Many people seek entrepreneurship because it allows them to be the boss. You get to make all the business decisions, from general company strategy and positioning to the management of your human resources. It’s an appealing position on paper, but in practice, managing people is far more challenging than most aspiring entrepreneurs realize.

If you’re fed up with your job, it may seem like there are only two steps to becoming an entrepreneur. The first is to quit your job, and the next step is to start a company. While it is possible to transition successfully from employee to entrepreneur, it’s a little more complex than that.

Here are the 12 steps you’ll need to take to become your own boss.

Spring is a season of rebirth. So it's a good time to remind ourselves that physician entrepreneurs are taking a more active involvement in innovating our way out of our sick-care mess—not dying, as some seem to think. The problem is that pundits confuse private practitioners as the only breed of physician entrepreneurs, when, in fact there are many.

European tech is booming. Over the last year, 13 startups became unicorns — companies with $1 billion-plus valuations — according to research bank GP Bullhound.

It's a marked increase from a year prior, when just 3 new unicorns were created.

What a difference a century makes. No, not in technological innovation, but in technological pessimism. As David McCullough writes in his new history of the Wright brothers, their discovery was met with near universal excitement and optimism, even in the face of setbacks, some of them fatal. Today, a century later, innovation and innovators are more often met with skepticism, approbation, and opposition.

The Intellectual Property (IP) & Science business of Thomson Reuters launched its State of Innovation website: http://stateofinnovation.com, which offers innovation trend data and industry-specific insights focusing on the Lifecycle of Innovation and showcasing the iterative process of discovering, protecting and commercializing ideas.

The launch of this website features findings from the business’s latest research: The Future Is Open: 2015 State of Innovation, an analysis of global scientific literature and patent data across 12 technology areas.

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics. His research projects provide a peek into the intriguing possibilities of machines and automation, from robots that “evolve” to ones that assemble themselves out of basic building blocks. (His Cornell colleagues are building robots that can serve as baristas and kitchen help.) A few years ago, Lipson demonstrated an algorithm that explained experimental data by formulating new scientific laws, which were consistent with ones known to be true. He had automated scientific discovery.

No matter the size or stage your business is currently at, having employees leave is just bad for business. As the Wall Street Journal notes, a high employee turnover rate can cost “twice an employee’s salary to find and train a replacement.” Not only are there financial repercussions, a high turnover rate can also lower the knowledge base in your company and decrease performance and morale.

Tesla’s game-changing batteries for the home are a page straight out of India’s frugal engineering playbook.

Elon Musk is out to change the world, again. At a recent press conference, the Tesla CEO introduced Powerwall, a suite of batteries designed to enable homes, businesses, and utilities to store up both solar energy and power from the grid. The idea is that by reducing the volatility of supply and demand, the batteries will shrink users’ electric bills by as much as 25 percent. This technology should also make it possible for utilities to increase renewables’ share of the energy mix. And, perhaps most intriguingly, Powerwall theoretically may allow homes to go off-grid completely.

I recently got a call from a CEO of a health system that encompasses several hospitals, medical practices, and clinics. Lakeland Health employs about 4,000 associates and takes in nearly $500 million per year. Its facilities are spread across the southwest corner of Michigan — where median income is 70% of the national average and the incidence of chronic diseases is substantially higher than the norm. It’s a challenging environment in which to be a healthcare provider.

It’s nice when your boss trusts you. But some managers let you have such a long leash that they don’t know what you’re really doing or can’t provide the feedback you need. Worse yet, it’s difficult to tactfully request more involvement without pushing your boss further away. How do you work with a manager who is too hands-off? And if she resists, is it possible to get what you want from her in other ways, or from someone else?

Every company has star players—the people who show up early, stay late, and go above and beyond to do the best job. These employees can easily become a manager’s favorite, earning their time and attention.

But if you’re spending more than four hours a week with your A-players, you could be wasting your time, says Tom Gimbel, CEO of LaSalle Network, a Chicago-based recruiting and human resources firm.

While each entrepreneurial success story is different, certain qualities separate great business ideas from the thousands that try and fail. Here are a few examples of what it takes to make it: 

Successful entrepreneurs validate their ideas. 

Dreamers dream, successful entrepreneurs do. Turning ideas into products, measuring how customers respond, and learning whether to stay the course or pivot are the bedrock of scaling a successful startup, so all processes must be aimed at accelerating that feedback loop explains startup guru Eric Reis in his book The Lean Startup.

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

Presidential candidates love to complain about how the U.S. is falling behind China because “we don’t make things anymore.” The only problem is, it isn’t true. The U.S. is still a manufacturing power, only a specific type of highly-skilled manufacturing.

Business editor and former consultant Joel Kurtzman, author of “Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance,” Here & Now’s Lisa Mullins to explain why we should be optimistic about America.

Image: Joel Kurtzman is author of “Unleashing the Second American Century.” (Courtesy)

Two years ago, a television cartoon in Pakistan made waves for its star, a superheroine named “Burka Avenger,” who promotes positive social change while clad in the titular billowing black silk outfit. With the tagline “don’t mess with the lady in black,” the show presents plotlines promoting gender equality, environmentalism and health.

Hack, hack, hack!

What’s that?

It’s the sound of a nation of hackers. That’s us in the 21st century.

Not so long ago, in the previous century, a hack was just a term at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an ingenious solution to a problem. Those who invented the solutions were hackers.  As computers came along, hacks and hackers came along too, spreading the terminology beyond MIT into general use. Hackers were those who found hacks for computers, ways to stretch their limits or detour around the limits they faced.

It seems part magic and part dumb luck. A kitten card game raises almost $9 million. A movie based on a cult TV show draws in nearly $6 million. A space simulator game still in development brings in $80 million. These are the wildly successful crowdsourcing stories, but for every successful campaign, Kickstarter is littered with failed game funding pleas.

Image: http://www.gamesandlearning.org/

Question: What is the difference between a business accelerator and a business incubator? — Lincoln

Answer: Terms such as business accelerator and business incubator are sometimes used in different contexts depending on the business, industry, and even geographical area. In general, both are focused on assisting startup businesses, but in slightly different ways.

Generally speaking, a business incubator provides a support community for a start-up business to be successful. This may entail providing physical space, consulting support and even resources in the form education, training or strategy. The idea is that if you put many different new business in the same environment, there will be synergies that are created. The tenants will support each other through similar challenges of starting and maintaining a business.

There is always talk, sometimes tongue-in-cheek but mostly sort of serious, that a lot of jobs will be replaced by robots or computers. Maybe that new iPhone I just bought will replace me by year end. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla thinks that the most doctors’ current functions will be replaced by algorithms; many believe that lots of white collar jobs, such as lawyers, accountants, and bankers will be replaced by machines with warmer personalities. Venture capitalists have already been “supplemented” with algorithms and, no doubt, there are plenty of people who would like to see us replaced by nearly anything metal—spatula, can opener–if they had their way. In Iron Man we see a world of robot-based soldiers going to war and in real life the echo of that is not so far off.