The latest list of the world’s most highly cited researchers features few scientists based in developing countries — and none from Africa outside South Africa — exposing the North–South divide and raising questions on how the impact of science is measured.  

Thomson Reuters has issued its The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014 report based on analysis of recent citations of published papers across science.  

Gus, the dad of one of us (Rob), found his dream job. After being head of sales in a large sporting goods company for over a decade, he was ready to move up to a CEO role. A good friend ran a sizeable sports cap company, a family business, and he was looking to step aside. Gus took the job and relocated his family. Eighteen months later he was out and looking for new employment.

What happened?

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I like FullContact's approach to getting employees to take vacation: The Denver-based contact-management company offers workers $7,500 a year to help finance their vacations. The incentive seems to be working, because employees are now using a lot more of their accrued time off, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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For years, the Japanese company behind the world’s first and busiest high-speed rail system has been itching to enter the U.S. high-speed rail market, hoping to sell one of the world’s ripest passenger rail markets on its breathtakingly fast Shinkansen bullet trains.

But with Central Japan Railway’s efforts to sell high-speed trains on the U.S. coasts going nowhere, Texas has emerged as the company’s best hope for introducing its wildly successful technology to the American market.

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Success in life depends not only on what you accomplish, but also how you overcome everyday challenges. This includes the challenges many college students face during back to school season. Don’t call mom and dad yet: Here are five easy problem-solving tips you can apply to just about any challenge, big or small.

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In India, innovation became part of the national policy when the government designated the decade decade from 2011-2020 as the decade of innovation. The government also constituted a high-profile National Innovation Council (NInC) to create an innovation culture across India. Few states like Karnataka and Maharashtra created their own innovation councils. Also, the central government approved a proposal by NInC to host annual innovation competitions by MPs in their respective constituency, enabling India to get at least 545 innovators every year through this initiative. India has a lot of potential but so far the progress has been relatively, largely due to inability to recognise true innovation.

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Entrepreneurs have got it wrong about education. Traditional models of sitting in classrooms listening to lectures have passed their sell-by date. The future lies in experiential learning by doing.

“It’s like learning to ride a bike, you push the pedals, you fall, you get back up, you adjust and try again,” says Juris Ulmanis, Latvian-based co-founder of global entrepreneurship educational platform Experiential Simulations, where students hone their entrepreneurial skills by behaving like entrepreneurs.

We're often asked how we gather our financing and exit data. We wanted to share some details on The Cruncher which is responsible for our machine learning based process of extracting structured data from unstructured data sources.

I remember first reading that line in an article praising the glory of entrepreneurship and thinking how that really describes my life. I mean, no one ever would have promoted me to CEO. I wouldn’t even have been considered a good ‘diversity candidate’. (A diversity candidate, I’ve been told, is one who makes it slightly easier to tell the rest of the finalists apart.) And in addition to that pesky second X chromosome that I carry around, the typical CEO is in the neighborhood of a foot taller than me.

All things considered, it was just easier to start a company and give myself the title, although I have to admit that at the time, no one else wanted it.

How can you be successful as an entrepreneur? The question hounds the full-time, venture-backed techie and the part-time freelancer alike. Two recent studies look at the success of each group, and they bear a strikingly similar result. 

To be a successful entrepreneur, you should think like a scientist. 

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As we continue to explore the global effects of innovation, idea management, crowdsourcing, and data science, it’s beneficial to keep an eye on developments and shifting trends in regions all over the world — especially in relationship to the considerable impact innovation has on economics, politics, and emerging industries.

This year’s Global Innovation Index, an annual report that uses a wealth of data to rank world economies’ innovation capabilities and results, focuses on these aspects of innovation through the lens of human contributions on the individual and team level.

Mobile apps. Responsive design. A customized search bar.

Although it can be tempting to integrate every design trend into your website, businesses need to remember that flashy features don’t necessarily improve user experience. Here’s a look at a few trendy approaches that may or may not suit your needs, and how to evaluate and think about them.

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The financial services industry seems to be awash with programs to support financial technology (fintech) startups. Accenture and local partners have launched fintech innovation labs in New York, London and recently Asia. Level39 in Canary Wharf has its own, while SWIFT’s Innotribe is going into its sixth year with a program that will pick a winner at Sibos in Boston next month. Yodlee has a lab, which I reported on a week or two ago, and so does MasterCard, as noted in a Fortune magazine article that profiled the company as a technology firm.

Most entrepreneurs struggle with financial projections, not wanting to commit to numbers they can’t deliver, and having no clue what investors might consider reasonable. However, making no projections, or non-credible projections will get your startup marked as unfundable. I recommend a simple set of guidelines, which work for at least 80% of the business domains I see.

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Is your organization  focused on merely reducing errors or is it also promoting ways to improve insight?

Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this “experiment” were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights. – Gary Klein

Image: Cynefin Framework by Dave Snowden 

I have been to a lot of different conferences over the years. Among other things, I have been a panelist at the Brookings Institution, have facilitated discussions at the Clinton Global Initiative, and have given a TEDx talk at a high school here in Cleveland.

These events are fun and educational and have allowed me to make important connections. But occasionally I attend or even speak at conferences that don’t inspire me quite as much, dare I say even bore me a bit.

Tom Szaky knows well the meaning of the saying “Beware your dreams, for they may come true.”  With the 2004 Christmas retail season rapidly approaching, he was trying everything he could to scale up TerraCycle, a two year old venture selling liquid worm poop as fertilizer in used PET bottles. So far, he had been successful distributing through lots of smaller retailers, but had encountered a flood of rejections from the big box stores. Undaunted, Szaky finally landed a 15 minute meeting with Walmart Canada’s buyer. Instead of telling Szaky to “drop off the face of the earth” (he had been warned this was likely) Walmart Canada placed a huge order ...

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MADISON – On the 125th episode of the show, Liz Schrum speaks with Maurice Cheeks, director of the Wisconsin Innovation Network, about what's next for the organization. Tom Still argues that outsourcing is a part of doing business in the modern world, and the WisBusiness.com Stock Report covers startup companies and consumer spending.

Click here view the biweekly show, produced by Tweedee Productions for the Wisconsin Technology Council and WisBusiness.com, as well as archives of past shows. The show is sponsored by Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek S.C., Madison Gas & Electric and UW-Milwaukee.

Joy Sawatzki

Conference Director

Wisconsin Technology Council

455 Science Drive, Madison, WI 53711

Office – 608-442-7557

Cell – 323-839-5042

www.wisconsintechnologycouncil.com

Entrepreneurs have an enormous stake in how well America’s patent system functions. Those who are users of patents want to be able to obtain a license on fair terms, without facing a never-ending threat of litigation and unreasonable demands. Owners of patents, perhaps even the inventors, want to be able to protect the value of their intellectual property through licensing or commercialization of the patent through their own business.