Agility. Rapid delivery. Fast learning. An appetite for risk.

These are not words and phrases that spring to mind when thinking about a traditional corporate or government IT function. But they are likely to be used when describing a technology startup.

With IT functions under increasing pressure to accelerate and innovate, these are also sentiments many CIOs have taken to heart as desired attributes of the IT function of the near future.

AUSTIN, Texas — Doing Innovation, a research project at The University of Texas at Austin that is supported by the MacArthur Foundation, has launched a multimedia website that examines how millennials are using new technology, developing creative communities and finding innovative paths to respond to the changing economy.

Image: Doing Innovation's Twitter Page

It was a little over 12 years ago, and Lisa Zandee had risen to a high-powered job as a vice president of W Hotels. She had a team. She traveled the world.

Then she had her first child, Callum.

But it wasn't the end of the adventure—only the beginning of a new one. Looking back, when Zandee mulls how she has managed to juggle work/life balance over a dozen years, she breaks it into three phases.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

People who manage to get a lot accomplished each day aren't super human, they've just mastered a few simple habits. Some may be easy to guess: Keep your desk organized and aim for around eight hours of sleep a night. But others, like taking a mid-day nap or complaining, might surprise you.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

When I ask people what they’d like to spend more of their work hours doing, I hear the same things over and over again. Mentoring. Nurturing relationships with colleagues. Reading industry literature. Sharing the great work you’re doing. Dabbling in ideas that may lead to major breakthroughs.

Two years ago, Tim Chen presided over a tech startup that employed mostly former Wall Street finance types (who were mostly new graduates). He’d bootstrapped his company, Nerdwallet, for over five years at that point, and they were already profitable, but he knew there was another level to be reached — another gear to shift into. They could go from making good money to impacting the finances of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. He wasn’t exactly sure what this future looked like, but he knew what it would take get there: a total talent reboot.

Are we ready for the “Internet of Things”? Probably not. The phrase — coined in 1999 by researcher Kevin Ashton while working for Procter & Gamble — refers to things (cars, homes, factories, hospitals) whose performance is monitored and guided by digital networks. We already have one wildly successful example: GPS navigation that directs us to unfamiliar destinations. But countless other possibilities have excited futurists and tech companies.

When the topic of customer service comes up, names like Amazon, Zappos and American Express often spring to mind. They should—these companies invest deeply in customer service, listening to their patrons, asking what makes them happy, and truly listening when to the answers. They treat their customers like gold, because they literally are. They're the lifeblood of a company.

Washington, DC – The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named six public research institutions as finalists for its third annual Innovation & Economic Prosperity (IEP) University Awards. The winners will be announced on November 17 at the association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis. The finalists — Auburn University, Clemson University, Ohio University, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, and University of Minnesota — are competing for four different awards that recognize different components of economic engagement. The award categories include talent, innovation, place, and connections.

My head is stuffed with stuff. Some of it has been in there since I was a young fellow, some of it made its way inside in the last few days. Every day more stuff tries to squeeze into my head, but unfortunately, space is limited, so for everything I add, something has to go.

Most of you reading this probably suffer the same affliction. Information Overload.

While I try to be selective in what I add, deletion has been more random. I find I still can easily recall details of absolutely no use anymore – my street address when I was about 15 – while specifics of experiences that could serve me well don’t come to mind as easily – where was it in Africa that I met Chief Steve?

GoPro wants to be a media company, not just a manufacturer of popular action cameras—but to make that transition it needs to motivate a vast network of people to start churning out great content with its devices.

That’s why the company is launching the GoPro Awards today, a program it hopes will inspire the creation of more and better content, and which could hand out as much as $5 million a year in awards to people making the best videos with GoPro cameras like those in its Hero line.

Today Twitter announced it had laid off around 336 jobs or 8% of its workforce. Nobody should celebrate, cheer or shout, “it’s about time.”

This is about 336 people whose lives are altered and need to begin looking for work, saying goodbye to friends & colleagues and go on that journey of transition that most people dread. I wish all of them well and feel confident that anybody employed at one of the most innovative companies of the past 10 years will land on his or her feet.

The CEO and his deputy were incarcerated. They had it coming. I should have seen it coming … on Day One. Your Business Professor was retained as a consultant for Business Development — these are code words for Sales and Marketing. However, few companies use these actual words. Sales invokes visions of a used car salesman. And nobody knows what marketing is.

South Africa, like many developing nations, is a young country. People younger than 35 years old make up about 66% of the total population and around half of our people are aged under 25. As businesses, one of the largest challenges we face is catering for this population’s expectations of the workplace.

If we harness our young people’s energy and innovative spirit, they could turn into one of our country’s biggest assets. However, many organisations are still stuck with organisational structures and old management paradigms that are not optimal for our idealistic and diverse youth population.

DNA doesn't just coil in the iconic double helix immortalized in every high school biology textbook. It also loops into a menagerie of fantastical shapes, new research finds.

By revealing the hidden shape of DNA, the new insights could provide a more detailed look at the workings of drugs such as chemotherapeutic agents, which interact with DNA.

Image: Images of tiny DNA looped into a figure-8, frozen and viewed with microscopy (yellow), with a computer simulation of its predicted shape superimposed (The purple is also a computer simulation).IMAGE: THANA SUTTHIBUTPONG

If you're just starting your startup, you don't need a ton of money to do it.

That's the advice Y Combinator president Sam Altman gave today in a mini-tweetstorm.

Today, founders don't get excited if they can "only" raise a million-dollar seed round of funding, but Altman says that you should be proud to make your company work on as little capital as possible.

JNS.org – The Cleveland Clinic and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem plan to form the Center for Transformative Nanomedicine, a virtual incubator designed to lead to breakthroughs in health care. The idea is to marry research skills available at the clinic to the nanotechnological work for which The Hebrew University is known.

Image: The Cleveland Clinic and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem plan to form the Center for Transformative Nanomedicine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Raising money is often the toughest part of starting a business, and it’s also the most important. The majority of small businesses that fail within the first few months have one simple thing in common — they run out of money.

The software world is famous for high-profile funding rounds and enormous valuations. But the reality is that most small businesses don't secure equity-based funding, and it doesn’t always make sense to chase down a venture capital investor.

One of the quickest ways to become an entrepreneur these days is to develop and publish a smartphone app. The price of entry can be less than $10,000, so the competition is huge and growing rapidly. According to Tim Cook at Apple, there were over 9 million registered developers in 2014. Yet according to other statistics, vanishing few of these ever generate a significant profit.

At more than $456 billion, the value of research and development performed in the United States grew 4.8 percent from 2012 to 2013 according to new data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). Over that same one-year period, U.S. gross domestic product grew at just 3.7 percent.

Over the five-year period from 2008-2013, R&D increased at a rate of 2.3 percent annually, while gross domestic product increased at a rate of 2.6 percent annually. Over the previous five-year period from 2003-2008, R&D outpaced GDP growth, increasing at a rate of 6.8 percent annually compared to 5.0 percent annually.  According to NCSES, although in recent years data indicate that total R&D is growing faster than GDP, the longstanding trend of this type of growth has yet to return.