With emerging tech hubs like Vancouver and Toronto, and cutting-edge research universities like McGill and Waterloo, Canada is brimming with young talent. Recent years have seen the rise of Canadian startups like Vancouver’s Hootsuite, plus the successful IPOs of Ottowa’s Shopify and Montreal’s Lightspeed. So who will be next?

Iowa could position itself at the forefront of global educational technology development, but officials will need to adopt a “strategic focus” to do so, a state-commissioned report says.

In the report, completed in August and released Thursday morning, researchers with Columbus, Ohio-based TEConomy Partners found that Iowa could leverage its “significant base” of larger in-state companies such as McGraw-Hill and ACT plus noticeable research-and-development assets at area universities.

Image: Gov. Kim Reynolds greets David Tominsky, chief relationship officer at NewBoCo, as she tours NewBoCo with executive director Eric Engelmann (right) in Cedar Rapids on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019. The governor announced a new focus on educational technology for growing Iowa’s economy based on a report released by Columbus, Ohio-based TEConomy Partners. (Rebecca F. Miller/The Gazette)

Since 1979, the World Economic Forum has been taking the temperature of long-term economic growth and productivity in its Global Competitiveness Report.

The 2019 edition covers 141 economies, accounting for 99% of the world’s GDP – and finds that, a decade on from the global financial crisis, most economies are still stuck in a cycle of low productivity growth.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2019 is a much-needed economic compass, building on 40 years of experience of benchmarking the drivers of long-term competitiveness and integrating the latest learnings about the factors of future productivity.

The Global Competitiveness Index 4.0 is organized into 12 pillars: institutions; infrastructure; ICT adoption; macroeconomic stability; health; skills; product market; labour market; financial system; market size; business dynamism; and innovation capability. The index has a scoring system ranging from 0 to 100, with the frontier (100) corresponding to the goal post for each indicator.

Entrepreneurs get their start for all sorts of reasons. Maybe you hate your job. Maybe you’ve got a groundbreaking, innovative idea. Maybe your childhood hero was Steve Jobs. But how do you bridge the knowledge gap between conventional ideas about business, and the wisdom that it takes to actually start and run a business? The first step is realizing what entrepreneurship is and isn’t. (If you ever want a good laugh, ask an entrepreneur how great it is to be able to vacation whenever they want.) Here are 4 common myths about being an entrepreneur—debunked.

Starting a business alone is one of the most challenging things one can do in their professional career. Many entrepreneurs seek help and advice from online publications, friends, family, and industry developments. The truth is, while all those resources can provide invaluable information, one of the best resources an entrepreneur can have is a mentor.

Millennials are changing the way people look at and talk about mental health.

As part of World Mental Health Day, Business Insider took a look at the mental-health state of millennials (defined by the Pew Research Center as the cohort turning ages 23 to 38 in 2019). It doesn't look pretty — depression and "deaths of despair" are both on the rise among the generation, linked to issues such as loneliness and money stress.

Millennials also f

Sanderlings, red-headed woodpeckers and great gray owls are just a few of the North American bird species projected to be threatened by climate change in the coming decades, according to the latest assessment depicting an increasingly dire situation for the continent’s avian wildlife.

“Two thirds of birds in North America are at risk from climate change, to large range losses, potentially extinction, and this is especially so if we continue on the current trajectory,” says Brooke Bateman, senior climate scientist for the National Audubon Society, which carried out the report.

China’s technology sector has grown so rapidly in the last two decades that it is pushing the United States out of its long-held position at the top of the digital food chain. Advancements by companies like Huawei, WeChat, Baidu, Tencent and others are helping the Chinese economy grow at an unprecedented rate and influencing the global economy. China and the U.S. are battling to be the leader in 5G technology, a fight it seems that Chinese tech companies are winning. A new book by journalist Rebecca Fannin looks at how China has come to dominate areas ranging from telecommunications to artificial intelligence to e-commerce. It is titled Tech Titans of China: How China’s Tech Sector is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder and Going Global. Fannin, who is also the founder of media platform Silicon Dragon Ventures, joined the K@W radio show on SiriusXM channel 132 to talk about her book. (Listen to the full podcast at the top of this page.)

The sudden slowdown in the U.S. market for initial public offerings is hitting the venture-capital business, which saw fundraising slow in the third quarter from recent record levels, new data from Dow Jones VentureSource show.

Venture-backed start-ups raked in $27.53 billion of new capital in 1,295 rounds in the quarter, down 17% in dollars and 14% in rounds, according to the report, which was released Thursday. The total raised was the lowest in nearly two years, but still the ninth highest since 1992. The number of deals was the smallest since the first quarter of 2014. The single largest deal was actually from a corporate investor— Microsoft’s (ticker: MSFT) $1 billion investment in OpenAI.

Cities are rich with information. Look closely, be it through street cameras, our phone GPS, or our grocery bills, and you can see patterns in how we live. But new research from the University of Queensland and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research has found a rich source of information beneath the surface of the city—specifically in the sewers.

Federal agencies fail, on average, 24 percent of the time to notify applicant small businesses of award decisions within required deadlines. A small business has a zero percent chance of being able to plan to start an innovation project within six months if they apply to ARPA-E (the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) or the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, both of which never met the deadline. 

Business transformation programs have long focused on productivity improvement—taking a “better, faster, cheaper” approach to how the company works. And for good reason: disciplined efforts can boost productivity as well as accountability, transparency, execution, and the pace of decision making. When it comes to delivering fast results to the bottom line, it’s a proven recipe that works.

WASHINGTON – The Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) today announced that industry veteran Jim Greenwood will step down as President and CEO of the world’s largest biotechnology organization after the 2020 election and help transition a new leader to represent the industry globally and to defend innovation from domestic political attacks.

ROCKVILLE, Md., Oct. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Emmes today announced the award of eight new task order contract awards associated with the Helping to End Addiction Long-termSM Initiative, known as the NIH HEAL InitiativeSM. The total value for the eight contracts is more than $9 million. The contract awards' duration ranges from one to five years.

The wind of change is blowing across Venture Capital. Not confined to a specific market or geography, the relationship between VCs and the companies they invest in has shifted culturally and economically. There is a sense that models are in need of a change to safeguard otherwise resilient sectors such as tech from the fated ‘bubble’ scenario that many sceptics see on the horizon, and with this, the deal structures and ultimately ROI is also changing.

Much of the current media-reported posturing by policy makers and pundits about the failure of U.S. colleges and universities to adequately prepare people for the 21st workplace is either ill informed or misguided, in my opinion.

Does Space represent a real economic opportunity or are expensive endeavors like SpaceX a form of billionaire hubris? Youngme Moon, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Mihir Desai discuss the Race for Space, before debating the viability of the electric scooter market in cities around the world.

Good incentive program design benefits both businesses and economic development organizations.

Companies and EDOs need well-designed and well-managed incentive programs that can create long-term, mutual benefits. Incentives with clear rules and responsibilities suggest a stable, responsible, and sustainable fiscal and economic environment, which is good for businesses too.

Dell Technologies plans to create an innovation ecosystem with local companies and startups to digitize citizen services, as the technology leader bets big on smart city projects in India.

The company said the next phase of smart city projects will not only create better outcomes for citizens, but also digitize services “in a way that can make them destinations for talent and make a great place to live”.