In 2014—a year in which cyberthieves stole customer information from at least four Fortune 500 companies—venture capitalists invested a record amount in privately held companies in the cybersecurity industry.

Venture-backed companies in the U.S. that provide cybersecurity technology or services raised $1.77 billion from investors last year, topping the previous high of $1.62 billion set in 2000 during the dot-com boom, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource. Globally, venture-backed cybersecurity companies raised $1.9 billion last year, also a record.

Image: David DeWalt, CEO of FireEye, whose 2013 IPO was the biggest among U.S.-based, venture-backed cybersecurity companies in recent years. PHOTO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Google as a company believes in internal transparency. 

On every software engineers' first day, he or she gets access to almost all of Google's code, every employee can view the personal goals and objectives (called "OKRs") of every other employee, and the company holds all-hands meetings every Friday where anyone can ask the founders questions about anything. 

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

What can New Jersey — once the home of storied inventors like Thomas Edison and the Bell and Sarnoff labs — do to get its innovation mojo back?

That question held center stage at a forum of business and civic leaders in Newark last week that outlined a way to jump-start New Jersey's struggling economy by tapping into the traits that once made the state a thriving, innovation powerhouse.

In 1965, a relatively young Gordon Moore penned his now legendary paper with the scholarly title, "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits."

That paper, by the future Intel co-founder, is widely celebrated as the original inspiration for Moore's Law, which states roughly that the number of transistors that can be installed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. His breakthrough observation became a sort of guiding principle for the still very young computer industry. During the next 30 years, it was often difficult to tell if chip and computer manufacturers were proving Moore's theory, or following it like some kind of law.

Real innovation in the business world is still rare. As I’ve said before, everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of new business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with more features, another smartphone app for marketing, or one more platform for faster e-commerce. Historic changes and great successes don’t come from linear thinking.

After spending 90 days under the mentorship of TechStars, 11 startups pitched their ideas to an enthusiastic crowd of investors and members of the tech community at NYC Winter 2015 Demo Day on Friday morning.

For many of these companies, Demo Day is the first time to show their product to a captive audience that includes press and potential investors. 

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

Most digital cameras are limited by a key aspect of their design: they have one lens and one image sensor. Light hits the lens and is directed at the sensor to produce a picture. A photography startup called Light is not making most digital cameras, though.

Rather than hewing to this one-to-one ratio, Light aims to put a bunch of small lenses, each paired with its own image sensor, into smartphones and other gadgets. They’ll fire simultaneously when you take a photo, and software will automatically combine the images. This way, Light believes, it can fit the quality and zoom of a bulky, expensive DSLR camera into much smaller, cheaper packages—even phones.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

The amount of trash floating in space continues to increase with dead satellites and other space debris posing potential danger to satellites and other spacecraft. To combat the problem, several means of collecting orbital debris have been proposed, such as through gas clouds, sails and nets.

The problem with these approaches is that they are generally targeted to capture larger objects. Thus, concerns over smaller pieces of debris that whiz around the planet like bullets remains. Such problem, however, may be addressed with a system that could zap these bits using a laser.

Image: A group of scientists proposed a system for eliminating smaller pieces of space junk. The group plans to use fiber optic laser, which could catch objects as small as a centimeter in diameter. - Photo : Abd allah Foteih | Flickr

An all-purpose solution is never the answer to your innovation challenge. Creativity initiatives come in all different sizes--and so should the tools we apply to achieve them. Be wary of innovation techniques or frameworks that claim to solve everything. The team that comes up with next miracle drug needs a radically different set of tools than the designers looking to improve an already-great app.

Parents, students and admissions officials have combed through college and university rankings for years. However, education researchers have largely ignored the controversial lists. That’s about to change, according to a Boston College expert in educational measurement.

“Are rankings doing more harm than good or more good than harm?” said Lynch School of Education Professor Henry Braun, part of a panel focused on rankings today at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting.

Image: http://scienceblog.com

Good managers—even great ones—can make spectacularly bad choices. Some of them result from bad luck or poor timing, but a large body of research suggests that many are caused by cognitive and behavioral biases. While techniques to “debias” decision making do exist, it’s often difficult for executives, whose own biases may be part of the problem, to know when they are worth applying. In this article, we propose a simple, checklist-based approach that can help flag times when the decision-making process may have gone awry and interventions are necessary. Our early research, which we explain later, suggests that is the case roughly 75 percent of the time.

Photo credit: HBO

When I watched a few episodes of HBO's new comedy series, Silicon Valley, I was literally rolling on the floor laughing.

So many of the situations rang true from my experience among tech startups. The margarita machines, the graffiti artists, the colorful characters, the chaos. It's like Mike Judge (creator of the equally hilarious take on the drudgery of office life, Office Space, and of course, King of the Hill) could see inside my soul. Turns out that Judge based the series on some of his own brief experience as a computer programmer.

Image: http://entrepreneurs.about.com

I left my employer of close to 4 years on February 19th, 2015. I worked for an amazing software company called Decipher, which was recently acquired by Focus Vision.

Why did I quit my job? To pursue my dream of course.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur; I even studied entrepreneurship in college. I started my first company in my senior year after college, but it wasn’t paying the bills so I took a position at Decipher right before graduation.

Last week, I wrote about a new groundbreaking report by Dane Stangler and Jordan Bell-Masterson, offering policymakers ways to better assess and measure the impact they are having on their local entrepreneurship ecosystem. The report proposes four baseline indicators – density, fluidity, connectivity, and diversity – as a starting point for evaluating and measuring entrepreneurial vitality. This week, I look at entrepreneurial density.

Image: http://www.kauffman.org

"Shark Tank" investor Lori Greiner started with a single invention, an earring holder, in 1997 and grew it into a multimillion-dollar family of businesses with products on QVC and in the world's biggest retailers.

On her path to more than 400 inventions and 120 patents, she tells Business Insider that she constantly reminded herself of the advice that both her father and her husband gave: "Don't let business get personal. It's just business. Shrug it off."

Image: Diane Bondareff/Invision for Staples/AP

The accepted approach for Corporate Innovation leaders is to secure buy-in from all stakeholders, in order to secure success. This article (first in a series) argues against this approach, aiming for a more tempered effort, that seeks enough buy-in to push forward.

I recently re-read the 2012 HBR article titled “Get the Corporate Antibodies on Your Side” by Mitra Best. The article’s underlying theme is that you need to run an inclusive approach to innovation activities, generating buy-in and support from all of your stakeholders (or potential antibodies), in order to drive the success of your efforts.

Babson Undergraduate student Emily Levy ’16 didn’t let her diagnosis take control of her life – she used it to empower others in similar situations. Here’s her ‘PICC’ perfect story:

Turning #LymeintoLemonAid

Emily Levy ‘16 has been suffering from Severe Chronic Lyme Disease since 2007. Yet, like most Lyme patients, she went undiagnosed and untreated for years. During Emily’s sophomore year at Babson, she had a PICC line inserted in her arm for six long months – all whilst continuing to go to class, and partaking in everyday college activities. PICC lines are catheters inserted through a vein in the upper inside arm that deliver intensive IV medications directly into the heart. They are used to treat a variety of chronic illnesses – from Lyme disease to cancer, and more.

There's migrating, and there's migrating.

Using satellite tracking devices, scientists discovered that a western North Pacific gray whale, which is a critically endangered species, traveled nearly 14,000 miles roundtrip from its primary feeding grounds off Russia's Sakhalin Island down to Baja, Mexico and back. This is the longest recorded mammal migration on record.

As economists debate the prospects for the future pace of innovation, a study by innovation specialists Ashish Arora, Wes Cohen, and John Walsh—published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research—indirectly helps buttress the optimists’ case.

The research team examined more than 6,000 U.S. manufacturers and service-sector firms between 2007 and 2009 regarding the extent to which innovators relied on external sources of invention.