We all want to strike out on our own. We can't stand performance reviews. We hate being told what to do. We get the feeling that if we have a boss, we're limiting ourselves.

Which is a bit silly. Programmer Jonathan Mumm shows us why. He talks about being a Midwestern kid with an inferiority complex (which this writer identifies with) out in the world with something to prove. Though bursting with motivation, he was clumsy--miffing coworkers, making unproductive arguments, and rubbing people the wrong way.

It finally seems that the uproar over Marissa Meyer's diktat banning flexible work policies at Yahoo is dying down. While good arguments were made on both sides of the issue, what got lost in the charged debate was the potential for evolving traditional business models through changing the employee-employer relationship.

Our research on identifying replicable templates for business model innovation shows that innovating how a company engages with its workforce is an often overlooked way of increasing business model performance. The basic structure of the firm-employee relationship has not changed much over the last 50 years. Relying on a forecast of organizational needs, firms select the nature and number of employees, who are then assigned some working hours and tasks to do in those hours.

When it comes to spurring economic development and job growth through startup funding, angel investors are in high demand. Angel investments, or early stage funding for a new company, help stimulate the creative economy, link entrepreneurial community with stakeholders and create jobs, said John May, chair emeritus of Angel Capital Network and managing partner of McLean, Va.- based angel investment fund New Vantage Group, who spoke today at an event hosted by the Nashville Capital Network.

Starting and running a company is a team effort. Yes, it takes a leader (entrepreneur), but you can’t do it alone, without a team. Maybe only you and a co-founder comprise the team at first, to provide key skills, back you up, and test your ideas. As the startup grows, the team has to be able to really push you in making growth decisions, rather than you pulling them along.

The responsibility for leadership rests on you as the founder or CEO, and your leadership style. Many entrepreneurs still fall back to the traditional “control” leadership paradigm, but I don’t see it working so well any more. I agree more with Dr. Roger Schwarz and his new book, “Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams.” He outlines eight keys to an effective mutual learning approach as follows:

Overit Media in Albany, New York, is at the leading edge of a trend. The 30-person company was recently featured in Fast Company because of its hourly company-wide business fitness breaks, which range from lunges and pushups to “freestyle dancing.”

Every hour, employees drop what they’re doing when the company P.A. urges them to join in the two-minute group fitness activity. There’s also a power walk at lunch.

When I saw the photos of Overit employees “planking” on their office floors, I giggled. (And also thought that you’d have to have a pretty casual dress code – or a pretty good janitorial staff – to be confident about dropping to the floor at any given moment). But giggles aside, Overit has the right idea.

We all want our businesses to be lean and mean. But efficiency can be like heat inside a building that has tiny cracks around windows and doors. Heat leaks out here and there – you don’t even realize it.  Below are some technology issues that can steal efficiency from your business through your information technology systems, that you may not even realize.

Technology Issues and How to Fix Them

Lack of IT Policies and Procedures, or Not Following Them

According to a Ponemon Institute study in 2012, “Negligent insiders are the top cause of data breaches.” Internal negligence accounts for 39% of data breaches. Probably most of those people involved in breaches were horrified at what happened, but human error was still at the heart of it.

Does the name of a business affect that business’s success? In most cases, absolutely it does. So how do you name a business?

While the right name can make your business popular within a short time, the wrong one can doom your prospects. The right name can create a unique business identity, but the wrong one can mar it, along with your chances of success.

Do you go with something descriptive or something creative? Do you include a location in the name? Do you decide this on your own or get expert help? You need to find answers to a number of questions before you make a final decision to name a business.

University of Maryland, College Park and two other East Coast schools will share $3.75 million from the National Science Foundation to develop a regional hub for turning university research into marketable products and services. University of Maryland will be working with George Washington University and Virginia Tech to create an Innovation Corps for the mid-Atlantic region. The initiative will aim to draw out the best research ideas from students and faculty members and bring them to the commercial market.

The Fog of Innovation — that moment when you realize that the data you need to make a critical decision about an innovative idea just aren't clear. Unfortunately, the data rarely are.

For most large companies that find themselves lost in the fog, the default answer is to keep studying. After all, a risk that doesn't pan out tends to have more negative repercussions than risks not taken. But remember: data only become crystal clear when it is too late to take action on that data. And time spent waiting for perfect clarity creates room for disruptive upstarts and hungry competitors.

Most companies put innovation at the top of their agendas. But how many devote the energy and resources it takes to build innovation into the values, processes, and practices that rule everyday activity and behavior? Not many, as we argued when we launched the Innovating Innovation Challenge in October.

That disconnect isn't due to lack of human ingenuity or resources; it's actually the result of organizational DNA. Productivity, predictability, and alignment are embedded in the marrow of our management systems. Experimentation, risk-taking, and variety are the enemy of the efficiency machine that is the modern corporation. Of course, it's variety and the daring to be different that produces game-changing innovation.

Companies are scrambling to develop products and operating systems for the developing world, but any old phone will do.

For some time now, smartphones have become tediously similar (see “The New Smartphone Incrementalism”). We’ve been to the glitzy U.S. launches—the Motorola Droids, the Nokia Windows phones, the iPhone 5, the Blackberry 10, and so on. Let’s face it: they are much the same. Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona was filled with the latest advances—but, again, these were at the margins. 

The real interesting story is at the low-end: how to put mobile Internet in the hands of the world’s poorest two or three billion people. The next wave of innovation and the biggest impacts will come from their hands. As Manoj Kohli, CEO of Bharti Airtel, said today in Barcelona: “They are young and hungry to pick up the Internet faster than anyone else.”

Get out there and regularly kick that soccer ball around with your kids, you may be helping them prevent a broken hip when they are older, say researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine’s Specialty Day in Chicago, IL.

“According to our study, exercise interventions in childhood may be associated with lower fracture risks as people age, due to the increases in peak bone mass that occurs in growing children who perform regular physical activity,” said lead author, Bjorn Rosengren, MD, PhD of Skane University Hospital, Malmo, Sweden. Rosengren and his colleagues conducted a population-based controlled exercise intervention for six years in children age 7-9 years in Malmo, Sweden. In the intervention group 362 girls and 446 boys received 40 minutes of daily physical education at school.

Since 2005, the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy the National Academies (STEP), has carried out a broad survey of possibilities to improve innovation policy of the USA. From a European point of view, this work seems to have reached a turning point by establishing a kind of intellectual consensus. But that may be an optical illusion?

Formally, during the XX° century, there was neither industrial nor innovation public policy. It was politically correct to say that market laws were enough to generate and optimize innovation. Nevertheless U.S. is not the world champion of innovation by chance. During the last seventy years, behind the politically correct arguments, we do find a strategy to build the U.S. military and industrial preeminence on a strong scientific strategy and a large public procurement. By now, we can see that the U.S. wants to maintain this leadership, even if it needs a revolution in their mind and in the “politically correct”. History enlightens the present change.

Download the full Report (PDF)

Google Now, an app for Android smartphones that serves up useful information such as flight details when it thinks you need it, is getting some competition from a former Googler.

Sherpa, a free smartphone app, mines your e-mails, calendar, and location data to determine the best time and place to let you know something like your flight information and help with next steps, such as getting a cab to the airport.

Bill Ferrell, the company’s founder and CEO, used to work on search advertising quality at Google. He spent a lot of time traveling for work, pulling out his laptop to look up when his flight was leaving or which hotel he was staying at. Why, he wondered, couldn’t the information just come to you?

As the global financial crisis roiled Europe, who was still investing in the future? From 2008 through 2010, the European Union’s EuroStat office conducted a survey to gauge commercial innovation. The numbers have now been crunched to create a continental leaderboard of business creativity (except for Greece, for which no data was available), with innovation defined as the creation of “new or significantly improved goods or services or the implementation of new or significantly improved processes, logistics, or distribution methods.” The survey also captured the rate of collaboration on innovative activities with partners in the United States or China and India.


In an era of ever-expanding virtual teamwork, some companies seem to be taking a Luddite’s view of the digitally-connected world. They’re smart people, so why are they taking this stand?

First, some equate virtual worker with non-contributor. Not so! The quality of someone’s contributions to their team can’t be judged by their geolocation. Is anyone looking at the organization as a living entity, and asking which team members are instrumental in maintaining processes, relationships, and ‘team spirit’?

Two announcements on Monday and Thursday of last week signaled a fundamental strategic and physical shift for biopharma giant AstraZeneca, including the establishment of a new corporate headquarters in a new UK location; the shift of small molecule and biologics R&D to three strategic centers around the world; and an eventual overall headcount reduction of 5,050 between now and the end of 2016.

On Monday, March 18, the company announced its intent to focus the R&D in three places, and to fully implement these plans by 2016:

In Pensacola, Fla., a research institute that has been nationally recognized for its groundbreaking work is teaching the lame to walk and the blind to see.

It is called the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), and it is part of a rapidly growing medical science cluster in the Greater Pensacola Area of Northwest Florida.

Long known for its Naval Air Station-based Blue Angels, its picturesque white sandy beaches and its 500 years of Spanish-American history, Pensacola today is undergoing an economic shift as old-world industries like logging and paper mills give way to a new wave of entrepreneurs conducting breakthrough R&D in a variety of life-science sectors.

Startup incubator Y Combinator has funded more than 500 startups, including big names such as Reddit, Socialcam, and Airbnb. The incubator brings in a new class of startups twice a year.

Those startups relocate to Silicon Valley for three months, get curtain-ready, and then demonstrate their startups at a Demo Day in front of investors. The first Demo Day of 2013 was held Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif., and brought with it a number of interesting new startups worth a look.

“I love my job” isn’t something you hear very often, is it?

Well, I love my job. Ever since I started working for a UK-based startup five years ago, I’ve never looked back. Still working at a startup, currently at mobile marketing company TextMagic, I’ve taken some time to reflect on the reasons why I find working at startups so compelling.

I have heard from many people that they avoid working for a startup as they see it as unstable, low paying, unambitious — or even all three. But that is a very short-sighted attitude — working for a startup can be an incredible experience and can also set you up for a successful and prosperous career in the future.