Brian Chesky, chief executive of Airbnb, likes to tell the story of his early struggles to fund his home-sharing start-up. Many venture capitalists refused to meet with him, he said in an email. Some walked out in the middle of meetings.

That changed after venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund decided to gamble on Airbnb’s potential to shake up the vacation rentals business.

The difference between living a life of peace and productivity versus a life of stress and resentment could lie in one simple skill: Learning how to say no.

Saying no makes the difference between a packed schedule and an open one. It makes the difference between having too many tasks and having just the right amount. It makes the difference between working crazy hours and hitting deadlines without stress.

It’s easy to say to people on your team that they must be accountable for their actions, but it’s not so easy to tell them how to do it. It’s even harder to give them the mindset of wanting to be accountable. In fact, many business leaders forget that they are the role model for accountability, and don’t audit their own actions to make sure that they always practice what they preach.

In a classic book, “The Difference: When Good Enough Isn't Enough,” Subir Chowdhury shines a bright light on both these issues. Chowdhury is one of the world’s leading management consultants, and he argues that accountability is only one part of a real caring culture that must be built and maintained to achieve a sustainable competitive difference.

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In this episode of the McKinsey on China podcast, McKinsey senior partners Nick Leung and Jonathan Woetzel, along with senior adviser to McKinsey Gordon Orr, discuss how slowing GDP growth and trade challenges are affecting the Chinese economy. See “China Brief: The state of the economy” for a related analysis on where the economy stands.

I’ve interviewed so many amazing innovators that I decided it was time to collect some of the top tips I’ve heard from them in driving STEM innovation, that is, in science, technology, engineering and math.

What role do universities play in a contemporary world?

Higher education institutes have long been known as hubs of knowledge of production and a means of gaining a respected qualification. But today, universities play a much bigger and more important role: preparing students for diverse roles in their future, whether it’s academic or professional.

AstraZeneca is spearheading the creation of a new life sciences park, in Wuxi, China, that aims to nurture innovation by bringing together local and international companies, government, and medical and academic institutions to help create a world-class healthcare innovation ecosystem.

The International Life Science Innovation Park will be built by the Wuxi municipal government and Wuxi High-tech District and supported by AstraZeneca as a founding partner.

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Despite all our differences, one of the things that links all entrepreneurs together is that we're all busy. Very busy. Even during our down time, it's hard not to think about all the things we "should be doing."

The amount of work you already need to get done at your own business often makes it hard to even think about working on a side hustle. Some may even feel like they'd be cheating on their company by working on one.

Five innovative companies focused on the diagnosis or treatment of Multiple Sclerosis, TBI, Autism, Spinal misalignment, and Metastatic Cancer will present their innovative technologies to a panel of judges and industry leaders on April 9th during the 2019 BioHealth Capital Region Forum, at the AstraZeneca campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Founded by BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) and AstraZeneca in 2016, the annual Crab Trap Competition highlights biohealth companies with strong commercial potential. The five finalists were selected from a competitive field of almost fifty entries. The 4th Annual Crab Trap Competition is sponsored by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The grand prize this year is $10,000.

Considering how deeply companies rely on innovation, it is astonishing how bad most of them are at finding, developing, and implementing new ideas. Global companies pour roughly $1 trillion yearly into innovation; we estimate at least 10% of that sum — $100 billion — is completely wasted.

Defining the new entrepreneurship: how it’s different from the current one

A gap between entrepreneurship and art has arisen over past industrial revolutions. New entrepreneurship aims to close the gap. It is imbued with entrepreneurialism, transplanting into the socio-economic sphere Brunelleschi’s Renaissance perspective in the art world.

Current entrepreneurship is in the STEM field, following the Fordist production environment, characterised by the bureaucracy of the 20th century. Know How To Do now has to be Knowing How To Think, Imagine and Understand. This requires familiarity with the Arts. STEM changes to STEAM. In the new entrepreneurship mode, innovationists take over from incrementalists.

According to The Washington Post and WSJ, the economy has been slowing down around the world, and the US will follow suit before 2019 ends. Yet if you wait for an economy bubble before starting your new business, you will be making a comparable mistake to the people who thought during the dot-com bubble "all I have to do is a startup, and I'll be rich." In reality, what matters more is who you are, not when you do it.

Research from Israel is driving awesome advances in medicine, healthcare, water management, autonomous vehicles, consumer products, manufacturing, and – well, you name it.

So it’s only natural that many international academic, corporate and government bodies are signing collaboration agreements with Israeli research universities and hospitals.

Developments surrounding the on-going Brexit negotiations create uncertainty which is reflected in the European financial markets and the global economy. This uncertainty is interrelated with economic risk, and thus forces entrepreneurs to re-evaluate their risk and return trade-off schemes. Throughout this interlude, London-based entrepreneurs may well be considering pursuing their entrepreneurial opportunities elsewhere rather than remaining in the London metropolitan area.

With companies like Salesforce worth upwards of $100 billion, and incumbents like six-year-old Slack valued at over $7 billion, it would seem there is no better time to be a SaaS company. While this is true in many respects, especially in the U.S. where venture capital is flowing (allowing SaaS companies to scale quickly), the truth is that most SaaS companies don’t make it to even $1 million in revenue.

The Illinois Medical District is launching a new initiative to establish a life sciences innovation district for the city of Chicago. In addition to its existing facilities, the Illinois Medical District has 31 acres of land for development of the future largest life sciences innovation district in the Midwest.

Startup investors tell me they invest in a new venture with a higher caliber of people, rather than the product or service, and I agree. In my role as a business advisor, I see successful businesses most often emerging from great teams rather than great products. Yet I find the people building teams are usually product experts, often with no experience in team building.

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Founders in Asia Pacific are always in such a rush to launch their product that many often fail to realize going to market too soon can also be a problem. Such products, as the saying goes, are ahead of their time. We need to look no further than the dotcom busts of the early 2000s, many of which re-emerged later on as successful ventures for the social Web, to see this truth in action.

Vitamin C could be a cost-effective way to reduce the time that patients spend in intensive care. This was the conclusion of a recent analysis of evidence from published trials.

Dr. Harri Hemilä of the University of Helsinki in Finland and Dr. Elizabeth Chalker of the University of Sydney in Australia have written a study paper that features in the journal Nutrients in which they explain how they found the "statistically highly significant evidence" that led to their conclusion.

A player drives to the basket. As the defense collapses, he passes the ball to his teammate, anchored at the corner, for the open three-point shot.

This corner shot is one of the most efficient shots in basketball, as measured through the expected points per shot. It’s second only to shots at the rim, followed by three-point shots above the break – that is, the location on the court where the three-point line changes from arc to a straight line.