It’s all eyes on the winners this time of year. With the Academy Awards and other major entertainment industry award shows, and America’s greatest sports spectacle just behind us, our obsession with being successful is in full bloom. The truth though is that winners get our undivided attention all the time. We all like to win and we revel in victories — the ones we brought about and the ones we embrace as our own, such as our favorite sports team’s triumphs. We want to be successful in what we do and eagerly consume advice on how to be better and achieve more. But wouldn’t it be equally, if not more, instructive to examine failure? As Oprah Winfrey once said, “Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.”

If there were a dark horse among technology hubs, Toronto is certainly the stallion among them. In the past five years, Canada’s most populous city has shown it has more to it than its commercial and cultural attractions, and the best view of Niagara Falls. It has quietly become the world’s fastest-growing destination for technology jobs, leveraging early investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and especially machine-learning technologies at its universities, government funding and other resources for innovation, and an immigration policy that is friendly to technology talent.

Many entrepreneurs hesitate to identify themselves as family business owners.

When business owners are working in the trenches, their focus tends to be on the day to day survival of the business and it may be difficult for them to envision the future. Even when they do, that vision does not usually include an answer to the question of business continuity— one that family business owners are forced to consider from the very beginning.

If you are an entrepreneur these days, or trying to grow an existing business, everyone is telling you that you need to use social media. There are many ‘experts’ out there telling you how to do it, or even offering their services. But very few are talking about how to measure your results and return on investment (ROI), and the right metrics for optimizing your marketing environment.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

The Baruch S. Blumberg Institute is proud to partner with Widener University to offer a Master of Organizational Development and Leadership at our campus at 3805 Old Easton Road, Doylestown (next to Doylestown Airport). This degree can be earned in one year through evening classes designed for working professionals. Learn more at an upcoming Information Session on March 21, April 6 or April 11, or visit www.widener.edu/odl.

Beginning this summer, the unique program will allow students to continue working full-time as they earn a professional Master of Arts in Organizational Development and Leadership, with a specialization in Life Sciences Management and Entrepreneurship.

Let’s face it, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. But those weaknesses shouldn’t get between you and your goals. Here are three ways to deal with those necessary skills that don’t come easily to you.

Take a class. There are tons of online webinars and courses (many of them free) that will give you a how-to approach to learning things like payroll, online marketing and more.

In this video with Entrepreneur Network partner Business Rockstars, Toot App founders Sophia Parsa and Shakib Zabihian recommend that when leaving your full-time job seems impossible, you should go out and see if you can raise money. The founders, Sophia Parsa and Shakib Zabihian, speak about raising $100,000 off one idea they believed in.

The process of entrepreneurship is filled with mistakes. No doubt, you will experience many setbacks that make you question abandoning a steady job. However, you can always work diligently to develop your business on the side until you have a sense of security. 

At a time when entrepreneurship is coveted, Wilma D’Souza Mohapatra, 32, finds value in continuing to work as an employee. Unlike the popular sentiment of being self-employed, Mohapatra, who is a senior project manager at Great Place to Work, a company that works on employee engagement, believes that she gets to innovate and reinvent herself despite working for an employer.

Image: Wilma D’Souza Mohapatra calls herself a ‘intrapreneur’ - https://www.livemint.com

Ryder Carroll didn’t set out initially to develop the Bullet Journal Method– a productivity system and mindfulness practice that has thousands of devoted followers using it to live more productive and meaningful lives. His more modest post-college goal was to afford to live in NYC, have a steady paying job and carve out some time on the side to pursue his side passions. In this interview, I speak with Ryder on our From the Dorm Room to the Board Room podcast about the reality of finding your way in the professional world. The following excerpt from that interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Most of the world’s great market-creating innovations – innovations for which there was previously no offering for a particular consumer, or no affordable offering - have transformed economies, nations, and created entirely new segments of consumers.  Most passionate innovators lie awake dreaming of the potential ubiquity of something they create. But now there’s something else they can dream about as well.  Through their market-creating efforts, they can imagine potentially lifting millions out of poverty.

Image: Karen Dillon, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox - KAREN DILLON

When I entered the venture capital industry, I admired the work of “father of venture capital” George Doriot – taking risks on revolutionary ideas and seeing them pay off. But I was a little mystified by the venture capitalists (VCs) of the current era. Based on the public versions of their success stories, I thought they were extremely lucky or they had a special gift of predicting the future or a combination of both. I also found them very intimidating, unapproachable and unrelatable. I didn’t want to do business the way they did.

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What if every college student had to major in three subjects, unrelated to one another? What if colleges built degrees around a series of global experiences? These are among the speculative considerations of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press). The author of the book, David J. Staley, sets forth a series of possible models for higher education, not restricting himself to those immediately possible or practical. Staley, director of the Humanities Institute and an associate professor of history at Ohio State University, sees lessons for higher education in these various speculations. Via email, Staley answered questions about his book.

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 11, 2019--The Maryland Tech Council (MTC) has announced the finalists for its annual Industry Awards Celebration (IAC). Winners will be revealed at a celebration on May 22, 2019 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. The event, which draws more than 500 executives from the technology and life sciences communities, celebrates individuals and companies that have made a significant impact in their sectors.

Gov. Tim Walz's budget proposal includes $9 million to create a new Minnesota Innovation Collaborative.

If approved by the legislature, the effort would funnel grants and other aid to help start, grow or attract high-tech start-up firms in Minnesota.

The collaborative plans to rely on a host of new state grants, apprenticeship programs, and new office or lab space that will be dedicated to outreach, education and training.

As I was growing up I’d often quip that my grandmother, who had been born at the start of the 20th Century in a Greek village and lived to nearly the age of 100, saw more change in her lifetime than I’d ever possibly see. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong because my future math was a few exponents short.

A recent webcast (below) by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil (co-founders of Singularity University) drove that point home and provided insight into how the future will be even more radically disruptive than anything we’ve already experienced and more so that what we can today predict.

Image: https://www.innovationexcellence.com

Lying in bed each morning, listening to the water run as her roommate took a seemingly endless shower, Emily Batt felt a mixture of frustration and exhaustion. She wanted to be able to sleep until the shower was free, but had no way of knowing when her less-than-considerate roommate would vacate the bathroom.

Those frustrating mornings served as motivation during a team project in the Technology Venture Immersion (TVI) program, a unique, two-week course in the University’s new MS/MBA program, jointly offered by the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Harvard Business School.

Image: Teammates Andy Harris, Emily Batt, and Jack Rockaway developed this connected device and app that delays a smartphone alarm from sounding until the shower is empty. (Photo by Eliza Grinnell/SEAS Communications)

In the future, it will be possible to cool the atmosphere by injecting clouds with sea water to make them reflect more sunlight.

That's just one tech prediction from Amy Webb, founder of the the Future Today Institute (and Inc. columnist).

Webb, who's also a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, unveiled her annual Tech Trends Report on Saturday at the SXSW festival in Austin. This is the 12th year Webb has published the report, which predicts short and long-term trends across a variety of industries.

I was honored when MIT Technology Review invited me to be the first guest curator of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Narrowing down the list was difficult. I wanted to choose things that not only will create headlines in 2019 but captured this moment in technological history—which got me thinking about how innovation has evolved over time.

Time and again, the world looks to Silicon Valley for breakthrough answers to some of our world’s most perplexing challenges: climate change, hunger, national defense, cybersecurity and privacy, biosecurity, homelessness, and more.

The research, thought, and invention produced by the Valley’s higher educational institutions are the repeated spark that changes industry and work as we know it.

Image: Santa Clara University is one of several institutions of higher learning that offer multiple benefits to the Valley and its future. (Bay Area News Group File Photo)

Innovation: A word more and more manufacturing companies are placing at the heart of their business strategy. But do they really understand what it means and, crucially, do they know how to turn it from an industry buzzword into a real, scalable plan of action?

Scale, not speed

Ask 100 people to describe innovation and the majority will probably tell you innovation is about ideation — about coming up with the next big thing.