Cultural differences matter in leadership and the most effective leaders embrace them.

In a globalised work environment, having a multinational team is becoming the norm. Whether a leader is “Eastern” or “Western” will influence how they interact with their employees. These differences can be stark and sometimes frustrating. Shyness might be considered rude in some cultures. Aggression might seem overwhelming to others even though it’s par for the course where they come from.

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Leaders don’t all walk and talk the same. Staying true to one’s culture is integral to empowered leadership.

Li Huang vividly recalls her first impression of a particular junior-high English teacher in her native city of Xi’an, China.

On the first day of class, Li says, the foreign-born teacher “sat down, putting his feet up on the desk…” In talking with the teacher months later, she found out that, although committing an obvious Westerners’ faux pas in the eyes of his East Asian students, “He felt a great sense of authority when he was striking that pose.”

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In January 2010, if you Googled the terms mompreneur or mumpreneur—the now common catchphrases for entrepreneurial mothers who start their own company—you’d get about 120,000 hits. A year later, according to one paper, you’d get more than 700,000. Now, the number may be in the millions. It’s clear that like telecommuting, self-employment is an increasingly attractive option for working mothers. Why do they embrace the twin challenges of entrepreneurship and raising a family rather than returning to familiar, corporate jobs?

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The holiday season is often accompanied by New Year's prognostications, and this year you're likely to read plenty of downbeat projections regarding the venture capital environment. It's true that the industry has shifted, and that the amount of venture capital raised and deployed has decreased. But I don't share the popular outlook that the sky is falling.

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University technology transfer has been largely dominated by a business model of licensing university patents to the highest bidder. This model is unprofitable for most universities and sometimes even risks alienating the private sector. However, a new and smarter model has emerged and is being increasingly adopted. In this new model universities nurture their own start-ups and make available their patents to them. This ought to improve technology transfer. But universities cannot do it alone, they operate within a larger innovation ecology and the government can help foster an adequate environment for entrepreneurship.

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When NYU leadership lecturer Helio Fred Garcia wants to gather an audience's attention, he enlists the most fearsome of allies: The Black Eyed Peas.

"At precisely 9 a.m. I touch a button on my remote mouse and play a sudden blast," he shared with us. "After a 10-second burst of very loud music, I have every student’s undivided attention. I then lock in the connection: I smile, welcome them, thank them for investing a full Saturday in developing their careers. Only then do I begin the class. I have hijacked their amygdalas. We need audiences to feel first and then to think."

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As long as passengers have been flying, they've been disappointed by the quality of in-flight meals. But why? After 90 years of commercial air flight, why haven't airlines been able to design menus that can survive the scrutiny of diners at 30,000 feet? Is it because airline food really sucks, or is it because we just think it sucks? In truth, it's a little of both. But airlines are making surprising strides to fix both.

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Stefan H Thomke, an authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS). He is chair of the Executive Education programme, Leading Product Innovation, which helps business leaders revamp their product development processes for greater competitive advantage, and is faculty chair of HBS executive education in India. He is also author of the books Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation and Managing Product and Service Development. In this interview, he talks to Forbes India on the various aspects of innovation.

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Year after year, our Global Innovation 1000 study has demonstrated that it is not how much companies spend on research and development that determines success—what really matters is how those R&D funds are invested in capabilities, talent, process, and tools. In addition to our recurring analysis of R&D spending trends, our ninth annual study of the world’s 1,000 largest publicly listed corporate R&D spenders focuses on the digital enablers of the innovation process: how the most successful companies are—and aren’t—using digital tools and processes to improve speed, decrease cost, enhance quality, reduce complexity, and sharpen insight into customer and market needs to improve their innovation efforts.

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Being a social butterfly just might change your brain: In people with a large network of friends and excellent social skills, certain brain regions are bigger and better connected than in people with fewer friends, a new study finds.

The research, presented here Tuesday (Nov. 12) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggests a connection between social interactions and brain structure.

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FiftyThree's app Paper has received all sorts of praise because it's both excellently designed and fun to use--it stands apart from many similar apps in the App Store. Now FiftyThree has taken another step to enable its users to create better images, notes, and projects by releasing a piece of hardware to complement Paper's software: A new stylus called Pencil.

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If you've ever dreamed of starting your own business, your idea might be just what it takes to "Ignite Erie."  That was the theme of a "day of innovation" here in Erie. It was well attended by a mix of entrepreneurs of all ages, policy makers and leaders in economic development and education.

Here's one reason for all of the interest.  National studies show 5% of all net new jobs in the economy are created by firms 5 years old or younger.  Local studies show it's an area where northwest Pennsylvania is lagging behind.

UPstart, the business incubator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology Transfer, is running a mobile application development contest known as the AppItUP Challenge. Each year, students, faculty and staff are encourage to submit their ideas for apps, which are then judged by a panel of venture capital partners. The top ten ideas then go on to a public event, where development partners bid for the opportunity to turn the ideas into functional prototypes. This year's AppItUP Challenge yielded 185 ideas across 11 of Penn's 12 schools. The finalists represent The Perelman School of Medicine, the Wharton School, the School of Nursing and the School of Design.       

Ian Bogost recently wrote an article for the Atlantic on the impact of technology on the redistribution of work, which has put most of us in a state of what he terms “hyperemployment.” He points out that the same technology that makes our communication easier also makes us more likely to distribute work:

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Last week $3.135 Million in Commercialization Infrastructure grants were awarded by Colorado’s Office of Economic and International Trade (OEDIT) under the Bioscience Discovery Evaluation Grant Program (BDEGP). Colorado BioScience Association (CBSA) appreciates the OEDIT for its ongoing commitment to the state’s bioscience industry through the BDEGP, which was created in 2006 by the Colorado General Assembly.

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This paper uses a pseudo-panel approach at an age-based cohort level to investigate the extent to which social capital accounts for differences in entrepreneurial activities. The findings suggest that trust measured by trust either in strangers or in public institutions facilitates entrepreneurship. We also find that parents’ emphasis on individual achievement relative to interpersonal relations in raising their child is positively associated with entrepreneurship. Evidence suggests that both social norms and networks influence entrepreneurship. These results do not change when we use social capital measured at the national level.

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The year my husband was born (1953), only 5% of Americans preferred a female boss. That number has climbed to 23%, according to a new Gallup survey. The proportion of people who prefer to work for men fell precipitously, from two-thirds in 1953 to about one-third today.

Perhaps even more important is the sharp rise in Americans who expressed no preference, even when cued to care. Gallup’s question asked, “If you were taking a new job and had your choice of boss, would you prefer a man or a woman?” Only 25% of Americans expressed no preference in 1953 but today it’s 41%. More good news: more people judge their bosses not by their gender, but as people. This is more likely to be true the higher the level of the job. Only 36% of those with high school or less, but 46% of those postgraduate degrees, expressed no preference.

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New Delhi, Nov.19 (ANI): President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday received the National Innovation Council's Report to the People 2013 in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Speaking on the occasion, President Mukherjee said knowledge and innovation are the twin pillars around which nations will compete, grow and prosper in the 21st century.

Let's start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism.

The word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because (I saw it on the web)) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because (of the web)). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself.

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