MORGANTOWN — Although education, broadband access, roads and energy were among the top issues during the 2019 session of the state Legislature, the West Virginia Bioscience Summit recently celebrated a different legislative victory.

Bryan Brown, executive director of the Bioscience Association of West Virginia, said one of the landmark pieces of legislation passed this year and signed by Gov. Jim Justice was House Bill 2550.

Image: https://www.wvnews.com - Photo courtesy of Brian Joseph

Every organization strives to innovate, but few succeed consistently over time. That’s why so many once dominant companies hit a peak and then decline. A recent study estimates that 50% of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years. Success is supposed to breed success, but it often breeds failure.

Yet IBM, Google and Amazon have been able to buck this trend. While most companies are lucky to come up with one major innovation, these three continue to develop breakthroughs and don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. In fact, they seem to be accelerating their ability to create impressive new products and services.

Everyone in the business world has heard of the old bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “Crossing the Chasm,” but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers.

Image: Image via Picpedia 

If you've ever wondered why your mind is a hotspot for new ideas in your 20s, it could be that you're experiencing the first of two creative peaks.

New research from Ohio State University found that our mid-20s is when our brains first become fertile ground for innovation.

The study looked at previous winners of the Nobel Prize in economics.

It found that those who did their most groundbreaking work in their 20s tended to be "conceptual" innovators.

So basically they had a light bulb moment and acted upon it.

We spend roughly one-third of our life at work. The question is, do you get a little bit better every day?

The best boss is one who is always becoming better. That means you keep learning—from your team, from difficult circumstances, from your wins and losses, from your friends and enemies. Everything that happens in your world presents something you can learn from. This is what Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.”

I know entrepreneurs who have suffered from premature execution often associated with the ready-fire-aim quick-to-market approach. Yet I believe that many more have benefited from this approach, especially in early startup stages. If your product is highly innovative, and speed to market is critical, you won’t get it right the first time anyway, no matter how cautiously you plan.

Image: Image via Flickr by Shawn Wolfe 

With great power comes great responsibility. Organizations can mitigate the risks of applying artificial intelligence and advanced analytics by embracing three principles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be a double-edged sword. While this can be said of most new technologies, both sides of the AI blade are far sharper, and neither is well understood.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

After last year set a colossal record of $132.1 billion of venture capital invested in the US, VC activity in 2019 was expected to start slow. But that's not what happened. Instead, valuations climbed to unprecedented levels, $100 million rounds became the new normal, and the beginning of what's expected to be a deluge of VC-backed IPOs kicked off in the first quarter, setting the pace toward a record exit value.

If you believe that great scientists are most creative when they're young, you are missing part of the story.

A new study of winners of the Nobel Prize in economics finds that there are two different life cycles of creativity, one that hits some people early in their career and another that more often strikes later in life.

Image: Credit: George Hodan/public domain

Before it was defaced, the original McDonald’s advertisement featured a towering Big Mac with the all-caps message “THE THING YOU WANT WHEN YOU ORDER SALAD” superimposed over it. Then someone scribbled in an extra clause. It now reads: “THE THING YOU WANT WHEN YOU ORDER SALAD SHOULD BE SALAD,” with the graffiti covering up a golden arches logo.

Image: Image: courtesy Christopher Bryan

The tube-dwelling anemone is an ancient sea creature that resembles a prehistoric flower. The animals live slow, long and predictable lifestyles and look fairly similar from species to species.

It’d be easy to use the word “simple” when considering this relative of coral and jellyfish. But wait – not so fast.

Image: https://scienceblog.com

When doctors at New Tafo Hospital in a city in Eastern Ghana need emergency medicine or blood for a transfusion and the hospital doesn’t have it in stock, they just need to send a text message and 15 minutes later, a drone will arrive and the medicine will drop from the sky with a parachute.

Image: courtesy Zipline

Interventions designed to increase women’s cultural fit can also create a better working environment for everyone.

Gender imbalance in the workplace is not confined to the gender pay gap or number of women vs. men in senior leadership positions. It also has to do with subtler yet deeper cultural cues about who belongs and who doesn’t. For the most part, organisational cultures do not yet meet the needs of a gender-balanced workforce. Not only do mental models of brilliance and leadership mostly skew male, but policies and practices are also largely holdovers from an era when male-dominated professional contexts were unquestionably normative.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu/

Alex had an impressive résumé. He had excellent grades in school, a string of technical projects that won recognition, and concrete results from his first two jobs. Yet when he interviewed at a new high-tech startup, the company turned him down. Luckily for Alex, he learned the reason for his rejection from an unofficial source — a colleague who didn’t agree with the decision. It turned out that the interviewers thought Alex lacked passion. He was quiet, didn’t specify how he contributed to the projects on his résumé, and didn’t display the effusiveness they were used to seeing in strong candidates.

The business world may be working toward equality for men and women, but we're not quite there yet.

One of the most powerful ways to achieve your career ambitions is to listen and learn from the incredible female leaders who have paved the way before us. From Shonda Rhimes to Sheryl Sandberg, these TED Talk speakers are full of real world wisdom that will help you feel inspired--and take action--through every phase of your career.

Wing, an eight-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm co-founded by veteran VCs Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg, produces interesting research about its own industry every now and then, based on smaller data sets than firms like PitchBook or CB Insights tend to use. Instead of looking at funding activity broadly, the firm tracks deal-making at the top 21 venture firms in the U.S. to “really focus on the signal,” as Wagner has explained to us in the past. Last year, for example, the firm determined that the funding pullback that everyone was worried about had actually happened in 2016.

Climate change results in warmer ocean temperatures, melting glaciers and more extreme weather patterns. Scientists have also observed its effects on the clams, snails, worms, crabs, urchins, starfish and more living on and in the deep seafloor off Alaska, as the ecosystem shifted from arctic to sub-arctic within the last few decades.

Now, scientists at the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences have found that seashells from these creatures show the same major regime change in Alaskan waters, where the ecosystem has shifted from arctic to sub-arctic within the last few decades.

Image: A collection of organisms taken from the Arctic seafloor. - Photo by Alex Kozyr

Phone addiction has become such a worldwide problem that even the Pope weighed in this month.

Pope Francis warned a group of high schoolers about it during a meeting at their school in Rome, reports the Catholic magazine America. He told the teens to "please, free yourselves from your phone addiction," explaining that "when the phone is a drug," there's a danger of "communication being reduced to simple 'contacts.'"

Breathe in, and breathe out.

We do this about 20,000 times every day. Each breath can be thought of as another small opportunity to decompress.

The retired US swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, knows this fact well. Although breathing is a crucial part of swimming, Phelps said he discovered outside the pool how breathing techniques can help with mental health.

Motown Records is gearing up to launch two music programs aimed at arming Detroit artists with the skills, connections and funds to take their careers to the next level.

"Detroit has always been a creative hub for new talent and development," Motown Records President Ethiopia Habtemariam said in the release. "With the Motown Musician Accelerator initiative, we have an opportunity to come back to Detroit and highlight the incredible talent that has always existed in their community. Being able to provide the necessary support, funding and programming to help them grow in their careers is an absolute honor for us."

Image: Detroit-based musicians and Musictech startups will have an opportunity to work alongside Motown Records as part of two new programs to be offered at Motown Museum and TechTown Detroit.