Bridging the Gaps

"If you are interested in creativity, that means that sooner or later, someone is going to ask you The Question. You know, the one that starts, “creativity…isn’t that something you are born with?”

"After teaching creativity for twenty years, I have had to deal with this question more times than I can remember. As a result, I have had to develop a menu of answers that cover all different types of settings, i.e. polite pre-dinner chitchat, through to the fellow passenger on the plane....

"In order to help you navigate these tricky encounters, I want to suggest four books that can provide you with the necessary theoretical underpinning required to deal with even the most curious interviewer. It is important to note that these books are not domain-specific. They explore creativity from many perspectives and therefore enable you to elegantly deal with all creativity related questions whether they are from artistic uncles or aerospace engineer nieces.

"Please note:  These books are intended to help you understand the field, but will not necessarily help you be more creative."

Multicultural News Network, a new television channel focusing on diverse content and voices, will launch in the second half of 2021.

The full article appears in the AI and Ethics Journal published by Springer Introduction The focus of knowledge management (KM) is to enable people and organizations to collaborate, share, create and use knowledge.

Remote teams can improve their productivity through 'bursty' communication. A behavioural insight on 'sequencing' for remote teams in 2020.

A roundup of recent funding in renewable energy and cleantech: Quidnet, DroneBase, Eos Energy, Urjanet, and Clir Renewables.

It’s no secret that the spread of COVID-19 around the country has already had a devastating impact on small businesses. With the economy on pause and uncertainty gripping communities across the country, Main Street has been left to cope with how to stay afloat during this unprecedented time. While Congress allocated $350 billion in small business lending in the CARES Act stimulus package, and small businesses have been eager for these loans to get them the assistance they so desperately need, daily reports from small business owners reveal the emergency lending programs currently in place are utterly broken and will not prevent businesses from closing for good. New scientific opinion polling reveals additional insight into the dismal state of small businesses right now and what we stand to lose if Congress doesn’t act to provide the direct grant relief that small businesses overwhelmingly support.  The poll was a survey of 500 small business owners nationwide conducted by Chesapeake Beach Consulting for Small Business Majority between April 6 and 9, 2020. The survey sheds light on a shocking rate of business closures, as well as small business owners’ views on proposals that can help ensure they are able to reopen and recover once the crisis is over.  An astounding 9 in 10 say the coronavirus has impacted their business, with 43% who say it has had a severe negative impact. Similarly, 41% report their revenues have declined by more than 50% since the COVID-19 crisis has begun. And a whopping 1 in 3 small businesses have already closed.  Figure 1: Most small businesses report they’ve experienced negative impacts to their business as a result of the coronavirus crisis Additionally, small businesses reported widespread lay offs and furloughs. Four in 10 have permanently laid off their employees, 56% have furloughed employees and most (72%) have reduced hours, salary or both for employees as a result of the crisis. One in three have permanently laid off, furloughed or reduced the hours/salary of their entire workforce. A majority of 53% report that at least half of their workforce has been impacted by layoffs or reductions.  Figure 2a: Small businesses report widespread reductions in workforce   Figure 2b: Percentage of staff affected by temporary layoffs, reduced hours or reduced wages A majority (53%) of small businesses say the CARES Act, the $2 trillion stimulus package recently passed by Congress, was a good first step to address the challenges they’re facing, but they believe more small business assistance is needed. Most small businesses (92%) say what they need from the federal government to help them survive the crisis is direct grant assistance. Two-thirds (66%) strongly support direct cash grants to help ensure small businesses can recover.  Figure 3: Small businesses overwhelmingly support direct cash assistance to ensure they can recover from the crisis Small businesses identified a number of additional solutions that would help the small business community have the relief it needs to make it through the crisis, including the following: Financial assistance for rent, mortgage and utility payments, not tied to maintaining payroll (86% support). Forbearance on all small business debt, not just current SBA loans as provided by the CARES Act (86% support). Increasing funding for community development financial institutions, which provide loans to small businesses (84% support). A moratorium on unemployment insurance taxes for two years (83% support). As cases of COVID-19 rapidly rise throughout the country, the impacts on our small business community become even more dire each day. Millions have closed up shop, experienced dramatic losses, and are being forced to make tough decisions on their own each day about whether or not they’ll ever reopen. While the small business loan programs funded by the CARES Act may be helping a select few small businesses, our economy will not stand a chance of recovering if Congress doesn’t immediately provide direct grant assistance and other relief that small businesses desperately need while our entire society is on pause.

The KPMG Global Mobility Services team addresses the fear stage of the COVID-19 curve for mobility and/or HR departments....

Jacqueline Hernández and Oswald Méndez are so close it seems like they can read other's minds.

Samsung SDS is making moves into the European market, with a blockchain-based payments solution for merchants...

From offering employment to promoting economic sustainability, small business success is critical to the U.S., but many owners find the process challenging.

Earlier this week, much was made of the e-commerce business Brandless deciding to shutter its doors. Industry observers found its fate particularly interesting, given that Brandless was only a few years old and had raised substantial funding, including $100 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund alone. Still, Brandless is far from alone in having tried […]

Vishak Raman; Director, Security Business, Cisco India & SAARC in a chat with ET spoke about the market expansion opportunities that the company sees in India, the changing patterns of the enterprise security market and the key threats that companies will face in the coming year.

Why might nations vary in whether and how fast to adopt potentially disruptive innovations? Our study investigates this issue, specifically how a nation's adoption of creatively destroying innovations is related to two previously unexplored variables: cultural looseness, which is a norm-based measure of informal institutions, and global connectedness. To highlight potential contributions from these new variables, we control for within-nation contextual variables examined in prior research, including formal institutions, Hofstede's dimensions of cultural values, socioeconomic attributes, and between-nation economic grouping.

A new AI system can automatically decipher a lost language that’s no longer understood — without knowing its relationship to other languages.

Researchers at MIT CSAIL developed the algorithm in response to the rapid disappearance of human languages. Most of the languages that have existed are no longer spoken, and at least half of those remaining are predicted to vanish in the next 100 years.

The new system could help recover them. More importantly, it could preserve our understanding of the cultures and wisdom of their speakers.

Learn more / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Research

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