The big question hanging over markets right now is the Federal Reserve. 

Will the Fed raise interest rates in September? October? December? Never?

But for all of the hand-wringing about when the Fed's first move comes, monetary policy around the world is still very, very easy. Take, for example, Mario Draghi's comments earlier on Thursday that the European Central Bank is ready to act if Europe's economy falters. 

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com 

The number of corporations making either direct investments into startups or adding separate venture arms has grown steadily over the past few years. Now, a coterie of some of the most highly-valued startups is also joining in on the action.

Backed by big war chests, “unicorns” including Flipkart and Didi-Kuaidi, have participated in startup financings this year (in some cases, co-investing with their own investors). Others have partnered with their venture investors to launch investment funds.

Many American cities are distinctly shaped by ties to other parts of the world. Washington has its Ethiopian community, and the restaurants that have come with it. Chicago has its Mexican neighborhoods, Minneapolis its Hmong culture, Miami its links to Cuba.

These differences — products of proximity or history or happenstance — are part of what makes New York feel culturally different from Atlanta. And they reflect the fact that New York and Atlanta look different to people living abroad.

Open innovation (or "OI") didn't used to be the way the most successful companies did business. It's the process of searching outside a company’s walls—and even its own industry—for technology and solutions to keep it at the cutting edge. For obvious reasons, then, many businesses still find OI risky, since it means exposing their goals and projects to public view, including competitors. But more companies now believe those risks are worth taking, and open innovation has emerged as a best practice when it comes innovation. We here at NineSigma sponsored a Harris Interactive survey late last year that found 79% of executives believed their companies were effectively drawing on innovations from other industries. And 71% said they expected their companies' investment in projects with outside innovation firms to rise in 2015.

Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone in your company, “How are you?” they are more likely to answer “Busy!” than “Very well, thank you”? That is because the norm in most companies is that you are supposed to be very busy – or otherwise at least pretend to be – because otherwise you can’t be all that important. The answers “I am not up to much” and “I have some time on my hands, actually” are not going to do much for your internal status and career.

For a long time, it was believed that people are born with a given level of intelligence and the best we could do in life was to live up to our potential. Scientists have now proven that we can actually increase our potential and enjoy ourselves in the process. We now know that by learning new skills the brain creates new neural pathways that make it work faster and better.

Now that back-to-school season is here, college students everywhere are likely being asked the same annoying questions. Postgraduates love to recycle the same-old conversation starters, and they’ve overstayed their welcome! But don’t worry—we’re not about to leave you hanging. Below, allow us to offer some clarity on which questions, exactly, college students have answered a zillion times (often via four words: "I don’t know yet!"), and which will result in more fruitful conversation instead:

Whether you have just graduated with an advanced degree or you are leaving academia for the public sphere, building a professional résumé after a life in higher eduction is a rude awakening. How do I talk about a decade of research? What if I have no experience outside academia? Here's a guide to building the perfect résumé that fits in all the right stuff from your years in the Ivory Tower.

For the entirety of my freshman year, I worked on building a startup with a group of three other freshmen. Our big idea was ThirdEye: a product that empowers visually impaired persons by telling them what they are looking at. During our freshmen year, our team of engineering freshmen was able to build a full prototype of our product on Google Glass, iOS, and Android, get accepted into the Wharton Venture Initiation Program, partner with the largest organization of visually impaired persons in the country, beta test our product with fifteen visually impaired persons, get selected as finalists and award winners in the MBA-dominated Wharton Business Plan Competition, and even establish a board of four well known Silicon Valley advisors.

Image: Rajat Bhageria ENG’18 and the rest of the ThirdEye team presenting at the 2015 Business Plan Competition Venture Finals.

After going through the slightly traumatic process last year of writing a book about the intersection of business and technology,1 I started to think about which books had an impact on me as a business technologist—especially beyond the obvious ones like The Soul of a New Machine and The Mythical Man-Month.2 None of the books that came to mind related to the latest technology trends (social! mobile! machine learning!)—those are important, but they change quickly. The books that really shaped my thinking provided perspectives, often historical, on the organizational, strategic, and human dimensions of business technology. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Notching a billion-dollar valuation as a private tech company is hard, exiting at one is even harder. For nearly all the most valuable investor-backed companies in tech, nailing a pitch to early potential investors was a step on the journey. As Bill Gurley of Benchmark recently noted in his defense of the pitch deck:

Writing about down rounds in a bull market feels like shopping for an umbrella in this historic California drought. You are bound to get some strange looks if you walk into a department store and ask for an umbrella. I also bet that once we hit our El Nino winter we will suddenly have a shortage of umbrellas. In other words, it pays to be prepared. When the current market climate does change, capital will become more scarce and will put downward pressure on valuations. Historically, the frequency of down rounds has always spiked during bear markets.

I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people.

I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power, and isn't too fussy about how.

Imagine a major intersection where all the innovation taking place in data analytics and all the advances in hardware meet. It would look a lot like Monica Rogati’s job at Jawbone. As VP of Data, she built a world-class team of scientists and engineers who pushed on the boundaries of wearables, data and the Internet of Things. Today, she spends her time advising multiple companies that want to make the most of their data.

“New England doesn’t have a monopoly on ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive…but we’ve been at it longer than many parts of the world.”

That’s what Scott Kirsner writes in the current issue of Yankee Magazine.

The 80th anniversary issue focuses on stories about New England places and people who’ve inspired us.

Image: In Boston, what started as a colony has become a hub of international innovation. (Emmanuel Huybrechts/Flickr)

At the National People’s Congress in Beijing in March 2015, China’s Premier Li Keqiang announced a growth target of 7 percent, acknowledging that “deep-seated problems in the country’s economy are becoming more obvious.”1 Three months later and thousands of miles away in Washington, the World Bank lowered its growth forecasts across the board and asked the US Federal Reserve Bank to delay any contemplated rate hikes. The World Bank’s chief economist said that it had “just switched on the seat belt sign. We are advising nations, especially emerging economies, to fasten their seat belts.”2 So it’s going to be a bumpy ride? How bumpy? And for how long?

The world is full of people with opinions. Television, radio, and other media are brimming over with commentators making suggestions and offering seemingly authoritative advice to government officials and corporate executives about what they ought to do. At dinners and cocktail parties — and around the water cooler at work — we talk about what others should do or should have done, or the flaws of our bosses.

September 2, 2015 — As this academic year begins, 20 higher education institutions are welcoming their incoming students in a unique way as part of a national STEM initiative called #uifresh (University Innovation Freshmen). Through this initiative, participating institutions are exposing incoming freshmen to design thinking, entrepreneurship, and innovation in order to attract and retain more students in STEM disciplines. Ten new schools have joined the 10 schools that committed to #uifresh earlier this year.

Image: http://epicenter.stanford.edu/

In 2013, veteran investor and former Salesforce.com executive Matt Holleran quietly opened a specialized kind of venture firm that he suspects will become more common.

Cloud Apps Capital Partners focuses on a single market—Web-based software applications for businesses. It aims to fill an early-stage startup funding niche that Holleran believes is not well-served by the general venture capital ecosystem.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com

Venture capital activity for 2014 was a hard act to follow. But 2015 has not disappointed so far, with fundraising and investment continuing at an historic pace. A total of $20 billion was raised by U.S. venture capital firms in 1H 2015, with large and small micro-VC funds continuing to increase their share of the VC market. On the investment side, while deal count is down, dollar volume is up: A new post-2000 record $7.1 billion was invested in early-stage deals in Q2 2015 and seed-stage activity is up. And in Q2, there was heavy investment of angel seed capital, along with $2.2 billion of angel and seed capital deployed across 763 rounds. PitchBook Data, Inc., PitchBook 3Q 2015, U.S. Venture Industry Report.

Image: http://www.mondaq.com