I’ve worked on my fair share of products that didn’t quite make it. The process for coming up with ideas for them was always the same: Sit at home, think of things people might willingly pay for, choose one, and run with it. Unsurprisingly, this formula didn’t work, and even though I learned something new with each attempt, I can hardly say it was worth my time or money.

Then something surprising happened: I built a successful product without planning to—through a side project I'd taken on a little reluctantly. In retrospect, it's clear to me why my intentional, sit-down-and-brainstorm approach was less successful than this accidental one.

Daydreaming. Horsing around. Aimless wandering. A sudden, traumatic loss. So many things that seem to conjure an automatic, negative connotation can actually have an interesting—indeed, often positive—impact on our creativity. In fact, the further you dig into the inner workings of the creative side of our minds, the more surprises you’re likely to uncover.

Paging through Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, the pattern is hard to miss. While much about the mechanics of human creativity is obvious—meditation, for instance, has long been known to boost a number of cognitive functions—much of it is downright counterintuitive.

The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and U2 aren’t the only ones who can fill up the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. If every person that Beth Steinberg has helped hire took a seat at the venue, about 500 people would be left standing. They’d hail everywhere from fashion retailer Nordstrom to gaming giant Electronic Arts, from solar provider Sunrun to social network Facebook. Any talent leader knows how astoundingly hard hiring can be — until they execute a layoff, which Steinberg has had to do at least once at nearly every company she’s worked. If you think hiring 10,000 people over a career sounds daunting, try laying off 2,000 of them.

Despite a dip in the number of start-ups founded last year, San Diego remains a good place for innovation, powered by diverse technology clusters and a continued healthy flow of federal research dollars.

That’s the gist of the 2015 San Diego Innovation Report released Thursday by local start-up accelerator Connect. It takes the pulse of the region’s innovation economy, including funding, new startups founded and jobs created.

Knowledge@Wharton: I’ve never interviewed somebody that has described herself in this manner or as part of the title of a book.

Phyllis Korrki: It’s pretty out there. Honest subtitle, isn’t it? The book itself is a very meta book. It’s a book about creative projects, and my creative project is this book.

K@W: What things did you learn about yourself in the process of doing this book?

Korrki: The idea for it came when I was writing a column in my job at the Times about deadlines. I said in the column, which was also kind of a meta column, that the only reason that I finished it was because I had a deadline, I was accountable to my coworkers, and I would have endangered my reputation if I hadn’t finished it. I thought to myself, how do we give that same sense of urgency to our own personal creative projects that no one else is asking for? I explore that in the book.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Richard Vevers has traveled the globe to photograph coral reefs since quitting his advertising job. In 2011 he cofounded the XL Catlin Seaview Survey, a collaboration between the University of Queensland and a number of research institutions, photographing underwater corals as they adapt to climate change. He captured the Great Barrier Reef during its latest—and most devastating—mass die-off, and documented how coral off the coast of Belize had partially recovered thanks to a no-fishing zone.

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--California Life Sciences Institute (CLSI) today announced the appointment of Heather Shane to build and lead the CLSI CARB-X accelerator, which will provide non-dilutive funding, business support and subject matter expertise to companies with innovative antibiotic product candidates. The Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X) is the world’s largest public-private partnership focused on tackling one of the greatest modern threats to public health — antibiotic resistance. CARB-X will commit $50 million during the first year, and at least $350 million over five years, toward preclinical research and development with the aim of accelerating antibiotic product development over the next 25 years. CLSI is the non-profit partner of the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA), and supports the foundations of innovation – workforce development, STEM education and entrepreneurship – that have made California home to the world’s most prominent life sciences ecosystem.

Freefly Systems found a new way to use a drone: surfing. While we were skeptical at first, a rep assures us that the video is legit. Surf's up!

Image: http://mashable.com

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) today announced the creation of the Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge which brings together leading-edge startups with prominent life sciences and health companies to tackle some of the world’s greatest health challenges including access, affordability and transparency.

As an entrepreneur, you’re often so consumed with your venture that you forget to take a step back, and put everything into perspective. But a death in my family recently forced me to do this, making me reflect on how I hope to live life to the fullest.

My uncle, James Chang, recently passed away. He was 73. I didn’t know my uncle well, as he was a man of few words, but I know he lived a life of service. He was a surgeon, and dedicated himself to improving others’ lives. However, five years ago, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and the tables turned as he became the patient.

Today we’re delighted to launch the Best Place to be a Social Entrepreneur, a first-of-its-kind poll surveying 900 experts in 44 of the world’s largest economies. It’s a collaboration between Thomson Reuters Foundation, UnLtd, the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network and Deutsche Bank, with the aim of understanding where social entrepreneurs are thriving throughout the world.

Image: https://unltd.org.uk/

Ever wonder how one of the most talked about entrepreneurs starts his day? 

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Evan Carmichael uncovers how billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk jumpstarts his mornings. 

Although he admits to going to bed late -- around 1 a.m. -- the techpreneur says he still manages to get up every morning at 7. And with such a busy schedule, sometimes it's hard for Musk to eat a full breakfast. 

Click play to learn about Musk's typical morning.

I recently read a blog post by Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director of Sapphire Ventures about why entrepreneurs should care about from whom their VC funds raise their capital. I spent a bunch of time thinking about this position — especially since Beezer is an investor in Upfront Ventures. There are a lot of things I think entrepreneurs should care about when raising from a VC:

There has been a lot of pressure in recent years for cities to emulate Silicon Valley. If you Google “the next Silicon Valley,” you will find hundreds of articles listing different cities as the next Silicon beach, desert, forest, etc.

Being the mayor of a city is like being the CEO of a startup in a constant cycle of iteration, failure and success. Just like business leaders, mayors have to look at market trends and high impact opportunities while adapting to constant change, stakeholder pressures and unexpected crisis.

3-D printing for construction is gaining in popularity in China, in particular, where builders have also constructed a six-story apartment building using the technology. While advances in 3-D printing stateside offer architects and developers an interesting, vertically integrated design and production tool, the technology has yet to achieve wide-spread adoption in construction projects, instead focusing mostly on parts and components.

Cost is a primary reason for the small-scale focus, and questions of job site supply logistics and general assembly labor will likely need to be addressed for 3-D printing to be seriously considered in any kind of production builder or commercial construction capacity. How close do 3-D printers need to be to the job site in order to be useful? Who will operate them, and how might they impact project management decisions? Those questions are only beginning to be explored.

Image: http://www.constructiondive.com

Newswise — Syracuse University’s Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises (EEE) Program, housed within the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, was ranked #1 in the country for veterans by College Factual, a USA Today-affiliated website that helps students find the best colleges and universities for their unique needs. The EEE program was ranked #2 overall for entrepreneurship.

“This recognition reflects Syracuse University’s institution-wide commitment to being the nation’s ‘best’ university for military students and veterans,” said J. Michael Haynie, vice chancellor and executive director of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families. “The EEE program is a great example of the kind of class-leading innovation we’re pursuing across the University, in an effort to broadly engage and empower the military-connected community.”

Delayed for months beyond its expected issue date the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicine’s report emerged yesterday.  Apparently the panelists scrambled to better disguise their predetermined agenda behind reams of soothing rhetoric. While lip service is given to the unimagined advances in medicine under the current industry led drug development system, that’s quickly discarded under the pretext of providing better access to health care for the world’s poorest citizens through a system run by international bureaucracy.  These recommendations are largely directed at the US life science industry.  Luckily, one panel member provides an effective rebuttal to this approach but unless his message is repeated many public officials, media outlets and the general public could come to accept that a government run system would be “more fair.”

I tend to wake up early and do my best work while the sun is coming up. Whenever I try to work late at night, I find I'm less focused and I have trouble thinking creatively.

But there is one thing that I've noticed that I have more of at night: motivation. Something about the end of the day makes me want to get a lot more done and complete more tasks—but by the time I wake up the next morning, all that motivation is gone.

When you imagine a typical nonprofit, you may picture a soup kitchen, a community center, or a homeless shelter. While such services still exist, many nonprofits now design apps, build websites, and design digital tools that help deliver social programs and services to those in need.

"A lot of organizations that were previously not integrating technology into their programs have quickly realized that you can't do work in the social sector or the public health sector without embracing technology, because it's cost effective and impactful," says Bhupendra Sheoran, the executive director of Youth Tech Health (YTH), a San Francisco Bay Area-based nonprofit organization.

The globalized economy is about the networked flows of goods, services, capital and talent. What hobbled so many post-Industrial cities’ ability to reinvent their economies is that they were not connected to these global flows. This lack of a connection has left cities like Cleveland and Detroit as “cul-de-sacs of globalization,” in the words of geographer Jim Russell.

Today, of course, most cities recognize the importance of connections to global flows and are working to make sure they are part of the right networks. One small way they do this is through conferences, both hosting them and attending them. I attended two recent global urban conferences, the Chicago Forum on Global Cities and the latest iteration of the New Cities Summit in Montreal, and got to see this in action.