If MONEY’s 2018 Best Colleges rankings put you in a West Coast state of mind, there’s a reason: This year’s list was dominated by the University of California system.

The top-tier network of public colleges landed eight campuses in the top 100 this year — four in the top 10 alone. (A fifth California school, Stanford University, clocked in at No. 5, giving the Golden State fully half of the top 10 spots.)

A local angel investor organization has set out to raise a $25-million venture capital fund.

Grand Rapids-based Grand Angels said yesterday it filed a form Regulation D with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to create Grand Angels Venture Fund III.

GA Fund III will invest in 12-15 "emerging companies" in four market segments: advanced manufacturing and materials; advanced technologies in agriculture and food; life sciences; and software.

Image: Paul D’Amato. Courtesy Grand Angels

As technology transforms our economy, one trend is getting more and more attention: the prospect that it will increasingly automate the work that we human beings do. And it’s not just low skilled, manual labor that’s at risk — “knowledge” work like operational analytics and marketing is also being taken over by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms.

But other changes are also afoot, changes that could allow the human dimension of work to become more important. While it’s true that technology is taking over routine tasks from many workers, it is also reshaping many supply and demand trends that drive our global markets. It’s this second technology-driven shift that can prevent automation from eliminating jobs; but jobs will change.

Costas Spirou is senior associate provost at Georgia College, the state’s public liberal arts university. He was a 2017-2018 American Council on Education Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. As Georgia colleges resume classes this month, Spirou cites the importance of rethinking current higher education practices by encouraging a more open culture that values partnerships and embraces innovation.

“Just 66 percent of millennials firmly believe that the Earth is round,” read the summary from the pollster YouGov. Kids today, right? But it’s not only curmudgeons eager to complain about the younger generation who ought to find the survey of interest. For despite the recent prominence of flat-earthery among musicians and athletes, YouGov’s survey seems to have been the first systematic attempt to assess the American population’s views on the shape of the Earth.

Image: Wikimedia

Almost 40% of the top 100 most innovative cities in the world are in the US according to a global analysis.

In fact, the top 10 is dominated by American cities, taking four of the spots and only outranked by Tokyo and London.

San Francisco-San Jose is third with New York and Los Angeles in fourth and fifth spots respectively. Boston completes the US showing in the top 10 in 7th place. Singapore (6), Toronto (8), Paris (9), and Sydney (10) complete the top 10.

New indicators point to corporate executives starting to wisen up to the notion that so-called blockchain technology is some kind of cure-all drug for their industries that they can just extract from Bitcoin and drop the cryptocurrency behind. The latest example of this is a recent survey by Deloitte, showing that 44% of American executives think “blockchain is overhyped”.

Image: https://news.bitcoin.com

Success tends persist in venture capital, but it has little or nothing to do with investor skill, a new study has found. 

Rather, scoring a few early wins — investing in the right companies at the right times — gives VC firms access to better deals, which often leads to long-term outperformance.

Image: Illustration by II - https://www.institutionalinvestor.com

As in romantic relationships, hiring managers avoid an overeager suitor. You know the type–after one date or one conversation, they’re calling, texting, and wanting to see you every day in a constant attempt to convince you that they’re “the one.” Unfortunately, this only has the opposite effect. Desperation is relationship repellant, and that’s true when it comes to hiring as well.

Think you know a thing or two about pollution? Plastic trash floating in our oceans and waterways is a serious problem facing current and future generations. Learn more about it!

Image: https://www.reusethisbag.com

Ian Hathaway at the Center for American Entrepreneurship recently took at look at startup financing to see whether tech was dispersing or concentrating. He found that first financings remain heavily concentrated in the top five markets:

Among his findings:

• After a stellar five-year period of expansion, a sharp contraction in the number of startups raising a first round of venture capital has occurred the last three years—falling to 2,496 first financings in 2017 from a peak of 3,465 such deals in 2014, for a decline of 28 percent.

More than money – what do younger accounting talent wants from work?

In previous generations, employees' main objective when starting at a company was a good salary. However, young professionals these days are different.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Four states have been selected to participate in a Policy Academy designed to help grow and strengthen manufacturing in their states. State teams will begin meeting on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. with policy experts to develop or further refine strategies to bolster manufacturing. The four participants chosen for the Policy Academy are Kentucky, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and Utah.  Each team includes representatives from the participants’ governor’s office, state economic development department, Manufacturing Extension Partnership center, manufacturing trade association, and other manufacturing centers.

If the governments of East Asia want their economies to thrive in the digital age, they may need to consider political liberalisation, Kris Hartley and Jun Jie Woo write.

While Asia’s economic rise in recent decades has largely been based on a manufacturing and export-led model of development, many cities in Asia are increasingly seeing the knowledge economy as a new pathway to global status.

Successful coaching involves working with – not against – an individual’s resistance.

“Knowing is the easy part; saying it out loud is the hard part.” – Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer 

The term “horse whisperer” was first associated with Daniel Sullivan, an Irish horse trainer who became famous for his ability to rehabilitate intractable horses more than 200 years ago. Today, it refers to those gifted with a deep understanding of equine psychology, enabling those who can “whisper” to elicit the horses’ cooperation.

Entrepreneurship is classically defined as one’s ability and willingness to take on risk to make a profit! An entrepreneur is an inherent problem-solver. As opposed to a job, which is well-defined, has a known pay structure and requires competing for progress - entrepreneurship requires an ability to deal with new and unknown problems on a regular basis, constantly sizing risk versus reward and requires tremendous personal sacrifice.

Want to know why we put a 13-year-old entrepreneur on the cover of this magazine? There’s the simple reason, of course: We want to celebrate youthful achievement and inspire others.

But there’s a deeper reason, aimed at anybody old enough to rent a car. If that’s you, go take another look at Zollipops founder Alina Morse on our cover. She looks like she’s having fun, right? So carefree! Her whole life ahead of her! But make no mistake; she and her peers are coming to replace you.

Does it pay to have happy employees? Companies in the tech sector such as Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Microsoft have historically led the way in showering employees with perks, ranging from free meals and generous vacation packages to on-site gyms and movie theaters. And now other industries are following suit. The Virgin Group implemented a paternity policy that gives dads up to 12 months of paid leave, for example, and firms in many countries have recently been experimenting with four-day workweeks and other flexible schedules.

As a startup investor in this age of the entrepreneur, I see many more startups, but innovation is still hard to find. The most common proposals I hear are for yet another social networking site (over 200 exist), or another dating site (over 2500 in the US alone). Startups which display real innovation, such as alternative energy sources and new medical treatments, are still rare.

I’ve always believed that we can learn how to innovate, and organize our businesses by learning from nature. One example is to question Wall Street’s obsession with short-term results, by understanding how giant redwoods maximize long-term growth by embracing variations based on short-term changes in resources.   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/does-wall-street-have-growth-wrong-giant-redwood-trees-pete-foley/.  I also believe that we can learn a lot about fast, agile decision-making in large organizations by looking at the distributed, heuristic based behavior of insect colonies.