Worldwide regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in biopharmaceutical and medical technology research, the Prix Galien recognizes outstanding biomedical and technology product achievement that improves the human condition.

Image: http://www.galienfoundation.org 

I was at Stanford in the Graduate School of Business and was interviewed by Peter Gardner of StartGrid for his On The Road podcast. I shared my current thinking about innovation in companies and government agencies.

It’s worth a listen.

BTW, it seems every podcast has a trick last question. This one was, “if I was on a road trip what’s the destination and what’s playing on the radio?”

The organization binding Kansas City’s coworking businesses hopes to set a world record for the largest single gathering of coworkers.

Organized by the Kansas City Coworking Alliance, KC Coworking Day will gather hundreds of entrepreneurs, freelancers and others to set the coworking world record at Plexpod Westport Commons on Aug. 9. The event will also recognize International Coworking Day.

Founder of KCCA Melissa Saubers said that the world record has not yet been set and that doing so will be a great opportunity for the Kansas City coworking industry. She hopes the event will attract more people than those who are already members at coworking spaces.

The billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are fighting publicly about the future of artificial intelligence.

On Sunday afternoon, while smoking some meats in his back garden, Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, questioned why Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, was being so negative about AI.

Image: Steve Jurvetson - https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/18659265152/  - Elon Musk

More often than not, pitching VC firms means pleading your case to white men. This is no easy feat for women entrepreneurs who, at best, may be easily dismissed or, at worst, may be taken advantage of. The solution, of course, is to overhaul the culture and demographics of VC firms—but as is the case with male-dominated tech companies, that’s a tall order.

Meg Whitman, president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, recalls how HP’s turnaround back in 2011 began with a return to the company’s founding corporate values and business objectives. She also discusses how leaders can take advantage of certain opportunities to carry out actions that can convey a symbolic message throughout an organization and get people’s attention.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Why are the best ideas often the ones that don’t seem to make sense? Bestselling author Adam Grant, one of the most influential management thinkers in America, recently came to Stanford to give a talk that was chock-full of counterintuitive tips for anyone seeking to be a better business leader — citing scholarly research and case studies from his 2016 book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.”

Stanford professor and author Bob Sutton covers a number of hallmarks and strategies of smart, in-tune bosses. While traditional management theory dictates constant monitoring of employees and processes, this may not be the best tactic, says Sutton. His research reports this is particularly true for bosses managing creative teams and employees. In these situations, over-management can backfire, often stifling creativity and innovation.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Here’s a riddle: What takes a tenth of a second to occur and can make or break your startup? No, it’s not the computation performed by your tech product’s proprietary algorithm. It’s a first impression, and the Princeton researchers who discovered how quickly we form them also found that our first impressions don’t change much after getting to know somebody for longer.

Researchers often call 2017 the year of the conversational computer in China. Leveraging recent advances in voice recognition and natural-language processing, e-commerce giant Alibaba and search giant Baidu have both been developing technology to crack voice-based communication (see 10 Breakthrough Technologies: Conversational Interfaces.) Now voice-operated products derived from Baidu and Alibaba’s technology are coming to the Chinese market.

The U.S. patent system is the primary contributor for the U.S. economy. Since the founding of the nation, the patent system has fostered an innovation culture that is directly responsible for making inventions that are more than all inventions accumulated in all major civilized regions in several thousands of years. However, the U.S. has inherent disadvantages in the political system and court systems. The inefficiency in patent adjudication has been used by corporations as an excuse for creating an anti-patent culture that is to make all inventions free for corporations. Corporate lobbying activities and litigation agenda have gradually influenced the government in forming an anti-patent political landscape in the last half a century.

Entrepreneurs are visual people. Exploring ‘what if’ scenarios can be a motivating exercise for those that want to see how their equity interest may shift as their baby grows.

Being able to visualize these scenarios can help an entrepreneur decide where and how they want to take on investors to maximize their own equity or the total value of the company.

California, do you want to be an incubator for great ideas—or a bubble that shuts out the world? That’s the question Californians need to ask, as we simultaneously confront three big challenges: building a more sustainable economy and future; reckoning with our crisis-level shortages in housing and infrastructure; and protecting ourselves from a deranged Trump administration. The bubble-or-incubator question is also the best way to understand the many hot fights being waged in the state legislature during this muggy Sacramento summer.

Selling today is all about giving back to your customers, and customers prize transparency. One of the ways I give back to my community -- and strive to be transparent -- is through public speaking events. What's more transparent than what you can see and hear?

Experimentation is vital in early-stage start-ups, but it involves a set of trade-offs that can influence a firm’s ability to adapt to future technological change.

“Move fast and break things” was the oft-quoted motto of Facebook’s early days. This ethos of speed is replicated in the lean start-up methodology, which emphasises getting to market as quickly as possible and learning from multiple, rapid iterations of a start-up’s product market offering. While experimentation is a cornerstone of the lean start-up approach, how does the process of learning – which occurs hand-in-hand with experimentation – influence a start-up’s longer-run viability? In particular, can learning and experimenting also have some say in whether a start-up is able to adapt to future technological advances?

Australian biotech, Trimph, has successfully completed a first-in-human trial of its proprietary bone “glue”, TrimphDent, the only bone graft substitute in the world to be applied in liquid form, halving the time of patient recovery, and requiring no specialised preparation or additional surgical expertise.

This breakthrough will allow Trimph to progress towards registering TrimphDent and launching into global markets, which could provide significantly more affordable and accessible oral surgeries to rural and disadvantaged communities across the globe.

Image: Dr. Ali Fathi - http://anthillonline.com

For website owners and/or managers, there are many paths for online marketing and optimization. From SEO to PPC and content marketing to social media marketing, there is certainly no shortage of ways through which to achieve your goals. However, those options and opportunities for your website come with rules that you have to play by, and if you don’t, you could find your website in hot water.

Even entrepreneurs who have built many startups, or sold their last one for millions of dollars, know they make occasional people leadership mistakes. They know leadership is all about managing their own complicated, illogical, and fallible human foibles, as well as the people they depend on. These can trip up even the best, often at the cost of more than a good night’s sleep.

Thankfully, most mistakes won’t be as spectacular as the America Online merger with Time Warner for $350 billion, back in 2000, engineered by then superstar entrepreneurs Stephen M. Case and Gerald M. Levin. They apparently ignored all conventional wisdom and advisors, and struck a deal which crashed both companies, now a case study in many business schools.

You packed your favorite journal and a couple of pens. You planned some time on the beach, or left an afternoon empty to find a table at an outdoor cafe where you can grab an ice-cold drink and just think. This vacation, you’ve told yourself, you’re finally going to be able to take a break and get some clarity.

Every brainstorm session you will ever facilitate or attend, like any good movie you will ever see, can be divided into three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end. No matter what the topic, who's in the room, or how stale the muffins, you will cycle through the same three phases again and again. How well you will cycle through these phases is another story.