The process of visioning may seem both daunting and mysterious. Indeed, it is in no way a straightforward method and there are always rocky rapids to navigate. An understanding of the make-up of this journey will create better results for this process to be a success. Visioning – the process of coming up with breakthrough ideas – is often assumed to be an isolated and instantaneous affair. We have images of the isolated creative genius experiencing a moment of eureka! in the bathtub, or a great vision while fasting in the desert. What commonly happens is that a new concept is developed over a sustained period of time.

The United States has two major employment dilemmas. On the supply side, American universities produce a well-documented surfeit of Ph.D.s, far in excess of the number of tenure-track job openings. On the demand side, the American information-technology industry is greatly in need of skilled workers. But there has yet to be a move to direct Ph.D.s into IT careers in large numbers.

Image: pellethepoet / Creative Commons 

You've surely heard this familiar refrain in the immigration reform debate: Newcomers to the country take jobs away from hardworking U.S. citizens. The reality, however, isn't nearly that straightforward. And particularly when it comes to America's small business sector, immigrants actually do our economy a huge service.

Ask any group of people if they’re doing today what they thought they would be doing when they started out. I begin every speech that way. Occasional a few people in the audience raise their hand, very few. Almost everyone will readily admit that they have had to reinvent themselves multiple times over their lives and careers. And yet if you ask them how they did it or if formal education prepared them for reinvention you get mostly blank stares. You hear answers like, I just did it because I had to. Most seem unable to share useful knowledge on how they reinvented themselves. If anything is clear about the 21st century it’s that change happens faster than it used to. Reinvention isn’t something to be done only as a last resort. It’s something we need to do all the time in order to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. We have to make personal reinvention safer and easier to manage. Reinvention has become an important life skill.

Many entrepreneurs are afraid of code. They see coding as magic — something that requires a degree in computer science to even begin to understand. Some think they’re not smart enough or mathematical enough to learn to code, so they decide it’s easier to hire a developer or find a technical co-founder — all because they’re too afraid (or think they’re too busy) to learn.

Technology has created more jobs than it’s destroyed over the last 140 years, research from Deloitte has found.

Since the Luddites in the 1800′s people have feared that technology is going to replace humans in the workplace. However Deloitte has studied 140 years of census results to conclude that as technology continues to take on the more repetitive tasks in industries such as manufacturing, consumer spending power has increased, creating the demand for more service based jobs.

The Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Region, covering eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces located around the lakes and waterways that have given this region its name, is what economic developers call a ‘macro region’. It is an area of intensive economic interaction through trade and value chain linkages. And it shares many similarities in terms of economic development, competitiveness issues, and institutional structure, culture, and history. These two factors make the Region an important arena for policy action, both in areas with strong cross-border implications and for those where challenges are similar but action will ultimately be local.

Since Steve Jobs’s death, in 2011, Elon Musk has emerged as the leading celebrity of Silicon Valley. Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, which produces electric cars; the CEO of SpaceX, which makes rockets; and the chairman of SolarCity, which provides solar power systems. A self-made billionaire, programmer, and engineer—as well as an inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies—he has been on the cover of Fortune and Time. In 2013, he was first on the Atlantic’s list of “today’s greatest inventors,” nominated by leaders at Yahoo, Oracle, and Google. To believers, Musk is steering the history of technology. As one profile described his mystique, his “brilliance, his vision, and the breadth of his ambition make him the one-man embodiment of the future.”

SwiftKey, the makers of the uber-popular iOS and Android keyboard app, analyzed more than a billion emoji used in the US between June 2014 and June 2015.

In a report released on Tuesday, they detailed each state's favorite emoji. 

We'll get to the methodology in a second. First, here's the map:

There’s an economic meme going around, and it’s a scary one: American firms aren’t innovating enough. Hillary Clinton last month and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink earlier this year claimed that corporations are focusing too much on short-term stock prices and quarterly earnings; that they’re spending their profits on share buybacks and dividends instead of on research and development.

Image: Ah, those good old days of American engineering genius. (AP Photo)

I’ve done lots of startup pitch events in my career. But nothing prepared me for what happened a couple months ago. That’s when I lived my own real “Shark Tank.”

Once upon a time, pitch events were a pretty obscure activity. But in recent years, they’ve been popularized on the TV show Shark Tank. That’s where startups present their business ideas to a panel of sharky (and usually snarky) judges. In the past, I’ve usually been on the judging side, as an investor or mentor. For instance, I was a panel moderator for the World Cup Tech Challenge startup competition hosted by SVForum last month.

My friend Ann (not her real name) recently tried the Paleo diet. She stopped eating dairy, grains, refined sugars and processed foods. Six weeks in, Ann had lost 15 pounds. But in that time, she had skipped happy hours, girls' nights out, office parties—really any occasion that might have put her in arm's reach of temptation.

Having to give a speech in front of an audience can cause some people to shake, sweat, get sick, or freeze in terror. The root of this fear is simple: It's scary because it's unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't regularly perform to a crowd.

"I always tell members after they give their first speech, 'That's the hardest speech you'll ever give,'" says Joshua Rinaldi, the former president of New York Toastmasters, Manhattan's largest chapter in the Toastmasters International network of over 14,000 public speaking clubs around the world.

The Chinese like to remind people that they are to thank for a great many inventions, including gunpowder, the compass, printing and papermaking. Today, we’d probably refer to them as ‘disruptive technologies’ as they fundamentally transformed the way things were done. The reason that China is so keen to remind the world of its incredible creativity of the past is its lacklustre present-day performance.

Government chief information officers struggle to quantify nontechnical factors such as "organizational health" and "innovation," a new report argues.  

After interviewing 27 government CIOs, Arizona State University Associate Dean Kevin Desouza concluded that most "have a very good inventory of metrics" for technical performance -- such as server downtime or application usage -- but are less sure how to measure performance characteristics of the organization itself.  

College Park, MD (PRWEB) August 17, 2015

Prior to the advent of human-caused global warming in the 19th century, the surface layer of Earth’s oceans had undergone 1,800 years of a steady cooling trend, according to a new study. During the latter half of this cooling period, the trend was most likely driven by large and frequent volcanic eruptions.

The digital economy is changing the way we do business, says a Massey University entrepreneurship expert, and it’s creating both challenges and opportunities for New Zealand companies.

Professor Lorraine Warren will share her research into the new business models emerging from technological change at a Massey Business School event next week.

This is your chance to improve your performance as a regional innovator, and put your science region on the map together with other leading players. Join our event and participate in the:

Taking a leap of faith into the freelance world can feel more like hurtling off a cliff into the great unknown. I know, because I did it a year ago. In the time since, I’ve discovered many things, ranging from which neighborhood cafes have shoddy Wi-Fi to the best way to follow up on a check that’s MIA.