Parents tend to want their children to finish high school. But sometimes parents are met with a child who has unconventional abilities, the kind that can’t be properly fostered in a regular high school environment. They are met with great success after dropping out of high school once they begin to follow their passions, and these kinds of people can be found across various disciplines throughout time. Here are 11 immensely successful high school dropouts that you might not have suspected:

Founders almost always cite lack of money as the reason for failure, but if you look deeper, I believe the reason is more often about dysfunctional people and leadership. Sometimes it comes right back to the founder, in terms of a malaise often called “Founder’s Syndrome.” A few years ago I was intimately involved with a promising startup that taught me about this issue.

I’ll be short on specifics here, to protect the guilty, but I hope you get the idea. It’s not a disease, but it can kill your startup. You can find a more complete discussion of Founder’s Syndrome on Wikipedia, but here are a few of the “symptoms” I observed in the Founder and CEO in this case:

The University of Florida Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator was ranked “World’s Best University Biotechnology Incubator,” according to an international study conducted by the Sweden-based research group UBI. The inaugural benchmarking report was based on an extensive analysis of 150 incubators in 22 countries. “Being recognized as world’s top biotech incubator is especially gratifying because UBI’s rankings are data-driven,” said incubator director Patti Breedlove.

While incubators have grown in numbers, the uneven performance and poor sustainability in many situations have become serious issues with the governments and sponsors who continue to subsidize many of them. There has been much recent interest in identifying ‘best practices’ that could then be used elsewhere. But these practices are location-, culture- and time-specific, and can only be adapted to the conditions prevailing in local situations.

In today’s part of Business Incubation Model Series we will describe the model proposed by Michael Lazarowich & M. John Wojciechowski. The document they presented had two main objectives:

1) to examine ‘best practices’ of setting up and operating business incubators. Hence the strategic plan is a form of blueprint for the proposed pilot project, identifying the parameters, goals, and processes of business incubator development.

"A lot of people will call themselves an incubator or entrepreneurial program," President and CEO Jasper Welch of the National Business Incubation Association said. "You need to have a process for business growth and development."

Welch advises startups to shop around for the incubator that’s the best fit, particularly as incubators may also specialize in a particular field. While variation among different incubators can be good for innovation,

Doug Engelbart knew that his obituaries would laud him as “Inventor of the Mouse.” I can see him smiling wistfully, ironically, at the thought. The mouse was such a small part of what Engelbart invented.

We now live in a world where people edit text on screens, command computers by pointing and clicking, communicate via audio-video and screen-sharing, and use hyperlinks to navigate through knowledge—all ideas that Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) invented in the 1960s. But Engelbart never got support for the larger part of what he wanted to build, even decades later when he finally got recognition for his achievements. When Stanford honored Engelbart with a two-day symposium in 2008, they called it “The Unfinished Revolution.”

I’ve read a great many posts and articles by and about entrepreneurs: how to be an entrepreneur; how to know whether you’re suited for the entrepreneurial life; the pitfalls of being an entrepreneur; the rewards of entrepreneurship; the impact of entrepreneurs on the economy.  I’ve even written some posts about the topic myself.

Then there’s the fact that I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 25 years – and still consider myself one, though Proteus is pretty well established at this point. I’ve also been working with some start-ups and stage 2 entrepreneurial companies over the past year as clients.

A pharmaceutical company that spun out of the University of Michigan Office of Technology Transfer in 2004 raised nearly $82 million in an initial public offering July 18.

OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, now based in Redwood City, California, is developing a series of drugs meant to combat the cancer stem cells that are responsible for driving the growth and metastasis of tumors. The company offered 4.8 million shares priced at $17 each, which was above the expected range.

Here’s something to add to your decline-of-the-empire files: the U.S. is falling further behind in world rankings of average Internet connection speeds.

That’s the verdict from the latest State of the Internet Report by Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), the Cambridge, MA-based networking company that handles about a third of global Web traffic.

The latest stats cover the first quarter of this year, and they’re not very comforting for American Internet users.

When growing a business, is taking venture capital advisable – or a big mistake? The New York Times takes a look at one company’s decision. And with so many social media platforms to manage, are you making the most of your efforts? Inc.com has tips on how to get more from social media.

LinkedIn’s new tool: LinkedIn launches sponsored updates, allowing businesses to promote themselves.

The mechanics of loafing are subtle.

To hear Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant tell it, at-work freeloading is a heady cocktail: a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, of internal motivation and social obligation--or a lack thereof.

The best ways to cure loafing, then, active those languid, latent energies.

But we must make one caveat: that loafing or slacking can be easily conflated with what we've taken to calling negative space, that is, the not-doing that is crucial to doing your best work. How so?

I’ve always loved the phrase “the truth will set you free.”

While I’ll admit that objectivity is hard to achieve, when you face reality as head on as possible, you can make better decisions than if you buy into various stories that people tell you, or that you tell yourself.

At least that’s what I discovered when I started writing about time management a few years ago. The first thing I did was keep an honest accounting of a week (168 hours) of my time. As if I were a dieter logging every morsel, I wrote down every activity: every email check, every work distraction, every unnecessary errand. I used a notebook for this, though some time trackers use spreadsheets or apps such as aTimeLogger and TimeTracker.

I feel like I’m drowning in self-promotion on social media. Links to buy digital products, e-courses, tickets to conferences (on the topic of social media promotion) all fill my social streams.

Self-promotion has become as ubiquitous as banner ads or “Keep Calm and Carry On” memes, and with that, just as ignored.

Without the traditional barriers for promotion, like getting a record deal, landing a job writing for a newspaper/magazine, having enough money to hire a publicist or getting a major book deal, we are all able to promote whatever we want, whenever we want.

Humans are good at some things. Computers are good at other things.

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt has put it, the key for humans who want to succeed in the future will be observing this "separation of powers" and collaborating with computers while specializing in what we do best.

But what is it that people are good at? If you had asked me today, I would say forgetting our keys, getting distracted and annoyed, and then thinking about where to get lunch. Human? Yes. Useful? Well... Luckily, a new report by scholars at Harvard and MIT has some more positive answers.

As someone who lives and breathes the future of US and global cities, I am continually inspired by the local practitioners who wake up everyday and take action to make their places more prosperous, productive, and sustainable.

At a time when it can seem like Washington has no real leaders, I still find our country rich in leadership—at the city and metropolitan level. I don’t just mean elected mayors or country executives or governors, but also leaders of corporations business associations, philanthropies and universities and civic, community and labor groups.Traveling into cities and metros across the country, I can’t help but meet leaders who exemplify this new pragmatic, affirmative leadership.

The Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) is changing the face of public education today. Through real-world learning and partnering with local businesses and mentors, students learn by doing. They work on real projects with real businesses. Learn how the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kansas, turned CAPS from an idea into a reality, how the program is affecting the future of its students and local economy, and how you can take the incredible success of CAPS to create positive change in your community.

A new mobile health trends report released Wednesday underscores the mid- to low sophistication of current mHealth application technology but also emphasizes the explosive growth and integration headed for the market .   The Research and Markets mHealth trends report shows the industry poised for a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent by 2017, to reach a value of $26 billion. This revenue, researchers project, will be derived predominantly from mHealth hardware sales and services.    Study findings also estimate that some 50 percent of mobile users will have downloaded mHealth applications within five years.   

London has the potential to be one of the world’s leading technology hubs, and the startup scene is growing fast. Research from UHY Hacker Young, released last week, showed that Tech City was the UK’s biggest growth area for new businesses in the year to March 2013, with 15,720 new companies formed. In 2008, it was home to just 15 tech companies.

And this is a boom underpinned by skilled migrant workers. According to research by Management Today, from a sample of 34 tech companies around Silicon Roundabout, at least a quarter of the founders were foreign-born.

When starting your own company, no one is short on advice. Sometimes it’s difficult to sort through all those opinions to focus on what really matters — and your success occasionally depends on knowing which advice to tune out, too.

We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council, an invite-only organization comprised of successful young startup founders, what piece of advice they found to be most helpful (even if they didn’t know it at the time).

Connect CEO Duane Roth has been hospitalized with a head injury after he slammed into a rock embankment in a bicycling accident Sunday morning in Pauma Valley, about 60 miles northeast of San Diego.

The impact broke his bicycling helmet, and Roth was flown by helicopter to the UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest, where he underwent surgery to remove a piece of his skull so as to relieve pressure in the brain, according to David Hale, a close friend and longtime Connect board member. Roth was placed in the intensive care unit in a medically induced coma.