Business school won’t teach you everything you need to know about starting and running a successful business. I learned that the hard way.

While business school taught me how to negotiate, communicate effectively and understand the foundations of finance, economics and law, it wasn’t until I started a business that I realized there were significant gaps in my knowledge.

A new report from the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings considers how incentives offered in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City and San Diego align with the Brookings framework for inclusive economic development. The authors examine incentive transactions by industry category and location to draw conclusions about how well incentives help the city grow from within, boost trade, invest in people and skills, and connect place (that is, link local communities to regional opportunities).

Managers in an up-or-out organization are expected to advance. Those who don’t are fired, at worst; at best they’re relegated to the outskirts of the organization or placed in stagnant roles. This sort of environment breeds constant pressure to compete with colleagues for the best assignments and promotion opportunities. Many employers (including ours, the U.S. Army) ratchet up the intensity with a competitive evaluation framework, rating people against one another to separate the highest performers from the rest.

One of the themes of this economic cycle has been that tech startups have stayed private for a long time, choosing to raise money via venture capital rather than going public. When a downturn inevitably arrives, some may regret that.

As prior cycles have shown, even if good startups technically can go public in a bad market, they generally don't -- and that might mean being forced to stay private for several years longer than they want. A few big startups are avoiding that trap as they finally look to go public -- Dropbox and Spotify have forthcoming listings -- but many other mature companies have stayed private, like Airbnb.

Image: So far, Snap's gains have all gone to its private investors. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

There was a short-lived segment on radio in Australia a few years back called “defend the indefensible” where a young lawyer was told an “indefensible” topic on the spot and asked to mount a passionate defence of what would seem to be a lost cause. It made for some funny,...

Image: https://www.livewiremarkets.com

March Madness bracket pools are commonplace at businesses across the country when the NCAA Tournament rolls around every year. But chances are no contest comes close to the stakes at Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett, a longtime basketball fan and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has had the most spectacular bracket pool in the country since 2014. That first year, he opened up the challenge to the public, offering $1 billion to any college basketball fan that could deliver the perfect bracket.

Image: Warren Buffett is a lifelong basketball fan whose March Madness competition has only grown in recent years. AP Photo/Nati Harnik

Even the most creative of business minds hit a wall at one point or another. The creative juices stop flowing, and it all just comes to a head. Taking the time you need to get away and reignite that internal flame can help you get yourself back in the mindset needed to come up with those innovative ideas once again and make thing happen at your business.

Once seen as a human-scale alternative to the crowded cities of the past, California’s cities are targeted by policy makers and planners dreaming of bringing back the “good old days,” circa 1900, when most people in the largest cities lived in small, cramped apartments. This move is being fronted by well-funded YIMBYs (“yes in my backyard”), who claim ever greater densification will help relieve the state’s severe housing crisis.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

From 2002 to 2007, I used to walk around everywhere with a little spiral notebook in my back pocket and a pencil sticking out of my hair. This was how I managed my schedule, to-do list, and (as a college student) the doodles I made of my professors.

Then the iPhone came out. Suddenly, the slew of apps in my pocket made it possible to do and keep track of much more than my little notebook  used to allow me to do.

Work hard and you’ll see results. For many in today’s knowledge economy, this feeling is elusive. They struggle to see how their labor contributes directly to the performance of the corporation, or how it helps the progress of their career. While there’s often increased pressure to be more productive in the office, it’s sometimes hard not to wonder, “What’s the point?” Whether in marketing or sales, it often feels like jobs are contingent on external circumstances, the whims of executives, strategic pivots, and shareholder demands. What happened to being rewarded for consistent, quality work over the long-term?

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the historic billion-dollar leveraged buyout of Beatrice Foods, put together by African-American business pioneer Reginald Lewis. As recently profiled in the PBS Documentary “Reginald Lewis and the Making of a Billion Dollar Empire,” Lewis was a business icon who paved the way for minority investors to ascend to the highest levels of finance. Thirty years later, his landmark acquisition of Beatrice and the example it set still resonates.

I’m co-founder of LendEDU, an online loan marketplace. We launched the business in 2014 and have since grown it to to seven figures in annual revenue.

My co-founder and I started the company while still in college, so it wasn’t like we could mortgage our homes in order to get the cash needed. Nor could we, as first-time entrepreneurs, rely our on our track-records.

Finding funding outside of Silicon Valley isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either.

In today’s fast moving world of business startups, learning trumps knowing every time. What established businesses know through experience keeps them from looking for the new and innovative ways to do what they do better, cheaper, and faster. I’m convinced that’s why most mature companies are slowing down or buying their innovation through acquisition, rather than building it.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

In 2014, Cigna decided to rethink its performance management philosophy and process, after reviewing the findings of recent research on human motivation. The company dropped its end-of-year performance ratings, and moved instead to requiring that managers conduct more frequent, less formal, check-in-style conversations with subordinates about their performance, emphasizing continual learning and growth.

A Houston nonprofit's goal of reaching $2 billion in venture capital investment in Houston by 2020 is "not feasible," according to the report.

Older people need more medicine. That rule of life is no secret to pharmaceutical companies across the globe. Many also realize that Japan’s rapidly aging population presents a unique business opportunity. Japan remains the world’s second-biggest pharmaceuticals market, behind only the United States and China. The Japanese market also is expected to grow annually. The lessons learned there will be critical as the population grows older in many other markets.

Image: https://hbr.org

New Zealand's current copyright laws are outdated and are likely to hamper digital innovation and experimentation, Deloitte says in a report commissioned by global search engine Google.

The use of a prescriptive 'fair dealing' test in the current regime, which seeks to define when original content can be reused without breaching copyright, has "failed to keep pace with changing technology", the report says. "This makes New Zealand a comparatively less attractive place to innovate."

Laurie Jugan is a leading innovator in the commercialization community. She is an independent consultant currently supporting the University of Southern Mississippi through the Mississippi Enterprise for Technology at Stennis Space Center and USM’s contract for the formalization of the Marine Industries Science & Technology Cluster. She promotes the Blue Economy of the Gulf Coast region, coordinates events and assists small to medium-sized companies find business opportunities.

For MSET, Jugan serves as a program manager, developing and conducting programs that link technology providers with organizations that can apply the technology to their missions. She is well-versed in government contracting and the technology transfer process. She routinely provides guidance to companies as they navigate through the processes of various federal agencies and identifies business opportunities for companies based on their products and services.

Image: https://neworleanscitybusiness.com - Jugan

False information spreads much faster and farther than the truth on Twitter—and although it is tempting to blame automated “bot” programs for this, human users are more at fault. These are two conclusions researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology drew from their recent study of how news travels on the microblogging site. Their findings, published this week in Science, explain a lot about how conspiracy theories (as well as misleading and downright incorrect information) drown out hard, clear facts on social media.

Recently, Match-Maker Ventures and Arthur D. Little have released an interesting report, titled “The Age of Collaboration“. The study does a good job in synthesizing the global state of play of corporate-startup collaboration and latest findings on success requirements for its implementation.

More and more corporations seek to engage with startups by pursuing corresponding activities across dedicated ecosystems and incorporating them in exploration units along with internal ventures. From an innovation perspective, the ultimate objective is to validate promising initiatives and selectively scale them up in order to adapt or even renew the existing core business. Startups, alike, show a rising interest in collaborating with corporations, rather than only trying to evolve under the umbrella of primarily value-oriented VCs.

Image: http://innovationexcellence.com