Combining data with expert analysis, this first-ever Trends in Entrepreneurship report translates rigorous academic research to ensure findings are actionable for the broader entrepreneurial community, aiming to inform practitioners’ decisions and encourage further exploration of research topics by scholars.

This summary provides a brief overview of the full report, touching on key topics that drive conversations throughout Frontiers in Entrepreneurship conference sessions. Our aim for this integration is to stimulate additional discussions among attendees that will help identify new areas to be explored and innovative questions to be answered.

Image: https://frontiers.unc.edu/

Airlines and passengers alike are flying into a world of flygskam and flying taxis.

Apreviously unknown strain of coronavirus has dominated headlines in recent weeks, and alarmed public health officials with its rapid spread and virulent nature. But it’s really no surprise to the scientists who study infectious disease: it’s just one of several pathogens that have the potential to reach calamitous status.

Image: https://time.com - From Video

Borrowers expect their income or credit history to send their loan costs up or down. Few, however, expect lenders to judge them based on what college they went to.

But that’s exactly what some of the nation’s largest banks are doing, a group of former federal regulators said. Companies including Wells Fargo & Co. are charging consumers more to borrow money if they attended less prestigious colleges, a form of educational discrimination that may violate credit laws and deepen inequality, according to a new study.

That means Harvard University students, already flush with opportunity, stand to gain an additional edge over their peers at nearby Bunker Hill Community College when taking out loans.

Entrepreneurship. That’s what Babson College does best. For decades, the institution has been in the trenches with individual entrepreneurs, working and sweating with them, helping them begin and build their businesses.

Now, Babson wants to look at the bigger picture.

Thanks to a $10 million gift from the family of John Butler ’52, Babson is establishing the Butler Institute for Free Enterprise Through Entrepreneurship. The new institute will look at entrepreneurship from a macro level, examining how government, business, and society can help entrepreneurship to grow and thrive in communities across the world.

Image: https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu

In my years of advising startups and occasional investing, I’ve seen many great ideas start and fail, but the right team always seems to make good things happen, even without the ultimate idea. That’s why investors say they invest in people (bet on the jockey, not the horse), rather than the idea. Yet every entrepreneur I meet wants to talk about the idea, and rarely mentions the team.

The three judges beamed at me. Buoyed by their support, I anticipated winning this college elocution competition. I nailed the first verse of my chosen poem, but might as well have been under general anesthesia when trying to remember a single word of the second verse. Now the judges’ encouraging smiles only roiled my rising panic. Finally, the timer buzzed, ending my turn on stage and initiating a two-decade fear of memorization.

Now that we have stepped over the threshold into 2020, what has the research community learned that will propel progress and how can we enable changes that can move health and science forward?

Here’s a look a 10 trends and big ideas we are watching as this new decade unfolds:

1.   Making patients the priority: Retail, banking, and other consumer-focused industries have placed the consumer in the center.

The US intelligence community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment report identified a number of research areas that will determine global military and economic superiority in the coming decades; AI, gene editing, synthetic biology, 5G, and quantum computing were among the areas specifically referenced in the report. It noted that America’s lead in the science and technology fields has been significantly eroded in recent years. The decline is the result of steadily declining US budgets for basic scientific research and a lopsided emphasis on the life sciences, to the detriment of emerging technologies. According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US government spent $67 billion on basic and applied science and technology research in 2017—less than 2% of all federal spending and just 0.3% of US GDP.

After more than 10,000 years of relative stability—the full span of human civilization—the Earth’s climate is changing. As average temperatures rise, climate science finds that acute hazards such as heat waves and floods grow in frequency and severity, and chronic hazards, such as drought and rising sea levels, intensify (Exhibit 1). In this report, we focus on understanding the nature and extent of physical risk from a changing climate over the next one to three decades, exploring physical risk as it is the basis of both transition and liability risks.

Everyone wants their child to move up the social ladder to achieve the American Dream of being more economically successful than themselves. However, it is also possible to move downward.

According to 2017 data released by the Pew Research Center, 58% of Americans believe today's generation will be economically worse off than their parents. And for many families in the middle and upper classes, there is a serious possibility of that happening.

Each new year brings with it new opportunities and emerging trends in the business world. The 2020 emerging industries to watch report from 99designs has 4 segments in its yearly outlook. For the new decade, the company is bullish about cannabidiol or more commonly known as CBD, veganism, biohacking and astrology.

As a small business owner or any entrepreneur for that matter, getting a glimpse of what is trending provides a great insight into possible opportunities. Even if you are not in these particular 2020 growth industries, you can identify ways to make them work in your sector. However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct implementation. You can form partnerships with growth industries and make your company more relevant moving forward.

Sequoia, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a full stack of outrageously successful tech investments (think Apple, Google, PayPal, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Stripe and WhatsApp), is opening an office in London. 

For some, it’s a sign that the European tech ecosystem has finally come of age. Sequoia is on the hunt for a partner to join the team and is, according to Sifted’s sources, courting the crème de la crème of Europe’s venture capital talent.

It may not be quite the game changer for local venture capital funds that some might suspect, however. 

2020 Crab Trap Competition - 5th Annual Biohealth Capital Region.

My mantra of investing, as any regular reader of this column knows, is capital begets capital. That's why Oklahoma's unique, pre-seed capital fund, Technology Business Finance Program (TBFP), is so critical to Oklahoma's innovation economy.

TBFP deploys state funding to provide equity-free capital for startups at such an early stage that there are virtually no other sources of capital available. TBFP is not intended to grain a percentage of the entrepreneur's company in return for capital. Its sole purpose is to help entrepreneurs fund the first milestones toward building and de-risking their companies with the aim of attracting additional capital from equity investors as milestones are met.

The January jobs report released Friday is chock full of positive figures for the American worker.

But there’s one other number that came out worth noting, a single stat that acts as one of the best measures of the health of the technology industry, which is itself one of the best leading indicators of the economy.

A group of executives have been hashing out for several months priorities and goals meant to improve the small business climate in Louisiana, focusing on access to capital, support programs, occupational licensing and regulatory policy.

The culmination of the Louisiana Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council's effort is a draft report expected to hit Gov. John Bel Edwards' desk in the coming weeks.

Economic outcomes and the relationship between individuals and institutions have shifted for workers, consumers, and savers in advanced economies.

ife has changed substantially for individuals in advanced economies in the first two decades of the 21st century as a result of trends including disruptions in technology, globalization, the economic crisis of 2008 and its recovery, and shifting market and institutional dynamics. In many ways, changes for individuals have been for the better, including new opportunities and overall economic growth—and the prospect of more to come as the century progresses, through developments in science, technology and innovation, and productivity growth.

If workers are having trouble concentrating on the job, it is likewise all too easy for employers to misunderstand how work flexibility can be a solution to poor productivity. Most of the conversation about flexibility focuses on the work-life balance benefits and treats the improvement of productivity as a by-product of the policy. That is, a reduction in working hours generates higher productivity as a consequence of a better work-life balance.

Being an entrepreneur can give you a high, but it is extremely demanding. You typically bite off more than you can chew, and still make it all work with sheer determination. Successful entrepreneurs manage to balance their many responsibilities and juggle many crucial tasks – without ever dropping the ball. They manage this by using their time efficiently. Here are a few simple tricks that can help you do the same: