Nominations are now open for the 2015 Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program. Communities large and small, urban and rural, in developing and industrialized nations are all invited to apply. Nominations are accepted from local governments, institutions, companies, non-profit organizations, national government agencies and consular offices. There is no cost to submit a nomination. On average, the Intelligent Community Forum tracks the progress of 400 communities each year through its own research as well as nominations submitted by communities. 

Click here for more information on the Awards Program and to download a nomination form.

Corporate committees, brainstorming sessions, suggestion boxes: These rarely produce free-thinking innovation. All too often, they’re the places where good ideas go to die.

But with competition and the pace of change only expected to turn feverish in the coming years across industries, organizations need to be able to encourage innovation to survive.

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You depend on your team. So when a key staff member tells you that they are considering moving on, it's usually an unexpected (and unwanted) surprise. We asked eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) what questions they should ask in this situation. Here's what they had to say:

What Are You Not Getting Here?

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It’s classic productivity advice: Match your most important work to your most productive hours. If you do that, you’ll get a lot more done.

But this advice assumes you know when your most productive hours are. Many people don’t, says Daniel Gold, a productivity specialist and author of Evernote: The Unofficial Guide to Capturing Everything and Getting Things Done, among other life management books. “We’re too often stuck without thinking about the bigger picture,” he says. If you’re constantly in reactive mode, or your life features irregular hours or travel, you may not be familiar with your own internal rhythms. Getting there is “really just about taking that uncomfortable step inwards,” he says. Here are strategies for paying attention.

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How do we persuade more British businesses to tap into potentially lucrative export markets overseas? 

The official government target is for Britain’s exports to double to £1 trillion a year by 2020 – but that currently looks to be a very ambitious objective.

In fact, research published in July by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) suggests the proportion of British businesses selling products and services overseas has remained more or less constant over the past four years, at around 50 per cent. Moreover, of those businesses not currently exporting, just 2 per cent said they intended to begin doing so over the next 12 months.

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I am a non-technical founder, a growth hacker (if you insist on giving me a technical name). I have spent last few weeks interviewing candidates for a tech lead position at Internshala. As difficult as it is to find good technology talent; you, a prospective candidate, can help me a great deal (and also dramatically improve your chances of making the cut) if you keep in mind the following things -

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People need time to innovate, but corporations tend to "tax" employees with time-wasting bureaucracy. As reported in The Economist, clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity.

"Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague."

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It turns out that people who are good at raising money through crowdfunding campaigns are also pretty good at raising money from venture capitalists.

Hardware projects that have raised at least $100,000 through Kickstarter or Indiegogo have gone on to raise $321 million from venture capitalists, according to a report published on Monday by research firm CB Insights. About 9 percent of the 443 projects that reach the $100,000 threshold on the crowdfunding platforms have raised venture capital, too.

Image: Photograph by Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg - Oculus VR attracted $91 million in Venture capitalist funding before being bought by Facebook for $2 billion 

Most leaders want their organizations to be more innovative. Yet, they often undermine that innovativeness by running them as command and control entities rather than incubators for creativity and ideas.

Innovation is regularly sabotaged in four common ways, and it’s up to a learning leader to avoid falling into the traps.

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When you tell people you work at home, it's usually one of two reactions: "Oh, I'd love to be able to work in my PJs. It'd be so much less distracting." Or: "I could never. I'd watch TV and do laundry all day." The past 8 years, on and off, my home office has been my primary one, my cell phone the tether to coworkers near and far, and the video conference my main meeting room.

Dear MBA Student,

Congrats on beginning your journey. My time at The Stanford Graduate School of Business were 2 of the best years of my life. More than anything, I learned how to think bigger and diversify my friendships.

Below are my thoughts as a 2007 Stanford GSB graduate. Let me know what you think.

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What did the "entrepreneurial dream" look like to you before you started, and what is the reality today? Would you say it is similar to what you expected, or completely different?

Answer by Jason M. Lemkin, cofounder/CEO of EchoSign, cofounder of NanoGram Devices, vice president of NeoPhotonics, senior director of BabyCenter.

Being a founder/CEO is nothing like you think it is when you watch as "just" part of the management team. You think it's about making tough calls and making key decisions every day, every week, every month. It is.

But what it's really about is 24/7/365 accountability — in a way you have never experienced before.

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You just can't keep your eyes off this guy.

California native Gentry Stein displayed his mesmerizing yo-yo skills at the C3yoyodesign 2014 World Yo-Yo Contest in Prague, Czech Republic on August 9.

You won't find anyone walking the dog here.

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In my experience, inventors and technologists aren’t interested or aren’t very good at building a business, and entrepreneurs aren’t usually good scientists. These people need to find each other, and can jointly make a great team for a new startup. Without the synergy, companies like Apple might never have gotten off the ground.

This is a question that haunts many entrepreneurs. Some scoff at the idea, claiming that an entrepreneur doesn’t need an MBA, while others see tremendous opportunity for learning business fundamentals, building networks, and starting a company in a supportive environment.

The truth is, the answer to this question will be entirely personal—only you can know if business school is right for you. What I can do is offer 3 questions that will help you figure out the correct answer for you.

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As you might have expected, the financial condition of private companies have changed substantially over the past twelve years, as the country experienced the end of a housing boom; a financial crisis that nearly took down Wall Street; the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression; and five years of one of the country’s weakest economic recoveries. But you might be surprised to learn how those financials have shifted. The changes aren’t all as one might have predicted.

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Systems to manage the wealth of knowledge inside companies can help junior staff get a leg up in career advancement.

Knowledge management systems help connect workers to knowledge and other people regardless of physical distance.  They are wide-ranging and can vary from custom-designed knowledge repositories to web-based systems which comprise discussion forums, file sharing and organisation charts, to name but a few features.

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HYDERABAD: Telangana special chief secretary (industries and commerce) K Pradeep Chandra on Saturday said that large manufacturing companies must partner with micro and small manufacturing enterprises to strengthen innovation ecosystem in the manufacturing sector.

"The Japanese system of 'Just in Time Delivery' (JITD) was successful by involving vendors and service providers in the innovation value chain by the larger manufacturing companies. Similar mechanisms should be worked out in our state to integrate MSME's in the value chain of growth in manufacturing sector", Chandra said, while addressing a conference on manufacturing sector — 'Man'Exe 2014 — organised by CII here.

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The answers Bert Vogelstein needed and feared were in the blood sample. 

Vogelstein is among the most highly cited scientists in the world. He was described, in the 1980s, as having broken into “the cockpit of cancer” after he and coworkers at Johns Hopkins University showed for the first time exactly how a series of DNA mutations, adding up silently over decades, turn cells cancerous. Damaged DNA, he helped prove, is the cause of cancer.

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Today, the American Heart Association has launched the Chicago Open Innovation Challenge, a crowdfunding competition to uncover new innovative digital health tools to prevent or manage heart disease and stroke. The top three finalists will receive grants from the American Heart Association totaling $25,000 and a chance to present at the Heart Innovation Forum in Chicago on November 14, 2014. Each award winner will be featured on healthcare crowdfunding platform MedStartr.