With the current strong economy, as an active startup mentor, I’m seeing a new surge of entrepreneurs and startups, with the commensurate scramble for funding. There just aren’t enough angel investors and VCs to go around. Thus I’m getting more questions on new mechanisms, like crowd funding, or going public through the side door as a reverse merger.

One of the things that stands in the way of many leaders’ success — and therefore the success of their companies — is their ego. Leadership expert Jim Collins found in his seminal study on what makes companies sustainably great that in two thirds of the comparison cases, it was “the presence of a gargantuan ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”

As we enter a new decade, characterized by rising economic complexity and geopolitical divisions — U.S.-China tensions, populism and nationalism in Europe, and the looming risk of a global recession — forward-thinking business leaders are developing strategies to mitigate the longer-term risk of deglobalization. They are concerned about trade protectionism, and the revenue a company could lose in any tariff wars.

The Founder Institute, the world’s largest pre-seed startup accelerator, announced this week it signed a partnership agreement with NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, to help startup founders connect to selected NASA software and technologies while providing a robust global network of startup resources. The accelerator also announced open applications for the “Founder Institute Advanced Technologies Accelerator” program in Silicon Valley.

TIME for Kids picks 50 fun places for families.

As I walked up to the Intel visitor center in Santa Clara, California, a big group of South Korean teenagers ran from their bus and excitedly gathered round the big Intel sign for selfies and group shots. This is the kind of fandom you might expect to see at Apple or Google. But Intel?

At my last job, where I was an executive at a growing startup, I often found myself struggling to find time to just think. 

I blamed it on the norms of office life. My days were fully scheduled with meetings. My evenings were filled with events or networking catch-ups. Even when I did sit down to work, my desk sat in the center of an open floor plan, so I couldn’t escape the inevitable parade of colleagues dropping by. 

Baylor University‘s Peter Klein, Ph.D., professor of entrepreneurship and senior fellow in the Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise in the Hankamer School of Business. Credit: Peter Klein

The establishment of university-affiliated incubators is often followed by a reduction in the quality of university innovations, according to a new study co-authored by a Baylor University entrepreneurship professor.

Whether it’s placing machine tools on the factory floor or designing work spaces for people that work at the company, the number one guiding metric is resources per square foot. If you’re placing machine tools, this metric causes the machines to be stacked closely together, where the space between them is minimized, access to the machines is minimized, and the aisles are the smallest they can be. The result – the number of machines per square foot is maximized.

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. I often get asked about the real alternatives to bridge this valley, and there are some good ones I will outline here.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Secretary jobs are disappearing.

These roles, which were once considered stable positions for women without college degrees, have taken a significant downturn over the last nine years. Labor Department data indicate the US has shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs since 2000, The Washington Post reported. 

But this change extends beyond administrative assistants — it also includes the disappearance of telemarketers, substitute teachers, and farmworkers.

The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report for 2019 ranks 141 economies on their innovation capability. The innovation ecosystem is measured with the help of five sub-pillars-commercialization, Interaction, and diversity, administrative requirements, research and development, and entrepreneurial culture. Other important factors like education and the intensity of competitive skills they possess also help determine the country's innovation capabilities.

The Caterpillar tanker truck weighed 70,000 pounds, and when it struck an overpass above Interstate 65 in downtown Nashville in April 2018, it twisted one of the steel support beams as if it were a pipe cleaner.

The driver of the tractor-trailer that was hauling the tanker had ventured more than a hundred miles from his approved route through Arkansas and west Tennessee. Nobody was hurt, but the driver’s mistake snarled rush-hour traffic and forced workers to labor for more than 16 hours to remove the damaged beam and extricate the truck. Repairs cost nearly $1 million.

Image: https://www.pewtrusts.org

What is the world's most innovative country? It seems like an impossible question to answer but thankfully it has already been done for us. 

The Global Innovation Index has been compiled and released every year since 2007 and is seen as the de facto method of ranking economies by innovation around the world. 

With the underperformance of IPOs like Uber and Lyft as well as the epic implosion of WeWork, the venture capital market has softened a bit. But then again, this year should still be quite robust—with over $100 billion in investments across more than 10,000 deals, according to estimates from PitchBook.

The new head of Finland’s innovation agency has urged the European Commission to exercise caution as it moves ahead with plans to make equity investments in small tech companies, through the newly established European Innovation Council.

Image: Nina Kopola, director general of Business Finland

(Every night) I send myself an email with the subject line: “rocks.” The idea is to separate the “rocks”—the big priorities—from the “gravel.” When you check your email in the morning, it can become a sinkhole. By sending myself this note, I’m able to use email in a more productive way.

In a year marked by charged debates surrounding identity and belonging—and continuously breaking news of violence and division—the best of fiction helped us to process. Authors both established and emergent cut through the noise with stories of transcendent love, courageous confrontations with power and histories that must not be forgotten, offering books that show us who we are, who we have been and who we should strive to become.

Breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether we’ve failed our latest diet (again), or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due. This is largely because we are constantly barraged by stimuli engineered to make us crave and consume, stimuli that hijack the reward-based learning system in our brains designed initially for survival.

North American forests are full of nonnative insects—more than 450 species, by the latest available count. Most have done no obvious damage, but the few that have—such as the emerald ash borer, which is killing off its namesake trees, and the hemlock woolly adelgid, which is devastating eastern hemlocks—have remade entire landscapes, doing untold ecological and economic harm.