Last year, Neil deGrasse Tyson came to Salt Lake City to speak as part of the Tanner Lecture Series. Before he gave his speech, I had the opportunity to briefly speak with him, and he said something amazing.

We were talking about what I wanted to do, and I said that I hoped to be an engineer. He asked me, "You hope to be an engineer?" I said that, yes, I did. He said, "If there was an asteroid about to destroy the Earth, would you hope that it missed, or would you do something about it?" The obvious answer was that I would do something about it. Then he said the words I won't forget, "Hope is for those who are not in control."

by Kurt Matzler, Johann Füller, Britta Koch, Julia Hautz, and Katja Hutter (Strategie und Leadership, hrsg. Von Matzler, Kurt; Pechlander, Harald; Renzl, Birgit. Springer, 2014)

Strategy development has traditionally been exclusive (i.e. job of the top management team) and secretive (to protect competitive advantages). Web 2.0 technologies offer new opportunities for internal and external collaboration, allowing more open and participatory modes of strategizing.

Not too long ago at a reception, one of my faculty colleagues at Johns Hopkins expressed concern about her academic future. The spend line for National Institutes of Well being (NIH) grants in her field was 7 % that means that she has to commit two or three weeks writing a proposal that has only a 7 % possibility of receiving funded. Assuming she need to create 14 proposals to get a single funded (a 7 % price), then she will be spending her whole year writing proposals and not in fact undertaking the operate. Due to the fact of this low acceptance rate, she is evaluating her choices about remaining a researcher right after getting gotten a lot of NIH grants and getting written over 60 peer reviewed articles in major journals.

Image: http://www.bulletinstandard.org

When computer scientist Michelle Lee joined Google as its first head of patent strategy, the company held a few dozen intellectual property grants. When she left eight years later, Google’s portfolio spanned 10,500 patents.

The patent explosion inside Google during Lee’s tenure there is emblematic of how much the U.S. economy relies on innovation — and how protection of intellectual property is essential to perpetuating that cycle.

When Steve Jobs famously recruited John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple, Jobs is reported to have asked Sculley, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"

There is no doubt that innovation has and is truly changing the world. Since the beginning of time, consider how nearly every basic human activity has followed the same pattern: People toil for long periods of time, and at great expense and great human sacrifice, to complete a repetitive task — until someone innovates a solution. Practically overnight, that previously difficult task is made easy, inexpensive and sometimes even obsolete.

Image: Tony Jeff (Photo: Special to The Clarion-Ledger)

For creatures without opposable thumbs, chameleons are exceptionally good at reaching out and grabbing things. That's thanks to their very special tongues. At one and a half times a chameleon's body length, these tongues can dart out and snatch prey on impact with sticky, gripping flaps of skin. In fact, Chameleon tongue mechanics are so ingenious that they inspired the design of a new robot hand.

Want to master the CMO role? Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited and we're limiting attendance to CMOs and top marketing execs. Request your personal invitation here! This sponsored post is produced by Ahrefs.com.

What if you could you see the Internet’s most-read stories all at once? That’s exactly what designer Anna Vital set out to do by visualizing the results of some exhaustive research into the most read online content. Ahrefs crunched one of the largest indexes of backlinks in the world — and Vital then used this to portray the most shared, commented, liked, and tweeted media articles. You could say the result shows just what the Internet thinks about.

Image: Funders and Founders

Want to master the CMO role? Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited and we're limiting attendance to CMOs and top marketing execs. Request your personal invitation here!

Life science companies are continuously looking for ways to advance clinical research while simultaneously improving the understanding of drugs they are developing. One of the biggest issues for researchers is the high failure rate of new drugs during clinical development. The stakes are high in a global pharma market that is expected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2018.

Like many inventors, Bob Nepper, 82, is a compulsive improver. Nepper, an electrical engineer who lives in North St. Paul, Minnesota, has pet projects that have included a self-guided lawn mower and an outside faucet that can run hot and cold. His basement is stocked with tools like a lathe and a milling machine to craft his ideas.

But Nepper, who retired from 3M Company decades ago, is most obsessed with building a low-cost way to purify water in the world’s poorest countries.

Image: Angela Jimenez / New York Times News Service - Bob Nepper, an electrical engineer who retired from 3M Company decades ago, is working on a low-cost way to purify water in the world’s poorest countr

New entrepreneurs who want to survive, and optimize the growth of their startups, need to think globally, and act locally, from day one. This approach, popularly known as glocalization, means you have to design and deliver global solutions that have total relevance to every local market in which you operate.

Australian photographer Ray Collins pulls himself out of bed in the early hours, while the darkness still falls heavy outside.

By the time the light trickles from behind the horizon, Collins is treading water, his body rolling in the heaving ocean. He holds his camera and waits for the perfect set. He analyzes the turbulent seas in search of the morning's most photogenic peaks and perfect breaks.

Image: RAY COLLINS 

Surely one of the most glorious absurdities of American capitalism is that it's easier to raise money online to make some potato salad than, say, to start an actual business. Of course, it should be more difficult to get people to invest in an idea than in a side dish. But it shouldn’t be this hard.

Dr Uday Phadke, CEO of Cartezia and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Cambridge Judge Business School, is one of the guest panellists at the Research & Development Society event ‘If We Build It…’ Creating a strategic and sustainable vision for UK R&D which is looking at the infrastructure needed to support a world-class innovation ecosystem in the UK and also aiming to increase the understanding of national R&D priorities around knowledge transfer, skills supply and competiveness for effective and sustainable innovation.

On Tuesday, April 7th, MOGUL had the opportunity to attend an exclusive panel discussion sponsored by Staples which featured Shark Tank’s Lori Greiner.

An expert in retail, having launched over 450 products and holding 120 US patents, Greiner is an entrepreneurial powerhouse who has a multitude of valuable pointers when it comes to starting your own business. Prior to turning that entrepreneurial dream into a reality, she advised that you do in depth market research to assess if there is a genuine need for the product.

Image: http://socialmediaweek.org

The U.S. government's patent chief today pledged to accelerate the pace of patent applications in a meeting with Detroit area start-ups.

Michelle Lee, the new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property, said the agency is aiming to be more responsive to tech companies that are seeking patents.

Image: Salwan Georges Special to the Free Press

Like a lot of people, you may be vaguely uncomfortable with how much Google knows about you. It makes a great deal of money mining your search history in order to help various companies serve you targeted ads, and even though it doesn't sell your data to advertisers now, you never know if it might change its mind sometime down the road.

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. – Francis Of Assisi

Days are hectic. Emails amass. Crises arise. With endless distractions and responsibilities how can you remain productive each and every day?

It's not as complicated as you might think. Here are my 6 top tips:

Your business can’t be all things to all people, and excel at anything. Every entrepreneur and every business needs a strategy to keep them focused. In fact, in this new world of pervasive interactivity, it’s time to rethink even how to develop a strategy. Strategy used to come from the inside looking out, but now it must come from a dialogue and engagement with constituents.

The tech incubator 1776 is a collegial place, with offices painted in lively colors, couches to greet visitors, and members who share seats, desks and the fixings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

It’s an atmosphere carefully cultivated by its founders, Evan Burfield and Donna Harris, and it helped position the outfit as a caretaker, connector and capital provider for tomorrow’s big technology companies.

Demo days from startup accelerators tend to have a formula. One by one, the CEO of each “accelerated” startup runs onstage to thumping music—or in the case of one CEO at the Techstars NYC Demo Day on Friday, the theme song from The Lion King—to enthusiastically deliver a PowerPoint pitch to a dark theater packed with investors, press, and hangers-on.

At best, a startup demo day is a showcase of new and exciting startups. At worst, it’s a collage of meaningless big numbers, naive promises to change the world, and cheesy sales pitches. In any case, it is a performance, meant to keep energy high and investors intrigued.

Image: http://fortune.com