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In assessing the possible economic benefits of immigration reform, Quartz 's Tim Fernholz chooses to look at an industry we've not thought about: manicures. Fernholz shares some key takeaways from a study on manicure businesses in California, and reveals that it is a thriving business. And the growth has been driven by Vietnamese immigrant workers: Fernholz writes: Why was this possible? Because the immigrants were—wait for it—innovators in the manicure space. They developed the idea of the standalone nail salon that reduced costs, “making a once-exclusive service commonplace.” That meant more nails to paint, not just more workers per nail. The benefits of immigration accrued to people who got their nails painted, to the new immigrants, and even to the remaining non-Vietnamese manicurists. While nail-care business might not be the perfect stand-in for all low-income work, it does reflect what economists find more broadly: When new immigrants come, it does mean new competition for similarly-skilled local workers, but the new immigrants may also create opportunities that lead to more investment, which maintains wage growth and leads to economic growth. Indeed, with more immigration, average wages seem to rise, not fall. But the American workers most similar to low-skilled immigrants are uneducated Americans. Economists looked at how immigration affected them between 1990 and 2006, when a lot of unauthorized workers were coming into the country. If they assumed every new immigrant had the exact same abilities as a native worker (which obviously isn’t true, starting on the language front), the effect of immigration on the wages of native workers who didn’t finish high school fell 0.6% over 16 years, while those of everyone else improved. In a more accurate simulation, they found that less-educated natives saw their wages increase by 0.3% due to immigration, and average wages increased 0.5%. That’s not so bad at all. Read How manicures explain the benefit of low-skilled immigration here .

We are living in the age of BIG DATA , though it may still be the dawning of that age. AT MarketingProfs , Verónica Maria Jarski suggests that many global businesses have a communication problem. When different departments are not working hand in hand, the potential benefits of having all this new data are not realized. Jarski presents an infographic to make her point (note: this is focused on marketing and sales departments, but we think there is a larger lesson for organizations here): See the full size graphic here .

For those executives who have not convinced themselves they have all the answers, strong leadership depends in part on utilizing the collective wisdom of all members of an organization. At Fast Company , Fort Hill President Michael Papay outlines some best practices for using crowdsourcing techniques to tackle organizational challenges. One tip is to " Create a Great Experience ": The quickest way to get to some fast answers is to make the experience a good one, perhaps even delightful. Time compresses when we’re engaged. The trouble is: Most survey methods are too cumbersome and too dreaded because the experience is dry and usually awful. What if you engaged people--perhaps even delighted them--in the process of asking them questions? This is less about driving people to do a survey, and more about the experience pulling them into a process where they see where others are, contribute, and shape direction. Facebook and other social media took off when the experience was simple and when people knew they’d learn something as they participated. And, in the process, those experiences created “stickiness”--the idea that people are drawn to return for more. In fact, the dominant social media sites--Facebook and Twitter--each ask simple questions to prompt posts and tweets: What’s going on and what are you doing? How about something that’s a good experience for the users--a crowdsourcing tool that engages the crowd and people see they can shape the opinion of a company? The process is transparent--people can see what others are doing. You get more engagement and you compress the time. Read Crowdsourcing Your Way to More Effective Leadership here .

Seth Godin's blog is required reading at The Watch. And we have been struck, and a bit confused, by how Godin is able to seem so optimistic while he points out all sorts of problems in the business world and beyond. But we may better understand now, after listening to him speak with Kara Miller , host of WGBH radio's Innovation Hub . And it all has to do with his views on failure. Godin and Miller spoke this week about the state of education in the U.S. But it is a conversation that is about so much more than failing schools. For Godin, the internet age requires entrepreneurial thinking and creative approaches to problem solving. He says we are not doing a very good job of developing the key skills to success. The reason? "We haven't taught our kids to fail," says Godin. Listen to the program here .

Bob Kulhan has taken his background in improvisation and built a business--and a teaching position at Duke's Fuqua School of Business--out of it. Kulhan applies the skills learned from improv to managerial decisions. He says the key to innovating your way out of a problem is to apply the central two words of improve work: "yes, and." He explains the value of this approach in a Big Think video:

Just as you make your own luck, innovative companies make their own serendipity. So says Jack Hidary --founder of Samba Energy and of the Auto X Prize. For Hidary, the best way to bring innovative ideas into the world is to gather people who are both smart and open to new ideas, and let them have at it. The results are better products and and more productive interactions. (Maybe we need to reconsider the guest list for our New Year's Eve parties) From Big Think :

Innovation doesn't just happen. Organizations need to first build a culture that supports creative thinking and innovative approaches among it workers/members. In this instructive video for Big Think , University of Michigan Business School Professor Jeff DeGraff lays out a path toward that culture. DeGraff focuses on what it takes to create high risk innovation--which he also describes as "breakthrough innovation.":

In a post for the World Economic Forum , Kenneth Rogoff weighs in on the argument by Peter Thiel, Gary Kasparov, and others that the global economic slowdown is the result of an innovation crisis in advanced economies. Rogoff seems to see some validity in exploring the question of whether there is a need to encourage more rapid, life-changing technological advancement (even in the age of iPhones and cloud computing), but he writes that "the evidence still seems overwhelming that the drag on the global economy mainly reflects the aftermath of a deep systemic financial crisis, not a long-term secular innovation crisis." There are certainly those who believe that the wellsprings of science are running dry, and that, when one looks closely, the latest gadgets and ideas driving global commerce are essentially derivative. But the vast majority of my scientist colleagues at top universities seem awfully excited about their projects in nanotechnology, neuroscience, and energy, among other cutting-edge fields. They think they are changing the world at a pace as rapid as we have ever seen. Frankly, when I think of stagnating innovation as an economist, I worry about how overweening monopolies stifle ideas, and how recent changes extending the validity of patents have exacerbated this problem. No, the main cause of the recent recession is surely a global credit boom and its subsequent meltdown. The profound resemblance of the current malaise to the aftermath of past deep systemic financial crises around the world is not merely qualitative. The footprints of crisis are evident in indicators ranging from unemployment to housing prices to debt accumulation. It is no accident that the current era looks so much like what followed dozens of deep financial crises in the past. Granted, the credit boom itself may be rooted in excessive optimism surrounding the economic-growth potential implied by globalization and new technologies. As Carmen Reinhart and I emphasize in our book This Time is Different, such fugues of optimism often accompany credit run-ups, and this is hardly the first time that globalization and technological innovation have played a central role. Attributing the ongoing slowdown to the financial crisis does not imply the absence of long-term secular effects, some of which are rooted in the crisis itself. Credit contractions almost invariably hit small businesses and start-ups the hardest. Since many of the best ideas and innovations come from small companies rather than large, established firms, the ongoing credit contraction will inevitably have long-term growth costs. At the same time, unemployed and underemployed workers’ skill sets are deteriorating. Many recent college graduates are losing as well, because they are less easily able to find jobs that best enhance their skills and thereby add to their long-term productivity and earnings. Read the full post here .