Successful people in every field are often said to be "blessed with talent" or even just lucky. But the truth is, many worked harder than the average person can even imagine. From athletes like Michael Jordan to executives like Howard Schultz, these people are known for waking up early and working toward a goal while other people are still in bed, and staying later than everyone else too.

The entrepreneurial spirit of the American public is one of our country's last great resources. As the national unemployment rate hovers around 8 percent, our strongest competitors continue to outpace us in education and macroeconomic stability. Helping to keep America afloat in an increasingly competitive global economy is our willingness to start new business ventures -- an asset that, despite only producing a slow jobs "leak," has nearly single handedly kept unemployment from spiraling out of control. Indeed, entrepreneurship is the best answer to the question of how to solve our unemployment problem.

Entrepreneurship has been the driving force of American employment for decades: from 1980 to 2005, new firms (those less than five years old) were responsible for close to all net job growth in the United States. According to the Business Dynamics Statistics data from the U.S. Census Bureau, America's net employment growth rate would be negative without the jobs created by new businesses. And though not every new business can succeed -- in fact, only half of all new firms make it to their fifth year -- cohorts of firms started each year retain, on average, 80 percent of their initial total employment to age five, according to a report from the Kauffman Foundation.

Ernst & Young is delighted to announce the launch of its Global Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, an online platform providing guidance to entrepreneurs and innovators on their growth journey as well as enabling fast growing companies to connect to each other sharing their different perspectives.

The new online platform showcases relevant entrepreneurial programs, conferences and forums from around the world and provides access to an extensive global network. The center also aims to help entrepreneurial companies with their future growth plans and how best to access funding.

Speak to any entrepreneur in India and you can have a drinking game on how many times he or she says ‘ Silicon Valley’.

The Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem is in a global race. Only, what’s a relay for its peers is an obstacle race for us. Though this constant comparison with the Valley is ambitious, it highlights the ambit of constraints within which our ecosystem operates. There are three things that fundamentally distinguish the two—the lack of product innovation, quality of mentors and an M&A scene that doesn’t inspire big exits.

Where does innovation come from? For one answer, consider the work of MIT professor Eric von Hippel, who has calculated that ordinary U.S. consumers spend $20 billion in time and money trying to improve on household products—for example, modifying a dog-food bowl so it doesn't slide on the floor. Von Hippel estimates that these backyard Edisons collectively invest more in their efforts than the largest corporation anywhere does in R&D.

The low-tech kludges of consumers might once have had little impact. But one company, Procter & Gamble, has actually found a way to tap into them; it now gets many of its ideas for new Swiffers and toothpaste tubes from the general public. One way it has managed to do so is with the help of InnoCentive, a company in Waltham, Massachusetts, that specializes in organizing prize competitions over the Internet. Volunteer "solvers" can try to earn $500 to $1 million by coming up with answers to a company's problems.

Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, is a preëminent figure in venture capital. He's been at it for 25 years: his first big deal was an investment in the Web community GeoCities, which Yahoo bought for about $3 billion in 1999. He went on to back startups including Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare. But from his successful perch, Wilson worries that his industry is in trouble.

Lately VCs haven't come close to generating the returns on their investments that made them stars in the 1990s. It's even becoming questionable what value they generate for society. IT companies are finding it cheaper than ever to get going now that they can rent computing resources from providers in the "cloud." Meanwhile, alternative funding mechanisms are proliferating. And because VCs often shy away from technologies that take a very long time to bear fruit, such as many in energy or biomedicine, some critics contend that VCs flood the world with too much money for ideas that don't solve big problems.

Tonight at the StartX demo day, the Stanford-based incubator provided a few metrics as a validation of its model. Among other things, StartX announced companies that have gone through its program have raised a total of $80 million. With about $1.3 million raised per startup, it’s ahead of most for-profit incubators. In fact, it claims to be Number 2 in the incubator space, behind Y Combinator.

While California’s Silicon Valley continues to be the mecca for emerging technology companies, New York City’s Silicon Alley has firmly established itself over the last several years as a magnet for dot com start-ups.

The state of New Jersey is now attempting to take advantage of its proximity to New York City and the venture-investment dollars flowing into the region through what is called a tech accelerator. It’s a program that supports and encourages emerging companies by pairing entrepreneurs with mentors, assisting them with product development and funding. The model has proven to be successful. File hosting service Dropbox and travel site Airbnb both came out of an accelerator.

A concept called equity crowdfunding hasn’t yet been tested. But many experts are already questioning whether it will work. The idea — letting startups sell equity stakes online — is one of the most compelling elements of the JOBS Act, which became law in April. It was conceived as a way to make more money available for entrepreneurs to jump-start expansion and job creation.

Peoria, IL (September 6, 2012) Bradley University has created the Robert and Carolyn Turner School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the first school of its type in the nation.

The Turner School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is a stand-alone academic unit, offering students in all disciplines opportunities to study entrepreneurship and innovation in classrooms and experiential settings. Entrepreneurship education is historically restricted to students studying business or engineering, and is housed in a specific college, while the Turner School is available to students throughout the University. The Turner School is welcoming its first students this semester.

“Our groundbreaking School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation will nurture students’ entrepreneurial behaviors, innovation, creativity and collaboration,” President Joanne K. Glasser said. “I thank Robert and Carolyn Turner for helping create this distinctive school that will offer an outstanding educational opportunity for our students, and will move Bradley toward national distinction.”

For all those who wonder what the heck the JOBS Act is and why President Barack Obama signed it into law, here’s an infographic for you.

Short form: It’s a way to let more people of modest means become micro-investors in startup companies.

It’s a step in the right direction, probably, but investors still need to be accredited. And some crowdfunding experts say that the way the Securities and Exchange Commission has implemented the new law actually makes investing harder, not easier.

As the glow of being back on campus fades and life settles into the routine of study, parties, exams, club events and trying to cram as much life experience as possible into 2 or 4 years, you may find yourself thinking “What am I going to do with my life and what kind of impact will I make?” Well, why not explore entrepreneurship? There are many reasons to pursue an entrepreneurial path – including research that suggests entrepreneurs end up happier and more satisfied – and they’ve been well detailed on this and other sites. I’m going to give you some tips about how to get started, whether you have a great business idea or just want to investigate opportunities.

Of course, there are opportunities to get involved with research and there are many classes you can take to support your entrepreneurial journey, but if you really want to get your hands dirty, Wharton Entrepreneurship has a number of co-curricular, experiential learning programs you can get involved in.

There has been a lot of negativity about venture capital, venture backed exits and IPOs lately, which is not surprising in light of the high profile declines in some of the big venture backed IPOs including Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, A123, etc.  However, at Point Judith our experience has been different and based on 6 exits in our portfolios over the past four years including the successful sale of Fidelis to General Dynamics at the end of August, my intuition is that the venture liquidity market is quite robust. 

Reputation.com founder Michael Fertik has a key piece of advice for most startups seeking financing options. First up, don't take venture capital. But if you still feel the VC route is the right one to take, then Fertik offers some a few nuggets of wisdom.

In a post today for the Harvard Business Review, Fertik said that if your company has big margin and growth prospects, swimming with the sharks may be just the thing to do. And he's got some pretty solid advice. Among his points:

Grey London CEO Chris Hirst outlines how the agency built a culture based on an "Open" philosophy and what you can learn from its efforts. 

Three years ago, Grey London really needed to change. The industry had changed, the media landscape had changed and Grey remained a relatively successful (in financial terms at least), safe, but dull London outpost of a global network. Not a great, or ultimately sustainable, place to be if you’re in a creative industry.

Grey had tried to change before. The business wasn’t in denial, but it just seemed like the "uncrackable" problem. This time, we did it differently. Our strategy for change was to change our culture. We called this Open. It is both an expression of a culture and how we believe today’s people-based businesses should work in order to survive, evolve and thrive. It is a philosophy of collective creativity and collective responsibility. It encourages increased collaboration between departments, the agency and its clients. Any business can be Open; what follows is a brief description of how we did it, the lessons learned and the results we’re achieving.

This past spring, representatives from industry, labor, government, and academia gathered at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center for the 2012 "U.S. Manufacturing Competitiveness Initiative: Dialog on Next Generation Supply Networks and Logistics," sponsored by Georgia Tech and the Council on Competitiveness.

During the two-day event, representatives shared their perspectives on the current state of U.S. manufacturing, the challenges it faces in terms of global competition, and possible solutions to mitigate those obstacles, specifically in terms of supply networks and advanced logistics.

The Bay Area is in the midst of a modern manufacturing revival that could help shape the region's economy for years to come. It sounds crazy. This is the land of Facebook and Google (GOOG), the land of cloud computing and big ideas. This is a place where you'd be forgiven for thinking that the only things we make are companies and millionaires. How often have you heard that manufacturing is dead in the Bay Area; that Silicon Valley stopped being a production center when the semiconductor plants moved out? Turns out, that's not the case. "It's amazing how the real story can contradict conventional wisdom," says Timothy Krueger, co-author of an April Brookings Institution study that found Silicon Valley had the country's highest manufacturing wages and the second highest concentration of production jobs in the nation's big cities. "Clearly Silicon Valley is the envy of much of the American manufacturing industry. There is no doubt about that."

The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013 assesses the competitiveness landscape of 144 economies, providing insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity. The Report series remains the most comprehensive assessment of national competitiveness worldwide. Access the data platform to visualize and download the data.

This year’s report findings show that Switzerland tops the overall rankings in The Global Competitiveness Report for the fourth consecutive year. Singapore remains in second position with Finland, in third position, overtaking Sweden 4th). These and other Northern and Western European countries dominate the top 10 with the Netherlands, Germany and United Kingdom respectively ranked 5th, 6th and 8th. The United States (7th), Hong Kong (9th) and Japan (10th) complete the top 10. The Report emphasizes persisting competitiveness divides across and within regions, as short-termism and political deadlock continue to hold back the economic performance of many countries and regions. Looking forward, productivity improvements and private sector investment will be key to improving global economies at a time of heightened uncertainty about the global economic outlook. Read the full report, press release and access the full rankings

The entrepreneurial spirit of the American public is one of our country's last great resources. As the national unemployment rate hovers around 8 percent, our strongest competitors continue to outpace us in education and macroeconomic stability. Helping to keep America afloat in an increasingly competitive global economy is our willingness to start new business ventures -- an asset that, despite only producing a slow jobs "leak," has nearly single handedly kept unemployment from spiraling out of control. Indeed, entrepreneurship is the best answer to the question of how to solve our unemployment problem.

Entrepreneurship has been the driving force of American employment for decades: from 1980 to 2005, new firms (those less than five years old) were responsible for close to all net job growth in the United States. According to the Business Dynamics Statistics data from the U.S. Census Bureau, America's net employment growth rate would be negative without the jobs created by new businesses. And though not every new business can succeed -- in fact, only half of all new firms make it to their fifth year -- cohorts of firms started each year retain, on average, 80 percent of their initial total employment to age five, according to a report from the Kauffman Foundation.

The following video from OnlineMBA.com helps you to evaluate your entrepreneurial potential by looking at four statistical truths about entrepreneurs. Interestingly, less than 1% of entrepreneurs come from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds, so entrepreneurs tend to emerge from those with the right mix of personal qualities.