After 18 months of struggling to get traction with two product ideas, Segment started its turnaround. What followed was a two-year stretch of growth from four to 60 people, thousands of new customers and $44 million over several rounds of financing. What was the trigger for such a significant inflection point? In the lead up to the sea change, Co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt and the team at Segment started to heavily lean into qualitative feedback tools like live chat widget Olark. It was embedded on each page and everyone from the newest hire to the co-founders were constantly learning from everyone using their product.

Marco Rubio has a plan for paid parental leave. The fact that this isn’t something you might expect from a conservative Republican running for president makes it a pretty good indicator of how popular the idea has become. According to one survey last year, two-thirds of Americans think employers should have to give new parents paid time off to care for their child, a belief shared by majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

One likely reason support for paid parental leave is so popular is because it’s in such noticeably short supply in the United States. As voters have been reminded in more than one stump speech, the U.S. is the only industrialized country that doesn’t have any paid parental leave laws on the books at a national level.

Xconomy San Diego —  A “Wired for Health” study recently reported by The Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego poses a significant challenge for those working to realize the potential of digital health technologies.

The Scripps team has been investigating the relationship between wireless health-monitoring technologies, healthcare costs, and outcomes in patients with chronic disease. After equipping one cohort of patients with an iPhone and a connected tracking device, researchers analyzed claims and medical data to track care utilization and outcomes, ultimately finding no significant economic or clinical benefit for the patients being monitored versus a control group.

A panel session probing the perennial heads or tails of mobile device commoditization vs mobile device innovation here at MWC 2016 earlier today heard an interesting range of views. Speakers ran the gamut of mobile makers big and small (Samsung, Motorola/Lenovo and Wileyfox), through to chipset maker Qualcomm, alternative open Android flavor Cyanogen, and mobile operator Telefonica.

The art and science of well-being at work Living in a fast-paced, digitally focused, hyperconnected world often means sacrificing the ability to step back and take a breath. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Publishing’s Lucia Rahilly taps principal Manish Chopra, specialist Els van der Helm, and author and McKinsey alumna Caroline Webb for their experience and expertise on the mind–body connection and why executives are increasingly taking notice.

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. Digitization, increasing automation, and new business models have revolutionized other industries, and automotive will be no exception. These forces are giving rise to four disruptive technology-driven trends in the automotive sector: diverse mobility, autonomous driving, electrification, and connectivity.

On average, 75 out of every 100 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges are white. Five are black, and even fewer are Hispanic. But that’s not the whole story. Among the higher ranks and at certain types of institutions — say, small, private master’s universities — the faculty is even less diverse.

Using the drop-down menus below, you can find the racial and ethnic breakdowns of all types of professors and institutions. Click the bars to see which colleges employ the most faculty members in each group.

Image: http://chronicle.com

How to Use Entrepreneurship to Drive Economic Growth Babson College is an acknowledged leader in entrepreneurship education. What is less well known is that Babson, for example via the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project (BEEP), has been innovating the use of entrepreneurship for economic development, but with a twist: Rather than increasing the growth of new firms, BEEP has been focusing on increasing new growth in firms, new and existing. The results of several years of work in Manizales-Mas and Scale Up Milwaukee have been very encouraging.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled his “Startup India, Stand Up India” initiative on January 16. Ahead of that, the Wharton School held its India Startup Competition in Mumbai on January 5. The 20th Wharton India Economic Forum (WIEF) hosted the Startup Competition for the third year in a row to promote entrepreneurship in the country.

“The WIEF Startup Competition identifies India’s next set of up-and-coming companies. It allows startups in India to gain exposure to investors, customers, mentors and the media,” says Vikram Arumilli, one of the co-chairs of WIEF 2016 and a second-year MBA student at Wharton.

Growing a business can be challenging but over time, entrepreneurs stop focusing on growth. The end goal is to have a business that has a steady inflow of income, after all, and once a business achieves that, it may be tempting to work on maintenance rather than growth. But when you stagnate, you risk eventually losing the very customer base you've worked so hard to achieve.

Ford didn’t announce a deal with Google to develop self-driving cars at CES this week, as some had expected. But the automaker did reiterate its commitment to developing autonomous vehicles, as CEO Mark Fields announced a new version of its self-driving test car and said the company will ramp up its fleet from 10 to 30 of them this year, letting the company gather more information faster in hopes of eventually getting to a point where it can sell such a car to consumers.

Image: Ford CEO Mark Fields announces the automaker’s new self-driving car model and other updates to its autonomous vehicle efforts at CES.  - http://www.technologyreview.com

You’ve probably heard the expression “It’s not what you know, but who you know, that matters.” The sentiment is rather demotivating. After all, why go the extra mile if success is just determined by connections?

It’s true that networks influence the resources, support, and advocacy you get during the course of your career, but networks can form in many different ways. (Good news for those who aren’t so fond of networking events.)

Growing revenue and profits is a core objective of most companies, and it is the responsibility of every function to contribute to the pursuit of this goal. Yet, in recent years technology startups have embraced a new role, Growth Manager — alternatively Growth Hacker, Growth PM, or Head of Growth — that focuses on it exclusively. By viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions, not silos, leading tech companies like Facebook and Pinterest are rethinking their approach to driving growth and achieving breakthrough results.

The province of Ontario, Canada, is investing nearly CAD 100 million (Canadian dollars) through its Green Investment Fund to boost cleantech innovation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the Ontario government has also extended a further CAD 60 million commitment to cleantech projects in India, following the premier’s visit there earlier this month.

Virginia’s House and Senate finance committees released two-year budget proposals Sunday that boost funding for economic development in a state bludgeoned by federal spending cuts, The Washington Post reports. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, has made growing and diversifying Virginia’s economy one of his top priorities.

Image: Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, has made growing and diversifying Virginia’s economy… more JOANNE LAWTON

The makeup of families has shifted in the the last few decades.

In the U.S., 46% of two-parent families have both parents working full time. With both parents working, tackling family obligations becomes even more of a challenge with the expectation to be constantly connected to the office.

Working parents trying to "do it all" often integrate their children into their work life. They discuss work problems at the dinner table. They bring their children to meetings when there are no other options. They make conference calls on long drives with their kids in the backseat. As a result, children grow up hearing—and understanding—what their parents do for a living in a way that was rare to experience in the past.

A pair of Myo gesture-control armbands and a computer or smartphone may make it faster and easier for the hearing impaired to communicate using sign language with those who don’t understand it.

That’s what researchers at Arizona State University say they can do with a project called Sceptre. They use the armbands to teach software a range of American Sign Language gestures; then, when a person wearing the bands makes one of these signs, it can be matched up with its corresponding word or phrase in Sceptre’s database and shows up as text on a screen.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Until now, when people talked about education innovation, there was much talk about online learning and how that would democratize learning, opening up university education to a wider audience. Last week, at the World Government Summit in Dubai, there was a grander vision presented of innovation and the universities of the future, in a talk by Dr Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of X-Prize, and co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University.

The first time I asked researchers at one of China’s academic research institutions “What do you think are the challenges to commercializing your discoveries?” I had no idea what to expect. I thought that if the ideas of technology transfer and commercializing academic research were not even on their radar screen, I was in store for a series of very short conversations! I was relieved, therefore, to find that researchers and administrators I met at institutions across China all seemed to have thought about the topic, and all seemed inspired to commercialize. But the experiences they conveyed were very different.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Liberty Mutual Insurance has 590,000 square feet to play with in its 22-story Back Bay headquarters. But for all of that space, it’s still putting about a dozen of its employees in tiny office space near South Station, elbow-to-elbow with tenants still working to make their first profits.

It’s not out of necessity. The Fortune 100 company opted to put its new in-house incubator, Solaria Labs, in WeWork’s shared office space on Atlantic Avenue because it wants team members thinking like a startup, and not necessarily like a century-old insurance company.