Now, acting as the US State Department's Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Stengel sat down with AJ+ presenter Dena Takuri on Wednesday to discuss the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES). The gathering brings together more than 1,000 young innovators, investors, and government officials with the goal of establishing socially and environmentally conscious businesses around the world.

In his first trip to the U.S. since assuming his duties as mayor of Taiwan's capital city in December 2014, Ko will visit San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, all of which are sister cities of Taipei, Lin said. A main focus of Ko's U.S trip will be to learn about industrial development in Silicon Valley in northern California.

Stanford University will be a partner and will serve as the venue for the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit with over 1,000 global delegates and hosted by President Barack Obama, the U.S. State Department and the White House announced today.

President Obama’s newly installed defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, toured Silicon Valley last week to announce a new military strategy for computer conflict, starting the latest Pentagon effort to invest in promising start-ups and to meet with engineers whose talent he declared the Pentagon desperately needed in fending off the nation’s adversaries.

An Australian government initiative branded as the InnovationXchange will broker partnerships between business, civil society, philanthropy, and academia in order to tackle problems in developing countries in the Australian region. The InnovationXchange is said to draw on the model for developing innovation in Silicon Valley technology startups. It will be licensed to embrace more financial risk than a normal government bureaucracy in trying new solutions.

Interestingly, the resurgence of Asia as a continent is resting significantly on the rise of its ‘soft power’. Asian tigers, including nations such as India and China that are gradually tilting the global economic balance, are emerging as powerful ‘influencers’ in the new international economic order.

35 well-coiffed foreign ambassadors on formal state business in the US were sitting in the Khan Academy kitchen to learn about the educational nonprofit that has become a global name. Standing amid a crowd of laid-back software engineers and employees in casual garb, the foreign visitors were immersed in a different culture in more ways than one.