Organizational innovation requires discipline. And like any other discipline, it requires monitoring and training to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of your capabilities. But what skills should you focus on building and how can you track your progress? Here are the ten main skills associated with innovation health at an organization:

Culture How are you working to encourage collaboration and celebrate failure? It’s one thing to say you care about innovation as a core value and something else to find ways to encourage and imbue it in your culture.

Leadership Is there buy-in in innovation and positive change from your senior leaders? The rest of the company will take its cues from the leadership. What are the values that they see at the top?

Just last week, I had a great conversation with a Manhattan taxi driver named Sherpa, who, after I asked if his name was connected to Nepal, told me that he had indeed stopped working on Mount Everest to live in New York City. Smiling, he suggested I visit the famed (and quite dangerous) mountain one day, to which I replied, "I'm a fragile city guy, maybe one day I'll visit it in virtual reality." 

Days after that conversation (yes, it really happened), it turns out that there is, in fact, an incredibly realistic Mount Everest VR experience that launched for the Oculus Rift. 

In 1950 Alan Turing devised a thought experiment that has since been revered as the ultimate test of machine intelligence. He called it the “imitation game,” but most people know it as the Turing test. Anticipating what we now call chat bots—computer programs that masquerade as humans—Turing envisioned a contest in which a machine tries to trick an interrogator into believing it is human, answering questions about poetry and deliberately making mistakes about arithmetic.

A couple of weekends ago, I, along with 26 other founders or founders-to-be, drove off into the woods of Maryland for a 3-day retreat organized by Penn’s student-run Founders’ Club.

The retreat was an aspiring entrepreneur’s petri dish—from long, meditative walks along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay to board games designed to spark innovation, we were surrounded by the great ideas of others or the opportunity to discover our own.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.wharton.upenn.edu

SINGAPORE — Now you can dive into a realistic reef without having to get wet.

A team of technologists and marine biology experts have produced a virtual reality coral reef based off the Sisters' Islands Marine Park in Singapore.

The demo, named "Eyes on Habitat: Coral Reefs" was unveiled on Wednesday. The training tool is designed for classroom instruction, where instructors can guide trainees through different kinds of coral in the reef, and educate them on the different organisms in the coral ecosystem.

He is one of the world's best known and most successful entrepreneurs, with hundreds of patents to his name—including the Segway scooter. But you will never see Dean Kamen in a suit and tie: the eccentric inventor dresses almost exclusively in denim. He spent five years in college before dropping out, does not take vacations and has never married. Kamen presides (along with his Ministers of Ice Cream, Brunch and Nepotism) over the Connecticut island kingdom of North Dumpling, which has “seceded” from the U.S. and dispenses its own currency in units of pi. Visitors are issued a visa form that includes spaces on which to note identifying marks on both their face and buttocks.

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Knowledge@Wharton: Where did you get the idea to put this book together?

James Sudakow: I started my career years ago, working for one of the big four consulting firms, Deloitte Consulting, and had a great experience there. But I have to say that one of the things I could not get out of the way there was the hurling around of what I thought were really strange expressions. I remember at one point, I sat in a meeting and instead of paying attention to what I was supposed to be doing, which was probably client work, I started writing down the terms that I kept hearing thrown around. That evolved into me putting it up on my whiteboard in my office, and you could say it evolved or devolved from there.

It has been a cruel 2017 thus far and now the humble thimble, the universal symbol of the blessed sewers who toil and sweat over clothes, blankets, and so much more, has unceremoniously been booted from the choice of Monopoly figurines.

In January, the game's maker, Hasbro, opened up fan voting on what it was calling Monopoly Token Madness for users to select new tokens for the game. But here's the twist: rather than simply replacing a token or two, as the game has done in the past, the current vote is to select all eight tokens for future versions of the game. 

Hey, I testified in Congress today. This made my mom really proud.

But seriously, I want to share my testimony with you because it's about something important. America is suffering from an "entrepreneurship deficit." This means fewer jobs, stagnant wages, rising inequality, lower productivity, and reduced quality of life. As my friend Ross Baird says, the American Dream is on life support.

RED WING, MN, February 16, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Red Wing, MN has been working diligently to share their small business business growth vision. This vision recently earned Red Wing a top-five finalist position with the Deluxe Small Business Revolution - Main Street. This short video tells their story perfectly (http://smallbusinessrevolution.org/main-street/season-two/finalist-red-wing-mn/).

"We are pleased Red Wing, MN has gained a spot as a Top 5 finalist in this year's Small Business Revolution - Main Street," said Golden Shovel CEO Aaron Brossoit. Red Wing became a national finalist after beating out 14,000 town nominations from all 50 states. They need votes because the decision is put to the nation to decide who will receive $500,000 from the Small Business Revolution. Brossoit added, "I am happy to celebrate their success and to ASK FOR YOUR VOTE." (http://smallbusinessrevolution.org/main-street/season-two/).

The tech boom has diffused beyond the traditional hotbeds of California, New York, and Massachusetts, across the the entire United States. Other states are home to well-funded and well-known startups, including Magic Leap (Florida), Draft Kings (Massachusetts), and the satellite company OneWeb (Virginia), among others. The less well-known include Idaho-based 4G LTE network solutions company CradlePoint, which has raised $106M in equity funding to date.

Image: https://www.cbinsights.com

Entrepreneurship has never been more important than it is today. Academic, business, government, and nonprofit leaders around the world have begun to recognize entrepreneurship education as essential for creating the societies of the future. Among the most vocal is the World Economic Forum (WEF). In one report, they cite the need to embed entrepreneurship at all levels of education, emphasizing that “it is not enough to add entrepreneurship on the perimeter – it needs to be at the core of the way education operates.” WEF further states that it is “a process that will require new teaching methods, new frameworks, and new models.”

The holy grail of today’s workplace is high employee engagement. According to Gallup’s oft-cited research on the topic, just about one-third of U.S. employees are engaged on the job. That number drops to 13% worldwide, and has held steady for years. Many companies are investing heavily to identify what leads to high engagement in order to motivate employees, thereby increasing their happiness and productivity.

Every tech or major news journal in the country is preparing to write their Snap, Inc (creators of Snapchat, Spectacles, etc) stories and many of them seem to want a “How does it feel to have missed this investment story.” I won’t speak to most of them due to time and also due to the fact that I simply am not the story and don’t want to pretend like I am. The story is Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy and the amazing team that supports them. The story are the early investors who had foresight to back them — Lightspeed, Benchmark, IVP, SV Angel, General Catalyst, etc. We simply aren’t part of the story and shouldn’t pretend to be.

"The workplace is changing."

Leaders hear this declaration all the time. In the past, it carried little weight because change is a constant in the business world.

So, why does it feel different now? Why does "change" feel so pervasive?

Because the changes that are affecting organizations today are coming at a dizzying pace. They're overlapping and colliding in ways they haven't before. They're historic and monumental.

For the past few years, French entrepreneur Fabrice Brassart has been building what he thinks will be the backbone of the city of the future: a network of app-summoned self-driving cars that seamlessly navigate roads on a rubber pad lined with radio frequency identification tags.

It’s an ambitious project that’s still in the conceptual stage, at least a year from pilot deployment and four years from commercialization. Brassart is still raising funds in Europe for his Nice-based startup, REVA2, and already aims to use French cities Cagnes-sur-Mer and Rennes as testbeds—they have already expressed interest, he said.

Upfront Ventures was created 20 years ago as one of the original VC funds in Los Angeles. Back then only 15% of our dollars were invested locally whereas today 50% of our dollars are invested in LA. 10 years ago we found ourselves trying to persuade LPs and VCs that it was worth spending more time getting to know the LA market and now the most common refrain that I hear from them is “there really is something going on in LA.”

For the past five years, we have taught a course at Harvard Business School that prepares students to search for, purchase, and run a small business. The course is always taught in the spring term of the second year of the two-year program, and indeed, as graduation looms, our students have to decide whether they will look for a company to buy and, if so, when to do it.

That’s apparently what engineers at Amazon think could happen with its much-touted delivery drones. While the e-commerce giant has already delivered packages to paying customers in the U.K. using its aircraft, it did so by landing in a large patch of open ground. Now, in a patent, it has outlined how it could drop packages from the air instead.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com