In this blog I'm going to talk more master game entrepreneur Luis von Ahn about his new game Duolingo, which he's using to help translate the web, and his top 10 lessons in game design.

Luis von Ahn is a master "micro-game" designer, whose last major success reCAPTCHA is now is digitizing 100 million words a day -- about two million books a year. His newest game, called Duolingo, is intended to help translate the World Wide Web.

"Duolingo really started when I asked the question of how can we translate the Web into every major language," Luis told me. "First of all, more than 50 percent of the Web is written in English and less than 50 percent of the world's population speaks English, so we'd like to really translate the Web into every major language," he said.

Luis knew that computers could do a bit of the translation work, but not all. "Sure, you can use computers for certain brief snippets," he told me, "but really they're not good enough yet to translate the Web. But if you want to translate the whole Web, you can't do it with 50 people or 100 people, so we started wondering how we might get, say, 100 million people, helping us translate the Web into every major language. That's kind of how Duolingo started."

"One challenge is the lack of bilinguals. I don't even know if there are 100 million people out there who are bilingual enough who use the Web to help me translate," said Luis. Another problem was this: "How are we going to motivate people to do this for free? I can't pay 100 million people."

Then Luis and his colleagues realized they could get work done by transforming translation into something that millions of people already want to do, learn another language. "There are about 1.2 billion people out there trying to learn a foreign language," Luis said. "Stuff needs to be translated, so why can't we get these people who are learning a foreign language to translate this stuff for us? That, in essence, is Duolingo, a language-learning website where, as people are learning, they're helping us to translate the web."

The gamification part of Duolingo comes from what Luis describes as a skill tree. "It really works out well," he said. "Basically the whole game is laid out as a tree and you unlock parts of the game." As a user completes a tree, he or she becomes more proficient in that language.

It's been super-successful, Luis said, with some 300,000 active users. "Of course, our goal is 100 million, but we're on it."

Next, Luis outlined for me his "Gamification 101" lecture, which he offers to entrepreneurs who want to utilize gamification to build their business or solve problems.
Here are his top 10 pieces of advice:

1. Gamification can solve a lot of problems with data interpretation. If you can figure out how to turn the problem into a game, you can have the crowd solve it, Luis said.


2. Playing a game should be easy, but companies should realize that creating one is extremely difficult. "It's a lot harder than you would imagine," Luis said. "Simply slapping points in there doesn't usually work that well."


3. Games themselves don't keep people engaged very long, unless they have a social component. Games "keep people engaged for the first week or the first month, but not for years," Luis said. "I think it's other people that keep people engaged for years. So, I think if you're thinking about gamifying, think about gamifying with other people."


4. Games must be social. "The experience of the game has to be with other people and there has to be a way for the other people to be creative as well," Luis said. "What keeps people coming back to Facebook is that there are other people there who are being creative, who are expressing their thoughts, who are putting up pictures." (You can sign into Duolingo, for example, through Facebook, and keep your friends informed of your progress.) "That keeps people coming back for years," he said. "Things like Tetris don't keep people coming back for years. You really need to have other people involved to create loyalty to a game."


5. The problem you're solving has to be really well integrated into the game mechanics. "It's deep integration to the game mechanics as opposed to shallow 'let's put some points and a leaderboard,'" Luis said. With Duolingo, learning the language is tied in to recognizing the digital version of a book in that language: you learn and contribute at the same time.


6. Playing has to mean something to the player: A player can't win all the time, a player has to be able to fail to keep it interesting. "Basically, in all the most fun games in the world you can actually fail," Luis said. "It's a tricky thing, though, of how often you let people fail: How hard do you make the game? I think it has to be hard so that it's not super easy to win, but if you fail too much you get frustrated."


7. Leaderboards are good, but only for the best players in your game. Be careful not to alienate entry-level players. "Leaderboards are awesome for the people near the top of the leaderboard and not for anybody else," Luis said. "Leaderboards tend to motivate the top players. The other 95 percent are not. If a leaderboard only helps motivate the top 5 percent, you've got to do something else," he said. One solution is to have regional leaderboards, so people don't feel overwhelmed.


8. Be cautious when using monetary rewards or awards. "I've never seen the use of prizes," Luis said. "We tried prizes for a little while. It didn't do anything. I've never been able to make monetary awards work for me. Usually, it just makes people cheat at the game to get the monetary award. But I don't know if it makes it that much more fun. Gambling works for a reason so I assume it can be made to work. But we just never really made it work."


9. Add random rewards, however. "Randomness is quite powerful," said Luis. "The fact that there is some chance that you will win gives you hope," he said. "That's why card games are so fun in some sense. You don't have to be the best poker player on earth, but you still have a chance of winning. In different games we have added things like a random bonus. It's completely random and now you get a bonus round or something and it really motivates people."


10. Play the game yourself offline. It avoids mistakes later. "If you're going to make a computer game, the first thing you should do is play it without the computer. Somehow figure out a way to play the game just with pencil and paper," Luis said. "That really tells you a lot. About 90 percent of the things that I come up with are just not super but you can catch the majority of them early. So, if you're coming up with a game, you should try it on pencil and paper beforehand. You will spend two hours on that and this will save you eight weeks of coding later."

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

By Naveen Jain
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain is a trustee of Singularity University and X Prize foundation and a Founder and Chairman of Moon Express.

There has been much talk in the media about what to do since last week's astronomically unlikely double asteroid attack.  efforts to detect asteroid threats such as those of the B612 Foundation have received much deserved attention. Ironically, a United Nations committee was in conference over this very question while the dramas unfolded.

Many people are asking, "What is the government doing about this?" Well, the answer, sadly, is not much. NASA and other space agencies have had a few on-again off-again attempts to search and catalog asteroid threats, but there is no active government program to identify threats, and absolutely no programs to try to protect us from them. Contrary to Hollywood imaginations, the hard truth is, if we detected a large asteroid on a collision course for Earth, we couldn't do a thing about it.

But there is hope. In the near future we could have technology to not only watch out for asteroid threats, but to deflect these planet killers and harvest their vast resources. We can turn swords into ploughshares on a cosmic scale. In fact, Earth has a natural ally in this effort - the Moon.

If you wonder how often asteroids have hit us, take a look at the Moon. The Moon is saturated with craters, caused by billions of years of asteroid bombardment. The Earth has many impact craters too - but they have become disguised over time by dynamic weathering and geological activity. Most of Earth's surviving impact features are so large that you have to go out into space to see them.

By comparison, the Earth grazing Asteroid 2012 DA14 and the Russian meteor that caught the world by surprise on Feb 15, 2013 are relatively tiny objects, hardly even rating a mention in the solar system scale of asteroid impactors. Even so, the Russian meteor exploded with over 20 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and is the largest recorded impact event since the much larger "Tunguska event" of 1908, when an object about the size of Asteroid 2012 DA14 exploded over remote Siberia, leveling a forested area of over 2,000 square kilometers.

One day it will be worse, much worse. The good news is, we can do something about it. And with our recent wake-up call fresh in our minds, the sooner the better.

How does the Moon fit in? The Moon acts like an asteroid magnet and has been aggregating asteroids for billions of years. Early in its history, the Moon swept up planetary debris and helped clear Earth's neighborhood for safe living. As a result, the Moon has trillions of tons of asteroid material shattered and pulverized all over its surface. But unlike the Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere, so when asteroids hit you don't have an "air burst" detonation like we witnessed over Russia last week. The asteroids hit the surface hard, over and over, and since the Moon has been a solid body for most of its history, their materials stay on or close to the surface.

It turns out that our sister world the Moon is the best place to study and harvest asteroids. It's dormant, unchanging surface is a museum of solar system history and represents a planetary Rosetta Stone of the asteroid bombardment record. And the Moon is close by and always in the sky, unlike the asteroids that flyby the Earth at incredible velocities or inhabit orbits tens of millions of miles away that take years to reach.

But more than just a scientific curiosity, the asteroid resources deposited on the Moon over the past 4 billion years represent an opportunity to harvest those resources in the construction of lunar bases for the benefit and protection of Earth. In fact, China and Russia have both declared objectives to set up lunar bases over the next ten to twenty years. The US is not so clear about its intentions right now, but China landing on the Moon later this year and a resurgence of international interest in the Moon could change that.

The Moon has many interesting natural virtues for scientific and commercial opportunity. It is a remarkably stable platform for astronomical observatories. And because of its very low gravity and vast resources, it will also be Earth's space port and a fuelling depot for missions to Mars and beyond.

The Moon will also play a vital role in the future of Earth's planetary protection, one day supporting robotic sentinels that will watching the skies, able to rapidly respond to asteroid threats.

This is far from science fiction. Thanks to Elon Musk blazing a trail for commercial space with SpaceX, private spaceships have already docked with the International Space Station.  My company, Moon Express, is focused on the next stage of commercial space beyond low Earth orbit, and is already developing early precursor robotic missions in partnership with NASA to explore the Moon and learn how to develop its resources for the benefit of life on Earth. Our first task is to explore the Moon's resource hotspots and establish infrastructure on the Moon, starting with robotic explorers who will lead the way for the first permanent human outposts and colonies.

This is the dawn of a new era of commercial space, driven by entrepreneurial ventures partnered with the deep experience and know-how of NASA. How timely nature's wake-up call, thankfully with no fatalities, that brings to us a new awareness of our fragility as a species and our obligations to our children to do something about it.

The asteroids that threaten us can also enrich us and enable us. It will be our smart choices for investments in space technology and strategic collaborations between the public and private sectors that will leverage the value of the Moon and its asteroid-rich resources to safeguard our planetary home for future generations.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

In this blog, I interview Luis von Ahn, a brilliant entrepreneur and game-design strategist and continue my exploration of how online games can help the crowd sort through data in a fashion that is both Fun and Free.

When you log into certain websites, sometimes the site makes you copy a bunch of blurry, squiggly, "drunken" letters to prove you're a human instead of a bot. Did you know that when you're typing in those letters, you're actually helping to digitize old books and newspapers through a service called reCAPTCHA? In this interview I sat down with its creator, a visionary entrepreneur named Luis von Ahn. (For more details, check out von Ahn's 2008 Science Magazine article called "reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures.")

I began the interview by getting Luis's background. A computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, Luis was pondering how humans interact with computers, and what people could do better than computers. He remembers thinking, "There are a bunch of problems that computers cannot do: Why can't we just get people to solve them for us?" Back at the turn of the millennium, Luis said, "nobody had realized this power of the Internet. The word 'crowdsourcing' didn't exist." So Luis came up with this idea of a game to see for himself how he might tap into the power of the crowd through its game-playing.

One thing that humans still do better than computers is recognize images. In one of Luis's earlier games, originally called ESP Game, he gamified the process of labeling images. "The way the ESP Game worked was this: two random people were paired with each other and they got the same image on their screen and were told to type whatever the other guy was typing," he said. "People typed a lot of words related to the common image. I realized that if we could get two people to agree on the same word, that would be a really good signal it's a good tag for that image," he said. But there was a caveat: "Turns out that wasn't quite enough in it to make it fun," Luis said.

"The way to make it fun was by adding a timer." Both players, randomized from different parts of the globe, entered possible words until they had a match. The game then showed them the next image. They had two and a half minutes to label 15 images. "It turns out that the time component for this really made it a lot more fun," he said.

"In fact, that was the entire motivation: to enjoy oneself for a few minutes online." Luis's estimate was that over the course of four years, some 10 million people played the ESP Game and labeled some 100 million images.

Even though the game was later acquired by Google and operated under the name Google Image Labeler to improve image search, the game is no longer available for play. "There's a good reason for that," Luis said. "It lasted about five or six years as a popular game, and then it started losing popularity. That's the thing with games. You've got to keep on. Almost no game lasts."

This idea of doing two things at once -- playing and contributing to research or analysis -- eventually led to the creation of reCAPTCHA, "where we started getting people to do useful work while they're typing the CAPTCHA," Luis said. "We are getting people to digitize books while they're doing this," he said. The number is colossal: All told, about 200 million CAPTCHA squiggles are typed in a day. Why not tap into that?"

"The thing is, each time you type one of those you waste about 10 seconds of your time," Luis said. "If you multiply that by 200 million, you get back that humanity as a whole is wasting around 500,000 hours every day." The inspiration was this: Why not use the phrases from books to be digitized as CAPTCHA squiggles and have people do two things at once?

As the company's website explains, "reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA."

I asked Luis to pick out three lessons he'd learned from creating his games. Here's what he selected:

1. Online games for data-mining have a short virtual shelf life. People get bored, especially if the game seems stagnant.


2. The games must be fun AND the data must be worthwhile. Luis created a game called Verbosity, "but the data I collected was not that useful," he admitted. "The idea was to collect what are common-sense facts, such as milk is white and water is wet. The idea is, if only computers had common sense they could be as smart as us. We were able to collect a lot of common-sense facts with this game. The problem is, the facts that we were collecting were just not very structured so we had a bunch of facts but we didn't take that a step further to make them useful to some sort of reasoning engine."


3. Choose "Cooperation" or "Competition." "In your game design, you can either have your players competing or cooperating. That's kind of a big, big difference," Luis said. "For example in the ESP Game you were not competing with the other guy you were cooperating with them. You both got points together. That, I think, attracts a different type of player. You can experiment with both types to see whether to make the game cooperative or competitive."

In my next blog, I'm going to look at Duolingo, another company Luis co-created, and I'll explore his 10 steps a company can take to ensure the successful gamification of a project.

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

In this blog, I'll share with you what I learned from Arianna Huffington on creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation -- 10 key lessons of extraordinary benefit to any entrepreneur or CEO.

I've gotten to know Arianna Huffington very well over the past few years. We share a common Greek heritage and she sits on my board at the X PRIZE Foundation. Arianna is both the force behind the Huffington Post and a force of nature herself -- a brilliant, powerful and loving person. When I talk about taking bold actions in the world, few things are bolder than creating the Huffington Post from scratch and reinventing the newspaper business. In 2012, this work was recognized when Huffington Post (now part of AOL) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

In August 2012, at Joe Polish's 25K Abundance event, I sat down with Arianna to talk about what inspires her, what worries her, and what bold ideas she's most excited about. She was remarkably frank about how she tries to be different, what drives her, how she comes up with ideas, how she stays focused, how she taps into her creativity and how she manages expectations.

We began the interview talking about taking BOLD actions in life -- specifically what advice she has about pushing the frontier. She addressed how she deals with failure and criticism and where she looks for inspiration. Here are the key points that she herself follows in doing BOLD things:

1. Think differently from other entrepreneurs by accepting failure and learning from it. "There are a lot of failures along the way," Arianna said. "I always stress that. I have two daughters, one just graduated from college, the other a junior, whom I always talk to about my failures." Entrepreneurs need to address the possibility of failure, she said, "because so often, I think, the difference between success and failure is perseverance and not giving up after one or two or three failures. Just keep connecting to that place where failure doesn't matter," Arianna said. "If we become so dependent on things always being a success, then we're in a very vulnerable position -- because we're not in control of how the world is going to receive something," she said. "I'm reading Marcus Aurelius, who was a Roman emperor and a Stoic, about how to get to the place where bad things can happen and you are not affected by them. This is now my ambition because I think that from that place then you can act so much more effectively."


2. Pick something you are passionate about that aligns with the zeitgeist. "For me, the most successful enterprises are always when the entrepreneur's passion matches something happening in the zeitgeist... There is a spirit of the times," Arianna said. "There are things that are happening, that have the wind on their backs and when we tap into them and when our passion converges with what is happening in the world then magic happens. It doesn't mean there's no hard work, but definitely entrepreneurs have the wind on their back. For me the Huffington Post was something like that. I mean, being Greek I was always about connections and conversations. The beginning of the Huffington Post was actually, then, just taking those conversations and moving them online. I could see that the important national conversations were moving online."


3. Relax in order to get your best ideas. "I'm very interested in how people get their ideas." Arianna said. "A lot of my ideas come in moments of peace, relaxation, hiking and reading. Something completely unrelated. Not in moments of dealing with my email or cleaning out my inbox," she said. "There is a great book by Arthur Koestler called The Act of Creation that tracks where great scientists get their ideas, not just the ones that we all know about. Again and again you come across the fact that creative ideas come in moments of relaxation, not in moments of stress. That's why if you talk to the people who've achieved great breakthroughs, whether it's Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, they all talk about how they manage their life. Bill Gates taking time to go in a cabin away from everything and read."


4. Never tolerate a toxic person in your organization. "I heard Jeff Bezos say it best," said Arianna. "He said that he will not allow anybody in the company who comes to his attention who is toxic person, however talented, to stay in the company. I'm a big believer in that. Zero tolerance for toxic people. I would rather have somebody much less brilliant and who's a team player, who's straightforward, than somebody who is very brilliant and toxic."


5. When hiring, trust your feelings. "When AOL acquired the Huffington Post and we had more resources, one of the hardest things I had to do was staff up rapidly. We're now almost at 700 employees," Arianna said. "I would spend weekends in hiring sessions that were like speed dating. Time is so precious, so I set up a system where I would have other people in the interview with me. I would participate for the first 10 minutes, and then leave them with editors to talk. In interviewing a candidate you know almost immediately if it's a 'no.' There's no need to spend more than that initial time."

   
   "You also know if it's a yes," she added, "that moment of falling in love. You know it's a yes 100 percent. The hard thing is in between. If there is any slight doubt about it, my answer is no. I don't proceed if I have any doubt because the hardest thing is hiring somebody who turns about not to be the right fit -- that mistake is very costly. We've all done it. It's problematic. So, 'If in doubt: Don't,' is a very good rule for me, whether in relationships or in hiring people."



6. Handle criticism and public scrutiny by refusing to doubt yourself. "I wrote a book called On Becoming Fearless where I talk about the voice in our head, that voice of doubt which is ultimately your worst enemy," Arianna said. "You can deal with everything outside. The hardest thing is dealing with what I call the obnoxious roommate living in our head. That voice that doubts us and learning to deal with that with a sense of humor or the way we're educating a child is also eliminating a huge drain from our lives."

   
   When the Huffington Post first began, Arianna added, it received negative reviews from some quarters. "In fact, if you'll go back to the first day, some of the reviews were not kind. I've learned one of them by heart. It was: 'The Huffington Post is an unsurvivable failure. It is the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate all rolled into one.' A year later the woman who wrote that review emailed me and said, 'I was clearly wrong, and I would now like to write for the Huffington Post, to blog for it.' I said absolutely -- and that's the other thing. You never hold grudges. It's really again part of living in abundance."



7. The truest drive comes from doing what you love. "I feel very blessed to be doing exactly what I love to do," Arianna said. "I feel very grateful. It doesn't mean that there aren't many things every day that happen that I wish didn't happen, challenges I'm dealing with, as we all are, but nevertheless the overwhelming sensation is one of gratitude."


8. It's important to step back from work to recharge. "One problem is learning to unplug and recharge," Arianna said. As somebody who loves what I'm doing I think we run the risk of forgetting to recharge ourselves. I have a lot of rules around sleep. One of my rules is I never charge my devices near my bed. It's really important because you may wake up for whatever reason in the middle of the night and be tempted to look at your data. There is medical evidence that if you do, even if you go back to sleep it's not the same recharging sleep. You know what? What is it that can't wait? The other thing is a lot of people say oh, I need my iPhone by my bed because it's my alarm clock. Eliminate your excuses. We all know there's nothing better than waking up recharged and nothing worse than going through your day like a zombie."


9. Find hope in the world by focusing on abundance. "I think the world is like watching a split screen. Depending on which side you are looking at you can be hopeful or despairing," Arianna said. "I focus on what gives me hope. It's key that we focus on abundance and surpluses rather than just our shortages. To that effect, I think, we in the media have not done a good job at spotlighting what is working. So, I think beginning to put a spotlight on what is working not just on what is not working is what gives me hope and we're doing a lot of that. On HuffPost we have a section dedicated to good news. We have a section called Impact, which is all about giving and what people are doing to transform the world."


10. Build a tribe that will support you. It's important to have a group of trusted friends, colleagues and family -- who will support your efforts. "For me the tribe always started with my mother and my sister, which is very Greek," she says. "What's important, is the combination of whomever it is that helps us connect with ourselves, our mission and passion."

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

This blog outlines how my friend Lajos created an atmosphere of innovation at GE HealthCare (Hungary) -- a lesson we'll all want to remember.

Most people want to be creative, but at big companies, they're often stymied by rules, regulations and fear of failure. Lajos Reich, chief technology officer for GE Healthcare (Hungary) ran an experiment giving his staff a no-strings-attached "week off" with which to do as they wished... Create, or go to the beach. What he found was a team of engineers hungry to create. Employees who, when given a specific window of unencumbered time, actually spent that time coming up with new ideas for the company.

A key part of Lajos' strategy was to get his engineers, who were typically stove-piped inside their disciplines, to work together across disciplines and to exchange best practices. He did this by organizing both an annual symposium and a monthly meeting at which engineers presented their work to each other independent of their team focus. He also created a number of competitions where engineers could demonstrate to other engineers -- and to company leadership -- their innovations.

Finally, Lajos also worked to make it easier for his employees to get patents for their work. What's the use of coming up with an idea if it goes nowhere? Historically, the patenting process was very time-consuming and cumbersome. This led to situations in which engineers dismissed novel ideas out of hand because of the difficulty in protecting the intellectual property.

"It was very complicated to submit a patent," Lajos tells me. "You had to submit it online, then if the patent was selected to proceed, people had to cooperate with attorney in the U.S. or India. Theoretically that's okay, but it killed motivation. The attorneys were in different time zones. The window to cooperate was small. The language was different. The patent attorneys were changing all the time and few understood the context of the design work."

To help break through this logjam, Lajos found and selected a local patent attorney -- in the same time zone, speaking the same language -- to work with his staff. "The attorneys could personally come to engineers and discuss how this patent can be best described, for the U.S. patent office and the European patent office," Lajos says. This sped up the patent process and reduced the frustration.

In addition, Lajos set an inventor fee. Now, a company generally owns all the ideas for which an engineer is developing working plans, but Lajos awards $1,000 to each inventor once the patent has been accepted. "It isn't for the idea itself, but for the working out of the idea," he says. "This motivates the people to work together with the patent attorney," he says.

But that was just one component of a much larger cultural change that Lajos engineered. Here is the eight-step plan he outlined to unleash creativity in a large organization:

1. Before venturing into new territory, first assure that all corporate deliverables are met at best quality, highest speed and lowest cost. Accomplishing this first gives you and your team the credibility and freedom to next be creative and do something even more interesting, challenging and productive.


2. Establish a strong culture that incentivizes innovative ideas even if they are not on the official technology roadmap. The trigger needs to be something concrete and demonstrable to receive the incentive, such as a "patentable prototype," not just an idea. Also, the staff should feel free to innovate wherever inspiration strikes.


3. Continuously facilitate the sharing of knowledge and cooperation between independent engineering teams. The first step Lajos took was an annual Technology Symposium. Last year 220 engineers made 54 presentations to each other. The second step was a monthly Technology Seminar, followed by online unlimited open brainstorming. The results of this sharing of knowledge has been a very fruitful cross-pollination across a variety of specialties.


4. Organize a competition. This can be part of the weeklong "vacation" in which engineers are free to create. In Lajos' case, the weeklong semi-sabbatical led to many ideas that would have never seen the light of day because the engineers were otherwise too busy. This one week helped unleash numerous ideas. The engineers were not only productive but extremely grateful for the opportunity to shine.


5. Create an award that is emotionally attractive to the participants. "I find this much more powerful than monetary awards," Lajos says. Last year iPads were awarded for best prototypes. This or next year it might be DNA sequencing. Further along it might be something from the new exponential technologies. Ultimately, the prize is secondary to achievement.


6. Expect and require tangible results that can be touched, tried, demoed, showcased. This forces engineers to think it through to the next level and creates physical representations that further inspire other engineers.


7. Make sure that the winners are introduced to the company leadership, so that they are aware of those talents hidden in the depth of the large organization. Educate leadership to expect further surprising prototypes.


8. Let the winners proudly share their results with the entire team to set an example for others and encourage further innovations going forward. The real prize is often the pride of success.

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

In this blog, I am going to show you how one GE exec (at GE HealthCare Hungary) figured out how to instill a sense of creative freedom among the employees that led to a real burst in innovation.

Dr. Lajos Reich was an Executive Participant in a recent Singularity University session. When he told me his story of spurring innovation at his division at GE Healthcare Hungary, I literally booked an interview with him the next morning at 6 a.m. so that I could capture his story for my book "BOLD" and for this blog. I thought his story was THAT important for you to hear.

Lajos Reich is currently GE Healthcare's Chief Technology Officer in Hungary. On his way to this position, he worked at chief technologies at a small Connecticut firm specializing in lighting, then onto GE facilities in Cleveland, Ohio, Bangalore, India and, ultimately, Budapest.

"I learned a lot," he says. "First of all, the difference between leading a small company versus a large company. In a large corporation it's hard to be nimble, because people are so hard-pressed to do their work, and they're often kept isolated in their own departments or on their own projects, without interacting."

"When I returned to Hungary to take the CTO position, my goal was to foster greater teamwork -- literally to institute a complete cultural transformation."

Since his arrival in 2008, Lajos has not only increased the number of employees at that GE division by 50 percent, he has also dropped the company's attrition rate from 15 percent to 2 percent. Better than that, under his leadership, GE Healthcare is now responsible for generating 20 patents per year, which is more than any other company in the country. So how did he do that?

"Innovation is a modality," he says. "Before, my teams were separate. A big part of the change was to move them closer so they could learn from each other. "Here are the two principal things that I did," he says:

1. "First, I started to host a technology symposium every year for all the engineers where they could hear across the divisional lines what they were all up to. Before, since teams did not work together very often, there was a tendency to reinvent the wheel." At last year's symposium 200 engineers gave 54 presentations. "This knowledge-sharing opportunity was so popular that I started a monthly technical seminar series, where people present their work to other GE engineers in a deeper context."


2. "Second, I was actually inspired by your X PRIZE, and I wanted to create a competition to foster creativity. I was also inspired Google's 20 percent time, where they give each employee 20 percent of their time to innovate, no strings attached. So I ended up doing a combination of both in a very risky fashion," he says.

"Engineers always complain that they do not have time to innovate. That there's too much documentation. They tell me that 80 percent of their time is spent on documenting rather than creating. So in this one-week competition I said: 'No documentation; just focus on creating and innovating. Do whatever you want. If you want to use your time to develop a prototype, great.' I gave them access to every resource and didn't disturb them with any last-minute meetings. They were totally free."

Lajos had conducted this experiment in innovation without letting his supervisors know and, should it have been a failure, he could easily have been sacked, he says. But the results were staggering.

The upshot: No one took any time off to go shopping or to the beach. The engineers formed 13 groups and came up with 13 different prototypes. Lajos created a one-day symposium to present the ideas. The management team selected the top three for awards, and six of the 13 have led to patents, with one or two of those products actually likely to become a marketable product for the company.

Many companies would not take the risk of giving engineers a whole week to innovate, Lajos says, "but a concentrated time does make a difference. They are not taken out from the flow of the idea, they can fully concentrate on it."

In my next blog I'm going to explore Lajos' steps for unleashing creativity.

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

By Deborah Perry Piscione
Deborah Perry Piscione is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and the author of the upcoming book Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World (April 2, 2013, Palgrave Macmillan)

It's been a long time since I've been around a traditional corporate executive. Six years ago I migrated from the East Coast to Silicon Valley, where I've adopted a completely different mindset. As I prepare to embark on a book tour that includes speaking at many sizeable, yet traditional corporations around the world, I've been having lots of conversations about the content of my upcoming book, Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2, 2013).

No matter what our starting point, the conversation inevitably gets around to innovation. What exactly is it? How does Silicon Valley do such a good job of it? Can other companies do it too?

What I have come to understand is that innovation isn't something traditional companies can add on, like a warehouse or benefits package. It's not an add-on anything. It's built into the cultural foundations and soil of Silicon Valley, a unique environment that spurs innovative thinking and performance.

Here's how I see the difference between how Silicon Valley and traditional corporations approach innovation:

Big corporations: Offer and throw some bonus money at employees who create intellectual property value, but only if the work leads to a patent.

Silicon Valley: Foster an environment that supports creativity, encourages employees to take risks, and tolerates failure.

Needless to say, the Silicon Valley way has a better track record. But how do they do it? While all night hack-a-thons may be fine for the twenty-somethings, that's not a model for the entire workforce.

The answer is simple: you have to value your employees.

Take Google, a company renowned for innovation and market success. It's not just Google's famed benefits and compensation package that sends the message to employees: "We value you." It's also a remarkably lively, creative, and colorful place to work.

Hey, Googlers (how Google employees refer to themselves), feeling stifled today? Why don't you go out for a game of bowling? Take a yoga class. Ride one of our Google bikes around campus - heck, ride it all the way over to the San Francisco Bay and come back in a few hours when you've worked out all your mental and physical kinks.

Google actually talks like that to its employees and offers dozens of other activities that, outside Silicon Valley, would sound more like play than work.

Or consider IDEO, one of the world's most innovative consulting firms. IDEO helps its corporate clients by building innovation into everything from product design to business and community-building processes to re-branding.

What does innovation look like to IDEO? The company's designers have invented some truly great stuff - things the world would be much poorer without, such as the mouse for the Apple computer, the Palm Pilot, the deodorant stick, and the standup toothpaste dispenser.

But at IDEO, a great idea doesn't have to be a grand invention that launches a new design or product line. It can simply be improving something that already exists.

IDEO co-founder David Kelley says if human resource professionals want to attract more innovative thinkers, they should seek out "T-shaped employees." These are individuals with deep expertise in one specific area who've also gained broad knowledge in a range of other areas. So think of a highly-qualified software engineer (the vertical part of the T) who can talk knowledgeably about higher education and art history (the horizontal part of the T).

According to Kelley, IDEO isn't actually teaching new skills; it's restoring "creative confidence" - the natural ability to generate new ideas and the courage to try them out.

Take, for example, the fear of a child who has to endure the harrowing experience of a CT Scan.. In a TED talk in 2012, Kelley spoke about children who walk into the CT room and are handed a black felt pirate cap. "Aaaarrr ye ready?" the technician growls to them. The child walks a set of brown planks leading to his CT ship - actually a specially decorated CT machine. The exam bed look like the hull of the ship, and the tube is a wooden steering wheel. From a nearby vaporizer comes the pleasant scent of tropical coconuts.

The day I toured IDEO's offices and warehouses in Palo Alto, I saw a place where my twin boys, who are turning eight, would love to hang out - every day. There are no business suits. There are no stuffy boardrooms. Executives in blue jeans sit cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by big boy toys like 3D printers and large tables with Exacto knives and foam core for people to congregate and make fast, rough prototypes. There is even an outdoor grassy knoll right in the middle of the offices that one would think serves for visiting children or their playful parents. Rather, the space is designated (among others at IDEO) to foster collaboration. It is this collaboration that fosters creativity that leads to innovation.

Yes, Silicon Valley thrives because there are a lot of smart people who live and breathe innovation. But there is so much more. There is flat management, where there are smart people in the room at all levels who contribute and are heard irrespective of their pay, age, or years of experience. This is how people continue to grow way beyond their skill set, how they treat and value one another, how people give back, and how they learn not to take "it" so seriously.

The roots of Silicon Valley were planted back in the 1950s, when it was mostly fruit orchards and quaintly known as the Valley of Heart's Delight. A bunch of East Coast transplants with disdain for the old hierarchies came to the valley and set up shop. Their easygoing, open culture took root, deepened and flourished - because they appreciated changing lifestyles and habits. Because they were ready to dispense with the old habits and respond to the ways people actually wanted to live their lives.

Now that's innovative thinking.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

In this blog, I am going to talk about why large companies typically can't innovate... What goes wrong? Why do they ultimately DIE?

The year 2012 marks the death of Kodak, a $26-billion, century-old "cornerstone" company of the U.S. R.I.P.

Did you know that Kodak actually invented the digital camera that ultimately put it out of business? Kodak had the patents and a head start, but ignored all that. Why? That's what this blog is about.

To put an exclamation mark at the end of the Kodak story: In this same year, Instagram, another company in the image business, was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion... The catch is, Instagram had only 13 employees at the time.

This is the difference between a "linear" company and an "exponential" one.

One of the biggest challenges that large companies have today is creating an environment that allows for innovation. Everywhere the rate of change is so fast that large U.S. companies are in constant danger of disruption. Not from competition in China or India, no. They're in danger of being made obsolete from two guys/gals in a garage in Silicon Valley, or anyone, anywhere, empowered by exponential technology, willing to risk it all, driven by their passion.

Whether it's steamships disrupted by the railroads, or railroads disrupted by the airlines, it's typically the large entrenched incumbents that are displaced by innovators. It happens over and over and over again... Why?

Here are my four primary reasons:

1. True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of businesses. My rule of thumb is: "You are ether disrupting yourself, or someone else is." Most companies and boards are not willing to change, give up near-term profits (public companies are driven by quarterly perspectives) in return for long-term gain. These companies that are linear, myopic and inertia-driven will ultimately follow the path of Kodak.


2. Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking. While this isn't always true, I've met too many experts who are fantastic at telling me why a breakthrough can't possibly occur. Think of it this way: experts whose field is disrupted are no longer experts, are they? They're now "has-beens." Plus, as we'll see below, a true breakthrough requires massive risk... risk to reputation, something that an expert has spent decades building and protecting. This is why, to some degree, peer-review science really leads to incrementalism versus breakthroughs. This is why the National Institutes of Health, according to Michael Milken, funds more researchers over the age of 70 than under the age of 30.


3. Technology is changing exponentially -- disruption is coming from outside the field -- and large companies are unable to keep up. Technologies that used to be in a completely different field are now disrupting complete new arenas. Who would ever have thought that biology would be a disruptive force in the energy/fuel business? Or in the insurance business, with rapid genome sequencing being able to predict what disease a person is likely to have? Or that synthetic biology would become the new programming language for the 21st century? Companies that depend only on their internal experts cannot possibly evolve fast enough during these times of explosive innovation. They are the large, lumbering, doomed dinosaurs surrounded by thousands of rapidly evolving small furry mammals.


4. The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And experimenting with crazy ideas requires a high degree of tolerance for risk-taking. Large companies and government agencies have a lot to protect and therefore are not willing to take big risks. A large company taking a risk can threaten its stock price. A government agency taking a risk can threaten congressional investigation. Remember what happened with the solar-panel company Solyndra? It manufactured thin-film solar cells. The Department of Energy, through the Energy Policy Act of 2005, helped fund the company. The company filed for bankruptcy in August 2011, and then the witch hunts began... Who was to blame? How could the government back a losing idea? Clearly, the only option for a government bureaucrat who sees this is NEVER TO TAKE A RISK AGAIN...

So it really is difficult for large organizations or government to make disruptive change. For that reason, the how of creating approaches that limit risk but allow for upside is very important.

Can large organizations be innovative? Can they take risks?

The answer is YES... And the subject of my next blog.

This is a remarkable story. More to come!

In my next blog I'm going to share with you how Lajos Reich, Chief Technology Officer for GE Healthcare in Hungary drove record innovation despite the limitations of working in a large company.

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

In this blog, I want to share with you how I overcame the risks involved in taking the world-famous wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking on a zero-gravity flight.

Doing anything bold and significant in life requires taking risks. And one of the biggest risks I took this past decade was flying the world-famous physicist into zero-gravity.

This blog is the first time I'm speaking about the behind-the-scenes story of those risks and the countermeasures we took. What might have seemed easy from the outside world, was not in any fashion in its execution.

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday. I told him that while I couldn't get him into orbit, I could offer him the chance to fly aboard our specially modified Boeing 727 and experience weightlessness. After all, the idea of flying the world's "greatest expert in gravity" into zero-gravity was too good to be true. He said yes immediately -- or for as long as it took him to type out the letters on his machine.

In 2007, I had been running Zero-G for almost 14 years. Co-founded in 1993 with astronaut Byron Lichtenberg and NASA scientist Ray Cronise, it had been a very, very long startup. It had taken us nearly 11 years to get permission from the FAA to offer the general public the experience of weightlessness (our first flight was in September 2004).

Meeting with my team, we brainstormed making the flight into a fundraiser for ALS (Hawking's motor neuron disease is related to ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). Hawking quickly agreed and we sent out a press release the very next day saying, "Zero G to fly Stephen Hawking into weightlessness to raise funds for ALS." I had expected nothing but positive reaction. But what happened next shocked me. I received two phone calls. One came from our airline partner saying, "You're crazy. You're going to be flying this guy who has been in a wheelchair for 40 years and there's a good chance he might get injured." The other came from a friend at the FAA who said, "You know the rules under which you are operating require that anyone flying must be certified 'able-bodied' and I can't imagine anyone here would view Prof Hawking as able-bodied." On top of that, I had a number of people in the commercial space world approach me saying that this was a bad idea, that a major accident could set back everything we had been working toward for decades.

I was in a quandary. I had started Zero-G specifically to broaden the public for access to weightlessness. Commercializing space was all about giving the experience to a much broader audience, especially amazing people like Prof. Hawking. To be told "no" was all the more reason to figure out how to make it happen. The challenge was getting there without aggravating the FAA lawyers and also making sure the flight was indeed safe for the world's most famous physicist.

It took me six months, many phone calls with lawyers, my friends at the FAA, our aircraft partner and a number of physicians... but we finally got there.

The first thing we did was ask the question, "Who determines if someone is able-bodied?" The second question we asked is how we could maximize Hawking's chances of safety.

The answer to the first question, in our opinion, was that the only folks qualified to judge Hawking's physical health status were his own personal physicians, and perhaps experts from the space-medicine world. So after purchasing liability and malpractice insurance policies for a few (not disclosed here) physicians, we were able to submit three letters to the FAA stating without question, that Hawking was "able-bodied" for the Zero-G flight.

Regarding the second question about safety, we decided to turn the forward half of the G-ForceOne (our special weightless 727 aircraft) into a mobile emergency room able to deal with any slew of medical conditions that might arise. We also decided to conduct a practice flight with a stand-in for Dr. Hawking on whom we would practice a series of zero-g healthcare maneuvers... everything from CPR to electroshock conversion.

With this plan in place and a final blessing from all concerned parties I set out to make this happen. Here's what happened next:

• We sold about 20 tickets at $15,000 each from donors and raised about $150,000 for ALS. At the same time, we covered our costs for the flight and press conference. (The flight was also sponsored by Spaceport Florida and by Sharper Image.)


• We flew a practice run the day before the actual flight. All of the paying donors got to fly on this flight as well, and float around and enjoy the experience (the next day, they'd be concentrating on observing Hawking during the flight).


• As a stand-in for Hawking during these "medical test runs," we found a 15-year old high-school boy who had a passion for physics and who was roughly the same height and weight as Hawking. He was put in a wheelchair, told not not to move a muscle, and we practiced what to do if Hawking had a heart attack and tachycardia or suffered a broken bone. These were things at risk: Hawking is very frail.


• Onboard we had four physicians and two nurses monitoring the 15-year-old's heart rate, blood pressure, Po2 and breathing at the same time that they ran through all of their emergency medical procedures in zero g.

But the day of the flight was extraordinary.

The entire event took place at the NASA's Kennedy Space Center on the 15,000-foot-long Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) -- one of the longest runways in the world. That morning in front of hundreds of reporters, we held a press conference announcing our intention to conduct "a least a single 30-second parabola" (normally on a consumer zero-g flight, we do about 15 in total). We chose to do a pre-flight press conference because, frankly, we had no idea what shape Hawking would be in at the end of the day.

What stood out most in my mind that morning, was his answer to the press conference question: "Professor Hawking, why are you doing this flight?"

This was Hawking's answer: "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space."

We boarded Hawking on his wheelchair using a scissor lift, then carried him off his wheelchair into one of the seats for takeoff. Once we reached cruising altitude of 24,000 feet, we carried him to the front of the airplane and lay him on top of pre-positioned padding and pillows. At Hawking's feet was my partner and two-time astronaut Byron Lichtenberg. I was at Hawking's head. As we entered the first parabolic arc and Hawking floated into the air, the entire airplane erupted into cheers. Thirty people in the back of the plane were hooping and hollering. Hawking was free of his wheelchair and the bounds of gravity for the first time in over 40 years. While his entire body is paralyzed, he does have use of a few facial muscles, and the smile that expressed his emotion was extraordinary. He looked like a kid floating in zero-g. After the first parabola, when we returned to normal gravity, I looked over to the lead physicians monitoring his vitals. Apparently everything was rock solid and I was given the thumbs-up to proceed.

While my original intention was to do at least one parabola, at most, perhaps three, Hawking wanted to keep going. At the end we finished up doing eight parabolas, with Hawking still raring to go.

Hawking was so filled with energy that after we landed he even did a post-flight press conference. The result was front-page press worldwide.

Again, doing anything significantly big and bold in life requires taking risks. This was a big one for me personally and for the company. One question people ask me is how do you know when to take a big risk? My answer is twofold:

1. If the risk is fully aligned with your purpose and mission, then it's worth considering. In this case, flying people like Hawking is exactly why we had created Zero G.

2. Second, you need to do everything you can to retire as much of the risk as reasonable, such that you can honestly say that you covered all of the situations you were most concerned about.

I get demoralized by organizations that start off with a mission and pull back when they find it's risky. I view risk-aversion as crippling America in many ways. Most people (and politicians) forget that 500 years ago, thousands of people risked (and gave) their lives to cross the Atlantic and settle America. And then, again, 200 years ago they did the same to settle the West.

For me, Stephen Hawking's flight also allowed us to pioneer the ability to take handicapped people into weightlessness and a year later we had the opportunity to take a group of six wheelchair-bound teenagers into zero gravity. These were kids who had never walked a day in their lives. Their experiencing the ability to fly like Superman around the airplane without their wheelchairs was remarkable.

Ultimately when you are doing something new, you have to ask yourself is it worth the risk to you? Is it something that you're willing to bet everything on? If you're doing something big and bold that's sometimes what it takes.

Zero-G today has flown over 12,000 people into zero gravity. The company operates flights in cities across the U.S. The ticket price is $5,000 -- reasonable when you think of the 11 years of start-up time! If you're interested in flying, you can find more on the company's website: www.GoZeroG.com. It is a truly remarkable experience and worth every penny!

In my next blog I'm going to teach you one of the most important fundraising lessons I ever learned. It's worked for me for over 30 years. It's something you need to know, too.

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

By Greg Becker
Greg Becker is president and CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, which opened its doors to the technology industry 30 years ago.

The majority of the entrepreneurs and startup CEOs we work with share a common dilemma: they struggle to find, attract and retain the engineering, scientific and technical talent they need to grow their businesses. This is a problem widely understood and attributed to large technology companies, but it is equally problematic, and perhaps even more acute for the companies that are just starting out, stretching every dollar, and competing with the tech giants for high-skilled workers.

The results of our annual Startup Outlook survey this year highlight this situation directly. While nine in ten startup executives said they were hiring, an equal number said it is challenging - or extremely challenging - to find workers with the skills they need.

Since technology startups have historically created 11 percent of all private sector jobs and 21 percent of US GDP, it's definitely in the best interest of the country to make sure we have a vibrant workforce, and that we increase the size of our tech-educated talent pool.

Our clients don't report that immigration is their issue - they don't think of it that way. Technology, healthcare and cleantech companies need skilled engineers, mathematicians and scientists to build on their ideas and their fast-growing companies. One of the ways to support these companies is through changes to immigration policy, but education is another important piece of the puzzle.

We need to create a tech-savvy, highly-skilled American workforce. The more people with skills that are in demand, the better for all of us. Congress is well aware of the issues facing the technology industry, so the time to act is now.

Approximately half of all the startups in our 2013 survey had at least one immigrant on their founding team. Our future economic success depends on our ability to attract - and employ - talent from around the world. Fixing this problem won't just help high-skilled tech workers either. Two in three of the startups in the healthcare, cleantech, or hardware sectors said in our survey they either currently manufacture or plan to start manufacturing in the next 18 months. More than eight in ten said they'll do some or all of that manufacturing in the US, and at least a quarter of those newly-created US manufacturing jobs will go to people with high school educations and/or on the job training. But all of that will only happen if those startups make it.

Considering the ripple effect that successful startups have on our economy, it is just good business sense to make it easier for them to succeed. Having spent a couple days on Capitol Hill last week, I am encouraged that members of Congress know what needs to be done, and are willing to make the necessary compromises to get a fix over the finish line.

Read more results from Silicon Valley Bank's Startup Outlook survey at svb.com/startup-outlook-report.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids. Given my personal interest in asteroids, today is an epic day. If you're interested in more info on this, I urge you to join our mission at Planetary by signing up for the regular updates on our website.

In the meantime, I want to fill you in on two breaking stories.

First: At about 09:30 local time, a large meteor exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and about 1,500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. Reports are coming in that up to 1,000 individuals have been injured (mostly by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave).

Second: This comes exactly at the same time that another asteroid -- 2012-DA14, a 150-foot (45 meter) asteroid -- is whizzing by the Earth a hair's breath from the surface. It's missing us by only 14,000 miles, well within the 22,300-mile orbit of the geostationary satellites that orbit around the Earth's equator. I wanted to put this in perspective for you with some of the chilling and fascinating facts:

1. This asteroid 2012-DA14 is approximately the same size as the asteroid that hit the Earth in Russia in Siberia (the "Tunguska Event") on June 30, 1908.
2. That impact was equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs and knocked down 80 million trees down over an area covering 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi).
3. Had it hit near a population center it would have killed millions of people.

Today, there are approximately 610,000 asteroids that are actively tracked in our solar system. This number represents less than 1 percent of the more than 60 million asteroids that orbit the Sun. Of these asteroids, about 1.5 million are larger than 1 kilometer in size and are what might be described as "extinction-level/dinosaur-killing asteroids."

Today scientists are closely tracking 434 asteroids that are large enough and come close enough to the Earth to be of potential future concern, and while none of these pose any significant risk today, increased surveillance is required.

While the primary business of Planetary Resources is to ultimately prospect and mine the most select of these for fuels and precious metals, the company views that this economically driven activities will assist humanity in the arena of planetary protection in two critical ways.

First, the Arkyd-100 Space Telescopes that the company is currently designing and building will assist in the detection and characterization of these small, potentially hazardous, yet undetected asteroids.

Second, as the company ultimately develops the capability and infrastructure for intercepting and mining asteroids, Planetary Resources expects to be able to help in the (slight) redirection of these rocks to keep the Earth safe.

Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways. First, by providing us access to the fuels to accelerate human exploration of space. Second, by expanding humanity's economic access to platinum group metals important for our rapidly growing high-technology industries; and third, by giving us the infrastructure to routinely and swiftly interact with and redirect asteroids, like 2012 DA14, which could someday pose a threat to Earth.

On the production floor of Planetary Resources Inc, we also now have full-scale mechanical prototypes of the Arkyd-100 Series, which is the first line in its family of deep-space prospecting spacecraft. According to our President & Chief Engineer, Chris Lewicki, "The Arkyd-100 Series will be the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that has ever been built. The system will be highly capable and cost-effective, which will allow for a constellation of them to be launched. That efficiency will not only fast-track our asteroid prospecting effort, but will also lend a hand in scientific discovery and planetary defense."

By Joseph Ajao
Joseph Ajao is a Singularity University alum who co-founded Oacsoft Technologies-a Nigerian company that develops low-cost software for SMEs, Schools and Government agencies.

In November 2012, I spoke to a security guard in Lagos, Nigeria about his current job. He works at a popular hotel. He is a 43 , he uses the Nokia 1100 phone and barely has access to the internet. He got his current job after working as security guard for 11 years in a popular Nigerian bank with over 5,000 employees. Due to the recent crash of the Nigerian Stock Market, he was sacked at the bank before he found a job at the hotel. I wondered endlessly about how he found out about his current job since he doesn't even have a CV.

He received a phone call from his friend who heard about both the hotel and bank job a from another friend . Now, he is under-employed and may never be able to find a new job. Even if he finds a new job, can he negotiate properly? He is currently paid 70% less than he was paid when he worked at the bank.

Like the security guard, there are over  85 million economically-active people and 35million unemployed people in Nigeria alone. Of this economically active population, there is a high number of informal workers. By informal workers, I will mean people like Mechanics, Drivers, Office Helpers, Plumbers, Messengers, Office Helpers, Cooks, Security Guards, House helpers etc.

Recently, I also had a chat with Godwin Ehigiamusoe , the CEO of LAPO Microfinance, a microfinance company that has giving loans to more than 700,000 SMEs in Nigeria. He complained about his ugly experience while trying to hire a plumber to do some plumbing works in his home. He spent more than a week talking to his friends  about recommending a reliable plumber. The plumber he found did a bad job, he had to spend another week trying to figure out where to find another plumber that is reliable. After 2 weeks of searching, he found none. He had to make do with the poorly skilled plumber.

If you are reading this and you live in the US or another developed economy, what comes to your mind is Angie's List or other similar platforms. Well, this will not work for the security guard. Though it may work for Godwin if there is a similar platform launched in Nigeria.

The Opportunity

It's not just Godwin that has the problem of finding qualified, reliable and trustworthy informal workers. Millions of families, SMEs and companies have the same problem. It's a great business opportunity with so many problems.

Any company that attempts to solve this problem must be prepared to address these challenges. Such company will have to answer questions such as:

1. How will the problem of trust be managed? Most people in Africa will only work with you if they trust you. People will only hire someone that can be easily tracked. Unfortunately, there is no centralized government database from which you can get data about people.

1. How do you handle receiving a large amount of application? There is a high rate of unemployment in many developing countries, hence, if a job is posted, more people than expected will apply. A company must be able to address this problem by allowing employers to easily select those that qualify for the job posted without wasting a lot of time.

1. Like the security guard, most informal workers will at least have a mobile phone. However, only a few of them can navigate this phones, but they are usually able to send and receive SMS. If a company will be connecting such informal workers to job opportunities, they must have this in mind.

A Singularity University company, MobiTrader, is on the verge of attacking this problem. The startup starting operations in Nigeria has a big vision of connecting 1 billion informal workers in Africa to local job opportunities in 10 years. Even the governments of most developing countries have tried organizing this informal workers especially via trade unions, but all efforts has been abortive. How do you get millions of informal workers who may not have access to the internet organized into an online job economy?

I am a data nerd and know what having an organized informal work-force would mean for economic development in Africa. If MobiTrader succeeds, then informal workers in Africa will find better job opportunities, make better employment decisions and have an improved standard of living.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

By Vivek Wadhwa
Vice President of Academics and Innovation, Singularity University.

You often hear Silicon Valley moguls say "we wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters". They believe that we've run out of ideas and that innovation is dead; that mobile and social-media technologies are our last hurrah. Not surprisingly, it is these startups that they mostly fund.

It's an open secret in Silicon Valley that venture capitalists make investment decisions based on their gut feelings and instincts--what they call "pattern matching". And who matches the pattern of a successful social-media CEO? Mark Zuckerberg, of course--the young, male college dropout. That's great for the boys wanting to cut school, but it means that other groups are left out--in particular women, Hispanics, and blacks. Attend any major tech event in the Valley, and you will notice their dearth.

I have written extensively about the challenges that women in tech face: how they are commonly discouraged during childhood from becoming engineers and scientists; the struggles they face in male-dominated tech companies; and the way in which they are stereotyped and mistreated by some investors when they look for startup funding. This is despite there being virtually no difference between men and women entrepreneurs in motivation, education, and capability. Indeed, Kauffman Foundation's analysis showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men, and Babson's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found  that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men.

But here is the good news. The pessimists who claim that innovation is dead and that mankind is doomed are dead wrong (pun intended). And the bursting of the social-media bubble has shown that they are making the wrong investment decisions. As I explained in this Forbes piece, this is the most innovative decade in human history. The future is not going to be one of dire shortages and stagnation; it is more likely to be one in which we debate how we can distribute the abundance and prosperity that we've created.

An assortment of technologies is advancing at exponential rates and converging--in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials. These advances are making it possible for small startups to solve humanity's grand challenges--including energy, education, water, food, and health.

I discussed some of these advances in my recent TEDxBayArea Ignite talk.

In these rapidly evolving fields, the young male college dropouts who excel at social-media app-building have no advantage. Those with experience and education--particularly in fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--have the edge because they can work across disciplines and see the big picture.

Women are primed to lead in this new era. Girls now match boys in mathematical achievement.  In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men.  Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women's participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women has grown almost tenfold.

It is not just the women who can lead; it is also entrepreneurs all over the world. There are few experts in these emerging fields, and the cost of developing technologies and starting companies has dropped dramatically over the past few years. Anyone, anywhere, can build the billion-dollar businesses in the new trillion-dollar industries that will emerge.

Our mission at Singularity University is to educate, inspire, and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity's grand challenges. We want to do what we can to level the playing field.  We are holding the door open for women applicants to our forthcoming graduate studies program. I encourage women--from all over the world--to apply. This 10-week program is nothing less than life-changing. You will leave our campus at the NASA Ames Research Park with a broad knowledge of the advancing technologies and build a network of like-minded people.

And one more plug: at the upcoming Women 2.0 "the next billion" conference, I will be presenting the results of our new research on women in tech. My team at Stanford and Lesa Mitchell of Kauffman Foundation surveyed 500 women entrepreneurs to learn what motivates them and why they took the leap into entrepreneurship.  This will also provide insights into a book I am writing on how to encourage more women to become entrepreneurs, to think big, and to help solve humanity's grand challenges.  It is they who are going to save the world, after all.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

By Jonny Miller
Jonny Miller is Co-Founder at Maptia, a TechStars company building the most inspirational map in the world.

Has our great ideas machine really broken down? Peter Thiel recently quipped that innovation in America is "Somewhere between dire straits and dead...we wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters."

And, he has a point. We are still relying on the out-dated intellectual property system to fuel and reward the creation of new ideas and startups. The lure of the acquisition lottery is leading smart and talented entrepreneurs to invest their time in low impact problems; while, traditional venture capital funds are avoiding the outliers or 'black swans', which often lead to revolutionary ideas.

Let us be thankful then for foundations like Peter Diamandis' X-prize that are sparking radical new ideas using a new competitive model. The X-prize foundation has already experienced remarkable success in a wide range of fields and has several more in the pipeline. This is only the beginning. For as Steven Johnson eloquently argues in his recent book Future Perfect, the world needs an 'X-prize for everything'.

Although innovation prizes have been around for centuries, they have never been used to their full potential.

When an innovation can be specified, prizes are vastly more efficient for incentivising, diffusing and promoting new ideas in comparison to the messy Western intellectual-property system. Put simply, patents grant ownership of an idea consequently restricting both the ideas' diffusion rate and the ability for others to further innovate upon it. Prizes on the other hand let innovators profit handsomely from their ideas without owning them.

If you add up all of the worldwide philanthropic prizes the total is not much greater than $375 million. This sounds like a big number yet in a global economy typically measured in trillions of dollars, it is barely a drop in the ocean. Let's apply Larry Page's moonshot thinking: imagine a pool 1000x bigger than the current philanthropic innovation prize total available. Here is one radical suggestion for what that might look like:

Lets revolutionise global incentive mechanisms for innovation by creating the world's first crowdfunded innovation prize.

Could a crowdfunding model be applied to innovation prizes in order to create a new incentive mechanism for global innovation? KickStarter has shown us the potential of crowdfunding, but there is so much more to come. Yvon Chouinard pioneered the '1% for the planet' campaign and raised well over $50m to protect land in Patagonia. He achieved this by crowdfunding money from hundreds of different companies who all committed just 1% of their sales. It was a simple, yet powerful strategy.

What if instead of a donation, these companies had pledged their 1% towards an innovation prize pool? This pool of money would follow the same model as Kickstarter - such that if the total amount was not raised or no innovations were made within the specified time period - none of the money would have to be donated. It is effectively a win/win for the company.

What if the philanthropic icons such as Richard Branson committed his Virgin Empire to backing this concept? What if he courted the media and charmed the Fortune 500 CEOs? How much could he and others collectively raise? $1bn? $10bn? Maybe even $100bn?

Imagine if we achieved the monetary target and then divided this prize pool into 50 different innovation goals/prizes. An X-prize for drugs, climate-change, you name the category. These goals/prizes could be researched and determined by globally minded thought leaders and academics, such as those working at the Singularity university.

Imagine also if the focus of these prizes centered not just on expensive/impressive prototypes, but on scalable products and process innovations. Instead of being patented and hidden under lock and key, these breakthrough innovations could be released to the commons for anyone to adopt, replicate, re-innovate and distribute.

Now, think of the serendipity explosion this new incentive mechanism would create. Past innovation prizes show that the total spending on research is many times the total prize winnings. For example in the Ansari prize, 26 teams collectively spent over $100 million in pursuit of a $10million prize.

Archimedes said 'Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world'. Innovation prizes are that lever. Who knows what would happen if the brightest minds on the planet had powerful economic incentives to work on audacious, make-a-dent-in-the-universe type projects. Peter Thiel might just get his flying car after all.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.