I was pulling together background materials on the Bayh-Dole Act assisting a 13 year old student who asked for help on a paper she’s writing when the news broke that the Pakistani Taliban had attacked a school killing children her age and younger. The theme of her paper is leadership that’s made an impact on the world. Even in the 9th grade she knows that encouraging innovation makes the world a better place. The contrast between her insight and the madness also taking place recalled a prior experience.

December is the time to set goals for the year ahead. Whether it’s making a resolution or forming a strategic plan, most of us are looking forward. But December should also be the time to look back and glean lessons from the current year.

Ten entrepreneurs, CEOs, and industry leaders share the challenges they encountered in 2014 and the lessons they’ll carry forward:

1. ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL IS NOT A GLOBAL STRATEGY — Hill Ferguson, chief product officer for PayPal

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com/ 

Sleep is a strange and wondrous thing.

According to various research, it helps repair and rejuvenate our bodies, boost our moods and memory, and, interestingly, even spurs our creativity.

By assisting the brain in flagging unrelated ideas and memories and forging connections among them, sleep has been found to improve our abilities to come up with creative solutions to problems. One neurologist at Harvard Medical School even found that if an incubation period—a time in which a person leaves an idea for a while—includes sleep, people are 33% more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The resume: there are so many conflicting recommendations out there. Should you keep it to one page? Do you put a summary up top? Do you include personal interests and volunteer gigs? This may be your best chance to make a good first impression, so you’ve got to get it right.

As two of his business units were completing their merger, Peter Noll, chief of the Diagnostics division at the Frankfurt-based Scherr Pharmaceuticals, felt it was time to address a nagging issue: The combined entity had no overarching revenue model.

This deficiency had been weighing on him for a year, ever since the merger had been approved by the CEO, the executive team, and the board. Although the two units had similar products, they relied on different strategies to earn their money.

Plasmonics is the study of the interaction between light and free electrons inside metals to form waves called plasmons on the surface of these materials. There is a great deal of interest in plasmons because they can carry information at high speed across computer chips, act as sensors because they are highly sensitive to the properties of the materials they travel across and might even be useful for high resolution lithography because of their extremely small wavelength.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com/ 

A real Christmas tree that's cut from the woods and installed in your home, requires time to care for. And a fake one, while less likely to set your house on fire, calls for yearly dusting and a complicated set up.

For those who just don't care to assemble a traditional tree, there are holiday alternatives that may be better suited for your needs.

Image: IMGUR, WEALLWANTRICHES 

Every single Saturday morning, a grand Australian tradition takes location: Thousands of people nursing hangovers drop an orange disc into a glass of water, down the resulting bubbly drink, and hope for a speedy end to their sorrows. The orange disc is referred...

I have said many times that teamwork is overrated. It can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team: be a team player or lose your job, is the implication in many workplaces. One of my main concerns with teams is that people are placed on them by those holding hierarchical power and are then told to work together (or else). However, there are usually power plays internal to the team so that being a team player really means doing what the leader says. For example, I know many people who work in call centres and I have heard how their teams are often quite dysfunctional. Teamwork too often just means towing the party line.

Image: http://jarche.com/ 

For Sony Corp., crowdfunding is a way to raise in-house entrepreneurs who could become future leaders of the company, according to Hiroki Totoki, the executive who runs the program.

Crowdfunding, in which entrepreneurs raise money from a large group of investors via websites, is typically seen as a tool for those who don’t have the backing of a big company. But Mr. Totoki, who also leads Sony’s smartphone business, said it was useful for encouraging a spirit of independence among the company’s younger engineers.

Image: Hiroki Totoki, who leads Sony’s smartphone business and in-house entrepreneurship program, speaks at a news conference on Oct. 31. Bloomberg News  

As Instagram hit a milestone this month, with its number of monthly active users ballooning to 300 million, TIME, in association with the photo-sharing app, takes a look back at the key moments of 2014.

The selection of images, shared by some of Instagram’s most popular and respected photographers, offers an intimate view of some of the defining events of the year: From the toll of war in Gaza to the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and from the border between Mexico and the U.S. all the way to Mongolia, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

Image: SCOUT TUFANKJIAN (@STUFANKJIAN) VIA INSTAGRAM 

Over the last fifty or sixty years most towns have been dedicated to accommodated cars in order to cultivate business and permit people to live better more convenient lives. For new developments out in a former corn field this was effortless since everything was custom built with the automobile in mind. But older towns that had been built prior to mass motoring were at a distinct disadvantage.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com/ 

Any way you cut it, 2014 has been a remarkable year for the innovation economy. The pace of disruption and growth today is faster than any time I’ve seen in Silicon Valley Bank’s 30-year history.

Is it a bubble or for real? December saw the return of a hefty investor appetite for tech IPOs, most notably Lending Club. The peer-to-peer loan company (and SVB client) saw its price spike more than 50 percent on the first day of trading, making it the largest tech IPO from the Bay Area this year.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

It’s been a fast-paced year for 3D printing, with more capital, more companies, and more big ideas than ever. Behind the scenes, we’ve witnessed no fewer than 50 new ventures raising money in the 3D printing sector. That doesn’t include more than 40 crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter alone.

Image: : Keith Kissel/Flickr 

Changes in technology are happening at a scale which was unimaginable before and will cause disruption in industry after industry. This has really begun to worry me, because we are not ready for this change and most of our leading companies won’t exist 15–20 years from now. Here are five sectors to keep an eye on:

Moonlighting can be big business. As Americans,  the idea of moonlighting isn’t new. We know of many business people who started off working on the weekends or in the evenings after work. For some, this brought in a little extra income or possibly even a new career path. For others, though, it could be the path to a $3 or even a $130 million business.

A lot of weird stuff happened in 2014, from the Ellen DeGeneres super selfie and Charles Manson getting married in jail. But perhaps the strangest of all is the vocabulary we picked up this year.

Like with any job or hobby, there's a necessary amount of jargon that you need to know to get by — or at least understand what people are saying when talking to you.

Here are the words that dominated 2014. It's never too late to brush up on your made-up English.

Image: MASHABLE 

SAN FRANCISCO — Major U.S. coastal cities, including Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, North Carolina, have already slipped past a sea level rise-related “tipping point,” and into a new era of increasingly common and damaging coastal flooding events, a new study found.

Other cities along the East and Gulf Coasts are following close behind, with the majority of coastal areas in the U.S. expected to see 30 or more days of “nuisance-level flooding” each year by 2050, regardless of how significantly countries cut emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming, according to the study.

California remains one of the top science and technology states in the country, but is not keeping pace in its high-tech workforce development, according to the most recent analysis by the Milken Institute.

The State Technology and Science Index, produced by the Milken Institute's California Center, tracks and examines important factors behind technology-based economic development in the United States. The index is intended to help break down the components that allow leading states to build and maintain their preeminence in high technology, and help others to develop their strengths in the field.

Image: California's score in human capital investment on the State Science & Technology Index has declined since the Index was begun in 2002. Source: The Milken Institute.

I always look forward to the annual Techstars video. I enjoy seeing it, and usually enjoy being part of it.

This year I’m one of your favorite Sesame Street characters. Hang in there for New Years Resolution #9.