I’ve always thought of the Ten Commandments as history's first how-to guide for the way the members of a society were supposed to live their lives. Now, as we’re looking at the new economy and pondering the new rules of work, I thought I'd take the Ten Commandments and give them a (non-religious affiliated) update for today’s workers.

I. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/65393953@N03/8147084078

“HUMAN BEINGS are ashamed to have been born instead of made,” wrote the philosopher Günther Anders in 1956. Our shame has only deepened as our machines have grown more adept.

Every day we’re reminded of the superiority of our computers. Self-driving cars don’t fall victim to distractions or road rage. Robotic trains don’t speed out of control. Algorithms don’t suffer the cognitive biases that cloud the judgments of doctors, accountants and lawyers. Computers work with a speed and precision that make us look like bumbling slackers.

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.

The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages.

Since we’re obliged to pursue innovation in a competitive marketplace, speed matters. In fact, it matters a great deal, for your competitors aren’t waiting, and you cannot afford to allow them to get too far ahead. The faster you recognize new trends, threats, and opportunities, the faster great ideas get discovered and created, the faster they get to market, the faster you earn money, build brand, and extend the relevance and reach of your firm into the future.

This is a big year for development. As the Millennium Development Goals are set to run their course, the international community must agree on new development priorities. These new targets are set to be adopted at the U.N. General Assembly in September.

As negotiations on finalizing the new development agenda heat up, one thing is clear: Delivering on these goals will require investment in innovation.

What exactly does innovation mean in the context for development?

Silicon Valley's top tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter, signed an open letter on Tuesday to President Obama — urging him to reject any government proposals that would grant law enforcement access to their users' encrypted data.

The strongly worded four-page letter was signed by more than 75 companies and cybersecurity experts.

Giving law enforcement access to users' data won't just compromise the products, the letter said, but also leave them more vulnerable to attacks.

Innovation is the process of taking an idea and putting it into practice. Creativity, on the other hand, is what you do in your head to generate the idea, an idea that meets three criteria: an innovative idea must be new, useful, and surprising. New means that no one else has done it before. Useful means that it delivers some new value for you or your customers. And surprising? It means that the market will be delighted with your latest innovation.

Image: http://www.innovationinpractice.com

You might think you have high speed Internet, and your provider may boast about how fast it is. But is it fast enough to be called “broadband?” Maybe not, and that slow connection can hurt your business. This year the FTC redefined broadband as a minimum of 3 Mbps upload speed. That 25/3 standard replaces the previous 4/1 standard, in order to reflect today’s heavier data transfers. This means current DSL plans may no longer be called broadband.

Surf's up more than 2 miles under the sea, where ice-cold waves as tall as skyscrapers tumble over an underwater "waterfall."

Yet the ocean surface is calm, and a tropical sun bakes scientists aboard a research ship moored between South America and Africa just south of the equator. Without the network of sensors dangling below, no one would ever know of the tremendous currents rushing through a narrow mountain pass on the seafloor.

Image: Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds over mountainsIMAGE: MOUNTAINS. CREDIT: UNIVERSITY CORPORATION FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH BENJAMIN FOSTER 

Everyone loves talking about a good idea, but did you know that good ideas can be bad for innovation? Good ideas encourage teams to spend more time refining and polishing an unproven thought, instead of testing and iterating on a hypothesis. In this post, we'll share our approach to avoiding the "good ideas trap" so you can spend more time testing and learning.

Until not too ago, I made a healthy living as a medical device salesman. It was a job I loved and thought would be my sole source of income for the indefinite future -- until something happened.

Related: Failure: The Key Ingredient to Winning

That something occurred in late 2013, when one of my colleagues suffered a stroke at age 35. This caused me to take inventory of my life and ask the tough question, “What would happen to my family if something happened to me?” The next week, my company made a change to my commission structure and overnight my income was slashed by 40 percent. That was the final straw: I decided it was time to take control of my life and begin my entrepreneurial journey toward building passive income.

Do you want job security? Do you want to know that no matter what happens to the economy, you will always have a source of income? Then you need to become an entrepreneur.

Wait, isn’t an entrepreneur kind of the opposite of being an employee? No, that’s not the definition of entrepreneur I’m talking about. My favorite definition of the word “entrepreneur” is someone who moves an asset from an area of lower utility to an area of higher utility. In other words, someone who makes things better, or adds value.

We’ve seen the unstoppable rise of the geek over the past few years. From popular culture to big business, the geeks have inherited the Earth. They’re the billionaires, the modern day rock stars, and their many achievements have resulted in a significant change to their status in popular society. They are now often championed, given the limelight or even imitated – geek is now chic! So let’s take some time out to look at how the geek — and our perception of the geek — has evolved.

People, the future is upon us. Everything that seemed like a distant dream, only spoken of in books and fantasized about in films, is rapidly manifesting into reality.

If the endeavours in this article are to be successful we will soon have a world filled with jet bikes and flying billionaires.

Image: http://motorburn.com

I was recently at lunch with an innovation leader of a Fortune 500 organization. He is a super smart guy and also a great person to “chew the fat” on strategic issues with. We were talking about the desire from his leadership to focus on supporting the development of disruptive ideas.

While this is a really valid topic and there is much talk of the value of disruptive organizations and their ideas, we debated the ability of large, complex organizations to support disruptive thinking.

Image: Free Digital Photos

The ideal manager is someone who solves problems before they reach the CEO. Sometimes, though, communicating honestly about business problems is important, especially if a lower manager isn't sure how to handle a specific situation.

If you're a leaders who suspects you aren't hearing everything you should, perhaps tweaking your approach to communication with colleagues is the way to go. I asked nine entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share the No. 1 question that founders and CEOs can use to get honest feedback. Their best answers are below.

At the current pace of urbanization, the world’s cities will add 65 million inhabitants a year between now and 2025.1 The resulting demand for infrastructure will mean that each year, India alone will need to add as much floor space as exists in all of Chicago, and China more than twice that. The way the world builds now will determine urban sustainability—in emissions, waste production, and water use—for decades.

Pharma firms need better incentives to create novel antibiotics to head off an ‘apocalyptic scenario’ where commonplace infections become deadly once more. And the latest report from economist Jim O’Neill, who has been commissioned by the UK government to investigate how to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR), offers two ways to make developing antibiotics more attractive to industry. He recommends rewarding firms that develop a new antibiotic with a substantial lump sum. Secondly, a global innovation fund should be set up with $2 billion (£1.3 billion) to be invested over five years to boost blue skies research into drugs and diagnostics. But questions remain over how to run such a scheme and where the money would come from.

Image: http://www.rsc.org

Rarely do small inventors and business owners go to such great lengths to lobby Washington lawmakers, but new patent legislation is proving to be so controversial that small innovators across the country are banding together to form a new lobbying voice.

But the issue is also proving divisive for the entrepreneurs’ natural political ally, as the Republicans in Congress have yet to unite behind a single position.

We have just published a Special Issue of our Credit News looking at Venture Capital (VC) investment in Germany compared to the USA. Our main findings include: 

– German VC Gap Reaches New Record of €7.1bn in 2014 - Cumulated VC Gap Exceeds €27bn since 2009 - VC Data Contradictory & Needs Improvement

Image: http://www.barkowconsulting.com