More and more employees are working at home instead of the office, and of course, more and more workers are opting out of corporate life altogether and going into business for themselves, often setting up shop in their own living room. While many get excited by this more relaxed environment at first, feeling giddy by being able to work in their pajamas or listen to some music while they work on reports, they too often find that they have trouble staying productive when working from home.

It is important for you to create a work-like environment in your home so that you can be as productive as possible and meet your goals. If you are working from home — either for a company or for yourself — these tips can help you to create a productive work environment from home:

Android, it seems, is the worm that eats away at Apple's core.

According to Gartner, Android-based handsets outsold iOS-based handsets 4-to-1 on a worldwide basis in the first quarter of 2013, up from a ratio of about 2.5-to-1 in the same period of 2012. As such, Android accounted for 74% of global smartphone sales last quarter, up from 57% in the first quarter of 2012, while iOS accounted for just 18%, down from approximately 23% last year.

Whether you are trying to motivate your team, close a deal with a customer, or get funding from an investor, a casual conversation is usually a waste of your valuable time. These result is a founder who is always “too busy,” but never seems to get the business done and the team moving. All real business is conversations focused on creating results.

Shawn Kent Hayashi, in her new book “Conversations That Get Results and Inspire Collaboration” makes my point very well as she outlines the top twelve types of conversations that relate to working together in business, and provides tips on how to make each of them more effective for all concerned:

You were invited to an interview. It may seem obvious. They like your resume. They like you.

At this point, it’s all about the dialogue. Since  you’re a fantastic interviewee, you don’t need to bring anything with you but your confidence – right?

Wrong.

Sometimes less is not more. And, interviews offer an opportunity to strategically slide in a value-add here and there, depending upon the course the conversation takes.

Do you have a mentor, accountability partner, confidant and evangelist on your business team?

“Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.” ~ Margaret Mead

We can not afford to have a lone wolf, go it alone, isolationist mentality in our life or business. That is not a survivalist formula. We live in a hyper connected, engagement, interactivity, real time world. The World Wide Web, social media and smartphones have connected us all far and wide, 24/7.

You may sometimes wonder whether Americans hate the rich.  With all the TV air time given to tax increases vs tax cuts for the wealthy that politicians love to argue over, it would not be surprising to get that impression.

Entrepreneurs take their money and reinvest it into their companies, benefiting the whole economy.  They have often made their wealth creating jobs and prosperity (example: entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, pictured above).

At the Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, nurses can see into the lives of some diabetes patients even when they’re not at the clinic. If a specific patient starts acting lethargic, or making lengthy calls to his mom, a green box representing him on an online dashboard turns yellow, then red. Soon, a nurse will call to see if he is still taking his medication.

This novel way of keeping tabs on patients is one of several studies of an app called Ginger.io taking place at hospitals in the United States. Once installed on patients’ smartphones, the app silently logs data about what they do and where they go. It’s looking for signs that something in their life has changed.

Turns out that business innovation is hard. And it's hard even if you have a chief innovation officer, a platform for crowdsourcing ideas or other formal means to turn the crank.

Just 18% of execs in a new Accenture study of 519 U.S., U.K. and French companies said they're getting a competitive advantage from their innovation strategies.

Harvard Business School's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, former E*Trade CFO Bruce Nolop and other members of The Experts weigh in on the effect the patent system has on innovation.

The ability to own a discovery and reap rewards from the investment in that unique invention or concept encourages innovation. Why invest, if predators could easily steal the idea and make it their own? The patent system is the innovator’s friend. But the current system is not necessarily the friend to the public that wants to see innovations put to use. Industry giants can lock up ideas and sit on patents in order to discourage competition. We should favor “use it or lose it” rules that ensure that true innovators can’t be driven out of an industry because incumbents protect their turf.

What are the most promising opportunities emerging for young entrepreneurs in the leading economies of Latin America? What challenges do entrepreneurs face in their efforts to take advantage of such opportunities? At the Wharton Latin America Conference 2013, a panel of four experienced entrepreneurs provided some answers to these critical questions.

At the moment, the technology sector is the focus of a lot of attention — and with good reason. Tech industries have helped turn San Jose and Austin into major economies and brought other large metros, like Detroit, through tough spells. But which small, off-the-radar towns out there also deserve recognition as technology hubs?

To explore this question, we analyzed 70 high-tech occupations identified by BLS economist Daniel E. Hecker. The list includes everything from computer systems analysts to forest and conservation technicians. Many of the highlighted economies contain a strong contingent of one or two of these occupations, while other occupations may not be especially concentrated in the region.

There are so many advantages to being your own boss. From the ability to set your own hours to the chance to work in your jammies, working as a freelancer has never been more popular than it is today. Transitioning into a freelance career or becoming your own entrepreneur also gives you a way to live free and clear of depending on an employer for a job and your income. But no amount of raw talent or client demand can help you if you don’t take care of some business basics such as bookkeeping, accounting and tax filing. Here are some tax basics that can make or break your business.

When you’re a young entrepreneur who’s just starting out on their early business adventures, there’s going to be a learning curve to the process whether you like it or not. We all need to learn what we still don’t know perfectly, and learning always carries mistakes with it. Heck, even people who’ve been running businesses and major corporations for decades still screw up from time to time, so you’ve got no reason to think you’ll be lucky enough or smart enough to avoid the same.

However, knowing that there will be learning through hard experience and screw-ups doesn’t mean that any preventative measures are doomed to failure.  While you will never be able to foresee every possible problem that might hit your company, you can at least do your research and work to diminish the likelihood of certain glaring, more obvious and more easily avoidable general disasters that a lot of entrepreneurs get hit by.

Venture capital funding of life science companies was down during the first quarter of 2013, in both volume deals and dollars invested. Venture capital funds invested $1.4 billion in 167 industry deals in first quarter, a drop of 14 percent in dollars and 16 percent in the number of deals when compared to the same quarter last year, according to a new PwC US report, “Capital Crunch,” that includes data from the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree Report, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

You know something’s up when companies are pitching to join a venture capitalist’s portfolio, no investment required.

That’s a surprising trend that Peter Boyce noticed at Roughdraft.vc, the student-run venture capital program supported by General Catalyst Partners in Boston. Roughdraft has invested up to $25,000 in 10 Boston companies since its launch in December last year.

The federal government is soliciting interest from private parties that want to team up with Ottawa on its initiative to boost venture capital investments.

After the government first announced it would set aside $400-million to invest in Canadian startups as part of the 2012 federal budget, there were almost no developments for a year. This month, however, Ottawa finally opened up submissions for potential partners and it also relayed some more information on how the initiative will function.

Canada is launching a full-court press to try to capitalize on what could be a large, albeit short, window of opportunity to attract the best and brightest foreigners in America’s technology heartland with promises of permanent residency.

As part of this hostile takeover of global entrepreneurs, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney will kick off a four-day trip to Silicon Valley Friday to promote Canada’s new start-up visa among Canadian ex-pats who’ll be encouraged to spread the word, as well as foreign entrepreneurs attending TiEcon 2013, the world’s largest conference for entrepreneurs. He’ll also be meeting with students at Stanford University, some of America’s top immigration experts and local media to promote the new program.

After the cherry blossoms have fallen from their branches in rising temperatures of the late springtime, we are every year greeted by a fresh crop of oratory as we enter into Commencement Speech Season.

It's certainly helpful to temper the wide-eyed wonderment of it all with a little cynicism--when you think about it, yes, these speeches are often "little more than TED talks in funny hats"--but, one would hope, that even the most expertly aloof Brooklynite could be won over by the rhetoric below.

Listen to the language that any leader, consultant, or HR professional uses, and you'll hear them expound at length about how "we" need to change "them." That says it all: the fact is, no one likes to be changed, even if the change is ultimately beneficial.

In his recent HBR blog post, Ron Ashkenas argues that the reason most change management initiatives fail is due to stunted managerial capability to implement change. He points out — correctly, I believe — that in many organizations the responsibility for change initiatives has come to rest with HR, and not with the line supervisors and managers. However, I believe that there's a deeper, more fundamental problem with the way we frame the whole notion of change management. In fact, I propose that we dispense with the concept of "change management" entirely. History shows that's a recipe guaranteed to foment fear, resistance, and — ultimately —failure.

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie once said that he who dies leaving behind many millions will "pass away unwept, unhonored and unsung." That philosophy took root in much of the last century, with major philanthropists giving vast fortunes in their later years to libraries, museums, hospitals and other institutions devoted to the public good.

But donors today aren't taking any chances. They are flexing philanthropic muscle at a younger age than their predecessors. At many top business schools, students are integrating the practice of philanthropy into education early on, and donors are often beginning to share substantial wealth long before accumulating the full measure of it.