Opinion makers, founders, and funders often develop a consensus of opinions around specific entrepreneurial ideas and evaluate opportunities narrowly within that predefined framework. Traditional and social media can exacerbate the problem by transforming that simple consensus into a dangerously hyped consensus.

Being an original thinker and challenging the status quo are the most exciting dimensions of entrepreneurship for both founders and funders.

In life as in work, we’re constantly dealing with uncertainty. As parents, employees, leaders, we look at the future and estimate the odds: what’s the chance that our teenage son will do drugs? What’s the chance that this system’s load will exceed what we designed it for? How likely is this risky investment to result in a huge competitive advantage?

The single most important skill of a good leader may not be what you think. Although it is important to be visionary and a strategic thinker, a new study suggests that it’s more rooted in their daily dealings with people.

According to DDI, the leader who’s mastered having successful conversations is most likely to do well steering their team and/or their business. "By the end of each day, leaders likely have had multiple conversations with a range of their constituents," DDI’s researchers write. "Each of these interactions will collectively determine their ultimate success as a leader."

Once upon a time, saying “the soft stuff is the hard stuff” was a snappy challenge to business convention. Now, it’s a cliché. Everyone knows that it’s not easy to suddenly make your colleagues more creative, adaptable, or collaborative, however well-intentioned you may be.

But thanks to research on human behavior, we know what it takes for the average person’s brain to perform at its best, cognitively and emotionally—even under the pressures of the modern workplace. These new insights suggest that simple tweaks in leaders’ communication and behavior can potentially create a much more productive atmosphere for any team. In this article, I’ll describe three leaders who knew enough of this science to spark positive behavioral shifts in their organizations.

A great source of new sales growth is with your existing loyal customers. After all, they already understand the category, they trust your brand, and you have an existing relationship - meaning you’ve been given permission to interact with them. When I say loyal customer, I mean one that buys 100% of the product or service from you and no one else like your main competitors.

You have three ways to get growth from your loyal customers: increase quantity purchased, increase purchase frequency, or increase the price, assuming you have a valid reason to raise it. Let’s look at each one.

The 50-and-over population is now simply too large to ignore - so let's stop ignoring it.

If you live anywhere in the Developed World, chances are you've been subjected to some inaccurate and politically-motivated propaganda about the economic and political status of various generations - particularly the Boomers.

Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, likes to play a game he calls Find the Robot. As he goes about his everyday life—shopping, traveling through airports—he looks for machines performing tasks that humans once handled. Most of what he sees doesn’t impress him. ATMs, self-checkout kiosks, and boarding pass scanners have been around for years. Beyond that, not a lot has changed. “It’s very hard for robots to do things that are extremely ordinary for humans,” Gordon says. “Turns out that teaching machines to do something like folding laundry is almost impossible.”

Image: A double-arm prototype robot moves a box during a media preview hosted by Hitachi Transport System at a warehouse in Noda City, Japan, on Aug. 25, 2015. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg

“I’ve got this great idea, I just need $500,000 to make it work.”

Investors have heard some variation of this statement thousands of times. With so many people vying for the same investor dollars in the Kansas City market, what’s a startup to do?

Here to offer some insight into the mind of an investor is industry expert Dave Palmstein, managing director of the Northland Angel Investor Network. With 30-plus years of experience in the startup world and more than 50 funded companies under his belt, Palmstein has seen firsthand what separates the “funded” from the “not funded.”

Whether you are perusing CauseVox’s blog because you are a startup nonprofit looking to earn some initial investments, or a large and established nonprofit interested in diversifying your income stream, chances are have probably tossed around the idea of using crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is a great way for organizations of every size, structure, and mission to get in front of a large pool of potential donors. With a solid crowdfunding platform, you should be able to spread the word about your organization’s mission and purpose, acquire donations from established and new donors, and get your name and brand in front of a potentially endless number of people.

The Federal Laboratory Consortium’s 2016 Award for Excellence in Technology has been awarded to Sandia National Laboratories.  Sandia won the award for developing a product that fights biological and chemical agents by neutralizing them and for developing a software that allows first responders to disable improvised explosive devices. Business Development Specialist Bianca Thayer also took home the Outstanding Technology Transfer Professional of 2016.

Every angel investor wants positive exits. Although great exits can take years to come to fruition, angels are willing to put in the time and effort to see the journey through. In the world of angel investing, oftentimes a “good year” equates to realizing one exit. When you can multiply that success by a few more exits, you’ve got a great year. But the real icing on the cake? When those multiple exits are quick exits.

At the Upfront Summit this past week there was an electric interview of Fred Wilson led by well-researched and artful Dan Primack of Fortune Magazine that ended up making news.  The newsworthy moment was when Fred expressed his view that companies like Uber should go public. The video of the interview will be available this week and I will talk more about it then because the interview covered so many great topics

Many words have been penned, and many pages written, about that one sacred, mysterious, and elusive piece of the business enterprise we call “culture”.  Culture is to a business what the persona and soul are to an individual. It defines who it is, how it thinks, what it does, and what are and are not the right ways for it to move into the future. When strategies sputter and fail, it is often the culture that either carries the business forward or does not. It is the culture that ends up holding the power of life and death in its hands. Peter Drucker summed it up well when he said “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

In the early 20th Century, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr engaged in a series of debates that would determine the future of physics.  Yet virtually nobody outside the physics community took much notice.  The true impact of what they were discussing wouldn’t be clear till a half century later.

Eventually, engineers began to understand enough of what Einstein and Bohr were talking about to create some basic components, such as the transistor and the microchip; and those innovations led to the information age that unleashed a boom in productivity during the 1990’s.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com 

Mikko Hyponnen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, has been working with computer viruses for over 25 years.  Over the course of his career, he's managed to accumulate more than a few computer viruses for his collection, storing the viruses on old floppy disks. So when he learned that the Internet Archive had the capability to run software written for DOS computers, it was a no-brainer to share his bizarre menagerie of malware with the world. 

Image: The "Crash" virus from the Malware Museum. 

Obese people aren’t always big because they eat too much. Some types of fat tissue won’t go away no matter how much one diets or exercises. And you don’t necessarily have to be large or overweight to suffer from these conditions. To aid the study of potential genetic, metabolic and hormonal causes behind the accumulation of atypical fat tissue, University of Arizona alumna Felicitie Daftuar has provided a $1.5 million gift through the Lipedema Foundation, of which she is the founder and executive director. The money is to be used as seed funding to establish a new Treatment, Research and Education of Adipose Tissue, or TREAT, Program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson.

The first place I visited when I started to write this book was Silicon Valley in California, the undisputed heart of global innovation and home to Google, Apple, Facebook, eBay, Intel and thousands of other high-tech companies. I wanted to figure out the secret to Silicon Valley’s success and learn what other countries can do to follow in its footsteps. I had a thousand questions in my head.

South Korea, Finland and Israel are not yet among the nations that Donald Trump decries for stealing America’s jobs and future. But the Republican presidential hopeful may be missing something. All three rank higher than the U.S. on the lists compiled by three estimable organizations of the world’s most innovative countries. China, the nemesis for Trump and many other Americans, doesn’t make the top 20 on any of the lists.

The famous philosopher William Godwin said, “He that loves reading has everything within his reach,” including wealth, success and happiness. But plenty of the book lists out there suggest the same great business titles over and over again.

Successful entrepreneurs often start with a “random” idea, but they quickly focus their efforts and follow a “system” to organize their startup and maximize the clout of their activities. Too many entrepreneur “wannabes” never get past the idea stage, or strike out randomly in many directions, hoping that their passion will convince people to follow them and make their business grow.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com