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he world is now using a record amount of oil even though Europe and the United States are paring back.

Explore DR Congo in maps and graphs

Russia’s goal is not to create another North American Free Trade Agreement; it is to create another EU, with the Kremlin holding all of the real levers of power.

And, once members give up their sovereignty over fiscal, banking, and economic affairs, they may eventually need a partial political union to ensure democratic legitimacy.

But the first step is a customs union, and, in the case of the Eurasian Union, it had to include Ukraine, Russia’s largest neighbor to the west.

Europe Pipelines map

“The rise of industrial big data is moving at twice the speed of other big data. That’s a great opportunity.” said William Ruh, the head of global software at G.E. “There’s all kinds of experiences that we’re going to create.”

The other is a kind of application software to help power companies figure out how to best build out and operate their turbines. By October, G.E. hopes to have similar applications out for railway, mining, and oil and gas companies.

Effectively, G.E. is taking the data-driven tools and strategies used by Google and Facebook to the much larger global economy.

Instead of basking in the reflected glory of a prize winner funded by European grants, she said she had to listen to a speech attacking the red-tape and bureaucracy - and "generally embarrassing the hell out of me".

Jan Muehlfeit, chairman of Microsoft Europe, explained what was profoundly different about these new digital industries - that they expand at a speed and scale that would have been impossible in the traditional manufacturing industries. Governments trying to respond to such quicksilver businesses needed to ensure that young people were well-educated, creative and adaptable, he said.

Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine

The federal government now spends $126 billion a year on R. and D., according to the National Science Foundation. (It’s pocket change compared with the $267 billion that the private sector spends.) Asian economies now account for 34 percent of global spending; America’s share is 30 percent.

Perhaps more crucial, the invention of much of the stuff that really created jobs and energized the economy — the Internet, the mouse, smartphones, among countless other ideas — was institutionalized. Old-fashioned innovation factories, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, were financed by large companies and operated under the premise that scientists should be given large budgets, a supercomputer or two and plenty of time to make discoveries and work out the kinks of their quixotic creations.