Debates about "best" and "worst" cities elicit strong feelings. It's a tricky issue because such debates are largely subjective.

So Business Insider attempted to use data to definitively prove which are the most exciting and most boring cities in every state across America.

To do that, we took counts of the number of establishments for 66 different types of businesses — like breweries, art dealers, and museums — that can make a city more "interesting." We sourced data from the Census Bureau's 2015 County Business Patterns program and picked the metro areas with the highest and lowest count of these businesses for our interesting and boring cities.

A century ago Detroit was a boomtown and Los Angeles a sleepy refuge for sun-seeking Midwesterners. A half-century later, L.A. was the fastest-growing big city in the high-income world, while Detroit was beginning its long tailspin. In the ’70s, New York was the “rotten apple” and seemed destined for further decline. But for the past 20 years it has enjoyed an enormous surge of wealth, as have many of the countries’ dense, culturally creative cities.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Are you a Millennial?

If you’re not sure, you’re not alone, but the Pew Research Center is offering a way to figure it out.

“Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 22-37 in 2018) will be considered a Millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward will be part of a new generation,” the Pew Research Center says.

Anyone born after 1996 is part of a new, yet-to-be named generation that, for now, the Pew Research Center is calling “post-Millennials” until a better name is established.

Why incubators matter

There’s a moment early on in the history of many life sciences companies where they need some help to get from academic discovery to self-sustaining biotech company or getting purchased by an industry giant.  

Called the “Valley of Death” by those in the industry, life science incubators can aid those companies in navigating that path. Mission Bay is home to several of these, including the Gladstone Institutes, headed by President Deepak Srivastava. The incubators can give early-stage companies access to world class facilities and collaboration.  

Image: Deepak Srivastava, president of the Gladstone Institutes, says it's important to find space for small companies with potentially big discoveries. PHOTO CREDIT: CHRIS GOODFELLOW / GLADSTONE INSTITUTES

Entrepreneurs in America are generally pretty optimistic these days, according to a new survey. So why are older business owners more pessimistic than younger ones?

Yesterday, the Kauffman Foundation, a nonpartisan group supporting entrepreneurship, released its 2018 State of Entrepreneurship survey of 2,165 business owners. Overall, 77% who’ve been in business more than five years and 67% of newer business owners rated their 2017 performance positively; so did 70% of owners under age 45. But only 59% of entrepreneurs 45 and older said their businesses did well last year.

At a time when entrepreneurship rates are just half what they were a generation ago, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation plans to focus on breaking down the barriers entrepreneurs face, particularly with government.

Even so, new businesses still drive the majority of new job creation, Kauffman Foundation CEO Wendy Guillies said during the ninth-annual State of Entrepreneurship Address on Wednesday.

Image: Wendy Guillies, CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation - ADAM VOGLER

New businesses are springing up all the time. Then why is it that as many as 8 out of 10 new businesses fail before they are two years old? In fact, almost one-fifth of start-ups fail in the first year, according to statistics published by the US Small Business Administration. Four out of five businesses go on to fail within the first five years.

Of course, no small businessman wants to think about failure shortly after setting up a limited company. But knowing what the potential pitfalls are can prove to be invaluable. In other words, learn from the mistakes made by other small businesses and avoid becoming part of the statistics.

Image: https://www.blogtrepreneur.com

Lisbon is fast becoming a creative and tech startup hub, helped by accelerator funding, tech incubators and newly refurbished coworking spaces popping up all over the city.

Boosted by the arrival of the annual Web Summit conference (previously held in Dublin), Lisbon's startup community is thriving - with healthy support from the Portuguese government . In June 2016, it created a national network of tech hubs and startups in Lisbon through the StartUP Voucher initiative that gives more than 400 entrepreneurs a one-year fellowship to pursue their ventures.

Cities with booming tech economies around the country face an existential crisis. How can they maintain their cultural identity and diversity amid job growth that contributes to wealth inequality and population homogenizing?

But Pittsburgh — and other small to medium-sized cities seeking to grow their tech sectors — is uniquely positioned to confront that challenge head-on.

According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau, almost 40% of the population is age 45 and over. More significantly, the age groups of 45-64 years and 65+ years saw the fastest growth rates in a span of ten years. But these rapidly-growing segments of the population are facing a critical problem - ageism.

Starting July 16, Maya Baratz will be relocating with her husband from New York to Philly.

See, that’s when the Techstars Managing Director, formerly of Flickr and the Wall Street Journal will begin leading the Comcast NBCUniversal Accelerator Powered by Techstars, a 13-week Philly-based program that seeks to connect 10 companies in the media and connectivity space with resources and connections.

Across the globe, a collection of healthcare professionals gather around their computer screens in their respective offices in Beijing, Brussels, London, and Los Angeles. A skilled U.S.-based oncologist leads this virtual board in discussing a 38-year-old British patient with advanced lung cancer. Using virtual reality technology, the team is able to simultaneously review the patient’s entire disease profile, including her medical history and lifestyle, and see high-resolution pathology images and all sorts of other biological data.

It’s no secret that most of us don’t get enough sleep and suffer for it. If you’re between the ages of 16 and 64, and don’t get seven to nine hours of sleep per night, your logical reasoning, executive function, attention, and mood can be impaired. Worse, severe sleep deprivation can lead to depression, anxiety, and symptoms of paranoia. In the long run, sleep deprivation is a main contributor to the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

As every entrepreneur knows, our chosen paths are fraught with risk. We often hear that all entrepreneurs will fail at some point, that it's important to "fail fast," and that failure can bring growth. But, who among us actually wants to fail?

In this world of constant change, new technologies, and a thousand cultures, it’s evident and somehow comforting to me that the basic rules for business prosperity really haven’t changed in the last hundred years. Business success is still more about the people than the technology or idea involved. As an angel investor and a mentor to entrepreneurs I still see this every day.

When Zoë Barry’s brother was diagnosed with severe epilepsy in 2010, her family struggled to get access to the rare medications that would treat his condition. Barry was devastated to learn that her family was not an exception to the rule but one of many faced with long delays in accessing specialty pharmaceuticals for ailing loved ones. She was determined to remedy the problem. Two years after her brother’s diagnosis, Barry founded ZappRx, a company that simplifies the process of ordering and filling specialty medication prescriptions.

Image: Photo by Kelsey H. Campbell - Zoë Barry, founder and CEO of ZappRx

This month marks the 190th anniversary of Jules Verne’s birth, on February 8, 1828. Known as the Father of Science Fiction, Verne not only authored classic adventure novels such as From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but he also influenced the Surrealist movement and the Steampunk aesthetic, and inspired figures such as the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton.

Image: Jules Verne Algerie. Credit: "L'Algerie" Magazine, 15 June 1884 Wikimedia

How do we get our employees to come up with more ideas? This is a question I have been hearing more and more from corporate leaders. And it is a good question to explore, because the more ideas we generate within our organizations, the better the chance that we will find good ideas. In the 21st century, we must design our companies for serendipity and encourage the sort of cross-functional collaboration that results in the cross-pollination of ideas and concepts.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) is on a firm footing and in good shape to take on an enhanced role in Framework Programme 9, according to Martin Kern, interim director.

Kern has staked out an opening position giving EIT a wider mandate in the 2021-2027 EU budget, in a proposal sent to the European Commission, its majority funder. “We have proposed new themes on migration, water, security and culture. It’s a starting point for discussion,” Kern told Science|Business. “We think we have a strong case.”

Image: Martin Kern, EIT interim director. Photo: EIT

When thinking about the future of technology, it's tempting to look to Silicon Valley companies like Netflix and Tesla. But, Silicon Valley isn't the only tech city in the market anymore. In fact, a report by Palo Alto Online highlighted that more workers are leaving the valley than coming in.

Over the course of 2017, I sought perspective on what the future of technology looks like across the nation, and these are the three cities that taught me what tech looks like outside of Silicon Valley.