Big companies starting businesses from scratch has become a big deal. In many cases, these volatile big bets create bigger movements, up and down, in the stock price of a company than its (more stable) core business.

For example, Google’s restructuring into Alphabet highlighted just how much the company is spending on new businesses, from self-driving cars to space exploration and more.

It’s a fact of modern geography that traditional political maps fail to capture the real outlines of American communities. Cities and states have for some time been slowly subsumed into economic megaregions created by people choosing to live and work at greater distances. For most people commutes are dictated by Marchetti’s constant, a sturdy observation that humans since the Paleolithic Era have always lived roughly 30 minutes from their work even as transport tech evolved from bare feet to carriage to train to automobile.

Smartphone geeks have a lot to look forward to in 2017. Phones dominate our list of the six most significant gadgets we expect to see this year.

Apple iPhone 8

To mark the iPhone’s 10th anniversary this year, Apple is expected to overhaul the phone’s design. One model could swap its liquid-crystal LCD display for one made of OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) that will wrap around the gadget’s edges. OLED displays are thinner, lighter, and more flexible than LCDs. Samsung’s Galaxy Edge phones sport a similar design and have been called gimmicky; Apple appears to be trying to make the feature more useful by enabling the phone to react when you touch any of its sides instead of just one. 

At the start of 2016, I asked myself one question: “How can I make achieving my professional growth goals effortless?” I found the answer was elegantly simple — by focusing on alignment goals.

Many people fail on their professional development goals for the year because they take on a lot of goals — goals that they feel they “should” do but ultimately don’t energize them. For example, maybe they tell themselves that they need to read a pile of books in order to learn more, keep up with their colleagues, or just stay up-to-date with their industry.

Hans Noordsij, a Dutch Tesla driver, uploaded a Dec. 27 dashcam video that dramatically shows the new radar processing capacity of Tesla’s Autopilot and resulting auto-breaking, DarkVision Hardware reports. The system’s radar saw ahead of the car in front and tracked two cars ahead on the road. Note the audible warning a second or so before the accident.

Image: http://www.kurzweilai.net

2016 has been a year like no other. From the U.S. campaign trail to the refugee crisis and the Olympics, the news has kept photographers on their toes, pushing new boundaries and expanding their vision. We were blown away by the exquisite work we have seen day in and day out. They are a relentless group.

Over the last few months we have been poring over thousands of photographs that provide a snapshot of the year in news and culture. There were so many runners up to this year’s Top 10 photos but these, we feel, are the most striking and lasting. We spoke to each of the photographers about the picture they made; their words provide the captions that accompany their photos in this unranked gallery.

In the course of my training with business leaders, we inevitably come to the existential business question… “What is the purpose of a business?” This is a great question, and one with a very simple answer. The purpose of a business is to create value. That’s it.  To create value.  Plain and simple.  That is what a business does. On the front end, a business takes in materials, energy, labor, capital equipment, knowledge, and information, and on the back end produces some offering – typically a product or service – that is in some way of greater value to those who consume it than were those things that went into the front end.

I was a data geek for the first half of my life but I am grumpy about how Big Data is only becoming Little Knowledge. I can't understand why we stuffing Data and Hyperloops and 3-D Printed candy canes in our stockings when:

PURCHASING DATA: I get propositioned by advertisers for exactly the products I just bought online the day before. If we should go to Mars, shouldn’t we first be able to figure out that if I just bought an Asana water filter for my house and just maybe I don't need another one this decade?

It is the powerful effects of different conditions, solutions and forces combining that will deliver the new innovation era in accelerated forms in 2017. We have a perfect merging of conditions that will have a transforming storm effect on innovation that are converging rapidly so please be ready to clear that existing agenda of innovations within your present (very) linear pipeline and be prepared to rework the entire innovation space in different “connecting” innovating ways..

Innovation Excellence loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

As a result we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos for Innovation Excellence. As a small thank you to many of the great Innovation Excellence contributors, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year and to make some great prizes available for members of the community who vote for them – to possibly win!

Image: http://innovationexcellence.com 

From President-elect Donald Trump’s tweets to Facebook fabrications, 2016 has been the year of “post-truth.” Fortunately, we have science to rescue us from fake news, right?

Maybe not. Just as some political reporters were taken in by fake news during the election cycle, science journalists also fell for their share of it this year. Examples abound on HealthNewsReview, which rates coverage of medical reporting. These include the breathless and most likely incorrect revelation that actor Ben Stiller skirted death by getting a screening test for prostate cancer.

It's the equivalent of a whole other meal

Have you ever noticed that the less you sleep, the more hungry you feel the next day? Research suggests that this is indeed true. But you might not realize how many extra calories you’re taking in (spoiler: it’s more than you’d think).

In a new study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers set out to put a number on those surplus calories consumed by the tired and weary.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In 2016, Gallup published global reports and articles on what people in more than 140 countries are thinking and feeling. Through its World Poll, Gallup systematically tracks and reports on well-being, leadership approval ratings, confidence in national institutions, employment rates and other important issues affecting people's daily lives. The following list includes Gallup editors' picks for some of the most important world discoveries -- and most highly read international stories -- of the year.

New Year’s resolutions are a bit like babies: They’re fun to make but extremely difficult to maintain.

Each January, roughly one in three Americans resolve to better themselves in some way. A much smaller percentage of people actually make good on those resolutions. While about 75% of people stick to their goals for at least a week, less than half (46%) are still on target six months later, a 2002 study found.

Gallup.com editors' picks for the top articles from 2016 on the workplace:

Are Women Buying Your Workplace?

Income is important, but women want more out of a job. They'll shop around for a role that best fits them and their lives.

Most current and emerging technologies can’t actually be seen. That’s why the art department here at MIT Technology Review often depicts them with illustrations.

Take deep learning: what on Earth does that look like? Not only is it a complex concept to grasp (for me at least), but there isn't yet a common visual vocabulary for it—no symbolic shorthand, the way an apple and mortarboard can represent education or a money bag and top hat conjures the banking industry.

In 2016, we featured photographs from a dome filled with self-destructive mosquitos in Perugia and showed a surreal transportation startup in the Nevada desert. We took you to a Canadian pilot plant trying to capture carbon dioxide from the air; an experimental, immersive movie theater prototype in the Berkshire Hills, and a South Carolina town struggling with both the prosperity and inequality created by advanced manufacturing.

In April 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published his Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes, or The Universal Cosmography according to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others. It was the first known map to feature parts of the New World labeled “America,” derived from the Latin version of Vespucci’s first name.

Image: The east coast of South America, the first known instance of "America" being used in a document. IMAGE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Once again, best wishes for a wonderful Happy New Year from the Innovation America Team.

Here at long last we present the most read InnovationDAILY articles of 2016.  These are presented with the most read articles first proceeding down.

We wish to thank all of our subscribers for your continued support.

Xconomy Raleigh-Durham —  Agriculture and food-related companies make up a global industry, but when it comes to seeding startups in the sector, agricultural technologies face a relative funding famine.

AgTech Accelerator, a new startup program launched Thursday in Research Triangle Park, NC, is trying to address funding issues facing agtech companies, while also providing some of the business support and infrastructure that these young companies need to grow. The accelerator is starting with an $11.5 million investment from global agribusiness companies and life science investors, and includes partnerships with leading academic institutions across the country. John Dombrosky, CEO of the new accelerator, says that investment could balloon to more than $30 million by the end of this year as AgTech Accelerator adds new partners.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com