Since 1978, the Chinese economy has seen phenomenal growth. While that’s not in dispute, the reason why China has managed to grow so fast and whether it can maintain that growth is far less clear. The consensus view among China scholars is that the country has grown by relying heavily on investments, exports, and its huge low-cost labor force. That formula has worked well so far, but evidence indicates that China is getting less and less from this approach lately. The country’s export growth is decelerating quickly, and China is already investing an amount equivalent to about half of its GDP—which is probably the highest level ever among any country in peacetime.

China has just completed its once-in-a-decade leadership transition.  An item that should be high on the new leadership’s agenda is changing the country’s strategy so that its growth wastes less energy, requires less investment, and is less reliant on exploiting cheap labor as a competitive advantage. We do not know the policy deliberations among the Chinese leaders; in fact we don’t know whether or not these policy discussions are taking place at the highest echelons of the Chinese government. What we do know is that a transition out of the rapid growth model of the last three decades will be fraught with technical uncertainties and political complexities. But it is critical that it happens.

What I am about to say is not a political statement. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I look at the results of the 2012 election through the prism of business and sales practices. To me, there are stark lessons that can be learned by sales people and small business owners.

Let’s start by taking a look at what happened.

On November 6th Americans cast their votes for who they wanted as President and Vice-President of the United States. All of the information available at the time showed that 49% of the population was going to vote for the Democrat and 49% of the population was going to vote for the Republican. That left only 2% up for grabs. That 2% was the Independents and it became a target market.

As an undergraduate, I studied calculus and physics; when I became an artist, I remained fascinated with the question of what artists and mathematicians can learn from one another. That's why I wanted to talk with mathematician Steven Strogatz, the New York Times columnist and author of the new book, The Joy of X. It's a juicy read, whether you're working through one of its gripping case studies with a pencil or leisurely perusing a chapter during a long, hot bath. In our conversation, we talked about ways that math and art are alike, and how adopting the right mindset can lead to breakthroughs in creativity. Strogatz, who has experimented with making drawings and is coincidentally married to an artist, says the professions definitely share affinities: "We're all trying to express ourselves. We're also struck by the wonder in the world around us." Here are Strogatz's top insights about the creative nature of mathematics, which are relevant to any creative person.

In March 2011, Google named Kansas City, Kan. the site of its first attempt to connect homes to its own fiber-optic network, appropriately named Google Fiber. It soon added the synonymous city across the river, Kansas City, Mo., to the list, and now these two mid-sized metropolises are on track to get the fastest broadband in the country (proclaims one local billboard: “Kansas City, you are now faster than New York City). The dream of a gigabyte in every pot has won the pair of cities new friends from around the world. There is little doubt the 21st-century city will be a connected one; tech media veteran Nancy Scola takes a look at the promises being made to ask if an experimenting Silicon Valley giant and the people of Kansas City can forge a path to get there together.

Business incubation is not a new concept. It focuses on growing new companies which will leave the business incubation programme when ready. It has evolved since the mid-'80s. What started as an experiment in the United States has over the course of three decades encompassed Europe and become a global trend. According to 2002 data, there were an estimated 5,000 business incubators globally. The concept found a solid founding in Asian economies accounting for about a fifth of that total. Again half of this figure is concentrated in the Chinese economy. Interestingly, China along with Australia and the US has incubators that have lasted more than fifteen years.

The idea of business incubators was born out of necessity. As any entrepreneur will agree, starting a business is no joke. Although most start-up companies and new entrepreneurs know their product or service they wish to launch, a great many lack all requisite skills and resources to turn their ideas into success stories. Incubators step into fill these voids. A 2008 study by Grant Thorton conducted on behalf of the US Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration found that business incubators produce new jobs at a low cost for the government. As stated in the report Construction Grants Program Impact Assessment Report: for every $10,000 in Economic Development Administration (EDA) funds invested in business incubation programmes, an estimated 47 to 69 local jobs are generated. Hence, these incubators are creating jobs at a much more cost effective manner than EDA and their application is in areas such as roads and bridges, industrial parks, commercial buildings, sewer and water projects. It was further found that incubators provide up to 20 times more jobs than community infrastructure projects at a federal cost per job of $126 - $144, compared with $744 - $6,972 for other infrastructure projects.

This morning when I opened my work email, there were about 600 unread messages. Near the top of the stack was an email from a mysterious person named Xavier. I had never heard of him before. More mysteriously, his email was titled, "Article."

Intrigued, I clicked. The message was brief:

When John Coltrane plays the melody early in the track Harmonique, you can hear some of the notes crack.

Of course, Coltrane was completely capable of playing these notes correctly. And yet he didn't. 

It's this effort and humanity that touches us about his solo, not just the melody.

Every entrepreneur should spend plenty of time thinking about competitors, and how they relate to your business, but you need to be very careful what you say out loud about them to your team, your investors, and your customers. What you say speaks volumes about how you think about your startup, how smart you are, and your personal integrity.

I’ve spent hours talking to startup founders, and heard a thousand startup pitches, and I always listen carefully to what is said (or not said) about competitors. Everyone has a view on competitors, so you will likely get some off-the-cuff questions on this subject as well. Here are some common pitfalls or traps to avoid:

What does a content writing service cost? How much should you pay for a blog post? For small business owners, every penny counts. But, if you’ve done any research on writing services, you’ve probably noticed that prices are all over the map.

Let’s look at five types of content writing services, the costs, pros and cons, and more.

Fat cells store excess energy and signal these levels to the brain. In a new study this week in Nature Medicine, Georgios Paschos PhD, a research associate in the lab of Garret FitzGerald, MD, FRS director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, shows that deletion of the clock gene Arntl, also known as Bmal1, in fat cells, causes mice to become obese, with a shift in the timing of when this nocturnal species normally eats. These findings shed light on the complex causes of obesity in humans.

The Penn studies are surprising in two respects. “The first is that a relatively modest shift in food consumption into what is normally the rest period for mice can favor energy storage,” says Paschos. “Our mice became obese without consuming more calories.” Indeed, the Penn researchers could also cause obesity in normal mice by replicating the altered pattern of food consumption observed in mice with a broken clock in their fat cells.

It's pretty safe to say that after three full seasons of the ABC hit show "Shark Tank," Daymond John has seen almost all there is to see when it comes to pitching an idea. Now into the fourth season, the "sharks" are facing some of the most passionate, intense entrepreneurs yet, but not all of their pitches lead to a deal. We spoke with John, whose own success with his company FUBU and as a branding expert makes him an ideal candidate for providing advice on how to nail the pitch:

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have shown that their “lung-on-a-chip” technology can mimic a life-threatening lung condition. They also report that scientists can uncover new aspects of the disease using the lung chip that would not be found with animal experiments.

The study, published in today’s Science Translational Medicine, is the first definitive demonstration that the institute’s organ-mimicking chips, which include a gut, a heart, and a kidney (see “Building an Organ on a Chip”), can be used to model a disease and even test candidate drugs.

The Ohio Third Frontier has announced a new program to encourage open innovation within middle market companies in the state.  Open innovation, first widely promoted nearly a decade ago by Henry Chesbrough, professor and executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at UC-Berkeley, occurs when companies look to communities of experts, thinkers and leaders for new ideas, technologies and solutions that help solve their most challenging problems.  Open innovation has been utilized by many organizations from consumer packaged goods manufacturers to NASA to generate ideas, bring products to market and advance technologies.

The beasts over at Tech Cocktail surveyed The US Startup Accelerators field and picked their top 15. Not to sure what they used to measure success, exits, funds raised… But nether the less it looks pretty close to what you would expect.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and the spiteful me-too northeaster, much of the East Coast looked so battered and flooded, so strewed with toppled trees and stripped of dunes and beaches, that many observers feared the worst. Any day now, surely, the wildlife corpses would start showing up — especially birds, for who likelier to pay when a sky turns rogue than the ones who act as if they own it?

Yet biologists studying the hurricane’s aftermath say there is remarkably little evidence that birds, or any other countable, charismatic fauna for that matter, have suffered the sort of mass casualties seen in environmental disasters like the BP oil spill of 2010, when thousands of oil-slicked seabirds washed ashore, unable to fly, feed or stay warm.

In another fillip to the start up ecosystem in India, veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla has set up an incubation centre in Bangalore, according to a Business Standard report.

Srikanth Nadhamuni, the head of technology at the Indian government’s Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will head the incubator as its CEO.

The Business Standard report added that the incubator will help in creating ventures that can solve issues like social inequality, governance issues and public grievances in India.

You might not feel it day-to-day, but business management is in a major transition.  The old days of command-and-control leadership are fading in favor of what might be better termed a trust-and-track method, in which people are not just told what to do, but why they are doing it.  More formally, we're moving from what was called "transactional" leadership to "transformative" leadership. And there's no turning back.

Business owners certainly have a long way to go, especially in more established companies where old practices die hard.  But you can see increasing evidence that by creating a company with a clear purpose and values, you'll find your employees connect themselves to something bigger, and that increases productivity.  In other words, a culture of engagement leads to greater customer loyalty, and better financial success.

Booz & Company’s annual global study of R&D spending reveals that successful innovators bring clarity to the early stage of innovation. It's when companies generate ideas and decide which ones to develop. 

Just 43 percent of participants said they were highly effective in generating new ideas. And only 36 percent felt the same way about converting ideas to development projects. Altogether, only a quarter of all companies indicated they were highly effective at the front end of innovation. Which is a shocking conclusion. 

In a recent blog post, we cited some alarming numbers: 40% of workers are planning to look for a new job within the next six months, and 69% say they're already passively looking.

As employers, those figures are frightening. We're careful to hire only the best workers, and once we have them, we want to keep them. We've previously argued why employees benefit by staying with the same company for at least 10 years. Now we want to supplement that advice with tips for companies on how to make workers want to stick around for decades.

Will you ever get those worthy internal projects done? Yes, says Indianapolis-based SmallBox. Their tips for a great “Factory Week” help make it happen.

Your corporate website is a shambles. Your team’s falling into creative ruts right and left. You’ve been sitting on a juicy product idea for months--all you need is sufficient time to scope it out. Are you twitching uncomfortably with self-recognition yet?

“We were discussing internal projects and moaning about how we never got to them,” recalls Jeb Banner, CEO of SmallBox, a web design and marketing agency based in Indianapolis. “We felt really bad about that. So the new project became: What can we do to concentrate on all these projects, cleanups, whatever they might be?”