The word crisis suggests something that happens infrequently. But these days, crises have become a regular state of affairs. Brands that you’d think would be fairly immune to scandal have found themselves embroiled in controversy. And those that deal with public relations challenges regularly have still been caught off guard by a customer insurgency. Some crises disappear quickly and others never seem to go away.

In the process of creating a minimum viable product, most entrepreneurs struggle with their budget and skill, says Gaurang Manjrekar, Founder, Football Paradise. Startups have million dollar ideas but they get stuck with the question of how to develop an effective minimum viable product with limited resources.

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Once they’ve finished pitching investors, many founders leave the boardroom thinking things went well. The venture capitalists in the room nodded politely, said they’d “follow up,” and admitted the business model sounded “compelling.”

But after a seemingly good pitch, that promised follow-up doesn’t always happen. No second meeting gets booked, and no investment is made. What’s really being said behind closed doors after the pitch wraps up and the founder leaves the room? These five VCs share the inside scoop.

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Snap and Instagram were founded within months of each other in the early 2010s. Both operated in the photo sharing space and targeted millennial, social media savvy users. However, their paths diverged when one chose to be acquired by Facebook and the other went public though an IPO (initial public offering) -- and it has made all the difference.

Macroeconomic changes lead to bias in how we assess the work of others.

In Outliers, nonfiction writer Malcom Gladwell makes the point that typically success does not result uniquely from hard work or innate smarts. Often, luck, good timing, privilege or some other external circumstance provides the boost to push a qualified person into the ranks of the highly successful.

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Get this special report to learn how institutions can better serve adult students.

America’s adult students have long been an afterthought in higher education. But demographic changes and economic pressures will soon require institutions to expand their horizons in order to survive or thrive.

This Chronicle report explores the growing imperative for colleges to support the adult-student movement.

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It’s early days for quantum computers, the still mostly theoretical subatomic processors so powerful they can make our fastest supercomputer look like an abacus. Mike Lazaridis, the co-inventor of the BlackBerry, says that when it comes to quantum technology, he’s learned his lesson. He won’t be iPhoned again.

After years of watching his brand wither during the iPhone era, Lazaridis stepped down as the company’s co-chief executive officer in 2012 and devoted most of his energy to researching quantum technologies, including computers, sensors, and a wide range of other gear.

Image: Quantum researchers use this device to test superconducting films on silicon at the atomic level. SOURCE: DAVID CORY/IQC

Startups from around the world have been pitching their ideas to potential investors while standing in a pool of icy water in the Baltic Sea.

The Polar Bear Pitching platform is an annual competition held in the Northern Finnish city of Oulu; a sound many of us might make if we had to dip our toes in the ice cold pool. The stage, carved in the frozen Baltic, welcomes a string of early stage companies to share their innovations, as they bid for the chance of secure crucial investment.

Image: Polar Bear Pitching

The architect Asif Khan’s latest project feels extremely, for lack of a better way to put it, of its time. It’s a sponsored pavilion, at the Olympics, for the car company Hyundai’s “global mobility initiative.” It’s a cerebral aesthetic experiment nodding to the Light and Space movement. It’s also a technical demonstration done in collaboration with a nanoscale material engineering company. Khan, for his part, has called it “a window looking into the depths of outer space.”

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We’re still fresh into the new year, which most likely means those ambitious goals you set at the beginning of the year are still fresh on your mind. Besides the goal of making more money, the next popular goal among entrepreneurs is centered around getting health. And rightfully so. Your health needs to be treated as a premium investment as opposed to being written off as just another expense.

A meeting with Gopal Srinivasan, the founder of the Chennai-based private equity firm TVS Capital Funds, got Entrepreneur India a closer look into his life’s beliefs and what makes his company manage assets worth INR 1,100 crore successfully.

With successful investments in growth companies such as the National Stock Exchange of India, City Union Bank, and Nykaa.com, TVS Capital Funds is set to launch to its third fund according to Indian national daily LiveMint.

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Johnson & Johnson has been talking up the benefits of its JLABS incubator strategy for R&D collaboration for some time, and is now setting up a unit in Belgium to debut the approach in Europe.

A year ago the company revealed it had signed more than 230 partnerships with life science companies as a result of JLABS, with more than 200 companies operating at its then eight sites east and west coasts of US and Canada. In the last year it has seen the number of hosted companies swell to more than 330 and these have raised a whopping $9.4bn in capital.

We all know today’s script for entrepreneurial success: A super-bright college student, impatient with classwork, drops out to pursue his big idea. Venture-capital funders chase after him, and he gathers smart pals around him to launch his startup. Sensational growth soon follows for the company—and riches for its founders—and the youth-driven innovation economy notches yet another success.

SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — Shepherd University has created a new nonprofit organization with a mission of helping facilitate research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. On January 24, the Internal Revenue Service approved the Shepherd Entrepreneurship and Research Corporation’s (SERC) status as a 501(c)(3).

“SERC is designed to help find technologies and intellectual contributions that can be commercialized for the benefit of the inventors and for Shepherd University,” said Dr. Ben Martz, dean of the College of Business and SERC director. “At the same time, organizations outside of Shepherd can look at SERC as a way to take advantage of the resources Shepherd offers.”

Image: Ben Martz

Bill Murray is a national treasure. From being the best part of any movie he is in, to surprising fans in the most random of ways (like showing up to a karaoke party and buying everyone drinks), Murray can always bring a smile to everyone’s face. He’s already taken over our hearts, now he’s about to take over the golf fashion world. Bill and his William Murray Golf Company are teaming up with Betabrand to crowdfund and bring back everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure of pants, the bell-bottoms.

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Most small businesses have now forgotten the last recession, and are back to “business as usual.” They don’t realize that business as usual is gone forever. With social media and smart phone apps, real product information spreads at astounding speeds. Entrepreneurs that are not listening, not engaging, and not changing are destined to be left behind even in the best of times.

Business agility is defined as the ability to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently. It is required today for new innovation strategies, analyzing markets for new opportunities, and organizational changes. Today’s customers are much more proactive in going online for the latest information, rather than simply reacting to the “push” messages that businesses traditionally use to drive commerce.

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Kate Davis clicked the little smiley face at the bottom right-hand corner of her Slack window, pulling up a box with 36 of her most frequently used emoji. “I have sobbing, crying laughing, rage face, eye-roll face, disappointed face, happy face, winking face,” she noticed. “I’m an emotional roller-coaster.”

You may be working for the weekend, but when it comes to actually getting work done, Monday is the most productive day, according to a study by Redbooth. The data collaboration software provider found that the highest percentage of tasks–20.4%–are completed on Monday, compared to Friday, when only 16.7% of work tasks are accomplished. Tuesday is a close second, accounting for 20.2% of work.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then you already know that Chamillionaire is having a great time with his new startup Convoz. He’s here on stage with Snoop Dogg and they had just dialed in Shaq to record a live video for his platform. It was just announced today on TechCrunch.

We’ve known each other for nearly a decade and he’s been a friend, a co-investor in startups and a mentor to many startups with whom I’ve worked. As you can imagine, when you introduce tech professionals or VCs to a grammy-award winning rap artist they start with pre-conceived ideas but of course that “pattern matching” is what leads our industry to underestimate people.

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Take any great idea and you can find no shortage of people who think they had it first. And it’s quite possible they did. History is full of examples of nearly simultaneous discovery. David Hilbert discovered general relativity at about the same time Einstein did. Alexander Graham Bell only narrowly beat Elisha Gray to the patent office.

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