Modeling afforded a number of insights about why high-technology companies fail. It is much harder to change decision-making procedures than we realized when system dynamics started. Whether in school or management education, the focus will be on “generic structures.”

Sometimes, the best tech is simple.

While 2016 was littered with futuristic gadgets — mind-melting virtual reality headsets, an iPhone without a headphone jack — we'd wager most of the technology you use day to day is a bit less amazing. Maybe you have a really good keyboard, or a neat smartphone app that saves you money: they may not dazzle, exactly, but they make a difference in your life.

Clayton Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School, builds upon the theory of disruptive innovation for which he is well-known. He speaks about his new book examining how successful companies know how to grow.

As dramatic music played in the background, Penn Engineering grads Matt Lisle ENG’15 and Adrian Lievano ENG’15 walked nervously onto the set of CNBC’s Make Me a Millionaire Inventor. After weeks of preparation, this was the moment they had been waiting for—pitching their water filtration system to a potential investor.

As fate would have it, that investor turned out to be Alicia Syrett W’99, founder and CEO of Pantegrion Capital and board member of New York Angels.

Image: Everwaters founders Matt Lisle ENG’15 and Adrian Lievano ENG’15

About half of 30-year-olds won’t make as much money as their parents did at the same age, a new study has found.

That’s a substantial decline from nearly 50 years ago: While in 1970s, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did when they were young, that figure fell to 51% by 2014.

What’s more, even if President-elect Donald Trump fulfills his promises of rapid economic growth, the trend won’t be reversed significantly. Even if income levels grew 3.8%, the percentage of 30-year-olds who out-earn their parents would bump up to just 62%, the Wall Street Journal reports.

NEW YORK — Three years into being a business owner, Becky Davis knew she needed to break the hold social media had on her.

Davis, a marketing and management consultant to other small business owners, was so immersed in emails, texts and social media sites that she was getting only four or five hours of sleep a night and her husband said he felt invisible. It also hurt her productivity: she’d get distracted reading people’s posts and realize she’d lost two hours of work time.

Early-stage health IT startups in Philly are getting one more door to knock on for seed capital: a new $6 million investment fund focused exclusively on local startups, backed by public-private venture firm Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Independence Health Group (the parent company of Independence Blue Cross) and venture firm Safeguard Scientifics.

The official announcement will happen this afternoon during Philly Startup Leaders’ Founder Factory conference. But, for now, you should know each company will kick in $2 million to the fund, which plans to dole out its funds over the coming four years.

Knowledge@Wharton: Your organization did a report on the state of the job market prior to the election. What are some of the necessary things that the next president, his cabinet and the Congress need to address?

Art Bilger: You’ve got to start by understanding what the circumstances are out there, because in my three-year journey, it has been quite amazing to (see how little of the crisis is perceived by) even by the most sophisticated people. I have laid (the problem) out to major news executives, foundations, corporate executives — and people haven’t really understood the magnitude of this and how quickly things are changing.

Conventional wisdom too often yields conventional results. These entrepreneurs succeed where others don't because they hold some unusual beliefs that create massive results for their businesses.

Learn from their ideas below to make your own venture a success.

Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s)

St. Louis County will have a new AgTech innovation district to build on the area’s leadership position in this field and to attract startups and AgTech companies from around the world.

The new district will be called 39 North (@39NorthSTL) and was officially announced on Wednesday morning at the Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur.  The 39th parallel north is the physical location of the district. It also reflects the coordinates of the prime agricultural belt across the world.

A defining moment in modern biology occurred on July 24, 1978, when biotechnology pioneer Robert Swanson, who had recently co-founded Genentech, brought two young scientists to dinner with Thomas Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist. As they stood outside Perkins’s magnificent mansion in Marin County, with its swimming pool and garden and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Swanson turned to his two young colleagues and said, “This is what we’re all working for.”

WASHINGTON- For many Americans the post-recession economy doesn't present the opportunity they wished came with growth. Rising stock prices and low unemployment have masked a low-growth status quo that threatens future U.S. prosperity. Drawing on proprietary Gallup data, the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and Gallup released "No Recovery," which examines the problems that persist with declining productivity growth.

The Trump administration will have an opportunity to reevaluate policies that affect innovation and technological development. How can federal policies promote broadband buildout, spur investment in intelligent infrastructure, encourage research and development, and advance a host of other actions that have the potential to improve productivity and the U.S. economy? Join ITIF and the Technology Policy Institute to discuss how the Trump administration can accelerate the pace of innovation in the U.S. economy.

When: Thursday, December 15, 2016, 8:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.

The 2017 NASA SBIR/STTR Program Solicitation was released via the NASA SBIR/STTR public website and cross listed on www.sbir.gov . NASA is seeking proposals from small businesses and partnering research institutions for research, development, and demonstration of innovative technologies that will address NASA interests and have significant potential for successful transition of technology into NASA mission programs and other markets.

Big data’s potential just keeps growing. Taking full advantage means companies must incorporate analytics into their strategic vision and use it to make better, faster decisions.

Is big data all hype? To the contrary: earlier research may have given only a partial view of the ultimate impact. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), The age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world, suggests that the range of applications and opportunities has grown and will continue to expand. Given rapid technological advances, the question for companies now is how to integrate new capabilities into their operations and strategies—and position themselves in a world where analytics can upend entire industries.

The U.S. ranks second on a global manufacturing competitiveness index, according to the 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index by research firm Deloitte Global and the Council on Competitiveness. The U.S. ranking has improved in each of the past studies and is poised to take over that top spot from China by 2020, the study maintains.  However, executives from across the world in responding to the study, noted that talent is the leading factor in determining manufacturing competitiveness, and finding and cultivating that talent is a topic that has received increasing attention from the manufacturing sector.

On Valentine's Day 2014 Elizabeth Droge-Young admitted herself to a hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. For more than a year, she had been struggling with depression—not eating well and losing interest in the movies, books and music that usually delighted her. She had withdrawn from her friends and was routinely missing classes at Syracuse University, where she was a fifth-year graduate student in evolutionary biology. Some days that winter she could not even make it out of bed, despite the fact that she had started taking antidepressants the previous fall. In her darkest moments, obsessive and frightening thoughts of self-harm and suicide flooded her mind. “It was horrible,” she recalls. “I felt very unsafe.” She realized she needed a serious intervention.

To be effective when pitching your start-up “you have 20 seconds to be compelling or you might as well go home”. That was the core piece of advice that Bill Reichert from Garage Technology Ventures, a Silicon Valley based VC Fund, highlighted in his presentation at the 2016 StartCon Event that ran this past weekend in Sydney.

Stress can be detrimental to your health, contributing to everything from higher blood pressure to nausea. Now, a new study zeroes in one of the the biggest sources of stress—our jobs—and suggests that exercise may be an effective way to ease the health problems sometimes caused by work stress.

It’s hard to get excited about a biotech shared-space in 2016.

Four years ago, it was an exciting and rapidly diversifying field. Now incubators are par for the course, with most Big Pharma and many institutions operating their own version.

Mass Innovation Labs was late to the game, opening in May 2015. But it is clearly doing something different.

According to CEO Amrit Chaudhuri, graduates of Mass Innovation Lab’s program have collectively licensed and raised over $4 billion. The overall valuation of those companies now exceeds $40 billion.