This one chart says it all about the power of digital technologies to upend traditional industry paradigms. 

OK, so it isn’t healthcare, but you get the picture. This is in 10 short years.

And let’s remind ourselves of the argument for why brick and mortar retailers sat smugly when e-commerce first showed up. The argument was simply this: Oh, consumers want to touch and feel and/or try on before they purchase, so this online buying is never ever going to work.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

How do we conceptualize aging and disability in an era where there’s a heady excitement about a future reality that surpasses our current lived experiences of health and old age? Consider future tech such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a growing movement of people into posthumanism and of course fiction like the TV series Black Mirror with the incredibly poignant San Junipero episode giving a fictional account of life beyond our physical beings.

Institutions of higher education have extensive resources, including specialized research, outreach, technology transfer, and commercialization capabilities, as well as recognized faculty expertise and sophisticated laboratories.

The EDA-supported University Center (UC) program is specifically designed to marshal the resources located within colleges and universities to support businesses and regional economic development strategies in regions of chronic and acute economic distress. The UCs, which EDA considers long-term partners in economic development, are required to devote the majority of their funding to respond to technical assistance requests originating from organizations located in the economically distressed portions of their service regions.

Image: https://www.eda.gov/

Philadelphia’s innovation economy is strong, but city leaders can do more with its existing assets to compete globally and benefit local communities, according to a new report from the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking at the Brookings Institution. 

In Sweden there’s a constitutional right they call allemansrätten. It’s a national concept of “freedom to roam” that allows anyone the right to access, walk, cycle, or camp on any land (the only exceptions being private residences, as well as gardens and lands under cultivation). To get the rest of the world to try it out, they just listed the entire country on Airbnb.

At some point in your career, even if you’re not a salesperson, you’re going to have to sell something — whether it’s your idea, your team, or yourself. So how can you improve your sales skills, especially if you don’t pitch people often? What should you focus on first? And what should you do if you lose a sale?

What the Experts Say Selling has a bad rap, says Thomas Steenburgh, professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. “Very few parents say they want their kids to grow up to be a salesperson,” he says. His MBA students are no different.

It's a hotly contested question in the nutrition world: is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? Experts say that people who eat breakfast are less likely to overeat the rest of the day, but recent studies have found no difference in weight between those who skip their morning meal and those who don’t. In the meantime, skipping meals has become an increasingly popular part of modern life.

Entrepreneurism is a journey, or at least it has been for me. What my journey has revealed over the years is that, much like traditional professions, there is a learning curve that you must respect and allow for, to assure yourself some reasonable amount of success.

The ultimate hipster bike has arrived, packing a flexible frame that lets you drift...

The U.S. patent system is not in a good place today. Patents are worth substantially less than they were a decade ago, patents are much easier to challenge thanks to the high kill rate of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), and some of America’s most innovative industries face questions as to whether their core innovations can be protected at all in the United States. Inventions in the life sciences sector and software have been hardest hit, and while many of those inventions are not protectable in the United States they can be patented in China, Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

A computer science degree from a top university can help graduates land their dream job at companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook.

But which computer science courses are the best ones to try and to get onto if you want to impress employers?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting businesses, governments, and consumers and transforming how they interact with the world. Companies are going to spend almost $5 trillion on the IoT in the next five years — and the proliferation of connected devices and massive increase in data has started an analytical revolution.

Imagine having a wearable that is capable of warning you when you are about to start a fight and can provide you with alternate behavioral solutions. The study of biometric data in prediction models for human behavior is an interesting peek inside what the future of wearables may be like.

Image: http://readwrite.com/ 

The class of 2017 is joining the workforce with some tough challenges but, according to researchers, with plenty of optimism. But no matter how lofty the speeches on this year’s commencement circuit may be, the reality is that lots of new grads will land in crappy entry-level jobs–if they’re lucky to find jobs at all.

That means competition for the good ones is going to be steep. So to find out what it takes to get a leg up, Fast Company asked a few recent grads at YouTube, Giphy, and SoundCloud for their advice.

We study how a new form of entrepreneurial finance—crowdfunding—interacts with more traditional financing sources, such as venture capital (VC) and bank financing. We model a multi-stage bargaining game, with a moral-hazard problem between entrepreneurs and banks, and a double-sided moral-hazard problem between entrepreneurs and VCs. We decompose the economic value of crowdfunding into cash gains or losses, costs of bad investments avoided, and project-payoff probability update. This economic value is generally shared between entrepreneurs and VC investors, benefiting both. In addition, crowdfunding can alleviate the under-investment problem due to moral-hazard frictions. Furthermore, crowdfunding allows some projects to gain access to both VC and bank financing and the competition between those investor classes benefits entrepreneurs. However, competition from other investors reduces value to VC investors, who may walk away from the deal entirely. This can also hurt entrepreneurs who lose out on valuable VC expertise.

AngelList has announced the creation of Angel Funds. These funds are designed to be the easiest way to start a “full-fledged” venture fund. Using their back-end technology, these investment vehicles can scale more rapidly minus much of the back office hassle. The funds operate like a traditional venture fund. They raise capital up front and angels  can contribute to their own fund. Angel Funds can also raise capital from any backer on AngelList including traditional VCs. The Angel Funds are said to complement their Syndicate model that allows investors to back one startup at a time. Angel Funds require investors to commit to building a portfolio, and to commit to investing only through the fund while it has capital. Backers also commit to all of the fund’s investments up front.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com 

Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who are mandated with finding breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this. This article provides a collection of ten tips that serve as a talent management roadmap for growth companies in search of high-performance teams that deliver.

Image: http://www.innovationmanagement.se 

I once read a quote that said: "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

Frankly speaking, I think it is altered every six weeks. Business is not so different. Every now and then, we witness a new trend that takes over.

A few years ago, it was the cupcakes craze and social media accounts sprung up managed by home businesses offering variations of cupcake designs. Following that it was cookies – consumers. More than a few businesses launched in the UAE to cater to this trend. Nowadays, it is all about burgers and food trucks. Gourmet food trucks could be seen outside parks, at concerts, and at markets and pop-up events.

Starting a business is always a risk, but not all sectors are created equal. Take one glance at recent retail sales figures or analyst reports, for example, and you’ll see plenty of fire, brimstone and collapses.

Just this week research firm IBISWorld blamed fierce competition and the emergence of online players for the collapse of local brands including Pumpkin Patch, Payless Shoes and Marcs and David Lawrence, saying shoppers now have too much choice for even formerly strong operations to survive.

Earlier this year I found myself waking up in sweat-laced anxiety for a week straight. I’d wrapped a month of high-stakes projects that put me at the top of my freelance career. I was financially secure, felt professionally accomplished, and had never been so flush with great projects. So why was I bolting upright in the middle of the witching hour?

During a 3:00 a.m. emergency journaling session (I’ve learned to think of it as paper therapy), I realized that in my efforts to please clients, I’d neglected the routines that had made me successful to begin with: making time to reflect, exercise, plan, and knock out real, focused work without any digital distractions.