What is the industrial Internet?

As good a place as any to find the answer is at General Electric’s newest U.S. factory, a $170 million plant it opened in Schenectady, New York, last July to produce advanced sodium-nickel batteries for uses that include powering cell-phone towers (see “GE’s Novel Battery to Bolster the Grid,” “Inside GE’s New Battery Factory,” and “Can We Build Tomorrow’s Breakthroughs?”).

The factory has more than 10,000 sensors spread across 180,000 square feet of manufacturing space, all connected to a high-speed internal Ethernet. They monitor things like which batches of powder are being used to form the ceramics at the heart of the batteries, how high a temperature is being used to bake them, how much energy is required to make each battery, and even the local air pressure. On the plant floor, employees with iPads can pull up all the data from Wi-Fi nodes set up around the factory.

Famed investor and financial expert Arthur Lipper speaks about the new Royalty Entitlement model of investing. Introduced for the first time in China, in Beijing, January 2013. This interview courtesy of CCTV, in English and Mandarin, with subtitles. Nine minute feature, broadcast January 25, 2013.

The gap between mature and emerging economies is closing, and more future economic growth will happen in emerging economies. Entrepreneurs and large companies in emerging economies such as India and China are innovating in ways which MNCs should learn from to retain their global advantage.

Corporate innovation is flowing not just from developed nations to developing ones, but in the reverse direction as well – hence the title of this book. The authors provide strategy insights, case studies and worksheets for companies to learn how to innovate in emerging economies – and to take these innovations to other emerging economies and back to mature economies as well.

In the world of entrepreneurs and startups, high level relationships are everything. You can’t start a business alone. You need partners, team members, investors, vendors, and customers. But people don’t realize that all relationships are not the same. There are people you only recognize on the street, business friends, and then close friends whom you can always count on to help.

Tommy Spaulding, in his book, “It’s Not Just Who You Know,” categorizes relationships into five levels, like floors of a building, and identifies the attributes of relationships at the different levels. More importantly, he talks about the actions required to build a network of contacts at the highest level. He also defines the five floors of relationships as follows:

UNESCO partner, Netexplo, is a future-facing initiative that helps businesses from France figure out how to cash in on tech innovation around the world. Through a network of about 200 journalists, scientists and academics, the initiative acknowledges brilliant ideas. The top 100 form the Netexplo 100 which aims to provide an overview of digital innovation happing in the world.

At the Netexplo Forum, the top 100 are further whittled down and acknowledged by a jury of independent personalities from the academic world, research and international organisations.

This week we can expect President Obama to speak to immigration reform and a new immigration proposal to be unveiled in the Senate. I have discussed in this blog the importance of creating a U.S. Startup Visa for high skilled immigrants—but only in the context of America’s loss. We take a look today on what America's loss in terms of brainpower and innovation skills means for one nation—India.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend in the U.S. of Indian and Chinese highly skilled immigrants leaving to return to their home countries. These returnees are relatively young (35 and 37) and most of them hold Master's and PhD degrees in management, technology or science. In an often cited Kauffman Foundation study, 56.6 percent of Indian respondents indicated that they would be likely to start a business in the next five years, and 53.5 percent of them believed their best opportunities for entrepreneurship were in their home country. Is the Indian startup ecosystem leveraging the growth engine leaving the U.S.?

The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team. Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. Stories often work better, because humans don’t always make rational decisions.

Most people care the most about the things that touch, move, and inspire them. They make decisions based on emotion, and then look for the facts that support these decisions. Thus it behooves every entrepreneur to learn how to craft stories from their personal experience and the world at large that make an emotional connection, as well as tie in the facts.

True leaders realize that, by definition, the word "leader" places the leader at the front, and not the rear. Yet many, many executives try to lead through fear and intimidation. This isn’t really leading at all. It’s pushing. In startups, leading from the front means that you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, pitching in to get the job done.

True entrepreneur leaders see the big picture and recognize that their startup is only a small piece of a much bigger community. They lead their own small community to pull together in a way that galvanizes the entire ecosystem of the market into a win for both sides.

A recent study by HireArt, a Y-Combinator-backed recruiting company, showed that startup employees often get fired or quit because they are not a good fit for the company. Part of the reason why that is the case is that working for a startup can be a bit different than working for larger companies.

Here are five things people should know before trying to work for a startup:

1. Working for a startup means having ownership over your work and doing something that you really believe in, but it also means doing whatever is needed of you.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has pledged a $350 million gift to Johns Hopkins University to support interdisciplinary research and student financial aid, a commitment that will push his lifetime donations to his alma mater to more than $1 billion, the university announced Saturday.

Hopkins officials said they believe that Bloomberg will become the first person to reach the $1 billion level of giving to a single U.S. institution of higher education — an assertion that’s hard to verify because many donors give anonymously to universities. It is also difficult to compare the dollar value of modern donations to those in earlier eras.

Within 20 years Cirque du Soleil had revenue levels that had taken Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey, the dominant global player in the circus industry, 100 years to achieve. They didn't do it by outperforming the competition but by creating uncontested market space which made the competition irrelevant. Their primary customers were adults where the circus had traditionally served children; they charged premium ticket prices where the traditional circus was set closer to the price of movie tickets. They are the classic example used by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne to illustrate what they called, in their classic book of the same name, Blue Ocean Strategy.

They explain the idea this way: “Imagine a market universe composed of two sorts of market: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans represent all the industries in existence today… Blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today.” In red oceans cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody. In contrast, blue oceans competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. It is true for organizations and it is true for careers.

LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.

IT’S the annual conclave of the presumed powerful, the World Economic Forum in Davos, with the wealthy flying in on private jets to discuss issues like global poverty. As always, it’s a sea of men. This year, female participation is 17 percent.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that global business and political leaders are overwhelmingly male. In America, only 17 percent of American Fortune 500 board seats are held by women, a mere 3 percent of board chairs are women — and women are barely represented in President Obama’s cabinet.

Indeed, I’m guessing that the average boardroom doesn’t have much better gender equality than a team of cave hunters attacking a woolly mammoth 30,000 years ago.

The legacy of Abraham Lincoln hangs over every American president. To free a people, to preserve the Union, “to bind up the nation’s wounds”: Lincoln’s presidency, at a moment of great moral passion in the country’s history, is a study in high-caliber leadership.

In this season of all things Lincoln — when Steven Spielberg is probably counting his Oscars already — executives, entrepreneurs and other business types might consider dusting off their history books and taking a close look at what might be called the Lincoln school of management.

Even before “Lincoln” the movie came along, there was a certain cult of leadership surrounding the 16th president. C.E.O.'s and lesser business lights have long sought inspiration from his life and work. But today, as President Obama embarks on a new term and business leaders struggle to keep pace with a rapidly changing global economy, the lessons of Lincoln seem as fresh as ever. They demonstrate the importance of resilience, forbearance, emotional intelligence, thoughtful listening and the consideration of all sides of an argument. They also show the value of staying true to a larger mission.

I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. I think many board members (including VCs) were trained 10+ years ago when life was very different and their advice often comes from an outdated lens.

One of the advantages of blogging, using social media, public speaking, etc as a VC is that you get a more nuanced view of these shifts by watching your own successes and failures.

Over the past couple of years I’ve written down some of my thoughts and it’s started to add up enough that I’ve now created a new tab on this blog with PR related articles on the topic. I will add to this as I write more in the coming weeks on the topic.

(Of course, this post isn’t actually about airports). 

I realized that I don’t dislike flying--I dislike airports. There are so many things we can learn from what they do wrong:

No one is in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down. Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem. The TSA blames the facilities people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the user’s problem is the driver of behavior (as opposed to maintaining power or the status quo) things change.

The “empty nest” of past generations, in which the kids are grown up and middle-aged adults have more time to themselves, has been replaced in the United States by a nest that’s full – kids who can’t leave, can’t find a job and aging parents who need more help than ever before.

According to a new study by researchers at Oregon State University, what was once a life stage of new freedoms, options and opportunities has largely disappeared.

An economic recession and tough job market has made it hard on young adults to start their careers and families. At the same time, many older people are living longer, which adds new and unanticipated needs that their children often must step up to assist with.

Last year, 105 tech-based companies in Greater Cleveland raised $201 million from venture capitalists and angel investors, according to the region’s Venture Capital Advisory Task Force. This activity represents a 34 percent increase over the amount raised by companies in 2011. This growth bucks a national trend: Data recently released in The MoneyTree™ Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (based on data from Thomson Reuters), showed an overall decrease in dollars invested of 10 percent in 2012.

With a glut of consumer startups struggling to raise funding, startups that serve businesses are becoming fashionable in Silicon Valley again because they have a proven way to make money.

Now new incubators are emerging to help those startups, on the theory that startups with business customers need help that less specialized incubators can’t provide.

The latest one, Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., is planning a new business-to-business accelerator for this spring.

I read the announcement today that Canada has just launched a startup visa program. By doing so, they are saying to the world, “Welcome, immigrant entrepreneurs — please come start your business in Canada.”

It’s brilliant, well executed, and modeled after the startup visa movement that a number of us have been trying to get started in the U.S. since 2009.

I continue to be really discouraged by the U.S. government activity around the startup visa movement, and more specifically around immigration reform as it applies to entrepreneurs. After trying for the past three years to get something passed, nothing has happened beyond administrative changes to the existing laws.