Every entrepreneur knows that business ownership is thrilling, gratifying and ridiculously hard work. Which is why this Thanksgiving, we are grateful for life lessons from those who came before us.

The Southern C Summit is a collection of female entrepreneurs collaborating, learning and building camaraderie. Here are the top four lessons from the 2014 Charleston, S.C. summit:

Amy Wallin Smilovic, owner of fashion label Tibi, was a big powerhouse keynote. Her advice? Be deadly passionate about what you do.

Image: Free Digital Photos

As part of our research of urban innovation ecosystems, we have been working in New York City to identify successful policies to develop sustainable tech innovation ecosystems in cities.  New York can seem a very far away example to many cities (it is one on the largest cities of the world, the GDP per capita is high and it is very well connected internationally, making it easier to attract talent, etc.); however,  when New York turned into developing a tech startup ecosystem, it faced similar problems as any other city: there was not enough critical mass or community to form the ecosystem, talent was not adequate, believe it or not, there was no financing (seed capital) interested in invested in tech entrepreneurs in the city, etc… (see below).

Image: Free Digital Photos

Any small business or venture capital company interested in Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding opportunities should pay close attention to the Small Business Administration's (SBA) recent request for public comments, by January 6, 2015, on data rights and Phase III funding, and a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report identifying the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) as the two agencies presently accepting applications from majority-owned portfolio companies.

Digital photography has bestowed many gifts, and some few horrors: selfies, naturally, as well as even less dignified self-portraits, of the sort certain politicians send out; mass surveillance, as well as the ability of average citizens to produce important pieces of evidence and to document history; hard times for professional photographers, as well as the full democratization of the medium. What it has almost rendered obsolete is the mechanism that enabled photographic images in the first place. In place of cameras, we have smartphones, the hated Glass…

Image: http://www.openculture.com

The color of your urine could be telling you something about your health condition. Yes, your standard yellow is where you want to be, but the different shades of the rainbow make an appearance on occasion.

It’s not always scary when you’re pee is red, for example. Eating beets can result in beeturia—the passing of red or pink urine because of a compound called betanin in the vegetable. But on the other hand, the red pigment could be caused by kidney disease or a urinary tract infection.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

There is most definitely a learning curve when starting a new venture, and if you aren't making mistakes, you're not taking enough risks. I've seen startups come and startups go. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. When it comes to marketing your start-up, there are a few key items you should avoid.

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Robots are creating work for at least one kind of human: venture capitalists.

They poured $172 million into robotics startups last year, according to an annual survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP—nearly triple the $60 million two years earlier. Travis Deyle, a robotics blogger who keeps his own yearly tally, pegs it even higher—at least $250 million in 2013.

“There’s definitely been a big uptick,” says Mr. Deyle, who notes this year appears headed for another record.

Obsession. The drive to succeed at all costs. When second place isn’t good enough because we live in winner-take-most markets. The desire to be better than anybody else in one’s field.

This blog started from a series of conversations I found myself having over and over again with founders and eventually decided I should just start writing them.It would often make my colleagues laugh because they’d hear me like a broken record and then the next week read my ramblings in a post.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Innovation America Team!

Steve Jobs often swam against the tide of prevailing opinion. (“You can't make a mouse without two buttons!” “You can't make a computer without a floppy drive!” “You can't make a cell phone without a swappable battery!”) He turned out to be right many times.

Occasionally, though, his decisions took the industry into awkward directions from which we've never really recovered. Jobs was fixed, for example, on the idea of a cell phone without any keys. The iPhone became a hit, it spawned imitators, and the rest is history (or the future, depending on how you look at it).

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After five months of traveling, veterinary work and crowdfunding, Leo the paraplegic dog is finally settled in Canada and ready to live the life of a happy pup.

While vacationing in Thailand, Meagan Penman found the dog dragging its hind legs on a beach. After posting a video of the wounded dog on the r/WTF subreddit, Penman reached out to local shelters in the area, who would not take Leo in. Believing Leo had a "better shot at life in Canada," she created a Gofundme page on June 21 to raise funds for medical and travel expenses.

Image: IMGUR, REDDIT, MEAAGS

Joint ventures and M&A are both poised to grow in the coming years, as interest in corporate partnerships grows. In fact, 68 percent of respondents to McKinsey’s newest survey on the subject1 expect their companies’ joint-venture activity to increase over the next five years, and 59 percent expect an increase in M&A.

Image: http://www.mckinsey.com

In recent years, few terms have been as overused and misunderstood as “big data.” From making predictions about massive flu outbreaks with a Google flu trends solution, to tracking shopping trends and directing savings to customers, to making real-time trading decisions that impact companies’ and individuals’ bottom line positions — data has become the key to staying competitive in today’s global economy. To understand the industry meaning of big data, and why big data has gotten so much attention, we need to break down the aspects of the database industry that have led to some of the challenges we face when managing and analyzing data today.

Image: Free Digital Photos

In 2015, hospitals will – and should – make more advanced use of "third platform" technologies based on mobile tools, social channels, data analytics and the cloud, according to a recent report from IDC Health Insights.

With healthcare costs unsustainable, but these new technologies now ubiquitous, IDC officials say hospital CIOs will increasingly be turning to new tools – especially as consumers expect healthcare to be as responsive to their wants and needs as other industries.

If a window seat is enough to make you nervous on a flight, you might want to avoid a new kind of plane that could fly in as soon as a decade.

UK-based tech innovation company Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) hopes to be among the first to design a windowless aircraft. Instead of windows, the plane would have high-definition, flexible screens to show what's happening outside, as it soars through the air.

Image: CPI

An irresistible attraction to gecko feet is an occupational hazard for engineers who study how one thing sticks to another. Geckos can climb just about anything, including glass, and in 2002 scientists identified the force of molecular attraction that bonds dry gecko foot pads to a surface.

Engineers copied nature’s invention with synthetic gecko-inspired materials, but the artificial materials didn’t work well with heavy loads like the roughly 150-pound body weight of Elliot W. Hawkes, a Stanford graduate student in mechanical engineering.

Image: Humans climb glass with a rig that uses gecko-inspired adhesive pads. Video by David Frank on Publish Date November 24, 2014.

We know self-driving cars are coming for us—in fact, by 2040, 75% of the cars on the road may be self-driving. But what will your commute look like when it doesn’t require you to drive anymore?

In the U.S., the average round trip commute to and from work is 50 minutes a day. That’s almost an hour that can you can spend however you like (as long as you're in a car).

Image: This is a concept for a self-driving car by Rinspeed--it looks like a spa, doesn't it? RINSPEED

Sorry, Vin Diesel. EMC just made your Fast and the Furious antics look like child's play.

EMC, along with the Lotus F1 Team, recently set the Guinness World Record for longest jump length (83 feet, 7 inches) by having a semi-truck bound over an F1 racer.

Image: http://mashable.com

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the Sunday after, are typically the worst travel days in the U.S. all year. And this year is no exception. Airlines for America, an industry trade group, projects 24.6 million passengers will take to the skies between Nov. 21 and Dec. 2, 2014.

Not all of them, unfortunately, will give a good accounting of themselves. But as with any kind of bad behavior, some airplane sins are worse than others.

Government departments must get better at promoting innovation amid falling spending on research and development, according to a study by the University of Cambridge. “The government should act as customer,” said David Connell, senior fellow at Judge Business School’s Centre for Business Research. “The UK public sector has not played that role for many years.”