A report issued last week by Babson and Baruch Colleges points to an exciting trend in the U.S. economy: The percentage of adults involved in startups in 2012 hit 13%–a record high since Babson began tracking entrepreneurship rates in 1999.

Better yet, the vast majority of these folks started businesses to pursue opportunity, rather than out of necessity. A whopping 43 percent of Americans believe there are good opportunities for entrepreneurship, up by more than 20 percent since 2011 and the highest level recorded in the history of the study, called the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor U.S. report.

My mentor in business once told me that one cannot be taught entrepreneurship; one can only learn.

This partially explains why most graduates from the best business school undergo a kind of paradigm shift when they venture into business either as owners or employees. They have to discard some of the things they have been taught and learn the stuff that conforms to the market realities.

For instance, whereas business school tells you that business growth follows a straight path in phases and draw graphs and charts to explain it, in real world growth often takes a crooked and unpredictable path.

Today, the “business as usual” is not sufficient. What we experience at an increasing pace are razor-thin margins, heightened global competition and a rollercoaster economy. Innovation is the key to creating and sustaining a business’s competitive advantage. In fact, without it, the results can be catastrophic. But there is good news: research shows that anyone can learn the skills needed to become more innovative. In this Expert Roundtable Discussion learn more about how innovation can be learned, what the key innovation skills are, and how companies can support a culture of innovation.

I recently hosted the annual Sunday Times Fast Track 100 event at my Oxfordshire home. It brings together leaders from the 100 fastest-growing private companies in Britain, a number of other leading entrepreneurs, and a few aspiring entrepreneurs from the Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg, and from the British government's Start-Up Loans scheme, which Virgin administers.

We spent the day listening to each other and sharing stories of achievement and innovation. There was lots of laughter and some great conversations. Looking at the people gathered around our dinner table, I had a wonderful opportunity to reflect on what makes a successful entrepreneur. I found myself going back to basics: the three key attributes that can make a real difference to a person's career.

Recognizing entrepreneurs that are doing amazing work around the world is quite important and that’s what the Global Forum on Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship is all about. This year’s event is currently taking place in South Africa and touts itself as a “biennial flagship event convening the global innovation and entrepreneurship community to exchange know-how, establish partnerships and develop innovative approaches”.

It’s hosted in partnership with the South African Department of Science and Technology and infoDev, a global partnership program in the World Bank Group. “Its mission is to enable innovative entrepreneurship for sustainable, inclusive growth and employment in developing countries,” says the event site.

Dale Carnegie wrote a fantastic book back in 1936 that really spelled out How to Win Friends and Influence People, and in my view it was so successful and continues to be successful because it contains such a lot of common sense about treating others how we ourselves like to be treated.

Unfortunately, we sometimes forget our common sense due to work and other pressures, and times have changed a little too, so I have put together a quick list with a few examples of both "old" and modern day areas to focus on to leave a lasting impression and be remembered for the right reasons.

creativeLIVE recently hosted marketing guru Michael Port for a three-day workshop detailing his tried-and-true Book Yourself Solid system.

The most effective marketing, Michael explained, is based on full self-expression coupled with sincere and intentional networking. How do you put that into practice? Michael shared three things he does on a daily basis to strengthen his professional (and personal) network:

I'm not sure who to blame. His mother, perhaps, or the public school system. But it turns out that my son - days away from graduating from High School- does not know how to send mail through the U.S. Postal Service. 

I am not making this up.

The boy has a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop, does some basic coding, is pretty good at CAD and gets excellent grades. He can bang out what appears to be 60 words per minute using only his thumbs. But a letter? Forget about it - he doesn't even know how to properly address an envelop

There's no hotter topic in human resource management at present than how to manage Millennials (aka Generation Y), the age 30-and-under members of the workforce. Millennials are the "kids nowadays!" that managers from previous generations fret about. Typical challenges older people experience in working with Millennials surfaced during a conversation I recently had with a group of executives. For example: "I used to be able to give an order to a young employee and expect it to be carried out at once. Now I have to spend 20 minutes explaining why it's important."

The stereotype Millennials get tagged with goes like this: they are a generation of smartphone addicts who live for feedback and praise, lack appropriate deference, feel entitled to rapid advancement but are unwilling to "pay their dues," prioritize personal life and work-life balance over employers' needs, and think they should be able to work wherever, whenever, and however they want. Although this portrait drives a robust market for multigenerational workforce training, it misconstrues the qualities of employees born in the last two decades of the 20th century — while over-hyping the differences between them and older employees.

There is a new player emerging on the cultural and business scene today: the idea entrepreneur. Perhaps you are one yourself — or would like to be. The idea entrepreneur is an individual, usually a content expert and often a maverick, whose main goal is to influence how other people think and behave in relation to their cherished topic. These people don't seek power over others and they're not motivated by the prospect of achieving great wealth. Their goal is to make a difference, to change the world in some way.

Idea entrepreneurs are popping up everywhere. They're people like Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO and author of Lean In), who is advocating a big new idea from within an organization. And like Atul Gawande (the checklist doctor), who is working to transform a professional discipline. Or like Blake Mycoskie (founder of TOMS shoes), who has created an unconventional business model.

It's easy to have a mentor-crush on Warren Buffett: He's worth $50 billion, he's had friendships that have lasted decades, he leans in. For an hour this afternoon, the Sage of Omaha made our mentee dreams come true.

Buffett was interviewed by Caroline Ghosn, cofounder of women's careership startup Levo League. The live-streamed conversation drew from Buffett's 82 years of facing fears, finding heroes, and painting canvases--if you have questions, ask him on his Levo profile.

Patrick G. Awuah Jr., founder and president of Ashesi University College, in Ghana, at Babson College: To really make change, we must have courage: the courage to imagine something new, the courage to act, and the courage to persist through setbacks. We all recognize those leaders whose dramatic acts of courage changed the world.

We are well familiar with the actions of political leaders such Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela; of innovators such as Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Bell; and of pioneering scientists such as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Charles Darwin.

Startups involved in an incubator or accelerator program frequently get asked questions about said program, particularly by members of other startups.

One of the great advantages of JOLT is the sheer level of hands-on support. Existing within the MaRS ecosystem, there is inevitably a wealth of knowledge and skill sets. What truly shocked us was just how community-rich the experience is.

Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) launches internet service at 1 gigabit per second (GBPS) today, making Cedar Falls the first and only Iowa community on the nation’s short list of gigabit cities.

CFU’s gigabit service is available now at any Cedar Falls business or home. The service is delivered through CFU’s city-wide fiber optic network, completed earlier this year. About 400 rural Cedar Falls properties also have access to the service.

“We can turn up a customer’s gigabit service on the same day they ask for it, if not the same hour,” said CFU General Manager Jim Krieg. “The facilities are already in place, so we can activate the service remotely from our network operations center.”

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Perhaps more significantly, faster and more powerful mobile devices hitting the market are producing and consuming content at unprecedented levels. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012, according to a recent report from Cisco, which makes much of the gear that runs the Internet. Yet the capacity of the world's networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will reach the upper limit and what we will do when that happens.

The Marketing Section is the single-most important section for early-stage investments.

The marketing section is the most troublesome for many founders to write convincingly and should, in view of the significance venture investors pay to the issue, be the most carefully drafted. It is relatively easy to obtain industry statistics and divide by some number. For example:

The overall market for Product X is $1.5 billion per year and we plan to capture, "conservatively," 10 percent, which means we project $150 million in annual sales. Our strategy is to pursue the following niches...

Becoming an entrepreneur is not the right fit for everyone. Unfortunately, there are many people who find this out when they start a business, and then end up with a ringside seat as it falters and fails. Experienced entrepreneurs who serve as mentors to aspiring business-owners cite one repeated issue as a reason this continues to happen. In short, the excitement of a new business idea and imagining oneself as an independent, successful entrepreneur frequently overshadows the reality of all the day-to-day work required for success. Because small businesses are so integral to shoring up a flagging national economy, more efforts are being made to connect aspiring entrepreneurs with the practical tools that can refine their dreams and prepare them for success.

First the good news: Venture capital fund performance remained steady last year and outpaced the Dow and Nasdaq in four of six time periods.

Now the troubling: Investors are still searching for exits and finding precious few.

Do people get happier or crankier as they age? Stereotypes of crotchety neighbors aside, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age—but overall happiness depends on when a person was born.

Like many birds, penguins must travel a long way between their feeding and breeding grounds. But rather than fly, they swim. It is a hard journey that has left biologists scratching their heads over why the birds did not keep their ability to fly as their diving ability evolved. A new study argues that birds cannot be both masterful divers and flyers, because flying abilities must weaken as the animals adapt to diving.