Around the world, people study the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem to try and understand how they can re-create its secret sauce to stimulate innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development and growth in their own region or country.

It’s not just about putting up incubators and accelerators, and providing some services to the startups. A lot of it is about culture and collaboration. As many who have visited Silicon Valley extensively have learned, there is a strong ‘pay-it-forward’ culture. That’s well explained in a recent article by Steve Blank, an adjunct professor at Stanford University who currently teaches entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley-Haas Business School, Columbia University, and Stanford University.

Business cards may seem old fashioned especially for Generation Y and Z. However, it is still essential to actually carry a business card because it provides an easy way of letting other people get in touch with you and is more personal compared to a digital contact exchange. Therefore, it looks like business cards will not go anywhere in the near future and every business professional needs to have one so keep reading below and find out the other reasons for having a business card.

You can’t win as an entrepreneur working alone. You need to have business relationships with team members, investors, customers, and a myriad of other support people. That doesn’t mean you have to be a social butterfly to succeed, or introverts need not apply.

It does mean that you need to look, listen, and participate in the business world around you, and network through all available channels, like business-oriented social networks online (LinkedIn), local business organizations (Chamber of Commerce), and events or conferences in your school or industry.

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Whether you’re composing a cover letter or drafting an email, it’s important to keep it catchy and lively. Because who wants to read something boring? To make sure your readers don’t start yawning while reading your message, there are certain words you should avoid using.

For example, stop using the word “next” and try replacing it with words such as “upcoming” or “following.” If you’re having trouble finding better words to use, just try to be as specific as possible. If you find yourself using the word “things” in your writing, think about what exactly these “things” are and use that word instead. This could be anything from “belongings” to “property” to “gear.”

Houston—As Tropical Storm Harvey made landfall in Houston, Florida resident Leah Halbina messaged friends in the city asking how she could help.

That was how she found out about Sketch City and the various civic tech projects the group and others were developing to aid rescue efforts, help people find shelter, and tend to other immediate needs. As a digital marketer, Halbina says she was instantly drawn to the group of developers and programmers.

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Forget everything you’ve heard: Not only is procrastination totally normal, knowing how and when to procrastinate can actually make you more productive than trying to fight it. Here’s what I’ve learned by embracing procrastination.

YOU’RE ALWAYS PROCRASTINATING ON SOMETHING

There are only 24 hours in a day, which is rarely enough time to tackle your to-do list. This perceived time crunch makes you hyper-aware that the opportunity cost of completing one project is not completing another. Procrastination is all about managing these tradeoffs.

So many organizations set out to innovate, but lose their way close to the finish line. All of the time, money, and energy invested loom over them like an ominous shadow of failure ready to overtake the whole scene.

What happened? There was so much momentum, good will, collaboration, and then—the painful, public crash into the wall.

What is this wall? The revenue expectations of the business may not have been formally expressed on the front end. Pressure builds. You see it on the faces of coworkers in the hallways. Things tighten up. The market has shifted. Competitors have gained ground. All longer-term projects need to shorten their cycle or cease.

The unicorn is perhaps unique among myths in that the creature doesn’t appear in the mythology of any culture. The ancient Greeks, for all of their centaurs, hydras and medusas, never had any stories of unicorns, they simply believed that some existed somewhere. Of course, nobody had ever seen one, but they believed others had.  Travelers would go to far away places, bring back stories of them and speak of the magical properties contained in their horns.  Alas, no matter how hard anyone searched for unicorns, none were ever found, but that didn’t stop people from looking.

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Chicago is home to many landmarks: Millennium Park, Navy Pier and Wrigley Field, to name a few.

But the Midwestern city is also a hotbed of healthcare-related activity.

At an event at Matter earlier this week, the Health Care Council of Chicago (HC3), an initiative of Matter and Leavitt Partners, presented a whitepaper on precisely that topic. Titled “State of the Chicago Health Care Industry,” it reflects on both the successes and challenges the city faces.

“Hey, I’ve got this great idea for a startup! You live in Silicon Valley, can you help me get venture capital funding?”

This is a common request that I get from people that live outside of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, raising money is hard regardless of if you want to start a company in the Midwest or Silicon Valley. Can I get funding based off of an idea? Nope… Can I get funding based off of a business plan? Nope… Can I get funding if I have an app built? Depends… Can I get funding for an app that has over a million downloads? Now you are talking… Can I get funding if I have an app with a million downloads, a rockstar team, and I sold my previous company to Microsoft? Yes!

In the world of university endowments, everyone wants to be Yale.

That’s because over the past two decades Yale’s investment officers have consistently generated market-beating returns by shifting a large portion of the university’s $25 billion endowment away from traditional stocks and bonds and into alternative investments such as private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital.

Want to be a millionaire? Who doesn’t, right?

Well, if you believe in emulating those who are successful, this infographic that explores the habits of famous business millionaires may be a good place to start.

Titled, “9 Effective Habits of Millionaires to Adopt Now,” the infographic by Beat The Market Analyzer gives us insights into some very successful individuals.

New entrepreneurs tend to focus only on getting the product right, and assume that the right culture and ethics will come later simply by hiring good people. In fact, they need an early focus on developing their moral compass, as well as setting the right ethical tone. Building an ethical business is more than just compliance and meeting legal requirements, and it has big paybacks.

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In my role as advisor to small businesses, I often think of the old joke, “In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is very involved, but the pig is committed.” Some business owners claim to be committed, but seem quick to look to someone else to make the hard decisions, or some external factor to blame for challenges. On the road to success, the buck always stops with you.

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Are you thinking of setting up your own business? If so, it could prove to be the ideal career plan for you, but you’ll need to be sure you’re up to the challenge before venturing forth. When I first started on my journey as an entrepreneur, there were a few traits that I focused on heavily, just to confirm I was on the right path. Successful entrepreneurship calls for some personal qualities and skills, so consider these first to make sure you’re right for the role. If you can apply the five essential qualities below, the signs will look promising:

It was barely two weeks ago, while in New York City for my niece's baptism, that Loren Feldman—the editor of this blog--and I caught up over lunch.

After our casual chat centered around baseball and unique life experiences abroad, we ultimately came back to how we know each other. We had first connected through our interests in entrepreneurial ecosystem building, especially in Houston where I’m based and where I met Loren just over a year ago at the Rice Business Plan Competition at Rice University.

According to a Bentley University Survey, over 66 percent of millennials would like to start a company.

It’s no wonder that colleges, universities, and private institutions are trying to ride the wave and offer entrepreneurship training classes, programs, and even degrees. In a recent feature in Forbes by Andrew Yang, the number of Entrepreneurship Education and Training Programs (EETs) has quadrupled over the past 25 years, and yet, rates of private business ownership for households under 30 have declined over 60 percent during the same period.

Pharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences has just put up a cool $11.9 billion to acquire Kite Pharma, which has developed a genetic engineering approach for treating cancers.

The investment is a clear sign that gene therapy applied to cancer is a powerful—and commercially attractive—new technology. Kite, which is one of our 50 smartest companies of 2017, has developed a pioneering treatment for use against blood cancers such as lymphoma. It takes some of an individual's immune cells, known at T cells, then reprograms their DNA so that they can attack the disease.

Atmospheric researchers tend to agree that tropical cyclones of unusual ferocity are coming this century, but the strange fact is that there is no consensus to date on the five-point scale used to classify the power of these anticipated storms. In what may sound like a page from the script of the rock-band spoof Spinal Tap with its reference to a beyond-loud electric guitar amplifier volume 11, there is actually talk of adding a sixth level to the current Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, on which category 5 intensity means sustained winds higher than 155 miles per hour (250 kilometers per hour) for at least one minute, with no speed cap.

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Knowledge@Wharton: What is it that really drives our curiosity?

Mario Livio: Curiosity has several kinds or flavors, and they are not driven by the same things. There is something that has been dubbed perceptual curiosity. That’s the curiosity we feel when something surprises us or when something doesn’t quite agree with what we know or think we know. That is felt as an unpleasant state, as an adversity state. It’s a bit like an itch that we need to scratch. That’s why we try to find out the information in order to relieve that type of curiosity.

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