Dr Richard Florida, one of the world's leading experts on economic competitiveness, demographic trends and cultural and technological innovation shows how developing the full human and creative capabilities of each individual, combined with institutional supports such as commercial innovation and new industry, will put us back on the path to economic and social prosperity.

Everywhere you look in the media these days you see alleged signs of impending economic doom—from the ‘financial cliff’ threatening  to punish United States policymakers if they can’t reach agreement soon to the Eurozone crisis with the Greek economy on the edge of collapse. Certainly all very troubling, but it is only one side of the coin. For the past 10 days, I have seen the other side—a side full of hope and promise thanks to a burgeoning movement to embrace entrepreneurship.

Last week, 130 countries celebrated Global Entrepreneurship Week through an assortment of events, activities and competitions aimed at getting more of their citizens to take the next step in their entrepreneurial journey. Those who had never before considered launching their own ventures soaked up advice and inspiration from the likes of Bono and Bill Clinton. New startups taking their first steps emerged from Startup Weekend events in more than 130 cities. Existing startups looking for their big break found it through competitions like Startup Open, Get in the Ring and the Creative Business Cup. And serial entrepreneurs looking to give back to the next generation shared their experience and knowledge through activities like EO24, run by the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and courses like FastTrac and Who Owns the Ice House?

Discovering a new species must be a heady experience — the collection in the field, the "eureka" moment when you realize you've got something new, the jubilant announcement to the rest of the scientific community.

Well, not quite.

In fact, an average of 21 years pass from the time a new specimen is discovered until the time it's identified and reported to the world, a new study finds. The individual steps may still be very exciting, but they're often incredibly slow. And at this rate, species may go extinct in the wild while the specimens that might have identified them languish unstudied on museum shelves.

Ever since his death in 1955, scientists have asked what features of Einstein’s brain contributed to his extraordinary insights into physical laws. Research on the anatomy of Einsteins’ genius was stymied because many of the post-mortem images and slides of tissue from the subsequently dissected organ were unavailable to researchers. The story is complex and the fate of Einstein’s brain, in fact, has furnished sufficient anecdotal raw material to produce a number of popular books.

In addition to the human drama, scientists have in recent years  identified a few special attributes. The size and structure of Einstein’s parietal lobes, involved with processing spatial relationships and numbers, seemed tied to his mathematical ability.

The 2012 World Series of Innovation has come to an end, and we are proud to announce the winners of this year’s challenge.

Check out our winners – and share their incredible work with your family and friends: Innovation.nfte.com/Winners

The announcement of our winners brings to an end another successful Global Entrepreneurship Week, made possible by so many.

Our partners – Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Sean John, and Franchise Source – posed compelling real-world questions for our innovators to think through.

These great young minds rose to the challenge, presenting some of the most distinctive ideas and creative solutions we’ve seen in World Series history. Each of our submitters deserves a hearty thank-you.

And, finally, none of this would have been possible without you – our voters. Thank you for supporting innovation, as well as the young students who took part in our competition.

Take a look at the winners of the 2012 World Series of Innovation: Innovation.nfte.com/Winners

Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel, in a recent column for the Financial Times, argue that true innovation-led economic and social progress is a thing of the past. Ever since the breakthroughs of the 1950s and '60s (jet aviation, the integrated circuit, nuclear power, communications satellites), this country has "discarded a century of can-do ambition built on rapid advances in technology and replaced it with a cautiousness far too satisfied with incremental improvements," the authors argue.

The column is breathtaking in its sweeping, unsupported generalizations and its omission of countless examples to the contrary. Apparently lost on Kasparov, a former chess champion beaten in his prime by a masterfully programmed supercomputer, and Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, a product of the Internet revolution that has transformed how people pay for goods and services, is the irony of their untenable position given their own run-ins and rich experiences with innovative technology.

Even as employers remain cautious next year about every dollar spent on employees, they'll also want workers to show greater skills and results.

For employees who want to get ahead, basic competency won't be enough.

To win a promotion or land a job next year, experts say there are four must-have job skills:

1. Clear communications

Whatever their level, communication is key for workers to advance.

"This is really the ability to clearly articulate your point of view and the ability to create a connection through communication," says Holly Paul, U.S. recruiting leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting and consulting firm based in New York.

Many startups are dedicated to disrupting the businesses of established enterprises by leveraging innovative ideas, processes and strategies. Big businesses, in turn, either ignore pesky startups or consider them possible competitors to be squashed - or, best case, acquired - as quickly and efficiently as possible.

But with competition keener than ever, those insular views are changing. A few far-sighted big businesses are starting to reach out to startups to fund, partner, mentor, exchange ideas and share expertise in areas such as marketing and brand awareness — especially in the field of technology. And that offers new opportunities for savvy startups willing to be frenemies with giant enterprises. These three companies - Mondelēz International, Volkswagen and SAP - are helping lead the way.

Chris Dixon, one of New York's top early-stage investors, who founded recommendations engine Hunch and sold it to eBay, is moving to Silicon Valley. He'll be joining Andreessen Horowitz as the firm's seventh investing partner, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reports. Andreessen Horowitz has quickly become one of the most reputable venture-capital firms in the world, having led rounds in hot startups such as Fab, Nicira, and Pinterest.

A while back, when a startup founder mentioned to me that he wasn’t sure he had the personality to be an entrepreneur, I realized how important that insight was. My first thought is that if you are more annoyed than energized by expert advice, team suggestions, and customer input, then you should probably avoid this line of work.

Actually, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s a good start. After working with entrepreneurs for more than a decade, I have developed a good “radar” to quickly recognize mentalities that will likely pass the test of investors, employees, and customers.

GAN is the global champion of the seed-stage, mentorship-driven accelerator model and includes over 50 of the most respected accelerators from six continents around the world. Our goal is simple: support the top accelerators that grow top companies. Because of the strength and connections of our members, mentors, investors, founders, and strategic partners… well, the results speak for themselves. We just love what we do.

It is hard to believe that it was only five years ago that the first Global Entrepreneurship Week was held.  Last week gives evidence of the tremendous enthusiasm for the idea that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and I kicked off in 2007 with 38 countries participating.  One hundred thirty nations sponsored an enormous array of events all aimed at helping young men and women around the world consider their future as potential creators of new businesses, and as contributors to the economic well being of their countrymen.

The success of the week can be measured in many ways.  It is estimated that over 15 million youngsters participated in tens of thousands of events and competitions.  The website http://www.unleashingideas.org/ provides a marvelous sense of the scope of activities.  Many young people had their first glimpse of a possible new future for themselves, others had their first conversation with an aspiring entrepreneur in another country, and still others visited a company, indeed, a start-up company for the first time.

How you spend your time could be the key to unlocking happiness. Research on the subject was analyzed in a paper in ScienceDirect by Jennifer L. Aaker and Melanie Rudd of Stanford Business School and Cassie Mogilner of Wharton. The psychologists identified five principles for good use of time: 1. Spend your time with the right people

As healthcare providers implement the changeover to electronic medical records and meaningful use requirements, the opportunities seen by health IT companies aren’t restricted to US businesses. The Consulate General of Canada in Philadelphia is planning to launch a health IT accelerator at the beginning of next year. The goal? To help Canadian companies to chase a significantly larger market with the potential to grow US jobs in the process.

Vincent Finn, a Philadelphia-based trade commissioner with the Consulate General of Canada, said the initiative has the potential to create high-paid jobs. Canada has already established technology accelerators in San Francisco and New York and a clean energy accelerator in New York. The companies selected for the health IT accelerator at the University City Science Center will be among those Canadian companies participating in the upcoming eHealth summit scheduled for November 28.

Teaching  Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning? 

In many ways, the arc of Professor Duneier’s evolution, from professor in a lecture hall to online instructor of tens of thousands, reflects a larger movement, one with the potential to transform higher education. Already, a handful of companies are offering elite college-level instruction — once available to only a select few, on campus, at great cost — free, to anyone with an Internet connection.

Brace for some surprising news. As a place to build a startup, Tel Aviv, Israel, outranks every other major startup hub in the world except Silicon Valley.

That’s according to a report set to be released today by Startup Genome, a San Francisco-based R&D project.

All right, you say; surely the No. 3 spot after Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv must go to Seattle, New York, Boston, or some other classic startup hub. Nope. The third best location for startups is Los Angeles, according to the study.

I live and work in Louisville, KY, a city that probably isn’t too different from a lot of communities in the U.S. that are not biotech hubs like San Francisco and Boston. Driven in part by economic development, many in my hometown would like to develop a biotech cluster. But building a biotech cluster is hard and takes time.

We have been hard at work on building a biotech cluster for some time. In 1997, Louisville community leaders produced a report that included developing an economic development niche “biomedical research and healthcare-related services.” The Research Challenge Trust Fund, or Bucks for Brains, started the following year. Bucks for Brains has enabled the University of Louisville to recruit and retain teams of research faculty from some of the best universities in the world. Carl Weissman, the CEO of Seattle-based Accelerator, frequently advises communities to recruit star scientists if they want to create biotech hubs, and Louisville has done it. In August 2011, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article on the top 100 universities in biggest gains in federal funding for R&D in sciences and engineering for the period 1999-2009. The University of Louisville ranked fourth on that list with an increase of 263.1 percent over the decade.

Imagine waking up each morning to a conundrum. You are a traveler making your way through a stark, unforgiving valley and you don’t know the way out. There is the sky above you, steep mountains that surround you, and the earth beneath your feet.

You start each day trying to gauge your progress. There are clues left on the trails where other travelers have been, but the valley itself has shifted. The mountains lengthen, shorten, disappear, or appear every so often, just to keep it interesting. The path someone else took that let them out of the valley may no longer exist. The things you did last week that brought you closer to exiting may no longer work because that exit may no longer exist. There is precious little food or water and starvation is a real possibility—even a probability.

The University of California, San Francisco, is no stranger to commercialization of academic research. UCSF professor Herbert Boyer co-founded Genentech, the company that arguably kicked off the entire biotechnology revolution, back in 1976. In more recent years the life sciences-focused campus has continued to produce faculty-led spinoffs such as Intellikine, Calithera Biosciences, Principia Biopharma, and SeaChange Pharmaceuticals. It’s also home to the California Institute for Qualitative Biosciences, or QB3, which supports biotech entrepreneurs at UCSF, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz, and also does some seed investing through its Mission Bay Capital operation.

Still, it takes a lot of time and money to get a life sciences venture off the ground, and for UCSF faculty, postdocs, and students who are new to entrepreneurship, it’s hard to know where to begin. Getting them oriented was part of the mission of the UCSF Center for BioEntrepreneurship, a division of the university’s Office of Research—but for the last couple of years the center has been largely inactive, as its previous director, Gail Schechter, left UCSF some time ago.

Today, the Startup Genome released the first half of its massive 160-page report on the world’s top startup ecosystems. Of the many moving parts of the report, the most noteworthy (and potentially controversial) is it’s so-called Startup Ecosystem Index, which ranks the world’s top 20 startup ecosystems, a la college football.

For those unfamiliar, the ambitious, collaborative R&D project known as “Startup Genome” was created by three young entrepreneurs, Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, and Ertan Dogrultan, who set out to take a comprehensive, data-driven dive into what makes startups successful — or go the way of the Dodo.