In order to continue to be viable in the next decade, the pharmaceutical industry is adapting in ways that might seem surprising just a few years ago. The pressure to reduce costs coupled with the need to be more innovative and still comply with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations has led to a number of new developments.

Disruptive technology, big data, demographic trends and healthcare reform are impacting the kind of decisions pharmaceutical companies make about drug development. A PriceWaterhouseCoopers report Pharma 2020: from vision to decision outlines the trends and opportunities that will help define the pharmaceutical industry and the challenges it will face implementing them.

International gurus want tax breaks to help boost angel investment.

The latest Young Company Finance Index shows angel investors poured $30.7 million into 97 deals with New Zealand starts-ups and entrepreneurs last year.

Spend was down $24 million on 2010, but until last year the figure had been steadily rising since 2006. In the past six years, a total of $220 million has been invested by angels in New Zealand.

Recently, the Angel Association held an angel investors’ summit in Wellington, with a number of guest speakers from around the world.

The National Science Foundation collects and releases a veritable fire hose of science- and innovation-related statistics that never get the attention that they deserve.* For example, earlier this year the NSF published a study entitled “Businesses Concentrate Their R&D in a Small Number of Geographic Areas in the United States.” This study should be required reading for anyone interested in how the Innovation Economy has developed geographically. I’ve taken the liberty of doing some calculations on just a small portion of the reported data (there is much much more):

Everybody I know is suffering from email overload, but entrepreneurs have it especially bad. There are about 50 hours of work in a 24 hour day, and email becomes a huge chunk of it.

All of us have tried to get better at email. For those that aren’t glued to their smartphones and check our inbox at set times during the day, it feels like never enough.

While developing a company to help busy folk manage their email, I have thought long and hard about optimal email workflow, and have come up with an extensive list of rules and tips. It will require a substantial shift in your thinking about email, but this rule will change your life: don’t make clearing your Inbox your top priority.

This is a great infographic from the guys at Startup Weekend, illustrating the locations of the leading accelerator and incubator programs from around the world in 2012!

Each year, Speakers Platform recognizes five speakers within ten popular topic areas. Excellence in speaking is based on: expertise, professionalism, innovation within the topic area, client testimonials & references, presentation skills, original contribution to the field and votes. The only substantive requirement is that the candidates' keynote presentation fee must be under $30,000USD. Please use the form below to vote for your favorite speakers in any number of the topic areas. You can also add "write-in" candidates.

Each winner will receive a distinctive crystal award, be highlighted at the Speaking.com Web site and can use the prestigious Top5 award designation and graphics in their marketing. Here are the 2012 honorees.

View the list and vote here by clicking here.

Download the PDF: The Global Innovation Imperative

For most business leaders, their current role is not where they intend to stay until they die. At the right time, they all intend to make a graceful exit, and leave while still perceived to be on top of their game. The challenge is how to know and exit gracefully when the right time has come, without trauma to either the company or themselves.

I haven’t seen much insight on this subject, so I was intrigued by a new book “Leaving on Top: Graceful Exits for Leaders,” by David Heenan, a business executive and Georgetown professor, with some good research on 20 top leaders, and why some leaders ‘get out while they’re on top’ while others ‘overstay their welcome.’

Android and iOS account for almost 90 percent of the global smartphone market. They control a similar share of the U.S. smartphone market, the world's largest by revenue. For now there's no certainty about which company, if any, will be able to mount a serious challenge to Google's and Apple's dominance. 

They say you learn more from failure than you do from success. And that appears to be the theory behind a new blog post from Sinobeat Capital managing partner and Fortune China columnist Ding Chenling. In his very long post in Chinese, Ding lays out the stories of 17 Chinese startups that ultimately failed, and breaks down the lessons learned. The whole thing is a bit too long for our purposes, but here are a few of the most interesting startups (and lessons) Ding picked. Company: Fanfou Lesson: Startups shouldn’t work in areas that could be politically sensitive. Fanfou is actually still around, but these days it pales in comparison to its competitors Sina and Tencent Weibo, even though it was around long before either of those services. Fanfou was China’s first Twitter clone, and back in 2009 it seemed to have the world at its fingertips. 300,000 users and growing, the company had netted a big investment from HP. And although the company was doing its best to block “sensitive” words and keep political speech to a minimum, it was blocked (along with a host of other sites) following the Urumqi riots in July, 2009. This gave big companies, which already had established relationships with the government and were better equipped to implement censorship, time to develop their own microblog products, and by the time Fanfou was allowed to re-open, Sina and Tencent had already left it in the dust.

Like the rest of the world, CEOs are rapidly increasing their use of mobile devices. CEO.com surveyed chief executives to find out which devices and apps are essential for corporate leaders, and put it in the following infographic. You'll note that while Blackberry is still pretty popular at corporations, CEOs are most likely to use iPhones.

Entrepreneurs and business owners claim to be hunting for more "entrepreneurial" talent these days - critical thinkers who are willing to take risks, wear multiple hats and most of all, lead. But are startup founders really hiring entrepreneurs, or just ambitious team players? What's the difference, anyway?

To find out, we asked eight successful entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share what they really look for in an executive team member - and how to nurture those "entrepreneurial" team members on day one.

AN ASTONISHING APP USES AN IPHONE’S ACCELEROMETER TO SENSE THE LOCATION OF A TAP ON ANY SURFACE AND TRANSLATE IT INTO TYPED LETTERS ON A KEYBOARD.

We have virtual keyboards, clip-on keyboards, magnetic keyboards and even laser keyboards. But what if your keyboard wasn’t a keyboard at all?

Florian Kräutli has developed an ingeniously simple alternative called the Vibrative Virtual Keyboard. By placing an iPhone on any surface, that surface becomes a keyboard. Technically, the phone’s accelerometer is measuring vibrations on that surface. Kräutli’s software maps those vibrations to a point of origin on the table. And when the phone can “see” where you’re tapping, you can have a QWERTY keyboard on any tabletop.

The hot piece of funding news today was Andreessen Horowitz’s $85 million investment in Zulily, a daily deals site that targets moms and their kids. Zulily’s amazing traction clearly demonstrates how much stuff kids need, and how parents are eager to find cost-effective ways of providing it. Founding a startup is in many ways like having a child- both can require tender love and care, both are expensive, and both can be all-consuming. But with young humans as with young companies, the hope is that all the time, money, blood, sweat, and tears will pay off. One way or another, someone other than the government needs to pay for retirement.

Venture capitalists fill tech blogs, their firms’ websites and their personal blogs with advice to entrepreneurs about how to raise money–filling space with gems like “Don’t ask us to sign a nondisclosure agreement” and “Don’t just call, get an introduction first.”

Though raising money is rarely easy, the most interesting companies and experienced entrepreneurs have far more power to pick their investors these days. Now that the tables are turning, it’s time for entrepreneurs to fill the Web with advice to venture capitalists.

People can process short sentences and solve equations before they're aware of the words and numbers in front of their eyes, finds new research that suggests we might not actually need full consciousness to perform rule-based tasks like reading and arithmetic.

In a series of experiments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, more than 300 student participants were unconsciously exposed to words and equations through a research technique known as Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS). With this method, a static image appears in front of one eye while rapidly changing pictures flash in front of the other eye. The changing pictures dominate awareness at first, letting the still image register subliminally before popping into consciousness.

James L. Hughes, MBA, chief enterprise and economic development officer and vice president at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), has been named director of UM Ventures, an ambitious joint research commercialization effort of UMB and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP).

UM Ventures is a central part of an initiative between the two universities called University of Maryland: MPowering the State. The presidents of the two universities, Jay A. Perman, MD, at UMB, and Wallace D. Loh, PhD, at UMCP, announced the appointment in a letter to students, faculty, and staff on Nov. 16.

At first glance it's difficult to imagine how being chief cook and bottle washer (not to mention diaper-changer) at home can actually help you kill presentations or manage creative teams back at the office. Studies show otherwise. People skills are the number two factor impacting organizations, after technology, according to the 2012 IBM Global CEO study, which interviewed more than 1,709 leaders. Of all the external forces that could impact their organizations over the next three to five years, 69% of the CEOs see people skills change as most critical. And many of those skills are also practiced in the home. Carrying over soft skills can give you a leg up when it comes to dealing with employees. Anything from quick thinking to negotiation skills can be learned in the home and taken back to the workplace, say executives. We asked travel, tech, beauty, and finance industry executives what they learned about raising children, maintaining a household, and living an active life outside of the office and how they’ve transferred those people skills to benefit their leadership style. Here’s what they said.

Every founder has heard of or even experienced a legal horror story: overpriced services; unanticipated fees; frustrating delays or an attorney that just doesn’t get it. But like it or not, lawyers are an indispensable part of almost every startup process, and it pays to understand what your lawyer is thinking, how they earn their fees, and what they should be doing on your behalf.

Get it Right at the Start: Lawyers are typically a startup’s first outside adviser, arriving on the scene even before angel or venture capital investors. Most importantly, a good lawyer provides a founding team with the lay of the land: what types of investors may be interested in your idea; how will those investors make go/no-go funding decisions; where can affordable office space be found; how can employees, advisory board members and company directors be effectively identified, recruited and compensated – just to name a few. Better lawyers know more.

Q. As a Gen Y founder, how do you keep Gen Y (and X) talent happy? How do you incentivize intrapreneurship over, well, leaving?!

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.