If you are like billions of movie goers, you spent a year looking forward to Avengers 4. Personally, as a practitioner in China’s university technology transfer, I spent the last two years looking forward to Decree 100 from the Ministry of Finance. We were hoping to see the state get behind universities that have led experiments with more efficient new ways to license patents for commercializing—but the Ministry’s tepid response in late March has instead scared schools into giving up their experiments.

"The delicate state of the world we live in affects every single one of us, but the choices we make about consumption can change this. Embed social and environmental values in your organization. "

These are the words of Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, The UAE's Chief Executive Officer, Alliances for Global Sustainability, at the recent opening of the pitch event for the Mohammed bin Rashid Initiative for Global Prosperity.

Finding coworking space is getting easier and easier for startups, but the same can't be said for startups looking for lab space. If Houston wants to continue to grow and develop its innovation ecosystem — specifically within research and development in the health sciences industry — the city needs more opportunities for small lab space real estate.

These are times of excess. Times when the young and predominantly male tech founders have encountered untold riches, despite untold legal and moral dubiousness.

We used to hold them up as great examples. Now we worry about what they've done to modern society. We desperately seek examples of great tech leaders whom we can respect, as well as envy.

Image: "Satya Nadella" by n.bhupinder is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

Don’t charge the hill until you are “ready.” This probably seems obvious to military types, but I see entrepreneurs violating this rule all the time. They approach key potential investors way too early, trying to talk their way up the hill, with no supporting business plan, and before they have a support team around them. Needless to say, they usually get shot down, and get no second chance.

Image: Image via Flickr by lumaxart 

The incredible success stories of self-made entrepreneurs that you see in the press may lead you to think that today’s celebrated founders made it to the top all on their own. What headlines usually don’t say is that they all had experienced mentors to guide them. Just think of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, or Sir Freddie Laker and Richard Branson, to name a few legendary mentor-mentee duos.

There’s evidence that startups with mentors do better. In an analysis based on interviews with 700 tech startup founders based in New York City, TechCrunch found that 33 percent of founders who are mentored by successful entrepreneurs go on to become top performers themselves. Studies have also shown that 70 percent of mentored businesses survive more than five years, double the rate of their non-mentored counterparts.

Effective meetings produce better business decisions. Yet too many decision meetings are doomed from the get-go. You can do better.

Decisions are the lifeblood of organizations, and meetings are where important business decisions often happen. Yet many executives are nonplussed—at best—when describing their own experience of meetings. Some business leaders we know wonder openly how they can dedicate so much time (commonly six to seven hours a day and often more) to an activity that feels so unproductive. “I spend nearly all of my time in meetings,” admitted one top-team member to us recently, “and I don’t get to sit down to think on my own until after 6:00 p.m.”

Israeli start-ups are of key importance to South Korean technology giant Samsung’s innovation push, senior officials said on Sunday, as the company held its fifth annual Samsung Innovation Summit in Tel Aviv.

“I think the Israeli start-up ecosystem is extremely important and that’s why we do this event every year, bringing together Israeli entrepreneurs and venture capitalists,"

Launching a business in an already saturated space is no mean feat. That said, there are basics, all too often overlooked, that can give you an edge. These days, it seems that many entrepreneurs are more focused on ritzy marketing campaigns, or to kicking off a startup by contracting an expensive branding agency. Attention is devoted to booking Instagram campaigns, and conjuring blog posts featuring staff members attesting to what makes your business “different.”

Image: Image credit: Epione Beverly Hills. - Simon Ourian 

In our previous articles, we looked at how an investment philosophy shapes the strategy and style of charities’ investments and discussed what charities should know about stocks and bonds.

This article, which touches on alternative assets, is the seventh in a series based on our forthcoming book Good Practices for Managing Funds for Non-Profit Organisations.

It is undoubtedly the case that stocks and bonds should make up the bulk of charities’ investment portfolios. And it would be wise for charities to have some cash on hand to meet their short-term financing needs for expected and unexpected reasons.

Change is about the only thing constant in the world of startups. Despite their own focus on changing the world, they often forget that they too have to change rapidly and often as the market evolves. Too many find that out too late, and are left chasing a rabbit that is long gone.

The solution is to establish and maintain a culture and processes that don’t view change as a discrete event to be spotted and managed, but as an ongoing opportunity to improve competitiveness. Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe, in a classic HBR article on change readiness for large companies, define it as “the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance.”

Image: Image via Wikipedia  - https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Many years ago I earned an MBA at The Wharton School, but the best course I took in my two years there wasn't about business. It was an education course taught by Professor Charles Dwyer in the School of Education.

He taught me how to get anyone to do anything you want, and now I will teach it to you. Everything in this column comes from Professor Dwyer.

Image: The system has five steps, and you can't skip any of them. Flickr/Europeana EU

No one has a bigger impact on new employees’ success than the managers who hired them. Why? Because more than anyone else the hiring manager understands what his or her people need to accomplish and what it will take — skills, resources, connections — for them to become fully effective.

Managers also have the biggest stake in onboarding their new hires effectively. Research has shown that being systematic in onboarding brings new employees up to speed 50% faster, which means they’re more quickly and efficiently able to contribute to achieving desired goals. Effective onboarding also dramatically reduces failure rates and increases employee engagement and retention.

Up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities, says the most comprehensive report yet on the state of global ecosystems.

Without drastic action to conserve habitats, the rate of species extinctions—already tens to hundreds of times higher than the average across the last ten million years—will only increase, says the analysis by a United Nations-backed panel, the International Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

In response to a question about ongoing e-commerce talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO), U.S. Trade Representative Lighthizer said last February that, “I think bringing China in will not help these negotiations.”1 That was an understatement if there ever was one. Indicative of the challenge, recent media reports indicate China has refused to relax its tight restrictions on data flows in bilateral talks with the United States.2 With multiparty negotiations on new global e-commerce rules moving forward in Geneva, the European Union, Japan, Australia, Singapore, the United States, and other participants should exclude China from the effort on grounds that its domestic data governance and international trade policies demonstrate that it is far from committed to putting in place the ambitious rules that are needed on data flows and other issues to foster an open, competitive global digital economy.

The exponential pace of technological advancement has made it more challenging than ever before to address its unintended consequences. We have seen it with digital innovation, especially social media, and we are only just beginning to contemplate it with artificial intelligence, which holds the promise of being the most transformational technology of the information era.

The life of an entrepreneur isn’t an easy one. There’s no direct guide for starting and running your own business successfully.

I know first hand what it's like to start businesses and have them fail. As someone who has built a multimillion dollar business without ever taking any outside capital or having mentors, I’m able to confidently attibute a large part of my success to the books I’ve read over the years. 

For cancer patients, undergoing regular testing to monitor their complete blood count (CBC) is a necessary part of treatment. But the commute to and from the clinic, especially for patients who live in rural areas, combined with the additional risk of traveling while immunocompromised and the long wait to receive results, can make an already stressful and taxing process even more exhausting.

Karbasi witnessed firsthand the toll these frequent trips for blood work took on his already-exhausted grandfather while he underwent treatment for lung cancer. Motivated by this experience, Karbasi set out to mobilize the CBC process, making it simpler, safer, and more convenient for cancer patients.

Four years ago, I was fortunate enough to lead Panasonic’s people efforts for the world’s largest startup, the Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory. As my team was tasked with bringing on nearly half of what would ultimately be a 7,000 employee plant, there were times when we brought on more than 300 new team members per month – a colossal challenge for a factory in the middle of the desert, employing technology completely new to the US, and in a relatively small labor market known more for blackjack dealers than battery engineers.

Image: https://www.innovationexcellence.com

It’s time to take the drudgery and dread out of work at your business. You don’t like it, millennials won’t put up with it, and current productivity levels at work continue to decline. Only 32 percent of American workers are even engaged at work today. Most workers are still rushing to retirement, where they hope to escape to more stimulating activities with a real sense of accomplishment.

Image: Image via Pixabay