Relationships are the key to survival and success for entrepreneurs, and first impressions usually turn into lasting impressions. As an advisor to many early-stage entrepreneurs, I caution them to always be prepared for that chance meeting with a famous investor, a potential partner or an industry guru. It’s not smart to believe that your passion and gift of gab will impress anyone.

It’s easy to go Hollywood, but it can be hard to come back. That’s not something paleontologist Jack Horner has to worry about—yet. A little more scientific loose-talk, however, and he could be flirting with trouble.

Horner is the celebrated curator of paleontology at Montana’s Museum of the Rockies, the co-author of the provocatively wonderful How to Build a Dinosaur, and, most famously perhaps, technical consultant on all four Jurassic Park films, including the upcoming Jurassic World, opening on June 12. Good science fiction, like good science itself, changes as new discoveries roll in, and the Jurassic franchise is no exception.

When some of the world’s most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated.

At the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest held over the weekend in California, two dozen extremely sophisticated robots did their best to perform a series of tasks on an outdoor course, including turning a valve, climbing some steps, and opening a door (see “A Transformer Wins DARPA’s $2 Million Robotics Challenge”). Although a couple of robots managed to complete the course, others grasped thin air, walked into walls, or simply toppled over as if overcome with the sheer impossibility of it all. At the same time, efforts by human controllers to help the robots through their tasks may offer clues as to how human-machine collaboration could be deployed in various other settings.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

When describing the SIT method, I sometimes say it’s like using the voice of the product. That’s because SIT is based on patterns that are embedded into the products and services you see around you. If products could talk to you, they would describe the five patterns of SIT.

But there’s another important voice in business innovation: the voice of the customer. After all, that’s why you do innovation - to create new value, directly or indirectly, for your customers. A good innovator understands their needs and wants.

The Centre plans to set up 500 incubation centres on PPP model across the country in the next one year to create more skilled professionals, Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Giriraj Singh said in Coimbatore recently.

“Though 65 per cent of the Indian population is below 35 years of age, only two per cent of them are skilled. These incubation centres will provide technical knowledge to them to make them skilled professionals or entrepreneurs,” he said.

These centres would be on the PPP model and initially Rs 200 crore would be allotted for setting them up, particularly in districts, he said. He added that the Government wants to make the MSME sector competitive through technological innovation.

As my Cleveland Cavaliers engage in an exciting championship series with the Golden State Warriors, sports commentators will no doubt spend lots of time comparing LeBron James and Steph Curry as well as their teams. While this is certainly a topic that has all Clevelanders' attention, what I think is also interesting, and perhaps surprising to many people, is how much these two regions have in common and how they have inspired each other over the course of the last century.

Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Before starting a business, there are four characteristics an entrepreneur should have, or look for in their partners.

The odds are stacked against entrepreneurs. Most new ventures fail within their first few years in business. Some try to scale up too early, or too late. Others run out of cash in the scramble, forcing founders to close shop before they go into the red. But the most determined will push on regardless.

For many people, work equals lots of travel. When you’re on the road, you’re at the mercy of public WiFi networks, which means security threats and unpredictable Internet browsing speeds. Before you worry about speed, you must make sure you’re not putting all of your personal and professional secrets on display. Most of the unfamiliar faces at the airport pay no attention to your smartphone or tablet, but there’s no way to really know if the person sitting next to you is trying to steal your personal information, data or files.

One of the joys of living in the West, and Colorado in particular, is having access to thousands of miles of rivers and streams where you can fly fish for cutthroat, rainbows, brown and brook trout. 

Like entrepreneurship, fly fishing has its own lingo and you'd be surprised how often the two overlap:

Break Off: When your line snaps unexpectedly, allowing the fish to get away- Like having a lead and converting them into a prospect but you just can't convert them to a customer.

Your employees have a lot of thoughts. Most of those thoughts they don't share, especially with you.

At times their silence can be a good thing, especially where your ego -- or their employment status -- is concerned, but their silence also may keep you from understanding what your employers really think... and what they really need from you.

Especially if they're thinking the following:

1. "You say you respect me... so give me something important to do." 

Buckle up fellow design and innovation junkies we are the proverbial kids in a candy store stocked with a growing inventory of brain-exploding emerging technologies. The shelves of our candy story are overflowing with exciting new technologies including genomics, robotics, Internet of things, big data, artificial intelligence, drones, and 3D printing to name just a few. Any one of these emerging technologies alone could change the world. Resist the temptation to gorge on any one of them before sampling the full cross section of possibility. Perhaps a better metaphor after appreciating the full breadth of possibility is to feel like a kid in a sandbox. A sandbox filled with both existing and nascent technologies beckoning design and innovation junkies like us to come play together to unleash the adjacent possible. To combine and recombine technologies in new ways to unleash a steady stream of transformational business models and to change the way we solve the important social challenges of our time. You know, little system challenges like education, healthcare and government!

The Human Genome Project was one of mankind’s greatest triumphs. But the official gene map that resulted in 2003, known as the “reference genome,” is no longer up to the job.

So say scientists laying plans for a new universal map they say will combine the genomes of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of people to create a true reference that reflects all of humanity.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Hi, my name is Unity Stoakes, and I am an entrepreneur and investor on a mission to improve the future of health and wellness globally. As a Forbes contributor, I will be sharing an insider’s perspective on the digital health revolution and insights about the wave of innovation that is transforming one of the largest and most complicated industries in the world: health care.

An invitation-only forum of global, national, and statewide investment expertise to explore immediate andnear-term opportunities in the $9+ billion Texas water technology marketplace.

This first-ever gathering of water technology market intelligence analysts with representatives from Texas family offices, private equity, corporate venturing, venture capital, wealth management, public funds, and individual investors will go beyond the issues of water ownership, rights, and traditional policy debates.

There are ‘grand challenges’ in Texas that, once addressed here, could become global breakthroughs. From brine management to reuse of discharged water, from leak detection to storm water management. Targets for water technology products and services in several sectors – such as energy, manufacturing, agriculture, and industrial facilities, operations and maintenance – could be deployed across the 4,600 water agencies, 5,000+ corporate campuses, and tens of thousands of farms and ranches in Texas.

Learn More (PDF Download)

An analysis of the just-released municipal population trends shows that core city growth is centered in the municipalities that have the largest percentage of their population living in suburban (or exurban) neighborhoods.

Improved Urban Core Analysis

There is considerable interest in urban core population trends, both because of recent increases in the interest of urban planning orthodoxy to restore living patterns more akin to the pre-World War II era. At that time, urban areas were considerably more densely populated, commuting travel was much more focused on downtowns (central business districts or CBDs) and automobile use accounted for far less of urban travel than today.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Jose_California_aerial_view_south.jpg

After conducting a nationwide search for a new CEO, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation determined that the best candidate was already within its doors. For nearly a year, Wendy Guillies has been interim CEO after the departure of Tom McDonnell in June 2014. Guillies, an Overland Park resident, has a 15-year tenure at the foundation and previously was vice president of communications. She also serves on the boards of KCSourceLink, Kauffman FastTrac and the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

Image: Wendy Guillies, CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Brian Krzanich, chief executive of Intel, announced today that his Intel Capital venture arm will invest $125 million over the next 5 years in technology startups run by women and underrepresented minorities.

The move is the first stage of execution of Krzanich’s promise at the Consumer Electronics Show in January to invest more than $300 million to diversify the talent in the technology industry. It is a huge commitment that dwarfs other efforts to change the face of Silicon Valley.

Image: Lisa Lambert of Intel Capital.

When scenario planning has worked well, it has proved enormously useful to a wide range of organizations as a tool for making decisions under uncertainty. First popularized by Shell in the early 1970s, the approach should be a natural complement to other ways of developing strategy—especially when executives are as concerned about geopolitical dynamics as many are today. It would probably be more widely used if it hadn’t been such a disappointment to many executives. In fact, 40 percent of those we surveyed in 2013 described it as having little effectiveness.

Image: http://www.mckinsey.com

We’re told not to judge, lest we be judged.

But we are judged, by our customers choosing between us and a competitor, by our employees choosing whether to entwine their careers with our fate, and by our peers, allies, and passive-aggressive antagonists on social media.

We’re instructed to respect others, especially other cultures. And it’s true that new perspectives yield new insight, and that we’re generally plagued with a bias against the unfamiliar, especially when it’s convenient for our egos to deny that a new idea is superior to our own. But battling our emotional distain of the alien does not automatically imply respect for all other cultures and ideas. “Respecting” female mutilation because “it’s a sin to judge,” is unacceptable.

Did you ever notice that Human Resource (HR) practices are designed to lock in the past rather than grow?  A quick tour of what HR does and you quickly see they like to lock-in processes and procedures, insuring consistency but offering no hope of doing something new. And when it comes to hiring, HR is all about finding people that are like existing employees – same school, same degrees, same industry, same background. And HR tries its very hardest to insure conformity amongst employees to historical standard – especially regarding culture.