Off late, courses based on entrepreneurship have been launched in various colleges and schools to help aspiring entrepreneurs. Many students spend their entire life dreaming about starting their own venture. As a business owner, it’s always wise to have a required set of skills and knowledge. But the real question is “Can entrepreneurship be taught in schools”?. Several entrepreneurs and scholars have voiced their opinion on this ongoing debate. We have many examples around us like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who don't have a college degree. These examples somewhere prove that the concept of entrepreneurship as a subject in the classroom is not required at all.

Millennials have come a long way in business since I started writing about them almost ten years ago. They started out as that spoiled generation of kids, born between about 1982 and 2004, who had everything, and could care less about business. Today they are in every business, and will likely comprise 50 percent of the workforce by 2020. Their success is now vital to our success.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Dallas-Fort Worth’s history is rife with innovation and entrepreneurship. Consider the likes of Mark Cuban, a self-made billionaire who got his start founding internet radio company broadcast.com. Or Ross Perot Jr., who has continued the Perot family’s legacy through real estate development and technology investments. And Bottle Rocket’s Calvin Carter, who started his first business out of his dorm room at Southern Methodist University. There’s no shortage of success stories in the region.

Image: Photo by Andy Luten - https://dallasinnovates.com

Why is it that nobody operates with a sense of urgency anymore? Seriously. Why is this? You're going to die. You, me, everyone you know and everyone you'll ever know. Everyone. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Maybe in 50 years. Maybe in 80.

Unless you're on death row, nobody knows the exact date and time, but that doesn't change the fact that you're going to die. You're literally borrowing your life from the universe, and it will take it back.

If you’re doing it right, entrepreneurship will never get easier, no matter what you accomplish. There will always be new challenges to tackle. Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 New Year’s challenge is proof of that.

As is his tradition, the Facebook co-founder yesterday shared his New Year’s resolution on the platform. In 2015, Zuckerberg said he would be reading a new book every other week. 2016 saw him building an AI program to run his home. In 2017, Zuckerberg hit the road on his own version of a listening tour as he traveled to the American states he had yet to visit.

If this cold snap has taught us anything, it's that iguanas are zombies and that we humans are merely their unsuspecting victims.

Residents of South Florida reported on Thursday that frozen iguanas were falling from trees all over the usually-temperate Florida landscape. 

Thanks to the bomb cyclone that hit the East Coast, temperatures in South Florida sunk below 40 degrees on Thursday. For humans, that means time to bundle up in your winter clothes but for iguanas that meant their warm weather-loving, cold-blooded bodies went into hibernation mode.

We’ve been conditioned to think of exercise as a key ingredient — perhaps the most important ingredient — of any weight loss effort.

You know the drill: Join the gym on January 1 if you want to reach your New Year’s weight loss goal.

But in truth, the evidence has been accumulating for years that exercise, while great for health, isn’t actually all that important for weight loss.

Image: https://www.vox.com

2017, witnessed a boom of incubators in China, especially driven by the government’s appeal for mass innovation and entrepreneurship. It is estimated that the number of Chinese incubators increased by over 5,000 in 2017, the equivalent of the total number of Chinese incubators for the last 26 years. While there are around 10,000 incubators around the world, around half of them are based in China. Now you can tell how hot the Chinese incubator industry is.

It’s time to roll out my ten predictions for the Canadian technology ecosystem for 2018. As with past predictions, I will review them in a year’s time to see how I did. Hopefully, I can beat my 5 out of 10 score for 2017.

1(a) Canada’s technology ecosystem will continue to thrive, but

1(b) overall VC investment will decline,

1(c) U.S. and global investment in the IT sector will decline, and

1(d) there’ll be fewer large (greater than $40 million) rounds.

As we saw for 2017, Canadian venture capital investment was about equal to that of 2016, with a decline in early-stage investment made up for with a larger number of rounds in later-stage companies, much of it coming from U.S. investors and global corporations.

Image: https://www.pehub.com

Tech companies continued to rake in massive amounts of venture capital last year, while the exit market was underwhelming.

Xconomy reached out to Boston-area investor Eric Paley to put 2017 in perspective and find out what might be in store for the coming year. Paley’s early-stage venture firm, Founder Collective, has backed companies such as Uber, Cruise Automation, The Trade Desk, and Formlabs. Here are the highlights of our e-mail exchange:

Image: EricPaley—Eric Paley, Founder Collective - https://www.xconomy.com

We asked a group of veteran Silicon Valley venture investors to peer into their crystal balls to tell us what they expect to see in the coming year. Here's what they told us.

or all the tech industry’s talk of changing the world, sometimes the best innovations aren’t particularly dramatic. They’re ideas that are small—but so clever that they seem obvious in hindsight. They improve the products we already use in ways we can immediately appreciate.

Big breakthroughs and splashy new products tend to get all the attention; for once, here’s a tribute to the small-scale innovations that are just as important.

Image: courtesy of Google

The University City Science Center announced today that Stephen S. Tang, Ph.D., MBA, will step down as President & CEO to join OraSure Technologies Inc. OSUR as President & CEO. Tang has led the Science Center since February, 2008. It is expected that Dr. Tang will transition his Science Center management responsibilities during the first quarter and join OraSure on April 1, 2018.

"Over the past 10 years, Steve has led a strategic plan designed to transform the Science Center from a traditional real-estate focused research park to an innovation powerhouse, and, in the process, reconnected the Science Center to its original mission and shareholders," says Board Chairman Craig R. Carnaroli. "During Steve's tenure, the Science Center has launched new programs to support technology commercialization, strengthened partnerships with the region's academic and research institutions and launched the largest campus expansion in our 55-year history.

Despite its history as the “nation’s medicine chest,” New Jersey’s biopharma industry is lagging some other states like California and Massachusetts. But the situation can be turned around if the state government, academia, and the industry itself work together on a focused strategy to better fund and support the sector.

That was the message highlighted by BioNJ, the trade association for the state’s life-sciences industry, which released a white paper Thursday that assesses the state of the sector and outlines strategies for Gov.-elect Phil Murphy and other Garden State leaders to use in improving New Jersey’s competitiveness. (Murphy’s team did not respond to a request for comment.)

The 4th annual Biotech and Money/Medtech and Money World Congress will offer insight into the investment landscape for biotech and medtech companies via a series of panel discussions with leading investors in the sector. Those attending the two-day event in London can hear from experienced investors about the current state of funding for life science companies at varying stages of development. This includes a focus on seed funding, with panel discussions on ‘Seed funding for biotech development’ and ‘PanEuropean medtech seed funding’.

Image: https://cdn2.hubspot.net

Did you have a productive 2017? Don’t answer that. No matter how much you got done last year, or how efficiently you did it, you can probably give your work habits a tune-up for the year ahead.

Maybe it’s a change to your morning routine or a different approach to your to-do list. Or maybe it’s reducing your reliance on to-do lists altogether. Since everyone’s productivity problems differ, so should their solutions. So Fast Company asked 18 of the most productive people we could find–starting with our top contributors–to share their own tips, hacks, and habits.

2017 was an extraordinary year in the history of medicine. It was the year when scientists beat cancer, and U.S. regulators approved the first therapy to fix a faulty gene. It was also a year that kept us enthralled with a quickening drumbeat of breathtaking news detailing spectacular advances – trials seemingly curing patients of hemophilia A and sickle cell anemia, and breakthroughs raising similar hopes for Huntington’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and even HIV. What is remarkable about these successes is that they are not just lucky breaks, but the products of new technologies that are ushering us into a new therapeutic space of vastly expanded possibilities.

In an 8×8 aluminum hut on a construction site outside Mumbai, Anchal Sahni sits down to dinner with her family: homemade aloo bhindo (okra and potatoes simmered in curry) and chapati (flatbread) with a side of lentils. Anchal has a healthier diet than many middle-class kids in India, who can afford to eat out. In Mumbai, a medium Domino’s pizza runs 13 bucks—about three times what Anchal’s father earns in a day.

Image: http://time.com

More than ever, academic technology transfer is driving economic development. The number of invention disclosures — a direct measure of institutional impact on innovation — has been on the rise the past five years, growing to 25,825 in 2016. 16,487 new U.S. patent applications were filed, a gain of 3 percent over the prior year, and 7,021 U.S. patents were issued, up 5 percent from last year. The 1,024 startups formed made a direct impact on local economies with more than 73 percent of these new businesses remaining in the institution’s home state. Consumers and businesses benefited from 800 new products.

Image: http://www.autm.net

Louisiana frequently finds itself at or near the bottom of lists that measure things like educational attainment, mortality rates and poverty levels.

Yet another to add to the collection is a list that ranks states based on the amount of money each receives from the Small Business Innovation Research program—a federal program designed to spur innovation, and help emerging tech companies bring their ideas and products to market.

Not surprisingly, Louisiana—as in so many other areas outside of football and good food—fares badly on this list, too.

Image: https://www.businessreport.com