CAPE TOWN - As youth Month draws to an end, society will move on to other matters of national importance. 

Yet, young people in South Africa still have less chance of securing an employment opportunity after spending years at an academic institution. Many are beginning to ask questions about the relevance of academic institutions if all one gets for studying is much debt and no employment opportunity. This situation should move society to begin a process of overhauling academic institutions to be entrepreneurial entities that develop people who employ others.

Image: File image: Wesley Diphoko, Head of the Independent Digital Lab. (IOL). - https://www.iol.co.za

The Irish Government has called on innovators in areas such as AI, robotics, smart food production, and health and wellbeing to compete for a share of a new €500m Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF).

The call was made at the launch of a new report – Project Ireland 2040: Investing in Business, Enterprise and Innovation 2018-2027 – at a forum at the Mill Enterprise Centre in Drogheda.

Startup founders no doubt see the prospect of entrepreneurial gold in equity crowdfunding sites, but those platforms also may represent a last resort for many.

New research from Europe, published in the Journal of Business Venturing July issue, suggests entrepreneurs lacking internal capital and access to new debt turn to equity crowdfunding platforms as a last option.

Long stigmatized as “junior,” community colleges might seem like an unlikely source of talent for major tech companies. Yet, increasingly, some of the biggest tech giants are turning to these two-year schools to find the skilled workers they desperately need.

“Community colleges are just absolutely key,” in companies’ search for new tech talent, says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a recent report on the future of work. Tech companies like Amazon, Google and IBM have all caught...

You can drive true innovation within your company by tapping into an entrepreneurial perspective. Here's how to work with entrepreneurs to disrupt your industry.

If you want to disrupt an industry, your best bet is to start from square one.

The problem is that once companies reach a certain size, the status quo (which has, until now, served them well) tends to get in the way. Certain protocols and processes that were once necessary for order suddenly turn into barriers, and it's hard to make a business case for straying from a company's core competency.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 27, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- MIT Technology Review today announced its annual list of Innovators Under 35. This renowned list honors exceptionally talented technologists whose innovations are poised to transform our world.

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From time to time, everybody leaves a task lingering on their to-do list for a few hours — or days, or weeks — too long. Procrastination is a normal, near-universal phenomenon — which makes it all the more important to understand why it strikes and what to do about it.

A new cultural leadership post is being created within Scottish government, aimed at supporting “creative and innovative thinking” across the country.

The post is revealed in the Scottish Cultural Strategy published this week.

The role, it says, “will be supported by strategic thinkers from across the culture sectors and beyond”.

According to the draft strategy: “The role will support creative and innovative thinking and highlight the benefits of a more connected and multi-disciplinary approach across all areas of government and its major stakeholders to consider the big societal issues faced in Scotland today and in the future.”

Image: Scottish culture secretary Fiona Hyslop 

A white paper by EBTC and ICRIER, on the role of two key pillars of an innovation economy - Information and Communications Technology and Intellectual Property,  discusses how they can help to enhance India’s positioning as a global hub for innovation and technology development, bring in investment, and create high quality jobs

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Andreessen Horowitz launched a $300 million specialist crypto fund this week, five years after first investing in the space through Coinbase. The venture-capital firm's long interest in crypto and sizable new fund make it a trailblazer — most VCs have largely ignored cryptocurrencies and are now struggling to play catch-up.

In 1992, the Supreme Court set a precedent -- Quill Corporation vs. North Dakota -- that unintentionally shaped the future of commerce.

The case was started when North Dakota sued Quill, a mail-order office equipment retailer, for unpaid North Dakota sales tax on orders shipped to customers in the state. The Supreme Court, citing a 1967 case as precedent, ruled Quill’s mail order sales were exempt from collecting sales taxes because the retailer had no "physical presence" in North Dakota.

Every May, Deutsche Bank releases its annual "Mapping the world's prices" report, cataloging the cost of goods and services in a cross section of the world's biggest and most powerful cities. To determine the cost of living all over the globe, the bank looks at everything from the cost of a packet of cigarettes to how much the average rent costs on a two-bedroom apartment.

No company has ever elicited so many questions by friends, colleagues, entrepreneurs, fellow VCs and journalists as has Bird, the company that pioneered the electronic scooter as a service market. Until recently it was headquartered 2 blocks from our offices in Santa Monica so we literally saw it emerge under our feet and we proudly invested in the last 3 rounds of financing.

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Respondents’ views on economic conditions and growth prospects have tempered. Meanwhile, trade-related changes have become ever more pressing risks to domestic, global, and company growth.

Midway through 2018, respondents around the world express more cautious views than they did in March about the state of the economy and its prospects for the rest of the year.

For our fourth annual roundup of the most influential people on the Internet, TIME evaluated contenders by looking at their global impact on social media and their overall ability to drive news. Here’s who made this year’s unranked list.

From whisky and gin to rum and tequila, there are plenty of mistakes people make when buying, ordering, and drinking liquor — but there are even things you could be doing wrong when enjoying a humble glass of wine.

Business Insider spoke to Sarah Abbott, an official Master of Wine and International Wine Challenge (IWC) judge who has worked in the industry for 15 years, to find out the most common errors wine drinkers make.

Image: Sarah Abbott. IWC

Matt Dyson, Co-founder of Rockit - the portable baby rocker - overfunded and raised £253,000 on Crowdcube in May 2018. Like others before him, Matt describes crowdfunding as incredibly hard work. He and his team left nothing to chance and there is much that others preparing for crowdfunding can learn from Matt’s experience. Together, we have put together the Five Ps Checklist for Crowdfunding Success.

It’s a guiding design principle for combat vehicles: to increase safety, increase the armor. But the advanced research arm of the United States Department of Defense, DARPA, wants to rethink how military vehicles are designed to protect the crews inside–by making them faster and smarter instead.

Image: https://www.fastcodesign.com - From Video

Venture investors poured more than $1 billion into agtech last year, and we are on pace to match or exceed that this year. The convergence of AI, cloud computing, big data and gene editing, with applications from soil to plants, foods to medicines, farm to table are driving investments. Discerning startups and investors will capitalize from the market’s current, numerous opportunities.

Chief executives of highly innovative companies must figure out how to take bold risks while being stable enough to sustain an enterprise over the long term. Achieving this balance is even more difficult in Japan, where lifelong employment is a strong tradition, than elsewhere. Shin Sakane, founder and CEO of the Japanese startup Seven Dreamers Laboratories, has built the company’s identity around resolving that conflict.

Image: by Tanja Houwerzijl