The White House on Thursday announced it is looking to fill a new roster of external entrepreneurs and technologists willing to serve short-term assignments to tackle some key government challenges.

Round three of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program will pair up talented individuals from outside government with top civil servants to work on one of 14 projects aimed at addressing key challenges and making government services smarter and more efficient.  

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Innovation is arguably today’s favorite business buzzword. Companies and countries that innovate are the business and cultural leaders, while those that lag are relegated to lower profitability and less political sway. The United States has had a preeminent role in global innovation for more than a century, but the rise of China and its focus on growing an innovative business culture threatens to upset the balance. There will be individual corporate winners and losers in each country, but the nascent competition between China and the United States will be an overall positive development for both nations, driving each to innovate smarter and faster.

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A great white shark called Lydia is set to make history. First tagged a year ago off the Florida coast, she's on her way to becoming the first tracked white shark to cross the Atlantic.

Lydia is being monitored by the marine nonprofit Ocearch as part of its ongoing project to help researchers and scientists gather previously unattainable data on shark movement, biology and health. The 14-foot-6-inch great white has migrated more than 19,000 miles since being tagged, and is about to cross the mid-Atlantic ridge -- closer to Europe than the United States.

Image: Researchers from Ocearch use a hydraulic platform to safely tag sharks like Lydia. Credit: Ocearch. 

The odds of success are against you, the efforts required to keep your head above water are massive (as is the stress) and at the end of the day, your competition may come out with a better product that sinks your entrepreneurial battleship and sends your customers overboard.

Image: N1178719 Adrian Trendall 

Would you rather be intelligent or disciplined? While most people would probably choose intelligence, discipline -- the ability to forgo immediate gratification in pursuit of a great goal -- is actually a greater predictor of subsequent life success.

“One great thing about self-control is that unlike other characteristics like intelligence, it’s easy to improve,” says Nathan DeWall, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky who studies self-regulation (he’s also an ultra marathon runner).

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Fierce Biotech today published the top 15 sites in the US for biotech venture capital in 2013.  This according to figures from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) as compiled by Thomas Reuters.  The findings are not terribly surprising in terms of the rankings -- except it might be a mild surprise that San Francisco outspent Boston/Cambridge on the VC front last year.  Otherwise, the rankings look to make sense.  Here is the summary below in terms of place, dollars and numbers of deals.  The total dollars for the US was $4.5 B.

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It’s invariably the unseen stories, the hidden, off the beaten track, unprepared accounts that evade our attention, but seem to be an indication of the bigger matters. Like how an Iranian businessman didn’t hesitate a second to invest in an Israeli startup founded by former Israeli defense military personnel. It’s an investment that’s emblematic of a better future – and in a world of political strife, this investment means more.

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Tech giants are winning the war for talent and Silicon Valley office space, encouraging start-ups to go on a global hunt for a new heartland.

In Asia, Singapore wants to be the answer. The government has established numerous schemes and initiatives to encourage entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to set up shop there.

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If you answered architect, you’d be flat wrong! According to U.S. News and World Report’s list of 100 Best Jobs in 2014, software developer is the top job in America right now. Software developers are in great demand and make handsome salaries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that 140,000 new software developer jobs will be created by 2020.

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LinkedIn is the best place for business professionals to post information about themselves, regardless of your discipline. As a business professional, regardless of what your function is, you need to be findable to those in your field. And to be findable among 300 million other professionals will take some hard work –  but it is doable.

TORONTO - Information technology giant Cisco has named Toronto as the location of one of four new global innovation hubs.

The California-based company, which is the world's largest maker of computer-networking equipment, said it will invest $100 million in the Toronto centre over the next decade.

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The last exclusively domestic ladder manufacturer in the US helped Wooster, Ohio, claim a title it’s been chasing for a long time: Top Micropolitan Area in America.

By recording more corporate facility projects than any other small-town area in the US in 2013, Wayne County captured a crown that had eluded it for decades.

Image: Bauer Corp. considered New York and North Carolina before deciding to expand its ladder manufacturing operation in Wooster, Ohio. Photo courtesy of Bauer Corp./Wayne EDC 

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland discovered an unusual assortment of marine creatures while exploring the South Pacific's New Hebrides…

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AT LAST, it seems, something is to be done about the dysfunctional way America’s patent system operates. Two recent developments suggest calls for patent reform are finally being heard at the highest levels. First, in 2013, defying expectations, the House of Representatives passed (by an overwhelming majority) the Innovation Act, a bill aimed squarely at neutralising so-called patent trolls. These are individuals or companies who buy up lots of patents and then use them to extract payments from unsuspecting victims. Second, the US Supreme Court agreed to rule on what is the most contentious issue of all: which inventions are actually eligible for patent protection.

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Barcelona has raised as one of the finalists cities to the European Capital of Innovation Award, also called ‘iCapital’, a prize created by the European Commission to distinguish the city that has created a better ‘innovation ecosystem’ linking citizens, government agencies, associations and companies.

As announced by the board of experts that will judge the prize, Barcelona is one of the favorites to become the iCapital for all the efforts that the city has done for introducing the use of new technologies to bring the city closer to citizens. This is just a result of the emphasis that Barcelona has put on being an international benchmark for using technologies to develop smart city management.

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Real leaders, the kind we want to follow and emulate, are rare in today’s global, hyper-competitive and financially driven-world.

Often in their place are fast-track wannabes and impostors focused on unsustainable, short-term results. Instead of mentoring employees and looking for long-term solutions to lasting profitability, they seek to drive performance by bullying and focusing on personal glory over the success of the entire organization.

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Suppose you’re meeting with a group of managers and staff members to determine who your key stakeholders are. (It’s an important task, because with limited resources, your organization or unit can’t do everything for everyone.) People will submit their ideas, and in no time at all you’ll have a large list — and potentially a nightmare. If you don’t focus on the relationships that matter most, management and staff will be running in all directions, not meeting anyone’s needs very well.

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It is 6:00 a.m. David is starting his first day as the “leader in residence” at Crotonville, GE’s global leadership institute, with a jog around the running trail with a couple of twenty-somethings who are half his age and might be five levels below him on an org chart. Their run is companionable; their discussion, candid. It is a serendipitous moment of connection that the three will always share.

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While President Obama’s FY15 budget request is unlikely to find much support in Congress this year, the document has traditionally served as a useful guide to the administration’s priorities and to federal programs related to research, regional economic development, manufacturing, entrepreneurship and STEM education.

Justin Rosenstein wasn’t sure what had happened. One of his company’s highest performing enginners seemed to have lost his enthusiasm for the work. “He had gone from super dedicated to detached,” says the co-founder of Asana, an app that powers teamwork without email. “Something wasn’t right. He seemed to be in an existential funk.”

So he took him for a walk and asked one simple question: “What’s wrong?”

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