You can’t read an article on a startup these days without hearing about a “pivot.” A pivot is just as it sounds, a swivel, a twist, a change of direction. Turning on an axis and swapping direction without dismissing the core idea.

It’s a tricky proposition, but more startups are pivoting because opportunity will only knock so many times, and if you’re not behind the right door, waiting, you’ll miss out.

If one were to suggest that wastewater could be used as an efficient source of fresh water, a likely rejoinder would be serious doubt and, at the very least, a pinched face and a declaration along the lines of "Ew, that's gross."

Call it "the yuck factor."

Yet capturing and reusing wastewater for municipal and household use, agricultural and industrial production, and recharging depleted aquifers is precisely what researchers writing in the latest issue of Science suggest needs to happen in order to address the world's growing water crisis.

QUESTION How do you set business goals and priorities?

PROFESSOR Eric Ryan, Cofounder And Chief Brand Architect, Method+

TOPIC Leadership

Ever since the iPhone came along in 2007, touchscreens have ruled electronic gadgets. Haptics, or touch feedback, hasn’t done as well. Will a new generation of better touch feedback technologies take the touch revolution to the next level?

Christophe Ramstein, chief executive of haptics startup Strategic Polymers, believes it will happen. He showed off a force-feedback module, dubbed an actuator (a tiny vibration motor) that was made out of bendable plastic and was the thinnest in the world today. Ramstein wants these little modules to be built into all kinds of gadgets so they can become easier to use, and he is one of a number of folks in a growing haptics industry who is encouraged about the coming era of haptics.

Skyrocketing social networking and mobile usage has led many to speculate on the key business model for mobile-social services.   The most common answer is local commerce. But, checking in is not becoming a mainstream activity (see chart) and local couponing experiments aren't working so well.  In a research report from BI Intelligence, we analyze how another potential solution, social discovery, could become the future for mobile social-apps. 

We cherish chance encounters in our romantic lives--but mostly discount them professionally. "The Click Moment" author Frans Johansson argues that behind every success story is a fortuitous meeting or an unexpected insight.

Howard Schulz walks into a buzzing Milan café and discovers that Starbucks should be about experience rather than beans; Stephanie Meyer dreams of a young couple in an enchanted forest and starts writing Twilight; Aheda Zanetti watches her niece play sports, realizes Muslim women need activewear, and invents the Burquni: these are all the stuff of The Click Moment, Frans Johansson's book about serendipity in business. Fast Company talked with the author about why ROIs are useless, why success is random, and how to court it. This interview has been condensed and edited.

Traditionally, the effectiveness of an economic development investment has been measured primarily by the number of jobs created and dollars leveraged. While critically important, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) has partnered with Portland State University to create an innovative, web-based tool that takes into account a broader array of economic, environmental, and social impacts to more fully evaluate the potential impact of projects. This new Triple Bottom Line (TBL) Tool will help economic development practitioners, investors, and decision-makers assess, compare, and communicate the viability of potential investments.

While the TBL approach has been recognized as a valuable analytical tool among businesses—including major U.S. companies such as General Electric, Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, among many others—it has not been widely applied or considered within the public sector or by the economic development profession. The new TBL Tool developed through EDA’s investment represents a significant step forward for expanding the application of the concept by planners, nonprofits, community organizations, and governments to help support the assessment and decision making of critical development decisions.In creating the TBL Tool, EDA collaborated with Portland State University and its project team—which included the University of Arizona, the Reinvestment Fund, and the Policy Board—and an advisory board of policy makers, practitioners, academics, and industry leaders, including the National Association of Development Organizations, the International Economic Development Council, and the Ford Foundation.

Meet L-Town, a male great white shark that was recently detected off the coast of San Francisco. At 4 meters long (13 feet) long and 800 kilograms (1,765 pounds), L-Town is actually one of the smaller members of Shark Net, a new iPhone/iPad app that allows users to follow the Pacific’s greatest predators as they travel the oceans traversing a network of acoustic receivers.

“I realized we have one of the wildest places on Earth here in our own backyard,” says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara Block. “We have all these predators, but nobody can see them.”

Yesterday at Excelerate Labs Demo Day, Brad Feld gave the keynote. He talked about start up entrepreneurial ecosystems and brought up some fantastic points. He has a new book out that talks about building a start up community.

Brad speaks from experience, because he was one of the foundational builders for the start up culture in Boulder, Colorado. It wasn’t happenstance. It was a purpose driven effort.

Can Chicago do it too? Sure, we can. But it’s not easy. It also isn’t random. It has to be a purpose driven effort that comes from individuals acting in their own self interests.

Female and minority entrepreneurs are still rare in the technology industry, although there are several efforts to change that balance, as The Wall Street Journal reported.  

One push is Focus100, a conference and boot camp scheduled for October in New York that aims to get 100 companies founded or co-founded by black women to raise funding or get acquired by 2015.

Sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Belmont, Calif.-based media network BlogHer, among others, the conference was inspired by founder Kathryn Finney’s own experience about five years ago, when she pitched an idea for a company that made beauty products focused on the African-American community to investors in Silicon Valley and New York.

Many organizations suffer from a tragic pattern: The chief executive officer launches a new change program with great fanfare and intentions, only to shelve it a few years later with little to show for great expenditures of time and consulting fees. How can you break this cycle?

Consider a health insurance company that has been struggling with change programs gone haywire for quite some time. A few years ago, the chief operating officer launched a customer quality initiative to improve six core processes and assigned executives to "own" each process. But in the budgeting process, the initiative got little funding. Only a few of the six processes were assigned staff, and each claimed credit for the work of colleagues. The initiative fizzled.

Hey entrepreneurs -- do you have an idea for growing small businesses, particularly ones that employ young people? If you do -- and your idea can be scaled up to employ lots of folks -- the Rockefeller Foundation may have $1 million for you. "We really think those ideas are out there," said Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin, who announced plans for this $1 million prize at a Tampa luncheon on job creation sponsored by the Huffington Post.

Babson College, the top-ranked college for entrepreneurship, is expanding the John E. and Alice L. Butler Venture Accelerator program to the College's San Francisco campus.

Babson's Butler Venture Accelerator serves all students looking to start or advance an entrepreneurial venture by providing an entrepreneurial community and support throughout the stages of developing their company including workspace, peer mentoring programs, mentoring and other valuable resources.

After delays, the S.E.C. finally ruled publicly on crowdfunding legislation.

When President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law on April 5, he also fired the starting gun to make business crowdfunding real in 270 days.

The S.E.C.’s mandate? Develop a set of rules that will — for the first time in 70-plus years — bring U.S. small businesses and ordinary investors to the table to make good things happen together.

It seems like incubator and accelerator programs are a dime a dozen these days. But it was Y Combinator, co-founded in 2005 by investor Paul Graham, that paved the way for these other programs, proving its success with the incubation of companies like AirBnB and Dropbox. So what’s the secret to Graham’s success and what does it take to earn admission to his storied program?

A new book, The Launch Pad: Inside Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive Startup Accelerator, attempts to look behind-the-secenes at the Y Combinator method, showing what it takes for startups to get from YC admission to demo day to launching a successful company. Author Randall Stross, a columnist for the New York Times and business professor at San Jose State University, received approval from Graham and the YC partners to follow the summer 2011 batch of startups from initial interviews to demo day. The book will be published Sept. 27, but we got an early look at the text.

While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.

What exactly is the role of government in a free society when it comes to the support of entrepreneurs? Especially entrepreneurs who are associated with the software, medical, and technology industries. I decided to start scouring the Internet for different videos to watch in regards to this topic. I stumbled across this video from the Kauffman Foundation that highlights Charles E. Phillips who was at the time the president of Oracle.

Mr. Phillips starts the conversation talking about government’s role in innovation and job growth. There were a couple of key points within the video that I thought I would point out.

When starting a business, a great idea is a terrific start, but it’s just the beginning.  To turn it into a business and get it to market, more is needed. A great idea can easily fail without the right mentoring, investment, partners, technology or execution. But now, a new online resource has surfaced that aims to make it easier for entrepreneurs to connect with potential partners, receive feedback, and build a network of professionals who can share advice and support.

iStart, a program of the Kauffman Foundation, is an online resource for new business ideas.  It features business plan competitions and has now added business profiles to its site so that entrepreneurs can add information about their projects and connect with an entire community of those who are involved in startups.  Using the new website, entrepreneurs can share their ideas and let others know what they need to start or further their business venture, such as partners, analysis, legal assistance, mentoring, information technology, consulting or marketing — as this screenshot shows:

Dan Mindus, investment director for the state of Virginia’s CIT GAP Funds, is launching a dozens-strong investment network of angels, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs — none older than 40 — adding a potentially powerful new funding source to the D.C. startup scene. Mindus, a former protégé of veteran angel organizer John May, is in the final stages of forming the network, which he expects to reach 45 to 50 investors. While some details, including the name, are still taking shape, Mindus’ effort has the potential to create a new, centralized hub for early-stage founders to find seed capital.