THE NEED FOR INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE, thinking outside the box, and cooperation has never been greater. Vast poverty and inequality contribute to global problems, such as climate change, disease, environmental destruction and armed conflict. Galvanizing societies and institutions to solve these unprecedented challenges requires a renewed effort and enhanced capacity to create and transform knowledge into reform. Consequently, just as in so many other fields, a stepped-up rate of successful innovation will be of the essence in achieving development results.

We know that ours is a world of change that will go through a massive re-thinking of its ways in the next decade. This also applies to the development profession and its recipes for reform and change. All of us are challenged to reinvent our work by adopting and adapting technology and social theory much more rapidly, or fall behind. We must develop the “Apps for Development” that can make us more efficient, effective and help us benefit the lives of many more people.

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You've heard it before: Digital technologies blew up the music industry's moneymaking model, and the textbook business is next.

For years observers have predicted a coming wave of e-textbooks. But so far it just hasn't happened. One explanation for the delay is that while music fans were eager to try a new, more portable form of entertainment, students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change.

That's exactly what some companies and college leaders are now proposing. They're saying that e-textbooks should be required reading and that colleges should be the ones charging for them. It is the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy, they claim. Major players like the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons are getting involved.

Tina Seelig Stanford Technology Ventures Program - Entrepreneurs

The American dream for me, growing up in India in the 1970s, looked something like the opening credits of Dallas. The blockbuster TV series began with a kaleidoscope of big, brassy, sexy images — tracts of open land, shiny skyscrapers, fancy cars, cowboy businessmen and the very dreamy Victoria Principal. We watched bootlegged copies of the show, passed around on old Betamax cassettes. America (certainly the CBS soap-opera version of America) seemed dazzling and larger than life, especially set against the stagnant backdrop of India in the 1970s. Everyone I knew was fascinated by the U.S., whether they admitted it or not. Politicians who denounced the country by day would go home in the evenings and plot to send their kids to college in "the States."

Of course, the 1970s were actually tough times in America — stagflation, malaise, the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate — but they were brutal in the rest of the world. Hyperinflation racked most third-world countries; coups and martial law were familiar occurrences, even affecting staunchly democratic India, where emergency rule was enforced from 1975 to 1977. Set against this atmosphere of despair, the U.S. looked like a shining city on a hill.

Octomom outfits are so 2009. This year, there's plenty of pop-culture news worth mining for Halloween-costume glory. TIME takes a look at the getups that are sure to win any costume contest

Last week, well-known blogger, video-marketing expert, author and speaker, Jim Kukral, announced that after 9 years, he was bailing on his blog.

Why?

Because he believes his business-building energies would be much better allocated to creating a single, substantial piece of content to share each month, likely in the format of an ebook, than to blogging.

As proof, Jim points to the year he took of of blogging to focus on video and how much more his business grew during that period.

Maintaining a blog can be a boon to your career, increasing your profile in the scientific community, connecting you to collaborators, and helping you land new grants or jobs.

Here are the top ten things I learned from some of the best innovation professionals last week.

Last week I went to the Optimizing Innovation meeting in NY. There were many different industries and disciplines represented. But everyone had a VP Innovation title. And everyone wanted to both share and learn about the latest in innovation.

The most important unsolved question for Big Data startups is how to make money. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on this, having discovered a thousand ways not to do it over the last two years. Here's my hierarchy showing the stages from raw data to cold, hard cash:

Data

You have a bunch of files containing information you've gathered, way too much for any human to ever read. You know there's a lot of useful stuff in there though, but you can talk until you're blue in the face and the people with the checkbooks will keep them closed. The data itself, no matter how unique, is low value, since it will take somebody else a lot of effort to turn it into something they can use to make money. It's like trying to sell raw mining ore on a street corner; the buyer will have to invest so much time and effort processing it, they'd much prefer to buy a more finished version even if it's a lot more expensive.

Dow Jones is releasing its third quarter venture capital numbers today, and the amount of money raised was down sharply from last quarter’s heady $7.7 billion distributed across 740 deals.

In the third quarter of this year, 662 companies raised just $5.4 billion. It’s not uncommon to see a muted third quarter in the venture business due to summer vacations, but this was the smallest amount raised in a summer quarter since at least 2005. Unless the fourth quarter outperforms, the industry will likely wind up in the same range as 2009′s total of $23 billion raised by US companies, which is down by about 30% from recent years. That’s not surprising given the dearth of IPOs and the fact that venture firm fundraising is down too.

Like swans of legend, our once esteemed American entrepreneurs sing their final, beautiful Swan Song before they just fade away, thus tearing open the heart of our country. Our unsung entrepreneurial heroes of America are no longer part of the national discourse, even though they were the ones who built our affluent middle-class, and helped so many of us to achieve the great American Dream. Without a return of our small business owners and family farmers, the American Dream will be forever lost.

Entrepreneurs started and finished things, things that built an affluent and viable middle-class society, something the world has seen very little of.

The small businesses and family farms that made America the envy of the world, were largely made up of a dynamic, rugged, bright, hard-working lot of entrepreneurs, who fought for the common hope of us all: the American Dream.

As we discovered in 7 Signs You May Be a Bad Manager, bosses aren’t usually aware that they are bad bosses. The fact is that nobody wants to believe they’re the problem. Nevertheless, there’s a bell curve for all things involving people, which means there are few really bad bosses, few really good bosses, and most of you fall somewhere in the middle.

To me that says, for the vast majority of you, there’s lots of room for improvement.

So, if you’re not exhibiting any of the 7 Signs, that’s great, pat yourself on the back. Still, if you really want to up your management game, maybe even vault into the executive or ownership ranks someday, you’d better start doing at least a few of these 10 Things That Good Bosses Do.

Your girlfriends give you love, support, and chocolate. But they don’t give you money, especially enough money to fund a start-up company.

Who has money? Men have money. It may not be fair, but that’s largely the way it is. Women entrepreneurs can either limit their networking to just other women, or break out of the sisterhood to the vastly broader network of male entrepreneurs and investors.

Among the seemingly hundreds of program intended to help women start and grow their businesses, Astia has a unique approach. “We believe that high growth entrepreneurship is a unique skill set and can be learned, ” Sharon Vosmek, CEO, told me a few days ago. “We believe we can surround the leaders of our innovative companies with a support system and relationships that ensure that they succeed — and become serial entrepreneurs.”

When Apple's executives took the stage in Cupertino yesterday, they weren't just listing off the new features and products. They were giving a master class in how to design and market world-class products. Here are a few of the lessons we took home:

Watch what's working in one product line, and adapt it to your other product lines ...

Companies with multiple product lines often run them as separate fiefdoms, rarely interacting, other than occasional hobnobbing among their executives. Few share their lessons well. Apple showed yesterday that it's one of them. "We invented some new things [for the iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS], and we've perfected it over the last several years," Jobs said. "We're inspired by some of those innovations in the iPad and the iPhone [and] we'd like to bring them back to the Mac."

From your hair color and your height to how much you drink and how many friends you have, Anneli Rufus on the ways to predict the net worth of your future self.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a seemingly endless parade of pop songs about how great life was in California, and millions of young Americans dreamed of moving to the land of sandy beaches and golden sunshine.

But now all of that has changed. Today, millions of Californians are dreaming about leaving the state for good. The truth is that California is broke. The economy of the state is in shambles.

Finding success as an entrepreneur in the competitive world of business requires more than a great idea and influx of cash. Success (or failure) depends heavily on personal traits that keep the real entrepreneur moving forward effectively despite setbacks, sleepless nights, and whispers of doubt.

Open Forum and Business Insider contributor Shira Levine picked the minds of several entrepreneurs to find out the characteristics required to make a successful run at entrepreneurialism.

A sampling:

* Motivation. Making it happen without get distracted by shiny objects along the way.
* Focused passion. Passion is great, but make sure you construct a road map.
* Nonconformity. Don’t fit in? Who cares?
* Street Smarts. Building a successful business doesn’t necessarily require an MBA, or even a college degree.

The sFund announcement passed me by this week, but its implications are immense for the way the web is moving.

It is effectively a quarter of a billion dollar fund to help entrepreneurs be creative with web technologies and is intended to, more than anything foster a feeling of innovation without boundaries.

What is especially interesting – other than the sum of money is that it is backed by 3 of the most influential trading names on the web today, Facebook, Amazon.com and Zynga. The very fact that a retailer, the largest social network in the world and the largest social gaming company in the world should give you a pretty big idea of where the web (and the opportunity that lies within it anyway) is going

With universities facing pressure to show the value of their research, to promote economic development and to find new sources of revenue, links between academic researchers and business are being encouraged and scrutinized intensely. The essays in a new book -- The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University (University of Pittsburgh Press) -- explore these issues. The authors of the essays and their content explore these issues in the United States and other countries as well. The editor of the volume is Hans Radder, a professor of the philosophy of science and technology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who responded to e-mailed questions about the themes of the volume.