Each year, as the United States of America prepares to celebrate its Independence Day, the urge to reexamine American history is inevitable. After all, it’s hard to escape what happened on July 4, 1776, when you’re marking a holiday known as the Fourth of July.

While the popular press talks of stress as a negative to be avoided, seasoned managers know better. If you’re trying to drum up new business, get a customer’s order out on time, or hit your numbers for the quarter, a little stress goes a long way. It’s even more important when you’re trying to transform your business or revitalize a sagging culture. That’s when you need enough stress to motivate action.

The European Union delegation on Tuesday organized a workshop to raise the profile of European research institutions here and foster future collaboration with Korean partners in science, technology and innovation.

The venue at the Hamilton Hotel in Seoul was co-organized by the delegation, the National Research Foundation of Korea and government-funded research agencies in Korea.

As Europe leaps forward and engages the world in science and innovation, harnessing links and carrying out joint projects with Asia’s leading technological hubs has become increasingly important, according to European Union Ambassador Gerhard Sabathil.

Image: European Union Ambassador Gerhard Sabathil (Joel Lee/The Korea Herald) 

You are absolutely correct that geography and climate do not justify Russia's relatively low population. Russia has fertile lands and other natural resources. Economy alone does not explain low population either, since most of India lived in poverty for the last few hundred years, while enjoying significant population growth. For the last 90 years, Russia had decent basic medical care (mass immunisations, medical checkups for secondary school students, etc), so thas is not an issue either. Below I am going to list several issues in the decreasing order of their impact on demographics

In modern society we’re all over-worked and over-loaded with information and tasks and to-dos and obligations. Nowhere is this more apparent than working in a startup where you are definitionally under-resourced and trying to make big accomplishments in compressed periods of time. That’s why focus is critical. Saying “no” often to people who want to divert you from your mission becomes obligatory if you want to make progress. Modern-society is also littered with over-networkers and over-introducers and professional conference attendees. These people are like the friend in college who always tempted you by telling you about the latest party when you were at the library studying.

Entrepreneurs inherently understand that they have to be the initial leader of their startup, but often they don’t have the experience or the training to know where their leadership competencies lie, or how to build a leadership team. For new entrepreneurs, leadership development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than business skills development.

Sharks are the perfect predator. They are fast, lithe, have heaps of teeth and sometimes, for fun, can propel themselves out of the ocean. 

Photographer and fisherman Jake Beazley, 19, discovered this unsettling fact first hand on Thursday when he spent a day fishing south of Perth, Australia.

Image: http://mashable.com 

Q: My small business has been doing very well recently, and I would like to expand my operations. I would prefer to fund my expansion without adding debt. What are my current options for raising capital?

A: Congratulations on the success of your business. With the passage of fairly recent laws and regulations, now is a great time to look for investors and raise additional capital to fund your business expansion.

Image: John Bentas of McLane Middleton  

Carl Gulbrandsen is so understated that even some people close to him didn’t know he played in a band growing up in Viroqua — or that his cousin is rocker Butch Vig of Garbage, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins fame.

Those were just two tidbits that emerged during a recent retirement event honoring Gulbrandsen, whose 16-year tenure as managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation officially drew to a close last week.

In 1892, George Eastman formed the Eastman Kodak Company to “make the camera as convenient  s a pencil.” The idea took off and by the early 20th century, Kodak had become one of America’s largest companies and Eastman one of its most successful entrepreneurs.

What made Kodak so successful was not just its products, but the ecosystem that it developed around them.  From chemicals to specialized paper to specifically designed processes, the firm became a centralized platform for connecting people to the resources they needed to capture moments on film.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com 

Did you know that on average, pre-school children ask their parents no fewer than 100 questions... a day!

Why is the sky blue?

Why does our dog have four legs?

Are you wearing that outfit out of the house?

If you are a parent like me, you know it never seems to end. After enough whys, a simple conversation about grass being green turns into a deep discussion about the meaning of life. By the end of the day you want to pull your hair out. But, that willingness to be curious leads to incredible creativity.

The beach is a beautiful place.

But unless you're headed to a private island, it's likely that you'll be spending your day next to hundreds of nearly-naked, salty humans while attempting to fight off the the feeling of sand inside crevices of your body.

Dealing with the public can have its fair share of frustrations and when everyone is trying to live their best #beachlife, true personalities will also come out to catch some rays. 

Image: http://mashable.com 

Most entrepreneurs avoid setting up a board of directors for their new business unless or until they sign up an investor who demands a seat on the board. That implies that a board of directors has no value to the founder, and is just another burden that to be assumed for the privilege of attracting outside investors or going public. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

It’s easy to forget just how recently we started using fossil fuels in large amounts. In honor of the July 4 holiday, the U.S. Energy Information has produced a chart showing how rapidly the country shifted from using wood almost exclusively as an energy source to using first coal, then petroleum and natural gas.

Here’s a couple of notable things about the chart. The first is the obvious staying power of coal (see “The Enduring Technology of Coal”).

In a three-month period at the end of 1879, Thomas Edison tested the first practical electric lightbulb, Karl Benz invented a workable internal-combustion engine, and a British-American inventor named David Edward Hughes transmitted a wireless signal over a few hundred meters. These were just a few of the remarkable breakthroughs that Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon tells us led to a “special century” between 1870 and 1970, a period of unprecedented economic growth and improvements in health and standard of living for many Americans.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

Real estate is inherently entrepreneurial—you start with a vision and then build a team.  Like any entrepreneur building a team, you must acquire customers and attract capital, and to do so, you need to know how to sell. Selling is one of the most under-appreciated skills for entrepreneurs in real estate or any other business sector.

Image: http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co 

Nate Yohannes, his three siblings and their parents were exiled from Eritrea shortly after the country’s war for independence in 1991. They ended up in Rochester, New York. Every winter when he goes home to visit, Yohannes says, he jokingly asks his parents: Why such a seemingly random, bitterly cold city? But he knows the real answer.

Image: President Barack Obama and Maria Contreras-Sweet, administrator of the Small Business Administration, in 2014 (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci) 

Could lab-grown bones replace tissue grafts and multiple painful surgeries? Nina Tandon is the CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, a Brooklyn-based biotech company that was chosen as one of the World Economic Forum's 2015 Technology Pioneers. Tandon is also a World Economic Forum Young Scientist who will be speaking at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, from June 26 to 28.

Image: Nina Tandon. Credit: World Economic Forum 

I was shocked to read an old Gallup study that indicates only 13 percent of employees worldwide are actively engaged at work, and more recent data shows only a small change in the right direction. In my own experience as a startup advisor and mentor, I find that entrepreneurs who can’t attract and maintain a highly motivated team rarely even get off the ground.

Political campaigns may have a symbiotic relationship to crowdfunding. In a sense, politicians have been crowdfunding political donations for years, even before the term was generally known. Since then, many have used actual internet-based crowdfunding campaigns in their fundraising.

President Barak Obama has high hopes for the new industry and will be able to count its advent as one of his accomplishments. Whether the next President will be as accommodating to the crowdfunding world is yet to be seen. Many believe past behavior is indicative of future policy so let’s take a look at the three candidates’ crowdfunding experiences and remarks about its prospects.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com