Many consider innovation to be the holy grail of entrepreneurial success. Investors and entrepreneurs alike dedicate resources and dollars only to come up short and frustrated. Consistently capitalizing on ingenuity and disruption can be almost impossibly challenging.

Kevin Fallon, CEO of Pivotal Innovation, believes that many executives are simply approaching innovation the wrong way. Fallon, a member of YPO, has been at the center of innovation as a COO with two publicly traded corporations and a successful entrepreneur.

I spent most of my adult life working in some of the world’s most challenging business environments. For 15 years, I managed and consulted for media businesses in places like Warsaw, Kyiv and Moscow. It was a difficult, but incredibly rewarding experience, both personally and professionally.

In time, I became adept at parachuting into a new market, learning the culture, learning the language and figuring out how to build a business. I was able to do so because I developed systems and processes for just about everything — marketing, sales, operations, even crisis management.

There are a few things you don't want to see when you're diving in the ocean, and a great white shark tops the list.

A scuba diver named Julian was scuba diving off the coast of Mexico when he found himself just inches away from a great white shark. 

Julian credits his smooth camera work in keeping the shark away.

Not everything belongs on the Internet, and the American electoral process is a textbook example. But 31 states don’t see it that way.

The recent cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee has raised the specter of an Internet-based assault on the democratic process in the U.S., leading computer security experts to call on the federal government to do more to protect the voting process from hackers.

Delivery by drone may be legal within two years. Just don’t expect many pizzas or packages to wing their way through your neighborhood by then. Despite huge interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and considerable hype around the idea of using them to deliver goods, experts say significant challenges still need to be solved for drone delivery to get off the ground.

“F--k-you money” may not be as much as you think. Try our calculator.

The American Dream is traditionally defined by a climb up the socioeconomic ladder to a comfortable middle-class life: a small business built from scratch, a house in the suburbs, a two-car garage, and the first generation of college-educated kids.

But another type of American Dream has now developed: The freedom to upturn your desk, give your boss the finger, and retire on the spot—without making a lifestyle sacrifice, of course.

The term “big data” is ubiquitous. With exabytes of information flowing across broadband pipes, companies compete to claim the biggest, most audacious data sets. And businesses of all varieties — old and new, industrial and digital, big and small — are getting into the game.

Masses of social, weather, and government data are being leveraged to predict supply chain outages. Enormous amounts of user data are being harnessed at scale to identify individuals among a sea of website clicks. And companies are even starting to leverage huge quantities of text exchanges to build algorithms capable of having conversations with customers.

By the end of 2016 the overall crowdfunding industry is on track to account for more total funding than the average annual investment from the venture capital industry (according to the most crowdfunding figures published by the most recent report by Massolution).

Just five years ago there was a relatively small market of early adopters crowdfunding online to the tune of a reported $880 million in 2010.

Image: https://medium.com

In 2008, Chris Anderson (then the editor of Wired magazine) wrote a provocative article called “The End of Theory.” Anderson insisted that the era of Big Data had rendered the scientific method — developing a hypothetical model first, and then testing it with data — increasingly obsolete. Google and other companies were generating a “data deluge” that could no longer be contained or explained by models, by theory. “With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” Anderson wrote. “We can stop looking for models.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Given the current landscape, with all it entails and all the connection ability we have, realistically should we be surprised that we’re talking about a term like megachange?

Darrell West: We shouldn’t be surprised, because there is large-scale change taking place all around us. But it’s something people have not quite gotten used to. During a lot of our history, we existed in periods of small-scale and incremental change, so I argue in the book people need to adjust their expectations, because large-scale change is here and is likely to stay in the near future.

1. Focus  “It’s been said that leadership is making important but unpopular decisions. That’s certainly a partial truth, but I think it underscores the importance of focus. To be a good leader, you cannot major in minor things, and you must be less distracted than your competition. To get the few critical things done, you must develop incredible selective ignorance. Otherwise, the trivial will drown you.”

Will big data cure cancer?

While there's a lot of breathless talk about the potential of big data to do just that, Greg Simon, the Executive Director of the White House's Cancer Moonshot Taskforce, is a skeptic--at least for now.

"What big data?" asked Simon speaking at Fortune's Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego Wednesday. "We have in the health system, what is basically insider trading. I know something you don't know. You know something I don't know. When I need to know what you know, I call you, I email you. You fax me stuff."

Israeli equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd has launched a new fund specifically focused on the digital health field, called OurCrowd Qure. They will work with Johns Hopkins University to provide validation of value, market access,  and on-going feedback on the startups.

"I think that crowdfunding for digital health makes a huge amount of sense," John Medved, CEO of OurCrowd, told MobiHealthNews. "We’re not just raising money in a different way. We’re helping to build the company in a different way. A crowdfunding platform is uniquely positioned to help digital health leaders."

Aihui Ong was a successful software engineer consultant taking home a six-figure salary when she decided to quit her job and spend a year traveling the world.

In 2014 she told Fast Company, "I got burnt out. I lost my love for technology." The decision, however, was met with criticism from friends and family. "You’re in your early thirties,’ they told me. ‘You should be having a kid or being VP of a company, not staying in dirty motels,’" she says.

Are our children’s future careers doomed to be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence? The short answer is no. The longer answer is of course not. And that's because humans have something no machine can yet embody: empathy. And it's that distinctly human characteristic which is going to make the technology industry more diverse and successful in the future.

Morning sets the tone for the day, especially when it's one of those times you wish you hadn’t gotten out of bed. So we asked eight productivity experts to give us a glimpse into their morning routines to help smooth the way and inspire better starts.

AN EASY MORNING You might be surprised that David Allen, author of the productivity "bible" Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, doesn’t have a structured morning routine.

Regulation Crowdfunding is another step forward to allow non-accredited investors to participate in online investment opportunities. Born from Title III of President Obama’s 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, Regulation CF provides access to alternative investments through online equity crowdfunding.

Regulation CF platforms differ from reward or donation-based sites such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo by offering stakes in small and startup businesses. Platforms approved for Regulation CF provide conduits for emerging businesses to showcase their offerings to potential investors. Regulation CF is the first time non-accredited investors can crowdfund capital in early-stage companies, including those striving to make lasting impacts on society.

“Industry is a necessary but not sufficient quality for achievement,” Lloyd Handwerker writes in his lovely book about his grandfather, Famous Nathan: A Family Saga of Coney Island, the American Dream, and the Search for the Perfect Hot Dog. “An additional element is needed — something ineffable, random, and hard to pin down. Call it luck, or label it being in the right place at the right time.”

This year, the narratives among the best business books all explored that ineffable something that makes the difference between dreams that are realized and those that are broken — from the prosaic (Nathan Handwerker’s quest to build a thriving, exacting hot dog business) to the utilitarian (revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine’s plans for an iron bridge) to the literally cosmic (Iridium’s futuristic scheme for satellite phones).

By now you’ve probably heard the story of the fraudulent business practices at Wells Fargo – the bank that pressured employees to create false credit card and deposit accounts. Have you asked yourself what you would do if you were an employee facing that kind of pressure? In other words, how do you handle a situation in which the incentives seem to be telling you to do something you believe is bad for your customers and clients, or maybe even illegal? And what if it’s clear your boss wants you to get with the program – and your bonus, a promotion, or even your job are on the line?

GLEN BURNIE, Md., Nov. 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/-- CSSi LifeSciences™, a trusted partner from discovery to commercialization for drugs and medical devices, is excited to announce the establishment and launch of its fully integrated Medical Device CRO. CSSi LifeSciences™ Medical Device CRO aims to positively impact the timeline of regulatory clearance and increase profitability for medical device companies, in order to successfully launch its innovative research discoveries and product concepts into the market.