Detailed strategic planning is missing at a regional level in the EU, with local authorities failing to design coherent long-term innovation roadmaps.

“The early pre-identification of funding opportunities is the last thing regions are thinking about. Without doing this, you will see regions limited to ad-hoc success,” said Alasdair Reid, head of Technopolis office for Brussels and Tallinn, speaking at a session on EU Regional Funding at the Innovation Convention hosted by ERRIN in Brussels earlier this month.

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“One of the most scalable organizations in human history was the Roman army. Its defining unit: The squad — eight guys. The number of guys that could fit in a tent.”

This is Twitter Engineering SVP Chris Fry on history’s greatest example of successful hyper-growth, and the tactic that made it possible: stable team building.

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Parse the numbers, and it's clear venture capitalists are retracing the path they trod in the dot-com era -- at least when it comes to which sectors are hot.

The latest MoneyTree Report, prepared by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers using data from Thomson Reuters, reported that investment in Internet companies last year hit the highest level since 2001. And the $7.1 billion pumped into Internet-specific startups accounted for 24 percent of all venture capital dollars last year.

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Where you live can determine how long you live. The latest County Health Rankings reveal which places have the best and worst outcomes--like premature death--and rank the health factors that lead to those outcomes.

Conversations about health tend to revolve around national statistics. People talk about the childhood obesity rate, the smoking rate, the diabetes rate, and so on. This is fine, but national numbers tend to minimize local differences, which can be quite dramatic. For example, the least healthy counties have twice the premature death rate--measured by years lost before the age of 75--as the healthiest counties, according to a new ranking. If you just cite the overall rate, you miss what's happening in, say, Menominee County, Wisconsin.

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I’m a big fan of angel investing. The thrill of helping innovative entrepreneurs launch their dreams is as exciting as anything I’ve ever done. I once heard someone say your life is divided into thirds—you spend the first third learning, the second third earning, and the last third returning. I like that. For me, angel investing fits into that last third.

I’ve been making investments in San Diego life sciences startups since 2002. I’ve had some success, most notably with N Spine (acquired in 2007) and Trius Therapeutics (IPO in 2010 and acquired last year).

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New studies involving researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego project that human influences will lead to a drier world as the 21st century progresses.

On Sunday, a team of researchers led by a former Scripps postdoctoral researcher offered a new explanation for why Earth’s tropical belt, bounded by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, has progressively expanded since the late 1970s. The tropical belt study appears the journal Nature Geosciences.

Adam Grant: What are your views on leadership, and how have they evolved over the course of your career?

Krawcheck: Leadership is a lot of hard work. I hoped when I was younger that I would just be a natural leader or that it was something that was innate, but it is really a learned skill. It is the result of thousands and thousands of micro lessons over long periods of time, in which you try (one style) of leadership. It works. You try (another) method of leadership. You fall on your face. Somebody gives you feedback. You adjust. It can be some big lessons at the end of your review. But, more importantly, it is those micro lessons that occur.

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Sometimes, taking the leap to investing in a strategy for true customer understanding can feel like diving head-first into a deep, daunting hole. The sheer uncertainty of it all is nearly enough to set you back on the path to the dark ages of mass marketing campaigns and untailored digital experiences.

To help you navigate your way out of generic marketing messages, we’ve mapped out 10 simple tips to get you started on your journey to deep personalization.

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Listen up, everyone who’s leveraging a new paradigm to monetize and optimize a business: Andy Craig--not to mention most of the rest of us--wants it to stop.

Craig and Dave Yewman, cofounders of Elevator Speech, a communication consulting company they run from Austin and Portland, Oregon, respectively, are and trying to get all of us to become better communicators by speaking more like we do on the weekends.

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FALLS CHURCH, Va., March 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Northrop Grumman Corporation and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) today announced a 2014 Global Externship Program to give international students exposure to career fields in cyber, program management and computer engineering.

The Northrop Grumman—UMBC Externship is an eight-week summer research program for non-U.S. citizens studying in America at an accredited university. Students will work with 10 startup companies at Cync, a Northrop Grumman-sponsored cyber incubator at the bwtech@UMBC research and technology park. The externship allows students to gain professional experience and apply their academic knowledge by job shadowing experts in their field.

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The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been ranked among the 10 public colleges with the smartest students. Nestled in between I-695 and I-195, UMBC is known for its technology, science and engineering education. The regional university is ranked No. 10 on the  list of schools with the smartest students, according to  Niche, a website that uses user-submitted responses to review colleges.

Image: UMBC The University of Maryland, Baltimore County is among the top 10 public colleges with the smartest students, according to Niche. 

Our economy is innovating faster than ever. So why not government?

Here in San Jose and Silicon Valley, we understand innovation. The technological innovations created in our region have increased productivity and improved the quality of life of people around the world.

Yet our government still operates the same way it has for decades -- an often slow, cumbersome process that can involve yards of red tape and high costs for even the simplest things, like getting a permit to open a business or having a street light fixed.

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Intel has acquired Basis Science, the maker of a line of health and wellness bands, the technology giant announced Tuesday. 

The chipmaker's interest in wearable tech is well known; in fact, the category featured heavily in a presentation Intel CEO Brian Krzanich made at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

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Facebook is going virtual in about the biggest way possible. The social network will acquire virtual reality-hardware maker Oculus, creator of the acclaimed Oculus Rift headset, for roughly $2 billion. The deal apparently represents Mark Zuckerberg's gamble on a technology he believes may one day supplant today's mobile devices.

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How many times have you been in a brainstorming session this week? Chances are the answer is, “More than I can count.” But no study has proven that brainstorming works well, even though it has been the go-to method for idea generation since 1953.

But there is an alternative. After researching why brainstorming inhibits creativity and innovation, my colleagues and I came up with a new process we call Brainswarming.

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Just as the Great Recession sent investors retreating to value positions in the stock market, it also heightened questions for anyone investing in higher education. In general, concerns with high tuitions, student debt loads, and student outcomes are fueling debates about whether the returns are attractive. The value of a higher degree can seem even more dubious when the timing of it lands a graduating student directly into a tight labor market.

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America today is the global epicenter of innovation.

The U.S. has 6 million workers employed in technology and the highest concentration of knowledge and technology intensive industries in the world, representing 40 percent of our GDP.

For our nation’s economy to continue to grow and remain globally competitive, we have to build on that momentum.

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Anglo-Swedish drug major AstraZeneca’s IMED Biotech unit has launched a dedicated web site to support…

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Brand is one of those perfectly good words that has picked up a lot of baggage over the past decade. At one point, it simply meant the label used to signify a product. Chiquita bananas. Ford cars. Coca-Cola. Now we talk about personal brands, political brands and brand management. And even though the conversation around brand has become bloated with jargon and gobbledygook, its importance can't be oversold. Marketing guru Seth Godin defines brand as "the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another."

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A new national study released Tuesday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that South Florida has grown faster than all other top metro areas in immigrant tech entrepreneurship.

The foundation’s research also shows immigrant-owned businesses are more likely to locate in ethnically diverse metro areas that have high foreign-born populations like South Florida.

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