Looking to hire someone who will make a creative contribution to your organization? Here’s a tip: When checking applicants’ college transcripts, don’t focus exclusively on their grades or honors.

Take note of whether they spent time studying abroad.

That’s the implication of newly published research, which provides the best evidence yet that studying overseas boosts one’s creativity. A semester spent in Spain or Senegal leads to higher creativity scores on two different tests, according to a research team led by Christine Lee of the University of Florida, Gainesville.

In May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg caused a stir after he showed up for an investor meeting wearing his signature attire: a hoodie. Besides drawing the ire of Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter -- who told Bloomberg TV, "I think that's a mark of immaturity" -- Zuckerberg and his fashion choice reinforced the widely held view of what an entrepreneur is: male, based in or around Silicon Valley and young.

However, recent Kauffman Foundation research contradicts this stereotype. Entrepreneurs age 45 and up comprised 49 percent of all new entrepreneurial activity in 2011, while 45-to-54-year-olds showed the biggest increase in entrepreneurial activity rate. In fact, over the last 15 years, the Kauffman Foundation discovered that the number of 55-to-64-year-olds participating in entrepreneurship increased significantly, from 14.3 percent to 20.9 percent.

Over sixty years ago, three inventions that would revolutionize our lives were made. In 1958, scientists at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductors built the first integrated circuit that would become the precursor of silicon chips, used in virtually every modern-day computer. At Cambridge, meanwhile, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA double helix, unlocking the mechanism of heredity and opening exciting prospects in molecular biology, genomics, and synthetic biology. Finally, the 1950s saw the launch of Sputnik, revolutionizing fields like physics and computer sciences, offering us a new perspective on our planet, and providing a chance to possibly reach others in our solar system.

What do General Electric (GE), Procter & Gamble (P&G) and IBM have in common? All three companies nurture and energize talent, carving out the necessary resources to invest in recruiting, selecting and growing the people who will become their future leaders.

So it's no surprise that GE, P&G and IBM occupy the top three spots in Hay Group's seventh annual Best Companies for Leadership (BCL) ranking. Our study clearly shows that great leadership is a strong competitive advantage, with the top 20 BCL firms far outperforming the S&P 500 benchmark on shareholder returns.

Why is it that American football uses eleven players, Canadian football twelve, and Gaelic fifteen? Why eleven in European soccer? Why does baseball field nine players, basketball five, volleyball six, water polo seven, and cricket eleven? Simple as these questions are, they are deceptively hard to answer. But whatever the historical reasons, the number of people on a team has significant impact on performance. Here's why.

The earliest known attempt to investigate the relation between team size and productivity dates back about a hundred years to the now famous experiments by French engineer, Maximilien Ringelmann. In a set of simple rope pulling experiments he discovered that, in what is now known as the Ringelmann Effect, people's efforts quickly diminish as team size increases. Eight people, he found, didn't even pull as hard as four individuals. He rationalized the decay in effort by suggesting it was difficult for team members to coordinate effort, and left it at that.

The rapid adoption of smartphones is changing the landscape of the marketing research industry. Last month’s “Market Research in the Mobile World” conference in Cincinnati highlighted many ways the market research industry is trying to adjust. The industry is evolving from using lengthy printed surveys and personal interviews to instead collecting consumer reactions “in the moment” that are transmitted digitally as it happens. What was once a process of collecting “many answers from few” is becoming a process of collecting “a few answers from the many.” With their trusty appliance in hand, consumers can now share what’s on their mind virtually any part of their day. Not only is data received faster, it is also more reliable by sampling smaller bites from a larger pool.

Mobile market research is proving to be better than online surveys. With online approaches, the consumer has to be taken out of the moment and put in their workspace in front of a computer. Mobile, on the other hand, gets you into virtually any consumer places including their private spaces.

Would you leave everything behind and trek 1,000 miles to an unfamiliar place and dedicate the next two years of your life to the pursuit of your passion? One young Olympic hopeful did. Was it worth it? Just ask sixteen year-old Gabrielle (Gabby) Douglas. Fast forward two years later to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, and Douglas has made history. "Douglas led from the start and never gave up the lead," according to TIME Magazine's Alice Park.

When Sravish Sridhar was graduating from UT Austin, he got an offer letter from a hot, mid-size software company. The firm even sent him a silver-plated pen from Tiffany & Co. to sign the letter. It was a nice touch, but Sridhar declined. Instead of taking the sure thing, he joined United Devices, a distributed computing startup, and he has never looked back.

That was in 2000—the height of the tech bubble—but some trends are back in style. Chief among them: the mainstream popularity of joining tech startups, and (in turn) the large number of startups looking to hire top talent. Over the past year or two, the competition for this talent has hit a fever pitch in the Boston area and across the country, with companies of all stripes pulling out all the stops to land their top prospects.

It takes guts to act, accept a risk, and to try something new. If the world were full of passionate and purposeful people with brilliant minds, but no guts to act, there would be no progress.

The guts trait can be subdivided in several different ways. One is the divide between risk takers and risk tolerators. Risk takers derive excitement and engagement from being in a situation laden with meaningful uncertainty. Many of the entrepreneurs we have spoken to refer to the dramatic emotional shifts of their “high-amplitude” lives (they love it that way, too). Bungee jumpers, cliff divers, and other adrenaline junkies are extreme examples of guts-dominant people.

“What cannot be measured cannot be managed”. The pressure to measure the results of innovation is gaining ground, but has been a challenge for many innovation managers. To get past this challenge, Caspar van Rijnbach suggests using the six W’s to define the right measurements for you.

Defining the right indicators and measurement for Research, Development and Innovation has been a long time challenge for companies, since:

innovation is more difficult to measure: how much did this technological innovation really contribute to this new product or process?

A major shift is underway from fixed to flexible lifestyles, from commute to communicate forms of consumption. The Millennials or Generation Y are at the heart of it, both by choice and necessity; but the impacts will be felt far wider as new technologies enable a more flexible, pick and mix approach to life and work. PUBLISHED: AUGUST 1, 2012 | BY: SHEILA MOORCROFT | 0 COMMENTS AND 5 REACTIONS IN: TREND ALERT What is changing?

We are living with what has been termed the golden triangle of technology as social, mobile and real time communications redefine almost every sector of the economy and create the connected consumer. Connected consumers are more likely, but by no means exclusively, to be in younger age groups. They use multiple screens in parallel, simultaneously and sequentially to shop, chat, watch TV, work, organise their lives, comment, share, decide.

At the 2008 summer Olympics, Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, broke two world records, earning the title "the world's fastest man." He sprinted 100 meters in 9.69 seconds and 200 meters in 19.30 seconds.

Bolt's top speed of 37.6 kilometers per hour (23.4 miles per hour) is impressive for us humble humans. But it's barely a jog for many animals. In a global competition, we would not even medal. N. C. Craig Sharp, of the Center for Sports Medicine and Human Performance at London's Brunel University, ranks some of the top-performing animals in a new review paper published online last month in Veterinary Record.

Europe’s security industry should harness its response to natural disasters and terrorist attacks to boost its profile as an international industry, according to a new Commission action plan released yesterday (30 July). The plan envisages a stronger internal market for the security industry harmonising standards and certification procedures for security technologies, and better exploiting the links between civil and defence security research.

New funding schemes are proposed including a ‘pre-commercial procurement’ to validate results stemming from EU security research projects and check on the impact to society of new security technologies at the research stage.

Germany is steaming ahead of traditional leaders France in research and development, says a new study by the French economy and finance ministry. EurActiv.fr reports. In 1996, French companies pumped 1.69% of their added value into research and development projects, against 1.65% for their German counterparts, according to the study, published this month, EurActiv France reports.

Since the days of the franc and German mark, the trend has reversed, with German businesses investing 2.11% of  their added value in 2008 compared to just 1.47% in France - below the average of the other countries included in the study, amongst them South Korea, Spain, the US, Norway, and Japan.

In the quest for starting up on the cheap, young founders are taking living lean to a whole new level.

To both surround themselves with their startup and live cheaply to keep from burning through spare funds, today’s young founders are increasingly bunking up with each other — choosing to save on rent and office space by living and working under one roof or flocking to off-price hostels.

These so-called “hacker hostels,” where young techies sleep in bunk beds and write code in common areas, generated national buzz recently following a New York Times article on the phenomenon. At Chez JJ in Mountain View, Calif., for instance, aspiring entrepreneurs enjoy affordable accommodations — rooms list on Airbnb for $42 to $128 per night — along with the chance to make connections in Silicon Valley’s startup scene.

When I run into people from different parts of the country, they are often surprised to learn how innovative and industrious Iowans are as a people. As your governor, one of my most important roles is to be our state’s chief promoter, educating companies on the benefits Iowa has to offer and encouraging them to set up shop here in our state.

Iowa is blessed to play an integral role in our nation’s economy, cultivating some of the richest farmland on Earth and acting as one of America’s most treasured bread baskets. Not only that, Iowa is also a beacon for cutting-edge technology, helping to shape the information economy of the future.

As tax reform discussions heat up, U.S. Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) and U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) are calling on Congress to advance tax policies that incentivize innovation and promote new domestic manufacturing. America leads the world in innovation and research and development, but our current tax code fails to reflect the challenges of a competitive global economy, especially as it relates to domestic manufacturing.  

Today, Schwartz and Boustany introduced the Manufacturing American Innovation Act to further incentivize innovation, research and development, and manufacturing in the United States. The bipartisan legislation reduces business taxes by more than half, to a 10 percent rate, for companies that manufacture patented products in the United States. By creating a fair playing field, this plan would lead to both U.S. and foreign companies bringing jobs back to the United States, as well as the creation of new jobs. 

High-tech companies say they can’t afford to build their products in the United States. It’s too expensive, they claim, and there are too few workers with the appropriate training. But since many states were able to get Japanese car companies to build here, and Brazil was able to attract plants for iPhones and other products, could the United States get, or keep, more high-tech manufacturing? Google is trying.

What policies, if any, should the United States pursue to encourage high-tech manufacturers like Apple to build their products in America rather than largely in Asia? Is this manufacturing worth going after? Are there lessons to be learned from the trade negotiation tactics the United States used with Japan in the 1980s, when the Japanese began building more goods, especially cars, in the United States?

The question is no longer who have hackers hit. It is who has not been hit.

The organizations attacked by pranksters, criminal syndicates or foreign governments include Google, LinkedIn and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Big companies are expected to spend $32.8 billion on computer security this year, up 9 percent from last year. Small and medium-size businesses will spend more on security than on other information technology purchases in the next three years, according to the research firm International Data Corporation.

Say you’re strapped for cash. You don’t exactly need a small business loan, nor do you have the time to go through the application process. Although you are expecting several invoices to be paid by large clients in the upcoming weeks or months, you need money now to pay your employees and vendors.  What’s the solution?

Accounts receivable financing or factoring might be an option for you — depending on your industry and the nature of your business.