Every week, Daniella Nistenpover sits down in a lecture hall for one class in neurophysiology and another in biological processes, and sees a sea of women. That’s not the case when the 22-year-old takes courses in the theory of electrical circuits or differential equations at the predominantly male Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. She says it’s evidence that she’s picked the right career.

The Creative Economy in Oklahoma - An infographic by the team at Creative Economy in Oklahoma

Despite the high levels of unemployment, companies are constantly complaining that they can't find good talent. Since having great people on board is an integral part of being an innovative company, it behooves us to find out why it is so hard to recruit them into the firm.  While it is easy to blame education, parenting, and a host of other factors, the most obvious culprit, and the one that organizations can control, is the hiring process.  Here are some of the best ways to get hot talent in the door:

Describe the position using goals, not skills

The first question to ask is: what are you looking for?  Typically, job descriptions are based on the last person who did the job, and the hiring manager is looking for that person's clone.  The list of skills and tasks can be very long, and hard to parse, which makes cover-letter and resume-writing very complex (and, in turn, hard for HR to parse).  To make matters worse, required skills and tasks are sometimes vague (what does "good communication skills" mean, anyway?), which qualifies either everyone or no one.  Granted, some positions require specialized software (e.g., R, CAD, Java), specific skills (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling, drafting), and deep experience (e.g., knowledge of pharmaceutical industry), but try to avoiding making a long list of requirements, because that can box the role into a narrow space that can inhibit creativity, innovation, and (most importantly) initiative.

Berlin’s city authorities have — “finally”, according to some in the local startup community — agreed to promote the city as an international tech hub, starting with a marketing campaign worth a reported €500,000 over the next year.

The campaign, announced last night at the 10,000-strong Campus Party Europe technology festival at Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport (above), is a joint venture between the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Technology and Research, Berlin Partner, the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry and regional ICT association SIBB e.V.

Before I begin discussing closing, I would recommend that no matter what I write below, the best way to learn how to really close deals is to work under someone who has done it many times and can teach you the craft. You can be a natural born pitchman/woman, but there is no such thing as a natural born closer. If you are a junior employee and have the opportunity to jump to the majors and run the show or work under a founder or a VP of BD/Partnerships to learn the fundamentals- work under the seasoned pro.

Now, here is what you need to know about closing:

Understanding Why Someone Would Want To Work With You If you want to work with Company X, you’d better bring something to the table. I’ve written a post before about The Four Golden Rules Of Partnerships. This is really where they apply. Either you are going to make Company X money, save Company X money, grow Company X’s userbase, or improve Company X’s product. These are the only four major reasons why Company X would want to work with you.

Hollywood North? L.A. with rain? The city that riots whenever its hockey team doesn’t win the Stanley Cup?

Americans might think of Vancouver in many ways — but typically not as a tech startup mecca.

And yet Summify, A Thinking Ape, OpenCal, TinySpeck, and PhoneGap are just a few of the city’s better-known startups of the past few years. Along with established-but-still-young companies such as Hootsuite, these startups have joined multinationals Electronic Arts, Sierra Wireless, Pixar, Sony, and Microsoft in the Vancouver area.

The largest fish in the ocean is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). This massive, migratory fish can grow up to twelve meters in length, but its enormous mouth is designed to eat the smallest of critters: plankton. While the biggest, the whale shark isn’t the only gigantic filter-feeding shark out there: the basking shark and the megamouth shark also sieve enormous amounts of the tiny organisms from the sea in order to survive.

While scientists like Al Dove and Craig McClain (of Deep Sea News) are learning more and more about the basic biology and behavior of these magnificent creatures, other scientists are busy investigating their neuroanatomy. A few years ago, Kara E. Yopak and Lawrence R. Frank from the University of California in San Diego got their hands on two whale shark brains from an aquarium, and put them into an MRI scanner.

The Jewish innovation economy is booming. One study from 2010 claimed that about 600 new initiatives had been launched in the previous decade. These Jewish startups represent millions of dollars in investment on programs that reach thousands of American Jews. But despite this proliferation, another recent study, conducted by the organization Bikkurim, declared that “the success of the innovation startup sector is by no means assured.” The demise of JDub Records, in 2011, seemed to prove the point. Startups still had a long way to go to prove they could eventually turn into sustainable organizations that are financially viable and have clear missions .

What is missing, surprisingly, from both the Bikkurim study and almost every other discussion of how to turn Jewish startups into long-term enterprises is a serious conversation about strategic partnerships and collaboration between startups and more established organizations. Synagogues, federations, and Jewish community centers are — or at least should be —looking for new ways to engage more Jews, while startups need the kind of stability and infrastructure that larger organizations can offer.

I have taken a real interest in equity crowdfunding and its potential impact on social entrepreneurs. One reason: I would have loved to have been able to take advantage of it when I was doing my initial financing of TerraCycle.  Had crowdfunding existed then, I would have been able to raise money faster, on better terms, and from a wider range of investors — all good things when it comes to financing a small business.

Here’s a quick update on where things stand (I have written about crowdfunding previously). Broadly speaking, a federal equity crowdfunding law that passed in April as part of the JOBS Act will allow an American company to use an online crowdfunding platform to raise up to $1 million from the general public without these shareholders counting toward the company’s private shareholder cap. I see this as a big opportunity because now entrepreneurs will be able to gain capital and momentum with an early shareholder base that is invested in the company’s success.

If you haven’t heard of crowdfunding, you might want to at least take a look at it. It could be an easy way to fund your startup.

The JOBS Act that passed earlier this year allows for greater use of small investors without restrictions. Crowdfunding, which is essentially appealing to a large group of potential investors via the internet, is one such funding source.

A number of websites have sprung up to facilitate crowdfunding, including Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Crowdfunder, WeFunder and Quirky.

The I-20 Corridor Regional Accelerator has the potential to serve as a model for the rest of the country in fostering economic development in rural communities, according to federal officials.

Representatives from the Obama administration visited Louisiana Tech University on Thursday to tour the campus and discuss the selection of the I-20 Corridor Accelerator as a winner in the Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge — a national competition designed to spur job creation and economic growth in rural communities by identifying and leveraging local assets and strengthening linkages to industry.

Why is it that most of the business plans I see are really product plans? I define a product plan as a detailed description of your product or service, with a bit of business thrown in at the end. A business plan is a detailed description of your business, with a bit of product description thrown in near the front.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely positive to have a product plan. A simple differentiation is that a product plan is designed for internal use, to get the product out. A business plan is an “outward facing” document for external investors, or for C-level executives within your own company.

Apple, a company that nearly filed for bankruptcy just 16 years ago, passed a very different sort of milestone on Monday, when a bump in its share price made it the most highly valued public company ever.

Apple already boasted the largest market value of any public company, a title it has held since toppling Exxon Mobil from that spot. But Microsoft still held onto the record for the biggest market capitalization ever, $616.34 billion, which it set at the close of trading on Dec. 27, 1999, according to Howard Silverblatt, an analyst at S.& P. Dow Jones Indexes.

When the whale known as Touché is hungry for a school of fatty fish, he circles below them, fashioning a net of air by streaming bubbles from his blowhole. Then he corkscrews toward the surface of the Gulf of Maine, herding the fish into an ever tighter packet with the bubbles and his 30-ton body. Finally he opens his jaw wide, takes a monstrous gulp and relaxes, breathing deeply at the water’s surface.

Since 1999, Technology Review has selected 35 exceptionally talented young innovators whose work we, their peers, and a distinguished panel of judges have agreed has the greatest potential to transform the world.

The list has become an important recognition among technologists at startups, in industry, and in the academy, and we take seriously the responsibility of choosing the winners. We seek nominations more than six months before we publish the final list. Candidates are nominated through a form on ­TechnologyReview.com or by an editor. The nominees are screened for easy rejections, and we collect curricula vitae, personal statements, and at least three reference letters for those we like. A panel of judges—experts in different fields, who may be past winners themselves—assess the candidates. The editors consider a final list of dozens of names, scrutinizing the judges' comments and seeking a mixture of individuals that represents current trends in technology and the diversity of innovation around the globe. The list is whittled down until 35 remain.

You want to be perceived as a good innovation project member, to be appreciated for your achievements – and just to safeguard that notion some of what you do leads to a success in time – you do multiple projects in parallel. But is this really efficient and effective? Check out Bengt Järrehult’s somewhat mathematical look at multi-tasking, where the exercise of putting numbers in leads to a result that may surprise you.

Two projects, A and B, can run in two different ways, both demanding ten weeks of full-time work. It seems to be virtually irrelevant whether we run one week with A and then one week with B, etc. (multi-tasking) or if we complete A before starting with B (single-tasking). In both cases we are ready after 20 weeks (see fig 1). But if we calculate the average time per project, using multi-tasking we get 19.5 weeks per project because A is ready after 19 weeks and B after 20 weeks, i.e. average 19.5 weeks. If we run single-tasking, A is ready to be launched to earn money after 10 weeks (see the red flags) while B is ready for launch after 20 weeks, both calculated from time = 0. The Average time per project is now only 15 weeks (as (10+20)/2 = 15). Therefore multi-tasking decreases the efficiency 30%! (as (19.5 -15)/15 =0.30). Do you agree?

The students at Bangkok University have a new lounge designed by Supermachine, and it's absolutely stunning. "There have been a lot of discussions about today's education whether it happen in classrooms, libraries, homes, cafes etc. when knowledge has been way easier to access in the era of internet and social networks," write the folks at Supermachine on their blog. "Schools and universities are adapting their environment to the new epoch." Supermachine calls the lounge a “youngsters’ ecology.” Here, they will be able to study, and have space to take a break in the social areas.

In the business world, knowing how to effectively communicate with your superiors is essential. You've got to talk their language in order for them to respect you.  Ironfire Capital Founder Eric Jackson recently put together two big lists of management terms for Forbes that every MBA should know.  He says that knowing these terms will help you get promoted to middle management — but warns that if you want to make it to the very top, you've got to back up this jargon with real substance.  

Congratulations! Whether with an attractive amount of equity or a persuasive pitch of promised impact, you’ve successfully recruited high-potential talent to your business. But the hard part isn’t exactly over, as nothing in this economy is ever guaranteed. Bringing on top talent is one thing; keeping them there is another.

Instead of continually dangling costly perks in front of their eyes, providing support and mentorships may be the way to maintain company loyalty from your high-potential talent. By investing in their work ethic and well-being early on, their productivity at present may grow while their career trajectories align with your business well into the future.