See which health issues drove online searches this year

To find out what’s ailing Americans—or at least which ailments they’re curious about—look no further than online search traffic. Zika, heartburn drugs and EpiPen prices were among the topics that saw the greatest rises in search interest in the U.S. in 2016, according to data gathered by health publisher WebMD.

While cold symptoms, the flu, high blood pressure and diabetes are always the most-searched topics among WebMD’s 72 million monthly visitors, who are largely young and female, here are six issues that saw big increases in attention this year compared to 2015:

" If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. " - John Quincy Adams

Senior managers can apply practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves—and their teams—more creative.

Although creativity is often considered a trait of the privileged few, any individual or team can become more creative—better able to generate the breakthroughs that stimulate growth and performance. In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams, ranging from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps, suggests that companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the creative output of employees at any level.

In 1982, at a nursing station in the frozen Canadian town of Davis Inlet, a young medical student made a troubling observation about arthritis.

“On the north coast of Labrador, let me tell you, the weather is terrible — you could have a snowball fight in the middle of July,” recalled Dr. Donald Redelmeier, who is now a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. “There are days of extreme and severe weather, but there is no epidemic of osteoarthritis. … Yeah, people are suffering, but not much different from what I was used to in downtown Toronto.”

LOS ANGELES—The Milken Institute’s annual Best-Performing Cities index for 2016 shows that tech is still tops, as cities that excel in innovation drive the nation’s economic dynamism. With an ecosystem for entrepreneurship, San Jose, CA, claimed the top spot again.

“America’s best-performing cities yet again demonstrated their innovation advantage aligned with high levels of entrepreneurship,” says Ross DeVol, chief research officer of the Milken Institute and one of the report’s authors. “That is witnessed not just in ‘traditional’ technology but in medical and financial services.”

Automation is happening, and it will bring substantial benefits to businesses and economies worldwide, but it won’t arrive overnight. A new McKinsey Global Institute report finds realizing automation’s full potential requires people and technology to work hand in hand.

Kauffman Entrepreneurship Scholars Awards inspire young researchers to study entrepreneurship

KANSAS CITY, MO (Jan. 9, 2017) – The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today the recipient of the 2017 Ewing Marion Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship and the recipients of the 2017 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. The awards were presented Saturday, Jan. 7, at the Allied Social Science Associations’ annual meeting in Chicago.

Nearly 60 Wharton and Penn alumni crowded into a classroom at Wharton San Francisco one evening in December for a workshop with Bay Area industry executives on alternatives to equity financing. They talked about how companies optimize their capital structure over the various life stages of growth—from grants and accelerator programs to term loans and lines of credit.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.wharton.upenn.edu

It is has been my honor and pleasure since 2006 to write this weekly column. From the beginning, I hoped that these columns would be archived so that they would form a cumulative resource to help federal employees plan for retirement at every stage of their careers.

Below is my annual index to previous columns, which I hope will serve as such a resource. I’ve updated it by adding last year’s columns and deleting some older ones that have become obsolete or irrelevant.

Great businesses are founded on great partnerships. But great businesses can also be destroyed by bad partnerships.

These entrepreneurs—and members of The Oracles—share their hard-won wisdom about what to watch out for before joining forces with a business partner.

Image: Jack Canfield Image credit: The Oracles

Knowledge@Wharton: I’ll throw the hard question out there first. Can you run the government like a business?

Philip Joyce: Well, I don’t think you can just decide that if you were a successful business executive that all of the things that you did are necessarily transferable to the government sector. And I think if you attempt to run government precisely like a business, then you’re going to find yourself relatively frustrated.

WWBIC, LISC, SBA, Wells Fargo, and Legacy Redevelopment Corporation are partnering with the City of Milwaukee to develop a guide for a nationwide grant program that will help revitalize communities around Milwaukee through business development and the rebuilding of neighborhoods. Currently, there are many commercial and foreclosed sites in the Milwaukee area, and with the help of this grant areas would be targeted one at a time to rebuild and bring value back to the community. Current cities that are also participating in the project are Boston, Charlotte, Houston, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis.

As a growing business owner, they are asking you to take a short 13 question survey regarding the layout, incentives, and features of your small business.

Due Date for this survey is Tuesday, January 17th.

Well, that hurt. Twenty years ago, I was standing in my commander’s office as he told me in muted tones that I had not handled something well.

He was a leader I really looked up to, and knowing I had disappointed him made his delivery even more painful—I almost wished he would just yell.

About an hour earlier, during a tension-filled exercise, I had told his boss, in front of probably 50 others, to keep quiet while the team I managed tried to work out a problem in preparation for an intelligence satellite launch.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) released a solicitation committing up to $8 million to support between one and seven Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Nodes. The nodes are part of I-Corps’ National Innovation Network that builds upon fundamental research with the goal of dramatically reducing the period of time necessary to bring a promising idea from its inception to widespread implementation. NSF will support new or previously funded Nodes that will foster understanding on how to:

Four gun-toting biologists scramble out of a helicopter on Southampton Island in northern Canada. Warily scanning the horizon for polar bears, they set off in hip waders across the tundra that stretches to the ice-choked coast of Hudson Bay.

Helicopter time runs at almost US$2,000 per hour, and the researchers have just 90 minutes on the ground to count shorebirds that have come to breed on the windswept barrens near the Arctic Circle. Travel is costly for the birds, too.

Americans are rightly increasingly angry about our colleges and universities. While many critics of higher education have outlined many sins (Victor Davis Hanson is particularly noteworthy), we can say the four biggest ones are that college is too costly, involves too little learning, is increasingly intolerant or contemptuous of free expression and diversity of opinion, and graduates students who increasingly are “underemployed,” taking relatively unskilled jobs for which college training did next to nothing to improve labor productivity. It is no wonder that 2016 is the fifth consecutive year of falling enrollments.

Global Startup Competition Debuts In North America!

For the 2016/2017 competition we are again looking for the most promising start-ups out there. The first regional selection event regional will be co-hosted with Plug And Play in Sunnyvale, CA - that has invested in companies with market value of ten billion US dollars like Dropbox, PayPal, Google, Lending Club, and got enormous returns from the angel round of investment in Google.

IBM Watson Health and Illumina have officially joined forces, announcing a new partnership on Monday as the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference kicks off.

Watson Health is a serial collaborator, but it chose a pivotal agreement to spotlight at JPM. By integrating with Illumina’s platform, the two companies can create an end-to-end tumor sequencing workflow that could increase accessibility and scalability in the field. It could also address a major problem, said Watson Health Vice President Steve Harvey; a lack of standardization.

HYDERABAD, India — The ritual goes like this: If you’re approaching the god Balaji with an appeal, walk in a circle around the temple 11 times and leave an offering of tulsi leaves at his feet. Should your wish be granted, come back and do it 108 times. 

“We call him Visa Balaji,” said Madhu Vadlamani, 25. “He is famous for granting visas.”

Vadlamani and her husband of just three days, Revanth Chilakamarri, 29, were but two of thousands of worshipers orbiting the “Visa Balaji” temple near here one recent morning. Years ago, the incarnation of Vishnu had blessed them both with student visas to the United States. Though they had grown up just seven lanes apart, they met in America and fell in love. 

MADISON – Looking for a self-directed project this semester that can lead to prizes, mentoring and live connections to the business world? The 14th annual Wisconsin Governor's Business Plan Contest is accepting entries online for the 2017 competition until 5 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 31.

The contest is designed to encourage entrepreneurs in the startup stage of tech-based businesses in Wisconsin. It links up-and-coming entrepreneurs with a statewide network of community resources, expert advice, high-quality education, management talent and possible sources of capital.