Universities have always played a significant role in society. Just 16 years after landing on Plymouth Rock saw the founding of New College — becoming Harvard College three years later. And an even shorter time, 12 years, transpired between the end of the Revolutionary War and enrollment in America’s first public university, the University of North Carolina.

“When it comes to thinking about women in powerful positions, we are too often blinded by the daggers of the mind, infected by the malignant mind bugs that mire us in the prejudices of the past,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde once famously said. “We need a 21st century mentality for women’s economic participation. We need to flush away the flotsam of ingrained gender inequality.”

An old-school request for some show-and-tell — which led to a 14-year-old boy controlling a motorized Lego car with his mind — has led to a commitment of at least $285,000 from a prominent national angel investor group in Neurable Inc., a University of Michigan spinoff that has quickly become the most-talked-about startup on the local tech scene.

In April, Neurable won $50,000 by finishing second at the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition in Houston. The company has created a patent-pending, noninvasive brain-computer interface that, thanks to artificial intelligence software developed by founder, President and CEO Ramses Alcaide at UM's Direct Brain Interface Lab, allows people to control software and objects with their brain activity.

Image: Photo by Tom Henderson Ramses Alcaide controls a Neurable car.

Last year, the federal government spent nearly $3.7 trillion, roughly one out of every five dollars in the U.S. economy. Read on for a glimpse into how the government spent and earned its money in 2015.

Where does the government spend all that money?

About two-thirds of the budget goes to mandatory spending, programs for which the government does not set a spending cap in advance, but, instead, provides specified benefits to everyone who meets the eligibility criteria. For example, once Congress sets the rules for Medicare—the health insurance program for the elderly—the exact amount of spending varies from year to year based on the size of the elderly population and how much or how little they use heath care services.

Given the refugee crisis, the potential Brexit, terrorism, and the recent economic crises in Greece and elsewhere, it can be easy to overlook the European Union as a viable region. In recent years, however, I have begun to believe that while the U.S. has been the dominant force in modern entrepreneurship, the future looks less promising for the U.S. than most think.

Wikipedia defines “intrapreneurship” as “the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.”

These days, we see and hear the words ‘innovation’ and ‘innovators’ all over the place. The government regularly asks for approaches and methods that are innovative in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and large companies increasingly invest time and money into innovative intrapreneurial programs. When you search TEDx talks for ‘innovation,’ you come up with over 1,800 videos.

The pending report of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicines not only attacks the patent system as predicted, but proposes giving the organization oversight of drug development. If you think United Nation functionaries would be more effective than entrepreneurs, you’ll be delighted. If you live in the real world where bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Brainstorming has developed a fraught reputation, perhaps deservedly so. When groups of people are thrown together and expected to come up with original ideas, there is often too much pressure to be creative—resulting in ideas that are anything but.

But what if brainstorms were designed to generate questions, not ideas? It’s an approach that’s being touted these days by a number of advocates, myself included.

Women are almost twice as likely to experience anxiety as men, according to a review of existing scientific literature, led by the University of Cambridge. The study also found that people from Western Europe and North America are more likely to suffer from anxiety than people from other cultures. The review, published today in the journal Brain and Behavior, also highlighted how anxiety disorders often provide a double burden on people experiencing other health-related problems, such as heart disease, cancer and even pregnancy.

The funding environment for tech startups is an ever shifting ground as we go through predictable shifts that go hand-in-hand with the slowing of the overall market.

The most important shift I would characterize as the market moving from “high conviction” and thus strong follow-ons to “limited conviction” and lots of gamesmanship / games of chicken … at your expense.

London Business School professor Lynda Gratton believes living longer requires individuals and corporations to change their approach to careers, life transitions, and retirement.

Imagine being 15 years from the traditional retirement age and deciding to start your own company. Or deciding to enter a completely different industry—at age 60. Or spending your twenties deferring further study to find out what really drives you.

Companies devote an enormous amount of time and effort to building the best teams. But if a team can’t overcome setbacks and challenges, those resources might be wasted.

"It’s an area more managers should be considering as they build their teams," says Richard Citrin, PhD, founder of the talent and leadership development consultancy Citrin Consulting, and author of The Resilience Advantage: Stop Managing Stress and Find Your Resilience.

If you’ve ever been in mid-conversation at lunch only to lose your train of thought when your cell phone buzzed, a new study published in Nature Communications offers an explanation of what’s happening in your brain to cause this.

Neuroscientist Adam Aron from the University of California San Diego and postdoctoral scholar Jan Wessel found that the subthalamic nucleus (STN)—the brain system that is involved in interrupting or stopping movement in our bodies—also interrupts cognition. In previous research, Aron identified that the STN is engaged when you make an abrupt stop in action due to an unexpected event.

Data in all its forms has exploded across the world. And now with Internet of Things (IoT), even the mundane is now connected to the inter-webs. Our fridge, the entrance to our home, the washing machine, the door to our car and the garage, shoes and even the beat of our hearts, everything is connected.

There is no doubt that having an interconnected world, where we can control all aspects will make life ever more so simple and easier to manage.

Antoine van Agtmael is coming to town Monday, and he might just carry the antidote if you’re feeling blue about the manufacturing economy.

His new book is “The Smartest Places on Earth,” but it is the subtitle that carries his hopeful message: “Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation.”

Image: Frank Espich/IndyStar 2009 file photo

With the Russian economy still struggling to emerge from recession, focus has shifted to ways that Russia can innovate its way out of a difficult economic situation. Doing so, however, would likely require that Russia adjust its top-down innovation culture to a bottom-up, grassroots approach.

Image: http://www.russia-direct.org 

The announcement of the National IPR Policy is something of a missed opportunity. What the Government should have delivered to the Indian people is a ‘national innovation policy’, in which intellectual property rights would have a place, but would not consume the entire foreground of the picture.

Too much of the new policy is about “educating the general public on ills of counterfeit and pirated products”, and other such rhetorical matters, which would be music to the ears of the American culture industries, but unrelated to actual technical, industrial, or social innovation.

Governments around the world are looking for new ways to nurture innovative businesses, in an effort to solve a range of pressing economic and societal challenges. However, they face many challenges in designing organisations that can help to deliver these objectives.

For every big success story – such as the Taiwanese government’s concerted investment in the development of the technologies that helped the country’s semiconductor industry grow to produce 40% of the country’s exports – there are many more stories of failure. And we still don’t know enough about what kinds of funding and other support are likely to be most effective in different circumstances.

Over the course of my career as a cognitive psychologist, I have always been interested in examining the “light bulb” moment, or the moment an insight occurs. In my book, Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, I analyzed 120 incidents in which insights occurred in an attempt to learn more about how insights arise, and to develop new strategies for people and organizations to boost their insights. Recently I formulated a strategy to help people gain more insights. But before I explain how that works, let’s see how insights arise.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com