You have a great idea that you would like to bring to the market. However, you have little to no capital in kick-starting product development. Furthermore, you don’t really have the business acumen and the research and development needed to make a solid business presentation to a group of investors.

So, how do you go about finding the seed funding you need to start turning your idea into a reality? Many entrepreneurs in recent years have turned to crowdfunding as a way to reach a large audience to fund product ideas and business models.

We have supported the local tech ecosystem through angel investing since 2014. Many of our portfolio companies have gone on to raise tens of millions of dollars in funding and have scaled significantly. Our investments have made a noticeable impact across the tech ecosystem in Canada.

We angel invest our own after-tax money through Two Small Fish Ventures, a private corporation we set up solely for the purpose of angel investing. We fully expected that the majority of our portfolio companies would fail. For the small percentage that would become successful, liquidity events are expected to be in the five to 10-year timeframe.

Image: https://betakit.com

It's been eight years since the end of the Great Recession, and credit cards are back. Today, 171 million Americans have at least one card in their wallet, the highest number since 2005. Consumers also owe more than $1 trillion in revolving credit card debt, an all-time record. Even the percentage of consumers with less-than-stellar credit who have access to plastic is nearly back to pre-crisis levels.

Image: http://time.com

In June 2017, the New York Yankee’s New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund got called out for not really benefiting those it was set up to serve. The fund, created to offset the fact that the stadium gobbled up 25 acres of public parkland, should eventually give out $40 million in grants and sports equipment, plus over a half-million game day tickets to community groups in the South Bronx. But, as the New York Times reported, many early gifts have been channeled to neighborhoods that had less need for improvement or inspiration than those now in the shadow of the stadium. In some cases, distributions ended up at groups that share board members with the fund.

For the last four weeks, we’ve been talking about entrepreneurship on In The Wings.

From a beer brewing startup, to a nonprofit supporting soon-to-be entrepreneurs, to an artist making a go of it by painting athletic shoes — we’ve met several kinds of business people making a living in Milwaukee.

And for our final story on the topic, we meet a woman who is prepping the next generation of engineers to enter the business world as Marquette University’s Opus College of Engineering “Entrepreneur In Residence.”

Image: Andonica Randall. Photo via Marquette website

Say you have a great idea for a new product or service in your field of expertise but you are reluctant to take the plunge, quit your job and start your own business. You know that launching this venture on your own would be risky, stressful and costly.

There is an alternative – stay with your current employer and become an ‘intrapreneur’ – someone who acts as an entrepreneur but inside an established organisation.

Most companies recognise the need for more innovation and actively encourage employees to suggest and develop new business ideas.

Within only a decade, accelerators have become a mainstay of startup ecosystems in regions around the globe. Throughout this period, the accelerator business model has continued to evolve. Still in the Global Accelerator Report 2015, a majority of accelerators globally still indicated that they intended to follow the traditional "cash-for-equity" model, first established in 2005 by Y Combinator, which involves investing a small amount of seed money in a startup in exhange for equity. Investments typically are around $25,000 on averag in exchange for between 5 percent and 10 percent equity.

A popular approach for aspiring entrepreneurs these days seems to be to corner anyone who will listen, with a pitch on their current “million dollar idea.” The initial monologue usually ends with the question “How much money do you think this is worth?” In my opinion, ideas are a commodity, and are really not worth much, outside the context of a visionary leader who can execute.

Few issues in urban tech today are as controversial as the impact of short-term rental startups like AirBnB and VRBO on neighborhood housing. The battle lines are clear: Do these startups help residents earn much-needed extra dollars on the side, or are they so constricting housing supply and raising rents so high that locals are forced to move out? Billions of dollars—and the livelihoods of vibrant communities—are at stake in this debate, and regulatory battles royale have already been waged in cities like Washington, D.C., and Austin. Of course, urban housing isn’t the only bedrock element of city life undergoing rapid and controversial change: Public officials have wrestled for years with how to handle ride-hailing’s destabilizing effect on taxi service, and potentially on public transit as well.

Image: Many leaders in Akron would love to have the problem of excessive housing that Airbnb has allegedly created. Shannon Stapleton/AP

After spending billions of dollars a year on corporate learning, U.S. companies probably assume that their employees have the knowledge and skills they need to carry out their jobs. The employees themselves probably think they’re prepared, too, having gone through these exercises. But according to data from industries including academia, health care, technology, manufacturing, retail, sports, and business services, people are actually “unconsciously incompetent” in a typical 20% to 40% of areas critical to their performance.  One global technology company my team works with, for example, discovered that, on average, its sales employees didn’t understand or know about 22% of its product features, even though they believed they did.

“Sensitive fake extrovert.” That’s how Jade Lenier classifies herself. As a performer and public speaker, you’d take her for an extrovert, but in truth, says Lenier, “my extroverted outsides don’t match my introverted insides. Because I do love being around people, but I become overstimulated and overwhelmed by them and must retreat to my own corner of the world.”

Image: Nigel Tadyanehondo

The Fiscal Year 2018 – Fiscal Year 2022 (FY18-FY22) U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command’s (USAMRMC) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for Extramural Medical Research contains several changes from previous USAMRMC BAAs. Read each section carefully. Note the following:

Biological clocks are ticking everywhere throughout our body. They trigger the release of the hormone melatonin during sleep, favour the secretion of digestive enzymes at lunchtime or keep us awake at the busiest moments of the day. A «master clock» in the brain synchronises all the subsidiary ones in various organs. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, together with their colleagues from the University of Bath, the Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, EPFL, the University of Surrey, and the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, have found that such a circadian clock is at work in our muscles. Their research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), shows that perturbations of this machinery might be important for type 2 diabetes development. Their work has just been published in the magazine PNAS.

Transforming companies to achieve organizational agility is in its early days but already yielding positive returns. While the paths can vary, survey findings suggest how to start.

Rapid changes in competition, demand, technology, and regulations have made it more important than ever for organizations to be able to respond and adapt quickly. But according to a recent McKinsey Global Survey, organizational agility—the ability to quickly reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology toward value-creating and value-protecting opportunities—is elusive for most.1 1. This definition of organizational agility was given to respondents when they began the survey and reflects McKinsey’s proprietary definition, which is distinct from how we define organizations with agile software-development processes. Throughout the report, we will use “agile transformations” to refer to transformations that focus on organizational agility. The online survey was in the field from February 14 to February 24, 2017, and garnered responses from 2,546 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of these respondents, 207 work at nonprofits and government agencies or departments. But we will use the word “companies” to refer to all respondents’ firms, whether in the private or public sector

Deciding to be an entrepreneur is a lifestyle move, and should be part of a long-term strategic plan. You shouldn’t be making this decision just because you are mad at your boss, or you would like to be rich, or someone else thinks it’s a good idea. In these changing times, if you already have a startup, with no plan, maybe it’s time to think ahead for a change.

Formally, that’s called developing and maintaining a strategic plan. Usually that means writing something down, since it’s hard to maintain something, or track yourself against it, if it’s not written down.

Lately, some people have been blaming the new giants, like Facebook, for killing innovation. Some stories, like this one in the Washington Post, say Facebook’s practice of rapidly copying rival app’s features creates a disincentive for investors and companies to develop new features Facebook might copy.

If we dug around, I think we could find similar stories about any dominant players in their industries at any time. Eventually, most big companies’ attempts to innovate by whatever means necessary fail, and they develop blind spots for the potential of new markets and how to serve them. (Silicon Valley has a gigantic blind spot for the women’s market!)

An entrepreneur whose business plan includes seeking growth capital for a growing business — perhaps after initial self-funding or obtaining seed capital from family and friends — should be aware of the business and legal attributes an experienced “sophisticated investor” will look for. Regardless of whether the investor is an angel, an angel group, a venture capital firm or a family office, the sophisticated investor will have evaluated hundreds of opportunities, achieved liquidity in some, but also written off others as failures. This investor knows the key markers of a business equipped to grow sustainably.

People who play a sport are more likely to stay healthy and fit as they age, according to a new study published in BMJ Open, compared to those who do other types of physical activity. Finding a sport you love early in life—and playing it often—may be the key to staying active in your 70s, 80s and beyond. The transition from middle age to old age is often one of slowing down. Retirement or injuries, for example, can lead to major life changes and affect the amount of physical activity a person gets on a regular basis.

Move over, Shark Tank. There are new investors in town, and they’re looking to Duke to fund entrepreneurs.

Contrary Capital, a university-focused venture capital fund, launched last Monday. The fund is decentralized, employing 100 investors who are current students at universities around the country, including Duke. The four student partners at Duke—MD/MBA candidate Tracy Han, senior Yixin Lin, senior Austin Wu and junior Steven Yang—will scout promising talent at the University.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs think it’s necessary to move to San Francisco or New York City to launch a new business -- particularly if that business is a tech startup. After all, both areas are overflowing with top-tier talent, venture capital and a healthy helping of innovation pie.

But the grass, despite what they say, isn’t really greener on the other side. Some tech startups are actually trying to “de-locate” their operations from trendy areas because they are so expensive and competitive. Zapier, for example, is currently offering employees $10,000 to leave San Francisco. The company believes this is a financially savvy decision that will also help it attract remote talent.