Right now if I look at Google Maps, I can tell you that three streets away there is a bank up of traffic leading from the city to the western suburbs. Of course Google knows everything but this ingenious bit of software began as a start-up by an Israeli army officer with an engineering degree.

It was sold to Google for $US1.3 billion and the deal ensured that each of the start-up's 100 employees would receive an average of $1.2 million...

Image: 'If you don't have the chance to fail, you simply can't win.' Illustration: Peter Riches 

The Kauffman Foundation, along with 70 community partners, is rolling out a new scholarship and college savings program, KC Scholars, to help low- and modest-income students, as well as adult learners, finance and complete a college education. KC Scholars is a three-tiered scholarship program developed by people throughout the Kansas City community who have worked together for more than a year to make the program a reality. To ensure KC Scholars' success, the Kauffman Foundation will invest $79 million in the program over the next 10 years. 

When we’re faced with only 15 minutes in between meetings, or waiting in line to get coffee or lunch, our natural inclination is to either answer email, look at social media, or text someone. These are not always the most productive uses of small slivers of time, according to several experts.

They say there is plenty you can accomplish in 15 minutes, if you do three things:

Manufacturing as a bedrock of the middle class: that’s a quaint thought, isn’t it? In an election cycle dominated by discussion of trade policy and economic angst, the idea that the American manufacturing sector can be an engine for equitable growth may seem as contemporary as tail fins on an Oldsmobile.

But many cities are discovering that not only can manufacturing be a key part of building the urban economy, it can also be an engine for improving economic equity and supporting minority job creation. The sector still carries plenty of weight, employing 12 million workers and generating $2.1 trillion in GDP.

Image: Linh Nguyen: Flickr/Creative Commons

Having physical stuff just isn’t as great as it used to be.

At home, we’re Marie Kondo–ing our way to minimalism, buying experiences rather than things, and using services — Netflix, Spotify, Uber — rather than owning assets such as movies, music, and cars. The companies that provide those services and enable us to share what we have (insights, relationships, assets) with others not only are valued more highly by investors but also are relatively asset-light themselves. Amazon has only a handful of brick-and-mortar stores, Uber doesn’t manage a fleet of cars, and Ebay doesn’t manage a supply chain.

Flu season is just around the corner, and public health experts are urging Americans to get vaccinated.

The flu vaccine is recommended for everyone six months and older, and is widely available at pharmacies and doctors’ offices. Unfortunately, the nasal flu vaccine, which is popular among kids and was used by 20 million people last season, will not be available. Vaccine efficacy tests revealed earlier this year that the nasal flu vaccine is currently not effective, for reasons that aren’t yet clear. Still, experts are urging Americans to get vaccinated in shot form to avoid getting the flu, which can be severe for young people and the elderly.

There’s even more reason to exercise, especially as you get older. While study after study confirms the benefits of physical activity for the heart, mind and body, many older adults do not follow a regular exercise regimen. The findings of a new study may compel them to change, though.

In a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers led by Dr. Thomas Gill, a professor medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, followed more than 1,600 elderly adults who were mostly sedentary at the start of the study.

Knowledge@Wharton:  The idea of creating this type of an app — where did it get started?

Hunter Scarborough: I was working very long hours in my last job, and when an election rolled around, I just didn’t have time to do personal research. I wasn’t keen to vote on a sound bite from a news anchor or a sound bite from an uncle at the dinner table. I really wanted to know who these candidates were, and I felt the only way to do that was to dive in and spend a lot of time looking at their track records, looking at the conflicting media sources that we have out there, and comparing everything — which is a lot to expect of your average voter, right? I figured, in the 21st century, there had to be a way to leverage technology to solve that problem. So that’s how we got started on it.

It worked for me. In the beginning, raising money for my startup was tough going. I pitched dozens of middle-aged men on the unique value of my dating app, in which members play games to assess personality and compatibility. When I stepped into the room without my male co-founder, I found it very difficult to encourage them to invest. And when he and I went to meetings together, they focused their attention on him.

Luckily, there was another option: Equity crowdfunding.

Image: Vana Koutsomitis raised money for her startup via equity crowdfunding.

America loves an entrepreneur! If you’ve got a good idea and a solid business model, I would say that the United States is the easiest place in the world to secure funding for a new enterprise. While you might already be familiar with the vibrant venture capital and angel investment communities, there are several more innovative strategies that could help you get that idea off the ground. These unique infrastructures are as American as apple pie or driving a Toyota (Google it).

I’ve gotten wrapped up in the mentality that an entrepreneur is always working. If they’re not, then they don’t care enough about their company.

Lately I realized how wrong that is.

A week ago, my year-old company had the craziest three days yet. We drove from northwest Iowa to southwest Iowa, stopped to do some reporting at a Blues fest, drove down to St. Louis, took some queasy pictures from the Arch, interviewed an Army Corp of Engineers woman and drove back to northwest Iowa.

In recent years, customer experience (CX) has emerged as a major differentiator for large companies, including financial-services providers. In a McKinsey survey of senior executives, 90 percent of respondents confirmed that CX is one of the CEO’s top three priorities.

It’s a priority because the stakes are so high. For financial institutions, for example, rising customer expectations are pressing organizations to come up with more functional improvements even as alternatives to traditional financial services are emerging. In this dynamic environment, financial institutions face a stiff challenge to differentiate their offerings while reducing cost and complexity for customers—and to do it at a profit.

The pace of digital disruption is increasing by the day. And as the saying goes, change is the only constant. 

Digital disruption challenges business models, alters workplaces and brings career paths into question. To survive in this new normal world, organizations must constantly innovate. Those that do stand to succeed, while those that don't risk becoming irrelevant. 

Renowned investor and author Michael Moritz describes how expansive and transformative it can be to put one's self in an environment where a lot can be learned from the organization or people around you. Such experiences can redefine your idea of excellence and influence your professional path, according to Mortiz, chairman at Sequoia Capital and co-author of the 2015 book "Leading."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

Astro Teller, director of Alphabet's moonshot factory, X, distinguishes pointless failure from the kind of failure that leads to insights that can accelerate innovation. He explains how the time spent figuring out how to do something is in fact learning. "I'm not pro-failure. I'm pro-learning," he says. "We mean find incredibly efficient ways to learn."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

In discussing how education is moving away from a prescriptive model to one that encourages more autonomy, Olin College President Richard Miller contrasts older tenets of learning with newer principles. These include long-held beliefs such as learning before doing, versus learning experientially; or that teaching is necessary for acquiring knowledge, versus learning independently.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

The great entrepreneurs of the last century — folks like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison — spawned huge companies that were designed around a model of scalable efficiency. In that model the job of workers was to fit into their roles and perform tightly specified and standardized tasks in a highly reliable and predictable way. The employee society was born. Enormous wealth was created for the entrepreneurs who pioneered this way of organizing business, and enormous value was delivered to the marketplace. And most of us became employees.

Latin America just might be the most overlooked emerging market on the planet.

The venture dollars in Latin America can’t hold a candle to India or China (compare China’s $11.8 billion in new VC funds for the first half of 2016, down 14 percent according the WSJ, to Latin America’s $218 million), and the region’s 600 million inhabitants get overlooked by investors who think that you need to reach a billion users to be a “real startup.”

Women entrepreneurs run 30 percent of all small businesses, and together employ 7.9 million people and generate $1.4 trillion in sales (as of 2015). Needless to say, these are pretty staggering numbers.

All that success is wonderful. However, there exists an underlying issue that is keeping women from being even more impactful -- difficulty finding funding.

Women-owned businesses receive just 7 percent of venture capital investment money, which is highly disproportionate to their role in the economy. Additionally, loan approval rates for female entrepreneurs is 15 to 20 percent less than it is for men. Clearly, something is not right.

Cashiers, cleaners, servers and other workers in Florida's gigantic service sector are a key to the state's economic future, several experts said Wednesday at the annual forum of Florida Chamber of Commerce and Enterprise Florida.

Diversifying the economy with industrial and tech jobs was also a major focus, and the chamber released statistics that said Central Florida is actually more diverse than other regions of the state, if you include Brevard County.

Image: http://www.orlandosentinel.com