The future is hard to predict and a lot of “experts” regularly get it wrong. However, there are some facts so important and trends so inevitable that leaders would be ill-advised to ignore and not try to anticipate. Here are three of many future megatrends that will not necessarily determine what will happen, but will most likely have a big impact on everybody’s business in the coming years to decades.

Growing your business isn’t just a worthy goal; growing your business is a necessity for your business’s survival and your economic well-being. What can you do to get your business beyond the bare sustenance level? All of these ways of growing your business have been successfully used by other businesses and, with some planning and investment, will work for you.

Wharton Entrepreneurship is pleased to announce our new video series, One Question, in which we ask entrepreneurial alumni to each answer a single question that speaks to their experience and expertise.

In this first video, we asked Anand Sanwal W’97/ENG’97, CEO and Co-founder of CB Insights, to answer the question, “How do you see data influencing private markets?”

The promise of fitness wearables is their capacity to raise the population’s health and wellness, primarily by making users aware of their lack of activity or sleep. But, as it turns out, the main users of these devices are not the unfit people they’re supposedly designed for.

Since the emergence of modern English, its speakers have struggled to use it in order to get to their points. (Just see Shakespeare's Polonius for proof.) But these days, one of the biggest obstacles to forthright communication are pause words—filler expressions that weigh down sentences and water down meaning. And typically we don't even know when we're using them. Here are six of the most common filler words to start cutting out of your conversations.

Being an ideas machine is one thing; giving your ideas the chance to be rediscovered and flourish is another.

Because let’s face it: Ideas are merely forgotten thoughts if they’re not recorded, organized, managed, and implemented. How many times have you heard of a new business and thought to yourself, "I totally came up with that idea years ago"? That’s proof that great ideas mean nothing if you don't manage them for later expansion and implementation.

I remember that Monday morning well. It was too early to be at the office, and the team sipped coffee anxiously, waiting for the meeting to start. For the past two months, every day seemed to bring bittersweet news about the future of our business. One day we were going to pull through. The next day we were doomed. Understandably, the team hoped that this special meeting would finally bring some clarity one way or the other. Unfortunately it too was painfully short on clarity or action.

Silicon Valley is the capital of global innovation, but it’s not just for startups anymore. Now big non-tech businesses are mimicking them by investing in innovation centers or labs that look and feel more like a boot-strapped venture rather than a global enterprise.

So why are the likes of Walmart, Sephora, BMW, Ford, Target, McDonalds and a slew of others investing in Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the world? That’s the focus of a recent report in innovation centers Jerome Buvat of CapGemini Consulting and I spent the past eight months studying and researching.

Ames-based NewLink Genetics Corp. announced Thursday it has been awarded an $18 million contract option for its Ebola vaccine candidate.

The contract is with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The pharmaceutical company Merck &Co. has the license for research, development, manufacturing and commercialization of the vaccine, according to a press release.

If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house.

Social media certainly connects us to whoever is on the other end of the line, and so extends our social networks in amazing ways. But this can come at the expense of deeper personal relationships. When it feels like we’re up-to-date on our friends’ lives through Facebook or Instagram, we may become less likely to call them, much less meet up. Networks connect; communities care.

Startup Community Builders: Are you leading entrepreneurial activities in your startup community like startup drinks, startup weekend, coding workshops, co-working or spaces, etc.?

Startup Support Providers: Are you a program manager for an economic development agency, incubator, accelerator or provider servicing entrepreneurs in a community that is considering entrepreneurship within their economic revitalization plans?

When you think about the accomplishments of great business leaders, the scope of their achievements may seem intimidating. After all, they’ve made huge waves in the world of business, whereas you may feel like you’ve barely made a splash. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from them in order to become a better leader yourself.

Much attention is paid to the office bullies, jerks, and energy vampires of the world. These are the folks who drain productivity and make that third cup of coffee necessary to face going to the office. Sometimes, it seems like they’re everywhere.

But that doesn’t seem to be the reality. While it’s probably not surprising that the 2015 report Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement by the Society of Human Resource Managers (SHRM) found that 44% of relationships with coworkers were "very important," what may be surprising it that the report also found that 79% of employees were satisfied with those relationships.

Jack Strauser’s relationship with the Chinese manufacturing industry is incredibly tense. Strauser, founder and CEO of Florida-based company Dok Solution, believes a Chinese factory stole his electronic charging station designs and then offered them to a U.S. distributor, who now sells them.

"I don’t have a million dollars to just throw around to defend my patent," says Strauser. "I’ll spend every dime I have, but I have a lot of patents. It could financially ruin me."

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review site here.

Are you jealous of your colleagues as they jet off to attend yet another innovation conference? Do you suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out) when you see people in your network sending tweets and posting pictures from TED, SxSW, or Burning Man? How do they have the time, money, or connections to always wangle their way into every cool conference? You don’t have to be envious though. For a growing number of conferences, you can now participate without actually going. I’m not talking about passively reading a post-conference report, or perusing blog posts that summarize key points after the fact, or watching videos like a voyeur. I’m saying you can actively engage, learn, contribute and even influence the conversation. This is becoming more and more possible as social media platforms increase access to content, speakers, and participants in real time. You don’t need to be in Austin or Vancouver or Black Rock Desert. You can attend from wherever you are.

The company? Volkswagen.

My first car was a beat up, used VW Beetle. In spite of its sorry state, it was a reliable car for driving around the dirt roads of Vermont and braving the spring mud seasons and winter blizzards. It finally met its match one night when a deer jumped out of the woods and landed right on top of the hood and windshield. While the car was a goner, the deer continued on its way.

We recently released our list of the 50 most powerful companies in America.

Unsurprisingly, several tech companies topped the rankings. So we decided to sort them into a separate list to show which command the most power.

To determine each company's level of power, we factored together fiscal 2014 revenue, number of employees, press mentions on Google News over the past year, and social media influence, as ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 by Klout, a site that analyzes social-media influence of companies and individuals across all platforms. You can read the full methodology here.

Cambridge University’s free early stage incubation facility for start-ups is expected to be viable though the university does not even insist on a contribution from successful enterprises, says Simon Stockley, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at the Judge Business School.

"The next Silicon Valley" may seem like the name of a reality television series.

In all seriousness, the competition to claim the title of America's Next Big Tech Hub is just as fierce as anything you might see on The Bachelor. As many startups promote themselves as "the Uber of" or "the Airbnb of" their respective industries, many cities around the U.S. aim to align with the hotbed of tech and startup activity that defines Silicon Valley.

Not too far into Seth Siegel’s revealing book about how Israel became a “water superpower,” he tells the story of the moment when drip irrigation was invented. Drip irrigation is so powerful a technique — dramatically cutting the amount of water that crops require while increasing the amount of food each plant produces — that it may rescue the world from both hunger and thirst in the next 40 years.

Image: http://www.strategy-business.com