Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn't make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource.

The moment a great idea or solution hits you can feel like magic—like it's been delivered whole to you by some divine being. We all hope for those moments. But what ends up happening, more often than not, is quite the opposite—we're floundering and stuck on a problem, desperate for one of those magic breakthroughs to pull through.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

This continually updated interactive tracks how executives around the world have viewed economic conditions and the economic prospects of their companies, and how those views have differed over time and across industries, regions, and types of company.

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Facebook showed plans last week for drone aircraft that beam lasers conveying high-speed data to remote parts of the world.

As powerful as that sounds, Facebook already has something that could be even more potent: a huge sharing of its once-proprietary information, the kind of thing that would bring a traditional Silicon Valley patent lawyer to tears.

Image: Computer servers in a Facebook facility in Lulea, Sweden. Facebook has shared designs for data storage, computer servers, and rack designs, among other hardware. ERIC RISBERG / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mark Crowell has been named the vice president of Innovation and Economic Development at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). As of July 1, 2015, his responsibilities will include the development, management and commercialization of our intellectual property portfolio, the creation and support of new businesses, fostering joint ventures and collaborations with industry partners and enabling a strong culture of entrepreneurship at KAUST. In addition, he will oversee the development and management of KAUST's Research and Technology Park and will help drive the strategic positioning and operation of pre-seed, seed and/or venture funding initiatives.

Being the leader is good, usually, but as several world leaders learned to their cost, a certain amount of restraint can go a long way. It can be a matter of leaders imposing discipline on themselves.

In his book “Seven Disciplines of a Leader,” Jeff Wolf offers his seven traits that are necessary in any leader. Wolf asserts that highly effective leaders practice them to first achieve personal and professional greatness and then lead teams and organizations. The disciplines are:

As founder of an Internet-based events marketplace I have always loved Google unquestionably because without them my company would not exist. For years, through the magic of organic SEO, we’ve derived the vast majority of our customers from Google. Put simply: without Google, there would be no GigMasters.

Do parents, especially mothers, spend enough time with their children? Though American parents are with their children more than most any parents in the world, many feel guilty because they don't believe it's enough. That's because there's a widespread cultural assumption that the time parents, particularly mothers, spend with children is key to ensuring a bright future. Now groundbreaking new research upends that conventional wisdom and finds that that isn't the case. At all.

Image: Bill O'Leary | The Washington Post

Gaithersburg, Md., March 30, 2015 – Today and tomorrow, more than 400 leaders from life sciences companies, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, investment funds and government entities across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. will convene for the first Maryland Regional Biotech Forum. This event, hosted by AstraZeneca and its global biologics research and development arm, MedImmune, in partnership with BioHealth Innovation (BHI), Inc. and the Tech Council of Maryland, will be held at MedImmune’s corporate headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It was launched as part of a collective effort to grow the region’s biotech ecosystem and chart a course toward becoming one of the top three biotech hubs in the nation by 2023.

When people feel sleep-deprived, they point fingers at many things: long hours and work stress; young kids; travel. All of these may play a role, but if you keep track of your time for a week, and you may discover a hidden culprit: how much me time you have (or lack).

I recently saw a log from a public sector lawyer with two elementary school-aged kids. When she kept a time log for me in 2014, she found that she averaged just over seven hours of sleep per day, but only because she slept for nine hours on Saturday.

Meetings are the new email: we've got too many of them, and too much time is spent sorting through productivity-zapping chaff before getting down to real action.

We've all been in a meeting (or 20) and thought: "This is so pointless." But how do you know when a meeting is needed, and when it's better to pass?

Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures has raised its fifth and largest-ever fund, bringing the 14-year-old firm on par with the area’s biggest investors in early-stage life science companies. The $537 million fund brings Flagship’s total funds under management to $1.4 billion. Industrywide, venture capital funding for startup biotech firms rose by 33 percent to $6.5 billion in 2014, according to market intelligence firm EP Vantage. But Flagship CEO and founder Noubar Afeyan said in an interview he still sees a “massive drought” in life science venture funding, despite the success such companies have seen in the public markets in recent years.

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David Johnson was just one minute into making his pitch when the interruptions started.

“Why do I care?” barked a bespectacled man at the back of the seminar hall. Johnson, chief executive of the California biotechnology start-up GigaGen, blinked. He had condensed his company's story into a neat ten-minute presentation for I-Corps, a nine-week course designed to teach business skills to entrepreneurial scientists like him. Now his talk was derailed.

An infographic published today illustrates how, together with the private sector, Innovate UK has invested over £3 billion in innovation since 2007, assisting over 5,000 businesses.

Looking across a range of our programmes it is estimated that this will contribute an additional £7 billion or more to the economy and over 35,000 new jobs.

Image: https://www.gov.uk

A common request I get while mentoring entrepreneurs is for a copy of the startup checklist they need to follow, in order to build a successful new business. I wish it was that easy. The challenge is that every new business needs to be innovative and different, in order to rise above the crowd, bring real change to the world, and give you the satisfaction you seek.

On March 25, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finally announced rules for several aspects of the 2012 America JOBS Act, which legalized “crowd funding” as we know it.  The announcement by the SEC has the potential to unleash large amounts of new capital into American startups.  It could also spell the end of venture capital as we know it.  Don’t get me wrong, investors in startups, whether they are institutional or individual, will continue to make large amounts of money. But the control exerted by early-stage angels and venture capitalists, along with the structure of deals, could change significantly.

The partnership between RHTU and GSVlabs enables further success of the RHTU Acceleratum acceleration program through a bridge to Silicon Valley. Selected startups will be given a dedicated workspace at GSVlabs for the duration of the program with access to all the benefits GSVlabs provides to its community members: reception services, 24 hour badge access, state of the art conference rooms, access to GSVlabs’ mentor network, and free access to all GSVlabs hosted events.

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Personalizing your work-space can boost your moral. Fun gadgets and toys can keep you company during those long work hours and provide some amusement to break the stress. A hilarious or unexpected knick-knack can spark conversations with co-workers or maybe even customers and clients.

Check out this list of 20 desk toys for the office that can bring a smile to your face.

Think all fast-growing companies in the U.S. are high-tech firms in California fueled by flashy venture capitalists? Think again. At the annual South by Southwest conference earlier this month, Kauffman Foundation research analyst Arnobio Morelix cited data on fast-growing firms that paint a radically different picture of what these companies are like. Pointing to several studies produced by the education- and entrepreneurship-focused Kauffman Foundation, Morelix debunked these three myths about high-growth firms:

For anyone who has been following the venture capital space over the last couple of years, they should have seen that something has been kind of off for a while.

Suddenly, companies started to get funding amounts that would have been earth-shattering a few years ago, but became somewhat commonplace. And now companies that are now being valued at rates that are beyond anything that we've seen for a long time, if ever.