A new upcoming report from Thomson Reuters unit CMR International declares that several positive trends are buoying the pharmaceutical industry to an all-time high in sales, which are projected to hit $1 trillion this year.

The CMR Factbook 2014 stated that global pharmaceutical sales reached a record of an estimated $980 billion last year and is expected to climb to a trillion dollars in 2014. On the other hand, the growth rate declined last year compared to previous years due to the patent expiration of several blockbuster drugs. The decline in growth was also attributed to cheaper generic drugs’ domination in the market.

Managers typically make portfolio decisions based on a series of logical justifications. The choice to invest, cut back, buy, or exit is ideally guided by the strength of a business’s structural attractiveness (business logic); the potential to improve the business or create synergy with other businesses (added-value logic); and the state of the capital markets—whether they are likely to over- or under-value the business relative to the net present value, or NPV, of its future cash flows (capital-markets logic).

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Learning how to code in San Francisco has become as hip as learning to how to DJ or eating $4 toast. From investment bankers to artists, everyone wants to beef up a skill that now seems as necessary as knowing how to read in this city’s startup fueled economy. With coding schools boasting job placement rates as high as 98% for graduates, and starting salaries as high as $110k, the rewards for learning how to code are instant and tangible.

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“The real promise of the technology revolution isn’t its products—it’s the new ways by which it has enabled us to express our humanity,” claims Bill Taylor, co-founder of the iconicFast Company magazine and author of the bestseller, Practically Radical.

“Today, smaller and smaller teams are building bigger and bigger things, faster,” he explains. In today’s marketplace—which is streamlined by technology and defined by abundant choice— “corporate muscle mass” such as factories and storefronts have lost the clout they had 50 years prior.

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The typical ways in which patients get matched up with clinical trials aren't exactly state of the art. At hospitals, clinical coordinators painstakingly sort through patient records, looking for people that fit the requirements of a given experimental treatment; meanwhile, patients bring their own Internet research to their doctors, asking if some new drug might help them. The Mayo Clinic is now seeking to improve this process by putting IBM Watson on the job. 

You know that taking frequent breaks is good for your productivity, focus, and creativity, but you just never seem to get around to it.

You feel stressed and exhausted when you hammer away at your keyboard all day, and the evidence is everywhere. A study earlier this year from the University of Toronto on lunch break patterns of office workers revealed the absence of a proper lunch break can actually lower productivity. John Trougakos, associate professor of Organizational Behavior & HR Management, who coauthored the study, argues our brains have a limited pool of psychological energy.

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What if whenever someone asked you a question, you had tons of innovative ideas waiting in response? You would be a hot commodity; who doesn’t want an ideas machine?

Unfortunately for those who want this power, the science behind the eureka moment is tricky. While cultivating great ideas is a process that can’t quite be produced at a moment’s notice, you can get better at thinking in ways that open yourself up to inspiration and, hopefully, generating better ideas.

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You’ve made it. You’re here. I can only assume you made it this far because you’re NOT doing things from nine-to-five that scare you sh*tless. Now that I have the assumption train rolling down the tracks, allow me to make one more sweeping—but, very calculated—generalization.

I’m fairly confident that the majority of you reading this post, at one point or another in your academic career, became visibly uncomfortable (I’m talking fingernail-biting, palm sweating, I’d-literally-rather-be-anywhere-but-here uncomfortable) anytime a professor stood in front of the class on presentation day, smiled, took a longer-than-normal pause, and simply said, “Alright, who wants to go first?”

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Venture Capital is a tricky industry. If you’re funding the same stuff as everybody else and if you started your activities when the clues were obvious you’re much less likely to drive enormous returns.

When Fred Wilson funded Twitter I guarantee you it wasn’t obvious that it was a billion dollar+++ idea. Far from it. Many questioned whether it could survive under the fail whale, inevitable competition from Facebook, founder fighting, fights with 3rd-party developers let alone become a revolutionary business that could make money. Lots of it. He couldn’t have imagined power users would be global political figures, dictatorships, small factions of people standing up to the Iranian army or every sports figure & celebrity in the world.

Forget what you know about how to maximize productivity.

That includes knowing which tasks can be breezed through with the help of a playlist, or exactly when to down that cup of coffee (or switch to another beverage) and when to mindlessly surf the web.

According to a new report published in Harvard Business Review, the key to unlock the greatest productivity isn’t necessarily in the hands of the individual employee. Rather, authors Ben Waber, Jennifer Magnolfi, and Greg Lindsay posit that chance and face-to-face encounters are the way anyone working in the knowledge economy is going to improve performance. That’s in spite of technology that keeps us “connected,” even when we work remotely.

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In this, perhaps, Golden Age of technology entrepreneurship, Peter Thiel can rest assured he will find an eager audience for his new book, ZERO TO ONE: Notes on startups, Or How to Build the Future (apparently he couldn’t decide).

Thiel, who turns 47 next month,  was a co-founder of PayPal, and a co-founder of the somewhat scary data firm Palantir. He’s well-known as the first outside investor in Facebook and oversees a hedge fund and his own venture capital firm, Founders Fund. Our crack team of wealth analysts here at Forbes have Thiel’s net worth pegged at $2.2 billion, as of Sept 12, 2014.

Image: Technology has made it easier than ever to start a company, but what skills and knowledge should new entrepreneurs fill their heads with and from which books should they get them from? (image credit: Rick & Brenda Beerhorst on Flickr)

For college seniors, returning to school in September is the beginning of the last hurrah: One last football season in the student section, one last round of fraternity and sorority rush and one last chance to host the epic house party that will be remembered for years to come.

Unfortunately, an impressive keg stand record doesn't count as a hard skill, and adjusting the margins on your resume to make it look beefier won't fool potential employers as easily as it did your Lit 201 professor. In today's competitive job market, now is the time to start thinking about post-grad plans, particularly if your resume is lacking.

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Or is it £55 million? Or $65 million? That depends on whether you’re an entrepreneur looking for to give away equity in return for investment, or an investor trying to leverage the best deal.

At least that’s the impression that TV shows like Dragons’ Den can create.

For entrepreneurs, putting a price on their companies is a crucial task that affects how much money they want to raise from investors, but it can be time consuming, costly, and for early stagers, very difficult to do.

Venture capital spending in Canada is still not back up to what it was prior to 2008, according to a recent report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the "OECD").1 The OECD found that Canada's venture and growth capital spending in 2012 was down by about 20% compared to 2007 levels.

Business loans in Canada were up during that time by about 5% for SMEs and total business loans were up by about 14%. In the US, business loans for SMEs were down by about 15% between 2007 and 2012, and, while venture capital spending during that period was also down in the US, it was down by 5% less than it was in Canada. Further, expansion and later stage funding in Canada is back up to 2007 levels, however, seed, startup and other early stage funding is not. The graph below highlights these trends.

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Venture capitalists maintain a heroic self-image even as other elements of the financial services industry have fallen into a degree of discredit. These guys aren't just shuffling money around — they're providing the financial sinews of innovation! But Diane Mulcahy of Babson College and the Kauffman Foundation says the entire sector is basically a huge scam.

She points out that the VC sector underperforms all the broad public stock indexes. You'd be better off investing your money in a nice S&P 500 index fund than with a sexy venture capital outfit. It's less risky, and the returns are higher.

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Not long ago, the division head of a multinational manufacturing company had a problem. After receiving an aggressive 12% annual growth target, she met with her team, and after a lot of research, meetings, and debates, they built a strategic plan around 17 key initiatives ranging from the overhaul of a production facility in Nebraska to fully integrating a new distributor in Nigeria. Everyone on the team was on board with the plan, and they were optimistic about its outcome. But just a weeks before the start of the fiscal year, they began to doubt their abilities to execute so many initiatives at once and they started second-guessing their overall direction.

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No one likes performance reviews, and one reason is that we've seemingly locked ourselves into a doctrine of numerical rankings. Your company might not be as extreme as Jack Welch’s GE, which famously relied on forced rankings to cull weaker managers (a system still in use by more than half of Fortune 500 firms as of 2012), but chances are your company has given you a number that puts you in a specific spot on the employee continuum. There must be a better way, and strategy+business turns to neuroscience to figure out what that is.

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If you can’t solve problems and enjoy it, you won’t make it as an entrepreneur. By definition, an entrepreneur is the first to undertake a given business, and firsts never happen without problems and people frustrations. The toughest problems are people problems, like personnel issues, but there are tough operational problems as well, such as vendor delays and quality surprises.

College Park, Md. — Brendan Iribe dropped out of the University of Maryland here, but before he did he amassed 227 parking tickets. And he managed to meet two business partners who would help him build the virtual-reality company Oculus VR, which Facebook bought this year for about $2-billion.

One of those parking tickets remains unpaid, but the university is likely to forgive it after Friday, when he gave $31-million to erect a computer-science building. That makes Mr. Iribe, who is 35 years old, the institution’s most generous donor ever.

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We're excited to have a guest post this week from Micah Rosenbloom, a partner at VC firm Founder Collective. Micah walks through some of the challenges and considerations of working with strategics (aka corporate VCs).

If you are a corporate VC or have experiences working with strategics and agree or disagree with Micah, leave your thoughts on the post.

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