Creativity is at the core of building quality in design. People rarely innovate when they simply follow instructions. This led me to think more about creativity – the act of doing something in an unconventional way, the act of creating something meaningful that changes you and hence the world. Traditionally (in an industrial world), only artists were meant to be creative – painters, dancers, poets and so on. In the knowledge world, every professional has an opportunity (and a need) to be creative – to see patterns that others don’t see, to create and initiate.

Around the same time I was thinking about creativity, I stumbled upon a great book titled “Creativity – Unleashing the Forces Within” written by 20th century spiritual teacher Osho. I read the book with great interest and gained some very enlightening insights. Here are a few:

Ego is the enemy of creativity. You are at your creative best when you do things because you find joy in doing it, because it has an intrinsic value to you. When you do things with a purpose of gaining recognition (and hence satisfy your ego), creativity is limited. Our need for external validation for our work stops us from being receptive, open and curious.

Getting to a point where it’s time to hire employees is a huge milestone for startups. But there are lots of things to consider when looking to hire someone to join your startup team, including whether or not that person’s goals are in line with the company goals and how good a fit the candidate is with the company culture. Ultimately, it might just be a matter of what your instinct is telling you about the candidate’s character and motivation.

We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, this question:

“What are some major red flags that startup management teams look for when hiring new employees?”

2012 will be a transformational year for smartphones in healthcare. It will mark the beginning of an era in which hospitals really figure out how to take these devices beyond their use as individual reference tools and turn them into technology that is truly interconnected throughout the enterprise.

Given this changing environment and the new possibilities of smartphones, we assembled a roundtable of industry and technology experts to compile this list of what 2012 will mean for smartphone use in hospitals.

A sneak peak at some of the 10 predictions:

• An incident involving compromised patient information will cause headlines and fines
• Message traceability will become a requirement, not a luxury
• IT and BioMed will join forces in the name of improved workflows

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Pitching to the press is no easy task. Every day, journalists receive thousands of emails from public relations professionals who are pitching their clients' ideas; sometimes hundreds of mass pitches are sent to unsuspecting journalists from just one person in a given day. With such a high quantity of pitches, it is really easy to make a mistake, but it's a shame when those mistakes could've easily been avoided with just a little awareness.

Take a look at the 7 biggest mistakes, and unfortunately some of the most common ones, that PR and marketing professionals make when pitching their stories to journalists. And next time you're pitching your story, make sure you don't fall victim to these public relations faux pas so you can increase your instances of PR success.

In recent years many policymakers and organizations — the National Research Council among them — have sounded alarms about the need for better science and engineering education in the United States. But what can actually be done to improve it? What needs to change in American classrooms? A new report from the National Research Council offers a framework to serve as the basis for new K-12 science education standards — one that embodies a significant shift in how science and engineering are taught.

“It has been 15 years since the last science standards were developed, and our understanding — both in terms of science itself and how students learn about it — has progressed a great deal since then,” said Helen Quinn, chair of the committee that wrote the report. “We hope the framework we developed will guide improvements in standards and in science education over many years.”

The rate of excess weight among children ages 2 to 5 has doubled since the 1980s. Currently, slightly over 20 percent are overweight or obese, and about 10 percent of children from infancy to age 2 carry excess weight, according to a report by the Institute of Medicine on policies to prevent early childhood obesity.

Concerns about extra pounds on babies and toddlers fly in the face of long-held convictions that a pudgy baby is a thriving baby and that young kids naturally grow out of their baby fat as they learn to walk and become more active. But the same factors that promote weight gain among older children and adults — an increase of sedentary behaviors, overconsumption of calories, and insufficient sleep — are contributing to persistent excess weight among too many of the youngest children.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,1 found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Each year begins for technologists and geeks with the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for CES. It's easy to write off this massive technology trade show as an outdated, overrated, and overhyped gizmo-fest. But I think it's incredibly valuable, and often results in real marketplace knowledge ahead of the curve.

That said, I go into CES each year with some insights and some crystal ball gazing that often helps me focus on what I'm expecting to see. This year, 2012 CES has a handful of trends that will impact media, content creators, and devices.

Just stuffing classrooms with gadgets isn't going to result in real 21st century learning spaces. Today's institutions must design classrooms that fully support technology and foster a collaborative learning environment. Here are six ways you can transform your classrooms into next-generation learning spaces.

Start with the physical shell. High ceilings, adequate lighting and lighting controls, open room layouts, and raised flooring are just a few of the elements that go into all of the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering high-tech classrooms. Classroom access is at the back of the room to reduce the number of outside distractions and an open layout allows teachers and students to move around freely and collaborate with one another. "When you start with the shell and then move to the student and instructor casework the technology itself becomes secondary," said Brian Vidic, director of technology. "The end result is a space that can flex and accommodate different types of instruction."

The race to the $1,000 genome heated up today as Life Technologies, based in Carlsbad, Calif., announced that it will debut a new sequencing machine this year that will eventually be capable of decoding entire human genomes in a day for less than $1,000. The machine, called the Ion Proton, will be the successor to the Personal Genome Machine made by the company Ion Torrent, a subsidiary of Life Technologies.

Not to be outdone, Illumina, the present market leader based in San Diego, Calif., said that it will release its own genome-in-a-day contender, the HiSeq 2500, in the second half of this year. Unlike Life Technologies, which is asking customers to buy an entirely new machine, Illumina says that it will be able to upgrade existing customers’ HiSeq 2000 machines for a relatively low price.

Last week, The Heritage Foundation co-hosted the launch of the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), a new tool giving insight into the effect that various drivers of entrepreneurship have on economic development in countries around the world.

Two crucial findings from the 2012 GEDI emerged at the conference:

The drivers of productive entrepreneurship have deteriorated globally.… In almost all countries high-growth entrepreneurship has suffered the most.

Ambassador Terry Miller, director of Heritage’s Center for International Trade and Economics, also highlighted a key finding from the forthcoming 2012 Index of Economic Freedom: Economic freedom, crucial for economic growth and prosperity, has declined across the world over the past year.

Entrepreneurship is all the rage these days. What with the breakout success of social media, the coming of age of Gen Y, and corporate America not hiring, it's not surprising that the question of whether to start your own company or join someone else's startup is a hot topic.

What is surprising are all the popular myths, obvious platitudes, and downright bad advice from people who have no idea what they're talking about because they've never walked the talk in the real world. So let me shed a little light on the subject.

Don’t let the good times roll just yet, Silicon Valley: Analysts at Dow Jones are saying the effects of the 2008 economic crash still haven’t worn off for venture capitalists.

While U.S. VC funds finished the year with a strong fourth quarter of fundraising, funds raised by VCs during 2011 came in at barely more than half of the 2008 total.

“The industry has not yet bounced back from the recession,” said a Dow Jones VentureWire spokesperson in an email.

The numbers for 2011 were slightly higher than those from 2010 (by 5 percent, to be exact), though that was largely driven by activity in

Most small businesses never reach $1 million in annual sales. Instead, they struggle just to survive. Of businesses started in 2004, barely more than half -- 56 percent -- were still around in 2009, a study from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found.

In fact, cracking the $1 million barrier at any point in a company's lifetime is a major achievement. U.S. Census data from 2007 shows that more than three-quarters of the country's 6 million firms with employees made less than $1 million in revenue. And most solopreneur businesses don't earn anywhere near that much: According to IRS data for 2008, the average solo business brought in less than $60,000.

Will digital health apps and devices for smartphones become so indispensable that we wonder how we functioned without them? Or do they risk becoming part of an enormous data avalanche? Those questions were raised in a recent article examining digital health by Fast Company that maps smartphone apps and devices across a human body.

AliveCor has developed an app that can read heart rhythms when users press their iPhones to their chests. The company expects to file for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this year. California-based CellScope‘s device can transform a smartphone into a mini microscope. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based BodyMedia‘s Armbands keeps track of how the body uses energy through skin temperature, heartbeat, heat dissipation and time spent at rest.

One of the worst situations for presentations is being mentally and logistically prepared for a large crowd in a room to match only to find a small audience in a too big room the day of the event. It’s easy as a presenter to get deflated in these settings and allow the conference room’s empty vibe to effectively swallow the audience, the presentation, and your energy as a presenter.

There have been a number of these mismatched presentations at the PCMA / VES conference this week in San Diego. Witnessing how multiple speakers have done – some better and some worse – with these presentations suggests nine success tips for better presentations with a small audience and a big room.

Richard A. Skinner, PhD

Other fabulous beasts are clearly inventions existing only in a mythical landscape of our own collective creation. But the Unicorn strikes us as more than imaginary. It seems possible, even probable – a creature so likely that it ought to exist.

Nancy Hathaway

It is all but an axiom: innovation is the process that provides an edge, even and perhaps most of all in turbulent times. As one participant noted in a 2007 McKinsey online discussion, “Quality and customer service are no longer differentiators, but rather prerequisites. Innovation is the best strategic decision for sustainable competitive advantage.”

A February 2009 study by the Economist Intelligence Unit carried out with the support of the government of Ontario, Canada, revealed “that innovation is the single most important predictor of future growth, and that access to talented staff is critical for innovation.”

Corporate executives embrace the notion and establish C-level “chief innovation officers” with mandates to foster a culture in which new or at least different ideas for products and services are coin of the realm.

Reformers mourn the drill-and-practice rote learning that often typifies much of education and point to the contrast between the unrestrained curiosity and inventiveness of pre-schoolers, on the one hand, and the solemnity and obvious control that characterizes Grades 1-n, on the other hand.

When Mark Zuckerberg first started Facebook, he knew he didn't have the experience necessary to run a major company, Ekaterina Walter says in her forthcoming book "Think Like Zuck." Here's how he triumphed anyway.

In the first several years of Facebook’s existence, multiple journalists portrayed Mark Zuckerberg and his friends as party lovers who would code all day and stay up all night. Mark liked to have fun just as much as any other college freshman, but he was also very focused. He knew that he needed to keep the company moving forward, and he didn’t hesitate to put the rest of his colleagues on the lockdown until something got done. Early on, he showed qualities of a natural leader, according to his friends. Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, remembers: “The leader of a company needs to have a decision tree in his head--if this happens, we go this way, but if it winds up like that, then we go this other way. Mark does that instinctively.” Zuckerberg also made sure every angle was covered. Parker continues: “He liked the idea of Thefacebook, and he was willing to pursue it doggedly, tenaciously, to the end. But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It’s like (former Intel CEO) Andy Grove says, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’”

Burning a hole at the top of a long list of needs for a startup entrepreneur is good old Benjamin Franklins.

Yes — stacks of capital needed to fund dreams of a vast and bright future.

And what entrepreneur among you couldn’t use a few more dollars for your startup?

Yes — just what I thought.

Disengaged workers cost the U.S. economy $350 billion a year in lost productivity. Here's how the happiest companies boost morale and the bottom line.

“Being able to be truly happy at work is one of the keys to being happy in life,” says Heidi Golledge, CEO and cofounder of CareerBliss, an online career database. And what company couldn’t use a little more joy among its ranks?