Cooking a Thanksgiving dinner takes a lot of work, whether you’re a professional chef or a first-time host. There’s the risk of overcooking (or undercooking) the turkey, the potential disasters of lumpy gravy and goopy cranberry sauce — not to mention the difficulty of wrangling the dietary restrictions and varied tastes of your guests. To get a delicious dinner on the table with minimal stress, let the culinary pros step in. Here are their tips on how to make Thanksgiving easier this year.

Not a day goes by that I don’t use Google Maps for something or other, whether it’s basic navigation, researching an address, or finding a dry cleaner. Though some of us might resent the dominance such mapping technology has over our daily interactions, there’s no denying its endless utility. But maps can be so much more than useful tools for getting around—they are works of art, thought experiments, imaginative flights of fancy, and data visualization tools, to name but a few of their overlapping functions. For the imperialists of previous ages, maps displayed a mastery of the world, whether cataloguing travel times from London to everywhere else on the globe, or—as in the example we have here—resizing countries according to how much tea their people drank.

Image: http://www.openculture.com

We all aim for some sort financial success. It makes sense. Having a significant amount of money eliminates a major worry and enables you to do more with your life. Money and financial freedom enables you to do more traveling, trying new things, and experiencing all that is life.

Despite all of these people that desire financial freedom, a huge proportion of them are not able to get there. Often, making that first 1 million dollars is the most challenging since it requires being different than everyone else that is trying.

Anyone can become an entrepreneur, but most new businesses fail. In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Patrick Bet-David wants to give you the best chance at success by listing 10 things you should do before becoming an entrepreneur. Like building a foundation for a house, you'll need these things to provide structure, stability and room for growth. 

Breaking out of the corporate world and starting your own business can be a terrifying concept. However, the path of an entrepreneur is one of the most fulfilling paths you can take. It requires smarts, planning, and, most importantly, guts. And in exchange, your career becomes an extraordinary vehicle for self-expression in sharing who you are with the world.

Memory is an astonishingly powerful thing. It allows you instantly call to mind events, emotions, songs, smells, first loves, first dates, and a thousand other things. In some senses, it is a mysterious thing. How can our brains call such powerful and vivid images to mind years after the fact?

While memory isn’t a physical object that can be studied like a plant or species of animal, we can analyze the cycle of remembering.

Two companies at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Venture Creations incubator were selected to compete for the $1 million grand prize in the New York state-funded Luminate NY accelerator program.

The companies, Positive Science and Molecular Glasses, will join eight others for a six-month accelerator program at High Tech Rochester’s incubator space in downtown Rochester. Each of the 10 companies also received $100,000 for advancing to the finals. In June, the companies will vie for a top prize of $1 million. An additional $1 million will be distributed among the remaining nine companies. Luminate NY, an optics, photonics and imaging accelerator program, is funded by Empire State Development.

Happy Thanksgiving from Rich Bendis and the Innovation America team!

Every entrepreneur can learn from a mentor, no matter how confident or successful they have been to date. Most people don’t know that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, for example, gives real credit to the inspiring mentorship of Steve Jobs for Mark’s Facebook success. Yet most entrepreneurs simply don’t know how to work with a mentor. It is not as simple as one person giving the other all the right answers.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

I regularly hear people complain that our region lacks venture capital. Last week I asked members of our entrepreneurial community about this perceived funding gap and what they thought we should do about it.

The first thing I learned was that the venture capital funding gap was most profoundly felt when a start-up needed capital to accelerate its climb towards success, what I’ll call “acceleration capital.” The entrepreneurs pointed to many start-ups successfully finding their initial risk capital from friends and families, or smaller venture funds, and raising the first $250,000 to $1 million necessary to get started.

As someone who loves to travel, I have a pretty intense bucket list of places I want to go to, sights to see, and events to attend. Right now, I have about 10 different countries I want to visit, and I need to squeeze in a drawing class to better hone my artistic skills, too. I also want to challenge myself at work by pitching and writing for different publications, and there’s a handful of musicians I want to see perform live at least once in my lifetime. Oh, and did I mention that I someday want to try reading my poetry at an open mic night?

Even as Site Selection publisher Conway Inc. and partners gear up for the 2018 edition of The World’s Most Competitive Cities, we have examined the results of the 2017 edition all year long, looking at top cities in each of six world regions across multiple industry sectors. But what if all those regional leaders competed straight up across all sectors?

We re-racked the project numbers and found an All-American Top 10 led by Chicago, the mighty Texas duo of Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, then No. 4 Cincinnati and No. 5 Atlanta. Detroit, Columbus, New York, Kansas City and Charlotte round out the Top 10.

Technology companies like Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and more are constantly finding new ways to improve their cutting-edge products, whether it’s with stunning new hardware designs, useful software improvements, or by coming up with entirely new products we didn’t even know we wanted.

Image: Samsung; Nintendo; Sony; Amazon; Photo Illustration by Kim Bubello

Texas Medical Center’s launch of the $25 million TMC Venture Fund adds the organization to a growing list of institutions that have made investing in early stage healthcare startups part of their strategy for cultivating innovation across their networks. TMC has connected the venture fund to its 3-year-old accelerator and other sources of entrepreneurship in its community.

From the perspective of Bill McKeon, Texas Medical Center CEO, the venture fund is a way of helping fulfill a broader vision of cultivating innovation across the health system.

When I first became involved with the startup scene here in St. Louis, I heard one phrase get used a lot: St. Louis needed a big exit, preferably a billion-dollar exit, to validate its startup scene. A billion dollars would really put us on the map.

A billion dollars does sound pretty good.

If I personally had a billion dollars, I wouldn’t be freaking out over the payment on the base-model Toyota Tacoma I just bought. In fact, I wouldn’t have the base-model Tacoma. I would have bought the one at the front of the lot that had huge tires and a fold-out tent in the bed. And, just like the way Ice-Cube’s uncle paid for his new house in Next Friday, I would have paid cash money for that Toyota.

Students were asked to create pop-up businesses for a class assignment. They were told they could keep their profits. They’re giving the money to nonprofits instead.

Gannon University entrepreneurship instructor Kurt Hersch tried something different this year with the students of his global business policy and strategy class.

He asked his 27 senior business majors to split into five teams and make a business pitch to two groups of finance majors who acted as venture capital firms. Think of the hit TV show “Shark Tank,” but on a smaller, more supportive scale, he said.

Getting the right gift for a co-worker or Secret Santa can be tough, but picking out the right present for your boss blows those two out of the water on the stress scale. Because hey -- that’s your boss and in some cases the leader of your company.

If you’ve got a boss who’s on the more serious side, maybe something like personalized stationery or eye care LED desk light. If they’re more on the goofy side, some fun, inspirational socks might be a better option. Don’t worry -- whoever they are and whatever your relationship is, we’ve got something on this list for everyone.

If you work for a big, established company, you’ve probably been noticing the sudden rise of a new trend: the innovation lab. Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines, Target, Google, Pfizer, Marriott, Autodesk, Fidelity Investments, Ford, Verizon, and Stanley Black & Decker are jumping on the bandwagon.

Often, it appears, companies are seeing the need to showcase how innovative they are. And the solution seems to be to build a flashy new work environment, install bean bags, foosball tables, whiteboards, and cold-brew some coffee and voila, we’ve got ourselves a lab.

Image: https://www.forbes.com

The Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative today announced the creation of the Duke Incubation Fund, a vehicle for enabling projects originating within the campus innovation community.

The fund will offer awards to Duke faculty, graduate students, post-docs and medical residents and fellows to support early-stage ideas based on Duke intellectual property with the potential to go to market and affect society. 

Between driverless cars and AI and gene modification technology, we're about to see a lot of very big changes in a short amount of time. But there's a danger of people rebelling because things moved too fast. Imagine an angry, jobless populace once driverless cars take away the transportation industry and electric cars take away the gas industry. Will politicians have to enact universal basic income? It's a sobering reminder that we are—as a country and as a species—still adapting to an every changing world. Even if it's a world that we designed. Vivek tackles this and a host of other issues (as well as some great things to look forward to) in our first long-form video. Vivek is the author of The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future.