During a particularly angsty time in seventh grade, I began writing in a journal every night. I’d record what I’d done that day and my thoughts about it. Over the decades, I filled stacks of notebooks with my musings on life. Then, sometime in 2011, I realized that I was writing so much about my life for my personal blog and elsewhere that journaling on top of that felt draining. I’m always looking for ways to save time, so I put my pens and notebooks away.

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Here is something that hit me recently: For a long time, I had a certain idea about what makes an introvert or an extrovert. I had always thought that it works something like this:

Extroversion relates to how outgoing someone is. Introversion is the same as being shy. That was kind of my general perception. Doing just a little bit of reading made it clear very quickly that my thinking was way off!

Author-entrepreneur David Kidder gave Inc. a definition of success that we can all act upon:

(Success is) when you have discovered your innate gift or proprietary contribution to the world and you are spending all your time in that strength and almost none of your time in your area of weakness.

Kidder, who wrote The Startup Playbook--which surveys the patterns of success of Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and other über-successful folk--has himself founded three companies, including enterprise accelerator Bionic. His definition supplies us with a (perhaps idealized) compass for the way we schedule: If the task plays to our strengths, we'll go after it; if we're playing to our weaknesses, send it elsewhere.

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It’s not Kickstarter, state Rep. David Craig cautions, but the popular online crowdfunding platform is a starting point to explain his latest legislative proposal.

Like Kickstarter, the Town of Vernon Republican’s idea relies in part on the Internet to generate funding for Wisconsin business. But instead of getting a T-shirt or signed album — like on Kickstarter — investors under Craig’s model get company shares.

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Interested in startups outside the Valley? Intuit just released this interesting infographic that breaks down the world’s top startup cities into eight key areas that distinguish them as major startup hubs: startup output, funding, performance, entrepreneurial mindset, trendsetting, support, talent, and differentiation.

Of course, topping the list is Silicon Valley, but just behind is Tel Aviv. But given major acquisitions like billion-dollar Waze, which sold recently to Google, clearly Israel’s second biggest city has got the gumption for startups.

The Internet is a wonderful place filled with mischievous cats and twerking baby GIFs, so we can understand why you might never want to leave.

As you log more hours online, you might notice subtle changes in your offline behavior. If your finger has ever absentmindedly flicked the air in an effort to scroll, you understand.

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made headlines in February when she banned telecommuting, as did Best Buy when it canceled its telework program shortly afterward. But according to the Families and Work Institute (PDF), remote working is on the rise: Last year 63 percent of companies reported giving employees workplace flexibility, up from 34 percent in 2005. And in a recent Gallup survey, 39 percent of employees said they spent some time working remotely. The research firm also found that remote workers put in more hours and are slightly more engaged than their office counterparts.

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Corporate venture capital may be what fills in the large gaps VC has left behind, with CVC deals about 60 percent larger than VC deals on the whole.Healthcare corporate venture capital deals are up nearly 40 percent compared to Q1 and funding is up 34 percent, according to a report from CB Insights.

In a prior century, high-tech innovation was largely a top-down affair, simply because the price of entry was so high, it was hard for individuals, and even for start-ups, to amass the capital needed. At the turn of the century, however, the rise of consumer technology, open source technology, and the cloud infrastructure needed to support open development have all reversed this dynamic. Today technology innovation is more likely to come from the edge than from the core, bottoms up rather than top down. Still, to complete the loop, to scale, and to monetize, eventually the top and the bottom must connect. Let’s sort out how this best unfolds.

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For over a decade, we’ve celebrated innovators under the age of 35. We choose to write about the young because we want to introduce you to the most promising new technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs. But I often hear: You really think older people can’t innovate?

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G20 leaders will commit themselves to bringing greater fairness to global tax arrangements at their annual summit meeting in Saint Petersburg on 5-6 September. But just how far and how fast they will be able to change a system that has become riddled with distortions is still open to doubt.

Governments want to reform international tax rules that enable multinationals to avoid taxes by booking profits earned on “intangibles” through low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions, but reaching agreement on changes may prove difficult.

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One secret to getting through yesterday’s Y Combinator Demo Day, if you were one of the 800 people enduring three hours of presentations at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, was to ignore the perky “We’re X for Y” shorthand summaries employed by so many startups.

“We’re Yelp for Latin America,” said one startup. ”We’re Git for documents,” said another.  ”We’re eBay for capital equipment.” “We’re Stripe for shipping.” (Also: “We’re Stripe for printing.”) “We’re Uber for flowers.” (Also: “The Uber of food.”)

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David Cohen: As founder and CEO of the Techstars accelerator program, I believe that entrepreneurs should demand transparency from startup accelerators. This has always been important, but will only become more so as the number of accelerators increases.

When we started Techstars in 2006, we were one of just a few accelerators in existence. Now there are more than 1,000 from all over the globe, with new ones cropping up all the time. Obviously, some of these will be of higher quality and have better results than others. Unless an accelerator is completely transparent, it can be very difficult for an entrepreneur to know much about those results or even how the program operates.

Techstars, the accelerator that connects start-ups with seed funding from over 75 venture capital firms and angel investors, has revealed a new accelerator programme with New York digital marketing agency R/GA focused on the next world connected devices, erstwhile known as the Internet of Things, which will seed fund start-ups to the tune of US$120,000.

The programme will target founders and start-ups focused on the Internet of Things.

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You’ve heard it before: the vast majority of businesses fail within a few years.

Now… let’s think about this for second.

Why do smart, hard-working people with good intentions crash and burn? It’s often a combination of factors, from co-founder conflict, to funding issues and execution struggles…

But at the core of it, businesses fail for one fundamental reason: they can’t sell their stuff.

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This just tweeted: AngelList has set up a webpage to educate everyone on the SEC's proposed rules that would impose pre-filing, information filing and mandatory legend requirements on Rule 506(c) offerings.

"506(c)" is the shorthand way for referring to the new version of Reg D Rule 506 under which it will, come September 23, be okay to "generally solicit and generally advertise" for investors, as long as you have taken reasonable steps to verify that all purchasers in the deal are accredited.

The world of innovation leadership is a tricky one.  At our best levels of leadership, we can create an organizational ecosystem that is robust, energetic, nimble and fun.  At our worst, we can create an ugly mess of uncertainty, miscommunication, misalignment and misdirection.

The difference between those two arbitrary extremes is measurement.

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Today, ARPA-E announced $36 million in funding for 22 new projects across 15 states. The projects will focus on developing transformative electric vehicle (EV) energy storage systems using innovative chemistries, architectures, and designs.

These projects are part of ARPA-E’s newest program, called Robust Affordable Next Generation Energy Storage Systems (RANGE). RANGE seeks to improve EV driving range and reduce vehicle costs by re-envisioning the total EV battery system, rather than working to increase the energy density of individual battery cells.

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There are dozens of different metrics that you can apply to the innovation process. In this excerpt from The Innovation Master Plan, we look at the 12 that are useful to most organizations, as well as the entire set of 92 metrics.

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Amy Radin became one of America’s first Chief Innovation Officers when Citigroup appointed her to the role in 2005. She is currently Chief Innovation officer at E*Trade Financial, the leading online discount stock brokerage. Amy talks to Innovation Management about what it takes to be a head up on innovation in a major corporation.