What do you associate with entrepreneurship? When most people think of entrepreneurs, they think of money, fame and charisma. After all, the most successful entrepreneurs attract the most attention and usually possess these things. However, no matter how much an entrepreneur demonstrates an aura of effortlessness, I’ve found that there is a secret that ties all entrepreneurs together.

Mention the word “networking,” and you might conjure repressed memories of awkward handshakes, disingenuous small talk and the utter dread of opening an email from a stranger who wants to “pick your brain.” Yet despite its unpleasant reputation, most people understand that networking is important, even vital. Connections are the steady undercurrent that powers the tech world, supercharging the careers of the founders, operators and investors who excel at cultivating them.

Type “Internships are” into Google, and you’ll get a list of fill-in-the-blank predictive suggestions such as: Hard to get, slavery, important, illegal, scams, paid, boring, exploitative, stupid, and overrated. Tell us how you really feel, internet.

The fact that people actually search for those phrases may be a litmus test that reflects the generally sour sentiment surrounding internships as stale leftovers of the Devil Wears Prada-like nightmares and Monica Lewinsky linger.

Research and development (R&D) is the lifeblood of innovation. Universities, businesses, and government all use R&D to create new technologies and services that create jobs and drive economic growth.

University research has been a core mission of Illinois’ leading universities since their founding. Research at universities in the state has led to the creation of technologies such as the LED, graphical web browser, MRI, modern nuclear energy, cloud computing, countless modern medicines and cancer treatments, and many, many more. The past decade has seen Illinois’ universities place an increased emphasis on commercializing discoveries made through university research. This emphasis has led Illinois’ universities to become hubs of economic development through the creation and commercialization of new technologies.

Proactive workers are in high demand, and it’s easy to understand why. When it comes to creating positive change, these employees don’t need to be told to take initiative. Research confirms that, compared with their more passive counterparts, proactive people are better performers, contributors, and innovators.

“Growth capital” provider Clearbanc, which recently raised $250 million in “Fund 3” and $50 million in “Series B,” has invested in more than 800 brands including Public Goods, Le Tote and Leesa Sleep, among others, and is on track to collectively generate $1 billion in sales this year.

Image: Michele Romanow CBC Media.

SCIENTISTS HAVE BEGUN to expose a global horror show: microplastic pollution. Tiny bits of plastic have been showing up in unlikely places, including Arctic ice floes. The particles are blowing in the air, so we’re breathing microplastic and eating it and drinking plastic-infused water.

The implications for human health are potentially huge. Potentially. The problem is that little is known about how microplastics affect the human body. That makes things difficult for the World Health Organization, which today released an exhaustive report on the state of research on microplastics in drinking water. The takeaway: As the limited science stands now, there’s no evidence that drinking microplastics is a threat to human health.

The 19th-century villa, glass-walled conservatory, and gardens of the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen is hallowed ground in the history of science. It was originally the home of J.C. Jacobsen, founder of the Carlsberg brewery. Jacobsen decreed that the property should become “an honorary residence for a man or woman engaged in science, literature, or art.”

From 1932 to 1962, that resident was Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist who worked out how quantum mechanics determines the structure of atoms. This is where Bohr strolled and conferred with luminaries of science like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, discussing the essential physics problems that provided the groundwork for the nuclear age.

Successful startups seem to follow similar paths to greatness, and unfortunately all too often that path leads them back down the hill much faster than they went up. Big company powerhouses, like IBM and Xerox, took fifty years to make the cycle, but new companies today, in the age of the Internet, often make the cycle in five to ten years, or even less. Consider MySpace and Webvan.

The future of healthcare is precision medicine—with the potential to revolutionise healthcare and move from a one-size-fits-all approach to an individualised one, precision medicine is viewed as an emblem of a new age. 

LSIPR has discovered the top things you must consider when looking to protect your inventions in the US and/or Europe, plus one issue which matters wherever you are in the world.

The pace of change in the world and workplace is accelerating, and every industry, including higher education, is being disrupted. Disruption and change create new opportunities for entrepreneurship. Colleges and universities that cultivate a multidimensional entrepreneurial ecosystem can position themselves to thrive in a challenging and changing marketplace.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.babson.edu

Too busy or lazy to read Melville’s Moby Dick or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina? That’s OK. Whether you read the classics, or listen to them instead, the same cognitive and emotional parts of the brain are likely to be stimulated. And now, there’s a map to prove it.

Image: https://scienceblog.com

The phenomenon of “beach money exits” — startup founders accepting large but low-ball offers to sell — is a pertinent threat to venture capital investors, according to VC researcher Matthew Wansley.

“Founders may prefer an exit that would diversify their risk and give them financial security for life — beach money — to the uncertain prospect of even greater wealth later,” wrote Wansley, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, in a forthcoming paper for the Journal of Corporation Law. 

Image: Illustration by II

For long-term-oriented investors, Warren Buffett is something of an icon. In less than seven decades, he took roughly $10,000 in seed capital and turned it into more than $79 billion in net worth.

However, Buffett hasn't needed fancy computers, technical analysis, or any quantitative analysis to figure out which stocks to buy. Rather, he's stuck to the simple investing strategy of looking for businesses that have sustainable competitive advantages, and buying those companies when he perceives them to be trading at a discount. Buffett has been the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A)(NYSE: BRK-B) for nearly 50 years, and when he buys stock, he tends to hang on for years or decades at a time. The average top-10 holding of Berkshire Hathaway has been held for 7.5 years.

A new school year is about to begin, which means a new group of high school students are deciding which colleges they should apply to.

To help both students and parents, school-ranking website Niche has released its 2020 list of the best colleges in America, after rating more than 1,000 schools. Niche based its rankings on factors like acceptance rates, student and alumni reviews, professor ratings, graduate income, and campus life.

Image: Tufts University/Facebook

In a world dominated by meme culture, ever-changing social media platforms, and your ability to cram your thoughts into a 280-character tweet, your grasp of basic slang can make or break your credibility as a functional and supposedly cool human.

Scroll through the comments of any Gen Z influencer's Instagram feed, and you may feel completely out of the loop on what the world is talking about.

With 18,841 high schools across America, the process of getting into one — and figuring out the best fit — can be just as daunting as applying for college.

To make families' lives easier, school-ranking website Niche has released its 2020 list of the best public high schools in America. The list was determined after rating thousands of schools in over 10,000 districts across the country.

Image: Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy was ranked No. 2 in the country. Google Maps

If one were to rank startup accelerator programs like one does colleges, Y Combinator (known as “YC”) is about as Ivy League as it gets.

YC offers a twelve week program to very early-stage ventures, providing founders with capital (currently $150,000) in exchange for a chunk of equity (currently about 7 percent). It all culminates on Demo Day, or, more recently, “days:” part graduation ceremony and part high pressure show-and-tell where founders pitch to an assembly of investors to secure capital to fund their next stage of growth.

Image: https://news.crunchbase.com

Venture capital money is pouring into podcast companies, with roughly 3x times as many deals being brokered today than 10 years ago.

Why it matters: Data has long suggested podcast listenership would explode as more Americans adopt smart speakers and voice assistants in their homes.

But before 2017, venture capitalists shied away from investing in podcast startups, fearing that Apple already had too much of a stronghold over the market and because the industry was (and still is) rather decentralized, which means that money hasn't flowed into it as quickly.

Image: https://www.axios.com

Biz2Credit has identified Miami as the "Best Small Business City in America," based on a weighted average that includes annual revenue, credit score, age of business (in months), and the company's proprietary BizAnalyzer score that factors in cash flow, debt-to-income ratio, taxes and other data. In its computation, Biz2Credit examined the financials of nearly 30,000 companies that applied for small business financing on its platform in 2018