In finding options for summer internships, all I knew was that I wanted to experience a little bit of everything, thereby hopefully learning more about what I wanted to do. As a rising sophomore, it was expectedly difficult to find companies who would even talk to me, let alone hire me.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.wharton.upenn.edu - Amy Wang skiing during a work trip to the Andes.

The 2017 Smart Cities Innovation Summit brings together over 200 Cities and their respective leadership to prospect and partner with innovative technology and service providers; linking progressive cities with state-of-the-art solutions and best practices.

Smart Cities Summit - Placing Cities First

June 26-28 in Austin

The Smart Cities Innovation Summit, in partnership with US Ignite, will once again deliver North America's largest concentration of C-Level Smart City Leadership working towards innovative solutions for progressive city needs. Join us in Austin Texas as we expand our community of city leaders and solution providers, delivering an exciting “city first” agenda accelerating state-of-art solutions into global city practice. We look forward to seeing you in Austin!.

If you find Mondays particularly difficult, it may be due in part to how you spent your weekend. Lingering hangovers and lack of sleep aside, new research suggests that the hobbies we engage in over the weekend can impact our productivity during the workweek.

"Our main motive was to find out if people would find more benefit in certain activities based on their career," says the study’s lead author, Kevin Eschleman, an assistant psychology professor at San Francisco State University. The study, which surveyed 350 U.S. workers in different locations and industries who work Monday to Friday, was presented at the 2015 Academy of Management Annual Meeting.

Image: Flickr user Johnny Silvercloud

For this year’s search for the ultimate hometowns, we analyzed 60 key factors: taxes, education, health care, and more. Looking for places where homes are affordable and jobs are plentiful? Good. Those communities earned the highest scores. Happy hunting!

Image: http://time.com

SAN FRANCISCO & WASHINGTON, D.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--California Life Sciences Association (CLSA), the nation’s largest statewide public policy and business solutions organization representing California’s leading life sciences innovators, today announced its participation in the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review’s (ICER) call for suggestions on how to improve ICER’s value assessment framework. The framework underpins ICER’s analyses and reports on the cost and value of new drugs and medical technologies, including those put before a regional “Public Deliberation Panel,” such as the California Technology Assessment Forum. ICER describes itself as a non-profit organization evaluating evidence on the value of medical tests, treatments and delivery system innovations so that others can use that evidence to improve the healthcare system.

In 2013, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics surveyed manufacturing firms that were active innovators to ascertain the extent to which they partnered with universities and public research institutes to develop new products and processes. The survey found that the great majority of firms did not interact with public research institutions at all. In the 31 high-income countries surveyed , university'industry ties were lowest in Australia (1.4% of firms), the UK (4.7%) and Italy (5.3%). Less than 10% of firms in a further eight countries reported collaboration with universities, namely Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, New Zealand, Portugal, the Russian Federation and Spain.

Image: http://www.bignewsnetwork.com/

The federal government is set to reveal the details of its $23 million Incubator Support program, which Industry, Innovation and Science Minister Greg Hunt says will help start-ups get better access to advice, capital and valuable connections.

The initiative was first given $8 million of funding as part of the Innovation Statement, but it then received a $15 million boost over four years in June, as part of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's election campaign.

We already know SpaceX CEO Elon Musk plans to send people to Mars as soon as 2024. But over the weekend, he hinted on Twitter that his ambitions are much bigger: He wants to conquer the rest of our solar system as well. 

According to Musk, SpaceX's Mars Colonial Transporter, a spacecraft designed to carry both cargo and astronauts to Mars, is actually designed to go "well beyond" Mars. As such, it naturally means the MCT needs a new name, and Musk already has an idea. 

Image: AP PHOTO/JAE C. HONG, FILE 2016%2f09%2f16%2f6f%2fhttpsd2mhye01h4nj2n.cloudfront.netmediazgkymdezlza1.53aea BY STAN SCHROEDER 1 DAY AGO 

The entrepreneurial brain is a marvelous and dangerous tool. We tend to think creatively, and quickly, whether it’s in response to solving a problem or as a way to kill time in line at the grocery store. We also aren’t afraid to explore our options, which means we’re usually considering three or four things at the same time.

As part of a simulation game on innovation management we have been running at universities and in corporate training programs for over 4 years now, we have developed an integrative model for dealing with innovation management on a daily basis. Innovation Management is a strategic activity that isn’t necessarily needed to implement throughly for every company. Mostly large companies have included structured processes that include administrative stages to following the (large number of) project that are in progress and to be able to follow-up on them and calculate the effect of innovation management in general. For smaller companies however, that is not general practice: having such a formal process in place simply doesn’t weigh up to cost efficiencies will generate. But for them, innovation management is just as important – but they rather use a toolkit than a formal process. Our 8 Types of Innovation Processes model is a simple design that makes it easy to bridge the gap between a formal process and the tools available.

Image: http://www.openinnovation.eu 

Alexandria Real Estate (NYSE:ARE) is about as successful a Wall Street story as you'll find. Started in 1994 as what management fondly recalls as a garage startup, the company now is one of the most successful and unique REITs on the market today. What makes the company so special is that Alexandria was the first REIT to focus exclusively on life science and biotechnology clients, specifically in the most prime real estate markets: Boston, San Francisco, New York City, etc.

What do you call a highly innovative person who builds a product out of nothing and launches something that will change people’s lives? Everywhere besides Cuba, you’d call this person an entrepreneur.

You would never expect in the land of communism, censorship and classic cars that you would find a hotbed of entrepreneurship. Technically, it doesn’t exist. But in my eyes, entrepreneurship is thriving in Cuba. Indeed, I’ve seen some of the world’s best innovators in Havana who could win any hackathon.

Image: https://techcrunch.com

The word "innovation" has become so common that we tend to forget what remarkable leaps have been made in convenience and opportunity by the technology sector. Shopping, travel and daily communications can be handled anywhere using a smartphone.

Many significant advances come to market from big companies in the tech sector. Unfortunately, since the financial crisis, there has been a prevailing thought in America that "big" is bad. This sentiment started with financial institutes, but in Washington, some are starting to question whether the theory holds for other industries as well.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has published the highest-resolution atlas of the human brain to date in a stand-alone issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. This digital human brain atlas allows researchers to investigate the structural basis of human brain function and is freely available as part of the suite of Allen Brain Atlas tools at brain-map.org.

“To understand the human brain, we need to have a detailed description of its underlying structure,” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “Human brain atlases have long lagged behind atlases of the brain of worms, flies or mice, both in terms of spatial resolution and in terms of completeness due to technical limitations related to the enormous size and complexity of the human brain.

Image: Allen Human Brain Reference Atlas image (credit: Allen Institute for Brain Science)

At FirstBuild’s headquarters there’s a sign reminding all who do work at the appliance-development factory that “A prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”

It’s an operating tenet for FirstBuild and other companies trying to change the way new products are created by liberating the process from the confines of slow-moving, bureaucratic research-and-development departments.

Image: At FirstBuild, amateur inventors, engineers and others design products that could become part of the GE appliance line. PHOTO: HUNTER WILSON

Deloitte’s chief edge officer, Pete Williams, didn’t hold back in his keynote presentation this morning at B&T’s DAZE of Disruption conference in Sydney, with KPIs, big data and blockchain all in the firing line.

Williams began his talk by emphasising the fact that businesses have to learn faster to move faster in these times of exponential change.

“The thing I’m finding a lot is that big companies, particularly in the digital space, have come from an environment we’re things move relatively slowly so they can take a long, considered look at scoping and planning, he said.

Humpback whales are actually just master pranksters.

Trevor Ryan was fishing off the coast of Langara Island, in British Columbia, Canada, on Sept. 3 with his father and a tour guide when a humpback whale suddenly breached the surface just a few feet from their boat. 

Image: http://mashable.com

The shrimp in your salad or tuna on your plate may have been caught illegally in areas threatened by overfishing. But tracing suspect seafood is a tricky task, given that many boats operate in unseen swaths of the ocean.

Global Fishing Watch, a new project from Oceana, SkyTruth and Google, aims to crack down on illegal fishing by training the watchful eye of surveillance satellites on the world's approximately 35,000 commercial fishing vessels.

Image: http://mashable.com

Since Apple announced the iPhone 7 to a resounding meh in San Francisco on September 7, the air has been filled with laments for the dearly departed headphone jack. Underneath these woeful cries can be heard whispers of a new rumor: next year, Apple may make an iPhone with a case made out of ceramic rather than metal.

Two things suggest the possibility. First, the company has started selling a watch with a shiny white ceramic case: the Apple Watch Edition, which costs $1,249. Second, the company has a handful of patents describing the design and manufacture of a “handheld computing device” with a ceramic case. Given ceramic’s potential to shatter, its limited color options, and the expense it adds to manufacturing, though, making such a phone would be risky.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Perhaps you didn’t notice when Google updated its logo last fall. The changes were relatively subtle, with a cleaner, sans-serif typography replacing the original’s highly ornamental lettering. But the revamp was actually a big deal, and not just because the logo is viewed trillions of times a year on Google’s search page. It reconceives the logo as an interactive visual device that adds functionality, using a clever animation of dots to communicate various responses to user actions. We spoke to Jonathan Lee, a Google creative director who helped spearhead the redesign, about how he approached the changes.

Image: Palette cleanser: Google’s Jonathan Lee helped modernize the company’s colorful visuals. (Photo: Ina Jang)