If you live in the United States, heading to McDonald's is not the most exciting of dinner choices.

But head overseas, and you'll find that dining out at the famous fast food chain is a pretty thrilling experience.

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TreeHouse Health will work with small health care information technology companies, offering them access to space, cash, connections to capital and marketing support.

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FORUTUNE -- "The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities," author, physician, space entrepreneur, and X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis remarked at the Open Innovation Forum in Russia last week. More than 10,000 people from around the globe converged in Moscow Thursday and Friday to discuss and demo the emerging technologies they predict will drive innovation and economic development in the coming decades, and to see if they can gain business opportunities by distilling those big problems.

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Internet marketers know that using Google AdWords is an excellent way to drive traffic to their sites. Since it can be expensive if not handled correctly, the trick is to manage campaigns to get the highest return on investment.

A poorly managed campaign can cost more than it brings in, but a well managed campaign can keep your store or company in business. It all comes down to how much you know about AdWords and how smartly you can manage your campaigns.

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The affordability and the accessibility of digital communication tools mean that it has never been easier or cheaper to start your own business. Customers and suppliers at any given time zone can command your attention and people have the ability to run global companies from their living room. These conditions have created fertile soil for the lifestyle entrepreneur, the lifestyle designer, barefoot executive… whatever you want to call it!

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One of the most common dreams we here is “I want to start my own business”. From restaurants to PR companies to pet store you have a dream to step out from behind your corporate life and head out on your own. The idea is a mix of fear, excitement, and a desire to control your destiny and wake up when you want.

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We live in a youth obsessed culture. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have replaced rock, film and even sports stars as our modern-day pop culture celebrities. And since youth is the currency of celebrity we inevitably assume that entrepreneurship is the provenance of the young.

I launched my company at 28 and proceeded to run it over the next 13 years (I am now 41). By most accounts, even at 28 I was on the older side of what most people would expect for an "Internet Entrepreneur." My experience however played a big role in the company's success and I have no doubt that had I jumped into starting a company five or six years earlier, I would have likely failed.

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There is something very wrong going on in the world of entrepreneurship right now. Entrepreneurs are coming under increasing pressure to sell their businesses far too early. 

No sooner have they created a vibrant business than wham, someone is dangling a cheque in front of their eyes and telling them it’s time to leave and hand it over to someone else to take to the next level. 

Motion capture is a widely used technique to record the movement of the human body. Indeed, the technique has become ubiquitous in areas such as sports science, where it is used to analyze movement and gait, as well as in movie animation and gaming, where it is used to control computer-generated avatars.

As a result, an entire industry exists for analyzing movement in this way, along with cheap, off-the-shelf equipment and software for capturing and handling the data. “There is a huge community of producers and consumers of motion capture, countless databases and stock animation resources, and a rich ecosystem of proprietary and open-source software tools to manipulate them,” say Ingmar Steiner at Saarland University in Germany and a few pals.

In a smart city, every electric vehicle must have access to a charging station within its driving range. So how should these stations be located? The good news: computer scientists have solved the general version of this problem. The bad news: it’s NP-hard.

The market for electric vehicles is booming. Take Tesla for example, which is making some 500 electric vehicles per week in California and has promised to deliver some 21,000 this year.

You own a small business or startup and your budget is often your biggest concern. Funding is not guaranteed.  The process to get investors in the door can be a long one. There is so much work to do, your aspirations are often bigger than your wallet.

Sound familiar?

How do you go about accomplishing the goals for your business while keeping your overhead costs low?

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It’s said that any entrepreneur should be able to deliver an engaging and succinct elevator pitch to anyone at anytime. Entrepreneurs hone and hammer their pitches every day with each new person they meet answering the same question countless times about their company: “what is it and what does it do?” This repetition and practice helps to drive not only a deeper understanding of the company and its core competency to others, it also instills confidence into the entrepreneur as to their own skills and strong points and how they relate to selling the product.

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Lately, there's been a lot of talk about these people we call millennials. Namely, the current generation, Generation Y, those "entitled, narcissists who still live with their parents", according to Keith Wagstaff. From complimentary to derisive, countless writers have deemed it their duty to predict exactly what this generation will add or (as most reports warn) detract from our current society. But the truth is, nothing has been said about the "Me, me, me generation" that hasn't been said about every generation before them.

Although it may be obvious to some, the culture of Seattle is steeped in the environment. From being vigilant about the environment, to simply taking advantage of the many beautiful natural amenities of the area, Seattleites embrace the notion that they exist within and affect the environment they so deeply cherish.

Land prices in China have been rising very rapidly; the growth has been as high as 16% per annum over eight years. This has been caused by both demand and supply factors. While it’s not realistic for this rate to continue, don’t expect a slump either, says Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko.

Gyourko, along with colleagues at the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University in China, has been studying the China housing market for some time now. It is not easy because data is difficult to come by, but the team has put together an index of housing land prices in China and is now planning a second phase to the research, Gyourko tells Knowledge@Wharton.

Despite its extraordinary scientific capacity, a stated desire to be competitive and the availability of capital, it may take several generations before Russia's investment in innovation will bear fruit, a report by MIT on the country's role in global innovation shows.

Russia has many of the necessary elements to take its place next to the U.S. and China as one of the great developers of global technologies, said Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of MIT's Technology Review, which conducted the research.

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Innovation isn’t easy, but based on some of these recent stories about the topic, it can indeed be done. It requires shifting, tweaking, or flipping your perspective so that you see things you don’t normally see.

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The Boston Red Sox 2013 World Series championship will long be remembered as proof that you can turn around nearly anything. The team ended last season at the bottom of the standings (Las Vegas odds were 28 to 1 that they’d make it to the World Series), but rallied this year. With renewed solidarity and determination, the beard-wearing Sox went on to win the division, the playoffs, and the big prize.

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When making big decisions, executives use familiar tools like discounted cash flow analysis far too often. That’s because the more uncertain a business context is, the less likely running some numbers and probabilities through a spreadsheet will be helpful. It’s much more useful to take a different approach: to build multiple qualitative scenarios, for example, or to develop a set of comparative reference cases.

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Venture capital in the Middle East and North Africa is on the rise, according to the latest MENA Private Equity Association report.

The hope is that the rising tide of startups can alleviate the joblessness that nearly 100 million young people in the region face (nearly 25% of the population); after all, in markets like the U.S., all net job growth occurs only through startups, according to the Kauffman Foundation.