Entrepreneurs are only taught half the lesson - FT.com

Entrepreneurial education today is incomplete. It is no wonder that so little of the new knowledge produced from institutions of higher learning is commercialised; there is no formal methodology for teaching students how to transform their business acumen into value-creating enterprises.

We are only building half of the bridge to entrepreneurial utopia and we need to finish the job. Some entrepreneurs work it out for themselves and cross the shark-infested waters to entrepreneurial success, but too few. And if we look beyond the headline-grabbing start-ups, innovation within existing companies is not exactly going well either. Such innovations, either within large corporations or in start-ups, are the work of entrepreneurs and are what create wealth and employment.

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Do Unpaid Internships Exploit College Students? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com

Employers often seem to flout the Labor Department rules about unpaid interns, but college students keep lining up for these positions year after year.

Should government intervene, because the downsides of unpaid internships outweigh the benefits? Or should officials step back, assuming that this arrangement mutually benefits employers and interns?

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Just About Every Startup This Guy Has Helped Launch Has Taken Off Like A Rocket

There are tons of startup accelerators in Silicon Valley — which give startups seed funding and mentorship to help them get off the ground — but Tandem is a little different.

It's run by co-founder Doug Renert and two other guys, and the team focuses on being exclusive. While Y Combinator — one of Silicon Valley's most popular accelerators — attracts more than 20 teams each "semester," Tandem limits it to only a few teams that focus on mobile products.

The results are pretty amazing — 8 of the 9 startups that Tandem has helped get off the ground have either seen positive exits or raised boatloads of money.

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Who's More Creative? Introverts or Extroverts? | IdeaFeed | Big Think

What's the Latest Development?

Extroverts and introverts are not different in the ways we usually consider them to be. Introverts want lower-stimulation environments—less noise, less action—while extroverts crave stimulation to feel their best. Introverts may be very outgoing people, just as an extrovert may actually be shy. The big difference is the kind of environment they thrive in, says Susan Cain, author of a new book on the creative power of introverts. Now more than ever before, says Cain, Western society approves more of extroverts.

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America Looks Over Her Shoulder and Washington Starts to Act - Entrepreneurship.org

Despite it being an election year and a period in American history of great political divide, the prospect that Washington, DC might actually get something done to make the path easier for nascent entrepreneurs and young firms is looking more promising. This past week saw lots of activity at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. First, on January 31st –the one-year anniversary of both the White House Startup America Initiative and the private-sector Startup America Partnership—President Barack Obama sent a “Startup America Legislative Agenda” to Congress. The following day, I took part in an official Senate roundtable on Capitol Hill focused on developing more high-growth entrepreneurship legislation. Add to this the efforts to support new and young firms announced in late 2011, particularly the Startup Act, and you have the most active pro-startup focus Washington has ever seen.

Accelerating the emergence of new high-growth firms is mostly about helping cities and educational institutions foster new communities of bottom up nascent entrepreneurs. However, government sets the rules and incentives and can play a vital role in encouraging more Americans to take risk from the top. This is

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Wanted: female entrepreneurs - The Globe and Mail

Women make up nearly half the Canadian work force and more than 50 per cent of postsecondary students. Yet, when it comes to entrepreneurship, they fall short of men – and the gap between the sexes hasn’t closed much over the past decade.

The relative lack of female entrepreneurs is unusual because Canada enjoys a high rate of entrepreneurship relative to other developed nations, a factor that helps drive our economic growth. But while Canadian men start businesses more frequently than their international counterparts, Canadian women are only average.

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Most Investors Bite Only at Specific Startup Stages

If you are looking for an outside investor, you need to know how they see you. Different types of investors look for startups at different levels of maturity. If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, fishing for money is a waste of time for both of you.

For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts. It wouldn’t work anyway, since your valuation at that stage would be less than the funding, meaning you would have to give away all ownership for the money.

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Four questions that determine whether an accelerator should accept you ~ Innovation Investment Journal

Question Number One

Co-founder relationships: do the founders of your startup actually get along?

My thoughts:

Founder matching is now a recognised startup investment and formation discipline, with its own systems, social networks, software, business models and startups (e.g., StartupWithMe, CoFoundify, Cofounderslab and FounderDating) addressing it as a lucrative and growing requirement.

In case you were wondering, ‘Solo-founder’ applicants to accelerators are now almost universally seen as profoundly problematic, so Drew Houston, as solo founder of what many consider to be Y Combinator’s ‘biggest hit’, DropBox is seen (especially by Y Combinator themselves) as an unrepresentative anomaly and is not accepted as being a reason not to insist on startups having co-founders.

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7 signs of a dysfunctional company - CBS News

I was just reading about how Barack Obama and George W. Bush are the most polarizing presidents of the past 50 years, meaning they had the largest gap in approval ratings between democrats and republicans. Some think there's a chicken and egg aspect to the question of which came first, our divisive leaders or our divided nation, but I think it's entirely a function of leadership. If Obama and Bush were effective leaders, the nation wouldn't be so divided.

That's because, by definition, leadership is about somehow getting people with disparate views to coalesce and execute on goals and plans they would never agree to on their own. Clearly, that's not happening in Washington and that's why America's so divided. Makes sense, right?

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A roundup of the Super Bowl and tech, by the numbers | VentureBeat

Super Bowl 46 is history now and here’s a roundup of all of the internet-related reports. Roughly 100 million watch the Super Bowl every year, making it one of the most viewed events in the world.

Twitter reported that there were an average of 10,000 tweets per second in the final three minutes of the game. That beats the Royal Wedding at 3,966 tweets per second and Osama Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 tweets per second.

Social TV startup Bluefin Labs said it saw 11.5 million comments during the game, up six fold over last year.

The official Super Bowl Twitter account has just 37,871 followers. Some 50 employees and volunteers manned the Super Bowl Command Center for social media.

The NFL has about 2.8 million Twitter followers and 4.5 million Facebook NFL page likes. Verizon added 400 additional 3G and LTE antennae for 3G and LTE service. AT&T added 200 new cell sites in Indianapolis.

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The creative workforce as a focus for economic development | Cliff Hague World View

Richard Florida’s writings on the creative class have underpinned much of the urban regeneration work in Europe, Australia and North America over the past decade. The creative sector is also getting increasing attention in India, Brazil and China. A new publication from ESPON shows regional patterns and trends in the creative workforce across Europe. It argues that the ability to attract creative workers is highly linked to the qualities of places, and that the opportunities are not confined to the urban centres.

The Creative Class The idea that economic development policies should look beyond their traditional focus on attracting manufacturing jobs was fundamental to Florida’s case. A decade on from the publication of his book on “The Rise of the Creative Class” this view has become widely accepted. Thus the ESPON report observes that the ability of cities and regions to attract creative workers “is usually associated with place-based qualities such as cultural and recreational amenities, diverse neighbourhoods, architectural quality, access to nature, etc.”.

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Google to the rescue - Business - The Boston Globe

CustomMade Ventures Corp. is a Cambridge Internet start-up that had a problem: 97 percent of visitors to its website weren’t ordering anything.

Another Internet company - one that knows a thing or two about attracting users - found a solution. Google Inc., whose Cambridge office is nearby in Kendall Square, helped redesign CustomMade.com so that wherever someone clicks, they know exactly how to get handmade goods from the site, which is designed to connect customers with crafters.

A week after the makeover, CustomMade saw a 200 percent jump in the number of people logging in to start projects, cofounder Seth Rosen said.

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'Indian entreprenuers will succeed in spite of govt'

For an entrepreneur who has floated almost all his ventures during recessions in the past, Romesh Wadhwani, founder of Symphony Technology Group and chairman of Wadhwani Foundation, says he loves recession which is a great time to buy companies and build discipline in one's organisation. In a chat with Kalpana Pathak, Wadhwani shares how his foundation plans to help Indian entrepreneurs. Excerpts:

You donated Rs 32.5 crores to two centres in India for research in biosciences. Why? Yes. Both the centres-- the Shanta Wadhwani Centre for Cardiac and Neural Research at National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore and the Wadhwani Research Centre in Biosciences at IIT Bombay are part of the innovation initiative of the Wadhwani Foundation where we have pledged Rs 32.5 crore in total---Rs 7.5 crore at NCBS and Rs 25 crore at IIT Bombay. The opportunities for innovation in India are very broad. And we have chosen biosciences and bioengineering as the initial focus. We think it can help health care in India and also across the world. It takes advantage of the great Indian mind and talent. And focuses on areas where most other Indian foundations and corporations don't seem to be investing enough.

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A New Net - Technology Review

In 2003 Martìn Casado found himself with no small challenge on his hands: he needed to reinvent the technology that underpins the Internet. It had been developed decades earlier and was proving unsuited to an era of cyberwarfare.

Casado, then a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had been approached by a U.S. intelligence agency with a thorny problem. Computer networking technology allowed intelligence agents and other government workers worldwide to stay connected to one another at all times. Field agents could instantly share data seized in a raid with experts anywhere in the world. But the fact that so many computer networks were enmeshed also aided enemy hackers. Once they gained entry to one system, they could hop across networks to search for other treasures. The agency (Casado won't say which one) told him it wanted to keep its large network but reserve the ability to temporarily close off parts of it for crucial transmissions, creating a data equivalent of the dedicated telephone hotline that used to link the White House and the Kremlin.

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Best Buy’s Super Bowl commercial highlights mobile tech innovators | VentureBeat

Electronics retail company Best Buy decided to forgo the regular celebrity spokesperson for its annual Super Bowl commercial in favor of highlighting mobile technology innovators.

During this year’s Super Bowl game, the company aired a 30-second commercial titled “Phone Innovators. The commercial  featured a handful of heavy hitters, including camera phone inventor Philippe Kahn, text-to-speech inventor Ray Kurzweil, SMS message innovator Neil Papworth, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, Square founder Jim McKelvey, and Shazam creators Chris Barton and Avery Wang.

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Advice from the judges on business plans, entrepreneurship - Business Plan Challenge - MiamiHerald.com

Here is advice on writing a business plan from the 2012 Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge judges:

“Your customer is just as important as your ‘idea.’ Be clear about who they are, how many there are and where they are. Make sure you have personally talked with some of them, really understand how they will ‘see’ your product and convey that in your plan.”

John Fleming, FIU Track

“Across the board, the weakest section of last year’s submissions was financial projections. Many entrants left them out of their applications altogether. Others just included one or two line items. The key to understanding an emerging business is understanding the financial drivers of the business. Show the judges that you understand your operating metrics and how the numbers scale over five years. And don’t forget to include your net revenue, EBITDA, cash flow, and net income figures.”

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For business schools, entrepreneurship is a bridge to other parts of campus - The Washington Post

Dean David Thomas, who took the helm of Georgetown University’s school of business in August, has been making the rounds lately pitching prospective donors on a plan to raise $50,000 for what he describes as a university “seed fund.”

The fresh money won’t be used to bankroll fledgling student ventures or faculty’s groundbreaking research ideas; in fact it won’t even stay in the business school for very long. The money is to be distributed to professors in other departments who design courses rooted in entre­pre­neur­ship.

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The Interview: Aneesh Chopra - Nancy Scola - Politics - The Atlantic

When the president needs advice on technology policy, he calls onAneesh Chopra. As the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, a post created by Barack Obama as the manifestation of a campaign promise, Chopra is charged with advising the president about where technology and innovation can spur job growth, boost industry, and improve quality of life for 21st century Americans when it comes to energy, education, health care, and more. After two and three-quarter years in the U.S. CTO seat, Chopra, 39, who holds joint titles as assistant to the president and associate director for technology in the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President, is leaving the president's service Wednesday. Chopra cut his teeth in the consulting world, as managing director of the Washington, D.C., health care and education think tank the Advisory Board Company (founded by Atlantic Media Company Chairman David G. Bradley). He moved into government to do a stint as Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia, but there was still plenty he had to learn on the job once in the White House, he says, when it comes to how you go about pushing the country towards innovation from that perch.

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Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) Jobs - JB1753230 | Jeddah, Saudi Arabia | Emirates 24|7

Job Summary: The KAUST Entrepreneurship Center offers incubation support and advisory services for entrepreneurs who are transitioning their innovative "big idea" into a commercial entity. For qualified teams, the Center offers assistance through coaching and mentoring programs, outreach activities such as the MENA and Global speaker series, partnering with domestic and international entrepreneurship centers, and other organized initiatives and services .

Major Responsibilities: Provide one-on-one and team-based coaching to KAUST and non-KAUST entrepreneurs in developing a professional business plan, building relationships with customers, getting ready to commercialize the product, preparing for venture fund raising.

Meet regularly with the entrepreneurs to develop milestone plans, provide coaching and advice, and connect them with resources to accelerate their business.

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Ambitious Austria - Public Service

At present, a key question in Austrian science and research remains unanswered: what are the chances that the efforts of recent years to catch up in R&D were not in vain? In the field of research, technology and innovation (RTI), Austria made impressive progress by international standards until 2008, both in terms of the amount invested and the quality of effort. Austria's research and development (R&D) expenditures totalled some €7.8bn in 2010, boosting R&D investments to nearly 2.8% of Austria's GDP. The latter figure rose by 0.63 percentage points between 2000 and 2007, thus earning Austria a top position among other European countries.

In basic research, Austria is characterised by particularly strong individual fields of internationally recognised excellence, and our scientists have enjoyed remarkable success in the highly competitive procedures of the European Research Council (ERC). There is broad political consensus in Austria regarding the great importance of education, science and research. Despite the financial crisis and the resulting austerity measures, there is also widespread agreement that these areas must be considered high priorities and be funded appropriately. Accordingly, the federal budgets presented included proactive funding for education, science and research.

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Your Morning Routine Is Making You Dull | TIME Ideas | TIME.com

Brrriiinnng. The alarm clock buzzes in another hectic weekday morning. You leap out of bed, rush into the shower, into your clothes and out the door with barely a moment to think. A stressful commute gets your blood pressure climbing. Once at the office, you glance through the newspaper, its array of stories ranging from discouraging to depressing to tragic. With a sigh, you pour yourself a cup of coffee and get down to work, ready to do some creative, original problem solving.

Good luck with that.

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Fast Talk: How FoundersCard Brings Exclusivity To The Startup Set | Fast Company

Eric Kuhn, 41, is the founder and CEO of FoundersCard, which offers networking opportunities, discounts, and perks for entrepreneurs and innovators. Since its founding at the end of 2009, FoundersCard, which is profitable, has been growing steadily--but more slowly than Kuhn might let it, since part of its value comes from its exclusivity.

How’d you get the idea for FoundersCard?

It was when I was on the roadshow for Varsity Books (his first company), which was going public, back in the Internet 1.0 days. The investment bankers were coordinating all the travel. Every night I stayed in a different city. I remember staying at amazing hotels: the Mandarin Oriental, the Four Seasons. I remember talking to (the bankers), asking, How much does this cost? It turned out they could travel in this kind of style because they received these incredible deals because of who their companies were. That struck me as odd, that it was the investment bankers--who leeched off the entrepreneurs, the value creators--that were getting these amazing benefits and rates. I thought it was the entrepreneurs and founders who should have this kind of access.

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Letting Hackers Compete, Facebook Eyes New Talent - Technology Review

Late this January, some 75,000 people around the planet sat in front of their computers and pondered how to make anagrams from a bowl of alphabet soup. They were participants in the Hacker Cup, an international programming battle that Facebook organized to help it find the brightest young software engineers before competitors like Google do.

After three more rounds of brain teasers, Facebook will fly the top 25 coders to its head office in Menlo Park, for an adrenaline-soaked finale this March that will award the champion $5,000. In return, Facebook gets a shot at hiring the stars discovered along the way.

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A Message for Dads Who Travel

Thirteen years ago I found myself standing in my closet, madly searching for clean clothes in a last minute attempt to pack before yet another business trip, when I noticed my 4-year old son standing at the entrance. In one hand, he held a small blue wand, in the other -- a plastic bottle of soapy water.

"Dada," he said, looking up at me. "Do you have time to catch my bubbles?"

Time? It stopped. And so did I.

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Seven Principles Inspiring the Green Economy | Global Transition 2012

Once again, one of the main themes of Rio+20, a UN summit held twenty years after its predecessor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is ‘green economy’. Back in 1992 the discussions were focussed primarily on environmental issues. More recently, this focus has shifted almost exclusively towards an economic approach to sustainable development. The key question being asked in 2012: how do we reshape our current economy in order to become a green economy?

Considering the urgency of many sustainability issues, the promising concept of a green economy should very rapidly be turned into a set of concrete actions, with both short and long term effects. But how do we go about doing this?

In order to contribute to this discussion, we (Jan Jonker, Jos Reinhoudt and Harry te Riele) will take the opportunity at the final meeting of the Dutch Platform Rio+20 to present our essay Transitions towards sustainability, in which we suggest seven principles we believe could speed up the development of a green economy.