One way to help get your business off the ground, is to leverage the mentorship and investor relationship benefits of a startup incubator or an accelerator. First of all, what is the difference between an incubator and an accelerator.

What is a Startup Incubator?

An incubator is physically locating your business in one central work space with many other startup companies.  In many cases, the startups in these incubators can all be venture funded by the same investor group.

Over the last several years crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular option for both entrepreneurs and investors. According to Statista, In the United States alone, there are 191 crowdfunding platforms. They also discovered that the volume of global crowdfunding platforms skyrocketed from $530 million in 2009 to over $2.8 billion in 2012. When you also consider that over 95% of business plans that were received by accredited investors and VCs have been rejected – via the Huffington Post - it’s no surprise that entrepreneurs are looking elsewhere for funding.

Recently, I received an accolade that not only meant a great deal to me, but also set many thoughts in motion about how I think about work. OK, this is just a Twitter mention, but it comes from a person whose own work I respect; and for me, “succeeding at research and teaching while staying human” is a pretty economical description of a successful academic career.

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We all know what makes for good character in soldiers. We’ve seen the movies about heroes who display courage, loyalty and coolness under fire. But what about somebody who sits in front of a keyboard all day? Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?

Of course it is. Even if you are alone in your office, you are thinking. Thinking well under a barrage of information may be a different sort of moral challenge than fighting well under a hail of bullets, but it’s a character challenge nonetheless.

Sometimes, inspiration comes from unlikely places.

Rainer Maria Rilke is a favorite well-known poet of the early 20th century. One of the great legacies he left behind is a volume entitled Letters to a Young Poet which was published posthumously by the young man whom he generously corresponded with for nearly five years.

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I did what they told me to do. I went to college. I took out loans. I graduated on time. So why, three months after graduation was I still jobless? 

The summer of 2010 was supposed to be my summer. The World Cup was roaring, I was a few months away from my 23rd birthday and I had just graduated from the international business program at San Diego State University. But instead of starting a luxurious career in sales or international management, I found myself a broke college graduate who had just moved back home. It was by far one of the most frustrating, challenging and trying periods of my life.

Image: Eric Ruiz - Image Credit: Mike Allen

Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we’re alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair. Chemical damage accumulates, and decomposition brings its own kind of collapse: membranes dissolve, enzymes leak, and bacteria multiply. How long until DNA disappears altogether? Since the delicate molecule was discovered, most scientists had assumed that the DNA of the dead was rapidly and irretrievably lost. When Svante Pääbo, now the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, first considered the question more than three decades ago, he dared to wonder if it might last beyond a few days or weeks. But Pääbo and other scientists have now shown that if only a few of the trillions of cells in a body escape destruction, a genome may survive for tens of thousands of years.

Definition: Valuation

The goal of a valuation is to determine the economic value of a business. It is meant to indicate how much a company should be bought or sold for.

There are several ways to perform a valuation on a startup, including asset valuation, the market approach, and income valuation, according to Forbes.

Have you noticed how annoying small business clichés seem to generate instant experts? It’s as if repeating the same half true clichés that appear everywhere validates a voice. I can’t resist pointing out these three clichés below.  Pointing out what’s wrong with them, why they are only half true, and why they are also dangerous. So here we go.

These days, you’re urged to “follow your passions” – “follow your heart” – and “lean in”–but what if you’re not sure where your particular passion lies? What if you don’t know which way to lean?

The modern definition of the term passion or passionate means to have strong feelings or a strong belief towards something, however, the root word of passion expresses the idea of being moved to action where there is pain and suffering. The heart of passion lies in having enjoyment and satisfaction in what you do.

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It’s no surprise to me that everyone and their friend is interested in learning more about what it takes to ditch the corporate drone power suit and become their own bosses. It took three months out of college at a consulting gig to know that corporate life was not for me: too much red tape, not enough professional autonomy, and moronically slow growth, all to be labeled an impersonal number in a sea of thousands.

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In late 2011 Peter Allestorfer and Manuel Koser launched Zando — a Rocket Internet-backed platform selling clothes and other fashion accessories online to South Africans. Today, it’s one of the country’s biggest ecommerce outfits, having also raised €20-million (US$26-million at the time) via international growth equity investor Summit Partners, as well as an undisclosed amount through JP Morgan.

Just how safe is your company data? According to the IBM Cyber Security Intelligence Index, U.S. businesses experienced over 1.5 million monitored cyber attacks in 2013 alone. Sensitive information regarding your internal operations, your customers and your employees is at risk if your organization does not take proper measures to secure its data. Take a look at these eight crucial security reminders for business leaders to keep in mind.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could hack into our own brains and rewire them to be happier?

Science has shown we actually can thanks to a phenomenon called experience-dependent neuroplasticity. "It’s a fancy term to say the brain learns from our experiences," says Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness. "As we understand better and better how this brain works, it gives us more power to change our mind for the better."

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In higher education today, only two things are certain: change is coming, and nobody knows what that change will look like.

At College for America, we are one year into what we believe will be a large part of that change: competency-based education. We apparently are not alone. A couple of weeks ago, Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell announced the continuation of a program designed to support student-focused, outcomes-based higher education--largely focusing on competency-based education. And just last month, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation to advance competency-based education.

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Business literature is filled with definitions of entrepreneurship. And we often speak of entrepreneurship within a tech or startup space, though surely the family running your neighborhood market is also an entrepreneur. Many people around the globe are forced to become entrepreneurs just to survive. 

Image: U.S. Department of Education/Flickr  

Ellen Weber, a longtime angel investor, entrepreneur and Philadelphia startup advocate, has announced her new executive director position at Temple University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute. She’ll also serve as an assistant professor in the Fox School of Business strategic management department. Weber will continue her role as executive director of Robin Hood Ventures, a group of angel investors focused on early-stage, high-growth companies in the region. Weber helped found Robin Hood Ventures 15 years ago.

Image: Ellen Weber is the new head of Temple University's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute.  - www.bizjournals.com

About four years ago, researchers in Michael Strano’s chemical engineering lab at MIT coated a short piece of yarn made of carbon nanotubes with TNT and lit one end with a laser. It sparkled and burned like a fuse, demonstrating a new way to generate electricity that produces phenomenal amounts of power.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today that it will provide a multi-million dollar grant to create a hub of innovation that unites public and private institutions throughout Southern California, headquartered at and administered by the University of Southern California, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the University of California Los Angeles.

The new center is part of the NSF Innovation Corps, or "I-Corps," initiative, which is aimed at fostering innovation throughout the U.S. by encouraging the translation of ideas and research beyond the laboratory to create social and economic impact. The announcement cements the position of Southern California as a crucial focal point of technology entrepreneurship in the country.