In 2013 John Tanacredi, an environmental sciences professor at Molloy College on Long Island, N.Y., received a call from a friend who worked at nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport. “You’ve got to see this,” he told Tanacredi, and sent him a photo of a cargo container filled with 600 dead horseshoe crabs. It was mid-July, and airport officials had opened the container because of a rotting stench.

Image: Horseshoe crabs along the Delaware Bay emerge in June from the water at high tide, in order to spawn. Credit: Caren Chesler

Last month I delivered my “un-kill innovation” executive workshop to an executive team of a Fortune 500 technology company in Florida. It was a great experience all around, but at the end I was asked for the key takeaways, and I narrowed them down to the following.

These are the top three things that will increase innovation in your company the most.

These are small things. They have no investment or budget associated with them. They don’t require you to roll out new processes or infrastructure. They don’t need company-wide training. All they need is a change of attitude. Yours.

The BIO 2016 Global Cluster Hub brought together cluster managers and key players from across the globe, with unique insights into the arrival of digital health within their own communities, plus opportunities to build partnerships around specific aspects of digital health.

CEBR members presented specific examples of digital health cluster support activities, alongside our global international cluster partners and we opened doors between clusters on the fastest moving sectoral development in the world. You can access all the slides from the session below, either from the Hub page here or individually below:

Before you trash your cellphones (or rather, responsibly recycle and dispose of them), a careful review of the data—and the real life human implications—is needed. Here are the facts:

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) just concluded a massive 2-year study investigating the potential health hazards of cellphone use on rats and mice – most notably including the specific radio frequencies and modulations (RF-EMF) currently used in our U.S. telecommunications industry.

The book on how to innovate? It’s been written … again and again and again. “The Innovator’s Solution” (Clayton Christensen), “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” (Peter Drucker) or “The Art of Innovation” (Tom Kelley) are just a few examples. An online search for “how to make your company innovative” generates over 300 million results.

Turns out, there is no shortage of strategies for innovation. In fact, if you ask 100 people how to innovate, you are almost guaranteed one hundred different answers.

Executive decision-making often makes or breaks innovation success. Most organizations are capable of generating ideas, but struggle with the process of choosing when, where, and how to commit dedicated resources to explore or develop promising ideas.

In most cases, this struggle can be traced to an internal tension between innovation efforts and operational priorities. Most innovation practitioners adhere to the “fail fast, fail often” mantra, with a bias toward quick experimentation and action.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com 

Of course, this isn't the whole story.

Silicon Valley loves vanity metrics, so lets add a new one to evaluate venture capital firms: mobile app downloads.

Mobile analytics company SensorTower recently released a report ranking the top 20 VC firms based on how many times people downloaded the apps created by their portfolio companies. And the winner is: Kleiner Perkins.

At a mere 109 years old, Oklahoma is a relative babe in arms when it comes to statehood. And while we may lack the history and pedigree of some of our older counterparts, our state — like many a youth — more than compensates with innovation and energy.

Take, as one example, the role that our state's government has played in stimulating the growth of science and technology.

Officials at the University System of Maryland have begun to analyze student data — grades, financial aid information, demographics, even how often they swipe their ID cards at the library or the dining hall — to find undergraduates who are at risk of dropping out.

Law enforcement agencies, political campaigns, retailers and other universities all mine data to help focus their efforts. University system officials say the practice, called predictive analysis, will boost graduation rates by enabling educators to intervene with struggling students before failure becomes inevitable.

Three weeks ago, 130 scientists, entrepreneurs and policy leaders held an invitation-only, closed-door meeting at Harvard University to discuss an ambitious plan to create synthetic human genomes. Now, after a flurry of criticism over the secrecy of the effort, the participants have published their idea, declaring that they're launching a project to radically reduce the cost of synthesizing genomes -- a potentially revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation.

National employment numbers released Friday underscored what many Albertans know too well: the province’s unemployment rate jumped again in May — to 7.8 per cent — while the national rate fell.   

And the reality is that even with an improvement in commodity prices, the prospect of meaningful reinvestment by energy players that would bring a new round of hiring is still months away.

Image: CIBC president Victor Dodig says more emphasis needs to be put on innovation in Canada. NATHAN DENETTE / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Entrepreneurs have a desire to solve problems, to innovate and to create. They are willing to take on risk and think outside of the box. They lead and they inspire. And by standard definitions, the way that they do all of that is through starting businesses.

Now, this gets a bit into the realm of semantics, but there are plenty of business owners who are not truly entrepreneurial, creating job-businesses that aren’t innovative and likely won’t experience much growth. Likewise, there are plenty of individuals who don’t own businesses, yet are entrepreneurial within the confines of another organization.

Few people have misconceptions about the ethics of principles of business world which really need to be clarified. Even after a rich experience in the commercial world, people are not well-versed with the aspects of this stream. Hence, it is the dire need of hour to know more about these misconceptions and their realities for better understanding. Following are these misconceptions which have been commonly popping up in the business world every now and then:

KITCHENER — The tech sector has long been a male-dominated field.

Danielle Graham and her Communitech colleagues want to change that.

Even at the organization's innovation hub in downtown Kitchener, which boasts lots of female employees and team members in the tech companies it has supported, only about 14 per cent of those businesses were founded by women.

As an advisor to entrepreneurs and active angel investor, I often get questions about the realism of the Shark Tank TV series, compared to professional investor negotiations. The simple answer is that with all the staging of TV lights and billionaire investors, it’s nothing like Silicon Valley. Yet the process is eerily realistic, and every entrepreneur can glean some important lessons.

Listen to 3 lifestyle entrepreneurs tell you the shocking truth about entrepreneurship. Are you ready to hear the truth? Our 1st guest is Matthew Lesko. He is a NY Times Bestselling Author. You probably have seen him on the late night infomercials with his question mark attire, telling you about free money via government programs. Our 2nd guest is Tom Antion. He is the multi-millionaire marketer. I like to call him the couch potato entrepreneur because he spends most of his waking hours in his comfy recliner, making thousands of dollars every hour. Our last guest is Kimanzi Constable. He is a TEDx Speaker and self-published author of two books, which have sold a combined total of 100,000+ copies.

From the first municipal water pump system to the I-beam, Bethlehem has been a cradle of innovation and industry for 275 years.

It began with the Moravians, who settled the land in 1741 and built a self-sustaining community with 50 industries in 20 years. By the mid-19th century, industry became the bedrock of the community with the rise of what became Bethlehem Steel. Its flagship plant attracted thousands of workers from all over the world to make the steel, while the era's brightest minds created ways to make the steelmaking process more efficient and the product stronger.

Image: http://www.mcall.com

Ronald Reagan once said the most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

The attitude was typical of early participants in Louisiana’s economic development department’s Economic Gardening Initiative. The program offers market research tailored to the needs of companies with the potential for high growth. The firms that participated in the program during its first three years have added the equivalent of 558 full-time jobs and increased revenue by $170 million.

Image: http://theadvocate.com

‘Europe is not only for big multinationals and renowned knowledge institutes, but also for smaller innovative companies with international ambitions. As long as they know which paths to follow’, was the main message of Ahmet Polat, international innovation specialist from the Dutch Government speaking at the latest Idox Grants’ event held recently in The Netherlands.

Image: http://www.idoxgroup.com

I have fond memories of playing summer softball as a pre-teenager at Ramapo Country Day Camp in New Jersey. Looking back, I realize that when my brother hit ground balls so I could practice breaking up the double play on poor unassuming middle infielder Ivan Kolodny, I was in extreme violation of today’s slide rule. And that when I moved into foul territory as a first baseman because a kid kept hooking foul balls past first, I was doing something that wouldn’t be allowed in today’s game.