Sometimes it seems like I’ve made a career out of debunking urban legends about federal retirement benefits. Anyone who has worked in a federal personnel office has heard many claims that just simply aren’t true, no matter how many people have passed the information around. Here are some of the common myths I’ve encountered recently.

Image: Flickr user christopher_brown

China’s next billion-dollar startup could have backing from an investor with more money than Warren Buffett and a knack for promoting spicy duck-neck delicacies. The Hubei provincial government is armed with 547 billion yuan ($81 billion) earmarked for investments that can diversify a job base dependent on steel, mining and cars. And the bureaucrats in the heartland region along the Yangtze River are letting professionals do the work -- allocating the money to investment houses Sequoia Capital LLP, TCL Capital and CBC Capital.

The SEC has scheduled a meeting to consider proposed amendments related to Rules 147 and 504 – securities regulations that impact intrastate crowdfunding.  The meeting of the Commission is scheduled to commence at 10AM on Wednesday, October 26 at SEC HQ in Washington, DC. The announcement is indicative that final rules will be forthcoming.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com

Long-term thinking, short-term savvy, and relentless focus on employees.

As organisations face increasing pressure to innovate faster, collaborating with other companies, large and small, may just be the answer. Research suggests that greater collaboration between G20 large companies and entrepreneurs could result in an additional £1.06 trillion in global economic output. But very few companies navigate collaboration well, or know where to start.

Image: http://www.information-age.com

Singapore is positioning itself as a leader in the development of sustainable cities. One of the ways they are doing so is by considering the implementation of the “circular economy” in Singapore. That is, a variety of business models and industrial processes which do not generate waste by intention or design and conserve natural resources as much as possible.

PayScale introduced its first college salary report in 2008, and the College Scorecard from the federal government followed last year, ushering an elephant into the hallowed halls of college admissions: What do the schools’ graduates actually earn?

Despite the hand-wringing of many in academia, who saw the immeasurable richness of a college education crassly reduced to a dollar sign, the data has wrought a sea change in the way students and families evaluate prospective colleges.

When Jill Lepore, critiquing Clayton Christensen's The Innovator’s Dilemma in the New Yorker, queried his theory of disruptive innovation ("disrupt, and you will be saved"), some commentators felt she had a point.

But a theory of change proposed by Christensen back in 1997, the idea that companies will fail if they do not disrupt themselves, has found new life in the digital revolution.

There is little doubt that technological innovation and disruption have brought fundamental change to many industries; none more so, perhaps, than the media and entertainment industry. Long dominated by established studios, broadcasters and publishers, the digital age has been a supreme leveller.

FORPHEUS was recently named the world's first robot table tennis tutor by Guinness World Records. It's now been updated in order to return balls with greater accuracy using artificial intelligence.

For years we’ve heard that geography doesn’t matter, we’ve conquered distance and the world is flat. Modern communication and transportation technology means it doesn’t really matter where we live or work. Even with the ongoing back-to-the-city movement, high-tech startups and the ecosystems in which they flourish are supposed to be the last bastion of suburban nerdistans—arrayed in office parks in Silicon Valley or the suburbs outside of Boston, Austin, and Seattle.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), university president Rafael Reif sees the future.

Universities like MIT are now about more than just higher education; they’ve become a source of groundbreaking research and innovation. At MIT, 89 percent of undergraduate students participate in research opportunities by graduation, working on cutting-edge research projects.

In my position as the Executive Director of Academic Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, I have the privilege of working with teachers  and district leaders from across the country. Through the many interactions that my team and I have had with these educators, I have gained substantial insight about what they hope to obtain from digital content. I have written extensively about the education innovation ecosystem (see working definition here, and additional Forbes blogs on the topic here and here), and the important role of educators’ voices as part of this ecosystem. For this reason, I have decided to share with you the features that teachers and district officials most often seek when choosing digital content to use in the classroom. Education entrepreneurs should take these requests into account when developing technology products.

The challenge of resource allocation is determining where the resources will bring the most value, how much money and talent to redistribute, and how to put those shifts effectively into action.

I recently listened to a CEO client lament his company’s low growth and the difficulty in shifting resources from a mature business to new fast-growing ones. The challenge he faced is all too common: unit presidents protective of legacy businesses, strenuously arguing that reducing resources would endanger the company’s biggest cash cows.

Siddharth Shah, WG’17, was already an entrepreneur in India when he applied to business school. He’d begun a financial service startup and one in mobile gaming, and the success of those companies led him to Wharton. He had plenty of ideas, but he needed to know more about business to scale his entrepreneurial efforts.

“I’m from an engineering background, and I also needed to learn leadership and management skills,” he said. “I came to Wharton for the global exposure. If I want to internationalize my company, if I want to get more clients or partners globally for my company, it made more sense to come to a global program.”

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

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the future of work. Much of the time, these conversations are fueled by the anxiety many of us share as we try to understand the impact new technologies will have on our industries. We tend to reduce these discussions to binary arguments -- how smart machines will do extraordinary things to improve our lives, or how this or that innovation will make human labor obsolete, creating a jobless dystopia. Both conclusions strike me as somewhat specious. It’s not that these concerns aren’t valid, but they oversimplify a more complex phenomenon.

Uncertainty in American Politics Lead to Uncertainty in SBIR/STTR   I'm sure it is no surprise to you that with politics being at its lowest level in recent memory, the near future of government programs and budgets are in disarray.  Under our current Continuing Resolution (CR), our government is only funded through Dec 9, 2016, and it will be up to our returning Congressionals to address another CR (albeit short or long term) in this lame duck session of our 114th Congress.  I do fear the term "lame duck" will be an insult to our fine feathered friends. 

Large, established companies get a bad rap for failing to be innovative. Conventional wisdom suggests that these firms are less likely to create path-breaking new technologies. Some argue this is because established firms are less likely to pursue radically new ideas—they get complacent or they don’t want to cannibalize their own success. Others claim that established firms may try to innovate, but are too set in their old ways to succeed.

The Current State Of Venture Capital In 18 Charts by Joshua Mayers, PitchBook

We recently released our inaugural PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor as a comprehensive resource on all matters venture capital. You can download the full 20-page report for free, but if you’d like to fast forward to the highlights, we’ve collated the top charts below:

Image: http://www.valuewalk.com

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will meet onstage tonight for the third and final debate in one of the most tumultuous presidential campaigns in modern history. Chances are good that they'll be talking about the economy, but the odds are low that either one will touch on one of the most important dimensions of it: freelancing.

Image: https://www.fastcompany.com

Ever lose something and go crazy trying to find it, only to discover it was right in front of you all along?

A few days ago I attended back-to-back events. The first was a late afternoon party celebrating the 10th anniversary of a client, Printfresh Studio. Most of the women reading this have one of their designs in their closet. I met another attendee who suggested we get together to discuss mutual opportunities to refer our clients.   We traded business cards.