A Surprising Way to Jump-Start Entrepreneurship

You don’t often hear economists tout assistance programs for moderate-income families as spurs to entrepreneurship, but Gareth Olds of Harvard Business School found that government-funded safety nets can have the effect of “reducing the risks of business ownership and relaxing credit constraints.” One program providing health insurance to children in moderate-income families boosted the rate of new-business creation, raised new companies’ chances of survival, and increased the self-employment rate by 23%. Olds tells Working Knowledge: “What I was seeing was reproducible and scientifically valid. It also just happened to be personally valid for me."

Meaning that when he was growing up in Alaska, his family lived paycheck to paycheck and relied on Medicaid and the Food Stamp program, yet his parents managed to start a successful vocational-training program for dental assistants. The government assistance helped, he says: People like his parents are more willing and able to walk the high wire of entrepreneurship if there’s a safety net to catch them. —Andy O'Connell

A Brief History Creativity Creep The New Yorker

There's no shortage of books and articles on how to be more creative. And in one recent survey, CEOs ranked creativity the number one attribute they value in their employees. But it might be worth taking a step back to better understand exactly what we mean by "creativity," argues Joshua Rothman. Tracing the history of the idea from the Enlightenment to today's notion of creativity as "the missing piece in a life that seems routinized, claustrophobic, and frivolous," Rothman notes key moments when creativity went from meaning to "experience life in a creative way" to being indistinguishable from "making stuff." In the 1950s, for example, psychologists started measuring creativity by what people produced rather than what was going on in their brains. Researchers began to think of creativity in terms of objects, not minds. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but Rothman reminds us that output isn’t the be-all and end-all of creativity. For "imaginative transcendence and openness to the world," he writes, "you'd be better off clearing your head and taking a walk in the woods."

Open Your Wallet How to Get Into an Ivy League College — Guaranteed Businessweek

Can predictive analytics guarantee that your kid gets into a top college? That's what entrepreneur Steven Ma is betting on with his company ThinkTank Learning, which "makes bets on student admissions the way a trader plays the commodities markets." About 10,000 students, the majority of them Asian immigrants, are enrolled in some aspect of the program, for fees ranging from $7,000 for a standard package to hundreds of thousands of dollars for guaranteed admission. ThinkTank, which has annual revenue of more than $18 million, says it's cracking the code of getting children into the best colleges with a combination of tutoring, application assistance, and guidance about which volunteer and extracurricular activities are most important.

Others, however, say he's taking advantage of wealthy immigrant families. "The commodification of fear is unfair to the parents, it’s unfair to the kids, and is deeply disturbing," says Stanford lecturer Denise Pope. Ma seems unfazed: He has a 78% retention rate on guaranteed contracts, and in the case of the son of one often-absent Hong Kong CEO, the money may not have gone so much to tutoring as it did to attention. "Steven was the only one who believed in me and told me I still had a chance," says the current Syracuse student.

It’s Brain Surgery Doctor Turns to 3D Printers in a Race to Save a Toddler’s Mind The Verge

Here’s a story about a 3D printer being used to make a squishy yet accurate model of a child’s brain so that surgeons at Boston Children’s Hospital could more carefully plan an operation to relieve seizures. The model of the brain was printed in soft plastic, and blood vessels were shown in a contrasting color for easier navigation. The doctors could essentially use the model to do a dress rehearsal before the operation. They could hold the artificial version, cut it, manipulate it, and look for things, Mona Lalwani writes in The Verge. The hospital has been using the technology for about a year, and there are high hopes for even more applications: In the future, on-demand anatomy printing could make its way into emergency rooms to meet the needs of trauma cases. —Andy O'Connell

Inside Shenzhen Visiting the World's Manufacturing Ecosystem Joi Ito

MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito's dispatch on his recent trip to Shenzhen, China, and its "ecosystem of suppliers and factories" is a rare glimpse into a world that makes a lot of our stuff, a world that, as Ito writes, probably couldn't exist anywhere else. His tour involves visiting factories, where management is "willing and able to try all kids of new processes to produce things that have never been manufactured before" (and who live in the same dorms as their workers); a clichéd Blade Runner-esque market where used cell-phone chips are bought by the pound by manufacturers that run out of parts, making it "very likely that the 'new phone' you bought from [AT&T] has 'recycled' Shenzhen parts somewhere inside"; and a shop that makes knockoff phones in the shape of key chains, boom boxes, and little cars that "aren't like anything that existed anywhere else...Many were designed by the so-called Shanzhai pirates who started by making knockoffs of existing phones, but had become agile innovation shops for all kind of new ideas because of the proximity to the manufacturing ecosystem."

Ito finishes his post by stating that the region, "like Silicon Valley, has become such a 'complete' ecosystem that we're more likely to be successful building networks to connect with Shenzhen than to compete with it head on."

BONUS BITS A Bit of a Hodgepodge

How Should We Program Computers to Deceive? (Pacific Standard)
Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner (Slate)
Legal or Not, the Pot Business Is Still Wacky (AP)