Most people probably will tell you that high achievers must set an aggressive goal, develop a smart plan and work hard putting that plan into action.  And indeed that is how many entrepreneurs find success.  However, there are others, like me, who are quite content to be drawn toward one challenge after another without a specific career plan or path in mind.  For us, life thrills do not come from meeting big career milestones, but rather from the excitement of learning something new and never knowing what will come next.  My new hypothesis is that having this outlook attracts a disproportionate share of opportunities.  And when it comes right down to it, I’m not sure there is anything more valuable in the entrepreneurial world than great opportunities.  This is my career story, still without a plan.

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Let’s look at it by the numbers: 7,225 jobs, 225 companies, and $300 million dollars.

It is a major boost to Michigan’s economy, and it is all coming from four lower Michigan partners who have banded together to form the Business Accelerator Network for Southeast Michigan (BANSEM).

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Haroon Ismail put his business idea first, knowing he would have to face his parents.

“What about medical school? What about the Fulbright?” the conversation went, said the 22-year-old co-founder of AkibaH last week.

He had turned down the prestigious Fulbright scholarship last May, just three months after hitting on his idea for a business. It meant giving up a valuable year of work and study in Malaysia.

Image: Sprint CEO Dan Hesse delivered a welcome speech during Demo Day held in the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in the Muriel Kauffman Theatre for the 10 companies that completed the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator on Thursday, June 12, 2014, in Kansas City, Missouri. A representative from each company gave a 5-7 minute pitch to a roomful of investors.SHANE KEYSER/KANSAS CITY STAR Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article564748/Businesses-grow-up-fast-inside-accelerator.html#storylink=cpy 

On Monday, Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, unveiled his company’s newest — and possibly most important — perquisite for its employees: a free college education. He announced this new program on a stage in The Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, alongside his partner in the new venture, Michael Crow of Arizona State University.

Starbucks has long been a trailblazer in offering company benefits; part-time employees get stock options and health insurance. Schultz has also been one of the few chief executives willing to speak out — and do something — about the need to get people back to work again. A few years ago, I wrote a column about a Starbucks program that turned donations from customers into small business loans.

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It happens every four years: The World Cup begins and some of the world’s most skilled players carefully line up free kicks, take aim — and shoot way over the goal.

The players are all trying to bend the ball into a top corner of the goal, often over a wall of defensive players and away from the reach of a lunging goalkeeper. Yet when such shots go awry in the World Cup, a blame game usually sets in. Players, fans, and pundits all suggest that the new official tournament ball, introduced every four years, is the cause.

Many of us are beginning to hear about new “crowdfunding” platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. But what is crowdfunding, anyway? As we’ll describe in this webinar, crowdfunding is the use of the Internet to raise capital by way of small donations, lending, rewards, or investments from a large number of investors. Since the inception of the crowdfunding model, billions of dollars have flowed into new ventures—representing what many have noted to be a “global phenenomon,” a “boom,” and a “revolution.”  Though it remains difficult to accurately predict the long term implications of crowdfunding, it is likely to become a permanent fixture in the entrepreneurial landscape.

Almost every startup is a virtual team these days, since most don’t start out with dedicated office space, and some or all members of the team work part-time or out of their own home. It’s a small world, so these team members may not even be in the same town, or the same country. Outsourcing is just another extension of the virtual team concept to people you don’t even know.

Business-to-business matching sessions held during Bangkok event, with focus on mobile sector, social networks

The Economic and Trade Office of the Embassy of Israel yesterday held the "IIT-SEA Mobile Forum: The 1st Israeli Innovation Technologies Day" in Bangkok.

The event promoted the Middle Eastern nation's creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in Thailand and the region, and presented Israeli innovative technologies in the field of mobile, new media and social networks to Thai businesses.

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In case you didn’t get the memo, it’s all about product-market fit. Marc Andreessen in his seminal blog post from 2007, “The Only Thing That Matters,” described the importance of product-market fit as being deterministic of whether startups succeed or fail. According to Andreessen, “Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” He goes on to dissect the importance of good teams, good products and good markets, but he argues that product-market fit is the thing that matters the most. He ends by saying, “What else could it be?”

Misconceptions about entrepreneurship nearly outweigh the accurate perceptions -- and if you're going to run your own business, you need to ground your expectations in reality.

Strong idealism is a positive quality for potential entrepreneurs, so when I see potential business founders talk about how excited they are to get started with a business, I'm delighted. But realism is also a necessary quality for entrepreneurs to have, and unfortunately many new entrepreneurs are so caught up in the excitement of their new venture, they lose sight of some of the realities of business ownership.

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Income inequality is growing in America, and it has much of the chattering class in an uproar. Between 1981 and 2011, the share of income (including capital gains, but excluding government transfers) of the highest earning one percent increased from 8.9 to 19.9 percent of the total, according to data provided by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, who has analyzed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) statistics on this topic. Because this rise followed decline in the top one percent’s share of income from 21.1 percent to 8.9 percent between 1928 and 1981, many have called for policy intervention.

What might be called the “make love, not war” branch of behavioral neuroscience began to take shape in (where else?) California several years ago, when researchers in David J. Anderson’s laboratory at Caltech decided to tackle the biology of aggression. They initiated the line of research by orchestrating the murine version of Fight Night: they goaded male mice into tangling with rival males and then, with painstaking molecular detective work, zeroed in on a smattering of cells in the hypothalamus that became active when the mice started to fight.

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U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker today announced a call for applications for membership on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) – a federal advisory committee that advises the Secretary of Commerce on issues related to accelerating innovation and expanding entrepreneurship, with an added focus on job-driven skills training that creates jobs and spurs innovation. The Commerce Department is now accepting applications for new Council members through July 14, 2014.

“As the voice of business in the Administration, the Commerce Department works to promote policies and initiatives that foster innovation and the success of our entrepreneurs,” said Secretary Pritzker. “One of the Commerce Department’s main priorities, through our ‘Open for Business Agenda,’ is to accelerate industry-led workforce training, which is a key component of economic growth and global competitiveness. NACIE has been an important tool in the Department’s efforts to strengthen innovation and entrepreneurship and develop a globally competitive workforce in the United States.”

June 17, 2014 (LBT) - 3M, the $30.8 billion global innovation giant, recently reached another innovation milestone with the issuance of their 100,000th patent. Fundamentally a diversified technology company 3M employs these patents to address a myriad of needs across industry segments.

“We celebrate this important milestone, and honor all of the scientists whose inventions have contributed to the success of 3M and the products it brings to companies, homes, and people,” said Suren Rajanathan, Vice President 3M Sri Lanka.

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The government and policy makers have the responsibility to promote entrepreneurial activities and improve the business environment for the economy to grow, more jobs to be available, and innovation to realize its true potential.

The European Union has all the necessary tools to become a pioneer in innovative, new businesses, success and growth. Specifically in the area of open innovation where the EU not only has large funds, but it has a diverse territory, which allows for sharing of different ideas, that when put together can make significant impact and also help to find new ways for recovery and growth.

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As a document that assesses how the New York Times can compete with its internet rivals, it is ironic that the Innovation Report is only public because someone leaked it to Buzzfeed last month.

Yet this is great for aspiring journalists, because it provides a “deep-dive reporting project” into how one of the world’s best newspapers – as we are frequently reminded – can adapt to the digital age.

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My paper on global biopharmaceutical productivity has been published in the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology.

This paper is a refinement of my work ranking international biotechnology for Scientific American Worldview, and draws on the DrugPatentWatch database.

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In today’s digitally driven world, access to information appears limitless.

But when you have something specific in mind that you don’t know, like the name of that niche kitchen tool you saw at a friend’s house, it can be surprisingly hard to sift through the volume of information online and know how to search for it. Or, the opposite problem can occur – we can look up anything on the Internet, but how can we be sure we are finding everything about the topic without spending hours in front of the computer?

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While no direct discussions have occurred yet between Washington and Tehran on coordinating efforts to stabilize matters in Iraq, the United States and Iran clearly have shared interests in weakening the al Qaeda-linked militia that continues to take control of much of western Iraq.  I recently met with  Mohsen Malayeri, cofounder of the Iran Entrepreneurship Association and CEO of Khavarzamin, who is the driving force behind building stronger entrepreneurship communities in Iran to learn more about our new relationship with Iran fueled by entrepreneurs.

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Who cares about innovation? The answer depends on what sort of innovation you’re talking about, and to what end. This report looks at the UK public's attitudes to innovation.

Key findings Nesta worked with ComRes to survey how the UK public views innovation, based on attitudes to technology, risk and pace of change.

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