The day before Kintan Brahmbhatt’s 10th birthday, he stayed up late, gripped with excitement, so he could open his presents. After tearing off the wrapping on one package, he was overjoyed to find a bright red, remote-controlled toy car inside. Brahmbhatt placed the car on the floor. With a smile on his face, he inched the joystick forward.

Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence ... It's mostly about bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself."

— Elon Musk thinks that, in a future filled with robots, humans will need to create a direct link with computers to move information around fast enough if they plan to keep up.

Image: Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors Annual Meeting Steve Jurvetson

Which state has the nation’s most research-intensive economy? California? Massachusetts? North Carolina?

Actually it’s Maryland. A greater portion of Maryland’s economy comes from private, federal, and university research spending than any state (with the exception of rural New Mexico with its two large federal labs).  But not enough of us recognize that.

On Valentine's Day, the world celebrates love by being bombarded with red and pink hearts — heart-shaped candies, heart-shaped cards and more.

But why?

"It didn’t mean love before the 13 th and 14 th centuries," says Eric Jager, author of The Book of the Heart and medieval literature professor at UCLA. When the shape was drawn before that point, it was generally for decorative purposes, he says, citing the enamel at the French Cluny Abbey (c. 1300) as one prominent example. As the idea of romantic love began to take shape during that medieval period, so did the symbolism.

You’re working on a new venture and you know you’ve got to create a plan to execute it. So you look at past projects, gather and analyze relevant market data, make predictions about how much revenue you’ll be able to generate, decide what resources you’ll need, and set milestones to reach your targets. Right? Not so fast. That process might work for conventional or ongoing business lines, but new ventures, which are less predictable, require a different set of planning and control tools. That’s where the discovery-driven planning (DDP) process comes in.

Here’s an unnerving stat. According to recent IDC report, “by 2018, 70 percent of siloed digital transformation initiatives will ultimately fail because of insufficient collaboration, integration, sourcing, or project management.” Whether the failure derives from workforce resistance to a new technology platform or the C-suite’s neglect to deliver and build new digital capabilities in the organization, efforts to drive meaningful change through existing organization channels often fail — while causing great disruption.

Fear of failure is a topic that Leticia Gonçalves, president of Monsanto Europe, is passionate about. She faced such fears years ago while working for Monsanto in her home country of Brazil. In 2006, Gonçalves was asked to take on a management job at corporate headquarters in St. Louis, but she balked. “I didn’t think I was competent enough,” she recalls. Sleepless nights, butterflies in the stomach, and long talks with her husband, a lawyer who would have to give up his practice, finally yielded a decision to say yes.

As tough as it is for talented women to climb the corporate ladder as compared to men, female entrepreneurs may have it even harder. According to a 2014 U.S. Senate report, a paltry 4.4 percent of the total value of conventional small business loans went to women-owned businesses. Women comprise only 7 percent of founders receiving US$20 million or more in the testosterone-heavy world of U.S. venture capital, Bloomberg reported last year.

It's a sad fact of life that the vast majority of startups are doomed to fail. 

If you stop to think about it, this is quite surprising. After all, entrepreneurs who choose to found a startup are usually bright, confident, and willing to take on risks . Even though they know that the startup mortality rate is so high, they are happy to challenge the existing players in the market, because they feel they can do a better job than the incumbents.

Living in New York and working in advertising I rarely see people over the age of fifty.

My elders seem to be a secret population -- a growing, sizable, increasingly healthy and wealthy group -- that I'm never exposed to, let alone have the pleasure of working alongside. This is one of the worst things about working in Marketing right now.

It all goes back to the birds and the bees. Fish too. And ants. It goes to all creatures that amplify their collective intelligence by forming flocks, schools, shoals, colonies and swarms. Across countless species, nature show us that social creatures, when working together as a unified dynamic system, can outperform the vast majority of individual members when solving problems and making decisions. In the field of biology, this process is referred to as “Swarm Intelligence” and it proves the old adage – many minds are better than one.

We are all familiar with the use of offshore intellectual property holding companies to capitalize on international tax gradients. These companies are designed to take advantage of strategic local tax rules to reduce tax burdens on royalty streams generated from licensing. Because of these favorable tax treatments, countries like Luxembourg have gained significant advantages in the international marketplace for favorably taxing intellectual property.

Early-stage startups based out of the University of Pennsylvania already have a decent well to pump for seed cash. But what happens when business starts booming?

Enter Chestnut Street Ventures, the latest Penn-focused investment fund, which looks to provide growth-stage startups with investments in the $200,000 range. Although the firm is not affiliated with the University, it’s rallying cash from Penn alumni and will invest exclusively in startups founded by Penn students, alumni and professors.

The ‘‘skills gap’’ in the United States is serious. Here is how to do better.

“The land of opportunity”—that is the promise of the United States. And one of the reasons the country has been able to deliver on that promise is that it has been able to develop the talent it needs to create wealth and to adapt to ever-changing economic realities. But there are concerns that the United States can and should be doing better.

Downtown has changed a lot in the past few years,” says Melissa “Missy” Kelley, president and CEO of Downtown STL, Inc., the nonprofit dedicated to creating and promoting a vibrant Downtown that attracts investment and economic activity to the region. While she could be referring to the unveiling of CityArchRiver, the launch of the National Blues Museum or the opening of The Field House Museum, all of which happened in 2016 alone, Kelley is referring to much more than physical spaces and real estate development. She’s referring to indicators of a bigger movement: one that is drawing in the city’s innovation community.

BuzzFeed. It conjures up a range of emotions anytime I’ve privately expressed my opinion to thought leaders in our industry that I believe it is one of the most innovative companies in digital media. Some, of course, agree with me that BuzzFeed has been and continues to be the gold standard innovator in digital media to emulate.

Vision Zero shorthand boils down the initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities to three E’s: education, enforcement and engineering. But expanding Vision Zero in the U.S., where low-income communities and communities of color are both more likely to be injured or killed in traffic and to be targeted by law enforcement, requires grappling with other fundamentals.

For many executives, the concept of organization design is an oxymoron. They are so consumed by working in the organization that they lack the patience to work on the organization. They don’t do the intricate, complex work of configuring their organization to execute strategy. Instead, they shift boxes on an organization chart, bolt on more resources that were lobbied for by a zealous executive, or cut costs across the board. They focus on communicating messages more inclusively or reassigning stronger leaders to troubled departments.

Since Tim Berners-Lee published the first Web page in 1991, more than three billion people have gotten online. Business and socializing have been transformed, and many fortunes made. But the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the free Firefox browser, says that all is not well with the Internet.

This book is for engineers and scientists who have the aptitude and education to create new products that could become income-producing businesses for themselves and for investors. The book uses short chapters and gets directly to the point without lengthy and distracting essays. The rapid growth in technology-based business plan contests is a clear sign that there are many wealthy inventors looking to make substantial investments in start-ups. The key features of this reference enable readers to sharpen their new idea, turn an idea into a commercial product, conduct patent search and complete a provisional patent application, collect requisite data and prepare a business model, and prepare a business plan. The material presented can be used in a college course with teams made of three or four students per team or for self-study. Supporting materials are provided on the book's website (www.engineer-entrepreneur-book.com/)