Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens, educational technologist and researcher at Athabasca University, has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

It's become increasingly clear that what matters most in web acquisitions is what happens after the acquisition, not before.

The small news that personal profile service About.me struck a partnership with Moo.com to let users print business cards for free is actually a big deal from the perspective of how big companies do M&A, because About.me got acquired by AOL recently. It's actually quite rare for "acq-hires" like About.me to come out with cool, innovative features like that.

Since the old economy broke down in 2008, presidents, prime ministers and mayors have been promising their electorate "green" or "sustainable growth" -- and that is good news. In order to confront "the epidemic" of global warming and shape a safe economic future, we need to combine green and growth.

The bad news is that nobody knows what "green growth" is. The term has risen to stardom despite a very fragile fact base and almost no academic understanding of how, e.g., reducing emissions of CO2 can actually create jobs and additional activity in the economy. And that is a very dangerous situation. Without firm definitions and a body of evidence to support policies and investments, there is a great deal of risk that green growth will not happen. It will be too easy to argue against.

In my view successful and sustained economic growth is almost always based on a mix of ambitious, local entrepreneurs and investment by national or international firms.

In any effort to build a successful industry cluster, there are distinct roles for both larger, established firms and entrepreneurial start-ups.

In any jurisdiction, only a very small percentage of small start-up firms will every break out and become global leaders in their industry. Determining how a cadre of these ambitious entrepreneurs can be fostered in a specific area is the holy grail of economic development.

An interesting report published this week by the World Economic Forum sheds some light on the factors that drive successful entrepreneurship. The report studied evidence from 110 surveys in 22 different countries.

So often people ask me, “How does research get out in the world?” When that question comes around, to me it means that someone is not asking how best to write her next academic paper. Rather, generally someone seems to be interested in how innovations can see the light of day in industry. On campus, we have a number of resources that students and faculty can take advantage of: the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship which bridges the academic and business world at the Robert H. Smith School of Business; the Maryland Industrial Partnership which funds partnerships with industry; the Technology Advancement Program which offers resources for developing companies.

Even startup incubators have to reinvent themselves from time to time, as ably demonstrated by the new abi Innovation Incubator in Manchester, NH. It seeks to attract new talent. For inspiration, and wall decoration in its old mill space, the incubator's operators tapped a deep local well of wise words from some sage local innovators.

First established in 1997, the Manchester incubator was recently renovated and its business mission fine tuned to the innovation exigencies of today.

In a story published this week by the New Hampshire Business Review, incubabator vice president of strategic initiatives and entrepreneur-in-residence Jamie Coughlin said he hopes the reinvented incubator will become the "home for all things startup and innovation" in the state.

It’s happened to all of us: Something we do one way is suddenly made more effective by an innovation. It could be a technology like webinars that changes the way we learn and train, or a new approach like open floor-plan offices that help ideas spread in a flatter corporate structure. In the field of global development there are many transformative innovations underway, from mhealth to microfinance.

These and other innovations may hold the keys to truly transformative change. That’s why as a community that cares about making the world a better place, it’s important we incentivize and celebrate innovation as a means to generate faster and more effective change for people around the world.

It’s in that light that we at Devex are delighted to present the Top 40 Development Innovators. At the core of this initiative is a survey of aid workers and international development professionals designed to recognize the most innovative of the world’s leading international development organizations. Today, the survey is complete and the results are in!

What happens when you have the right stuff at the wrong time?

Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week, and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in June — and all the seats are spoken for.

“Morale is pretty low,” said Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”

A term I’m hearing more and more these days is “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to create and manage a venture to make social change.

On the surface, this sounds like entrepreneurs who want to build a non-profit organization. Yet the term seems to be more often associated with people whose work is targeted toward long-term socio-economic change. Think Margaret Sanger (birth control) or Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent), as opposed to the leaders of the Cancer Society or Goodwill Industries.

Whether the objective is to generate profits or social capital, the common element for all entrepreneurs is the recognition that there is a problem which needs solving, or there is an opportunity to improve the status quo.

As an ever greater number of foreign companies are investing in the Russian innovation and new technology sector, economic modernization was central on the agenda of the Russian Business Week Forum and the Global Innovation Partnership Forum which took place in Moscow this week.

Russia’s state-run companies, often criticized for being slow in Russia and abroad, lead in innovation spending. Nearly one third of non-budgetary financing for research and design projects is channeled to state-run corporations, such as Gazprom, Russian Railways and United Aircraft Building Corporation. Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said this as he addressed the Russian Business Week Forum in Moscow.

A new documentary film takes a look at the lives of the original rat pack of venture capitalists including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine.

George Doriot, the father of venture capitalism, liked to quip "Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete." Doriot died in 1987, but his ideas about venture funding can be seen to this day; Intel, Apple, and Cisco (to name a few) are some of the first companies to be funded by venture capitalists. The VCs that followed in his footsteps—including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine—have, through their work, trailblazed a path of American innovation.

Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year's TIME 100

YOU bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel and rented the car. But have you packed the right credit card?

As credit card companies vie for a favored position in customers’ wallets, they’re pitching new travel enticements, from waiving foreign transaction fees that can add up to 3 percent to your purchases abroad to picking up fees for checked baggage. Earlier this month, for example, American Express did away with the 2.7 percent foreign transaction fees on international purchases for Platinum Card holders, and added two new travel benefits — Priority Pass Select airport lounge access in more than 300 cities worldwide and free membership to Global Entry, which offers expedited security clearance for pre-approved travelers entering the United States.

Stephen Daze can't understand why teaching young people about starting and owning a business isn't a bigger priority in Ottawa's schools. We want our children to grow up to be self-sufficient, independent and ready for the challenges of tomorrow's economy. And studies show many kids are interested in owning their own business. So shouldn't they learn about entrepreneurship in the classroom?

"Other places get it," says Daze, OCRI's executive director for entrepreneurship and talent.

"They teach entrepreneurship as a life skill."

In Canada, he says, business isn't really part of the curriculum, apart from a bit of talk in economics class about the role of big industry. But the majority of jobs being created today are in small and medium-sized companies, not giant manufacturers. For some reason, we aren't introducing students to the intricacies of small business.

The exponentially increasing amount of digital information, along with new challenges in storing valuable data and massive datasets, are changing the architecture of today’s newest supercomputers as well as how researchers will use them to accelerate scientific discovery, said Michael Norman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

In a presentation during the 3rd Annual La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit this week, Norman said that the amount of digital data generated just by instruments such as DNA sequencers, cameras, telescopes, and MRIs is now doubling every 18 months.

Face reality. As an entrepreneur, you should assume none of your customers is like you, yet I find that most entrepreneurs assume just the opposite. Customers don’t have your technical base, the passion, and interest in your solution. In fact, even if they did, they couldn’t find you in the clutter. An underrated portion of every startup effort must be about communication and marketing.

By habit, people market to customers like themselves, because they know what they like and need. The challenge is attracting customers not like you, since that isn’t so intuitive. Kelly McDonald, who runs a top ad agency, takes on this challenge in “How to Market to People Not Like You.”

Many states have begun calling for tests of student creativity. Massachusetts has already mandated such tests, and the Governor of California has demanded similar tests for his state's students. (1) The only reason to test for creativity in schools is to teach it and to determine how well it is being taught. But can creativity be taught? Can creative outcomes be mandated in the classroom? We don't think so....

Whoa! Did we just say creativity can't be taught?! Yes, we did!

How can we write a blog about creativity and not believe that it can be taught?

It used to be so easy to define what a book was: a collection of printed pages bound inside a cover (hard or soft) that you could place on a shelf in your library, or in a store. Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books — like the recent opus written by author John Krakauer, published through a new service called Byliner — and a whole series of ongoing attempts to reimagine the entire industry of writing and selling books. If you’re an author, it’s a time of incredible chaos, but also incredible opportunity.

If you’re an early stage venture capitalist or angel investor there is no time like the present to declare a bubble, say valuations are out of control and predict the demise of the tech industry in the very near future. Since they’re in the business of buying low and selling high, any angle that suggests that the buy price should be even lower sounds great to them.

If there’s any evidence of said bubble all the press will eat it up. Mostly because they were out buying Internet stocks in 2000 instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the fairly obvious signals that the Nasdaq was about to implode. They won’t get caught with their pants down and their hand out again. Declare a bubble early and declare it often.