Reporting for The Atlantic this week, John Hudson detailed a “polarizing conversation” taking place at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. The discussion’s participants, George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen and MIT's Andrew McAfee, have very different opinions on the impact of technology.

Hudson reiterated Cowen’s comparison to the latter half of the 20th century with the first when he declared, "We have simply not had that many life-altering innovations since 1973."

As Mike Myatt noted in his April article, it’s impossible to become a great business leader without being a great communicator—not a big talker, but a great communicator—as well.

Famous entrepreneurs are known for their skilled communication with employees, vendors, investors and clients. It is one of the most vital traits they must have. Whether the news is positive or negative, they know it is best to be forthright, honest and timely. They know that people appre

An engineering researcher was clairvoyant when he said in 1994 that subordinates often make the best leaders:

“Often with small groups, it is not the manager who emerges as the leader. In many cases it is a subordinate member with specific talents who leads the group in a certain direction. Leaders must let vision, strategies, goals, and values be the guide-post for action and behavior, rather than attempting to control others.” –Daniel F. Predpall

Accelerator, the venture-backed biotech startup machine, has made its name over the past decade as a hotspot for financing life sciences companies in Seattle with big dreams and potential. Now it’s considering expanding its model for starting biotech companies in other life science clusters around the world, including New York.

Plans are still in the exploratory stage, but the idea is that Accelerator would remain headquartered in Seattle and build a network of satellite labs in four or five other locations around the world, says Carl Weissman, the co-founder and CEO of Accelerator. Accelerator’s existing venture backers, and some potential new investors, have expressed interest in a more far-reaching version of Accelerator, Weissman says.

America’s history is as diverse as its people, yet the schools only seem to hit the same beats over and over and over and over again. No doubt, the major events and players do need to be known, explored, and understood, but there’s so much more to the nation’s overarching narrative than the usual tales of bashing the British, crushing the Confederates, and neutralizing the Nazis. Thankfully, many organizations, historians, and students have taken to the Internet to share their findings and interpretations about almost every corner of the United States’ political and cultural heritage imaginable. Before lighting up the barbecue this Independence Day, read up on what makes this country both great and not-so-great to spark discussions while waiting on the fireworks.

Creativity is a hard-to-define thing that eludes many of us precisely when we need it the most. So where does it come from? The great and the good have tried to answer this very question, as the quotations below demonstrate:

“Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.” DonatellaVersace (fashion designer)

“But out of limitations comes creativity.” DebbieAllen (dancer and choreographer)

“Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.” T. S. Eliot (writer)

If you’ve ever played sports, you are a natural entrepreneur. The skills cultivated on any playing field will continue to serve you professionally, well beyond competitive sports. Entrepreneurs can benefit from tapping into their experience working with a team, applying lessons from a coach, working toward common goals and utilizing a healthy competitive spirit.  

Additionally, entrepreneurs can also learn from successful athletes, and train using the principles of organized sports to achieve results at the next level:

SURF Incubator, Seattle’s newest startup incubator, celebrated its launch last week at its new facility in the Exchange Building in downtown Seattle. We got an inside look at the incubator a few months ago, but now Seaton Gras’ dream is brimming with activity.

To kick off the festivities, Seattle area startup veteran Bob Crimmins — the CEO of MoonTango — delivered a keynote speech in which he discussed three of his key axioms for startups.

One of the interesting features of modern news coverage is the way that stories spread across the web. Many research teams have attempted to model this process, likening it among other things, to the spread of flu, fashions and forest fires.

One of the fundamental insights that these studies have produced is why these phenomenon spread in similar ways. These phenomenon do not share similar physical properties--a flu virus is not much like a burning leaf or a designer dress.  

You may think you won your independence from the workforce when you quit your job, but the truth is: running your own business sometimes means you’re dependent on many factors. You may depend solely on the revenue produced by just a handful of clients.You may depend on your vendors to produce products and services to you in a timely manner. Are you really as independent as you think?

Here are tips to help you get your independence back as a business owner:

1. Diversify Your Client List

A co-dependent small business owner gets their income from just a few clients. If one of those clients should leave, that business owner is in trouble. They’ll scramble to generate enough business to replace that single client.  Instead, work to score a few key clients, as well as smaller ones, and become an independent business so that you’re not dependent on the money you generate with one or two clients. This way, you diversify your client list and if one client should stop needing your services, you won’t be desperate to pay your expenses.

What strategies did women owned small business owners use to ride out the recession and how are they recovering in its aftermath? Cutting costs was the major focus for most, reports Small Business: Lessons of the Recession, a new study by the NFIB, Chase Bank and the Center for Women’s Business Research.

Here’s more of what they found:

Money matters: During the recession, 45 percent of women business owners said they had focused on cutting costs; 31 percent focused on increasing their sales. Overall, the majority on both sides felt they had made the right decision.

I know some entrepreneurs with successful businesses, and others who seem to have a great relationship with their family, but I can’t think of many who have both. Some people would argue that these two successes are mutually exclusive, but I’m not convinced.

Individually, they both take focus, commitment, and a variety of skills, all the strengths of a good entrepreneur. Assuming a person wants both a family and a business, the challenge is to achieve a balance that can satisfy both. This July 4th Independence Day Holiday in the USA is a good time for all of us to do a reality check on our own efforts.

At some point around the beginning of February 2012, David Coffey — a co-worker of mine in the math department at Grand Valley State University and my faculty mentor during my first year — mentioned something to me in our weekly mentoring meetings. We were talking about screencasting and the flipped classroom concept, and the conversation got around to Khan Academy. Being a screencaster and flipped classroom person myself, we’d talked about making screencasts more pedagogically sound many times in the past.

It has been my intention to write a post telling you all about my new pets – I have recently bought and set up a tropical aquarium. I have wanted to have fish since I can remember and even insisted on having an ‘under the sea’ themed bedroom for many years! Anyway a couple of months ago I decided to take the leap! Picking which fish to have was not easy, but I now have a small community of fish that I am more than happy with! I like my fish to have something interesting about them, a bit of history if you like. This might be where they came from, a novel feature they have, or perhaps just a great personality (I may or may not have imagined!).

The most recent arrivals: two beautiful Peter’s elephantnose fish (see picture). I imagine your first reaction is something like “what is that!” The love child of a dolphin, elephant and a shark perhaps? When I saw these fish in the pet shop it was one of those ‘I have to have one’ moments. But once I had them settled in to their new tank, the scientist in me shone through and I started to research what I had bought! (As usual the pet shop in question had been very vague and I suspect knew as little as me).

Working "out of your comfort zone" is the euphemism; the organizational reality is "working through pain." Innovation hurts.

Every organization I've observed that's serious about being innovative is filled with people in genuine pain — not just stress or anxiety or deadline pressure, and certainly not discomfort. Pain. This can be the physical strain of consecutive all-nighters to test every meaningful configuration of a website before it goes live, to the emotional pain of subordinating your vision of the innovation to the vicissitudes of customer taste. Ideally, innovators go through pain so their customers and clients won't have to.

We hope it never happens to you. But, should you be fired, this straightforward listicle from US News's "Ask a Manager" column will help you navigate those first, chaotic moments.

Unexpected advice includes making your health appointments while you're still on employer insurance, and applying for unemployment benefits — which you can get even if you've been fired. You can also negotiate how your firing will be portrayed to future employers.

And what do you do after you've successfully not sent out a bridge-burning all-staff email? For more on processing the stark emotions a firing can elicit, we recommend this classic HBR article. The key: keeping what the authors call an "assignment" mentality, in which each job is "a stepping-stone, a temporary career-building project."

There is a bit of an entrepreneur in all of us. Most of us just admire these great champions. Others take the plunge and create and build as entrepreneurs themselves. Just about all of us benefit from the results of these heroes of the IT industry. Whoever you are, I would like to draw your attention to some lessons from a master of this art, Gilman Louie of Alsop Louie Partners. Gilman has a great history in IT, including time as a video game designer and time as the first CEO of In-Q-Tel.

Gilman gave a talk at Stanford University on 14 February 2012, and this talk was captured in a YouTube video. As a venture capitalist, he had many good points to make to the class. I summarize them below.

Pioneering incubator TechStars rolls out its “microinternship” program in Boulder, Colo., on Thursday, giving middle school kids a chance to spend a day shadowing the founders of tech start-ups at work there. (Here’s a list of TechStars’ active, Boulder-area companies

The founder of TechStars, David Cohen, teamed up with Centennial Middle School educator Joshua Feiger to coordinate the program. They started working together in 2009, when Feiger invited Cohen to speak to the Entrepreneurs Project school assembly, inspiring kids to learn about and even try their hands at business formation. Cohen consequently blogged about “What I learned from a bunch of middle school kids.”

Matthew Scholz has been told many times that his idea for reprogramming the body’s immune cells to create drugs was impossible. Maybe dangerous. Maybe just dumb.

Scholz, a computer scientist with no formal biology training, could easily have been written off as a quixotic dreamer until this spring, when he got his breakout moment. The foundation started by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, decided that Scholz’s startup, Immusoft, just might be onto something, granting it close to $400,000.

Surgical Serenity headphones are designed to make pain and anxiety medications less necessary and to give a person going into surgery more control over the experience. Dr. Alice Cash programs the headphones with music designed to help a person relax. The patient listens to the music at home before the surgery, during the surgery and continues wearing the headphones into the recovery area.

“The music the patient needs — slow, steady comforting — is the opposite of what the doc needs. Plus the patient doesn’t need to hear the doctor’s music or the conversation going on around them,” she said. “There is also a large placebo effect – knowing you have a safe cocoon can lower anxiety and lower blood pressure.”