The world of Mad Men is made up of wood of every conceivable grain and color. The show’s sumptuous design palette has been responsible for popularizing midcentury design again, showing everyday objects and funiture that were popular in the 1960s not as the cracked and fading relics of our grandparents’ basements but as objects that define the characters who inhabit Matt Weiner’s vivid, romantic world.

But what about the design of 1960s technology? The Sylvania television set veneered in wenge? The record console cabineted in oiled walnut? The vintage hi-fi, pulsing its needles in a Santos Palisander shell?

Veteran creative directors Evan Fry and Dave Swartz are charged with managing, inspiring, and organizing the creative staff at agency CPB. Here, they outline some of what they’ve learned about getting the best from the people we call "creatives." 

When the Harvard Business Review published a post called Seven Rules For Managing Creative People a few months back, the reaction was an almost universal, Oh, please! This was due to the fact that most of the advice in the piece was bizarrely off base ("surround them with semi-boring people." What?), but also because of the patronizing tone and the assumption that "creatives" are a breed of brats demanding a different set of operating instructions.

Twitter's full data stream--their “firehose”--is a very detailed thing. Access to raw tweet upon raw tweet lets brands know what customers think and allows first responders to instantly tabulate hurricane damage. The firehose is also full of metadata which discloses personal, geographic, and technological information on Twitter's tens of millions of users. Gnip, one of the best known Twitter firehose resellers, just turned a raw sample of metadata from 280 million tweets into an amazing example of data visualization.

A new $80 million accelerator fund for emerging tech companies has been announced by digital development company Vivant and venture capital firm MH Carnegie & Co.

Anthony Farah, chief executive at Vivant, told StartupSmart Vivant's incubator arm, Vivant Ventures, will develop and represent four start-ups a year to MH Carnegie & Co as possible funding candidates.

"There is not enough venture capital in Australia. There have historically been a lot more ideas than capital, so we're hoping to curate some of the idea that come and a platform to be funded," he says.

In the world of hyper-innovation every company needs to address the unknown. Idris Mootee of Idea Couture takes a look at white space mapping, a tool for overcoming your fears.

When people talk about exploring white space in innovation, they are often referring to the need to explore under-served markets or businesses that are outside their core. White space is where unmet and unarticulated needs are uncovered to create innovation opportunities. It is where products and services don’t exist based on the present understanding of values, definition of business or even existing competencies.

Innovation is essential. But it is difficult and risky. Inspired by great explorers like Columbus, Magellan, Amundsen, Hillary and Armstrong a method for ideating new concepts was developed, designed as an expedition.

The life cycle of products decreased by factor 4 the last fifty years. Innovation is essential. But it is difficult, risky and it demands a lot of resources. A lot of mistakes are made over and over again at the start of innovation in organizations, like:

Earlier this year the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) reported that for the first time the developing world has taken over responsibility for producing over half (52%) the commercially available Genetically Modified (GM) crops worldwide. While the majority of these seeds can be traced to Western companies, the current state of native GM research in both the African and Asia-Pacific regions are both growing and have noticeable similarities; in both areas only a handful of countries serve as the growth poles for a region with scattered levels of GM policies and research institutions.

Spending a few days in Moscow last week where I spoke at the G20 Young Entrepreneur Alliance Summit, I found a dynamic and outward facing city with startup communities as vibrant as any in Europe. I check on things in Russia on the eve of this Thursday’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and on the heels of an announcement yesterday that Russia will convene the next Global Entrepreneurship Congress (March 17-20, 2014) only a few yards from the entrance to the Kremlin in the historic Moscow Manege.

Like so many of you, yesterday I called my father honoring that wonderful tradition of stopping to take the time to say thank you to our dad. As I arrive home from Russia, I am reminded that for him the Soviet Union was a Cold War enemy. Had he been with me last week, how he would have been surprised to see clean renovated historical landmark buildings side by side with modern glass skyscrapers, a thriving market-based economy and local and national government leaders hosting entrepreneurs and international business leaders from all the G20 countries.

As groups of high-net-worth individuals continue to band together in the form of angel investment networks and funds, they’re creating new opportunities for funding for mid-stage startups. But to some entrepreneurs, they’re also starting to look an awful lot like VCs.

There are about 350 angel investing groups in the U.S. today, according to Marianne Hudson,executive director of the Angel Capital Association. Although most of the U.S.’s more than 300,000 angel investors still work as individuals, the influence of their networking is growing. The median angel round size in 2012 was somewhere around $600,000, according to the 2012 Halo Report, up from $500,000 in 2010.

Hard to understand, slow to exit and more than enough risk to go around.

Not many investors are brave and smart enough to fund startups working to get new pharmaceuticals, medical devices and therapeutics on the market. To highlight this breed of investors, and to give healthcare entrepreneurs a way to find them, we have compiled a list of venture capital firms with a track record of healthcare investing.

You can scan the entire list to find a potential investor in your city, or you can search by investment focus.

Savara Pharmaceuticals needed several million dollars to take its inhalable drug for troublesome infections in cystic fibrosis patients through Phase 2 clinical trials. So CEO Rob Neville, naturally, began talking with venture capitalists. But in the end, he didn’t end up needing any of their money.

Over the course of about a year, Savara raised a $16 million Series B round – in two tranches – led by a quartet of angel groups from central Texas to southern California.

Medical schools have been preparing for the changes health care reform is bringing. Many have framed their education around iPads and other tablets and are encouraging more of their students to focus on primary care as physician shortages are expected to worsen. From accelerated programs to a technology focus, the description of some of the innovative approaches proposed to obtain some of the $11 million in grants being offered by the American Medical Association over the next five years offers a window to their thinking about health care reform.

Combined primary care degree Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School is setting up a dual degree in primary care and population health. “The goal is to educate a new type of physician with a primary care background,” its proposal said.

Advanced energy development and deployment is supporting new industries throughout the country and serves as a valuable source of jobs and competitive differentiation. Given this reality, it becomes increasingly important for regions to implement strategies that harness the full potential of their advanced energy industries.

So, what are some strategies that help a region access its full advanced energy potential?

While we were talking with Phil Libin, the Evernote CEO told us that in its quest to become a hundred-year startup, they're constantly pruning away any corporate culture handed down to them. Vacation policy quickly got cut.

Evernote's not alone: unlimited vacation is part of the code for workplace happiness at social coding startup GitHub, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once said that the unlimited vacation policy is part of their "freedom and responsibility culture."

"Just as noise is meaningless without quiet," Fabrica CEO Dan Hill once observed, "connectivity becomes meaningless when pervasive, when it is without a few 'sanctuary spaces' as contrast."

For many, that contrast is most available in the early hours: management thinker Kevin Meyer does yoga after he gets up, Kayak cofounder Paul English makes sure to meditate, novelist Somerset Maugham thought on the first two sentences he would write while soaking in the bath tub.

A successful university business incubator has lots of engaged mentors, is run like a startup and generates buzz and benefits for its local business community.

Those are some of the high-level findings of a new venture out of Sweden that’s trying to create an objective way to evaluate business incubators across the world.

The team behind the University Business Incubator Index set out to find the top university incubators in the world, discover what makes them successful, and learn where others are falling short. Over the past year, they collected data on 150 university incubators in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. They interviewed incubator managers, entrepreneurs and investors, and came up with about 60 independent indicators of success. Then they scored each incubator, adjusting scores for those in the most favorable and unfavorable locations.

I was speaking at an international conference on angel capital recently, and the panelists listed off the number of companies they or their angel groups were in.

It was a fantastic number: 300-plus. This showed me that the angel movement is really picking up steam. What was truly impressive, though, was that three of the panelists were from what would politely be referred to as “non-startup hotbeds." I remember a time in the late 90’s when said panelists had done maybe 30 deals. And the mandatory “Valley guy” in the group did three-quarters of those deals.

We publish a lot of advice from executives and commencement speakers, but due to survivor bias, those might not always be the best tips.  It's also worth  hearing the advice from parents, grandparents, and everyone in between that's stuck with regular people and had an impact on their lives

A recent Reddit thread asked users "what's the absolute best advice you've ever been given?" We've collected the very best answers.

Entrepreneurship isn't about selling things -- it's about finding innovative ways to improve people's lives. Until recently, most people in business focused on products and services that would appeal to consumers, and this resulted in the creation of many great companies and a lot of jobs. But attitudes are changing. A new generation of entrepreneurs is using approaches from the commercial world and employing technology to tackle social and environmental problems -- these areas used to be the exclusive territory of government agencies and charitable organizations.

The British Cabinet Office says that there are 70,000 social enterprises helping people, communities and the environment in this country alone. These businesses and organizations contributed more than 54.9 billion pounds to the economy in 2012 and they employ almost 1 million people, yet we have only scratched the surface.

Over a year ago, Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson said something that sounded a bit odd: He didn’t believe the venture capitalist business was sustainable in its current iteration.

At the time, it seemed like a reaction to then recent events. The Kaufman Foundation had just issued a report detailing the poor returns that the venture capital business has delivered for well over a decade. In addition, the rise of things like Kickstarter, angel investors, and accelerator programs were coming to the forefront.