Lives could be saved and crops protected by playing sounds of growling tigers to wild elephants on their way to raid fields in India, a study reports. There have been hundreds of deaths and much crop loss in the last decade in areas where elephants come into contact with people.  

The study, published in the current edition of Biology Letters, looked at the night time behaviour of elephants, and particularly their reaction to 'aggressive' tiger and leopard growls, in villages bordering two animal reserves in the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala.

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Science and technology based innovation and the development and support of sustainable high growth enterprises are at the heart of all leading economies. So says the introduction to this year’s Technology Incubation Conference set for next month in Riyadh. This year, the 5th such event to boost technology development in the Kingdom, will be held in conjunction with the 10th annual Technopolicy Network Conference, the first time for such an event in the Middle East.

A group of private sector players, including Google and the Omidyar Network have joined forces with governments around the world in a bid to provide cheaper internet. The grouping, which is called the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), claims to be a coalition to “lead policy and regulatory reform and spur action to drive down artificially high internet prices in developing countries”.

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Being into digital marketing isn’t just great. It’s awesome. It’s an ever evolving industry and nothing ever stays the same (especially with social media). I love what I do and have been in the digital marketing space for a couple of years, but lately, I’ve seen many “social media gurus” crowding the online scene. Social media has been trending for a couple of years now and there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of it, but please don’t give the industry a bad name.

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Why do startups fail in the B2B world?  Any number of reasons.  Today we’re going to take a look at some of the main reasons, and more importantly, what you can do about it.

The numbers are daunting.  Startup failure rates indicate 50% of small businesses are out of business within five years.

However, rather than focus on the negatives, you can learn something by looking at WHY startups fail.  As you structure your startup, you want to keep those common failure reasons in mind.  Anticipate them. Avoid them. Compensate for them.

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There is a lot of talk about the innovation ecosystem these days.

It's a cute metaphor, but recent work by my research group at Callaghan Innovation suggests the innovation ecosystem is more than just a pair of buzzwords. Nature may, in fact, have a thing or two to teach us.

To see why, think about a natural ecosystem. In a forest, for example, plants use a variety of strategies to compete for water, sunlight and nutrients.

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October 7, 2013 – PHILADELPHIA – Rich Bendis will be a featured presenter tomorrow at the 2013 International Economic Development Councils Annual Conference in Philadelphia. He will be presenting a Learning Lab focused on an Innovation Nation. The presentation will feature the editor of Innovation Daily discussing how innovation will help create tomorrow’s economy today focused on which sectors of innovation are generating the biggest impact.

Since 2007 economists from Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have issued the annual Global Innovation Index (GII), a report that sizes up the innovative capacities and results of the world's economies. This year's report includes data on 142 economies, which represents 94.9 percent of the world's population and 98.7 percent of global GDP. How does one measure something as abstract as “innovation”? The GII researchers use 84 data points ranging from political stability to ease of starting a business to the number of Wikipedia edits originating there every year.

As employers, as citizens, and as parents, executives the world over are increasingly becoming concerned about the education systems, especially post-high school, that are supposed to prepare young people for work and life. The crescendo of concern is shaping public discourse, policy debate, and private experimentation through commitments such as the $472 million made to higher education by the Gates Foundation since 2006.

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It wasn’t Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso’s fancy degree, tailored business suit, or five years of investment banking background that grew her e-commerce venture into a $128 million company, which has been courted by major potential buyers as of late.

In fact, she had none of those things at first. She launched her business as an eBay store out of her San Francisco apartment six years ago. Believe it or not, that same small business is now one of LA’s most rapidly growing tech companies.

My scrappy, serendipitous, exciting and ultimately successful adventure finding work at a startup.

It’s official: I’m a real person again. My first post-MBA paycheck is moments away from hitting my bank account, and my alarm clock is routinely set to predawn hours. I was one of those “nontraditional” types who took on the renegade post-graduation job search, and I’m happy to report that it worked out quite favorably. I am an ex-consultant who managed to break into the San Francisco startup scene.

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As divisive as the debate has been, there is a clear consensus across political parties and health-care stakeholders that if the United States is to address its unsustainable health-care costs, it must change the way it pays hospitals, physicians, and other providers. The country needs to move away from fee-for-service reimbursement, which rewards providers for tasks performed, and toward a method of payment that compensates them for successfully addressing patients’ health-care needs. These approaches are often referred to collectively as “outcomes-based payment.”

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Emerging markets are changing where and how the world does business. For the last three decades, they have been a source of low-cost but increasingly skilled labor. Their fast-growing cities are filled with millions of new and increasingly prosperous consumers, who provide a new growth market for global corporations at a time when much of the developed world faces slower growth as a result of aging. But the number of large companies from the emerging world will rise, as well, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). This powerful wave of new companies could profoundly alter long-established competitive dynamics around the world.

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It's a safe bet that this fall's crop of new medical students is the most tech-savvy cohort yet. These are young adults, after all, who've been tapping on smartphones since they were 16, surfing the Web pretty much since they could read.

But how much information technology are they actually getting their hands on in school?

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My friend and Boston Globe innovation columnist, Scott Kirsner, has launched an interesting new on-line platform for corporate innovation executives. You will want to check out and subscribe to Innovation Leader where you will find lots of food for innovation thought and where this post originally appeared.

Even people without diabetes could be at higher risk of dying from disease

High blood sugar has been linked to a greater risk of dying from several types of cancer, a potentially worrying finding for countries with growing rates of obesity.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, USA and Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea made the discovery by following more than 1.2 million Koreans for 10 years.

Strategic decisiveness is one of the most vital success attributes for leaders in every position and every industry, but few leaders understand where it comes from or how to find more of it. It is not surprising that picking one strategic direction and then decisively pursuing that direction are hallmarks of good leadership, if not boilerplate management skills. The big mystery is why these obviously important skills are still rare enough to distinguish excellent leaders from average managers.

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Ask any entrepreneur how much blood, sweat, tears (and soul) they’ve put into their startup, and you’d get an imprecise answer at best. The long hours, the lack of resources, the simultaneous product and customer-network building--not to mention fundraising--often make the venture a one-time enterprise.

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A group of creatives made a site in response to the government shutdown that tracks how much money has been collected from taxpayers since the U.S. closed up shop.

As of this writing the government has been shut down for over six days. Unsurprisingly, people are pretty upset with Congress. Some have channeled their frustration into a data-driven protest.

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Donald E. Ingber, a professor at Harvard University, has combined advanced electronics and biology to create a "lung on a chip," a breakthrough device that could safely allow precise tests of risky new medical treatments before they are tried out on humans.

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