The world’s largest technology companies have announced new partnerships in mobile payments and image changes, as they seek to maintain dominance in the fast-shifting technology market. EurActiv reports from the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Two key partnerships were announced in the mobile payments sector pushing the issue to the forefront of industry strategy and suggesting such payments will become more prevalent over the next months.

South-Korean electronics giant Samsung announced an agreement that will see it introduce Visa’s payment technology on its next generation of handsets, and speed the growth of near field communication (NFC) payments worldwide.

To position Oman as a regional hub for innovation and leader in producing new ideas, products and services, the Government of Oman is pursuing a diversification program known as Vision 2020. With a key goal of the program being to increase the contribution of the non-oil sector to the country’s Gross Domestic Product, SRI was commissioned by The Research Council of Oman to conduct a comprehensive assessment of Oman’s National Innovation Ecosystem (NIE).

Using a proprietary assessment technique it developed, SRI mapped the main pillars, frameworks, drivers and institutions underpinning Oman’s innovation capacity. SRI analyzed the main barriers to national and regional innovation, and recommended a series of policies and programs to foster national economic growth. 

Encouraging the innovation ecosystem in the country, finance minister P. Chidambaram in his Budget speech on Thursday said that funds provided by the corporates to academic incubators will qualify as part of the corporate social responsibility.

This move by the finance minister will enable incubators to have access to a wider pool of funds. These incubators set up in engineering colleges like the IITs, NITs and other institutes like IIIT-Hyderabad are largely dependent on the government funds to invest in start-ups that are incubated at these centres.

Mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, smartphones have even begun reaching the group of relative technophobes that consumer researchers call the “late majority.” About half of mobile-phone users now have one.

The big question facing technology companies, and the subject of the upcoming stories in this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report, is how to make money from this rapidly expanding technology.

The worldwide dance contagion that has spawned over 12,000 YouTube imitations is not the Harlem Shake. The real Harlem Shake, a much more raw, technical, fluid, frenetic dance, was born in the hardscrabble streets of New York City back in the early 1980s

Twenty years ago, on two different business school campuses a continent away, the seeds of social entrepreneurship were planted.

At INSEAD, two students Philippe Dongier and Katie (co-author of this post) sent a school-wide email asking if anyone was interested in cultivating coursework and careers related to nonprofits. Overnight, 126 students, staff, and faculty responded — a number equal to 50% of the newly arrived class. With a student-faculty steering committee and 50,000 Euros of seed funding from the school's administration, they founded INDEVOR, INSEAD's social enterprise club.

With 28 million small businesses in the U.S., it’s hard to be a member of planet earth and not have a personal connection to small business. Small businesses play a critical role in the economy, making them a hot topic of discussion.

What’s the problem if everyone is talking about small business?

The problem is this: Small business means different things to different people.

Small businesses come in many shapes and sizes. If you’re a solopreneur, you have different needs and challenges than a business with 10 employees. And you have widely different needs and challenges from a 100 person company.

Energy technologists and entrepreneurs are modern adventurers who take risks to “discover new paths” and change the way we think about the future, says the leader of America’s energy innovation agency.

Dr. Cheryl Martin, deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), opened up the second day of this year’s Energy Innovation Summit by comparing her agency and the innovators in the crowd to early explorers.

One week before delivering the final manuscript of my book, Taking Smart Risks, I came to a disturbing realization. There were 38 stories in the book, but only seven were about women.

Jill Logan, an employee helping me get the final product out the door, noticed it. I was stunned. My first reaction was That can't be true. I walked over to the whiteboard listing each story and counted them myself: Seven out of 38. She was right.

Officials in British Columbia have encountered a unique problem in recent years that most jurisdictions would be thrilled to have: Infrastructure projects are being completed not just on time, but early. Way too early. Builders have been finishing hospitals, for example, so far ahead of schedule that they haven’t even been allocated operating funds. “We had to limit how early they could be built,” says Sarah

Clark, president and CEO of Partnerships British Columbia. Clark’s office is charged with helping the province navigate the world of public-private partnerships, to make sure deals are structured properly so the public gets the best return on its investment in infrastructure. So far, it appears to be doing just that, racking up a record number of projects that are finished on schedule and at significant savings to taxpayers.

Anything--even doing laundry--will help you dream up new ideas better than sitting in a meeting, says Debra Kaye, author of "Red Thread Thinking." A case study of the history of the single-use detergent pod.

Eleven men and women file into a conference room and take their places around a large table. Coffee cups and pastries are assembled in front of them. George, the leader, steps up to a large whiteboard and scrawls across the top “SOAP STORM SESSION 9/18/12.” “Okay, let’s begin,” he tells the group. “Let’s just start free-associating. What do we think of when we think clean laundry?” he asks. “To get the ball rolling, I’ll write a few words down,” he says and dashes off chore, piles, whites and brights, and fresh on the board. “What else?” he asks. Several people add a few more words: time-consuming, fold, bright, uncontaminated, pretty, nice, old-fashioned, and pleasant.

There are some lessons that no amount of reading can teach an entrepreneur. Sometimes, you just have to learn by doing.

And that goes for companies at all stages, as a panel of CEOs at the CED Life Science Conference shared on Wednesday. During a workshop focused on building a successful life sciences company, they talked candidly about mistakes they made that taught them an important lesson. Here’s what they shared:

Some crowdfunding industry leaders are using the lull before the fundraising practice is publicly viable to develop educational material for people who may soon be making their first investments.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently drafting rules to allow start-ups to sell stakes in their companies to the general public, potentially raising large sums from crowds of small investors.

While we wait for the JOBS Act to go into effect, it can be easy to forget that there has been crowdfunding for equity going on in the United States for years now among accredited investors.

One of the leading, not to mention pioneering, platforms in American equity crowdfunding for at least half a decade has been EquityNet, which dug into its own internal data recently to try and paint a landscape portrait of the industry.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) just released their 86 page report on the state of entrepreneurship across the world. The research program, initiated in 1997 as a joint venture between academics at London Business School in the UK and Babson College in the United States, is now a consortium of more than 400 researchers from 99 economies.

Speaking alongside Steven Chu at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy’s annual summit outside of Washington, D.C., Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, confidently declared that his company, which received a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, is a success story, and said the company would repay the loan in half the time it is required to. The loan is due by the end of the decade.

Tesla received a loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan program. The loan enabled Tesla to retool an old automotive plant in California to produce the electric Model S. In last week’s quarterly earnings call, Tesla reported that it hit production-rate targets for the vehicle and saw a big increase in revenue, despite losing nearly $90 million for the quarter and $400 million in 2012.

Please join the Yale Center for Business and the Environment for a panel discussion with leaders of Connecticut's growing entrepreneurial community to explore the challenges and opportunities of building a richer environment for startups.

In order to attract and develop successful new ventures, Connecticut is creating a network of organizations that aim to connect entrepreneurs to resources and to accelerate the growth of early stage companies.

We asked a handwriting analyst to look at the signatures of some big-name technology executives and tell us what they say about their personalities. Sheila Lowe, president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation, provided a blurb for us on Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, and many more. In researching this story, another handwriting analyst said Lowe is "great" at analysis. Lowe's group, the AHAF, is trying to get cursive back in school curricula.

The America Invents Act (AIA), which was signed into law on September 16, 2011, will convert the U.S. patent system from a "first-to-invent" system to a "first-to-file" system on March 16, 2013. Although the conversion itself brings with it important process changes for patent filers, other changes to the U.S. patent system that will be made under the AIA are of greater concern, as they will punish American innovators and, by default, our innovation marketplace.

Under the current first-to-invent system, if two people filed patent applications on the same invention at about the same time, a contest would be held to see who actually invented the technology first. However, under the AIA, the first to file in the U.S. Patent Office will get the patent, and there will be no contest as to who actually invented the technology first.

A disease or disorder is defined as rare in Europe when it affects not more than 1 in every 2,000 persons. Yet, because there are so many different rare diseases – between 6,000 and 8,000 – taken altogether they affect a significant share of the population. Today, the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union will host an all day conference in Dublin to discuss the key issues in this area.

In the EU, as many as 30 million people suffer from a rare disease, and many of them are children. The European Commission announced that the €144 million is to be distributed between the 26 projects will go towards covering a  broad spectrum of rare diseases such as cardiovascular, metabolic and immunological disorders.