As near as I can tell, almost everyone is suffering from information overload coupled with an unreasonable need to be available to everyone and to respond to everything immediately. How often are you in a face-to-face conversation with someone who, without a word of apology, answers their phone? How often has someone sent a follow up email to you within moments of their first email, wondering why you haven’t responded yet? Worse, how often have you interrupted something important you were doing to respond to someone’s text which turns out to lack any urgency at all?

How often would the result be different if you waited to respond?

Tuesday, June 30, 2015 (Ames, IA): The Iowa State University Research Park (ISU RP) and Pella, Iowa, based Vermeer Corporation announced today the groundbreaking on the Vermeer Applied Technology Hub to be located at 2710 South Loop Drive; a state of the art facility that will house offices, meeting spaces and a high bay space. 

Vermeer intends to create an environment for software engineers to excel in the development of practical, affordable and modular equipment technology. The unique space will provide office space to allow students and faculty from Iowa State and other schools to work collaboratively on technology advancements for Vermeer industrial and agricultural equipment. As technology is developed, Vermeer intends to utilize the high-bay facility for testing and validation.

How should society think about technological innovation? Enthusiastically embrace it? Vigorously reject it, Neo-Luddite style? Worry, but remain tentatively optimistic?

There is an increasingly vocal debate on these questions in the public and political spheres. Technology is being singled out for killing more jobs than it creates, depressing wages, exacerbating inequality, destroying personal privacy—and even for posing a potentially mortal threat to mankind. But is the pace of technological change really accelerating? And if it is, should we be worried, or should we rejoice?

The World Architecture Festival — held this year in Singapore — won't name 2015's Building of the Year until November, but the nominations are officially in. 

With 338 buildings in the running, we combed through the contenders and made our own shortlist. From a ribbon-inspired wedding chapel in Hiroshima to Zaha Hadid's £240 million London Aquatics Centre, these are the 27 buildings that really jumped out and caught our eye.

Image: World Architecture Festival Built in 2013, this wedding chapel on the grounds of a Japanese resort is nominated in the religious buildings category.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake triggered a tsunami off Japan’s coast that killed almost 16,000 people and injured 6,000 more. Tsunami early warning systems prompted evacuations, but some physically couldn’t leave—mostly children, the elderly, and the infirm. What if you could protect the immobilized from nature’s worst? Survival Capsule, a small company just north of Seattle, Washington, is channeling its founders’ decades of aerospace experience into building ultrastrong spheres for people to shelter inside during catastrophic storms.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com/

Hamburgers might seem pretty straightforward, but actually they've become vehicles for innovation as chefs around the world have started tinkering with the familiar formula, especially over the last 15 years. It makes sense: The concept—meat patty served on a bun—is simple enough that it serves as a blank canvas for creative food minds, whether they're tinkering with 24K gold dust or unusual ingredients from the Far East. Here's a look at some major milestones in the evolution of the hamburger from drive-thru staple to gourmet favorite.

Science commissioner Carlos Moedas has continued his lively start to his premiership of EU research with a new proposal to set up a European Innovation Council. He says Europe needs to better capitalise on its research, as it currently underachieves in getting results to market, with European technologies often commercialised elsewhere.   Moedas set out his visions and priorities for European research and innovation policy at a recent conference in Brussels, ‘A new start for Europe: Opening up to an ERA of Innovation’ saying the current the legislative frameworks, entrepreneurial attitudes and innovation ecosystem in Europe fall short.

A study by B. Korcan Ak and Richard Sloan of the University of California at Berkeley and Steve Rossi and Scott Tracy of RS Investments analyzed stock data to try to determine what kinds of events and firm characteristics are associated with stock crashes.

The researchers came up with three statistical measures of stock price crashes, each of which captured a sudden drop in a company's stock price in a given time period. The simplest of the measures was the worst daily return for the stock's price in the given time period. The second measure flagged whether or not a stock's return on a day was extremely below the average return for that stock. The third measure looked at the overall distribution of a stock's daily returns and how far skewed to the downside that distribution was: A negatively-skewed return distribution is an indicator of one or more really bad days for a stock's price.

Thirty years ago, a company called Etak released the first commercially available computerized navigation system for automobiles. Spearheaded by an engineer named Stan Honey and bankrolled by Nolan Bushnell, the cofounder of Atari, the company's Navigator was so far ahead of its time that the phrase "ahead of its time" seems like an understatement.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

We live in heady times. Startup companies continue to grow at unprecedented rates, raise enormous amounts of venture capital and achieve valuations that imply that they will continue to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future. We can see in the market the telltale signs of a rapidly expanding market: wage inflation, high staff turn-over, rapidly increasing rents with scarcity of space and booming real estate market with prices and rents for homes unaffordable for many. I don’t meet many rational invests (VCs or LPs) who believe this will last but of course nobody knows whether we have 6 weeks, 6 months or 2 years.

AURP is requesting nominations for the 2016 Board of Directors. All research park members in good standing may nominate themselves, or others, for service on the Board. Board service is for an initial term of three years, with a maximum of two three-year terms allowed.

Six board seats are available this year, including the seats of up to three incumbent members of the Board who may be standing for re-election. With six openings on the board, per AURP By-Laws, a minimum of eight people must be on the ballot.

Nominations must be received no later than 8:00 am on Monday, July 13, 2015.

Get the Nomination Form here.

If you’re building a startup, chances are that you’re aspiring to innovate – to create something new or do something differently. In fact, innovation and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. However, many startups unwittingly create obstacles that hamper innovation in their organization. What are some of those obstacles and how can you avoid them?

Though corporate capital may be just a sliver of the overall funding scene, the money is nothing to sneeze it.

Corporate venture groups in 2014 invested $5.4 billion in U.S. startups—making up 11 percent of venture dollars spent—across 775 deals. That was the word from a panel at last week’s New York Venture Summit, citing a MoneyTree report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com

After the disastrous launch of Healthcare.gov, a website promising easy sign-ups for health insurance, President Obama corralled a team of top software engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to fix the glitches. Now, Nava, a startup composed of people who rebuilt the website, wants to radically improve other government services, too.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

You may not know the name Ubisoft, but you probably know some of the company's franchises: Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Far Cry, Rayman, Raving Rabbids, Just Dance, or Assassin's Creed. The latter will become more well known with the December 2016 release of an Assassin's Creed film produced by and starring Michael Fassbender.

Yves Guillemot This game developer and publisher is based in France, though it has dozens of studios all over the world. It had €1.46 billion ($1.63 billion) in revenue in its last fiscal year. According to the company, it has sold over 500 million games. Fast Company spoke with CEO Yves Guillemot about how the company embraces risk to survive. Here are the ways Ubisoft uses bold choices to operate and succeed.

Employee engagement is often touted as the tool of choice for businesses aiming to increase performance and revenue, and have happier and more loyal customers.

Yet, in a study of more than 1,000 employees in 13 countries the number of "fully engaged" employees was dismally low. China and the U.S. each reported just 19% of such workers, while Argentina and Spain rounded out the bottom of the list at 13%, according to research by The Marcus Buckingham Company (TBMC).

External models of R&D innovation are the rage in Pharma today, as they should be – the future of our industry depends on a great deal more rather than less collaboration.

In a very healthy way, lots of experiments are being done across the ecosystem and the final scorecard for what worked and what didn’t is years from being tallied up; however, the early biomarkers are positive and it’s a widely-held belief that a critical element of exceptional R&D organizations in the future will be creative BD engagement. In short, great BD and R&D are becoming synonymous with each other.

If you have a particular interest, odds are there’s a job in America that aligns perfectly with it. Got a knack for public speaking? Become a broadcast journalist. Love spending hours on the open road? Why not drive a truck.

For this year’s Answers Issue, we compared 40 occupations ranging from firefighters to university professors to parse out which out of the group was the fastest growing, least stressful and had a decent median salary to boot. By analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the fastest growing jobs and data from CareerCast.com on work-related stress, we were able to determine which job is America’s “best.”

Have you ever wondered why two people can say exactly the same thing in a meeting, but only one of them gets credit for it? Many times it’s the way we sound that makes the difference between whether or not we are actually heard.

We all know when someone sounds nervous or confident. Think about the following phrase hesitantly uttered, “I have something to say?” versus the same message confidently declared, “I have something to say.” Click here to hear the difference — both instances are my own voice, yet the differences are striking. Which voice do you want your employees to use when speaking to clients?

I didn’t start my business: my blog did.

When I started blogging in 2004, I had just finished graduate school and I was trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. I knew I wasn’t going to pursue a traditional academic career, but I wasn’t sure what else a Ph.D. had prepared me for.

But the emergence of the social web meant there was an ever-expanding set of websites and tools that were driven by the same kind of online participation I’d researched for my dissertation.