There are 4633 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. This weekend I had dinner with one of them—a friend who’s now the president of Philadelphia University. He’s working hard to reinvent the school into a model for 21st century professional education.

The Silo Career Track

One of the problems in business today is that college graduates trained in a single professional discipline (i.e. design, engineering or business) end up graduating as domain experts but with little experience working across multiple disciplines.

What we need for 21st century business development is entrepreneurial fusion, not entrepreneurial fission. This is the view of Martin Curley (Intel’s Global Director of Innovation), Piero Formica (Founder of the International Entrepreneurship Academy) and Vincenzo Nicolò (President of the Technical Board of the Italian Association of Machine Tool Builders). Writing in the February issue of Industry and Higher Education, Curley, Formica and Nicolò argue in favour of a new approach, which they characterize as the ‘experimental business laboratory’. They contend that established methods of business incubation attempt to produce entrepreneurial ‘energy’ through a process of fission, ‘creating a division between aspiring entrepreneurs’ demands for, and the supply of support and services’.  For Curley, Formica and Nicolò, this is the old world. ‘The concept of nuclear fusion,’ they say, ‘is useful as a metaphor for the type of businesses that must be launched in the future. As with fusion, in which there are high releases of energy with potentially less toxic waste produced than from nuclear fission, the world needs new kinds of businesses that optimize not only cost and market efficiency and effectiveness but also ecological and resource efficiency.’ For more details, see http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ip/ihe/2011/00000025/00000001/art00002.

Rich Bendis is proud to serve on the International Advisory  Board of industry & Higher Education

Back in the early 1990s, while most of us were still trying to wrap our heads around this new thing called the internet (don’t miss this amusing bit), NPR’s Science Friday started pushing the envelope and hosting the first internet-based radio talk show. This marked the first time that listeners could “phone into” a program via the web and talk together – in this case about the creative uses of this emerging technology. The broadcast, which singlehandedly brought the internet to a crawl, has now resurfaced online. You can listen below (or here).

Cotton Gin

On March 14, 1794, Eli Whitney patented his invention, the cotton gin (“gin” being short for engine). The machine succeeded in making the growing of cotton profitable for farmers in the south by speeding up the separation of the cotton bolls (the fluffy part) from the seeds.

The unforeseen side effect of Whitney’s invention was that it made Southerners want to grow more cotton on larger plantations, and thus, bring more African slaves in to pick it. Between 1790 and 1808, when it became illegal to import African slaves, 80,000 slaves were brought to the American South.

New Geography of Global Innovation: A report from the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute says student interest in science & engineering (S&E ) is low in G-7 countries, suggesting that these markets are likely to have difficulty replacing an ageing cohort of native-born scientists and engineers.

The G-7 or Group of Seven countries are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States.

The report says while the United States and Japan remain leaders in innovation, increased competition from growth markets, notably China, suggests a changing landscape. Research and development (R&D) spending in Asia surpassed EU levels in 2005, and is likely to overtake US levels in the next five years, thanks primarily to striking growth in R&D investment in China. R&D investment is driven largely by the corporate sector, which finances more than two-thirds of total R&D spending in many countries.

The nation's top economics bloggers see a bit of hope on the horizon in 2011, according to a new Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation survey released today. Although 77 percent continue to describe the economy's overall condition as "mixed," "facing recession," or "in recession," 23 percent now believe the economy is "strong and growing" or "strong with uncertain growth" -- an increase from last quarter.

Replacing both knees in one surgery, or simultaneous total knee replacement (TKR) was associated with significantly fewer prosthetic joint infections as well as other revision knee operations within one year after surgery, compared with total knee replacements performed in two separate procedures. However, simultaneous replacement was associated with a moderately higher risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes within 30 days, according to a study presented today at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

Do you want to start a business or fund a creative venture but are hobbled by the current economy? Have you been turned down by venture capitalists who believe your idea is not scientific enough or won’t be the next Facebook?

No fear - a new form of funding is on the rise, driven in part by the continuing ascent of social networking and possibly by the work ethic
generated by the software open source movement.

Scale matters in technology transfer and commercialisation – to secure enough research funding to build a rich patent portfolio; provide access the depth and variety of expertise to engage corporate partners, and develop leading edge intellectual property that will attract venture capital partners.

But scale of course implies distance, and this works against the other prime requirement of technology transfer and commercialisation, which is intimate knowledge of the science, the expertise of the researchers, and the ambitions and requirements of spin-out companies.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Startup America Partnership, the private sector alliance launched at the White House on January 31st to celebrate and accelerate entrepreneurship, announced the appointment of Timothy “Scott” Case as Chief Executive Officer.

“Whether starting and growing entrepreneurial companies like Priceline, or scaling critically important public-private partnerships like Malaria No More, Scott has demonstrated a unique ability to bring innovative ideas to life," said Steve Case , chairman of the Startup America Partnership. "I can think of no one better suited to lead the Startup America Partnership.”

So you've got a great product that’s gone from an idea on a cocktail napkin to the beginnings of something that could be bigger than sliced bread. But you’ll be stuck in neutral for quite awhile unless you can secure the necessary capital to keep things running. For startups and early stage companies, success and failure boils down to whether you can intrigue a potential investor in the time it takes to ride an elevator from the lobby to the executive suite.

The elevator pitch is an essential tool to grab the attention of venture capitalists, and no one knows that better than presentation coach Steve Bowman. Founder of BizClarity, a consulting firm headquartered in Media, Bowman has earned the reputation of "The Pitch Doctor," going beyond presentation deliveries and PowerPoint slides and delving deep into content to find and compose his client’s core message.

What do you do when colleagues in your university laboratory complain that you are taking up valuable research space to run a business and hampering their PhD work?

Answer: Bring in the beer and explain what you are doing.

Above all, make sure the university president supports academic enterprise. Such lab rivalries are not uncommon, and can hinder campus start-ups, according to students attending a meeting earlier this month hosted by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The goal was to gather input from young entrepreneurs on encouraging technological innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe.

An artificial heart and its lightweight power drive. A better airline for Brazil. Chocolate from Madagascar and a soccer shirt made of plastic water bottles. A fashion leader escaping its pattern, a smelter, and that little coupon startup in Chicago that's suddenly worth billions. All this from one simple word: innovation.

The 50 companies on our 2011 list have chosen a unique path. Today's business landscape is littered with heritage companies whose CEOs battle their industry's broken model with inertia, layoffs, lawsuits -- anything that squeezes pennies and delays the inevitable. How many of these companies will be dominant in 2025? Few.

It’s that time of year again. The time when companies descend on Stanford, Berkeley and other college campuses across the country to try and recruit top students as summer interns.

Most startup founders recognize that interns can be a critical resource for making new hires and getting part-time help at a discount. Startups, with their small bankroll and even smaller brand recognition, have to compete for the best talent with the likes of Google and Facebook who offer large hourly salaries, a great name on a resume, and access all summer to free beer and a sushi bar.

The machines are taking over! IBM’s Watson supercomputer soundly defeated its human opponents in the final round of man vs. machine on the Jeopardy TV show.

The computer defeated Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, after a three-night tournament that drew lots of chatter about the progress of artificial intelligence. It’s a testament to the talented human engineers at IBM who figured out how to make a machine that could beat a human at the popular TV game show.

Does higher productivity destroy jobs? Sometimes, but only in the very short term, considering US economic performance over the past 80 years. In fact, every ten-year rolling period but one since 1929 has seen increases in both US productivity and employment. Even on a rolling annual basis, 69 percent of periods have delivered both productivity and jobs growth (Exhibit 1). Over the long term, apparently, it’s a fallacy to suggest that there’s a trade-off between unemployment and productivity. These are among the key findings of the latest report from the McKinsey Global Institute, Growth and renewal in the United States: Retooling America’s economic engine.

In this clip, Square and Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey shares how Twitter came into existence, while he was working at Odeo, a consumer podcasting company. Dorsey joined Odeo to gain a greater understanding of the consumer Internet market, but eventually learned that few people at the company, including him, were interested in podcasting. Dorsey says the Twitter project began at Odeo, when at the company's urging for new ideas, he suggested the concept that would become Twitter.

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann shares a story to illustrate how innovation occurs in the field of biotechnology. She describes the development of an innovative cancer drug at Genentech, even in the face of great skepticism, and the team effort it took to gain regulatory approval.

These are indeed exciting times for HR and OD practitioners and the organizations they serve because the business and socioeconomic implications of managing talent have never been so well understood, measureable, or vital. There are immense opportunities for HR and OD professionals to collaborate and actually lead the formulation and execution of winning talent management strategies in their organizations. The demand for strategy-based talent management has never been greater. Senior management, boards of directors, analysts, and investors often factor a company’s talent management maturity and the quality of its workforce into the valuation equation. Considering that staff costs including salaries and benefits comprise a very large percentage of most companies’ overall spending, it is vitally important to run talent management like a business in order to drive maximum return on investment in people.

In this article we focus more on what the actual work is rather than who should deliver it. The fact is that who actu- ally has responsibility for the different elements of talent management varies from organization to organization. By focusing on the work to be done or HR and OD domains, it is our hope that business and HR and OD leaders will have a guide to help them define specific roles, responsibilities and structures that best suit and leverage their organizations’ values, vision, mission, and strategy. Our goals for this article are to:

1.    Examine examples of current role confusion and overlap between HR and OD practitioners when it comes to practicing talent management.
2.    Review the strong business case for talent management and position it as the only potential sustainable competitive advantage that a company can develop.
3.    Explore opportunities for HR and OD to collaborate and use their valuable interdependencies and complimentary skill sets, knowledge, and roles to leverage their unique purview of the whole organization and have impact at the whole system level. We propose a structure to more clearly define the separate domains of HR and OD work and the area of overlap we call integrated talent management.
4.    Introduce a conceptual yet practical model of integrated talent management that helps HR, OD, and others work together more effectively and realize synergies created by their complementary strengths and capabilities.

HR + OD = Integrated Talent Management (Download the PDF)