Just because China has 500 million bikes on the road or tucked away in sheds or courtyards does not mean the two-wheeler has a bright future there, especially in its largest cities.

Such is the growing indifference to the bike in China that no one seems to mind that the national model is manufactured in Taiwan (or under license on the mainland). With a single gear and heavy steel frame, the Giant is ideal for long rides on flat city streets. At a cost of US $180, it is the bike bargain of the world. Nevertheless, the dream for younger Chinese is a Honda scooter.

Right now, someone is tinkering with a billion dollar secret — they just don’t know it yet. “What people aren’t telling you,” Peter Thiel taught his class at Stanford, “can very often give you great insight as to where you should be directing your attention.”

Secrets people can’t or don’t want to divulge are a common thread behind Thiel’s most lucrative investments such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as several other breakout companies of the past decade. The kinds of truths Thiel discusses — the kinds that create billion dollar businesses in just a few years — are not held exclusively by those with deep corporate pockets. In fact, the person most likely to build the next great tech business will likely be a scrappy entrepreneur with a big dream, a sharp mind, and a valuable secret.

The Rockefeller Foundation, celebrating 100 years of global innovation, announces that it will be hosting its annual Innovation Forum tomorrow in New York City as part of its Centennial initiative honoring its 100-year-old mission to promote the well-being of humanity. The Forum will focus on one of today's most pressing issues - how to ensure that the benefits of new technologies do not bypass the world's poor. The Foundation will seek to address this issue by showcasing some of the latest cutting-edge technologies and inviting participants to become innovators by imagining how these technologies might benefit people around the world. The Foundation will then leverage ideas and recommendations explored at the Forum to search for new ways of ensuring rapid advancements in technology to help the world's most vulnerable.

The annual Rockefeller Foundation Innovation Forum convenes some of the most creative and inventive minds from the worlds of business, government, civil society and journalism to bring innovation to bear on urgent challenges facing poor or vulnerable people around the world.

When the soon-after ousted publisher of Philadelphia’s two largest daily newspapers and Philly.com announced his company would be housing a ‘digital media startup incubator,’ funded by $250,000 from the national, news innovation-focused Knight Foundation, it could have been seen as a simple land grab in a competitive space.

Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today. That influence comes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, perhaps the world's richest philanthropy, which he co-chairs and which has made education one of its key missions.

The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Gates in an exclusive interview Monday to talk about his vision for how colleges can be transformed through technology. His approach is not simply to drop in tablet computers or other gadgets and hope change happens—a model he said has a "really horrible track record." Instead, the foundation awards grants to reformers working to fix "inefficiencies" in the current model of higher education that keep many students from graduating on time, or at all. And he argues for radical reform of college teaching, advocating a move toward a "flipped" classroom, where students watch videos from superstar professors as homework and use class time for group projects and other interactive activities. As he put it, "having a lot of kids sit in the lecture class will be viewed at some point as an antiquated thing."

You spend a solid 40 (or more) hours at work each week — would you really want to spend any more time than you already have to with your co-workers?

Statistics show that you should — strong relationships with co-workers foster happiness and productivity. A report from RedBalloon/AltusQ found that companies with high employee engagement levels were up to 10 times more likely to see an increase in sales and profit than those with lower engagement. What’s more: Coaching, buddy programs, company lunches and nights out had the greatest effect on employee engagement levels. In other words, employees want to feel nurtured and belong to a community.

In the fine old tradition of magazine lists of powerful people—check out Slate’s Top Right!—comes The Newsweek Daily Beast Digital Power Index, a paean to potentates whose influence is measured in terabytes and retweets. Here are the sultans of Silicon Valley, from celebrity CEOs like SpaceX’s Elon Musk to behind-the-scenes shakers like “super-angel” Ron Conway.  Here are the nerd heroes of computer culture, like Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Ruby founder Yukihiro Matsumoto. And here are the information age’s insurgents, like Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, and its philosophers, like author and NYU professor Clay Shirky.

In all, the magazine picked 100 digital luminaries across 10 categories—“Innovators,” “Revolutionaries,” “Opinionists,” etc.—plus 11 lifetime achievement honorees. Not counting three groups, that’s 108 people. And 99 of them, by my count, are men.

Two federal innovators are applying their ideas to acquisition. And their target is small technology innovators.

U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announced the new RFP-EZ initiative as part of the Obama administration’s larger digital strategy at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NYC 2012 event in May. With the broader strategy, the administration is embracing a more mobile environment in which the public can access government services anytime, anywhere and on any device.

Think “innovative startup” and the picture of an entrepreneur under 30 generally comes to mind — someone ready to feed new products to the coveted 18-to-34 demographic.

It’s time for a new picture.

Baby Boomers are starting companies at a faster pace than ever before, according to a March report by the Kauffman Foundation and younger workers lack the disposable income and job prospects they once had. This means we may be witnessing a passing of the innovation baton to members of the older generation. As older Americans begin to define the debate around innovation, then the generation gap will soon make its presence felt in innovation hubs like Silicon Valley.

This year a report issued by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, on which we serve, concluded that if the United States is to maintain its historic pre-eminence in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and gain the social, economic, and national-security benefits that come with such pre-eminence, then we must produce approximately one million more workers in those fields over the next decade than we are on track now to turn out. At first glance, that may seem to be a daunting task—but it doesn't have to be.

At current rates, American colleges and universities will graduate about three million STEM majors over the next decade, so an increase of one million would require a whopping 33-percent increase. Yet the report's lofty goal can be seen as quite feasible in the light of two other statistics: First, 60 percent of students who enter college with the goal of majoring in a STEM subject end up graduating in a non-STEM field. And second, reducing attrition in STEM programs by 10 percentage points—so that half of freshmen who enter college with the intention of majoring in one of those fields complete college with a STEM degree—will produce three-quarters of the one million additional graduates within a decade.

A couple of months ago, Facebook acquired the wildly popular photo sharing social network, Instagram, for a cool US$1-billion. Popular yes, profitable? Nope. With zero revenue to speak of, hacker-CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw something in Instagram and its thirteen employees that justified spending a chunk of Facebook’s newly acquired change after its record-breaking, yet troubled IPO.

What’s the next billion dollar idea? It’s anyone’s guess, but here are our favourites.

Pinterest

Pinterest, the social scrapbooking darling has seen its user base shoot past the 104 million mark in March. Just one year ago, the site was managing a comparatively meager 500 000 monthly visits. According to Experian Hitwise, Pinterest has the third-largest traffic number, behind only Twitter and Facebook.

Whether it’s for our blog, newsletter, social media updates or something else, we’re all a little obsessed with content right now. And who can blame us? The search engines have been clear that it’s through our content that customers will find us, trust us, and buy from us.

So, just like that, we’ve all committed ourselves to producing pages and pages of content each week that we’re using to attract customers and promote our range of services. But what if you could reap the benefits of content without doing all the legwork to create original content all by yourself?

I’ve long believed that entrepreneurs are different. We all know successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of school, and people with high IQs that cannot manage a business. I used to call this “street smarts,” but recently I found a better explanation, called multiple intelligences. Successful entrepreneurs always seem to have several good intelligences.

The theory of multiple intelligences was developed way back in 1983 by Dr. Howard Gardner, at Harvard University. He suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, called the Intelligent Quotient (IQ), is far too limited. Instead, he now has broad acceptance for at least eight different intelligences that cover a broad range of human potential. These include:

We set out with a few simple questions: how are business startups going from the idea phase to real action and implementation? How does place -- the physical location of this conversion of ideas into action -- have an impact on entrepreneurship? And where can we track this relatively new phenomena as it happens?

For this special report we picked Detroit, Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids and asked our writers to dig into these questions.

Two major non-commercial health information technology organizations are working together in a new vendor-neutral health IT innovation network designed to stimulate development of new ideas and shorten the time required to bring new solutions into practice.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) Innovation Sandbox Cloud and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Interoperability and Integration Innovation Lab will collaborate to address interoperability issues, accelerate the development of integrated health IT solutions, provide an unbiased environment for testing new products and help train the IT workforce needed to move the industry forward. Georgia Tech is believed to be the first academic organization to connect directly to VHA’s system.

The urban theorist Richard Florida often illustrates his data with anecdotes, and he has one about an art collector. In it, he asks the art dealer, someone “very well known,” how to tell which artists’ work will be worth something in the future. To what degree is it a factor of non-artistic skills, Florida asks the dealer. “That’s the one that’s going to make it,” the dealer says of the hypothetical artist who could draw attention to himself. “That’s the one who’s going somewhere.”

As we hit the tenth anniversary of his polarizing 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, that anecdote is only one of the many that Florida has to add to his oeuvre. An anniversary edition of the book, which will be released on June 26, includes several new chapters, with revised data (and anecdotes) throughout. Most of that information is about the topic for which Florida is best known—whether cities can be revitalized if their leaders work to attract creative types, which has gotten him his current gig at the helm of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto—and he takes the opportunity to rebut some of the many criticisms he’s faced over the last decade. (The criticism is still coming: the new book The New Geography of Jobs by economist Enrico Moretti contains a substantial list of cities that are counterexamples to Florida’s theories.) But the revised edition of the book also includes his prophecy about the future of the entertainment industry—and, between the lines, his prescription to keep artists from starving. That’s where the collector comes in: more than ever, entertainment-industry workers have to be creative; at the same time, art isn’t enough.

In all aspects of our lives, sometimes the best lessons are learned the hard way. As a business owner, making a decision that maybe in the end wasn’t the best choice can end up costing customers, money and in some cases, the business itself. What is important is to view any failure as a positive opportunity for the future.

Sure, this may sound like obnoxious optimism in the face of a tough time and a losing plan. If entrepreneurs throw in the towel at the first mistake or continue to make the same mistakes over and over, business may not be the worst of their problems. Take a step back, notice where the plan went wrong, and cross that approach off the list of future options.

Crowdfunding—the new, hip way to raise money for early-stage technologies and interesting projects—has found a happy home in the world of high-tech, where many people are eager to experiment with new models and new approaches.

But can the same model work for the much stodgier health-care industry?

The founders of MedStartr, a crowdfunding platform for medical technologies, say that it will. On the 4th of July, the site will go live, with dozens of health-related technologies and services looking for benefactors.

Regardless of whether some investors thought it was a damp squib instead of a moon-shot, the Facebook IPO was a landmark event in Silicon Valley terms — a multibillion-dollar share issue by a company that has become a global behemoth virtually overnight. While that may have given thousands of entrepreneurs and investors big ideas about the future, there are those who argue Facebook’s success has also done something else: namely, changed Silicon Valley culture for the worse. One of the most recent critics to advance this theory is Bill Davidow, a venture-capital veteran who says the social network has altered the values that tech entrepreneurs used to hold dear.