Becoming a successful entrepreneur is as much about psychology as it is about business. At this inspirational masterclass, you’ll learn how to adopt the mindset of an entrepreneur and take those exciting first steps towards starting your own business. The class also includes lots of practical tips on how to build your venture – from making contacts in your industry to marketing your brand and balancing the books. If you’ve got an idea for a great business and want inspiration to get it up-and-running, this is the ideal class to kickstart your new year.

Not everyone wants to become an entrepreneur, but a healthy majority of people have at least toyed with the thought of starting their own business. The thrill of being your own boss, setting your own hours, creating something from scratch and building a legacy is exhilarating, but few people actually pull the trigger, and, if you ask them why, they'll offer one reason or another -- or maybe 25:

The bright black sand at Diamond Beach, Iceland, is dotted with smooth gray pebbles and glassy chunks of ice. The crash of foamy waves fills my ears as I turn my head to look up and down the beach and see the dark strip of sand fade into white fog as if it goes on forever. I don’t feel the cold, because I’m not really there. Moments earlier, I had been standing in a cable car climbing over Onomichi, Japan.

Language is one of the places where we can see and track the evolution of disciplines. Somewhere along the line, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf (of National Lampoon fame among other creative credits) got very interested in deciphering the twisting and turning dialects that politics and business have spawned, starting with political correctness (The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook) and now, have just released Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language.

Our society craves instant gratification -- we want things now and we want them fast. We are able to rent movies on demand, use our smartphones to have a personal driver waiting outside within minutes and Chipotle’s Twitter feed goes nuclear if someone has to wait in line for more than a couple minutes to get their burrito.

If you’ve been around the startup world long enough, you’ve most likely seen one or more investment deals go south after all the starts have aligned, simply because the investor and entrepreneur couldn’t agree on the valuation.

I once had a deal agreed to with a VC. We had negotiated over months and we had the contracts drawn up and approved by both sides. They then encouraged us to buy another company as part of a larger overall roll up plan, so we did. Since we needed to give the founders of the other company some of our stock, we wound up issuing new stock. This diluted our VC’s ownership percentage below their 15% minimum threshold, so at the 11th hour (literally, this happened at 11:30 pm) they told us that we would need to cut our valuation in half.

LAWRENCE — Imagine shoveling soil to create a backyard garden plot and unearthing a rock embossed with the fossil remnant of a creature you’ve never seen before. It looks like something out of the ocean, but you live in the Midwest.

Is it a rare fossil from hundreds of millions of years ago or just the trash from a previous homeowner 50 years back?

Now, a free app developed at the University of Kansas with support from the National Science Foundation will enable anyone with an iPhone or iPad to discover and classify fossils with the eye of a scientist. The Digital Atlas of Ancient Life is available now at no cost for download from iTunes.

Being productive at work is key to both your company's success and your career success.

Yet, despite the positive payoff, many workers have trouble maintaining high productivity levels throughout the work day — mostly due to factors outside of their control.

Project management software provider Wrike recently conducted a study of 1,500 professionals in various positions, including marketing, IT, accounting, HR, sales, and manufacturing to figure out what hinders their productivity in the office. 

Image: http://e.businessinsider.com

In China, the Siemens R&D team has designed a high-end computed tomography (CT scanning) device that’s simple enough for health professionals who are not doctors to use. To develop this, the company pioneered a type of innovation it called “industrial design thinking”: The innovators convened workshops with users of its devices and used craft supplies such as colored paper to build models in order to get a clearer idea of what people wanted.

Image: Illustration by Lars Leetaru - http://www.strategy-business.com

Valuing a business based on assets and financial performance is a well-understood process, but every investor knows the real value goes well beyond these parameters, either higher or lower. The key elements of leadership in a company, both individual and organizational, are less tangible, but very critical in setting a market value for investment, acquisition, or going public.

The world champion Kansas City Royals basked in the adulation of hundreds of thousands of ecstatic fans in a parade and rally Tuesday that nearly shut down downtown for hours. City officials estimated that around 800,000 people attended the events.

Image: REED HOFFMANN/ASSOCIATED PRESS - http://mashable.com

Goat farts may have grounded a plane last week.

On Oct. 26, a Singapore Airlines cargo plane en route from Adelaide, Australia, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, received a signal that there was smoke in the cargo bay. The plane descended and diverted to Bali's Denpasar airport.

Entrepreneurship has changed a lot in the past two decades. Access to information and resources is greater than ever thanks to the advances of the Internet, and a culture of startup favoritism has encouraged young creative thinkers to follow their projects more than ever before. In many ways, we live in the midst of a startup renaissance, filled with opportunities for anyone with an independent passion and a strong idea.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The 4th Annual K-TECH Conference & Expo is showcasing technology’s top minds to explore and demo the big ideas driving one of Asia’s most dynamic economies among 1,000+ business influencers, entrepreneurs and investors on November 12-13 at the Santa Clara Marriott.

Dubbed yet again the most innovative country in Bloomberg’s Global Innovation Index, number one in innovation performance in a recent European Commission release, and a leader in the development of frontier technologies by the OECD, Korea continues to lead the race unlocking the world’s leading-edge technologies.

Last week, the Security and Exchange Commission signed off on new regulations under the JOBS Act allowing average investors to buy equity in startups on crowdfunding platforms—think Kickstarter but with actual equity for sale, not just trinkets.

To get a sense of how entrepreneurs stand to benefit from the new equity crowdfunding regulations, we sat down with Rod Turner, cofounder of Manhattan Street Capital – a growth capital marketplace looking to take advantage of the new changes by building an equity crowdfunding platform for mid-sized firms.

A European crowdfunding company will launch in the U.S. after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted new rules last week which will allow start-ups to sell equity to anyone.

Seedrs, the largest crowdfunding platform in Europe, announced this week it will start a beta test of its platform in the next couple of weeks. The test will allow investors to back a small selection of campaigns, and Seedrs will officially launch in early 2016.

Neurology research is one of those rare topics that immediately fascinates people outside the field. Any technology that makes healing brain ailments easier is a relief for people of all ages who fear what the future might bring for their health. But it’s also fascinating to see what new developments could do not just to protect our brains, but also augment them.

Image: Brainnovations' opening day at Google's Campus Tel Aviv. Photo Credit: IBT's Shay Rishoni, Facebook

Chicago might not be Silicon Valley, but local tech incubator 1871 has a new claim to fame. It's been named the top university-affiliated business incubator in the U.S. and #2 in North America by performance analyst UBI Global. Over 400 incubators around the world were analyzed for the latest rankings, the entrepreneurial hub announced in a statement. Since it launched in 2012, 1871 has integrated itself with universities around the Chicago area and in other parts of the world. The Merchandise Mart-based hub has dedicated spaces for students and faculty from Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Loyola University Chicago,

Image: via 1871 - http://chicagoist.com

Who says you can't combine work and play? Not millennials, at least. Recent research suggests they aren't the strictly utilitarian business trippers their parents tend to be. While traveling for business, millennials are spending more company money than their gen X and baby boomer colleagues. But before your company puts its expense accounts on lockdown, it's worth first considering how that trend could be an opportunity rather than a threat.

If there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done and administrative tasks like expense reports and invoicing are falling through the cracks, you may have considered getting an assistant. But before you hire someone, make sure you’re really ready, or you could be wasting time and money.