A note from investment bank Credit Suisse on Friday shows just how much the valuation of many of the most well-known and successful start-ups has exploded in the post-financial crisis years. 

The authors have tracked the number and total valuation of "unicorns" for the past seven years. Unicorns are defined as private start-ups estimated to be worth more than $1 billion (£641.7 million). 

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Have you ever taken the leap to create a product, start a business, or launch a service? What was your strategy? Was it successful?

Here's the deal: Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It's a fact. However, entrepreneurship can be found in the very basic factor of what makes America a great nation. Being self-employed, launching a start-up, and being an entrepreneur, in general, is not always easy or glamorous. You could peruse the internet and find people who have generated millions of dollars in revenue from their products and have a successful business.

In an industry where nine out of 10 of even the best startups can fail, junior Greg Foreman knew his chances were slim.

For two years, Foreman has worked to get his e-commerce app off the ground. Along the way, he has sought nearly every entrepreneurship resource UNC has to offer: 1789 Venture Lab, the Carolina Challenge, the entrepreneurship minor, Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies — and its alumni network.

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If you're watching the GOP debate tonight to learn about the candidates' leadership style from what they say, you won't get the whole story. You might learn more about what type of leader they will really be if you focus on their body language.

Ahmed Mohamed is the least scary person in the world—or at least the least scary one you’re likely to meet on any given day. He’s a 14-year-old ninth-grader at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas—sweetly nerdy, slightly awkward, and here’s what he did on September 14: He brought a digital clock to school, one he’d built himself, so he could show it off to his science teacher.

Image: Reuters - A homemade clock made by Ahmed Mohamed, 14, is seen in an undated picture released by the Irving Texas Police Department September 16, 2015.

During an argument a few months ago, my husband, John, accused me of being a bad listener. “Who, me?” I thought. “I interview people for a living—all I do is listen!” Later, after I calmed down, I remembered that John is actually a pretty reasonable and insightful guy—if he says he's not feeling listened to, maybe it really is me. So, for a second opinion, I texted someone who has known me for a really long time: “John says I don't listen. Am I hard to talk to?” Her response: “You can be, yes. Love, Mom.” And there you have it. I quit arguing and asked some experts for help. Here's the advice that has really resonated with me. Think you don't need it? Read on anyhow—you may be surprised.

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NEW YORK, Sept. 16, 2015 /satPRnews.com/ — Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University top the inaugural Reuters Top 100 ranking of the world’s most innovative universities. The Reuters Top 100 ranking aims to identify which institutions contribute the most to science and technology, and have the greatest impact on the global economy. The ranking uses proprietary data and analysis tools from the Intellectual Property & Science division of Thomson Reuters to examine a series of patent and research-related metrics, and get to the essence of what it means to be truly innovative.How can potential partners, investors, faculty and students know if an institution is really transforming science and technology and affecting the global economy? To answer that question, Reuters set out to find and rank the world’s top 100 innovative universities, building a methodology that employs 10 different metrics.

The statistics are overwhelming: women receive a meager 5% of venture capital money, which is even more shocking considering that women CEO’s in the Fortune 1000 drive three times the returns as S&P enterprises run predominantly by men. I’ve spoken to a lot of investors about why this is the case, and they repeatedly tell me that because they have limited funds to distribute, they only put their money behind the person who presents the best growth opportunity. This decision is based largely on two factors: who has the skill set to best execute their plan and who has the most believable plan.

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In China, like a frog that from the bottom of the well leaps to the open air, the word "Renaissance" - fu xing - has been fully taken into account in the vocabulary of Xi Jinping, Secretary General of the Communist Party of China from 15 November 2012, who mentions that word three times in his first press conference. The entrepreneurial renaissance in China aims to redraw the geopolitical map of the distribution of power. If the old and cultured Europe of the Enlightenment was inspired by the Chinese philosophers, to our times there are the entrepreneurial spirits, released by Den Xiaoping's (architect of Chinese economic reform between 1978 and 1992) metaphor of "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice", which are observed with curiosity and desire for emulation by both the old and new generations of the advanced Western world.

Entrepreneurs have always believed that their product or service must show real value to customers, but today the smart ones are even able to make their marketing valuable. The days are gone when marketing was all “pushing product.” Now customers seek out people who are willing and able to add value, with expertise and insight, even before they have a product.

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Many agricultural-technology entrepreneurs are farmers who’ve taken to their garages or workshops to build mechanical devices that solve common agrarian problems. To serve such inventors, government officials in Ottawa County, Mich., developed the Great Lakes Ag-Tech Business Incubator. 

On a mission to promote sustainable development, the African Transition To A New Economy (ATTANE) has revealed the 10 South African startup finalists selected for its inaugural New Economy Accelerator (NEA) programme.

NEA gives the selected enterprises — which are all focused on so-called bottom of the pyramid solutions — the opportunity to join its nine-month programme which will include couching, access to finance and general business support.

Humans have been building solutions that make us better, faster and stronger since we discovered that we could fashion tools out of rocks and twigs. Our earliest technological innovations focused on amplifying our physical skills, but once Alan Turing created an early example of the modern computer with his code-breaking machine, our attention increasingly turned towards processing information as quickly as possible to mimic human cognition. Today, everything from our watches to our thermostats are ready and able to process information far faster than our brains can.

KARL ULRICH: As a professor of entrepreneurship I get asked a lot, “Can entrepreneurship really be taught in a university?”

The short answer is “yes.”

Teaching entrepreneurship does require educators to recognize the distinction between action learning and knowledge transfer. The direct transfer of knowledge is certainly important—entrepreneurs need to know about accounting, finance and the legal aspects of starting a business, and these subjects can be learned and taught in conventional ways in the classroom or online.

It may not look like much at first glance, but a map created by University of Wisconsin computer science professor Paul Barford and about a dozen colleagues took around four years to produce. He believes it could make the Internet more resilient to accidents, disasters, or intentional attacks.

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The University of Washington is the most innovative public university in the world, according to a new ranking by Reuters released Wednesday. The UW is ranked fourth overall, behind only Stanford, MIT and Harvard.

“Innovation and turning ideas into action are at the center of everything we do,” UW Interim President Ana Mari Cauce said. “This is great recognition of the hard work done by our faculty and students working across all disciplines, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.”

Innovation-led growth is no longer the prerogative of high-income countries alone. Middle-income countries are catching up fast, but they still need some crucial ingredients to compete.

There is a common misconception about the success of Silicon Valley; that its success is largely down to the disruptive and rebellious innovators who have made it their playground. A hive of innovative activity it may be, but the truth is that the young and ambitious have congregated around the valley because it is home to universities, research labs, venture capital firms and armies of risk-taking talent, which came because of smart government policies.

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Leading innovation is a lot like parenting.

As a parent, you generally don’t have any meaningful training or preparation before you start.  You kind of learn as you go, and figure things out as they land in front of you.  Most of the advice y0u get is off base and not at all relevant to your circumstances.  By the time you’ve accumulated enough experience to be more or less competent, the skills you’ve acquired are mostly irrelevant.  To top it all off, the really important things you did, the things that will really matter somewhere in the future, are totally invisible, hidden away in a flurry of daily actions and drama and living.

Austin’s healthcare landscape is poised to change dramatically with the new Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas, said Josh Jones-Dilworth. Dilworth is a member of The Fifty, a group of Austin residents who have committed to raise $50 million to help finance the new hospital. It is scheduled to open in 2017 and will be across Red River Street from the new Dell Medical School at UT.

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As the debate rages on which city is India's start-up hub, VCCEdge, the financial research platform of VCCircle.com, has come out with a funding data that may give a clearer picture on the issue.

According to the VCCEdge, Bengaluru might be the home of Flipkart and Amazon India, but Delhi-National Capital Region is the hotbed of e-commerce startup activity in India.