How’s this for an entrepreneurship-education outcome: The proportion of high school students saying they’d like to start a business declined over the course of a summer program, according to research from New York University.

But that’s not a failure — not at all. I’ll explain.

Prior to the BizCamp program, funded by the Citi Foundation, 91% of the participants indicated they would like to own a business. But then they learned how much time it takes to run one — a lot of them realized they were too busy. And then there’s the risk: “I’d rather work for a company versus become an entrepreneur and try to start from the bottom because it takes a lot of hard work and it’s also work that might not pay off, and I’m not that big of a risk taker,” one student told the researchers.

Doing a few hours of exercise every week will probably help you live longer, but doing a whole lot more exercise doesn't provide much extra benefit, according to a new study on physical activity and longevity.

Still, doing as much as 10 times the recommended amount of exercise was not linked with an increased risk of dying during the study period. That's good news for marathon runners and triathletes who may have been concerned about the long-term health effects of such high levels of activity.

A common challenge faced by every entrepreneur is that they don’t have the bandwidth, interest or skills to do everything that is required to build their startup. Of course, they can outsource part of the work or hire employees, but that approach means more time and money to manage the work, which they don’t have. The right answer is to find a co-founder with complementary skills.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Startups based in regional areas should join an accelerator program or partner with local universities or corporates in order to improve their chances of launching a minimum viable product, according to the founder of an online marketplace shortlisted for the 2015 StartupSmart Awards.  

Justin Hales launched Camplify in November last year, a startup allowing caravan owners to rent their vehicles out to travellers looking to go on holiday.

Image: http://www.startupsmart.com.au

The Brontosaurus is back. Or at least it should be, according to a new analysis of the long-necked dinosaur family tree.

The study researchers suggest the dinosaur currently known as Apatosaurus excelsus is different enough from its Apatosaurian kin as to be a different dinosaur altogether. Because A. excelsus was famously first known as Brontosaurus until 1903, the species would revert back to that original name and become Brontosaurus once again.

Image: This illustration reveals Brontosaurus as researchers see it today, with a Diplodocus-like head. Credit: Davide Bonadonna, Milan, Italy. Creative commons license CC- BY NC SA.

Some typical crowdfunding proposals posted online may look like this: Help my band record our next album or please contribute to my child's medical expenses.

But here's one thing the average investor can't do through crowdfunding: buy stake in a private company. That policy, however, is under closer scrutiny. With more competition for venture capital funding, equity crowdfunding is getting more attention.

My latest Boston Globe column looks back at the impact of two initiatives born in Cambridge in 2005: Web Innovators Group and Y Combinator. I also sk what we can do to improve Boston’s stickiness for consumer-oriented Web and mobile startups; it’s impossible to look at the alumni of both programs and not notice that may of the most successful, like Reddit, Dropbox, Birchbox, and E la Carte, have migrated to New York or the Bay Area.

Michael Gerber , in his book The E-myth Physician, says that doctors can assume three basic roles: technicians, managers or entrepreneurs.

A 2013 AMA report notes that 53.2 percent of all physicians surveyed were self-employed, and 60 percent of physicians worked in practices wholly owned by physicians. More and more doctors are becoming employees of hospital systems. Most of the latter will be techicians. Most of the former, independent physicians, will have to move up the value chain, being entrepreneurs, to thrive,let alone survive.

Today, Starbucks unveiled a massive expansion to its program granting free college educations to part- and full-time U.S. employees. Called the College Achievement Plan, the $200 million initiative allows employees who don’t have a degree to earn one through Arizona State University’s online coursework.

In a wide-ranging discussion from Starbucks’ offices overlooking the Seattle skyline, CEO Howard Schultz said he expects to see 25,000 employees earn their degrees —for many, they will be the first in their family to do so — through CAP in the next 10 years. And that’s being conservative. “We have a long history of under-promising and over-delivering,” he says. “We think we'll do the same there."

The number of venture-capital-backed IPOs plunged in Q1 2015 to the lowest level in two years, in the wake of a huge number of VC-backed companies that went public in 2014, a VC trade group said on Monday (April 6).

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) counted 17 IPOs that raised a total of $1.4 billion in the first three months of 2015. That’s less than half the pace of Q1 2014, when 37 VC-backed startups went public to raise a total of $3.4 billion.

For some of the approximately 10 million people worldwide with traumatic brain injury (TBI), forming and holding onto new memories can be one of the hardest things they’ll do in a day. Now imagine a device implanted in the brain that can help them encode memories by means of small electric shocks.1

Initial steps toward such a memory neuroprosthetic are being taken at the University of Pennsylvania, where researchers have started tests on brain surgery patients to try to locate, and influence, the processes that control memory formation.

Image: An x-ray shows EEG-recording electrodes under the skull of an epilepsy patient. - http://www.technologyreview.com

Should you disagree openly or find private channels for feedback? It depends on the cultural backgrounds of your team.

Li Shen, a young Chinese manager who eagerly accepted a job as a marketing manager for L’Oreal after doing her MBA in Europe found herself working at the company’s Shanghai office. Her excellent command of English and acceptable French gave her confidence when dealing with her European colleagues. She didn’t feel there was a cultural gap between her and her European peers, until she was invited to Paris to present her ideas about a marketing campaign in China.

WASHINGTON DC—AARP today announced the launch of a new program to give developers of popular and emerging products insight into how Americans 50-plus use technology in order to identify ways to improve the devices for mature consumers. The initiative is called Project Catalyst and its first study is focused on popular activity and sleep trackers. In conjunction with UnitedHealthcare and Pfizer Inc., this is the first of several technology studies that AARP will conduct with the goal of accelerating innovation for aging Americans.   

Did you know you could use your iPhone to monitor your pulse and oxygen levels? From nanobot surgery to microchip medical records, new medical technologies come about in different ways. 

Check out the infographic below to see what affects medical research, research spending numbers, and some of the important technologies now available as a result:

The bicycle is en vogue.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of cities around the world have adopted bike-sharing systems — the setup that allows urban dwellers to share bicycles for short-term amounts of time for a fee (think Citi Bike in New York City or Santander Cycles in London).

According to a recent blog post from leading bike-sharing consultancy MetroBike, 855 cities across the globe had bike-sharing systems in 2014. That's compared to 703 one year earlier in 2013, and only 11 cities a decade earlier in 2004.

A first-time entrepreneur has challenges in two broad categories:

a) External

b) Internal

The internal challenges are many and they are the invisible forces of resistance for the first-time entrepreneur. I have picked five such forces of resistance here for the sake of discussion. They are:

"What if, after pouring all my resources and my soul into this new venture for the next two years, I end up failing? What if after all the effort and suffering I end up with nothing, what will I do then to bounce-back?"

The questioner stood at the microphone, a look of acute discomfort as she imagined this dark future for herself, and the demise of the startup that she hadn't yet created.

The Internet has been used by academia since the 1980’s, but in the last fifteen years it has become what we know today. Today, 2.5 billion people log onto the Internet every day, and it's estimated that the number will double in the next five years

For entrepreneurs looking to start or grow a business, the Internet offers a fairly unlimited and mostly untapped customer base. There are many successful lifestyle entrepreneurs, but they are just scratching the surface of the opportunity that’s available. 

The EAGB put together a year-end report on the regional economy for the second year, this time highlighting local universities and the innovation economy. Also in this report, the EAGB lists its most memorable achievements from the previous year. Take a look!

http://www.greaterbaltimore.org/Portals/0/Publications/Annual Report/2014/2014.pdf

Taxes create a wedge between what a new venture earns and what investors receive, boosting the hurdle rate that must be met in order to attract funding.

In a recent study, we examined how big this effect is, how it varies across industries, and how it differs between startups and established businesses. To do so, we combined all of the features of the federal tax code—rates, deductions, credits, special provisions, etc.—into a single measure known as a marginal effective tax rate (METR).