Throughout history, women have been paid less than men; this male-female income disparity has been called the "gender wage gap."

While some differences in occupation, experience, and hours worked play a role in this gap, studies claim that even when those factors are controlled, a pay gap remains.

On the flip side, a recent study shows that if the gap exists at all, it favors women. Today, with the help of the Credit Score Blog, we take a look at this issue and give you a historical perspective.

Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. This is especially true when it comes to tech companies hiring the wrong chief technology officer.

Today, CTOs are multi-taskers that aren’t just coders locked in some basement — they play a vital role in a tech company’s strategic plan and growth. Not only do they need to have a high level of diversified technical prowess and proficiency, but they also need to possess strong leadership and project management capabilities. With development teams often based around the world, being the center of communication and progress can either lead to a tremendously successful strategy or a bott

Every entrepreneur wants to know how they can improve their odds on the road to success, and why some entrepreneurs seem to be able to squeeze success out of even a marginal business case. Most experts agree that is has lot to do with your level of passion, determination, and innovation, modulated by a strong focus on reality, common sense, and street smarts.

John Bradberry, in his new book “6 Secrets To Startup Success” explores many of these attributes, especially passion, and defines some useful principles to help enthusiastic entrepreneurs squeeze the most out of their passion, while not being trapped by it. Every existing and budding entrepreneur should internalize these reality principles:

After nearly a week’s worth of 2011 TED Simulcast posts, here are seven takeaways that apply to strategy, creativity, and innovation from the various Day 2 TED Talks presented at TEDxKC:

* Never underestimate the fragility and apparent simplicity of complex systems. If you’re struggling to see simplicity in seemingly complex everyday situations, don’t let yourself off the hook. Keep looking for simplicity.
* It’s vital to continually alter your perspective to maintain creativity. Sometimes being too close makes situations look very diverse when they aren’t. This is a big challenge for experts when they try explaining things to those us who aren’t experts. Other times, proximity may obscure diversity. Innovative thinkers have to be able to be in multiple places at once mentally to be both great analysts and explorers.

Companies the world over find it tough to turn good ideas into great businesses. That's partly because, as we all know, organizations and cultures rebel against innovations, especially when they are first conceived. Companies that can protect ideas in their early years usually have a better chance of success.

Take the Vevey-headquartered Nestle, for example, whose Nespresso has become Europe's leading coffee brand by packing a variety of high quality coffees in aluminum capsules that can be used only with the company's three types of coffee machines. Executives had to vanquish three hidden enemies that surfaced before the concept could see the light of day and become the Swiss company's fastest growing new business in the 2000s.

CHINA’S continued economic progress depends on mastering the art of mould-breaking innovation. President Hu Jintao intones that the “capacity for independent innovation” is the “core of our national development strategy”. Sceptics agree with his premise, but scoff that innovation and autocracy do not mix. So long as China remains a dictatorship, it will be trapped in a world of mass production and routine assembly, they say. One scholar, Cong Cao, argues that the country faces a future of “premature senility”.

China has invested heavily in homegrown innovation. The government has not only persuaded Microsoft and Google to establish research centres in China. It has also set up science parks across the country, in the hope of creating a Chinese Silicon Valley. Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park alone is home to thousands of high-tech enterprises. Chinese universities are joining the charge. Peking University, for example, has established “innovation and entrepreneurship” programmes.

Each year, ICF's Building the Broadband Economy summit (www.icfsummit.com) attracts public and private-sector leaders instrumental in the Intelligent Community movement.  The summit features keynote speeches, interactive discussions and international awards during three inspiring days.  Featured speakers will address the transformational impact of information and communications technology in healthcare, local economies and community life, and the often complex challenges it creates.  Featured speakers will include :

• Mayor Ron Loveridge of Riverside, California, USA, current president of the National League of Cities
• Suvi Linden, Finland’s outgoing Communications Minister and UN Commissioner on Broadband for Digital Development
• John Goggin, Director, Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems
• Gale Brewer, Member, New York City Council
• J. David Liss, Vice President, Government Relations  &  Strategic Initiatives, New York-Presbyterian Hospital
• Mayor Ron Littlefield of Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, which has deployed America’s most advanced smart grid program
• Gary Shapiro, President, Consumer Electronics Association
• Mayor Rob van Gijzel of Eindhoven, Netherlands, a leader in open innovation
• Anette Scheibe, CEO, Electrum Foundation & Kista Science City AB, Stockholm

Building the Broadband Economy is an international summit for community leaders and their technology partners from around the world.  BBE offers a unique opportunity to learn how to use information and communications technology to build prosperous economies and meet the social challenges of the 21st Century.  The 2011 edition of BBE, produced in partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, focuses on "Health in the Intelligent Community ."

The audience for BBE 2009 is limited to 250 attendees in order to provide the right environment to share knowledge and build relationships.  Attendance is principally by invitation but a limited number of paid registrations are available at www.icfsummit.com.

Intelligent Community Forum

www.intelligentcommunity.org

We have all seen or experienced it. When traveling at the right speeds, bikes can practically steer themselves, remaining upright and defying the pull of gravity. Physicists thought they figured out this minor mystery long ago. But a new paper (read the PDF here) by Andy Ruina (Cornell University) and Jim Papadopoulos (University of Wisconsin – Stout) challenges the conventional wisdom. This video, which comes to us courtesy of Science Friday, explains…

For centuries, Sweden has been producing world-class innovations, some for the betterment of mankind. Isn’t it time we learnt from them?

WHAT do Swedes have that we don’t? Well, blonde hair, blue eyes and a towering stature, for starters.

According to the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2010, Sweden is the most innovative country in the European Union (EU). And yet, it has been noted that many still confuse it with Switzerland.

The idea: The Handy Scale is a luggage handle that weighs your bag.

Just lift your suitcase and the scale will automatically display the amount in pounds.

Never pay that ridiculous airline fee again.

Whose idea: Baek Kil Hyun

Why it's brilliant: It's a pain having to pack luggage with weight limitations in mind.

Entrepreneurs often are adept at combining a personal skill or interest with business savvy to create a new enterprise.

But what happens when a person's area of expertise is a little, well, unusual? As in fire-eating and snake-charming type of wacky.

The enterprising performers on this list have created businesses out of teaching their special talents to others. And as it turns out, the businesses behind these schools are growing.

Revenues in the fine-arts schools category, which as unlikely as it may sound includes such training, are projected to increase by nearly 3 percent this year to $4.73 billion, says industry research firm IBISWorld. By 2015, revenues are expected to jump to $5.72 billion.

No matter if it’s a test score, sports game result or a sales figure, what we measure is what goes down in history. After all, “what’s measured is treasured.” It’s human nature to look back at past results as a basis for comparison and for improvement in the future. For this reason, it is absolutely essential to carefully observe and measure performance in the New Product Development process. In each of the different stages of the process, keep track of how much time is being spent so you know if you are ahead or behind schedule compared to past NPD cycles.

What gets measured is what gets done. Therefore, it’s necessary to set leading and lagging indicators for how the NPD process is going. Leading indicators such as the number of new ideas in the database, number of projects in the hopper, patents applied to, and amount of time and resources spent are all important information that give you insight on the NPD progress. Lagging indicators could include number of new products introduced, patents granted, new product sales in the first three years after launch, and how close your team is getting to the goal of introducing “at least one new product per year.”

The jig is up. Publications have been filled with stories of high achieving people like Martha Stewart, P. Diddy and Jerry Weintraub who supposedly need only three or fours of sleep a night. But the boasters–and their work–might be eyed with more suspicion now that the evidence is out that the less sleep you get, the worse you perform.

Maggie Jones described one study in an eye-opening article in the New York Times magazine in which subjects were allowed to sleep four, six or eight hours a night for two weeks and were then tested with the psychomotor vigilance task, or P.V.T., which measures sustained attention, a gold standard of sleepiness measures:

After last week's horrifying news of tornadoes that swept across the South, killing over 350 people, you had to wonder: Is anywhere in America safe? On the Mid-Atlantic coast, there's hurricanes, which every year seem to be getting more and more fierce; all across the south, tornadoes; and the West Coast lives under constant threat of a catastrophic earthquake. And enormous tracts of our country face severe droughts.

The publication includes full information on the Innovation Union Initiative as a key to achieving the goals of the Europe 2020 strategy for a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. With over thirty action points, it aims to improve conditions and access to finance for research and innovation in Europe, to ensure that innovative ideas can be turned into products and services that create growth and jobs by giving an important boost to cross-border co-operation between researchers, universities, research centers and industry.

Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. These should be carefully selected, with a proven track record, willing and available to help, and be completely trustworthy. Make sure they are willing to check their egos at the door.

Let’s talk specifics. I recommend that every early-stage startup find three Advisory Board members. These should all be people who bring credibility and value to your company just by their very association with your company name. They should have deep backgrounds and experience in a relevant domain to your startup, and executive experience in running a company.

There's no simple answer why entrepreneurship has bloomed in Wichita for a century. Fran Jabara, the father of entrepreneurship as an academic discipline at Wichita State University, boils it down as simply as anyone.

"Wichita is a 'why not?' town, not a 'why?' town," said the entrepreneur who founded WSU's Center for Entrepreneurship in 1977.

For decades, Wichita has been the place where business ideas can bloom, beginning with the city's oil men.

The entrepreneurship thread runs through the booms and busts of the aviation industry to two brothers' idea for a fast pizza and the rent-to-own industry — all of them generating the money and expertise that percolate through the economy, creating jobs and other business opportunities.

Game developer David Braben has built a computer that's the size of a USB stick and costs $25, called the Raspberry Pi.

The computer has one port on either side: just plug in a screen and keyboard, and off you go. The computer has a 700MHz processor and 128 Mb RAM, which is really impressive considering size and price.

It's not just an impressive engineering accomplishment: because it's cheap and portable, it can potentially be great for developing countries, particularly in education.

Braben made a fortune with his game development studio Frontier Developments and works on getting more computers in classrooms, especially in developing countries.

Now that we are smack in the middle of a technology upcycle, it is not really a surprise that we are beginning to hear more and more about "incubators." If you have been around the block as many times as I have, you may remember the sharp increase in such experiments about a decade ago. At that time, if a group offered free office space, bandwidth, other perks (including access to capital) and facilities, it was called an incubator. According to a Harvard Business School study, during the dot-com boom, there were 350 incubators.
IDrive Online Backup: Don’t spend your time recovering from disaster.

As the dot-com boom progressed, "incubator" became a much-maligned term. Thus, the idea of a metacompany was born. It was a concept coined by Anil K. Gupta, then a visiting faculty member in the Stanford (University) Technology Ventures Program (and otherwise a professor of strategy and global e-business at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park).

Everybody and his cousin is blogging these days. All it takes is a template and a little time on your hands to have your thoughts broadcast on the Web.

An effective business blog, on the other hand, take a commitment of time, resources and intellectual energy. Unless you are committed to producing a quality, well-written blog and are committed to updating that blog on a regular basis, don’t even bother starting.

The worst business blogs are the ones where it is clear that the writer is winging it, just writing whatever comes to mind. A business must approach its blog in the same way it would approach any other marketing or branding campaign: with planning, staffing, execution and monitoring.