All of us who have experienced the joys of parenthood have passed through the adolescent years, when our children refuse to accept advice. Most teenagers pass through this stage and go back to being able to learn. Sadly, when it comes to innovation policy, both Ottawa and the leaders of our main political parties have never outgrown their adolescent phase.

PARTICIPATE The Roundtable Forum is a two-day, "Invitation Only" event featuring influential panelists and interactive discussions surrounding the innovative public-private partnerships with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at Montgomery County's planned LifeSci VillageTM biomedical cluster adjoining the U.S. FDA Headquarters in White Oak, Maryland.

LEARN LifeSci VillageTM is planned to be an international epicenter for advancing global health and biomedical innovations, including a biomedical university consortium campus for up to 16 world renowned medical universities, researchers, patient advocacy groups, foundations, and private biomedical and biotechnological enterprises. For more information about the LifeSci VillageTM and U.S. FDA Headquarters consolidation in White Oak, MD, contact Ayana Lambert at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Cities around the world are facing strains caused by massive population and economic shifts. One hundred million people are moving to cities every year and nearly 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to be urban by 2050. The top 100 cities in the world will generate 35 percent of global economic growth over the next 10 years.

But it’s clear that economic growth and opportunity won’t automatically be spread evenly across cities like peanut butter – it’s a competition and those cities that positon themselves for growth will emerge the strongest. We looked at this in a study we conducted with The Economist Intelligence Unit. There are key factors that make a city competitive, such as the strength of its government institutions, infrastructure, financial maturity, human capital and cultural institutions.

Image: Ed Skyler - Ed is executive VP of global public affairs at Citi and oversees the Citi Foundation, an underwriter for City Accelerator.

If you're on the job hunt, consider a position in the field of technology. Although jobs in technology don't pay as well as those in health care, tech firms are still paying their employees competitively.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com

In-house strategy and consulting groups are growing in popularity, supplementing and increasingly winning business from traditional consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company. Today, many high-profile companies—Cisco, Google, IBM, Samsung, Siemens, Disney, Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank, to name a few—contain such roving consulting groups to help solve the most critical strategy and operations problems throughout the business. Internal consulting groups have a number of advantages over external firms, including a company-wide perspective, continuity into implementation, attraction of top talent to the company, higher levels of confidentiality, and greater cost-effectiveness. But building an internal consulting group is an unprecedented endeavor for many companies, and because best practices have yet to spread widely, internal consulting groups vary greatly in how they operate and the business impacts they are able to achieve.

You know that feeling you get when you’re new? The anxiety and general awkwardness of being in an unfamiliar setting? Well, it turns out we’re hardwired to respond that way in new situations. In fact, that feeling of alert was something that used to protect us.

"During the hunter-gatherer days, encountering a stranger usually occurred when you were moving into another tribe’s territory, and that was stressful and potentially dangerous," says Keith Rollag, associate professor of organizational behavior at Babson College and author of What to Do When You’re New: How to Be Confident, Comfortable, and Successful in New Situations.

Starting this month, global professional-services firm Accenture will add its name to a growing list of organizations including GE and Deloitte that are ending their annual performance review and ranking systems.

David Brennan, general manager of Achievers, a firm that helps businesses reward and recognize their staffs, tells Fast Company, "There’s a growing understanding within the HR industry that the annual performance review just isn’t a good way to manage people or boost performance."

The spotlight is usually on the most active VCs leading massive rounds across the board. But what about those relatively unsung heroes that fill the pre-Series A funding gap where others are too cautious?

We had a chat with Michael Blakey, a Singapore-based angel investor of 16 years, to learn more about the do’s and don’ts of fundraising and leg work startups should do before asking for money.

Peter Thiel knows a promising tech startup when he sees one. The investor was the first outside investor in Facebook. But does he have the same touch in biotech?

The prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s investment fund has put its largest ever bet on a biotech company called Stemcentrx, a private and all-but-unheard-of San Francisco company developing cancer drugs that debuted this week with a spectacular valuation worth billions (see “Peter Thiel Backs Biotech ‘Unicorn’ Fighting Cancer Stem Cells”).

Image: Peter Thiel

Global mobile trade body, Mobile Ecosystem Forum, has revealed the finalists for the 12th annual Meffys – the international awards for recognising commercial success and rewarding innovation across the mobile ecosystem.

After two years in Silicon Valley, the Meffys return to the UK – highlighting London’s world-class tech city and mobile credentials. The competition has attracted entries from over 30 countries across 15 award categories that encompass Innovation, Market and Sector Awards.

Many entrepreneurs begin a business by brainstorming an idea with their spouse or a professional colleague. In the idea stage, it is easy for the entrepreneur to continue working at a salaried job while developing the idea. Increasingly, a startup can begin with a few online applications, the development of a database or interface and evangelism on the projected value that an application or product will have in the market. The web has made this aspect of developing an idea much more cost effective than decades past where most individuals lacked coding skills and didn’t have access to open source tools or scalable platforms.

In my years of advising startups and occasional investing, I’ve seen many great ideas start and fail, but the right team always seems to make good things happen, even without the ultimate idea. That’s why investors say they invest in people (bet on the jockey, not the horse), rather than the idea. Yet every entrepreneur I meet wants to talk about the idea, and rarely mentions the team.

Our obsession with sneakers is nothing new. Since the inception of the Chuck Taylor in 1917, sneakers have been a part of the American consciousness. 

They're now more popular — as well as more adventurous and varied — than ever before. Pop Chart Lab, a two-person collaboration between a graphic designer and a book editor, has decided to distill over 98 years of sneaker history into the 134 most important styles, all rendered in a beautiful graphic.

Creative England has launched a new £1m fund to support creative industry “hotspots” in film, television, games and digital media outside of London.

It’s now seeking public and private companies and organisations to work to develop support programmes around specific industry areas, to invest directly into creative businesses in their region.

U.S. technology companies face a tough choice when it comes to doing business in China: Access to the country’s immense market increasingly requires helping local companies upgrade their skills, leading to deals that could turn erstwhile partners into entrenched competitors.

Image: Dell’s founder Michael Dell appeared at an event in Shanghai on Thursday with Kingsoft Chairman Lei Jun to launch their collaboration. PHOTO: PR NEWSWIRE ASIA

Whatever happened to Sony? Once as cool and innovative as Apple and Google, Sony now ranks as No. 478 on the Forbes list of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies. If you heard someone describe himself as “a Sony kind of person,” you’d assume he was kidding or had just arrived from 1981 in a time machine.

The ultimate nightmare for critics of the Iran nuclear deal being debated in Congress is that somehow, despite the agreement and all its built-in safeguards, Iran will still manage to design and build a nuclear weapon, escaping detection until a large city is consumed by nuclear fire.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Where is the growth in the UK’s creative economy coming from? The answer is everywhere.

Recently-published government figures on employment show that between 2011 and 2014 the creative economy increased its share of all jobs in every region and devolved nation of the UK.

This momentum helped power the creative economy – the sum total of all jobs in the creative industries plus creative occupations in other sectors – to add 200,000 new jobs in 2014, a growth rate of more than three times the average reported for the UK economy across all industries.

San Francisco and Boston accounts for the most investment in digital health and the largest volume of deals. But research from The Brookings Institution shows another way to size up digital health investment beyond these two bookends by looking at the proportion of VC money in metropolitan areas going to digital health.

Image: http://medcitynews.com 

China venture investment may look a lot different for the second half of the year compared to the roaring first half 2015. Investments in Chinese startups soared to $15.3 billion in the first six months of 2015, 91% of the total $16.2 billion for the full year 2014. In the second quarter of 2015, the totals exceeded $8 billion for the first time ever in one quarter alone. All this is not to dismiss that China investment hovered around only $5 billion in 2013 and 2012.