After years in the finance industry, Ryan Harwood knew he wanted to change his life and go into work with a smile on his face once again. He also knew he wanted to own his own business. But there was one major problem. He didn’t know what industry he was passionate about or what kind of company to create.

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The view that diversity is a resource that can improve performance is spreading throughout organisations. Research shows that for complex tasks that require creativity, diverse teams do better than those comprised of similar individuals – as long as the team members have the skills to collaborate. Diversity of views, experiences, expertise, culture and race can all enhance the way organisations and countries work.

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One-third of the EU’s population is under the age of 30. So what do today’s youth think about our world and their place in it? What areas should be prioritised in the EU’s next post-2020 budget, set to be presented in May 2018? John Hewko provides some insight.

John Hewko is the General Secretary of Rotary International.

A new World Economic Forum survey gives us some answers. Firstly, the millennial generation views climate change and conflict as the most critical issues we face.  Secondly, they regard a “start-up ecosystem and entrepreneurship” as the most important factor contributing to youth empowerment in a country.

As wireless service providers roll out what they promise to be faster and better networks, they’re also slowly installing more and more gear in our urban spaces, as the photographer Rian Dundon captures.

Negotiation is a scary thing. Whether you’re a college grad advocating for a salary bump for the first time, or a seasoned employee who needs to convince their bosses to allocate a bigger budget for training and development–it’s a situation filled with nerves, personality clashes, egos, and uncertainties.

Yet it’s something that all of us have to do, and the only way to do it successfully is if we know how we can leverage our strengths as best as we can in the situation that we’re in. Fast Company reached out to negotiation experts to learn how our personality traits can affect our negotiation styles, and why a collaborative “win-win” approach isn’t always the most effective.

In early 2018, the White House is slated to start work on the congressionally-mandated National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing. While manufacturing issues — including trade, tax, and regulation — have been a major focus for U.S. policymakers in recent years, there's one crucial aspect of manufacturing policy that's in need of serious strategic thinking: Innovation.

Executives increasingly see investing in retraining and “upskilling” existing workers as an urgent business priority that companies, not governments, must lead on.

The world of work faces an epochal transition. By 2030, according to the a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation, as many as 375 million workers—or roughly 14 percent of the global workforce—may need to switch occupational categories as digitization, automation, and advances in artificial intelligence disrupt the world of work. The kinds of skills companies require will shift, with profound implications for the career paths individuals will need to pursue.

In the latest release from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, "The Millennial Dilemma: A Generation Searches For Home... On Their Terms," Anne Snyder and Alicia Kurimska examine how millennials are affecting the housing market, especially as the older tier begins to settle down.

Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

A Microsoft Accelerator in Shanghai is contributing to the city’s innovation plans.

Political leaders in Shanghai want the Chinese city to be a ‘global innovation centre in science and technology’ by the end of this decade and an ‘eco-friendly metropolis’ that is home to 25 million by 2035.

The Microsoft Accelerator Shanghai, launched a year ago, has graduated 29 startups developing products using frontier technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and the internet of things.

MONEY identified 100 spots that offer a healthy economy, affordable homes, and a high quality of life.

A new university program in Philadelphia aims to train medical students to think like city planners. 

Facebook Twitter Email Dr. Bon Ku, like many Americans, grew up without health insurance. The son of Korean immigrants who bounced from Chicago to Houston before landing in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he spent his adolescence working in his family’s restaurant, bussing tables and washing dishes alongside undocumented workers. Like him, they were living on a knife’s edge, hoping to not get injured or sick.

Image: PHOTOGRAPHY BY Joshua Albert

With the current strong economy, and sparked by the last recession, I’m seeing a real resurgence of entrepreneurial spirit, and more startup activity than ever before. I believe the days of the “job work” mentality are thankfully waning, with more people looking to get satisfaction by making the world a better place, rather than just tolerating brain-numbing work to fund enjoyment elsewhere.

According to the 2017 Kauffman Startup Activity Index, the share of new entrepreneurs who started businesses to pursue opportunity rather than from necessity reached 86 percent, more than 12 percentage points higher than in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession. In addition, young businesses enjoyed a three-decade high five-year survival rate of nearly 50 percent.

Davos, Switzerland, 22 January 2018 – The global economy faces a reskilling crisis with 1.4 million jobs in the US alone vulnerable to disruption from technology and other factors by 2026, according to a new report, Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, published today by the World Economic Forum.

The report is an analysis of nearly 1,000 job types across the US economy, encompassing 96% of employment in the country. Its aim is to assess the scale of the reskilling task required to protect workforces from an expected wave of automation brought on by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Are you happy with your job? If you live in Hawaii, Alaska or Wyoming, then you probably answered “yes.”

It’s no surprise that a job can have a strong impact on your happiness. Often, many people have experienced first-hand what it feels like to be unhappy with your work, which can have an effect on your social life, family relationships and overall well-being. Research shows that the average worker will spend one-third of their life at work, so it’s important to make sure you’re doing something that makes you smile. And it turns out, geography can also play a big role.

The news that 2017 was either the second or third-warmest year on record, depending on the agency doing the official tallying, is not shocking. The past three years were each among the top three warmest on record, with 2016 coming out as the clear winner.

To climate scientists, individual years and where they rank are not particularly significant. Instead, it is the long-term trend that matters, and that's what has climate scientists so concerned about our future. 

Image: Global average surface temperature departures from average during 2017.IMAGE: BERKELEY EARTH

As an advisor to new business owners, and an occasional angel investor, I see new business proposals daily, many seeking investors to fund early research and development (R&D) of a new product idea. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs don’t realize that the words “research” and “development” are red flags to investors, and all such proposals are routinely discarded.

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Human capital investment in a budding start-up can be just as, if not more, crucial to success than a cash injection.

According to super angel Christopher Mirabile, who has personally made over 60 investments in fledging firms, mentoring is vitally important.

"There are three different kinds of mentors; one who really knows the industry, one who generically knows how to build a company, and then a leader who is invested in the person. You need all three in diminishing capacities," he told Independent.ie.

Image: Startup Professionals Musings: 

As every entrepreneur starts his/her journey into the world of start-ups, advice start pouring in. They start reading books on how successful entrepreneurs have managed to build innovative products that paved the way for the future. They rely on the rules set by visionaries to find the answers to their “how tos”.

Many a times, entrepreneurs blindly follow these paradigms set by their predecessors in the start-up world. Another founder’s success story often becomes the rulebook for others. But should an entrepreneur really stick to the rules set by experts or should they be out there creating their own?

As a mentor to startups and new entrepreneurs, I continue to hear the refrain that business plans are no longer required for a new startup, since investors never read them anyway. People cite sources like this recent Inc.com article “5 Reasons Why You Don't Need a Business Plan,” or my own blog discussion on this subject, “Situations Where A Business Plan Does Not Add Value.”

Let me be clear – business plans are never “required,” they should never be written “just for investors,” and if you sold your last startup for $800 million, most investors will not ask for a written plan for the next. On the other hand, if you are a first-time entrepreneur, the discipline of building a business plan will dramatically improve your success odds, and your odds of finding an investor.