You have no idea how popular Justin Bieber is.

In the past twelve months, more people have searched for the 16-year-old wonder on Google than have searched for "china," "jesus," or "boobs."

Bieber also left other celebrities in the dust. The only person who came close was Lady Gaga.

Most business presentations suck.

They're boring.

They're confusing.

They're out of touch.

This gallery explains exactly why most presentations are so dreadful, and what to do make your own presentations better.

No matter what your artistic interests, whether photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, etc., the underlying force behind your work is creativity. It’s much easier to talk about technical aspects of photography as it’s a tangible skill, unlike the more mysterious intangible skill of creative thought. While every art form is unique unto its own, harnessing one’s creativity is a universal skill.

There are some that might say you either have it or you don’t in relation to creativity, but the truth is we’re all creative. Every child makes believe at some point and lets their imagination run wild, and if I’m correct you were once a child. Creativity is a thought process and one that can be strengthened with practice and exercise. Below are 6 ways I like to get my creative mind working. If you have techniques that work for you be sure to add them in the comments.

While many companies understand the importance of investing in innovation, they often fail to realize how managing intellectual property (IP) is essential to ensuring long-term success. To address this issue, Harvard Business School offers Intellectual Property and Business Strategy. Taught by world-renowned faculty from Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, this Executive Education program helps you maximize the value of your firm’s IP investment.

As a previous program participant shared, “My firm invests in energy-related technologies, so IP is important to every one of our investments. The strategy-focused case studies put the learning into perspective, demonstrating that sometimes the most obvious approach is not the best one. You have to think through the problem from many angles to come up with a good strategy. Where is the profit going to be made? Where might margins deteriorate? Cases from other industries exposed me to new issues and approaches I would not naturally have thought of.”

Recognizing that IP is driving today’s technology-based economy, savvy companies are leveraging their intellectual property to differentiate products, protect margins, create barriers to entry, sustain first-mover advantage, and drive innovation.

There are 4633 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. This weekend I had dinner with one of them—a friend who’s now the president of Philadelphia University. He’s working hard to reinvent the school into a model for 21st century professional education.

The Silo Career Track

One of the problems in business today is that college graduates trained in a single professional discipline (i.e. design, engineering or business) end up graduating as domain experts but with little experience working across multiple disciplines.

What we need for 21st century business development is entrepreneurial fusion, not entrepreneurial fission. This is the view of Martin Curley (Intel’s Global Director of Innovation), Piero Formica (Founder of the International Entrepreneurship Academy) and Vincenzo Nicolò (President of the Technical Board of the Italian Association of Machine Tool Builders). Writing in the February issue of Industry and Higher Education, Curley, Formica and Nicolò argue in favour of a new approach, which they characterize as the ‘experimental business laboratory’. They contend that established methods of business incubation attempt to produce entrepreneurial ‘energy’ through a process of fission, ‘creating a division between aspiring entrepreneurs’ demands for, and the supply of support and services’.  For Curley, Formica and Nicolò, this is the old world. ‘The concept of nuclear fusion,’ they say, ‘is useful as a metaphor for the type of businesses that must be launched in the future. As with fusion, in which there are high releases of energy with potentially less toxic waste produced than from nuclear fission, the world needs new kinds of businesses that optimize not only cost and market efficiency and effectiveness but also ecological and resource efficiency.’ For more details, see http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ip/ihe/2011/00000025/00000001/art00002.

Rich Bendis is proud to serve on the International Advisory  Board of industry & Higher Education

Back in the early 1990s, while most of us were still trying to wrap our heads around this new thing called the internet (don’t miss this amusing bit), NPR’s Science Friday started pushing the envelope and hosting the first internet-based radio talk show. This marked the first time that listeners could “phone into” a program via the web and talk together – in this case about the creative uses of this emerging technology. The broadcast, which singlehandedly brought the internet to a crawl, has now resurfaced online. You can listen below (or here).

Cotton Gin

On March 14, 1794, Eli Whitney patented his invention, the cotton gin (“gin” being short for engine). The machine succeeded in making the growing of cotton profitable for farmers in the south by speeding up the separation of the cotton bolls (the fluffy part) from the seeds.

The unforeseen side effect of Whitney’s invention was that it made Southerners want to grow more cotton on larger plantations, and thus, bring more African slaves in to pick it. Between 1790 and 1808, when it became illegal to import African slaves, 80,000 slaves were brought to the American South.

New Geography of Global Innovation: A report from the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute says student interest in science & engineering (S&E ) is low in G-7 countries, suggesting that these markets are likely to have difficulty replacing an ageing cohort of native-born scientists and engineers.

The G-7 or Group of Seven countries are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States.

The report says while the United States and Japan remain leaders in innovation, increased competition from growth markets, notably China, suggests a changing landscape. Research and development (R&D) spending in Asia surpassed EU levels in 2005, and is likely to overtake US levels in the next five years, thanks primarily to striking growth in R&D investment in China. R&D investment is driven largely by the corporate sector, which finances more than two-thirds of total R&D spending in many countries.

The nation's top economics bloggers see a bit of hope on the horizon in 2011, according to a new Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation survey released today. Although 77 percent continue to describe the economy's overall condition as "mixed," "facing recession," or "in recession," 23 percent now believe the economy is "strong and growing" or "strong with uncertain growth" -- an increase from last quarter.

Replacing both knees in one surgery, or simultaneous total knee replacement (TKR) was associated with significantly fewer prosthetic joint infections as well as other revision knee operations within one year after surgery, compared with total knee replacements performed in two separate procedures. However, simultaneous replacement was associated with a moderately higher risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes within 30 days, according to a study presented today at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

Do you want to start a business or fund a creative venture but are hobbled by the current economy? Have you been turned down by venture capitalists who believe your idea is not scientific enough or won’t be the next Facebook?

No fear - a new form of funding is on the rise, driven in part by the continuing ascent of social networking and possibly by the work ethic
generated by the software open source movement.

Scale matters in technology transfer and commercialisation – to secure enough research funding to build a rich patent portfolio; provide access the depth and variety of expertise to engage corporate partners, and develop leading edge intellectual property that will attract venture capital partners.

But scale of course implies distance, and this works against the other prime requirement of technology transfer and commercialisation, which is intimate knowledge of the science, the expertise of the researchers, and the ambitions and requirements of spin-out companies.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Startup America Partnership, the private sector alliance launched at the White House on January 31st to celebrate and accelerate entrepreneurship, announced the appointment of Timothy “Scott” Case as Chief Executive Officer.

“Whether starting and growing entrepreneurial companies like Priceline, or scaling critically important public-private partnerships like Malaria No More, Scott has demonstrated a unique ability to bring innovative ideas to life," said Steve Case , chairman of the Startup America Partnership. "I can think of no one better suited to lead the Startup America Partnership.”

So you've got a great product that’s gone from an idea on a cocktail napkin to the beginnings of something that could be bigger than sliced bread. But you’ll be stuck in neutral for quite awhile unless you can secure the necessary capital to keep things running. For startups and early stage companies, success and failure boils down to whether you can intrigue a potential investor in the time it takes to ride an elevator from the lobby to the executive suite.

The elevator pitch is an essential tool to grab the attention of venture capitalists, and no one knows that better than presentation coach Steve Bowman. Founder of BizClarity, a consulting firm headquartered in Media, Bowman has earned the reputation of "The Pitch Doctor," going beyond presentation deliveries and PowerPoint slides and delving deep into content to find and compose his client’s core message.

What do you do when colleagues in your university laboratory complain that you are taking up valuable research space to run a business and hampering their PhD work?

Answer: Bring in the beer and explain what you are doing.

Above all, make sure the university president supports academic enterprise. Such lab rivalries are not uncommon, and can hinder campus start-ups, according to students attending a meeting earlier this month hosted by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The goal was to gather input from young entrepreneurs on encouraging technological innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe.

An artificial heart and its lightweight power drive. A better airline for Brazil. Chocolate from Madagascar and a soccer shirt made of plastic water bottles. A fashion leader escaping its pattern, a smelter, and that little coupon startup in Chicago that's suddenly worth billions. All this from one simple word: innovation.

The 50 companies on our 2011 list have chosen a unique path. Today's business landscape is littered with heritage companies whose CEOs battle their industry's broken model with inertia, layoffs, lawsuits -- anything that squeezes pennies and delays the inevitable. How many of these companies will be dominant in 2025? Few.

It’s that time of year again. The time when companies descend on Stanford, Berkeley and other college campuses across the country to try and recruit top students as summer interns.

Most startup founders recognize that interns can be a critical resource for making new hires and getting part-time help at a discount. Startups, with their small bankroll and even smaller brand recognition, have to compete for the best talent with the likes of Google and Facebook who offer large hourly salaries, a great name on a resume, and access all summer to free beer and a sushi bar.

The machines are taking over! IBM’s Watson supercomputer soundly defeated its human opponents in the final round of man vs. machine on the Jeopardy TV show.

The computer defeated Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, after a three-night tournament that drew lots of chatter about the progress of artificial intelligence. It’s a testament to the talented human engineers at IBM who figured out how to make a machine that could beat a human at the popular TV game show.