Sometimes it’s more than just a case of the Mondays. When you don’t want to go to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday–or any day–you could be in a slump. Luckily, it’s not uncommon,  and it is something you can fix, says Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder.

“Fifty-five percent  of workers feel they have a job, not a career,” she says. “What’s important to remember is that while a single bad day is one thing, a lingering work rut can be detrimental to your happiness and overall career success.”

We all know that in the modern economy, we can’t just stop learning. But how to keep educating ourselves is a complicated question. Is it a worthwhile investment to get a formal degree, like an MBA or PhD? Should you take a more targeted approach, with a short-term executive education program? Or perhaps DIY it by signing up for an online offering, such as a MOOC?

Sales and marketing were once disciplines ruled by emotions. But somewhere along the way, we recognized that they were based on definable pipelines and applied technology to manage those pipelines. Today you can put a corporate dashboard in place to manage them and tweak the settings to try to boost your results.

What if we applied the same thinking to innovation? After all, innovation, like marketing and sales, is a pipeline. In one end go raw concepts and notions. Out the other end come actionable ideas that can move the business forward. With the right technology, could you manage this pipeline the way you manage a sales pipeline?

The venture capitalists who fuel Silicon Valley’s tech ecosystem raised less cash last quarter, slowing the frenzied flow of dollars gushing into the industry.

Nationwide, VCs raised $5.3 billion in the third quarter of this year, a sharp drop from the $10.9 billion they raised the quarter before, according to the Venture Monitor report released Monday evening by PitchBook Data and the National Venture Capital Association. That means there’s less capital available to fund the Bay Area’s next Facebook or Uber. But experts say that’s not necessarily bad, because it assuages fears of “bubbles” and inflation.

Law360, London (October 9, 2017, 2:18 PM BST) -- European leaders adopted new venture capital rules aimed at boosting investment in start-ups and innovative new companies on Monday as part of a major plan to expand the bloc’s capital markets.

The regulation was adopted at a meeting of the Agriculture and Fisheries Council, without discussion by European Council members, who define the bloc’s political priorities. It comes after directly elected members of the European Parliament voted for the measures in September.

Venture capital spending in 2017 is on track to be the highest in the last decade, while the number of transactions has shrunk to the lowest total in five years. That means deals between venture capitalists and companies are simultaneously getting both huge and hard to land, according to new data from PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

Image: https://www.recode.net

Every business professional I know faces the challenge of getting more things done on time, and getting the right things done. They all dream of working less, and accomplishing more. Yet I see that most are their own worst enemies. They seem to all fall victim to a common set of mistaken priorities and well-meaning distractions that keep them from exceeding their own objectives.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

CU Boulder’s crowdfunding program is an online platform that allows students, faculty and staff to raise money for projects, initiatives and experiences. Since 2014, many people have found success through the crowdfunding site, including Jen Forrester, a CU Boulder senior studying environmental design.

Jen and her team built a playground in a Lakewood, Colorado, neighborhood last spring. Great ideas can be expensive, but this project was made possible through CU’s crowdfunding program. Here is how Jen and her team benefitted by using CU Boulder Crowdfunding:

Image: http://www.colorado.edu/

Did you know that body language and tonality account for over 90 percent of how you're perceived by others? If you're only thinking about what you're going to say when meeting a new prospect without taking body language into account, you're missing a massive opportunity to turbocharge your approach.

A marketplace developed in rural India for low-income artisans to sell their wares sits largely vacant, used by only a select group of higher-income exporters. The reason: When planning the facility, government officials consulted only with people of similar high status. Elsewhere, a Panamanian entrepreneur with a bold vision of introducing organic coffee-farming techniques shuttered his business after just a few months. Although local farmers were interested, they were unable to assume the financial risk inherent in making the change.

Image: https://www.strategy-business.com

This is a driving principle for companies of all sizes as they plan for digital transformation. Open innovation can play an important role in accelerating digital transformation for existing businesses of all sizes across all industries.

Hackathons on open innovation platforms have become popular lately. Several Fortune 500 companies are leveraging developer communities to build solutions and improve existing processes. Businesses are using the principles of hackathons to break through organisational inertia by offering short intense bursts of creativity and problem-solving in a high energy atmosphere. In a hackathon environment, innovation can be accelerated with excellent results.

Five years ago, The Economist published an article called European Entrepreneurs – Les Misérables, arguing that the continent suffered from a chronic failure to encourage ambitious entrepreneurship. In it, the editors argued that Europe’s issue is not with encouraging entrepreneurship in general, but with creating new businesses destined for growth. 

Image: http://www.ecosysteminsights.org

Taiwan has in the past been synonymous with toy manufacturing and electrical components, but a growing revolution in agriculture is set to give the sweet-potato-shaped island a new area of influence in the global economy.

With a Mandarin speaking populace and geographical location that is less than two hours from Shanghai, Taiwan is also the perfect base for companies looking to profit in the lucrative Chinese market.

Sorry, Fitbit. We may soon have a battery-free wearable device that monitors your health--a bio-sensing tattoo.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School recently announced the development of the "Dermal Abyss," a health-monitoring tattoo that can turn your body surface into an interactive display. It is a development that should excite biohackers and transhumanists, but also have potentially large mainstream applications.

Image: From "Tattoos as medical condition monitors," YouTube video, by Harvard University. (Fair Use)

When you’re pitching investors, you need a great product and a great story–that much is a given. But those aren’t the only things venture capitalists are looking for. Just as emotional intelligence (EQ, or EI) has steadily crept to the fore in hiring, it’s also “a critical part in the process that we go through when deciding whether or not to invest in a company,” says Janet Bannister, general partner at Real Ventures. As Bannister sees it, “A leader with strong EQ can hire people to complement their skill set and cover for areas where they are weak. However, someone low in EQ will never be able to attract, retain, and motivate high performers–and therefore will have huge difficulties in scaling a company.”

A new list reveals which US cities are most ready to benefit from smart city technologies. The Smart City Benefits index claims to be the first comprehensive study designed to examine the relative potential benefits of smart city technology in America’s major metropolitan areas. Boston tops the list, followed by Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Austin.

Entrepreneurial policies promote high-technology job growth in regional contexts where there is already considerable high-tech employment, while two policies – SBIR and technology deployment policies – have direct, additive effects on high-tech job growth regardless of agglomeration and location factors. This is the finding of recently published research of in the Journal of Social Science Research, which considers the impact of sustained state investments in technology based economic development activities on high-technology job growth.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

Connecting with others is at the heart of human nature. Recent research emphasizes that the power of connections can help us be creative, resilient, even live longer. But we can easily overlook the importance of these bonds. As popular writer and researcher Adam Grant has noted, the pressure of tight deadlines and the pace of technology mean that fewer Americans are finding friendship in the workplace. In fact, many of us are further disconnecting from the people we work with: we’re more stressed out than ever, and half of us regularly experience incivility in our jobs.

Image: https://hbr.org

When the economy tanks as it did in the last recession, that’s a strong signal that things have to change, and it’s hard to miss. But most of us in business have to deal most of the time with weak signals, or change that is happening in a far more subtle way. These changes can be cultural, like the increasing need to be social, spawning Facebook and a hundred others, or technological, like the explosion of mobile devices around the world.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

BENGALURU: Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator, the accelerator behind some of the most-valued startups such as hospitality service Airbnb and payment processing company Stripe, is seeing the most applications from Indian startups after the US in its upcoming batches and expects the trend to continue.

In its two batches in 2017, the accelerator has already seen the entry of 18 Indian startups, more than the aggregate of 12 between 2011 and 2016.