Stephen Quake’s laboratory at Stanford University looks like biology’s version of Thomas Edison’s famous New Jersey workshop. Roll-down curtains cast shadows across odd devices buzzing and clicking in the aisles. You half expect to find Quake, author of 135 patents and rarely seen wearing anything other than a faded polo shirt, sleeping on one of the benches, just as the Wizard of Menlo Park was known to.

Though 2016 may have felt like a tumultuous year, a variety of factors are poised to ripple through 2017, further disrupting business as usual.

That's according to Brian Kropp, the human resources practice leader for CEB. The best practice insight and technology company that works with 20,000 senior leaders at 10,000 organizations worldwide gathered and analyzed internal and external data to look at broader trends that will influence the way we work next year. Kropp says major changes in public policy, technology, and employee demands will shape the challenges faced by business leaders and employees in the year to come.

After spending years and significant financial investment to earn a university degree, why do people take jobs outside of their field of study? The lack of jobs in their area of education must have forced these workers into a mismatch, right? At least, that’s what many people assume. But this is not the full story. To be sure, labor market conditions are important. Yet even in STEM fields where unemployment rates are low, many highly trained scientists still work in jobs outside of their field of education.

For those of you who have developed ideas and technology you wish to capitalize on, The Great Lakes Ag-Tech Business Incubator (GLATBI) based in West Olive, MI, can help you do just that.

The GLATBI, which officially opened its doors in 2014, is designed to support growers and ag-related entrepreneurs to help develop, market, and sell their agricultural inventions. Whether it is a piece of equipment, a tool, or software, GLATBI works one-on-one with clients to help get his or her product or service to market successfully.

In advanced countries, government policy has tended to play a significant role in the development of new technologies. Governments in these countries have invested heavily in basic research and development, especially in defense spending. Yet “spillovers” from such investment has led to the creation of commercial (or civilian) products and services, which has driven overall economic growth.

The 2016 edition of the Illinois Innovation Index offers a new, comprehensive analysis of Illinois' high-tech economy by examining the supply and demand of talent in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). For the first time, ISTC has partnered with LinkedIn to uncover and examine unprecedented new data and trends on talent migration and skills in demand.

Key findings show Illinois extending its lead over the nation in the production of STEM degrees, as well as the highest number of computer science degrees in more than a decade. In addition, new LinkedIn data show nearly all the top hired skills in Illinois over the past year were technology-related, including computer programming languages, user interface design, and statistical analysis and data mining.

Within a single decade, the music industry underwent a revolution in which digital upstarts triumphed over the market leaders. In 2006, record labels generated US$9.4 billion in CD sales in the U.S.; a mere 10 years later, their sales had dropped 84 percent, to $1.5 billion. The cause of this decline, of course, was digital online music.

Edward Byrne, president of King’s College London, recently spoke with The Chronicle about how deeper collaboration across borders could shake up the international hierarchy of great institutions.

Image: http://www.chronicle.com - image from video

With the average life expectancy growing apace across the globe, most of us face the prospect of working in some shape or form way past the traditional retirement age. As the first generation to experience this change, Baby Boomers are experimenting with the new possibilities before them. Many are using their late-career phase—traditionally, the easing-into-retirement years—to launch “encore careers” or “second acts”, as they have become known.

Deciding on a subject to major in is a huge decision for most college students. There are many factors to consider, including your interests, your strengths and future career opportunies. Choosing a less lucrative career path may have its downsides, particularly if you have few job prospects after graduation and you’re buried under a mountain of student debt. That’s why students might want to think about the return on their educational investment before picking a major. For the second year, SmartAsset took a look at the highest-paying college major in every state.

The day Phil Mackenzie decided to expose his almost naked body to gas colder than the lowest natural temperature ever recorded on Earth started like any other day. The professional rugby player woke up and headed to the playing field in Manchester, England, for his usual grueling workout. He ran passing and kicking drills. He was repeatedly tackled. He lifted weights. By the end of practice he was exhausted. Usually Mackenzie would head back to the locker room and soothe his sore body with a hot shower. On this day, however, an enclosed pod resembling a massive standing tanning bed beckoned from the nearby parking lot. Mackenzie and a couple of his teammates stepped inside. Frigid gas started to swirl around them.

Biotech venture capital is supposed to be the highest-risk/highest-reward type of investment there is. But many biotech VCs are actually pretty conservative, hesitant to wager on edgy science that might take a decade to pay off.

Not Third Rock Ventures. The Boston and San Francisco-based firm with an appetite for some of the riskiest and potentially highest-impact ideas in biomedical science, is announcing today it has raised a new fund with $616 million. The firm, founded in 2007, now has $1.9 billion under management spread across four different funds. More than a few of its portfolio companies — Agios Pharmaceuticals, Bluebird Bio, Sage Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, and Foundation Medicine — are closely watched public companies with large, avid followings on Wall Street.

Venture capital (VC) accounted for $3.6bn (£2.95bn) of investment in the UK tech sector last year – a 70 per cent increase on the previous year.

On a per capita basis, the country is now the second biggest destination for VC money in the world. But while it’s a valuable option, it’s not necessarily the simplest kind of funding to pursue: with the money comes a number of responsibilities, complications, and sacrifices.

Imagine the following scenario. You’re a division president of a Fortune 500 company and you’ve been tapped to run a crucial new initiative. The executive committee has targeted Southeast Asia as a new market for your company, and you’re tasked with reorienting the strategic focus of your division. You know this change will be controversial, as you’re going to have to redistribute parts of your division to make the strategic plan work. You’re also going to have to lay off a small part of your workforce, and you need to decide exactly how many people and in which areas. Although you know the discussion with your executive team will be heated and that not everyone will agree with your decisions, you’re excited about the task and know you can make it work.

In the largest proposed deal of the year, AT&T reached an agreement to buy Time Warner. Some observers are skeptical, comparing the acquisition to the spectacularly failed AOL–Time Warner merger of 2000. Others say the new company will be a “powerhouse.”

Will the outcome be different this time? AT&T’s stock is not massively overvalued, as AOL’s was. Broadband has made the experience of consuming content far better than it was with dial-up. And consumers are shifting away from TV and toward mobile devices. Combining the second-largest wireless carrier with the fourth-biggest entertainment company — one whose impressive assets include HBO and CNN — is likely to create an unassailable mobile-entertainment business.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”

The success of crowdfunding as a whole isn’t something that nonprofits can ignore. Nonprofits, in the constant state of needing more donations, can learn from the more lucrative crowdfunding trends.

In fact, nonprofits have already started applying crowdfunding techniques to their online fundraising channels.

One key to innovation is creativity—and organizations spend a great deal of time looking at how to promote and foster it both in and out of the office.

It’s no wonder. Fifty-eight percent of respondents to a study by Adobe and Forrester said firms that foster creativity had 10% year-over-year revenue growth in 2013. Just 20% of less creative companies performed similarly.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a report on technology transfers between federal laboratories and private sector entities in fiscal year 2014.

NIST said Thursday the “Federal Laboratory Technology Transfer, Fiscal Year 2014, Summary Report” shows federal laboratories established approximately 9,180 formal collaborative research agreements and 27,182 research and development-related relationships in FY 2014.

At the start of this year, President Obama called for an ambitious, $4 billion investment in computer science education for students from kindergarten through grade 12. The proposal gained the support of business leaders and 27 U.S. governors, but Congress predictably failed to act. In the meantime, countries like Canada, the U.K., Estonia, and Singapore are all adding programming skills to their school curricula.