Ed Bensman, NSF atmospheric scientist, reveals that storms at night depend on daytime predecessors and how they can rumble on for many hours.

Agnes Fenton, who turned 110-years-old on August 1, has a secret to living a long life: the cool, refreshing taste of Miller High Life.

The New Jersey resident, born in 1905, gained national attention before her 105th birthday when she claimed to have consumed three beers and a shot of Johnnie Walker almost every day for 70 years.

Image: AMY NEWMAN/NEWJERSEY.COM

Just as transformative ideas and discoveries often arise from unexpected places, innovators and entrepreneurs are as likely to come from a small town in Ohio as Silicon Valley.

To help give a more diverse group of inventors, entrepreneurs and researchers the tools they need to bring bold science and engineering ideas to the marketplace, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has formed new public and private partnerships to give a larger community of innovators access to its successful Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) program.

Image: Wearless Tech Inc., a San Francisco-based technology startup, will showcase its new intelligent video baby monitor, Cocoon Cam, in the first-ever White House Demo Day on Aug. 4, 2015. The Cocoon Cam is designed for parents looking for a simple and secure way to monitor their newborns. The Cocoon Cam team--Sivakumar Nattamai, Rubi Sanchez and Pavan Kumar (shown above from left to right)--successfully completed NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) training in July. The I-Corps curriculum prepares scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and broadens the impact of select, NSF-funded, basic-research projects. Credit: Wearless Tech, Inc.

Each month, we’re hoping to better answer the question: what’s being read by academics with an interest in entrepreneurship?

Last month, we found these top papers downloaded on the Social Science Research Network’s (SSRN) repository of working papers and journal articles in their Entrepreneurship Research & Policy Network (ERPN).

Innovation, creativity, art, invention - each word has a different focus, but they all have a set of common skills. These traits help make some of the most successful people in the world drive new and interesting initiatives every single day. From discovering new ways to connect people with accommodation while traveling to bringing space travel to the general population, these innovators all show the same 4 traits.

Information is so easily accessible nowadays, we have an endless library at our fingertips via the internet. The digital realm has allowed us to quench our burning questions — all without stepping out of the front door — and it's constantly evolving to help us collaborate and connect across countries and continents.

In many ways successful people are just like unsuccessful people. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, all types of demographics, have all levels of education and experience and expertise.

In many ways successful people are the same as everyone else. Yet look closely and you'll see that in certain key ways, they are very, very different.

Some of the most important lessons you learn during your first decade working in "the real world" come from one source: the school of hard knocks.

There are professional failures you can’t predict, opportunities that end up being too good to be true, and moments when you don’t live up to your potential.

Although they may seem career-ending in the moment, these workplace setbacks can prove their value over time.

Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates ranked among the VC firms with the best exits (meaning biggest acquisitions and initial public offerings) between 2009 and 2015, according to a new report from CB Insights. Silicon Valley firms Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners were also included at the top of the list.

Image: JOANNE S. LAWTON Harry Weller is the general partner of New Enterprise Associates. The Chevy Chase-based ranked among the top VC firms wit the best exits since 2009

Let’s face it: business models are less durable than they used to be. The basic rules of the game for creating and capturing economic value were once fixed in place for years, even decades, as companies tried to execute the same business models better than their competitors did. But now, business models are subject to rapid displacement, disruption, and, in extreme cases, outright destruction. Consider a few examples:

Entrepreneurs have a lot to worry about -- marketing, hiring, productivity, funding, development, R&D and communication, among a thousand other things.

Communication with investors is one of the areas in which many entrepreneurs lack a solid understanding. Your investors are the ones who are making it financially possible for you to work your passion and build your legacy. But there are a host of legal considerations to keep in mind, especially if your company goes public.

I’ve felt the pain of this quote firsthand. Back when I was running Yammer, I loved strategy meetings. I felt like I was good at hearing everyone’s opinions and encouraging dissent. I also felt like I added a lot of value given how much energy I put into talking to our customers and understanding our market. Yet now, with the benefit of distance, I’m starting to see how those meetings may have failed to drive the successful outcomes we were sure they would. In hindsight, there are a few, interrelated reasons why:

AOL co-founder Steve Case wants to take in entrepreneurs' new ideas, to pick their brains, before picking one to receive an investment of $100,000.

"The idea has to be more than a scribble on a paper napkin," he said Monday. "There has to be something to show, a product with some momentum that needs a boost of cash but hasn't gotten big enough to get the interest of venture capitalists."

Image: http://www.philly.com

Ten years is a long time. When we started First Round in 2005 with the idea to fill the gap between individual angel investing and Series A investing, many on Sand Hill Road dismissed our model as a “cute” novelty. Boy how times have changed. What began as a crazy, contrarian idea has now led to a Series Seed Surge — in the last 4 years alone, over $4 billion has flowed into seed stage and 200 new firms have been formed.

According to a study done by Millennial Branding and Internships.com, 72 percent of high school students want to start their own business someday. 61% percent expect to start a business right out of college. Little do employers know, but Corporate America is quickly becoming the 'back up' option -- what do to if all else fails.

Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

At just 18-years-old and only a few months removed from her high school graduation, Katie Ledecky is the best swimmer in the world. Some are even calling her the greatest freestyle swimmer of all-time. At the FINA World Championships in Kazan, Russia, Ledecky accidentally broke her own world record in the 1,500m freestyle during a preliminary race in which she wasn't swimming her hardest. 

There’s growing evidence that conventional performance reviews are not working. According to a CEB analysis, organizations can only improve employee performance 3% to 5% using standard performance management approaches. Last fall, 53% of human resources professionals in a Society for Human Resource Management study gave a grade between B to C+ when rating how their organization managed performance reviews. Only 2% gave an A to their organization. As a result of findings like these, some companies are doing away with annual performance reviews altogether.

Baltimore will be the first stop for billionaire investor and entrepreneur Steve Case, who in September kicks off a $1 million investment round. Case, CEO of the Washington, D.C., venture firm Revolution, plans to invest $1 million in startups in cities that are off the beaten path for most venture capitalists. The Rise of the Rest bus tour kicks off Sept. 28 in Baltimore and will make stops in Philadelphia, Buffalo and Manchester and Portland, Maine.

Image: Steve Case - WASHINGTON BUSINESS JOURNAL

Last summer, Matthew Bellows was handed a startup’s PR dream: A sit-down with the New York Times. But he didn’t talk about how his company Yesware, the sales productivity software maker, had quickly attracted thousands of enterprise users. He touted not a single product feature. Instead, Bellows described his then-recent, and potentially catastrophic struggle to make his sales team work.

It's virtually impossible to imagine life without learning. We come into the world armed with little more than a bunch of primitive survival instincts, but it’s thanks to our ability to learn that we start adapting to the environment, going from helpless infants into semi-autonomous children before maturing into young adults. Still, when it comes to how we learn, most of us differ considerably at every stage in that process. Now scientists are learning more about that variation and what's behind it.