It's almost impossible to have fun playing ping pong with someone who doesn't care, won't try or isn't any good.

The same thing is true of just about anything that matters in the connection economy. A consultation with a surgeon, creating a new conference or working in partnership with an ad agency... If you're going to create something worth building, it's going to be because there's an infinite game going on, not merely blind obedience and tired conformity.

The Vatican has a new boss. The papal conclave has chosen a new Pope and the Catholic church can breathe a sigh of relief because it is no longer leaderless. Benedict was just getting into Twitter when he stepped down as the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church. Being the Pope is hard work and being the Pope on social media is doubly hard. Pope Francis has already proven that he will not just be another Pope, as evidenced by the fact that he chose an unprecedented name that has never been used before. From St. Francis of Assisi, this name means a rebirth and “rebuilding the Catholic Church”.

The dust is beginning to settle around Marissa Mayer's infamous Yahoo lockdown. Now it's time to begin putting together a comprehensive strategy that works for your company.

Now that the dust has settled a bit about Marissa Meyer’s controversial “no working from home” policy at Yahoo, I thought I’d weigh in. Many companies provide work-from-home options. Employees love it.

But many managers struggle with it. They ask me about this all the time--How do you optimize motivation AND productivity?

With the latest unemployment numbers showing that U.S. businesses are steadily adding new jobs and the Dow Jones breaking records, the economic outlook in much of the country is brighter than it’s been in years.

As a small business owner, it’s essential to take advantage of these economic indicators to expand your operations and keep your business growing. And study after study shows that, by simply increasing employee engagement, business owners can improve nearly every area of their performance.

South by Southwest is a big interactive, music and film conference that's going on right now in Austin, Texas. Over the course of the week, more than 120,000 people are flying south to learn what the next big things are and, of course, to party.

Companies sometimes behave like the ostrich with their head in the ground while others emerge from the crisis like a phoenix. Not knowing with which new products or services your company really earns money is a bit like the ostrich. However there are effective means to gain transparency on innovation spending without too much effort. These tools also allow a comparison with your competitors to understand what they are doing differently in their approach to successfully managing their innovation activities. Finally, they help companies which currently struggle with the economic situation to become more effective and efficient in their innovation management.

Our first article in this series, titled “Include Business Model Review as a New Year Resolution”, described a method to reveal weaknesses in your business model. So, what do you do next after you complete your business model assessment and find weaknesses in one or more of its cornerstones? You find Value Accelerators (VA)™! VA’s are specific and market-proven ideas, assets or strategies that directly accelerate revenue and profit growth. This article discusses how to develop, assess and prioritize the best VAs to strengthen weaknesses in your business model. It also gives you a link to download an example of a scorecard to help prioritize the VAs.

Pepsi MAX & Jeff Gordon Present: “Test Drive”… NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon puts on a disguise and takes a Chevy Camaro out for a test drive with an unsuspecting car salesman. Somebody get this guy a clean pair of underwear…

The UK government does not have a coherent strategy to support the commercialisation of research and is failing to secure the full economic benefits of its world-class science base, warn MPs.

The evidence shows there is no coherent UK innovation policy and the government does not have adequate mechanisms in place to leverage academic research into economic benefits, according to a report from the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee published yesterday (13 March).

Surfing isn’t exactly the sport one would associate with startups, but there’s a lot to be learnt from hanging ten that applies to the world of online business:

Know the conditions

Ideal surfing conditions are a cumulation of swell, tides and wind. Ideally, offshore conditions hold up he wave, giving the surfer more surface area on which to surf. Similarly, startups should have an idea of what their market’s conditions are — for example: knowing that iOS users monetise better than Android users means that iOS development takes precedence if you want to monetise early.

Name: Nice Laundry

One-Liner Pitch: Nice Laundry makes it easy and affordable for men to replace the holey, mismatched socks in their drawer with a completely new set of stylish socks.

Why It's Taking Off: It's like Warby Parker for men's socks.

Tech startups have tried to disrupt everything from payment processing to taxi services, but one new startup has launched a Kickstarter campaign to tackle what may be the greatest challenge yet: change the way men feel about their socks.

Every startup with any traction quickly reaches a point where they need to hire employees to grow the business. Unfortunately, this always happens when pressures are the highest, and business processes are ill-defined. At this point you need superstars and versatile future executives, yet your in-house hiring processes and focus are at their weakest.

The result is a host of hiring mistakes that sink many young companies, or take years to fix. The solution is to never forget that hiring is a top priority task for the CEO, which should never be delegated, and which often has to supersede the urgent crises of the day.

Alec Ross, the State Department's first senior advisor for innovation, is leaving after nearly four years of spearheading the department's lunge into the twenty-first century.

After leaving the State Department, he'll take time to write a book and perhaps a screenplay, found a company to advise investors, corporations and government leaders on the "implication of macro-factors emerging at the intersection of geopolitics, markets and network technologies," mentor up-and-coming talent and work with fast-growing startups to help them understand foreign markets.

If you’re doing a startup, there’s an allure to big brand partnerships. You might think: close a deal in a couple of months and then prestige, validation, press, growth, new opportunities, and lots more all await. “If I get this deal we’ll be up in bright lights.” Except it doesn’t usually work that way. The reality is that it’s so hard getting a foot in the door, then signing a contract is grindingly tough. Next, getting a successful partnership that delivers real mutual value is the real challenge, and then you have to do all this without getting sidetracked and accidentally burning your precious funds.

As part of the run-up to PSFK CONFERENCE 2013 in New York this April, PSFK will be publishing a series of short interviews with speakers to give a taste of what will be discussed in this meeting of creative minds. Bruce Nussbaum, former Assistant Managing Editor of Businessweek and author of the new book Creative Intelligence, will talk about the nature of design and and fresh ways of delivering innovation. Here he speaks to PSFK about his work:

Perhaps it is not surprising that if you ­recruit a noted angel investor to run one of MIT’s highest-profile research groups, the Media­ Lab, one of the things he will do is create mechanisms to invest in student start-ups.

That is what is happening at the Media Lab, where Joi Ito — an early investor in Twitter, Kickstarter, and Flickr — is into his second academic­ year running the place.

I’ve spent most of my career studying how key regions around the world have harnessed their indigenous research capabilities, entrepreneurial spirit, and industrial prowess to realize the economic and employment returns many innovative technologies promise.

I’m particularly intrigued by the differences that make some places engines for innovation.

Innovation, the endless effort to find a better way, cannot be achieved by robotically lining up best practices and imitating them. The real catalyzing agent for innovation is the ground from which these best practices spring -- the confluence of purpose, people, and processes better known as culture.

From where will the next wave of groundbreaking innovation come?

Not from organizations mechanically mimicking each other's best practices, but from organizations with the commitment to take their stand on ground that has been cultivated for breakthrough.

Traditional business intelligence (and data mining) software does a very good job of showing you where you’ve been. By contrast, predictive analytics uses data patterns to make forward-looking predictions that guide you to where you should go next. This is a whole new world for startups seeking enterprise application opportunities, as well social media trend challenges.

According to Eric Siegel in his new book “Predictive Analytics,” it’s the power to predict who will click, buy, lie, or die. He calls his book a primer, but his real-life examples illustrate well how predictive analytics unleashes the power of data, and how “big data” embodies an extraordinary wealth of experience from which to learn.

Over the weekend at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, I had the opportunity to briefly try on Google's next-generation gadget, Google Glass. The experience was interesting, to say the least. The frames do not feel heavy on your face, and I did not notice any difference in weight from my normal glasses. Because they're made of metal, Glass is durable too. It can be bent and twisted and quickly return to its normal state.