Each September, thousands of new students stream into Ontario’s universities, carrying their clothes, books and increasingly global ambitions.

The question for Ontario and Canada is: Where will those ambitions ultimately take them?

It’s no secret that science courses, particularly at the first- and second-year levels, can be dry. The classes are big, the content is wide but typically shallow, and professors often resort to lectures. There’s a lot of talk among science educators about how to make these courses more interesting, to attract students and retain them as majors, but much of the conversation thus far has focused on improving individual faculty members’ teaching. And that’s not a bad thing: one innovative teacher in a department is better than none.

Image: https://www.insidehighered.com

Most aspiring entrepreneurs feel it in their bones — they were born to be an entrepreneur, to the point where nothing else in life could satisfy them.

They’re dissatisfied as employees, followers or consumers.

They want to create, build and grow their own enterprises, and they’re filled with the passion of their own ingenuity.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com - Flickr

Wisdom often comes with maturity, but a growing number of young entrepreneurs are proving that age doesn’t matter when it comes to achieving success. In the new book 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials Are Breaking Down Age Barriers and Changing the World, coauthors Stacey Ferreira and Jared Kleinert share the stories of 75 ambitious entrepreneurs who started with an idea and turned it into reality.

TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Specialty materials innovator StoreDot Ltd. (http://store-dot.com/) announced today a new round of financing of $18 million for its new Electric Vehicle business unit, bringing the total funding to-date to $66 million. Investors in this round include mostly existing investors such as Norma Investments Limited, representing Roman Abramovich and Samsung Ventures. Other existing investors also include Singulariteam.

Aisling Capital, a life sciences-focused private equity firm, is raising $400 million for its fourth fund, with a hard cap of $500 million, Fortune reports.

The New York firm has a vast portfolio of healthcare and life sciences startups, with some notable players including antifungal immunotherapy player Cidara Therapeutics; the much buzzed-about sepsis diagnostics maker T2 Biosystems; and Seragon Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Roche last year for $1.7 billion. It also had a healthy exit with Aimmune Therapeutics, which makes immunotherapy products for food allergies. It went public last week and has a $1 billion valuation.

Startups today are growing faster than they have in the past. US VC backed startups in 1998 grew revenue 63% per year on average. In 2014, the median startup grew at 85% CAGR before going public.

Image: http://tomtunguz.com

Early on, Angie Chang discovered that asking questions was actually the best way to influence others. One of her most important questions was posed to college classmate and now AppSumo CEO Noah Kagan. Kagan was running entrepreneurship conferences and events in Palo Alto at the time and had contracted Chang to build the website and design marketing collateral. After reviewing the speakers page, she asked, “Noah, why are there no women on any of these panels?”

 “I have not failed.  I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”  The quote, ascribed to celebrated inventor (and prolific patent holder) Thomas Edison, captures the innate optimism of those who engage in the exhausting, risk-laden work of innovation. 

Innovation and leadership go hand in hand.

Without innovation an organization will stagnate and without strong leadership innovation withers. This linkage is deftly made in the following quote attributed to Steve Jobs, "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

As a human being your potential is unlimited. You have the unlimited potential to learn, grow, develop and achieve anything. The problem is that the belief systems in your subconscious mind will create a box or a lid on what you perceive is possible and that will create the limit for what you can do and can’t do.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a major consumer technology developer and Internet services giant which is involved in an incredibly diverse array of innovative tech fields. The company is best known for its Internet search engine, which processes an average of about 40,000 search queries every second, but in our Companies We Follow series  we’ve seen them develop everything from robots with humanoid personalities to medical emergency response drones. We’ve covered Google acquisitions that have pulled the company into the sphere of digital wallet tech as well as patenting activities in the field of autonomous vehicles. It’s clear that the tentacles of the corporate octopus that is Google stretch wide and far away from each other.

Image: “Google Around the World Background” by C_osett. Public domain. 

When Google announced the creation of Alphabet, its new umbrella organization that separates Google’s “bread-and-butter” businesses like Google Search and YouTube from riskier or non-core ventures like GoogleX and Google Capital, shareholders rejoiced. As Todd Zenger writes in his recent HBR piece, “Why Google Became Alphabet,” investors were somewhat uneasy with Google’s approach of mixing unrelated investments, acquisitions and businesses, because it appeared to limit transparency, accountability and discipline. There were also branding benefits to the change, as Kevin Lane Keller explained in another article.

NEW YORK, Aug. 18, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- After reaching a record high of $56.4B spent in 2014, the U.S. is on track to smash that record and break $70B in Venture Capital (VC) spending by the end of 2015, according to Venture Pulse Q2 '15, the first in a global quarterly VC report series from KPMG International and CB Insights, a VC-data company. With $36.9B already invested in the first half of the year, the final total money spent by VCs in 2015 could mark a five-year high for the U.S.

Image: http://news.sys-con.com 

Every big thinker who's made a difference in our lives, from Thomas Edison to Bill Gates, has had a high degree of mental toughness—or what you might call a thick skull. It isn't just about being stubborn, although that's part of it. These tough-minded sorts make for great leaders and entrepreneurs because they keep moving toward their goals despite ridicule from naysayers who can't appreciate what they're trying to achieve. But mental toughness isn't necessarily something we're born with, as many believe. It's a set of characteristics we can all learn. Here are some habits the most tough-minded leaders have developed.

For most of your career, having more experience than other candidates will boost job chances. But when you're likely decades older than anyone in the office, will concealing your age help you get a foot in the door?

Hello,

I worked for the first half of my career in communications and, for the rest of my career up to retirement, as an English teacher. Because of the wide variety and the time I’ve worked, my résumé is lengthy. How do I get all of my skills and experience across without length and without putting in dates, since there is so much ageism out there?

Thanks, Nancy

If only we always made the best decisions for ourselves—choosing the gym over watching trashy TV on the couch; doing laundry instead of having a beer after work—and actually followed through on them.

Researcher Katherine Milkman, from the Wharton School at UPenn, has been looking at how we can have the best of both worlds—making the most optimal choices for our health and wellbeing while still indulging in temptation.

The iPhone has spread all over the world, but that doesn't mean it costs the same amount country to country.

In fact, an iPhone in Brazil ($1,107.53) costs almost twice as much as one in the United States ($649). WebpageFX has compiled a nifty graphic that shows not only how much iPhones cost all over the world, but what percentage that price would be of the annual income of someone living there. The lowest is the US at 1.6% of average income, and the highest is Indonesia, at 39.3%. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-one-graphic-shows-how-much-an-iphone-costs-around-the-world-and-theres-a-big-difference-2015-8#ixzz3jHX36rAp

In the May 15, 2014, edition of the journal Nature, Floyd Romesberg’s chemistry lab at San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute published a paper titled “A Semi-Synthetic Organism with an Expanded Genetic Alphabet.” Romesberg and his colleagues had created a bacterium incorporating chemical building blocks that, as far as anybody knows, have never been part of any earthly life form.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

How important is intellectual property in the digital age? Not very, if the business strategies of industry luminaries like PayPal's Elon Musk and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are any indication.

Musk, the multi-talented entrepreneur behind PayPal, and more recently Tesla cars and SpaceX, has made it clear he considers Tesla’s impressive lead in battery and electric engine technology to be of secondary importance. So much so that he made Tesla’s digital platform openly available to outside parties — a move that stunned other car manufacturers.