How will New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s tuition-free public college plan affect individual campuses? It’s not a completely fair question, at least not yet. The truth is that no one quite knows at the moment. Cuomo issued a broad proposal Tuesday calling for the creation of an Excelsior Scholarship that would stack on top of existing federal and state grants to pay for tuition for students at public two- and four-year institutions whose families earn $125,000 or less. No legislation had been filed on the matter as of Wednesday afternoon, and the proposal will still have to go through the wringer of the New York State Legislature.

If your organisational culture has these five characteristics, all attempts to implement strategic change will likely be doomed.

It’s no longer a secret that most companies struggle with strategy execution. McKinsey research tells us, for example, that 70 percent of change efforts fall short of desired results. The financial losses implied by statistics like these are massive, and corporate leaders have taken notice. Today’s senior leaders realise that implementation is at least half of the leadership challenge when it comes to improving performance via strategic change. Too frequently, however, they seek solutions in the wrong place.

NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 9, 2017 — Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC, New York State, and the New York Genome Center today announced a collaboration to launch a new JLABS in New York City. Called JLABS @ NYC, the 30,000-square foot facility will be located at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) in Soho and will open in 2018. The project is receiving $17 million in New York State funding. The site will be open to biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer health companies. A Quick Fire Challenge seeking companies working in these areas, particularly startups working on cross-sector solutions to prevent intercept or cure diseases, will be launched by Johnson & Johnson Innovation, with the winner(s) eligible for one year of residency at JLABS @ NYC.

In the late morning of April 11, 2011, hours before its planned launch, the third-generation Kindle—the first lower-priced Kindle with Special Offers—was leaked. Moments later, 20 people in a Seattle conference room jumped into gear. Thirty-seven minutes after that, the device was officially unveiled and available for purchase, and Jeff Bezos was getting ready to sing its praises in a press interview.

It would seem that Juan Ponce de Leon’s trip to the New World in search of the fountain of youth may have been even more in vain, given that it may have been right in his “backyard.” Evidence from a new study by investigators at the University of Malta and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS/University of Bordeaux) shows that chemicals in ubiquitous Mediterranean plants could hold the key to delaying age-related diseases. 

Performance measurement is one of the hottest topics in economic development right now. This month, IEDC will hold a webinar called Measure What Matters: Top Metrics in 2017 (January 18) and C2ER will host a webinar on Promoting Evidence-Based Policymaking by Sharing State Administrative Data (January 25).

Our own article on the State Economic Development Performance Indicators White Paper we wrote with CREC was among the most-read posts of last year. (Check it out here in case you missed it.)

Image: http://www.smartincentives.org

Recent cases highlighted in the media suggest that executives, in a desperate quest to quench the market’s unquenchable thirst for growth, are ignoring reason and dictating growth targets so insurmountable that their employees are turning to unethical and perhaps illegal means to achieve their goals (e.g., Wells Fargo, Enron, VA). Are you worried about something like this happening in your organization? You might believe that you’re an innocent pawn in this game, but as a manager, you have a responsibility to ensure that unreasonable targets don’t unleash harmful behaviors on your team.

Andy Grove was not a pathbreaking scientist. He did not author anything so important as the law associated with Gordon Moore. He was never a household name like Bill Gates. Unlike Steve Jobs, he was not a design genius, nor did he have the same intuition for consumer sentiment. But no person had as much to do with making possible the third industrial revolution as this Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1956.

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Andrew_Grove.jpg

As he looks ahead to his second five-year term, President Xi Jinping surely knows that innovation must be an economic priority if China is to escape the middle-income trap that awaits it in about ten years. Even amid slowing economic growth, there are signals that China may be starting to come into its own as a global innovator. However, even if these trends prove sustainable, will it be too little, too late? Furthermore, can commitment to innovation be reconciled with Xi’s increasingly authoritarian leanings? To many of us at INSEAD – an institution whose history of Asia business research dates from the 1970s – the balance of power in the region, if not the world, seems largely to depend on the answers.

The vast majority of organizations' strategic branding and communications is focused externally -- aimed at various constituencies outside of the company. But marketplace changes over the past decade have shaken things up, decreasing the effectiveness of many traditional branding strategies.

Droughts, wildfires, heat waves, intense rainstorms—these are all extreme weather phenomena that occur naturally. But climate change is now increasing the frequency and magnitude of many of these events. Flooding in Paris and the Arctic heat wave are just two instances where climate change contributed to extreme weather in 2016—and there are many more examples.

LG's 'wallpaper OLED' lives up to the hype. The screen is thinner than an iPhone. 

Image: http://mashable.com

The growing popularity of artificial intelligence technology will likely lead to millions of lost jobs, especially among less-educated workers, and could exacerbate the economic divide between socioeconomic classes in the United States, according to a newly released White House report.

But that same technology is also essential to improving the country’s productivity growth, a key measure of how efficiently the economy produces goods.

It involves talking to yourself

So convincing are the health benefits of exercise that it’s a wonder we don’t all run to work every day. That’s until you consider the downside of exercise, of course: it’s hard, sweaty and uncomfortable.

In the last few years, single-pixel cameras have begun to revolutionize the field of imaging. These counterintuitive devices produce high-resolution images using a single pixel to detect light. They do not need lenses, the images of have none of the distortions that lenses produce, and the entire picture is always in focus. Physicists have used them to make movies and even to create 3-D images.

Under Armour Inc. CEO Kevin Plank's keynote speech Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show stressed the importance of product innovation and provided another clear sign that this is not your mom and pop’s CES anymore.

A common thread in the study of organizational culture is the idea of culture as a unifying force that brings people together to work productively toward the attainment of organizational goals. In this approach, organizational culture is understood as a variable to be used in projects of social engineering aimed at creating unity and cohesion.

The Pentagon’s research and development division, DARPA—the creative force behind the internet and GPS—retooled itself three years ago to create a new office dedicated to unraveling biology’s engineering secrets. The new Biological Technologies Office (BTO) has a mission to “harness the power of biological systems” and design new defense technology. Over the past year, with a budget of about $296 million, it has been exploring challenges including memory improvement, human–machine symbiosis and speeding up disease detection and response.

Below is 450+ pages of our most popular research reports from last year. As always, if you find these reports helpful, share with friends. If you think they're terrible, please send to your enemies.

10. The 'Big 5' Patents Report Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have collectively applied for 52,000 patents since 2009. Get insight into their corporate product strategy and innovation in our patents report.

For American tech behemoths like Google and Facebook, Europe can be both a blessing and a curse.

The region and its 500 million consumers are one of the companies’ most important overseas markets. And in cities from Lisbon to Ljubljana, people often can’t get enough YouTube videos, Amazon purchases and Twitter messages.