David Reibstein: I want to talk to you about public-private partnerships because you’ve done a lot of work in that area. How do you go about defining a public-private partnership?

Gilbert Probst: I don’t want to make it too academic. In general, there is a new collaboration paradigm. I truly believe that collaboration is the paradigm of the 21st century. (The origin of) public-private partnership goes back to the early 1990s. All over the world, both at strategic and operational levels, key players from the public sector, business and civil society are working out how to (collaborate) as partners to find long-term solutions to the most intractable problems facing us environmentally and socially, but also economically.

While I have kept both my statutory summary pages and comparative summaries relatively up to date, it has been quite a while since I have done an editorial update on Intrastate Crowdfunding. With the increased number of active Intrastate regulations, as well as the growing popularity of the new Title III regulations, I thought it was time to take another lay of the land.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com 

An antiquated hiring process could be stymieing federal efforts to recruit young tech talent, a new survey suggests.

About 43 percent of millennials—those born between 1979 to 1997—think the federal government should use social media to connect with recruits, according to an Accenture Federal survey. McGuire Research, which performed the survey, canvassed 500 D.C., Maryland and Virginia residents.

Older generations were less enthusiastic about social media in hiring; only about 31 percent of baby boomer and Generation X respondents—including those born between 1946 and 1978—thought the government should be using social media.

Sight Machine is a manufacturing analytics company based in the Ann Arbor SPARK Central Innovation Center. It takes all the different resources available to manufacturing companies – quality, ERP systems, etc. – and integrates them into a digital twin of a factory to help stakeholders in the manufacturing process improve quality and efficiency.

The value Sight Machine provides its clients is illustrated in its work with a major global apparel company. For this Fortune 100 Company; it not only automates the process of data collection and analysis, Sight Machine works across a number of factories simultaneously. The intelligence it provides is helping this client resolve issues like debugging over several different locations, offer insight on what’s going on in individual plants, and how similar assets are performing in different locations.

You know how to write a to-do list. If you’re like lots of people, you may already be in the habit of writing out a list of the day’s tasks as soon as you get into the office each morning or even the night before.

The bigger challenge is figuring out how to prioritize it. No matter how productive you are, there will always be too many tasks for you to complete. You’re always going to have to choose which ones to do first, which to do second, and which tasks to do not at all. It isn’t always easy to remember that it’s not the amount of time you put in, it’s the value of the work and the things you achieve in that time that really counts.

Image: Flickr user J E Theriot

A Nobel Prize winner and a leading behavioral economist offer common sense and counterintuitive insights on performance, collaboration, and innovation.

The confluence of economics, psychology, game theory, and neuroscience has opened new vistas—not just on how people think and behave, but also on how organizations function. Over the past two decades, academic insight and real-world experience have demonstrated, beyond much doubt, that when companies channel their competitive and collaborative instincts, embrace diversity, and recognize the needs and emotions of their employees, they can reap dividends in performance.1

Image: http://www.mckinsey.com

Customers often want to call support representatives bad names, not praise them by name. Not so with WiFi system startup eero, thanks to its CEO and Co-founder Nick Weaver and Head of Customer Experience (CX) Dana Lindsay. While most founders tack on customer support as an afterthought, Weaver purposely created and integrated it from the start. That meant establishing a dedicated team to gather feedback for its beta and bringing aboard eero’s first CX hire at a stage when most startups are solely focused on engineering. Weaver understood that to get where it needed to go, eero needed service so superior that it rivaled its product.

Frustration peaked over perceived inaction on setting standards for broker-dealer regulation during an SEC meeting devoted to small business issues.

Patrick Reardon, who sits on the SEC’s committee on small and emerging companies, criticized Stephen Luparello, the agency’s director of trading and markets, at a meeting at the commission’s headquarters in Washington.

“We’re asking questions after 16, 19 years,” Reardon told Luparello. “You should know all the answers to the questions by now.”

As the US presidential candidates lay out competing visions for the country, I have been thinking about a topic they have not yet discussed in detail: what political leadership can do to accelerate innovation. Innovation is the reason our lives have improved over the last century. From electricity and cars to medicine and planes, innovation has made the world better. Today, we are far more productive because of the IT revolution. The most successful economies are driven by innovative industries that evolve to meet the needs of a changing world. From the advances that put a computer on every desk to the discoveries that led to lifesaving vaccines, major innovations are the result of both government investments in basic research and the private-sector creativity and investments that turn them into transformative products.

Even the most sophisticated psychometrics and people analytics have yet to make leadership development more science than art. Competence, character, creativity, and charisma remain difficult qualities to quantify, let alone cultivate. Growing effective leaders is challenging work.

Five years ago today, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. His passing shook not only the tech industry, but the entire world.

Today, Jobs’s legacy lives on. His creativity, passion and drive continue to inspire. To honor the late genius, we’ve collected 10 quotes of remembrance from executives and innovators.

1. "His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me.” -- Larry Page

Internet users are tired of constantly updating their passwords online, which sometimes causes them to engage in unsafe cyber behavior such as reusing old passwords, a study finds. 

It's a phenomenon called "security fatigue," which the National Institute of Standards and Technology has described as "reluctance to deal with computer security." 

Marriott Hotels is jumping on the accelerator bandwagon with the launch of TestBED for early-stage startups. The group is looking for startups with products or services that further the traveller experience and are ready to go to market. Marriott will add “support, expert advice and the perfect test bed.” Criteria to participate in the programme include a service to help guests explore a city or region or, something that helps Marriott understand guests requirements.

Image: https://www.tnooz.com

An acquisition in any business ecosystem garners a lot of attention from media and industry folks. But what happens in the pre and post acquisition/merger phase is something only an entrepreneur and his team can elaborate!

One of the most high-profile mergers/deals this year has to be that between Roadrunnr and TinyOwl.  Speculations were rife about the funding situation and operational challenges at both these startups and the foodtech sector was also marred by valuation markdowns and weak funding.

As an entrepreneur, you have to do more, faster, in order to succeed.  Entrepreneurs are at a significant output disadvantage. For every task that you have to complete, your larger competitor has three or four full-time employees working on the same thing.

Fortunately, with hard work, leverage, and the understanding that larger teams move slower and stupider, you can do more than all of them.

In 2007, the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative (USTAR) was created. At the time, their goal was simple: expand the technology economy in Utah by primarily focusing on recruiting top research talent to the University of Utah and Utah State, specifically researchers who had a history of commercializing technology. In theory, this would evolve into the creation of new jobs and businesses within Utah, which sounds fine and dandy until a legislative audit in 2013 revealed USTAR had exaggerated the number of jobs created and the amount of money brought in.

The success of customer-driven innovation depends on who’s invited to participate.

Historically, companies have been coy about engaging directly with customers, using market research to keep them at arm’s length. But largely due to pressure from today’s digitally empowered consumers, many top companies are shedding their shyness and inviting outside stakeholders into their creative or product development process. DHL, IKEA, and Fuji Xerox are a few of the companies that have incorporated customer co-creation workshops as a standard feature of R&D.

Tim Chaves (MBA 2015) is the founder of ZipBooks, a free accounting app that helps small business owners get paid faster. Tim founded and sold two small businesses before coming to HBS, where he made the decision to dive into the venture-backed startup world. We recently caught up with Tim to discuss what the HBS experience is like for entrepreneurs. Here’s what he thought you should know:

1. There are mentors available for aspiring entrepreneurs

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Startup incubator 1776 has selected Accenture (NYSE:ACN) to provide guidance and insights to its growing roster of digital health startups.

“1776 is thrilled Accenture is with us in the mission to drive health care into the future,” said Evan Burfield, 1776 cofounder & co-CEO. “There is so much opportunity to improve health care dramatically, but it can’t be done unless talented new entrepreneurs and prestigious established institutions work closely together.”

“Funny or die” has a whole new meaning, thanks to a large study published in April in Psychosomatic Medicine. Women with a strong sense of humor were found to live longer in spite of illness, especially cardiovascular disease and infection. Mirthful men seem to be protected against infection. Norwegian researchers reported findings from a 15-year study on the link between sense of humor and mortality among 53,556 women and men in their country. The team assessed the cognitive, social and affective components of humor using a validated questionnaire, and examined death from specific conditions: heart disease, infection, cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.