One plans to colonize Mars. Another promises to bring the department store to your living room. And then there's the upstart that's taking the chicken out of the egg. Yes, chickenless eggs.

Say hello to the future: The 2014 CNBC Disruptor 50, our annual roundup of the country's most ambitious and innovative companies changing the economy and overall business landscape. And once again we're looking well beyond the technology, to identify disruptors in industries ranging from energy and manufacturing to retail and financial services.

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Many cities including Dallas are turning to entrepreneurs and high-growth startups to accelerate economic development and urban renewal.

At the New Cities Summit in the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, speakers offered their views on what role government should play in fostering entrepreneurship.

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While the term ‘accidental entrepreneur’ is commonly associated with the shift in working dynamics that took place after the recent economic downturn, it has far greater relevance to a wider period of history. After all, some of the world’s most ground-breaking inventions and innovations developed in error, including Coca Cola and Penicillin.

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At Novartis’s research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a large incubator-like piece of equipment is helping give birth to a new era of psychiatric drug discovery. Inside it, bathed in soft light, lab plates hold living human stem cells; robotic arms systematically squirt nurturing compounds into the plates. Thanks to a series of techniques perfected over the last few years in labs around the world, such stem cells—capable of developing into specialized cell types—can now be created from skin cells. When stem cells derived from people with, say, autism or schizophrenia are grown inside the incubator, Novartis researchers can nudge them to develop into functioning brain cells by precisely varying the chemicals in the cell cultures.

Image: Photo by Adam DeTourAn - incubator at Novartis’s labs is used to grow stem cells. Scientists can derive such cells from patients and, under the right conditions, prompt them to develop into neurons for research and drug screening.

The United States economy has been experiencing a slow recovery since the Great Recession and 2013 was not an exception. There are, however, developments that make 2013 different. Wall Street rallied throughout 2013, ending with one of its best years in recent times. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 26.5% (from 13,104 to 16,577), its largest rise since 1989, and the S&P 500 rose by 32.4%, its largest increase since 1997. The unemployment rate, although still more than 6.5%, showed the largest annual drop since the recession. Health care costs exhibited smaller increases in 2013 and new housing starts reached an all-time high since the Great Recession started in December 2007. And the U.S. became the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, passing Saudi Arabia and Russia; it now produces more oil than it imports.

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As we continue to see the #Crowdfunding industry explode around the world we still find too many campaigns failing and people reaching out in desperation seeking help once they see no funds appear in their coffers after launching.

People need to know that it's hard work to be successful at crowdfunding but if you're willing to learn (and get prepared ahead of time), you can make incredible things happen with the right knowledge and tools, which you can find right here:

Making decisions in your business, especially with so much at stake, can be rough. Do you follow your gut? Your friend's suggestion? The latest information published on Huffington Post or at Entrepreneur.com? Although all are good resources to facilitate your decision-making, the best decisions any entrepreneur can make to grow their business are strategic decisions.

From the time your feet hit the floor in the morning to when your head hits the pillow at night, you're continually making decisions. It's exhausting! With so much riding on each and every decision, the choices you make either put out fires or prevent them from occurring. Your decisions either advance your business growth or stall its growth.

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WHEN HE WAS 34 years old, Clayton Christensen started a company with a few MIT professors called Ceramics Process Systems Corporation. “I was the business guy,” he explains. “We were making new products out of advanced materials. In that market niche, we were the only ones to succeed: we beat DuPont, Alcoa, Hoechst. I could not explain this by our having smarter people. The other companies had smart owners and smart managers, too. How could smart people fail? I started to think about other industries where talented leaders had failed—were they actually stupid managers?”

Image: Illustration by Taylor Callery 

Producer Gale Anne Hurd explains why the entertainment industry is ripe with opportunity for creators of content. She also describes why Hollywood is now looking online to find fresh talent leveraging new, lower-cost technologies to tell their stories.

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Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, describes how companies often don't spend enough time nurturing and improving an initial idea and quickly produce something lacking because of the pressure to "feed the hungry beast."

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In conversation with Stanford Professor Tina Seelig, singer/songwriter Nate Ruess discusses the importance of being aware of trends in the culture and the market to avoid being left behind when doing creative work.

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IF WE USE ALL FIVE SENSES--SCENT, SIGHT, SOUND, TOUCH, AND TASTE--TO STIMULATE OUR MINDS WHILE WORKING, THEN THIS MAY SPARK MORE CREATIVITY.

BY JANE PORTER

We don't work in a vacuum. Our environment feeds into the work we produce--particularly when that work is creative by nature. So how can you use all five senses to stimulate and maximize your creativity and focus?

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At its Worldwide Developer Conference last week, Apple announced its new programming language Swift. It’s the latest in a rash of new languages developed by big tech companies, in some cases for specific use with their own platforms.

Apple has Swift for iOS developers; Facebook has Hack, a language for back-end development. Google, meanwhile, has its own entries—the would-be Javascript replacement Dart and a new general programming language called Go.

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Abstract: Young firms disproportionately employ young workers, controlling for firm size, industry, geography and time. The same positive correlation between young firms and young employees holds when we look just at new hires. On average, young employees in young firms earn higher wages than young employees in older firms. Further, young employees disproportionately join young firms with greater innovation potential and that exhibit higher growth, conditional on survival. These facts are consistent with the argument that the skills, risk tolerance, and career dynamics of young workers are contributing factors to their disproportionate share of employment in young firms. Finally, we show that an increase in the regional supply of young workers is positively related to the rate of new firm creation, especially in high tech industries, suggesting a causal link between the supply of young workers and new firm creation.

When politicians around the world talk about supporting entrepreneurs, one idea is repeated more than almost any other: improving business regulations.

According to this line of thinking, entrepreneurs would be much more successful if governments would just get out the way. The most commonly cited ways to do this include making it easier to file the paperwork to start a business, and reducing the amount of administrative bureaucracy and restrictions that entrepreneurs encounter.

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Complaining, gossiping and lying are just a few of the worst traits of disengaged employees.

Everyone has worked with a disengaged employee or coworker at one time. They're easy to spot once you chat with them for a few minutes: they just don't care about whether the company succeeds or fails. Instead of helping your business grow, they're dragging it down.

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The first-ever point-of-view footage of polar bears living in the Arctic shows us the perspective of a female bear as she violently mauls a seal, goes for a swim, and checks out a potential suitor. Polar bears: They're just like us.

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THESE WOMEN TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR SUCCESSES AND FAILURES, AND TEACH US ALL A THING OR TWO ABOUT LEADERSHIP ALONG THE WAY.

BY VIVIAN GIANG

If we want innovative results, we need leaders who aren’t afraid to think differently. And who aren’t afraid to lead differently.

The most successful leaders know all too well that their high-demand positions mean nothing if they can’t influence others to believe in their mission.

Image: Flickr user Reed Sturtevant 

One of the best ways to become an angel investor in early-stage private companies is to join a local angel group.

More than 1,000 such organizations exist around the world, with at least one in every state in the United States, and at least one in more than 75 countries. What all these groups have in common is bringing together accredited investors who want to put capital to work and assist each other.

A new report shows how leaders in business, academia and government are working to revitalize urban areas and drive inclusive growth across America

Thanks in large part to an understanding of the industrial economy after World War II, cooperation between our universities, businesses, and government helped produce an explosion of growth and prosperity that benefitted more Americans than ever before.