I am nothing if not a consumerist. Meaning, I am constantly impressing upon companies I work with to make sure they have a deep and empathic understanding of their customers…past, present, and future, especially if they are contemplating a strategic shift that entails repositioning or refocusing their efforts to target new and different segments.

Generally speaking, most companies are pretty good at getting out and rubbing elbows with customers to conduct the kind of ethnographic research that involves watching customers in their user habitat. The challenge that all of them have is turning their observations into insights that produce a new strategy and competitive advantage. Some are better than others at it, of course, and some are masters at it, but it is always a challenge.

Image: http://innovationexcellence.com

The reported death of the middle economy is greatly exaggerated. There are 30 million good jobs in the United States today that pay without a BA (bachelor’s degree). These good jobs have median earnings of $55,000 annually (Figure 1). Traditionally, many people with good jobs that pay without a BA have worked in manufacturing. Those jobs are declining while the number of good jobs in skilled-services industries, such as health services and financial services, is increasing.

These trends vary across states. Twenty-three states gained good blue-collar jobs from 1991 to 2015. For instance, Utah had a 105 percent increase in good blue-collar jobs, and Nevada had a 50 percent increase. However, many Northeast and Midwest states saw steep declines: Rhode Island lost 39 percent of its good blue-collar jobs for workers without BAs during this period. New York saw a 31 percent decline in these jobs, and Pennsylvania saw a 27 percent decline. Good jobs in skilled-services industries increased in most states, growing by almost 200 percent in Arizona and 124 percent in Texas

In 2001 the list of companies with the highest market caps was dominated by blue chips. General Electric, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Walmart, and CitiGroup — all were businesses led by managers who were experts in efficiency and optimization and who grew their businesses by making them work better than they had previously.

Fast forward to the present, and the list looks strikingly different. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway now top the list, with Alibaba, Facebook, and Tencent close behind. They are for the most part young firms led by founders and their teams, bold leaders who continually prioritize new growth over efficiencies to their core businesses.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved the first drug in the U.S. with a digital ingestion tracking system. Abilify MyCite (aripiprazole tablets with sensor) has an ingestible sensor embedded in the pill that records that the medication was taken. The product is approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute treatment of manic and mixed episodes associated with bipolar I disorder and for use as an add-on treatment for depression in adults.

The system works by sending a message from the pill’s sensor to a wearable patch. The patch transmits the information to a mobile application so that patients can track the ingestion of the medication on their smart phone. Patients can also permit their caregivers and physician to access the information through a web-based portal.

If you have chosen to go the investment route when funding your company, you should know that every investor has one major question on their mind: “What is your exit strategy?” That is, “How do I cash out my shares and get my money back?”

There are two common standards to think about, acquisition and IPO, when it comes to exiting (also called a liquidity event). You should be familiar with both before you sit down with any investor and consider asking for a check.

Happiness changes over the course of your life.

There is "scientific evidence that people get happier as they get older," according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report that analyzed Nielsen data. "While there are differing theories as to why this is, most agree that it is an acceptance of aging that promotes contentedness."

But the path to happiness doesn't increase with every birthday.

People report the lowest levels of well-being in their 50s. That's the age at which most folks begin seriously thinking about retirement plans, figuring out how to pay for their kids' college tuition, making plans for their aging parents, and maybe even running into health issues.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

Want to feel younger? Consider moving to Boca Raton, Fla., where the median age is just over 50 years old — much higher than America’s median age of 37.9. If, on the other hand, you want to feel older and wiser, pack your bags for a college town. Flagstaff, Ariz. and College Station, Texas have median ages near 23 years old, according to 2016 Census data for cities with more than 65,000 people.

While college towns and retirement communities represent extremes, there are also age trends in urban and suburban areas, says William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “Suburbs are aging more rapidly than cities, due to the fact that baby boomers were a big part of the suburbanization of the United States in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “They grew up there, and now they’re like anchors of the suburbs.”

As one of the exceedingly rare members of her species to live beyond age 110, Goldie Michelson had divulged her secrets to longevity countless times before dying last year at 113.

“Morning walks and chocolate,” the Gloucester, Mass., resident and onetime oldest living American told the steady stream of inquisitors that marked her final years.

Unlike the growing ranks of nonagenarians and centenarians, those who breach a 12th decade, known as supercentenarians, rarely face protracted illness or disability before they die, a boon that many of them have ascribed to personal habits.

For years, Houston's tech community was considered to lack cohesion. Houston has a lot of tech workers, but they're siloed in energy companies, the Medical Center, the space industry, academia at Rice & UH, and in the PC business at HP to the north. And local tech startups must compete with the lure of Austin when it came to attracting talent.

But there is a growing startup community, and Houston's quality of life has improved dramatically. Still can the sprawl of tech's footprint, which matches the spread of the city's 600 square miles, be overcome?  Or has the community finally reached "critical mass"?

Image: http://www.houstonchronicle.com

Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi, President and Chief Executive Officer at Emergent BioSolutions Inc., joins BioTalk host Rich Bendis, to discuss his background, where Emergent is headed, the vaccines and BioHealth industries, and his views on BioHealth Capital Region.

This new podcast series features conversations with some of the most accomplished and exciting business, academic, and government leaders in the biohealth industry. Learn from these leaders about issues which can help you grow your business. What are the current trends? Where are industry sectors headed? How do we increase access to capital in our region? Rich and his guests dive deep into these topics and much more.

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), in partnership with EdScoop, today revealed the contents of a virtual EdTech Time Capsule, the culmination of a national crowdsourcing project that sought to identify the top 25 products, people and developments that transformed education through technology over the last 25 years.

The time capsule recognizes nine innovators and 16 innovations, with a handful of others included as honorable mentions.

It isn’t often that the broad infrastructure that underlies industrial civilization undergoes a dramatic transformation. But just such a change appears to be happening now. In a great wave of technological change, sensors are spreading through factories and warehouses, software is predicting the need for maintenance before a machine breaks down, power grids and loading docks are becoming intelligent, and custom-designed parts are being produced on demand. The leaders of the next industrial revolution are companies making advances in fields such as robotics, machine learning, digital fabrication (including 3D printing), the Industrial Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and blockchain (a system of decentralized, automated transaction verification).

Tech giants Google, Microsoft, and eBay all use blue, yellow, red, and green as their logo colors. But those hues made an indelible mark on consumer tech 40 years ago with a product from Milton Bradley, a board-game company with roots stretching back to the Civil War. The colors differentiated the four wide plastic arcs on the face of an electronic party game called Simon.

Named after the classic children’s game “Simon Says,” the new toy tested players’ memories by making them repeat progressively longer patterns of lights and associated sounds by pressing the four colored buttons. Pressing the wrong button or failing to press one in time yielded an insulting raspberry sound. Simon sold for $25–about $92 in today’s dollars—and became a phenomenon that holiday season.

Image: Simon Classic, today’s most direct descendant of the original game. (Photo: Courtesy of Hasbro)

So, you want to spend smarter. You want to learn how to evaluate your financial decisions more rationally. You want to know what money mistakes you’re making and how to fix them.

But, you want to just read this short article to do so. Interesting. Well, we a) applaud you for saving the cost of our book, but b) suggest that you’re not correctly valuing our effort, and c) offer you the short version of some of what we’ve learned:

Why, all of a sudden, are so many successful business leaders urging their companies and colleagues to make more mistakes and embrace more failures?

In May, right after he became CEO of Coca-Cola Co., James Quincey called upon rank-and-file managers to get beyond the fear of failure that had dogged the company since the “New Coke” fiasco of so many years ago. “If we’re not making mistakes,” he insisted, “we’re not trying hard enough.”

When our analysis of STEM talent began five years ago, the state lagged the national average for degree production, ranking 43rd among states for the share of college degrees awarded in STEM disciplines. In 2016, Illinois rose to ninth. This transformational growth, especially in health and computer science disciplines, has positioned the state as a national leader for STEM talent.

Computer science (CS) degrees have seen unprecedented growth in Illinois, reaching a record high in 2016. The state has more than doubled its production of CS degrees over the last five years, and is the second largest producer in the country. Aiding this growth is the number of international and immigrant students in the field. A staggering 49.9 percent of CS degrees were awarded to international and immigrant students in 2016.

The stories are almost legend. The barista who hustled his way into Uber, learning coding in quiet hours at the coffee shop, all without a college degree. The guy with a 2.5 high school GPA and a few college credits at a satellite campus who snagged himself an engineering job at Google.

The key to their success -- hustle -- won’t be surprising to you. Stories like these trade on hard work by people willing to find their own teachers to learn the trade.

A wave of disappointing third-quarter results and clinical trial failures by the largest biotechs in late October 2017 signaled to some the start of another market swoon, akin to the one that dented share prices starting in late 2015 through 2016.

“Biotech Heads for Worst Slump Since 2015 After Disappointing Earnings,” predicted a Bloomberg headline on an October 26, 2017 story that followed a week of largely bad news. While Amgen and Celgene led the parade of bearish biotech news, investors were also rattled by President Donald Trump’s renewal of his on-again, off-again verbal volleys against prescription drug prices: “We want to bring our prices down to what other countries are paying, or at least close,” Trump told reporters October 16 (See 3:18 of the clip), adding: “The drug companies, frankly, are getting away with murder.”

Some people have the gift of gab, and can talk to anyone about anything. And some people struggle to make small talk. What separates the two isn’t knowing what to talk about; it’s polishing up your communication skills so you can keep a good conversation going.

“Good conversations require a give and take, just like keeping a ball in the air during a game of catch,” says Anne Green, president and CEO of CooperKatz & Company, a communications and media-training firm with clients that include Richard Branson. “When someone directs a question your way–when the ball is thrown to you–you should always respond with an answer that will continue the flow of dialogue, passing the ball back and never letting it drop.”

Google’s growing focus on healthcare artificial intelligence has been crystalized through its new accelerator program. The scheme is aimed at fostering startup enterprises that are set to introduce technological solutions for healthcare.

The new Google venture is called the Launchpad Studio and it was unveiled in November 2017. The aim is to provide a new health-orientated artificial intelligence access path to Google experts for start-up companies to take advantage of.

Image: http://www.digitaljournal.com