You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Some people are content with their regular jobs and throughout their professional careers they strive to get better opportunities, while some are not satisfied till they build something of their own.

Carnegie Mellon University contributes nearly $1.5 billion to Pittsburgh's economy each year, according to a report CMU released Thursday.

The university is not only an economic driver in the region but also a key player in the transformation of Pittsburgh into a hub for robotics, artificial intelligence and other innovations, the report found.

"CMU's reputation, expertise and talent pipeline in this and other growing fields have made Pittsburgh a prime destination for cutting-edge technology firms and in the process is fundamentally remaking Pittsburgh's brand in the global marketplace," the report stated, adding later, "Pittsburgh now is well-positioned to compete as an innovation hub against other world-class locations because of the concentration of intellectual capital and entrepreneurship activity represented by CMU, and the innovation ecosystem it has helped to foster."

In recent data pulled from Indeed.com, the online jobs site says some of the most in-demand positions at small businesses are in the medical field.

Here’s more data that points to the increased demand of small businesses for highly skilled medical professionals.

Small Business Healthcare Staffing Shortages

In fact, 7 of the top 10 high-skilled positions small businesses are desperate to fill are in the healthcare industry. They include the top 4: Speech language pathologist, Registered Nurse, Physical Therapist and Occupational Therapist.

Image: https://smallbiztrends.com

David Cohen and David Brown, co-CEOs of Techstars, in an interview with ET ahead of the company's India launch spoke of their plans for startups in the country. Here are edited excerpts:

Economic Times (ET): Why did you want to launch in India?

Brown: Our goal is to help entrepreneurs succeed anywhere in the world and it is born out of the fact that we started Techstars out of a small town called Boulder in Colorado. It is not necessary to move to the Silicon Valley to start a business.

Image: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

America is facing a critical shortage of people trained in cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity Workforce Alliance — a partnership of companies, the government and universities — aims to bridge that skills gap because the country’s future literally could depend on it.

Sounding the call to cyber defenses through “industry-first” planning and collaboration is this opinion piece written by Frank C. Cicio, Jr., co-founder and CEO of iQ4, an emerging workforce-transformation firm and collaboration platform that partnered with the City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the State University of New York at Albany and several cybersecurity professionals to launch the alliance in 2015; Gopal Padinjaruveetil, chief information security officer of the Auto Club Group in Michigan and chairman of the Advisory Council Board for the CWA; and William Squires, a former iQ4 research intern and sophomore at the University of Southern California who co-authored iQ4’s response to the White House’s recent NIST Request For Information on cybersecurity. 

When Mark Cuban sold his internet streaming service Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999, 300 of the company’s 330 employees became millionaires overnight, he said.

What they did with their newfound wealth was immediately important to him.

“We had to have people talk to them about how to make sure they kept it” rather than mismanaging the windfall, Cuban recently in an interview with MONEY.

Those days of striking it rich in the dotcom era are gone, but Cuban cited the Broadcast bonanza as an example of one of the most dramatic ways workers today can increase their net worth: by earning equity in the companies they work for.

Image: http://time.com

Try going a day at work without saying “I”–bet you can’t do it. The same likely goes for “me” and “my,” pronouns we use so frequently that we’re almost never fully conscious of them. But these tiny words, in addition to other common “function” words–like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions–may carry more weight in our speech than many of us suspect. And according to the social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, first-person pronouns in particular don’t always communicate what we think they do.

Image: https://www.fastcompany.com

Call it your company’s secret weapon or secret sauce; both are apt descriptions of the advantage a quality mentor brings to your startup.

Mentors can be paid confidantes or volunteer advisors to your operation. They can be industry specific or a business generalist but in whatever form they come to you they are an entrepreneurial advantage for your startup.

How can cities build inclusive, innovative local economies? That’s the question Forward Cities is answering through a multi-city learning collaborative comprised of Durham, Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans.

Supported by the Case Foundation and Kresge Foundation, Forward Cities has partnered with ScaleUp Partners in visiting each metro region to meet with local community, business and government leaders and discover first-hand what’s working as well as the challenges faced by these pioneers. Although many of these efforts are nascent, they represent a growing base of committed collaborators determined to forge new paths toward equitable access to economic opportunity.

Companies must assess both the financial and environmental feasibility of remanufacturing before jumping into the circular economy.

The concept of the circular economy, most recently popularised by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, was first raised by David Pearce and Kerry Turner, two British environmental economists. They pointed out in their book, Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment, that the open-ended economy had no built-in tendency to recycle and effectively treated the environment as a waste “reservoir”. The “take, make, dispose” economic model, explains the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is reaching its limits.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu

It’s no secret that talent is tougher to find these days. From skills deficits and low application levels to intense hiring competition between companies, contingent workforce managers know the search for the right candidates is fraught with challenges.

No wonder, then, that one survey from the Society for Human Resource Management reported more than two-thirds of organizations hiring full-time staff are struggling to fill job openings, with the healthcare and manufacturing sectors reporting the highest levels of recruiting difficulty.

As the ranks of America’s millionaires continue to grow, the question for many becomes: “How can I join the club?” For a billionaire entrepreneur like Mark Cuban, joining the 3-comma club was about discipline and investing in himself.

“You’ve got to have discipline in how you spend your money,” Cuban told MONEY in an interview. “You also have to be a little bit of a risk taker. Or invest in your education—whatever it may be to help you get to the point where you can truly save money.”

Image: http://time.com

When diverse perspectives are applied to financing, doors open for entrepreneurs. Last week, I wrote The Next Business Revolution: Diversity and how it fuels innovation and enhances employee engagement. This week, I look at how the diverse makeup of one company has created finance options for innovations that might otherwise never get to market … and why more companies are going to follow their lead.

Image: Courtesy of Indiegogo - Indiegogo's Diversity & Inclusion Team

Many great—or seemingly great—ideas come to fruition during the course of drinking a beer. When you’re out with the guys (or girls), one or two cold ones could have you rhapsodizing about how you’re going to change the world. This is most likely when self-lowering toilet seats, automatic pet petters, and self-twirling ice cream cones were all dreamed into existence.

Venture capital is getting crowded with a surge of first-time funds entering the market.

It's a hard time to be an established venture capital firm.

There are a ton of investors chasing a few great ideas, and the pressure is showing in a number of ways, according to a midyear report from Fenwick & West.

A surge of newcomers. The report found that 2017 is on pace to see the highest number of first-time venture capital funds formed in more than a decade.

Image: http://www.hitc.com

Venture capital firms certainly have no shortage of cash to invest in startups.

PitchBook released its 2017 PE and VC Fundraising report today for North America and Europe. Through July, $27.5 billion has been raised across 165 firms as venture fundraising is on pace to exceed $40 billion for the fourth consecutive year. It’s also approaching the record $51 billion raised last year.

Image: https://www.geekwire.com

Research from government and university labs has brought us technologies as ubiquitous as the internet, microwaves, and GPS. But the path from laboratory bench to market success goes uphill, and it’s a steep hill at that. Most projects never make it out of the lab, and instead of helping us stream Youtube videos or warm up leftovers, are left to languish, unused, forever. It’s a cruel irony, given that today’s tech economy is driven by the relentless search for innovation. But this uphill path is not insurmountable, especially not with the right partner to guide the way. If venture capitalists, investors, and companies are truly serious about sourcing the latest tech, they’d do well to look to the government. Here’s how.

Tech entrepreneurs are the cool kids on the block. Whereas young people once aspired to be rockstars or astronauts, today they dream of being startup founders, flush with venture capital and working out of sleek, open-plan offices in San Francisco’s trendy SoMA district or New York’s bustling Flatiron neighborhood.

In the United States, governments are increasingly turning to public-private partnerships (P3s) to implement public infrastructure works. Here’s why the benefits of P3 project delivery, not just financing, will continue to shift the market in this direction.

The World Economic Forum ranks US infrastructure behind that of most other comparable advanced nations such as Singapore, Germany, and the United Kingdom.1 And it will get worse: from 2013 to 2020, cumulative US infrastructure needs are estimated to be nearly $3.5 trillion.

America needs a new economic model that infuses entrepreneurship into every corner of the economy and removes barriers to starting and growing businesses.

Image: http://www.citylab.com