Last July, our own Ian “Mac” MacMillan, Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Jim Thompson, Director of the Wharton Social Enterprise Program, published an initial edition of The Social Entrepreneur’s Handbook. And then they did an amazing thing: they invited readers to join The Social Entrepreneur’s Advisory Group, to respond to what Mac and Jim had written. Hundreds of social entrepreneurs, from founders to CEOs to philanthropists, and from countries around the world, joined the group. (Read more about this process on our blog and from the Wharton Digital Press.)

When new species are found near populated areas, they are often small and inconspicuous, not, for example, a hammerhead shark.

But that's exactly what a team of researchers discovered along the coast of South Carolina. The new species looks virtually identical to the scalloped hammerhead, but is genetically distinct, and contains about 10 fewer vertebrae, or segments of backbone, new research shows.

Image: Save Our Seas Foundation / Peter Verhoog

Buried in all the hype about MOOCs is a somewhat surprising admission by some of the world's leading universities—that their teaching methods may not be very good.

Lectures are the norm for introductory courses at colleges worldwide, from large research universities to local community colleges. But there's a growing sense that monologues by professors are of limited effectiveness for many of today's students. The teaching style is a tradition passed down through generations of academics, and despite the addition of computers, projectors, and PowerPoint, little has changed in the basic model: A professor talks, large numbers of students listen, and one or two brave souls ask questions in the final moments. Class dismissed.

National Academy of Engineering Presational Academy of Engineering President Charles Vest tells a story about the roles of people and computers. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat chess master Garry Kasparov; since then, chess masters have also periodically beaten computers. But Vest notes that the combined team of a computer and chess master always beats either the computer or the chess master alone. This says much about the future of higher education, especially in the sciences.

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The debate over whether or not there is a shortage of workers with engineering and math skills in key industries has taken a new twist, with serious implications for innovation.

Researchers at MIT, while agreeing with other economists that fears of a widespread skills gap are exaggerated, have sounded the alarm that it appears quite real, and potentially dangerous, for a key sector of the economy that drives growth: the most innovative manufacturers that bring an above-average number of new products to market.

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How much can one simple number tell you about your health? A growing body of research over the past few years has highlighted the shortcomings of the body mass index (BMI), a basic measure of rotundity, as a predictor of well-being. The latest—and in some ways most comprehensive—of these reports appeared in August in the journal Science.

Image: www.scientificamerican.com

Welcome, my friends, to the cult of innovation. To help you drink the elixir of entrepreneurship, I present to you its 10 commandments:

1. Love and cherish the wisdom of TED

2. Worship at the great wall of Twitter

3. Never take Steve Jobs' name in vain

4. Ensure thine copy of Wired Magazine is always conspicuous

5. Love thy follower

Investor Barbara Corcoran said that she has learned to spot the red flags of “well-intended misrepresentations” and fancy talk during her four seasons judging startups on Shark Tank.

Corcoran talked with Henry Blogett of Business Insider about how many companies she has invested in — about 25 — and how many have worked. Here is how she evaluated the four seasons:

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Billlionaire investor Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theaters and is a regular on Shark Tank, has expanded his interests to personalized health. He is part of a group of investors in mobile health startup, Validic,which raised $760,000 in a seed round. The Durham, North Carolina company has developed a platform to integrate and aggregate data from more than 80 health-oriented apps.

Cuban said this about the investment:

“Personalized health is the future of healthcare…and with the explosive growth of new mobile apps and devices coming on the market, Validic solves a fundamental problem of integrating all those new innovations into the healthcare system. I’m very excited for the future of Validic and the mobile health space.”

An earlier research brief we’d issued highlighted that Silicon Valley dominates the list of top 50 VC-backed tech exits. The post generated a fair amount of chatter including some comments calling us arrogant Silicon Valley’ites (we’re based in NYC).

Among the more constructive comments were several from healthcare VCs who wondered if the data would be similar for the healthcare sector.  The prevailing hypothesis was that Silicon Valley’s dominance wouldn’t translate to healthcare (or perhaps not as much).  Note: our healthcare classification includes companies ranging from medical devices to biotech to pharma.

For Aaron O’Hearn, molding the ideal startup hire is one of his passions – I mean, it’s literally what he does on a day-to-day basis. O’Hearn is the cofounder and CEO of Startup Institute, a career accelerator that teaches skills to help people become successful startup employees. The Institute provides four different tracks to choose from: 1) product and design, 2) sales and business development, 3) technical marketing, and 4) web development. Essentially, O’Hearn and his cofounder, Shaun Johnson, created Startup Institute to provide people with the hard skills that are in demand by startups. In this regard, it could really be counted in the same category as General Assembly; however, what makes the Institute so unique is its belief that emotional intelligence (EQ) is one of the necessary skills that prospective startup employees should develop.

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Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos. Martha Stewart. Bill Gates. Larry Ellison. Jack Welch. Successful. Visionary. Competitive. Demanding. And each with a well-deserved reputation for raising their voices. They yelled. Yelling was an integral part of their leadership and management styles.

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The Venture Initiation Program, fondly known as VIP here on the 4th floor of Vance Hall, is one of the programs Wharton Entrepreneurship is proudest of, and with good reason. VIP is an educational incubator, with the emphasis on educational. As with incubators elsewhere, early-stage businesses apply to join and, once admitted, receive certain advantages that help them move their ventures forward, such as membership in an entrepreneurial community and office space. What sets VIP apart is that we also offer educational programming and advising, and because we’re at Wharton, the instructors leading the workshops, holding the information sessions, and answering the questions are the top in their fields.

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Future State 2030 identifies nine global megatrends that are most salient to the future of governments. While they are highly interrelated, the megatrends can broadly be grouped into trends reflecting changes in the status and expectations of individuals, changes in the global economy and changes in the physical environment.

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Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School has identified three broad forms of innovation that make firms – and ultimately economies – stronger. Firms can make incremental changes to existing products, thereby becoming more competitive in an existing market segment; they can introduce products, like Sony’s iconic Walkman or Apple’s iPhone, that create new market segments; or they can develop a product – such as electricity, the car or an Internet search engine – that is so disruptive that it renders an entire sector or way of doing business almost obsolete.

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In the age of the internet, trends change faster than blink of an eye and businesses are evolving faster than ever. By the time you realize that a technology or business trend is emerging, something else is already come up to disrupt the situation that quickly makes the business / technology plans you are thinking of, look obsolete.

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Is the phenomenon of "crowdfunding" – where entrepreneurs or more or less anyone asks the public to put cash into their proposed venture – getting out of control? Numerous websites have sprung up offering one version of crowdfunding or another. The websites allow those seeking finance to publish details of their project including how much cash they need, how they will use it and how investors stand to profit (if at all) in future.

"I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet may not spend his time well," wrote Henry David Thoreau a century and a half before his society had stuffed its white-collar workers into cubicles with computers. His point, made as part of a longer series of lectures, boiled down to the notion that if you don't sustain yourself with love for what you do, whatever you're doing might be sort of worthless--or worse, without principle or enjoyment.

Image: fastcoexist.com

Unpaid internships are, in my opinion, a blight infecting the modern American economy. I understand why companies offer them, and if they were truly a way for those entering the workforce to get some real world experience by taking on a light work load within their chosen field, I might even support them. But they aren’t – instead, unpaid internships have become a way for businesses to get free labor. And we aren’t talking about one or two faceless corporations taking advantage of a crummy system either, this problem is endemic; the prevalence of lawsuits in the news that are filed by unpaid interns show that. I made it a personal mission to be part of the force fighting against the tide of unpaid internships, and I pay every intern I hire for five reasons.