America’s first offshore wind farm should be commissioned to create that sweet, breezy, renewable energy off the coast of Rhode Island sometime this fall.

Block Island Wind Farm will enter the final stage of construction in August in what creator Deepwater Wind calls a “complex operation that will feature some of the industry’s most innovative offshore wind technology and a world-class team of dozens of workers and specialists.”

The Transportation Department and the Department of Health and Human Services are taking the buzz out of innovation.

While many agencies and companies talk about how they are becoming more innovative in how they work and address mission areas, DoT and HHS actually are experiencing the transformation.

Transportation hired a chief innovation officer, Chris Gerdes, a professor from Stanford University, for a one-year stint.

Image: Chris Gerdes is the chief innovation officer at the Transportation Department. (Photo courtesy of Stanford University.)

From leading the global technological landscape in its struggle against the USA during the Cold War, Russia has fallen into the nethers of mediocrity. Today, tech stocks account for only 4.1% of the Russian stock market, compared to 14.1% of the Indian and 9% of the South Korean markets respectively. Meanwhile, the figure of $9.8bn for high-tech exports is dwarfed by the likes of China ($558bn), Germany ($184bn) and the USA ($154bn). The USSR launched the first satellite into space, but now Russia controls less than 1% of the global telecoms market.

Image: http://themarketmogul.com

Digitization is fundamentally changing the way we live and work. It is one of the key forces behind the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT). This emerging connectivity of physical objects to the web promises to help businesses accelerate efficiencies and increase profits. Industries will also be disrupted. Cisco predicts that the market valuation of the global IoT ecosystem will reach $14.4 trillion by 2022.

“If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.” — Scientist and environmentalism pioneer Barry Commoner

GE Is No Longer Jack Welch’s Company

Have you seen the recent commercial where a young son tells his parents that he is going to work for GE — as a software developer? Their response was one of bewilderment. In their minds, GE is a manufacturer. The commercial exemplifies the idea that mental models of leaders create organizational and industry models as well as customer and investor perceptions. In this case, the mental model behind GE has been rooted in manufacturing for decades.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

There are an abundance of firsthand accounts that document the uncertainty that mires the entrepreneurial experience, but written words alone cannot fully capture the doubts that entrepreneurs face when building a startup. Luckily, the Wharton Innovation Fund is a pillar of support for early entrepreneurs and helped me and my startup when we needed it most.

When my cofounder and I started building HashFav, our original vision was to offer users a simpler method to bookmark Tweets. Twitter is home to the world’s most important primary sources: the newsmakers of our time. What happens on Twitter echoes across the rest of the web and throughout the broader world with lightning speed.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/

A decade ago, eager entrepreneurs with little business acuity and in need of funding turned to startup accelerators for help. From the outside, these programs had an air of exclusivity with the source code to build successful businesses.

Now that image seems passé.

“New models are emerging on how to create ventures and scale them,” says Martin Ihrig, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Wharton and practice professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education.

In early June, the U.S. House of Representatives, Financial Services Committee, approved the “Fix Crowdfunding Act” bill (HR 4855). Maybe it’s the title of the bill that is misleading, but since then I have seen multiple articles which incorrectly describe what this legislation, if fully passed, would do. As a result, I felt it necessary to do a detailed review of the bill itself to point out what it actually does and what it does not.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com

It’s getting even more expensive to become a homeowner — especially if you’re looking to buy in Seattle or Dallas.

Those cities saw their median home prices rise to the highest point ever: $385,000 in Seattle and $240,156 in Dallas, according to a report released Thursday from real estate data company ATTOM Data Solutions.

Across the nation, home prices reached an all-time high of $231,000 in June, up 6% from May and up 9% over the same time last year. That exceeds the peak set before the housing crisis, when they reached an average of $228,000 in 2005. June also marks the 52nd month in a row of rising home prices across the nation.

Over the last several months, there has been a flurry of activity in government-supported efforts focused on addressing the skills gap faced by manufacturing firms and other key S&T industries. The intent of these programs is to develop industry-led partnership that align workforce development efforts with the needs of specific local industries to unlock a region’s economic prosperity.  In July, two new initiatives were announced that may help provide a data-driven guide for these efforts in the future. By mapping job skills around the nexus of manufacturing and design, the Chicago-based Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) hopes to better develop a workforce for the 21st century manufacturing workplace. At the Center for Data Science and Public Policy (DSaPP) at the University of Chicago, a team of researchers hopes to develop a public database that will contain the “DNA” of every job in America that is akin to the output of the Human Genome Project.

With 1.3 million citizens, Estonia is one of the smallest countries in Europe, but its ambition is to become one of the largest countries in the world. Not one of the largest geographically or even by number of citizens, however. Largest in e-residents, a category of digital affiliation that it hopes will attract people, especially entrepreneurs.

Started two years ago, e-residency gives citizens of any nation the opportunity to set up Estonian bank accounts and businesses that use a verified digital signature and are operated remotely, online. The program is an outgrowth of a digitization of government services that the country launched 15 years ago in a bid to save money on the staffing of government offices.

What technologies and questions about technology are just too hot to handle?

According to researchers presenting at “Forbidden Research,” a conference held last week at the MIT Media Lab, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the list includes child sex robots, genetic gene drives, and a simple but controversial way to save Earth from rising temperatures.

We added a couple of our own to create the following list of forbidden technologies. Each question is morally or legally fraught and sets up a clash of ethics between individual technologists in search of solutions and institutions that see possible harm.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com/

Yes, there's life for entrepreneurs outside New York and San Francisco -- and we've got the proof! To identify the best places in which to launch and operate a business, we partnered with Livability.com, which studies small and midsize cities. Matt Carmichael, the site's chief trend analyst, developed the ranking, crunching a wide range of data, including the number of businesses and employees between 2011 and 2015; unemployment rates; number of VC deals in the past 10 years; business tax rate; value of SBA and 7(a) loans; percentage of college-educated locals; cost of living; commute time; accessibility of high-speed broadband; projected household income and population increase from now to 2020; "leakage and surplus," which charts whether people spend their money outside a city on goods and services rather than in it; the growth of good jobs and high-income positions: and Livability's own rating of overall quality of life.

I've been a millionaire three separate times in my life. The first time I saw $1,000,000 in my bank account, I almost fainted. Even though I knew it was hitting my account, it still caught me off guard.

Becoming a millionaire isn’t as far-fetched as you would believe. With dedication, patience and focus, becoming a millionaire is completely obtainable. If I can do it, anyone can.

Last week, I shared what I consider the seven virtues of entrepreneurship.

Practices that I see the founders that I look up to hold near and dear; things that top performers are always working to get better at.

But just like successful entrepreneurs share many positive habits, I’ve also noticed that the people that I try to emulate tend to do everything in their power to avoid the same types of behaviors.

No small company wants to go out of business, yet many do. And the younger the company, the greater the likelihood that it will. According to the SBA Office of Advocacy (PDF), about two-thirds of businesses with employees survive at least two years, but only 50 percent make it to the five-year mark and just one-third celebrate their 10-year anniversary. The rates of companies that go out of business have changed little over the past 20 years, the SBA says, and are consistent across a range of industries, including manufacturing, retail trade, food services, hotels and construction.

As I’ve written before I believe Computer Vision will become a major factor as a Human-Computer Interface (1) as sensors and cameras help us make sense of our physical world.

There is so much in the media about “The Internet of Things” that it has lost meaning and for many for some strange reason it became a short-hand for wearables. Wearables are clearly an important market but to me a much broader use case is bringing real-world objects into the computing world and there is no better mechanism than Computer Vision.

Stanford University President John Hennessy defines entrepreneurship as transforming an idea into something real that can have wide impact, not just starting a business. In conversation with Tina Seelig, professor of the practice in Stanford's Department of Management Science & Engineering, Hennessy also discusses some of the essential ingredients in Silicon Valley's "secret sauce."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

Brit Morin, founder and CEO of Brit + Co, shows a video that captures how uninhibited young girls are when asked to be creative, and how differently young women behave in the same situation. Morin says it illustrates how people, especially women, often lose touch with the playfulness of their youth by the time they become adults.

Olin College President Richard Miller, a prominent voice in the movement to reform engineering curriculum, explains how higher education can create more innovators by better integrating studies that have traditionally segregated students, in order to show them that the potential for large-scale impact is at the intersection of feasibility, viability and desirability.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu