How leaders communicate has a tremendous impact on their ability to lead and influence others, and on their personal success. Yet unknown by many is that most communication is unconscious.

Nick Morgan, communications expert and author of Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact, has looked at recent brain and behavioral science revelations about how humans communicate, and how effective communicators use subtle gestures, visual cues, sounds, and signals that elicit emotion.

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Yesterday, hardware stole the show at the Apple unveiling. But Apple’s most impressive achievement on display at yesterday’s announcement was not a technological feat — although the technology on display was certainly impressive.

Apple’s great feat was the use of their scale to swiftly get the world lined up behind a new model for payments. Apple Pay will be more secure, it will be easier, and it will probably be more profitable for the payments industry as a whole by shifting people away from cash (at least for the time being). But putting it into practice required an entire ecosystem to move in unison — merchants, consumers, credit card companies, and banks. Something that only a company with the massive reach of Apple could do.

For those of you still scratching your head over the ins-and-outs of Hive, Spark and Pig, don't bother. There's a race on to make complex Big Data technology like Hadoop easy for the lay user, and it has the added benefit of making you rich.

Yes, you.

After all, the closer you are to the end user of Big Data technology, the bigger the paycheck. Former Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher nailed this years ago in a research brief, arguing that the "biggest winners in the Big Data world aren’t the Big Data technology vendors, but rather the companies that will leverage Big Data technology to create entirely new businesses or disrupt legacy businesses." 

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Venture capital Limited Partner Agreements look very similar. The formula goes something like this: 10 year fund, 4 year investing period, 2% management fee and 20% carried interest. The implications of these terms can help explain why venture capitalists work the way they do, and help founders ask the right questions of their investors.

Patents are complex documents that bury a handful of important sentences under a mountain of fluff and jargon. If you’re going to read a patent (and I urge you not to) you might as well start with the important parts, and read them correctly.

Let’s suppose you want to figure out whether your new technology might infringe some patent. Here’s a simple strategy I might use to start the infringement analysis.

Today’s job market is increasingly competitive. Young professionals in the workforce are faced with a mountain of educational debt and the decision to continue with their career, or go back to school. While an MBA might be the right career move for someone in the financial sector, it might not be the right move for everyone.

The MBA is now the most popular master’s degree in the U.S., making up one quarter of all such degrees conferred. But a few schools are recognizing that a different course of study might better serve both aspiring business leaders and the world at large: a master’s in social work.

The University of Southern California’s School of Social Work just launched a business concentration for its students, and a number of universities now offer joint MBA-MSW degrees.

Even though the color of their money is always green, all startup investors are not the same. Struggling entrepreneurs are often so happy to get a funding offer that they neglect the recommended reverse due diligence on the investors. Taking on equity investors to fund your company is much like getting married – it is a long-term relationship that has to work at all levels.

Crowdfunding has become the way to raise money for all kinds of projects in the early 21st century. Businesses, nonprofits, artists, and entrepreneurs of various stripes have all succeeded in running startup funding campaigns on one of the many crowdfunding platforms that have sprung up in recent years.

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Some of the greatest health care innovations have taken decades to reach widespread adoption, adding to the ever-increasing cost of health care.

We are looking for solutions that have already been implemented at least once and have demonstrated effectiveness. This "scale-up" competition seeks to shorten the time frame for innovation dissemination.

TrueBridge Capital Partners, one of the few remaining fund-of-funds managers focused exclusively on venture capital, closed its third venture-focused fund of funds at $408 million, which includes the general partner commitment.

The Chapel Hill, N.C., firm, which exceeded the $325 million target for TrueBridge-Kauffman Fellows Endowment Fund III LP, said it attracted capital from investors that include the endowment of Lehigh University, which backed the firm’s previous fund of funds, and agricultural company Syngenta AGSYNN.VX -0.62%.

The country’s leading organization of technology management officials reported today the results of its annual licensing survey showing steady growth in the patenting and licensing of new technologies and a 16% increase in the number of new technology business enterprises in 2013.

Meeting this week in Washington the Board of Directors of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) released the highlightsof its annual Licensing Activity Survey covering technology transfer activities in Fiscal Year 2013. The Highlights Report is available on AUTM’s web site: www.autm.net.

Tech is in a state of constant state of evolution. That seems like a throwaway statement, until you start to think about how quickly you can get left behind when you don’t keep with emerging trends. Technology trends are, after all, disruptive trends. Even within tech though, there are different levels of disruption.

The tech industry is hurting itself and the U.S. economy by limiting opportunities for women in the most innovative fields, according to a Stanford scholar.

Women are ready to take on key problems and challenges in technology, says Vivek Wadhwa, a technology entrepreneur and fellow with Stanford's Rock Center for Corporate Governance. But when women go to venture capitalists seeking financing for their new startups, he says, they are often treated differently than men. Stanford News Service recently interviewed Wadhwa about the tech world gender gap.

Since their inception in the 1940s, the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories have been in the vanguard of America’s global research and development leadership. However, the national innovation system has changed in the past 70 years. 

Today, much technology development and application occurs in the context of synergistic regional clusters of firms, trade associations, educational institutions, private labs, and regional economic development organizations. Unfortunately, legacy operating procedures limit the DOE labs’ ability to engage fully with the regional economies in which they are located. This lack of consistent engagement with regional technology clusters has likely limited the labs’ overall contributions to U.S. economic growth.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) released a new study on American entrepreneurship, and the results are fascinating. The study created an entrepreneurship index by state in order to rank which states were the best (and worst) places to start a new business in the U.S.

Nowadays, global business changes at such a stunning pace, entry-level professionals barely have time to acclimate themselves to a new company, a new competitive environment, or new operational requirements. The challenges faced by young workers include lack of experience, a complex corporate world, and business education that is too theoretical and out of sync with companies’ day-to-day needs.

The biggest misconception about success is thinking that what you did yesterday will help you succeed tomorrow. But in order to stay on top of your game, your business, your leadership, you need to keep innovating.

To continue innovating you have to keep learning, thinking, questioning, exploring, experimenting, associating, and intersecting ideas.

Image: Thomas Edison was a successful innovator, in part because he was constantly trying new things. (AP Photo/J. Walter Thompson)

With millions of students returning to school — both K-12 and college — this is a good time to review the intriguing results of some research that Gallup did over the past year, exploring the linkages between education and long-term success in the workplace. That is: What are the things that happen at a college or technical school that, more than anything else, produce “engaged” employees on a fulfilling career track? According to Brandon Busteed, the executive director of Gallup’s education division, two things stand out. Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school.

We already turn to the Internet for help making countless little decisions like where to go out to dinner or what movie to watch. Now one startup thinks the Web can help you work out life’s biggest decisions, too—like whether or not to get married, go back to school, buy a house, or have a child.

Cloverpop launched a public beta test of its website on Tuesday that anyone can access for free, and anonymously. Previously, in a private beta test, the site had about 2,500 users who asked 1,100 unique questions, the most popular of which concerned jobs, moving, school, and relationships, founder and CEO Erik Larson says.

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