Ryerson University prides itself on its approach to entrepreneurial education. It is home to one of the largest entrepreneurship programs in Canada, and promotes student entrepreneurship through organizations. It also focuses on experiential learning that requires a hands-on approach to facilitate creative thinking in even the most traditional professions. While entrepreneurial education is gaining popularity with post-secondary institutions, entrepreneurship as a teachable discipline is still having to contend with critics.

The common misconception is that entrepreneurship can’t be taught, because it requires too much real-world experience to master. Victor Hwang is the managing director of T2 Venture Capital and he has seen many qualified M.B.A-educated professionals try and fail as an entrepreneur.

Amid the exhaustive meet-and-greet opportunities available at the 2013 JP Morgan conference, which took place in San Francisco earlier this week, we met with Jens Eckstein, who joined SR One as its latest president slightly more than a year ago. SR One, as most IV Blog readers know, is the corporate venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline, and one of the oldest corporate venture funds in the industry. In an era in which such funds are assuming an ever-more important role in early-stage funding of innovative biotech companies, SROne’s priorities and strategic direction should be of great interest.

GSK has set broad parameters for SR One, with few restrictions; the firm invests with an eye on "the future of pharma in general," not GSK, Eckstein says. GSK has never bought an SR One investment, and the firm steps aside if it sells one of its portfolio companies. He adds that the fund's priority is early-stage innovation, with innovation defined broadly as “anything that changes the way medicine is done today.” That said, as SR One’s interests move "earlier and earlier” up the value chain, the evergreen funding provided by the corporate parent eliminates funding cycles and gives the venture firm a huge advantage over independent competitors.

An important factor for new entrepreneurs is the ability and willingness to change your business model or product mid-stream. Most successful startups have pivoted, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

It’s a humbling experience to admit your original vision and product was off or something went wrong. An entrepreneur might reflect on how they spent their investors’ money or their life’s savings into a black hole and revisit the highs and lows of their journey. Some entrepreneurs don’t reach this point because they are blinded by the same fierce determination that brought them there or have a hope that things will turn around.

VentureBeat has emerged triumphant from CES 2013, with only one writer stricken with a mysterious convention illness. The past week went by like a whirlwind, but now that we have some time (and distance) away from Las Vegas, we can finally sit back and take a look at what worked best at this year’s show.

While this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was filled with straightforward news and elegant gadgets, there were also a few strange things that stood out.

Check out five of the oddest things we saw on the show floor and a bonus from a keynote below.

While you may not want to give up 5% equity in your company to be on Shark Tank, the ABC reality show, you can learn a thing or two by watching the ones who do.

For business owners who choose to dive into the Shark Tank and plan to walk away with a deal, they have to market at least two things to this cunning group of investors:

2012 was quite a year for civic innovation. Still a relatively young field, civic innovation thrived in 2012, thanks in large part to the strengthening of the entire civic innovation ecosystem. It begins with citizens identifying challenges in their cities and being empowered to create solutions to these challenges through hackathons and online engagement platforms like ImproveSF. This idea of citizen engagement has been around for a couple of years, fueled by the rising popularity of Open Data and Open Government. But what made 2012 different was the realization of the full civic innovation ecosystem. These solutions that citizens create have the ability to create new jobs. Products and companies are being born from hackathons or being built on Open Data, and civic accelerators and crowdfunding platforms are arising to meet this new demand.

Luck. Perseverance. Success.

These were all topics billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson discussed recently in a video interview with LinkedIn executive editor Daniel Roth. Branson was the first among the professional network's "Influencers" to cross the million-follower mark.

LinkedIn launched the Influencer network in October, allowing a select group of thought leaders in business to write posts and LinkedIn members to follow them. Other LinkedIn influencers include Barack Obama, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington and Guy Kawasaki.

Power entertaining is about creating an experience for guests, built around great wine, great food, great company and great ambience. It's about giving people enjoyable memories that will cause them to remember you fondly and make them want to do business with you in the future. The following principles will help you take your business entertaining to a new level.

Think of power entertaining as a business-development strategy. You can brand yourself and your company by creating memorable and enjoyable social events that people will long remember and always associate with you. Hosting power entertaining events is a great way to become "a center of influence," because every event you put on for others is an opportunity to create an indelible impression in the minds of others. Creating a memorable experience doesn't need to bust your budget. Power entertaining is about offering people delectable samples of food and tastings of wine, especially of things they haven't had before or don't know much about.

Entrepreneurs of any age could learn a thing or two from Zach Marks of Melbourne Beach, Fla., about turning obstacles into opportunities. The 12-year-old has launched Grom Social, a free social network for teenagers and preteens under age 17. His motivation? Getting kicked off Facebook -- twice -- for violating the age restriction.

After borrowing $2,500 from his older brother, Marks set to work on his own social network, which now boasts Instagram and Twitter integration, and free educational content for kids -- even tutors to help with homework. As of last month, the new site had nearly 7,000 members.

Today there are more than 50 crowdfunding sites in the U.S. and countless projects asking for your donations. If you're looking to successfully fund your project, here are some useful tips:

1.  Build beyond your network -- The people who are most likely to give are a part of your close social network. After that, it’s friends of friends. For some people, the biggest challenge is breaking beyond their close social network. But that's something you must do in order to succeed. One strategy: pre-work. Put effort into building your network before you launch.

There are more than 50 crowdfunding websites in the United States alone and they attract a lot of money from a lot of people. But why do people give on these sites and why do they support certain projects? Elizabeth Gerber, a professor at Northwestern University, has studied crowdfunding and says there are four primary reasons why people give:

1. Because of a reward system, people want acknowledgment.

2. Because they have a connection to one of the people seeking donations.

3. Because they want to be a part of something, be part of group

4. Because they want to support efforts analogous with their beliefs.

TEDxMaui aims to “broaden understanding and knowledge in order to make Maui one of the most exciting and promising places to live and work,” or even just visit. Created in the spirit of TED — a national nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” (largely by way of talks posted online)  — TEDxMaui, now in its second year, is an independently organized event, licensed by TED, which stands for “Technology, Entertainment and Design.”

TEDxMaui 2013: “The Dream is Real” will get under way at 9 a.m.  and wrap up at 5:30 p.m. (Hawaii time) on Sun., Jan. 13 at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Kahului. For ticket information, click here. For details about a live webcast of the event, click here.

Germany's Evotec has entered into another strategic partnership with a US university as it continues to adopt an open innovation approach to drug discovery.

The latest agreement will see Evotec join forces with Yale University in Connecticut on discovery science for a number of diseases with unmet medical need, including metabolic diseases, disorders of the central nervous system (CNS), immunological diseases and cancer.

I first noticed something was off when I went to pay my rent one month. The window for a timely online transfer of funds was closing, so to get the money to my landlord in time, I'd have to do something unusual. I took out my checkbook, grabbed a pen and started writing the date. 

It felt weird. My hand cramped a little, churning out numbers and letters with the slightest - but still noticeable - discomfort. My handwriting sucked. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't actually written anything by hand in a long, long time. Just a few years earlier, I kept a paper journal by my bed and would buy three-packs of Moleskin notebooks for brainstorming, sketching and jotting things down. What happened? 

Tough economic times have often been the best times for starting a new business – just ask the creators of General Electric, Walt Disney, Burger King and Microsoft. The slow recovery -- rather than discouraging enterprise -- may actually be the ideal time to make major moves towards the free enterprise dream. With more funding options than ever, cheaper office space, and increases in technology, the time to start a business is now.

The European Commission has published its call for proposals for ERC Proof of Concept Grant, which is coming under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Funded with EUR 10 million from the 2013 budget, the call aims to help grant holders establish proof of concept as well as identify a development path and an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) strategy for ideas arising from an ERC funded project. The objective is to enable innovative ideas to be presented to venture capitalists, companies or social entrepreneurs in a pre-demonstration stage where potential opportunities for exploitation have already been identified.

It's been nearly 20 years since California Gov. Pete Wilson won re-election by tying his campaign to the anti-illegal immigrant measure Proposition 187. Ads featuring grainy images of presumably young Hispanic males crossing the border energized a largely white electorate terrified of being overwhelmed, financially and socially, by the incoming foreign hordes.

The demographic dilemma facing California today might be better illustrated by pictures of aging hippies with gray ponytails, of legions in wheel-chairs, seeking out the best rest home and unemployed young people on the street corner, watching while middle-age families drive away, seeking to fulfill mundane middle-class dreams in other states.

Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bakery or a local start-up conducted an IPO. Could personal relationships drive local investments and investor profit? In economic times like these, investment in their neighbors will appeal to investors of every stripe.

The purpose of this post is to do my small part in helping convince our regulators of a much needed change.

The crowdfunding concept garners a good deal of media attention lately, and rightfully so. Simply put, crowdfunding entails taking a little bit of money from a lot of investors as an alternative to taking a lot of money from a few investors. For a more visual appealing explanation, watch this two-minute video.

Here’s a novel way to keep track of your wallet, your cat, or, yes, your keys.

Jimmy Buchheim stopped by the the TechCrunch booth at the Consumer Electronics Show to demo StickNFind, a bluetooth sticker technology that you can use to track almost anything. Once you’ve attached the sticker to an object of your choice, you can track it down again using the StickNFind iOS and Android apps, which tell you whether you’re getting farther from or closer to the object in question — basically, it’s the tech version of that that hotter/colder game.

In the video, you can watch me track down a sticker that the TechCrunch crew has hidden. It took the app a little while to refresh as I walked around, but I was eventually able to find the “keys.” (Full disclosure: They told me the sticker’s location ahead of time.)