Every industry is seeing innovation and disruption coming from all directions: from startups to established companies and even from companies that would not traditionally be considered a competitor. And CEOs are responding.

In fact, in a survey conducted by my firm, 72 percent of US CEOs say their organizations are disrupting their sector, rather than waiting to be disrupted. The market and investors are demanding it. Investors now routinely compare companies not only to their traditional rivals but to fast-moving startups.

FOR MANY RUSSIAN students, the academic year started last Friday with tips on planetary domination from President Vladimir Putin. “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind,” he said, via live video beamed to 16,000 selected schools. “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

Image Credit: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AP

Networking is at the core of open innovation and it is a socioeconomic process where people interact and share information to recognize, create, and indeed act upon business opportunities. We have all seen cases of collaboration that create effects which are at best additive, delivering a sum of the parts which is less than the sum of each of the individual components. OI 2.0 generates synergies and network effects rather than just additive effects. Synergy describes two or more entities interacting together to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

How does the cultural evolution of an innovation community open to business opportunities look like if viewed with the lenses that, albeit in an approximate way, reconcile that community with the world of physics? Similarly to water molecules in a microwave oven, its agents collide and mingle by moving from one team to another. When mingling, teams change configuration. This is a disorder creative of interactions that fuel the intellectual energy arousing very variable events. Innovation emerges from the disorder of events.

Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken. This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which employees (working with their managers) set goals for the year; managers interview others who have worked with them and write up an appraisal; employees are rated and ranked numerically; and salary, bonus, and promotion opportunities are awarded accordingly. A 2013 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management asked HR professionals about the quality of their own PM systems; only 23 percent said their company was above average in the way it conducted them. Other studies uncovered even more disdain. According to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a management research group, surveys have found that 95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with their PM systems, and 90 percent of HR heads believe they do not yield accurate information.

Image: Illustration by Francesco Bongiorni

MIT and Harvard are among the top schools that produce entrepreneurs who have raised billions in venture capital funds, according to a new report.

Pitchbook, a venture capital research company, released its annual report last week on the top colleges and universities that produce entrepreneurs. The report focused on entrepreneurs who raised venture capital funds between Jan. 1, 2006, and Aug. 18 of this year.

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Millennials have a bad reputation when it comes to their views on work, whether it's that they're lazy or impatient. To find out the truth about the millennial generation's workplace needs, job data website Comparably asked more than 36,000 workers in the U.S. a series of questions about their careers and thoughts about work and culture.

WELLESLEY, Mass., Sept. 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Over the past year, 163 million women were starting businesses across 74 economies worldwide—this according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2016/17 Women's Report released today with sponsors Babson College, Smith College, Korea Entrepreneurship Foundation, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Universidad Del Desarrollo, and Universiti Tun Abdul Razak.

Image: http://www.prnewswire.com

Hurricanes Irma and Harvey have reignited discussions about the link between global warming and extreme weather, with climate scientists now saying they can show the connections between the two phenomena better than ever before.

Scientists' explanation of how they do that involves a complex discussion of climate models, historical temperature data and probability. But understanding the link really comes down to one figure: the air can hold 7% more water with every degree Celsius that the temperature rises. That figure comes from the Clausius–Clapeyron equation, a widely accepted physical law established centuries ago long before any politicized debate on climate change.

Image: http://time.com

There's mounting evidence that some of the best things you can do for your brain are also some of the best for your body. A new scientific advisory from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association, published in the journal Stroke, promotes seven simple steps people can take to keep their brains healthy and reduce their risk of cognitive decline as they get older.

We’re living in an era where being an entrepreneur is as easy as posting a picture of your merchandise on Facebook or Instagram and making an offer. Many people run their businesses solely on the internet.

With such ease and drive to make impact in the world, we see startups springing up everywhere.This is good news as the increase in competition helps to promote innovation among business owners.

Remember the big one that got away? Wisconsin doesn’t.

Landing the largest capital investment in state history has a way of erasing bad memories. In Wisconsin’s case, winning a $10-billion investment in a 20-million-sq.-ft. (1.8-million-sq.-m.)advanced electronics manufacturing complex from Taiwan-based Foxconn not only eclipses any other economic development deal in the Badger State’s past; it offers the potential to rewrite the state’s future.

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All it takes is filling out two forms: the nomination form for the Intelligent Community Awards Program and a short addendum form with questions specific to this year’s theme, Humanizing Data. The goal of the program is to provide communities everywhere – large and small, urban and rural – with evidence-based guidance on becoming an Intelligent Community, and an objective method for measuring their progress.

There is no cost to submit a nomination. Nominations are due by September 13, 2017.

Can genomics wizards make an informed guesstimate on what a person looks like, based on his or her DNA? J. Craig Venter sure thinks so, per a new PNAS paper. Yet his Human Longevity Institute study is facing Twitter blowback for that claim.

Venter’s proof-of-concept study used a machine learning algorithm to analyze the genomic and biometric data of 1,061 volunteers. It looked at gender, facial structure, age, height, weight, skin color, eye color, and voice, generating a facsimile of the person based on their genetic analysis.

There needs to be an EU-wide solution to precarious app economy jobs, said Estonian Labour and Health Minister Jevgeni Ossinovski in an interview with EURACTIV.com.

The minister also spoke about labour laws causing disputes between EU member states and explained why Estonia has the bloc’s biggest gender pay gap.

Jevgeni Ossinovski has been Estonia’s labour and health minister since November 2016. He is chair of the Estonian Social Democratic Party.

Ossinovski spoke to EURACTIV’s Catherine Stupp.

EU labour laws have gotten a lot of attention recently. French President Macron visited Central European member states last week and brought up the controversial posting of workers directive. Are social issues driving member states against each other right no

Image: Estonia's Labour Minister,Jevgeni Ossinovski. (Council of the EU)

Welcome to 2025. Self-driving cars have become mainstream. Artificial intelligence is diagnosing  iseases, doing our taxes, and evaluating insurance claims. Humans are certainly also involved in these tasks, but their workload is getting lighter and more efficient.

While the world around us looks perceivably different, one thing is familiar: A new graduating college class is preparing to enter the workforce.

These 10 states outperform the rest in data accessibility, technology and business.

Nec est mirum ex intervallo magna generari (And it is not surprising, either, that greatness develops only at long intervals), Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius)

Not obstructed by preconceptions, open innovation can aim at harbouring those ambitions that appear at the first sight to be oversized. Contrary to Seneca's statement, the birth of highly transformational ideas is shortened by the quality of the conversation in the "mental space of open innovation" (see our article published here on July 5, 2017). As we have already said ("Open Innovation: The New Age of Conversation", published on March 9, 2017), the culture of conversation at the root of the present forms of open innovation had its cradle in Paris between the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet, that Age at the crossroads between the Scientific Revolution with its two great agitators, Galileo and Newton, and the Enlightenment, symbolised by the Encyclopédie under the direction of Diderot and D'Alembert, is not the exclusive prerogative of Europe, with France and England contending for the primacy.

Bad news: Science now confirms that scientific studies are getting harder to understand. New research in eLife looked at more than 709,000 scientific abstracts published between 1881 and 2015, and found that the use of scientific jargon — clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, anyone? — is becoming more common. More than 20 percent of scientific abstracts now have a readability level that's considered beyond college graduate-level English. That makes it harder for the public and policymakers to understand scientific research. One of the authors' suggestions: Include a "lay summary" that makes a paper easier for people to understand.

The list of human foibles is long. The 2015 s+b article “Beyond Bias” lists 24 of the most common biases, including blind spots, the illusion of control, and the concept of sunk costs. Since the early 2000s, Princeton University psychology professor Alexander Todorov has been studying one of those long-standing human foibles: the first impression.

In his new book, Face Value, Todorov pulls together all he’s learned about first impressions. At first glance — and upon a careful reading — it makes for a fascinating and thorough examination of the subject. Todorov’s expansive tour includes the history of physiognomy (the dubious science of predicting character from physical appearance) and a survey of modern first-impression research, much of which Todorov has conducted in his Social Perceptions Lab at Princeton. His conclusion: We find judging others based on a single glance irresistible, but the judgments we reach are usually wrong.

In the beginning all businesses are just people playing out an idea. It’s never the other way around – there is no idea so big that it doesn’t need people to make it succeed. Investors know this, hence the saying “Bet on the jockey (founder), not the horse (idea).” A great jockey is a great role model.

Like it or not, everyone looks to the entrepreneur as the jockey role model in a new business. Typically this energizes new startup founders, but some struggle trying to live up to their own, as well as everyone else’s expectations. In reality, nobody really expects anyone to be superhuman, but it can feel like that.