Being an entrepreneur in today’s fast-paced world is complicated. With so many tactics, tools and techniques to consider when setting up for success – one thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is your skillset – and in this instance, we don’t mean your ‘essential’ or ‘soft’ skillset. We’re talking technical.

Let’s dive straight in and take a look at some of the most valuable technical skills you’re going to need as an aspiring entrepreneur.

As college leaders move ahead on plans to reopen their campuses this fall, it is becoming more clear that they lack confidence in their ability to control student behavior that can spread the coronavirus.

In addition to plans to regularly test students for COVID-19, college administrators are putting faith in conduct codes and written pledges that mandate students refrain from large gatherings, follow social distance guidelines and wear face masks. The administrators are setting up clear expectations for how students must conduct themselves and getting the message out through campus health campaigns and online training modules. What is less clear is how far colleges can go beyond their gates to enforce healthy behavior, which some students have already proven they are not willing to engage in.

Image: https://www.insidehighered.com

IoT systems and solutions are iterating rapidly, and providers are coming to meet more and more of companies' and consumers' needs.

Emerging tools and technologies like smart speakers, machine learning, and 5G are enabling huge gains to efficiency and more control at home and in the workplace.

The continued growth of the IoT industry is going to be a transformative force across all organizations. By integrating all of our modern day devices with internet connectivity, the IoT market is on pace to grow to over $2.4 trillion annually by 2027.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

It was two weeks after the Covid lockdown hit San Francisco. Many entrepreneurs were starting to worry. The venture capitalists of Sandhill Road and South Park were still taking pitch meetings, albeit over Zoom. But the check writing had practically stopped, and “The Great Pause of 2020” had begun. At the early-stage venture firm NFX, James Currier huddled around a Zoom with his co-founders, Gigi Levy-Weiss and Pete Flint. Being a four-time entrepreneur himself, Currier knew that this was the moment NFX was built for. It’s said that generals are made in times of war. The world was at war with a virus, and he was hatching a plan. 

Image: James Currier, NFX. Image credit: Christopher Michel, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/42904978424 CHRISTOPHER MICHEL

A successful entrepreneur has to pull things together and influence people. They need to be able to raise money, be good at presenting ideas and building trust, and know how to lead and inspire a team. In my part-time role as entrepreneur in residence at the Francis Crick Institute in London, I mentor scientists taking their first steps towards the intersection between research and industry.

Image: Barbara Domayne-Hayman says scientific entrepreneurs should think in terms of knockbacks, not failure.Credit: Francis Crick Institute

The most valuable assets of a new startup are the people on the team, and the most challenging task of the entrepreneur and team leaders is to spend their leadership time and energy productively. Cash isn’t always the scarcest resource startups have to invest – more often it’s the leadership capital of under-experienced and over-stretched entrepreneurs and co-founders.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

We are currently in the midst of the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate has hit a record high, and the International Monetary Fund is predicting a drop in our GDP of nearly 6 percent this year. If this is purely a supply shock, then our economy should recover quickly once restrictions on economic activity are lifted. On the other hand, according to a report from the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago, 42 percent of the jobs lost so far in this crisis could be permanent losses. If that is the case, then this supply shock will turn into a demand crisis much like the Great Recession of 2008, and recovery will be much slower. With so much uncertainty, what should a strategist do?

Image: Illustration by Israel G. Vargas - https://hbr.org

Human emotion is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Emotions start wars and create peace; spark love and force divorce. While unavoidable, emotions are also indispensable sources of orientation and propel us to take action. But unbridled emotion can make us and those around us to act irrationally. 

Emotional intelligence is a relatively new construct, but its impact on how we work will be significant moving forward. The first academic article on emotional intelligence appeared in 1990, but the topic didn’t become mainstream until Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

In the wake of the pandemic, mass unemployment looks inevitable: corporations are now facing decisions that could make many of their middle-tier staff — literally millions of jobs — redundant.  

Every single action in response to pandemic recovery is time sensitive. If we don’t invest in venture growth and reskilling at scale now, we will lose the opportunity to create a whole new wave of jobs, and we won’t have the talent we need to fill these roles.   

COVID-19 has swept through workplaces like a hurricane, scattering employees in every direction, exposing many to new risks, and redefining what workers need to do their jobs safely, efficiently, and effectively. At the same time, customers’ needs and expectations have changed drastically, too. As interactions have moved online and economic pressure has made revenue a matter of brand survival, the touch points where the customer journey and employee journey intersect — moments when a brand can create (or lose) value — have become even more critical than they already were, both in ways that can easily be counted, such as revenue, and in ways that cannot, such as emotional connections.

(WTVY) - According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University and Medicine, more than 1 million Americans have recovered from COVID-19. As of 7:40am Central time on Monday, July 13th, that number stands at 1,006,326. That’s out of 3,304,942 confirmed cases since the pandemic began.

Worldwide, the recovery number stands at 7,139,672. The total cases worldwide since the outbreak started is reported as 12,932,741.

Recovery numbers in Florida and Georgia are unavailable at this time, but the 25,783 recoveries are reported for the state of Alabama.

Image: https://www.wtvy.com

As we embark on our third fund at LionBird, we believe that proactively thinking deeply about what will drive the next decade of healthcare will help us both filter through the noise of digital health, and quickly identify the right investment opportunities. We believe that 2020 represents an unprecedented inflection point in digital health (due to both the COVID-19 global pandemic, as well as many other factors) and we aim to define the trends for the coming decade and their implications for our investment strategy.

They can offer discounts for online classes and take a hit to the bottom line, or they can stick with full tuition and still probably take a hit to the bottom line.

To many people, networking feels a bit like squeezing into trousers one size too small. But networking is essential if you wish to amass the social capital indispensable to a successful career. Its importance has not diminished with the overnight explosion of remote working. If anything, networking has become more critical, as jobs and advancement opportunities are swept away by the coronavirus.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu/

When disruption strikes a business, it is natural for its leaders to try to defend it by focusing on core business activities and improving current products and practices, even while creating a sense of urgency to bring about change. In a survey of 486 global CEOs PwC undertook in 2019, a significant majority said this was a good response to disruptive new entrants.

Image: Illustration by Peter Stark

A safe, effective vaccine is the ultimate tool needed to end the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Biomedical researchers are making progress every day towards such a vaccine, whether it’s devising innovative technologies or figuring out ways to speed human testing. In fact, just this week, NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) established a new clinical trials network that will enroll tens of thousands of volunteers in large-scale clinical trials testing a variety of investigational COVID-19 vaccines.

Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing that if artificial intelligence is going to help in a crisis, we need a new, faster way of doing AI ethics, which they call ethics for urgency. 

(CNN)If the year 2020 is good for anything, it's the lesson that during a crisis, anyone who builds a better mousetrap will find the world beating a path to his door.

A humble team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland reminded the world of late poet Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase when they created a real time tracking map of coronavirus cases and deaths.

Image: https://www.cnn.com

During the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s then-chief of staff famously stated, “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”

Unfortunately, some large high-tech companies who have long sought to weaken the patent system to support their business models are now embracing that Machiavellian mantra as they seek to use the threat of the coronavirus pandemic to undermine patent rights — not just for drug manufacturers, but for all inventors.

As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always surprised by the fact that some never seem to be able to that first startup going, while many others never seem to stop, starting their second or third initiative before the first one is fully hatched. I’m now convinced that serious entrepreneurs relish the startup process more than success. They enjoy the journey more than the destination.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com