CB Insights study suggests that 42% of startups fail because they do not identify the right need, in other words: there is no need for the startup or product in the first place. The issue here is the lack of tools used to generate the ideas and validate those. Bottom line, this issue is about a structured approach to idea generation and problem-solving. Do you know that most people engaged in collective problem solving spend a lot of their valuable time in meetings, discussing ideas, which they think eventually do not add value to product or startup? Harvard Business Review survey suggests that 71% of managers feel that meetings do not help accomplish much, as they do not have specific templates and exercises to guide specific outcomes with engagement from participants. THE SOLUTION BOOK is going to help you in experimenting with ideas effectively by providing you steps on how to create a framework for coming up with new ideas and products, considering a variety of views, develop teamwork and collaboration keeping you better focused on your results and outcomes. The solution book consists of 101 easy to follow techniques on problem-solving and ideation. Startup, innovation and venture failures are expensive and justified only by lack of tools and data for analysis. The book caters to all stages in your lifecycle as a creative thinker and problem solver with tools to optimize your resources, go beyond conventional solutions and experiment with divergent (out of the box) thinking thanks to Elina Kallas, a researcher on entrepreneurship education with European Commission and in entrepreneurship at Harvard University, and Vidyangi Patil, an interdisciplinary professional of Biomedical Engineering with an extensive startup and research experience.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th IAPR-TC-15 International Workshop on Graph-Based Representations in Pattern Recognition, GbRPR 2007, held in Alicante, Spain in June 2007. The 23 revised full papers and 14 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on matching, distances and measures, graph-based segmentation and image processing, graph-based clustering, graph representations, pyramids, combinatorial maps and homologies, as well as graph clustering, embedding and learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2016, held in Edinburgh, UK, in September 2016. The total of 93 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 224 submissions. The meeting began with four workshops which offered an ideal opportunity to explore specific topics in intelligent transportation Workshop, landscape-aware heuristic search, natural computing in scheduling and timetabling, and advances in multi-modal optimization. PPSN XIV also included sixteen free tutorials to give us all the opportunity to learn about new aspects: gray box optimization in theory; theory of evolutionary computation; graph-based and cartesian genetic programming; theory of parallel evolutionary algorithms; promoting diversity in evolutionary optimization: why and how; evolutionary multi-objective optimization; intelligent systems for smart cities; advances on multi-modal optimization; evolutionary computation in cryptography; evolutionary robotics - a practical guide to experiment with real hardware; evolutionary algorithms and hyper-heuristics; a bridge between optimization over manifolds and evolutionary computation; implementing evolutionary algorithms in the cloud; the attainment function approach to performance evaluation in EMO; runtime analysis of evolutionary algorithms: basic introduction; meta-model assisted (evolutionary) optimization. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaption, self-adaption and parameter tuning; differential evolution and swarm intelligence; dynamic, uncertain and constrained environments; genetic programming; multi-objective, many-objective and multi-level optimization; parallel algorithms and hardware issues; real-word applications and modeling; theory; diversity and landscape analysis.

This volume constitutes the edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on Methods of Heuristics, which was held at the University of Bern, Switzerland, from September 15 to 19, 1980. In organizing the symposium, the editors of the present volume were able to invite specialists from psychology, computer science, and mathematics. From their own perspective they made contributions to the central questions of the conference: What are heuristics, the methods and rules guiding discovery and problem solving in a variety of different fields? How did they develop in individual human beings and in the history of science? Is it possible to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of heuristics as the field unifying all these efforts, and, if yes, what are its basic characteristics?

The Egyptologist acclaimed for re-dating the Great Sphinx at Giza sets his sights on one of the true mysteries of antiquity: the Great Pyramid of Giza. What is the Great Pyramid of Giza? Ask that basic question of a traditional Egyptologist, and you get the basic, traditional answer: a fancy tombstone for a self-important pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. This, Egyptologists argue, is the sole finding based on the data, and the only deduction supported by science. By implication, anyone who dissents from this point of view is unscientific and woolly-minded-a believer in magic and ghosts. Indeed, some of the unconventional ideas about the Great Pyramid do have a spectacularly fabulous ring to them. Yet from beneath the obvious terms of this controversy, a deeper, more significant question arises: how is it that the Great Pyramid exercises such a gripping hold on the human psyche- adding cryptic grace to the back of the one-dollar bill and framing myriad claims of New Age "pyramid power"? In Pyramid Quest, Robert M. Schoch and Robert Aquinas McNally use the rigorous intellectual analysis of scientific inquiry to investigate what we know about the Great Pyramid, and develop a stunning hypothesis: This ancient monument is the strongest proof yet that civilization began thousands of years earlier than is generally thought, extending far back into a little-known time. In tracing that story, we come to understand not only the Great Pyramid but also our own origins as civilized beings.

Whether you are preparing for a management consultancy career or only want to acquire widely applicable consultancy skills, you will need a clear and concise introduction to this area. This fully updated second edition text provides you with a practical, step-by-step guide to learn the proven successful methods and techniques of the world′s leading management consultancy firms. Detailed descriptions and real-life illustrations enable you to develop consultancy skills for structured problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Additionally, this text provides rich insights into the latest developments in the consultancy industry and their firms. It includes alumnus of a top management consultancy firm and is essential reading for aspiring consultants as well as anyone dealing with consultants in their career.

Parallel-Algorithms for Regular Architectures is the first book to concentrate exclusively on algorithms and paradigms for programming parallel computers such as the hypercube, mesh, pyramid, and mesh-of-trees.

This new student textbook draws authoritatively on a wide range of actionable, conceptual, practical, case and visual material to help develop vital business skills for the 21st century within the organizational and societal contexts of problem-solving, identifying opportunities and finding solutions. Skills and competencies covered include: communication; co-operation; creative/critical thinking; and data-driven decision-making. These are essential skills needed in workplace and social environments that are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). They are integral to solving not just business problems but largescale societal challenges including global injustices and sustainability, and the author draws accordingly on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) throughout the text to help emphasise and impart the role of business skills in balancing prosperity and purpose. Includes short videos from the author to provide overviews of each chapter. Marc G. Baaij is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam.