You have a meeting or an important discussion coming up.  What is your real objective?  If it has anything to do with selling, how can you maximize the likelihood of success?

And just to be clear, your objective almost certainly does have something to do with selling. As Daniel Pink argues in his latest book, To Sell is Human, we’re constantly trying to influence behavior — a.k.a. selling. We may not be selling cars, but we are likely on a daily basis to be pushing ideas (e.g., a pitch for a campaign or strategic project), telling about our capabilities and track-record (e.g., for a job), or projecting our values (e.g., in everyday leadership and mentorship).

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One of my favorite movies is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho, an elegant story with gripping suspense and one of the best twist endings you still will ever see. It’s also one of the absolute worst inspirations for presenting ideas inside companies.

This thought crossed my mind (once again) as I listened to a pitch from a young entrepreneur. He was brimming with energy as the story slowly built through page after page of facts and figures and graphs and pictures and profiles of interesting companies around the globe that were attacking the market he planned to target. Then, the twist! The entrepreneur wasn’t going to do what everyone else was doing. No! He and his team were going to go in a different direction and try to disrupt the market.

Accelerators are often exciting, collaborative and deeply rewarding incubators that help you to grow your startup, develop a product or idea, and find follow-on investors.

Although there are hundreds of accelerators to choose from, you’ll be competing against thousands of other applicants all vying for the chance to learn from one of these life-changing mentoring programs. To help you stand out from the crowd, we asked Kirsten Campbell, General Manager for Seedcamp and Simon Jenner, CEO of Oxygen Accelerator for some inside knowledge.

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When our startup Agent Anything, a job marketplace for students, was selected as one of 10 companies to be a part of ANZ Innovyz Start, an accelerator in Adelaide, Australia, we were excited. Not only is ANZ Innovyz Start a member of the Global Accelerator Network which includes other top accelerators like TechStars and Excelerate Labs, but it also provided an opportunity for us to scale our company internationally -- something we wanted to do from the get-go.  

Amazon’s plans to deliver packages by drones, which it predicts “will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today,” has been widely dismissed as little more than clever self-promotion.

Yet, in some contexts, drone delivery has shown potential. Last year, a startup called Matternet in Palo Alto, California, tested drones as a way to deliver supplies to refugee camps in Haiti and found it cost only 20 to 70 cents to deliver a two-kilogram package 10 kilometers—at least a fivefold savings compared to standard truck delivery.

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Startups are the corporations of the future, so I have long believed that entrepreneurs who study existing corporate models, rather than ignoring them with disdain, will likely profit from the exercise. In today’s fast-paced world, that means recognizing early and capitalizing on the changes that are bringing many big companies to their knees, before that company is yours.

We see evidence in the news every day of these irresistible forces of change, like the pervasive global penetration of the Internet, the impact of terrorist activities even to peaceful countries, the power of social media in building business relationships, and the depletion and pollution of natural resources. These are all huge challenges, as well as huge opportunities, for entrepreneurs.

New York has built gleaming new research facilities and lured at least one large drug company, but the city still trails places such as Boston and San Francisco in fostering small companies that experiment with cutting-edge medical treatments.

To help the local biotechnology scene catch up, the Bloomberg administration is working with large pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists to create a $100 million fund to invest in fledgling life sciences companies.

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AOL co-founder Steve Case stressed the need for the United States to remain innovative Tuesday at an event hosted by the Aspen Institute in Washington. “We kind of led on the digital information revolution. We need to lead in the next revolution, otherwise our economy will start stagnating and we’ll never be able to solve some of the fiscal problems,” Case said.

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Scientists have been toying for years with creating tiny implants and nanorobots that could carry drugs to certain diseased cells. It is about as targeted as therapy can get, but at this point it's all a bit futuristic. Within the confines of petri dishes, researchers are still tinkering. A new study is the first to demonstrate that a nanorobot, which the researchers are calling a DNA nanocage, can both encapsulate and release a biomolecule without degrading the cage itself -- and at a size small enough to keep the drugs trapped until they reach the end target.

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“Community” is perhaps the most popular word right now in the world of entrepreneurship. Across the country, discussion is alive with talk of “entrepreneurial communities.” A leading book at the moment is Brad Feld’s Startup Communities, and in coffeehouses, conferences and classrooms everywhere, entrepreneurs seek the help of “the community.”

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The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, could encourage 1.2 million people to leave steady jobs and strike out on their own, according to a report released in May by the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Urban Institute. The reasoning the three think tanks gave for their bold prediction was simple: The availability of low-cost health plans for all will unshackle would-be entrepreneurs from a phenomenon known as “job lock,” where people feel pressured to stay with less-than-optimal employers solely so they can hold onto their health benefits.

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Leading on from my previous article around why the understanding Internet of Things (IoT) is vital do digital success, one of the biggest and fastest industries to adopt the IoT will be healthcare. The way in which wearables can be foreseen to significantly impact healthcare is by designing products for individual use where they become customizable and are all about tracking your own data, and using tech as your health advocate.

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Imagine a modern renaissance where a generation holds creativity and innovation as a common goal, has constant access to creative tools that provide instant feedback and encouragement, and are highly connected to each other for the exchange of ideas.  Imagine how many innovators could emerge from that generation.  Now imagine what the beginnings of this phenomenon would look like. Could it be that today’s young generations, growing up in a world of iphones, ipads, twitter, and instagram could be on the verge of their own iRenaissance?

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WHEN the news broke recently that a team of Belgian scientists had “discovered” a new body part — a ligament located just outside the knee — the first place my mind went was to Padua.

Padua is the small city in northern Italy where the 16th-century Brussels-born scientist Andreas Vesalius taught anatomy and created his history-making masterpiece, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (“On the Fabric of the Human Body”), published in 1543. The old man would have been delighted by the news, I couldn’t help thinking.

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The future is coming, and it's going to be manufactured in a whole new way.

3D printing is revolutionizing manufacturing, so GE decided to give it its own holiday: 3D Printing Day. They're celebrating by designing and 3D-printing holiday gifts for their fans all day on December 3. After all, even elves deserve a break for the holidays, right?

But what exactly are 3D-printed things made of, and how will the process influence the way manufacturers work? Take a look at seven things you probably didn't know about 3D printing, and join the 3D Printing Day celebration with the hashtag #3DPrintMyGift.

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For many years we've been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory -- based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research -- was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What's actually happened are two very bad things. First, it's seriously harmed university research, by guaranteeing much less information sharing between researchers. And, it turns out, that information sharing is a big part of how innovation and big scientific breakthroughs occur. Not surprisingly (if you understand basic economics), when you try to lock up each idea with a patent, researchers (and, more importantly, their administrator bosses), suddenly don't want to share any more. The end result? Lots of important research stifled. What a shame.

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That Montreal is a city blessed with creative talent has long been established as a given, evidenced in the city’s festivals, arts scene, proliferating video game industries and international success stories like Cirque de Soleil, Arcade Fire and Moment Factory, producers of the 2011 Super Bowl halftime show.

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Global computing firm Dell today announced the launch of its UK ‘Start-Up In Residence’ award, set to give two businesses with high potential a comprehensive package of growth support.

Announced last month as part of its new UK Centre for Entrepreneurs initiative, applicants have from now until 15 February to submit a brief business plan and short two-minute video to Dell explaining why technology is integral to their business growth and success.

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NEW DELHI: Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, has released its HDS 2014 Asia Pacific predictions. Adrian De Luca, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific, identified 5 key IT trends emerging in this region for 2014 that will impact the use of technology among organizations.

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The size of the Chinese Internet is staggering. There are almost 600 million Internet users in China now, more than in any country in the world — next highest is the U.S, with 254 million. That’s just 44% of the Chinese population compared to 81% in the U.S., so this gap will continue to grow. For example, if every province in China achieves a 50% penetration rate, 135 million new Internet users will come online. 78.5% of Chinese users access the web from their mobile devices (compared to 63% in the U.S.), and many of the most popular services, like WeChat, exist only as a mobile application.

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