From its headquarters in Ann Arbor, LawnGuru is building a better platform for outdoor services, specifically lawn and snow. It allows customers to get the services they need, when they need them, versus the traditional model where a provider comes out weekly, or at some other set interval, whether or not they need service. By allowing the customer to easily request, skip and pause service, LawnGuru users can save up to 30% each year.

For providers, LawnGuru improves several backend operations. This includes delivering quotes, automated payments, improving route density and tackling customer support. This helps small and midsize landscape businesses focus on the work that actually earns money. And it’s paying off -- the average LawnGuru provider adds $700 to their weekly revenue, and in some cases, much more. This past summer one Michigan provider earned an additional $80K through the platform.

To the Editor:

We the undersigned, founders and leaders of biotech companies, write to express our deep concern and opposition to the executive order signed by President Donald Trump on January 27, 2017, barring the entry of citizens from seven countries into the United States1.

The United States is the world’s greatest developer of medicines and new inventions to ameliorate and cure intractable diseases, a status achieved through massive investment in private and public companies, academia and R&D. Most importantly, our success has been founded on the creativity and dedication of our most precious resource—our people.

Booz Allen Hamilton has made major investments to introduce new levels of innovation throughout the company, including opening its Innovation Center in downtown Washington, D.C. last May.

Michael Isman, vice president and Strategic Innovation Group executive at Booz Allen Hamilton, said the company sees innovation as “integral in paving a path to the future, and a way for us to enable our people and our clients to truly do things that will change the world.”

Digital innovation is giving rise to new business models. Uber and Airbnb are household names today, when not so long ago we were all learning about the sharing economy. The regulations don’t always evolve as quickly as technological change — at least that’s the perception. So what should policy makers and regulators do? Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach, who wrote a policy brief about the topic for the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative, recently shared his insights into that question with Knowledge@Wharton.

Numerous leaders and community organizers have been talking about public service lately, especially in the US - mostly encouraging the public to take place in ongoing dialogues and to volunteer in their communities in order to create positive change at local and national levels. But what does civic engagement look like in an increasingly globalized and technologically-powered community? And when it comes to building the future of our cities, are governments doing enough to leverage collective intelligence?

This month we’ve seen how the crowd continues to contribute in the political arena and in further developing clean and safe cities. The trend of incorporating “citizen scientists” in the search for data and groundbreaking ideas is expanding from the glaciers all the way to Mars. This month we’re seeing a large number of medical studies calling for crowdsourced data, and finally we can learn from ZTE’s failure to crowdsource a smartphone.

Mark Cuban opened the Upfront Summit in an epic interview by Jason Hirschhorn, founder of Media REDEF. Machine Learning / AI They discussed many topics ranging from protection of the press to what Mark looks for in an entrepreneur to investing outside of Silicon Valley and of course Trump and sports. But perhaps to most insightful was their discussion about Machine Learning / AI.

Most executives today know their enterprises should be aligned. They know their strategies, organizational capabilities, resources, and management systems should all be arranged to support the enterprise’s purpose. The challenge is that executives tend to focus on one of these areas to the exclusion of the others, but what really matters for performance is how they all fit together.

In 2015 Doreetha Daniels received her associate degree in social sciences from College of the Canyons, in Santa Clarita, California. But Daniels wasn’t a typical student: She was 99 years old. In the COC press release about her graduation, Daniels indicated that she wanted to get her degree simply to better herself; her six years of school during that pursuit were a testament to her will, determination, and commitment to learning.

Our new Corporate Horizon Index provides systematic evidence that a long-term approach can lead to superior performance for revenue and earnings, investment, market capitalization, and job creation.

Corporate short-termism has been the subject of ongoing debate among leaders in business, government, and academia for more than 30 years, but hard evidence that short-termism genuinely detracts from company performance and economic growth has remained scarce. To fill this gap and better understand capitalism for the long term, we have created a systematic measurement of long- and short-termism at the company level.

The Trump administration may be trying to revive the moribund coal sector in the U.S., but new figures released Tuesday show that it will be hard to catch up to the galloping solar sector. 

The annual National Solar Jobs Census, published by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Solar Foundation, found that 1-in-50 new jobs created in the U.S. in 2016 were in the solar industry. 

The report, which is the seventh annual look at the solar power workforce in the country, found that solar industry employment outpaced U.S. economic growth by 17 times, with an addition of 51,000 jobs during the year. 

Wisconsin tech-based economy is a vital work in progress. Advancing the public discussion around Wisconsin’s high-growth economy is core to the Tech Council’s 2017 white papers, “Investing in Wisconsin’s Future.”

Improving access to capital for Wisconsin entrepreneurs, building the supply of human capital, enhancing the startup and business climate, and improving tech development, delivery and transfer are four major themes of the Wisconsin Technology Council’s 2017 “white papers” report.

As the state weighs its budget priorities for the next biennium, policymakers need to hear ideas that focus on the creation of next-generation jobs for Wisconsin – and keeping our best and brightest young people at home.

David Lieb knew his company Bump was going to take off when strangers dressed up as the app for Halloween. While at the University of Chicago, he built the app so he could more easily exchange contact information with new classmates by physically bumping their phones together. Bump was no blip. The app exploded. It was downloaded 150 million times and hit #2 in the App Store. Apple even featured Bump in a commercial that aired on prime-time television.

Our future prosperity depends on developing new, collective habits of complex thinking together. At the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab, we have introduced the concept of a "civic economy" to explain the importance of civility to our future prosperity. We have found audiences remarkably receptive to this new thinking. 

Our civic economy supports our market economy. It represents investments that are publicly valuable but not privately profitable. These investments -- often collaborative and undertaken by countless non-profit organizations, foundations, governments, and universities -- support our shared well-being. They represent the collective responsibility that makes our individual freedom possible. 

It was only a year ago that many in the Venture Capital industry were predicting that “winter was coming” and to be fair the author of this post was chief amongst them. Yet as we enter February 2017 the VC funding markets are booming, Snap, Inc has filed for its IPO, AppDynamics was just purchased for $3.7 billion by Cisco and the only winter that can be found is at the ski resorts following California’s epic snowy and rainy January.

When asked about the definition of an intrapreneur, the obvious answer is an entrepreneur inside a large organization. While technically correct, there’s much more to it.

Someone once mentioned- we can talk about intrapreneurship and innovation programs all night long, and train everyone in design thinking, business model canvassing (if that’s a word) and lean startupping, but still, not much would happen without real intrapreneurs.

Esther is a well-liked manager of a small team. Kind and respectful, she is sensitive to the needs of others. She is a problem solver; she tends to see setbacks as opportunities. She’s always engaged and is a source of calm to her colleagues. Her manager feels lucky to have such an easy direct report to work with and often compliments Esther on her high levels of emotional intelligence, or EI. And Esther indeed counts EI as one of her strengths; she’s grateful for at least one thing she doesn’t have to work on as part of her leadership development. It’s strange, though — even with her positive outlook, Esther is starting to feel stuck in her career. She just hasn’t been able to demonstrate the kind of performance her company is looking for. So much for emotional intelligence, she’s starting to think.

Given the avalanche of email we receive each year — 121 messages per day, on average — it’s no wonder that we have become somewhat desensitized to its impact on our professional brand. We’ll spend hours polishing our LinkedIn profiles and revising our résumés, but hastily hit send on an unintelligible missive simply because we’re in a rush. “Sent from my device, please overlook typos” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for shoddy communications.

Image: https://hbr.org/

The vital role of immigrants in American technology innovation is so well documented that it shouldn’t need repeating. But in light of last week’s executive order that blocks access to the United States by citizens of seven countries with a collective population of well over 200 million, a few reminders might be timely.

Super-short workouts are a favorite topic in this column. I have written about seven-minute, six-minute, four-minute, and even one-minute workouts. They are appealing because they require so little time, but they also demand straining effort.

Martin Gibala is the scientist we most have to thank for the popularity of very brief, very hard exercise. All of these workouts are built around the concept of high-intensity interval training, in which you push yourself almost to exhaustion for a brief spurt of minutes or seconds, and then rest and recover for a few minutes before repeating the intense interval.