Are you putting together a business plan? Well, good luck with that. I’ve seen lots of business plans over the past few decades that have been prepared by many well-meaning business owners for themselves, their bankers and their investors. Just about all of them have been useless.

Want to know why? It’s almost always one or more of the following three reasons.

Anywhere from 4.3 to 13.1 million people in the coastal United States will be at risk of inundation due to sea level rise by 2100, according to a new study that combines population growth projections with sea level rise forecasts.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, uses population trends and sea level rise projections to conduct a county-by-county risk assessment across the U.S. The results show that anywhere from 4.3 to 13.1 million people are at risk of inundation by 2100, depending on how much sea level rise there is by then.

Every year we see players in the business, technology and media space vying to outdo each other in predicting the digital trends that are likely to hold sway in the coming year. One of the best collections is put together by the online business publication Business Insider, which performs months of research and deep investigations before putting together a sober and realistic prediction for the year.

Healthcare in the United States is a $3 trillion industry, more or less. We tend to think of entrepreneurs as operating smaller companies, but great companies of every size have to continue to behave entrepreneurially.

Being an entrepreneur in healthcare looks a lot like being an entrepreneur in any industry, there’s just a lot more at stake. With lives in the balance every day, this is an industry that simultaneously encourages innovation, and operates in a risk-averse environment. With these two contradictory goals in place, it takes some serious creativity to succeed. Let’s look at a few examples.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last few years, the spotlight in start-up investing has largely shone on those who poured money into a company when it was already well along on a growth path. It turns out that spotlight may have been misdirected.

While some investors are throwing giant sums into more mature start-ups like Uber and Airbnb at soaring valuations, it is the venture capitalists who identify a promising company at its infancy and bet on its growth who often come out on top.

As venture capitalists focus more on bigger deals, a growing demand is developing for business accelerators and incubators to fund startups, Dreamit Ventures LLC CEO Avi Savar said Saturday at South By Southwest. 

The leader of the Philadelphia-based business accelerator said incubators are stepping into the breach created by the shift by VC firms to do fewer early-stage investments. A typical Series A round of funding set up through a venture capital firm today is $7 million to $10 million versus only $1.5 million four or five years ago. The shift is fueling a need for accelerators and other sources of seed-stage financing, Savar said.

Who has the hot hand in venture capital?

To identify today’s top venture investors, CB Insights, a research firm that tracks the venture capital industry, created a data-driven list. The firm based its report on factors like connectedness, since people with access to the best information hear about hot companies first, and exits, meaning the returns generated when a start-up is sold or goes public. For exits, the firm considered the valuation and when the investor first put money into the company.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com 

A recent Crain’s Cleveland Business headline, reporting on local startup Phenom’s entry into the Silicon Valley accelerator, 500 Startups, led with the words “sad truth,” going on to say that Phenom probably wouldn’t have been accepted into the acclaimed West Coast accelerator unless founders Brian Verne and Mike Eppich had moved from Cleveland to San Francisco.

Somewhat ironically, the story (and the comments found underneath) went on to point out that Phenom hopes to come back to town and that our local startup scene has grown significantly in the last decade.

Image: Ray Leach is CEO at JumpStart Inc., a Cleveland nonprofit that assists entrepreneurs. 

How badly would your career crumble if you simply quit email for a week? If the results of one experiment are any indication, the answer is not at all. In fact, your office life would improve. You'd be happier. You'd talk face-to-face with people more often. Your stress might even decrease. What about digging out of your inbox at the end of this little email-quitting experiment? It wouldn't be nearly as bad as you might think.

The best time to identify signs of obstructive sleep apnea may not be at night while snoozing in bed but, instead, while sitting in the dentist’s chair. According to a new study led by UB orthodontic researcher Thikriat Al-Jewair, dentists are in the unique position as health care professionals to pinpoint signs of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep due to blocked upper airways.

The headlines proclaim frightening news about American education. It has been failing for decades and is getting worse; American students are among the dumbest in the world, ranking below most industrialized nations, including Estonia and Slovenia:

Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com 

Researchers from Rice University, MIT and the University of Richmond took another stab at determining which accelerator programs do the best for their founders in rankings announced at South By Southwest this year in Austin. It's no surprise that the Bay Area, home to six of the programs named in the study, had the greatest number of highly ranked startup launch pads in the country.

Bloomberg Philanthropies has added six new cities to its What Works Cities initiative, the organization’s $42 million program to help mayors and planners of midsize cities make the most of big data. They are Boston, Massachusetts; Charlotte, North Carolina; Little Rock, Arkansas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Victorville, California.

Image: Raleigh, North Carolina (Photo by Sergey Galyonkin on flickr) 

Health Wildcatters got recognized for the first time in an annual report ranking seed accelerators. It scored a Silver ranking while Healthbox attained a Gold in the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project.

Hubert Zajicek is the head of the Dallas-based Wildcatters accelerator, which has been around since 2012. It has 32 portfolio companies and is currently looking for applicants for its Fall class later this year.

The 2016 election is peculiar for many reasons, one of them being that the leading candidates are so widely disliked. According to the latest Gallup polling, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are all disliked by more Americans than ones who like them; only John Kasich and Bernie Sanders have positive images overall.

Image: Flickr user Gage Skidmore 

Startup activity can signal a city’s economic potential, but it’s actually the quality of the startups, not the quantity, that matters.

That’s just one of several important findings from a paper released this week by Jorge Guzman and Scott Stern, both of MIT. The paper surveys the landscape of American entrepreneurship, offering an optimistic picture of it and of the U.S. economy’s future prospects.

“At these Games, some competitors have won gold, some have broken records, and some of you have even soared like an eagle.” - Frank King, President of the Organizing Committee for the 1988 Olympics at the closing ceremony

Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards is the only athlete ever to be singled out in a closing ceremony at the Olympics. And when Frank King spoke these words, the crowd chanted “Eddie! Eddie!” Today, Eddie the Eagle is back in the news as the unlikely hero in the feature film bearing his name.

It’s the latest big idea among tech elites, as those in Silicon Valley struggle to cope with growing public unease over the effects digital technologies have had on jobs and income inequality. Dressed up as “universal basic income,” the idea is to give everyone—in some versions, every adult—a fixed sum every month. It’s not a lot of money, but—so the argument goes—it would help people survive as jobs are increasingly lost to robots, software, and automation.

Every entrepreneur realizes that change is now the norm, and they have to adapt their business quickly to survive and prosper. In fact, the best entrepreneurs seem to see breakthrough changes coming even before they really happen, and are able to turn them into huge new opportunities. In the trade, this rare capability is called the ability to see around corners.

In South Africa, most of the focus on entrepreneurship is happening too late. Not all cultures have benefited from dining room table discussions, or seeing it positively in action through family members. For many, exposure comes too late, and this means that solid foundations are not set early enough and therefore the impact is lessened. Entrepreneurship should be encouraged and fostered from a high school level. There are a few privileged schools that do include it in the curriculum, but the reach needs to be far beyond that.