study, when we first charted the global flows of corporate R&D spending. Collectively, in fact, more R&D is now conducted in Asia than in North America or Europe.

While each entrepreneurial success story is different, certain qualities separate great business ideas from the thousands that try and fail. Here are a few examples of what it takes to make it: 

Successful entrepreneurs validate their ideas. 

Dreamers dream, successful entrepreneurs do. Turning ideas into products, measuring how customers respond, and learning whether to stay the course or pivot are the bedrock of scaling a successful startup, so all processes must be aimed at accelerating that feedback loop explains startup guru Eric Reis in his book The Lean Startup.

“John knows exactly what he’s doing and needs little management. He works rapidly but without any mistakes so he delivers an amazing amount of high quality work. No one can do what he does.”

This was the response I received when I asked a manager how John was doing. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Read on.

“But he has a terrible personality. John finds fault with everyone but himself. He complains incessantly about everything. He thinks he knows more than anyone, especially me and the other senior managers. No one likes him.”