Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. The myth of footloose 25-year-olds changing the world while incidentally becoming deliriously rich has intoxicated a generation. And governments are eagerly handing out tax breaks to help them get started. After all, those new companies are engines of economic growth and job creation, right?

Well, maybe, says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor George Foster. He suggests that policymakers and would-be tycoons alike could do with a sobering belt of reality. In a new multi-country study, he finds that most startups never take off — and among those that do, setbacks destroy a sizable share of the employment and revenue gains in the sector.

There's a reason Shark Tank's Daymond John has earned the nickname "The People's Shark": He's all about spreading the wealth. 

In an interview with Inc. Tuesday, John shared his plans to open his own incubator program to help foster entrepreneurship for the next generation of founders.

"I know I'm going to do it, I'm just not certain if it's going to be an incubator for kids with learning disabilities, like dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, or something else," John says. "I want it to be a little different in regards to the angle."

Image: Daymond John. IMAGE: Scott Foreman

Local officials hope a new ultra-clean laboratory in the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine will help draw businesses in the burgeoning field.

"It is one of the only few places of its kind on the planet available to companies," said Gary Smith, president of Rochester Area Economic Development Inc. "These are expensive facilities to build, and a lot of companies can't afford that capital investment."

MADISON – Is Wisconsin producing enough startup companies? No, especially when all startups are counted… whether those young companies are bakeries, burger joints, beauty salons or biotechnology firms.

What often matters more than the sheer number of startups is the survivability and “scale up” stages for young companies, a time when emerging firms produce increasing numbers of jobs that pay solid salaries.

Wisconsin has some prominent examples. Companies such as Epic, Promega, Astronautics, Direct Supply, Logistics Health, Renaissance Learning, Trek and many more were all Wisconsin startups not so long ago. As they grew, they collectively produced thousands of jobs created through innovation born close to home.

It seems like "innovation" -- in business, in technology, in client service -- is such a hot topic it manages to span the gamut from meaningless to mystical. Everybody wants it. We're in awe of it. But nobody can define exactly what it is. It's positioned as fundamental to business success, but at the same time something elusive and mysterious, flowing from the minds of a select few visionaries.

Three-day weekends feel like a treat when holidays fall on a Friday, but employees at several companies regularly say "TGIT" because four-day workweeks are their norm. According to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management, 43% of companies offer four-day workweeks to some employees, and 10% make it available to all or most employees. The reason? It positively impacts the bottomline.

Like other serious crypto-anarchist visionaries, the 21-year-old Russian Canadian entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin sees the blockchain—the public ledger underlying bitcoin—as a way to liberate us all from inefficiency, cut out the middleman, and make big government and business bow at the free market's feet. What makes his vision different is its scope. Where bitcoin aims to disrupt banks, Buterin's Toronto-based company, Ethereum, aims to become what he calls "the foundational platform for everything."

Same acronym… new innovative meaning. The Biotechnology Industry Organization… better known as BIO will soon become the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. This news release from BIO says the change is to highlight the scientific innovation the group brings.

We are supposed to be moving rapidly into the “information era,” but the future, as science fiction author William Gibson suggested, is not “evenly distributed.” For most of the U.S., the boomlet in software, Internet publishing, search and other “disruptive” cyber companies has hardly been a windfall in terms of employment. As jobs in those areas have been created, employment has shriveled in old media like newspaper, magazine and book publishing (these industries lost a net 172,000 jobs from 2009 through 2014). In the 52 largest metropolitan areas that we studied, information employment declined for roughly half from 2009 through 2014. Overall, in information industries (a sprawling sector that also includes movie and TV production, radio and another big job loser, telecom) employment has shrunken 4.2% since 2009 to 2.7 million jobs, while total nonfarm employment in the U.S. grew by 5.1%.

Over the last month, several universities have announced new initiatives to support entrepreneurship among faculty, students, alumni, and the community that surrounds them. These efforts focus on providing individual and teams of entrepreneurs with access to capital, education, and other resources. In an effort to reshape their entrepreneurial ecosystem, Princeton University released a new report to guide the university’s entrepreneurial education and support efforts. 

This may be one of the best environments for tech companies to receive funding since the extreme financing figures recorded during the tech boom in 2000, according to a new Small Business Administration (SBA) factsheet. In Q1 of 2015, venture capital (VC) investments totaled $13.4 billion making it the fifth straight quarter to see over $10 billion in VC investments. This trend is part of a sizeable post-recessionary rebound in VC evidencing major growth – VC investments have grown by more than 150% over the last five years. However, this increased VC activity is not benefiting many early stage startups because VCs are shifting away from funding startups as they are just developing. Most VCs are making targeted investments in more mature tech companies in order to potentially jump in before companies go public. The result of this trend of late stage investment by VCs has caused a reduction in the availability of risk capital for promising startups.

About.com invited entrepreneurs to reveal what made their small businesses unique and the lessons they'd learned (the hard way) as a result of being in business. Eight-five business owners responded with profiles of their companies, heart-felt stories of years of struggle before important breakthroughs, and solid pointers for everyone looking to make it in their own business. Here are some great lessons from people who have been there and done that.

Regardless of how brilliant or sophisticated the strategy, it has little value if not adopted and implemented. Creativity is enabled at the intersection of Freedom and Passion streets. More time spent in user testing could have saved us time in the long run, because it would have allowed us to catch our mistakes and get ahead of them. Haste makes waste.

In 1899, Charles Howard Duell, the Commissioner of Patents, was quoted as saying, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." And of course we now know that to be so far from the truth. However, it was only an urban legend that Duell ever made that bad prediction.

In fact, Duell stated that in his opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the 20th century would witness. A middle-aged Duell even wished that he could live his life over again to see the wonders which were to come.

The concept of the "pivot" has become central to the wildly popular entrepreneurship bible The Lean Startup. As you'll learn below, deciding whether to stay on track or try something new is very much a function of questioning your assumptions and refining your visions of your business.

What's a Pivot?

The concept is simple: stay the course or change things up? It's an important "moment of truth" that all entrepreneurs must face.

Europe’s economic growth since the start of the financial crisis has been sluggish, and the region faces difficult long-term demographic and debt-level challenges. But a new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, A Window of Opportunity for Europe, finds that the convergence of low oil prices, a favorable exchange rate, and quantitative easing has given these economies a chance to unlock new economic dynamism by undertaking ambitious reforms and stimulating job creation and investment.1

A year from now, the 2016 presidential primaries will be over, and the nominees of both parties will need to focus in arnest on the broad interests of the American people, not just the parochial concerns of their respective bases. When that time comes, this ITIF campaign memo provides the draft of a speech that we believe is critically important for the US to hear on technology and the economy.

We are delivering this memo a year early because, frankly, it covers issues that partisans on both sides need to hear and understand. The big picture is, quite simply, that the country must embrace innovation to grow the economy for everyone. Below is an overview of the action plan we recommend to bring this agenda to life:

The Senate recently passed legislation to create an economic gardening program to help stimulate New York’s economy by providing technical assistance to existing businesses looking to expand, according to Sen. Patrick Gallivan, R-C-I, Elma. The bill, S-73, was introduced by Gallivan and would establish a pilot program known as “GrowNY.”

“The goal of this program is to generate new jobs from so-called second-stage companies,” Gallivan said. “These are existing businesses already in our communities that have grown beyond the start-up stage and are ready to expand and create additional jobs.”

At New York City’s newest university, the Ivory Tower is being declared dead before it even gets built.

That’s the philosophy embodied in the name the Bridge, one of three buildings slated to open in 2017 during the first phase of construction of Cornell Tech’s new $2 billion, 12-acre campus on Roosevelt Island. The graduate school—a pillar of New York City’s efforts to grow its tech economy—is not shy about its desire to knock down traditional barriers between academia and industry collaboration. The Bridge, formerly referred to as the "corporate co-location" building, is where the action will happen.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

Much has been written about open innovation as if it were a new idea, or that tech startups are the secret to its success. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and organizations that do it well — like Bayer, Campbell Soup, and the U.S. Agency for International Development — share at least three key approaches, as well as embrace the importance of effective communications.

I had a chance to explore the topic when I moderated a panel at the Chief Innovation Officer Summit in San Francisco last month, and here’s what the experts said:

Exercise has always been part of my life. My father was a gym teacher who made sure I had an active childhood and after college, I spent eight years in Los Angeles, where how you worked out said something about you. It was social. It was tribal. And it was fun.

In 2002, I moved to New York City with my husband. We were burned out and in search of more rewarding careers. I asked friends to recommend exercise classes and started dropping in to gyms around town. I tried everything, but nothing stuck. New Yorkers treated exercise as a chore, a box that needed to be checked—every ounce of joy was being squeezed out of the experience. I knew there was a better way.