SAN FRANCISCO, March 4 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese delegation held a scouting event at Stanford University on Sunday to recruit talents from Silicon Valley, a global innovation hub.

The delegation from Yangpu, a district in Shanghai, was looking for high-tech skills in areas such as big data and machine learning.

"Yangpu welcomes talents from all around the world. We hope foreign talents can come to participate in and share the rapid development of Yangpu," Li Yueqi, Communist Party of China secretary for the district, said.

The Brookings Institution launched a new guide to help local leaders assess their innovation districts.

“Assessing your innovation district: A how-to guide,” provides a framework to audit the assets that comprise local innovation ecosystems. The document is designed to aid in targeting resources toward innovative and inclusive economic development based on an area’s unique strengths and challenges.

Image: https://www.bdcnetwork.com

Geography can transform a paycheck. That is: How much your wages are actually worth depends largely on where you live.

On some level, everyone understands that—even if you don’t have a firm grasp on precisely how far a $50,000 salary would go in California, compared with, say, Ohio. MONEY set out to find the answer, meshing average income data with a cost of living measurement for each state.

Many new entrepreneurs are so excited by their latest idea that they can’t resist contacting every investor they know, assuming the investor will be equally excited and want to contribute immediately. Others will work hard on a business plan, and then mail it indiscriminately to every potential investor they can find on the Internet. Both of these approaches are a waste of your time and theirs.

I’ve written a lot about the benefits of efficient entrepreneurship. I’ve explained my view conceptually, tried to illustrate the mechanics of how excess capital kills promising companies, and shared data from 71 IPOs that demonstrates that even in success, more capital raised is not correlated with better outcomes. Just in case all of that was too conceptual, this blog post is designed to appeal to another emotion—greed.

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Canada’s biggest pension plan aims to back as many as four fledgling hedge funds a year at a time when investors are balking at high fees and disappointing returns from the industry’s biggest managers.

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has made initial investments of as much as $250 million each in five startups and young hedge funds under its Emerging Managers Program in the past two years, according to Poul Winslow, Toronto-based head of thematic investing and external portfolio management.

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: Photograph by Tanja Houwerzijl

Ever wondered how India’s startup journey began? Trace back to the liberalization of the Indian IT industry in 1984 and the consequent launch of the first ever commercial internet service by VSNL in 1995.

Representational image. Since then, there has been no looking back! Once known to be the country of snake charmers and elephants, India now ranks third in the world for the most number of startups in technology. Indeed, we’ve come a long, long way with India becoming the hub of more than 56,000 startups today.

Independent workers’ carefully cultivated professional identities point to new possibilities for talent development.

The rise of the independent worker is arguably the biggest change to hit the global labour market in decades. Well over 30 percent of the United States workforce reportedly lack “real jobs” working full-time for a conventional company, and that figure, some say, may top 40 percent by 2020. If these trends continue, non-traditional workers will almost certainly attain unprecedented levels of financial and political clout.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Feb. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NYU Tandon School of Engineering's FutureLabs – a network of startup business hubs that includes the Data, Urban, Digital, and recently launched Veterans Future Lab – today reported an estimated economic impact on New York City's economy of $4.06 billion since launching in 2009 as the first incubators with city support through the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).

Image: http://markets.businessinsider.com/

Global life expectancy averages out to 71.4 years. That means, of course, that some parts of the world see much shorter life spans, while others enjoy far greater longevity.

Five places, in particular, fall into the latter category. They’re known as Blue Zones—named for the blue circles researchers drew to identify the first one on a map—and they’re home to some of the oldest and healthiest people in the world. Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones and The Blue Zones Solution, told TIME why residents of these places live so long—and how you can steal their habits.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

– The Who, “We won’t be fooled again”, 1971

Once seen as the saviors of America’s economy, Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

What worked for Texas and Nebraska in 2016, and in previous years, worked just as well for them in 2017. Both states have successfully defended their claim to the Governor’s Cup they won last year — for total projects per capita in Nebraska’s case and for total qualified projects in Texas’. Both states’ investment attraction success in 2017 was impressive. Nebraska increased its project count from 101 to 110; Texas dropped from 642 in 2017 to 594 in 2017 but still finished well in front of runner-up Ohio’s 467.

Image: https://siteselection.com

In January, Amazon announced the 20 finalist cities still in the running to host its second global headquarters. Parsing the list, one city stood out as the only option outside America’s borders: Toronto.

But that’s the least of the reasons why Toronto, my city, stands out on that list. While many finalists are trying to lure the Seattle-based online retail behemoth with large subsidies -- including Newark, New Jersey, and Montgomery County, Maryland, whose respective $5 billion tax-break packages equal the amount Amazon says it will invest in its HQ2 -- Toronto’s bid is unique for offering zero public subsidies whatsoever.

Imagine landing your dream job at a major tech company with a degree in literature, and without knowing a single line of code.  Or even being on the autism spectrum and going through an interview process designed to work with your particular style of thinking and communication.

The company that facilitated both  is Microsoft. With Satya Nadella at the helm since 2014, it’s generated more than $250 billion in market value, but he’s also led its workforce of over 126,000 employees to adopt a “learn-it-all” curiosity that emphasizes soft skills alongside technical wizardry. This cultural shift put Microsoft on Glassdoor’s recent list of best places to work, according to employees.

Three beliefs about globalization have propagated since the early 1980s. First, that globalization leads to a reduction in global inequality. Second, that high income growth among the richest will lift the incomes of the poorest. Third, that there is no alternative to rising inequality without turning our backs on trade and technology. The recently released World Inequality Report, the first research study to comprehensively examine wealth and income inequality trends across rich and emerging countries over approximately 40 years, dispels these notions.

One of the business ironies that many entrepreneurs have learned the hard way in the past is that ideas which are truly disruptive carry the highest risk of failure, take the longest to gain traction, and thus are the least likely to get external funding. So some entrepreneurs stick with incremental solutions, avoiding more transformational or adaptive solutions implying disruptive change.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

“Oh my god, this is so cute!”

Robin Li, an investor with the San Francisco venture capital firm GGV Capital, was standing in the lobby of the Madison building in downtown Detroit. Built in 1917 as a theater and refurbished several years ago as a tech co-working space, the Madison checks all of the aesthetic boxes of hipsterdom: reclaimed wood, exposed brick walls, pour-over coffee served by tattooed baristas.

Millennials often get a bad rap in the workplace, but the reality is many of these young people are extremely hard workers and willing to make sacrifices to get ahead in the workforce.

To find out exactly what these young people are willing to give up for their careers, financial intelligence company Comet surveyed 364 employed millennials who are single and don't have children and asked them whether, and to what extent, they would put their work before relationships.

A consortium of Chinese private equity funds are investing up to $250 million to create a biotech firm that seeks to build on the work of Gaithersburg, Maryland-based MedImmune, bringing 100 jobs to Montgomery County’s biotechnology corridor.

Investment companies Boyu Capital, 6 Dimensions Capital and Hillhouse Capital announced last week that they have teamed up with MedImmune, the research and development arm of AstraZeneca, to spin off six of the firm’s drug candidates into a new company focused on severe autoimmune diseases.