Culture.  That’s a word I’ve heard a lot over the past two days here in Rio de Janeiro at the US-Brazil Innovation Summit.  But what does it mean?  And how does culture actually cause innovation?

The rules of innovation and production at work

I attend my share of conferences, and sometimes I notice trends.  This time, I observed a sea change: the willingness to speak openly about culture as a driver of innovation.  A few years ago, talking about the economic role of culture might have gotten someone in trouble as an arrogant American.  Now, it’s a consensus opinion. That’s a huge shift.

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Taiwan's government plans to put more resources into domestic start-up companies to help them grow faster in the rapidly changing business environment, Deputy Economics Minister Duh Tyzz-jiun said yesterday.

The government now wants to help start-ups tap into the supply chain of large global companies in three to six months through an incubation accelerator platform, rather than the three to five years typically needed using a more traditional approach, Duh said.

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Prepare for battle by laying down your NDA.

That would be my advice to you as you enter the game to raise capital for your startup.

Look everywhere and you’ll see a vast sea of first time entrepreneurs dance with smiles on their face in the courtship game called “we need money to start or grow our business”.

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Detroit may have just filed bankruptcy, but the city's young people have an unprecedented opportunity to make things better. The Challenge Detroit fellowship program is one of the initiatives trying to draw young professionals back to the city.

Jason Zogg lives on the 21st floor of a Mies van der Rohe apartment building in Lafayette Park, one of Detroit's best neighborhoods. He pays $800 a month in rent and has a free parking space.

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Scientists have good news for all the older adults who occasionally forget why they walked into a room - and panic that they are getting Alzheimer's disease.

Not only is age-related memory loss a syndrome in its own right and completely unrelated to that dread disease, but unlike Alzheimer's it may be reversible or even preventable, researchers led by a Nobel laureate said in a study published on Wednesday.

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The heroes of entrepreneurship are often college-drop outs who left school to create billion dollar fortunes – think of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg. Such is the power of this college drop-out archetype that some prominent members of the entrepreneurial community have actively encouraged potential entrepreneurs to not go to college at all.  What should we make of the idea of the entrepreneurial prodigy?  Is it better to found a company as a fresh-faced drop-out or as an experienced (and maybe older) individual?

The competitor who could threaten your company's livelihood or industry's relevance 10 years from now might not even exist today. That hard truth about the pace and scale of change in technology came from Jim Carroll, author and futurist. Carroll delivered the opening address at the Tech Theater presentation forum presented as part of UBM Canon's collocated advanced technologies shows at Chicago's McCormick Place, including PLASTEC Midwest, Design & Manufacturing Midwest, ATX Midwest, Pack Zone, Quality Expo, and MD&M Chicago.

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Wearable technology is still more hype than bona fide trend, but that hasn't slowed down companies around the world who desperately want to know what makes people want to slap gadgets on their bodies. Some advice from the folks who have actually had hits in this space might be in order.

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Jeff Reid is a name well recognized by educators and the D.C. Tech community alike. As the Founding Director of the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative, Reid took the time to engage with the local tech crowd prior to launching a brand new entrepreneurship program fostering student innovation. He recognized what invaluable assets startup founders are to education institutions, and took advantage of the resources at his fingertips. It seems like a natural connection to make – a university working side-by-side with the burgeoning startup community  – but as it turns out, most schools nationwide tend to forget about how beneficial local up-and-coming businesses are to universities. Georgetown, however, certainly has not.

So, you know when you know. That is, you know when it’s time to move on to better things for your business, whether that means finding a stronger vendor, hiring a new employee (and letting go of the old one) or even firing a client (gulp!).

But often we hang on far too long out of fear, worry and plain old procrastination. Today, I’ve got your back. Because there are three terrible reasons to avoid change and two great ones that you need to remember when it’s time to let go.

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The President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of International Business Machines (IBM), Ms. Virginia Ginny Rometty,  said  the company had concluded arrangements to establish two software incubation centres in Lagos and Calabar, by the  first quarter of 2014.

Rometty made the disclosure in Abuja while she led the company’s delegation on a courtesy visit to the Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson.

Being pregnant or a new mother may be a tough time to raise money for your entrepreneurial venture, but Diana Lovett, Co-Founder Cissé Trading Company proves that with the right attitude and by targeting the right angels, it can be done.

Cissé (pronounced “see-say”) is a new line of gourmet baking and hot cocoa mixes. It buys organic cocoa from small-production cocoa growers in the Dominican Republic at a fair price. You can find its products at more than 400 retail locations, including many Whole Foods, Fairway, Kings, and other supermarkets. Cissé’s hot cocoa was chosen by Epicurious for its gift guide and won “Best New Product” at the Specialty Coffee Association show. I’ve tasted their cake and it’s scrumptious.

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The New York Times Co. is going to invest in early-stage media startups through its incubator, timeSpace.

An experimental program within the newspaper company, timeSpace provided for three startups to spend the past four months collaborating with Times staffers and receiving crucial insight into the news industry and feedback as they developed their products.

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We are drawn to those who echo what it is we already believe. We get a dopamine rush when we are presented with confirming data similar to what we get when we eat chocolate or fall in love. On Facebook we defriend those with different political views to our own. On Twitter we follow people just like us.

Yet a vast body of research now points to the import of contemplating diverse, dissenting views. Not just in terms of making us more rounded individuals but in terms of making us smarter decision-makers.

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How important is innovation these days? Increasingly important, if one goes by the frequency of the word appearing during earnings calls that publicly traded companies have with investment analysts. In 2008, the word appeared 1,733 times in earnings calls for 435 large publicly traded companies. That's an average of about four mentions per company (Starbucks topped the list with 139 mentions). In the last four quarters where full data are available, the total was 3,299, or about 7.5 mentions per company (Nike, recently named the world's most innovative company, topped the list with 239 mentions).

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College application essays? They’re all the same. That’s according to Rick Clark, the head of admissions at Georgia Tech, who kicks off this past weekend’s episode of This American Life by, in part, mocking the tired trope of “idealistic teenager goes to Central America to help the people there but becomes transformed by the experience.” Clark, however, is self-aware enough to realize that the colleges are equally bad: the glossy brochures they send out to high school students, trying to attract their application fees if not their tuition checks, are all exactly the same in virtually every respect.

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State officials have issued a call for applications to be investment manager of the Wisconsin-sponsored venture capital fund signed into law in July.

Questions about the request are due Sept. 20 and applications are due Oct. 17, according to the Department of Administration's request for qualifications.

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An expert panel report examining business investment in research and development acknowledged that a “disconnect” exists between Canada’s strong publicly funded research and development activities at postsecondary institutions and the country’s comparatively weak investment in industrial R&D. But it cautioned against redistributing resources from the former to the latter.

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Making a mark in a male dominated field is no more an uphill task. Four decades ago, however, the scenario was quite different. Let alone entrepreneurship, but even the thought of a woman working shoulder to shoulder with her male colleagues was a taboo.

Forget medical school or law school. These days, record numbers of high-school and college students say they aspire to be entrepreneurs. At Yale University, for example, over 20% of the undergraduates indicate that they are interested in pursuing entrepreneurship as a career. Compare that with 1980, the year I graduated from Harvard.

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