At any given moment, most colleges are planning, building, renovating, or maintaining an infrastructure project. This special report examines how colleges’ buildings and grounds help them do their jobs better (or, in some cases, hinder them).  A well-designed space matters: It can encourage more interaction between students and faculty members, and it can help a rapidly expanding university serve a growing student body without having to choose between function and aesthetics.

Image: Bruce Damonte The U. of California at Merced's Science and Engineering Building II was designed by SmithGroupJJR.

Kannan Grant’s door in the UAH Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) is always open. "We proactively promote and support a culture of learning and innovation at UAH by creating and capitalizing on commercial opportunities that benefit our constituents," says Grant, who has served as the OTC’s director since late 2007, "and I think we provide a service that is becoming more important to research-intensive academic institutions such as UAH."

Image: OTC director Kannan Grant and Dr. Randy Gaillard are pictured with a mini-oligonucleotide synthesizer that was co-developed by Gaillard while a graduate student at UAH. Michael Mercier | UAH

For the founders of I-Select Fund, Craig Herron and Carter Williams and their partners, holding a conference like Davos on the Delta around the future of agriculture seemed like a no-brainer. According to them, the AgTech sector is a market ripe for rapid innovation and disruption with all the blessings and consequences inherent in each.

Jennifer Petriglieri, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, asks company leaders to consider whether they really need to relocate their high-potential employees or make them travel so much. She says moving around is particularly hard on dual-career couples. And if workers can’t set boundaries around mobility and flexibility, she argues, firms lose out on talent. Petriglieri is the author of the HBR article “Talent Management and the Dual-Career Couple.”

Founders can become myopic during the long, stressful process of fundraising. Many focus solely on the amount of money they’re going to raise, their valuation, and the brand name of the investors they are pitching.

Many Japanese visited Los Angeles during the Golden Week holidays to watch Shohei Ohtani play for the Angels. I was one of them and was impressed with not only his performance but also how he behaved as if he had been there for a long time. Watching him play in front of so many fans (the stadium was almost full even though the game was on a weekday) made me think of the significance of keeping an organization open to attract the best talent and stay competitive.

After his father was murdered on Chicago’s South Side and his mother was sent to prison, Derrius Quarles spent more than 12 years in foster care. Thankfully, a teacher who noticed his intellectual spark urged him to take his education seriously. He listened, worked hard and hustled to get more than $1 million in scholarships before enrolling at Morehouse College in 2012.

If you are a frequent reader of my posts, you may know we’ve been relentlessly highlighting the importance of organizational ambidexterity as vital requirement for modern dual corporate innovation approaches. Managing today’s business and creating future’s business successfully at the same time is probably the most demanding, yet indispensable challenge for future-proof organizations and their leaders.

There's a reason the most successful people in our society are often the most voracious — or dogged — readers.

Think about how many new ideas you're exposed to in the pages of a book, compared to days in a year of your life alone. Frequent readers are constantly engaged with new ways of thinking, alternate perspectives, and a habitual effort for self-betterment. None of these things are exactly hurdles to success.

Technology companies continue to be some of the most valuable private companies in the world, according to PitchBook's most recent list of the highest valuations of VC-backed companies.

Uber tops the list as of May 2018, but it's followed closely by its Chinese competitor, DiDi. In fact, there are a total of five ride-hailing companies on the list; Lyft, Indonesian GO-JEK, and Singapore's Grab are also on there.

The Tufts Launchpad offers over 15,000 square feet of rentable lab and office space in the heart of the city.

Image: Scientists work in the Launchpad space. ALONSO NICHOLS

Location, location, location doesn't just apply to your first apartment post-graduation; it also refers to what city you move to. Yes, there are tech jobs everywhere but some cities have more of a payoff.

For its annual salary survey, Dice.com, a career site for those in technology and engineering, got the input of over 10,000 professionals in 2017 about how much they make. The number of cities with average salaries in the six figures is half of what it was two years ago. Silicon Valley still has the highest at $114,654.

Image: Image credit: via PCMag - https://www.entrepreneur.com

Word is, early bird specials are going the way of VHS tapes and flip phones. But plenty of deals remain for folks who were alive during the Johnson administration.

I turned to my Retire With Money newsletter (sign up here!) and asked readers to tell me the best senior discounts available today. The answers flooded in and below we’ve rounded up 10 choice ones any one over 55 (or 50) should know about.

With over 50% of the working population working in a small business, according to U.S. government statistics, entrepreneurs are a vital part of the economy. They provide new millions of new jobs and put money back into the community. But not all of these entrepreneurs are successful.

Many entrepreneurs find themselves in trouble during the first year, with cash flow problems that they can’t seem to rectify in order to save their business, or unfocused offerings that do more to damage a reputation than help it grow. It is mistakes like these that can cost a business owner their livelihood and cause them to close their doors for good.

Image: Photos courtesy of individual members. Members share a few mistakes you can avoid making.   

Trying to build on Arizona’s significant investments in the life science discovery and healthcare delivery infrastructure, the state’s leaders are focused on bridging the funding gap that slows the growth of Arizona-based life science companies. Leaders of Arizona’s life science sector share a drive to accomplish a common goal: accelerate the growth of local companies that are developing and delivering innovative treatments that truly change lives.

Image: https://azbigmedia.com

We’ve all heard the mantras around failure.

“Fail fast. Fail often.”

“Love your failures.”

“You can’t succeed without failure.”

But why? Why is failure so important to innovation and success? Why are we constantly being told to embrace failure rather than run away from it?

We are told often it’s because we learn the most from our mistakes. If we aren’t failing, we aren’t pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

In my 25 years in business, I’ve come to believe that there is actually a deeper, more emotional reason failure is important to each of us, personally and professionally.

Image: http://innovationexcellence.com

A nationwide focus on innovation has changed how we live and work. Since the National Innovation Strategy was launched in 2014, innovation in the UAE has facilitated everything from cleaner energy to better data management and easier, more convenient services. The results are palpable to everybody who lives in the UAE, and they earned the country a six-point jump on the Global Innovation Index from 2016 to 2017. But has this innovation culture filtered into every part of the workplace?

This is part of a series of advice for founders who need to raise money from venture capitalists. The first in the series is “Lemons Ripen Early,” which also has a link to other posts.

The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them.

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has created a $10 million accelerator fund to speed up the commercialization of research at the school. It's starting with two investments in drug-development ventures.

The i3 Asset Accelerator will provide capital and business development support to its researchers. Icahn joins a growing group of local medical schools—including NYU Langone, Weill Cornell, Columbia and SUNY Downstate—that have dedicated funds to commercialize their research.

Image: hoto: Courtesy of Mount Sinai - Lium says Mount Sinai’s accelerator will quickly evaluate projects.

When the World Happiness Report announced recently that Finland is the happiest country in the world, we Finns reacted the same way as we have reacted to other top rankings in various international comparisons: we criticized the methodology of the study, questioned its conclusions and pointed to the shortcomings of Finnish society.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. When the World Economic Forum ranked Finland as the most competitive economy in Europe in 2014, the chief executive of the Finnish chamber of commerce, Risto Penttilä, felt obliged to write an opinion piece for the Financial Times where he tried to prove that the results couldn’t be right.