The modern world is filled with constant distractions. Only those with maniacal focus on results and a willingness not to engage in every activity achieve extraordinary results. As executives we’re all seemingly accessible at any moment to anybody via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Text. We are over-intro’d and at the same time under-resourced in terms of staff to handle the barrage of in-bound requests.

The pace of change in today’s marketing can be startling. Technology is making new products and services available to the consumer and to businesses every day. But those trends have implications for all sorts of businesses. For example, what will happen to the transportation and shipping industry once everyone has autonomous vehicles?

Image: https://ideascale.com 

Entrepreneurs have high demanding schedules that come along with the job. With countless daily tasks and deadlines to be crossed off a to-do list, it is not always easy to take the time for self-care and remain healthy through exercise. However, there are many lessons all avid runners can learn from their time spent on the pavement to the time spent in the office. To remain healthy while also staying on top of all your to dos in the business world, you can apply a few running lessons to your work life and become the best CEO you are capable of.

Image: Cara Frasco. Motion PR CEO Kimberly Eberl completing 1 of her 100 individual races. Image credit: Cara Frasco   

Imagine you need people to donate to a cause you care about. How do you get as many people as possible to donate? You could send an email to 200 of your friends, family members, and acquaintances.  Or you could ask a few of the people you encounter in a typical day—face-to-face—to donate. Which method would mobilize more people for your cause?

How vital is entrepreneurship to the future of Ontario? How important are entrepreneurial skills to creating a robust, adaptable workforce? And how do we ensure entrepreneurs and innovators can thrive in communities across Ontario?

Those were a few of the questions that were discussed and debated in Kingston last week as a mix of students, academics, city officials, and innovation and business leaders gathered at Queen’s University for a roundtable on entrepreneurship.

Image: http://ontariosuniversities.ca 

“Why do strategies almost always fail to live up to expectations?” Raphael S. Cohen poses this question in his Lawfare blog article “Why Strategies Disappoint—and How To Fix Them”. A regular Benari blog reader sent Cohen’s blog post to me with a note saying, “I thought of you as I read this piece.”

Is my skepticism about such things so obvious? Indeed, I am fully in agreement with the military leaders Cohen quotes who decry the uselessness of so many of the strategic documents the United States military produces. My favorite comment comes from former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, who “lamented that the major defense strategy – the Quadrennial Defense Review – had devolved into ‘a glossy coffee table brochure.’”

David Loftesness and Alexander Grosse know a thing or two about hypergrowth. You might say they wrote the book on it.

Between them, they’ve held engineering leadership roles at Twitter, SoundCloud, Amazon/A9, issuu and Nokia — in many cases, during periods when hot products demanded that those companies stretch in new ways, and fast. Now Grosse, Director of Engineering for BCG Digital Ventures, and Loftesness, the Head of Platform at eero, have lived through both the brilliant and bleak moments of scaling teams.

When a CEO announces a major initiative to foster innovation, mark your calendar. Three years later, many of these ambitious ventures will have quietly expired without an obituary. Among those that have met that fate in recent months are initiatives at Target, Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola, the New York Times, and Chubb.

The problem isn’t that large companies lack good ideas. In most cases we’ve studied at Innovation Leader, an online resource for people responsible for innovation and R&D, there’s a surplus of good ideas for new products, services and business models. Often, there is early data that shows customers are willing to buy.

Without immigrants, Silicon Valley would look very different. There would be no Amazon, no eBay. No Reddit, no Intel. Google, Tesla, and Yahoo? Gone. And you can say goodbye to your iPhone. These are just a few of the biggest names, but half of all billion-dollar U.S. startups were founded by immigrants. Silicon Valley would simply not exist, and the United States’ position as a global tech leader might never have come to fruition.

A new European-funded project, led by the University of Southampton, is to bring together established businesses and startups to meet today’s challenges with data.

Data Pitch will provide up to 50 European startups and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) with world-class business support including: up to €100k equity free funding, expert mentoring, investment opportunities, and access to data from established businesses and the public sector.

Image: Professor Elena Simperl, Data Pitch Project Director 

President Donald Trump has created a new White House office dedicated to applying business practices to government operations, to be headed up by his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

The new Office of American Innovation, codified in a presidential memorandum, is described internally as a sort of “SWAT team” of consultants who bring business practices into government, according to The Washington Post. Its mission is to “improve government operations and services, improve the quality of life for Americans now and in the future and spur job creation,” the memorandum stated—including by fixing problems at the Veterans Affairs Department and modernizing federal IT.

Japan Inc. where companies with roots going back decades, if not centuries, have long dominated, is finally warming up to startups.

Major banks and venture capitalists are keen to tap into faster growth by investing in innovative entrepreneurs, when they can find them. Money raised for ventures in Japan reached a record 276 billion yen ($2.5 billion) last year.

That's up from about 50 billion yen ($450 million) annually after the financial crisis, according to Japan Venture Research Co.

The EU’s Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG) unites industrial groups, academia, governments, and private individuals to support policies for open innovation at the European Commission. As presented on the official page, the “OISPG philosophy embraces the Open Innovation 2.0 paradigm: creation of open innovation ecosystems where the serendipity process is fully-fledged”.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 11, 2017) — The University of Kentucky Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) recently held its first Patent Palooza, an event that celebrates the university's inventors and commercialization deals of the previous fiscal year.

“This event is the starkest symbol of the Office of Technology Commercialization’s excitement about the inventive researchers and commercialization potential that UK has to offer,” said Ian McClure, director of the OTC. “We are channeling this enthusiasm through this and other efforts to raise new awareness about this potential and the importance of intellectual property and commercialization to renewable research opportunities.”

Image: The UK Office of Technology Commercialization is responsible for managing all of UK's intellectual property and commercializing its research through technology licensing and start-up ventures. - https://uknow.uky.edu 

We all want to be part of a great organization and a high-performance workplace. We want to be at our best, surrounded by colleagues who help us and challenge us, doing work that is financially rewarding and personally meaningful. But there’s more than one kind of successful organization, and there are many kinds of productive workplaces. What matters at work is whether the value proposition that drives your company is in sync with the values that motivate you, whether the culture that defines life inside an organization is compatible with your personal style, and whether the people with whom you work make you think, grow, even laugh.

ROCKVILLE, Md., April 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a regional innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant bio-health innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland, has been awarded a renewal of its contract to extend and expand its entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). BHI will place EIRs within the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the NIH Office of the Director and other NIH Institutes and Centers.

It's not the current product lineups that matter the most for big pharma companies. It's their pipelines.

Three big pharma companies boasting the strongest pipelines are Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Novartis (NYSE: NVS), and Roche (NASDAQOTH: RHHBY). Here's what sets these drugmakers apart from their peers.

On Thursday, President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping — a meeting many observers expected to be tense given the situation in North Korea, as well as each leaders' commitment to strengthening their respective countries' positions in the world. The president and his team are no doubt also aware of China’s moves to supplant the U.S. as the leader of innovation and even patent protection. Unfortunately, this ambition coincides with our own actions to weaken patent protection in America.

Every age is defined by its technology.  The stories of Dickens wouldn’t have been possible without the steam engine and the industrial revolution it brought about.  For that matter, neither would the those of Vanderbilt or Carnegie. And what would the 20th century have been like without the internal combustion engine and electricity?

Yet we often miss the fact that stories drive technology as well.  Steve Jobs, quite famously but not uniquely, believed that the humanities and technology are deeply intertwined and the power of story has a lot to do with it.  Technology, after all, doesn’t live in a vacuum but co-evolves with mankind.

Perhaps the most important role of the innovation leader is creating a competent team. For that reason alone, it’s one of the most challenging. It’s a constant fight for talent. You may have the best products and services in the market, but without a strong, talented marketing team behind them, you’ll start losing ground to the competition.

Building a competent team begins with recruiting and hiring the right people. But it takes much more than just telling your human resources department to go fill open slots. Top innovation leaders get actively involved. When is the best time to recruit marketing people? All the time! What I mean by that is you should think of recruiting as an ongoing activity. You need a pipeline of potential marketers ready to step in when a position opens up.