For years, Western observers and media have been talking about the rise of Asia in terms of its massive future potential. But the time has come for the rest of the world to update its thinking—because the future arrived even faster than expected.

Daina Trout first learned how to brew kombucha at Tufts University where she earned Masters’ degrees both in Nutrition and Public Health. After graduation, Trout moved to Los Angeles and in 2012, she co-founded Health-Ade Kombucha with her husband, Justin Trout, and best friend, Vanessa Dew.

Image: Photo: Entrepreneur Network

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup founders quandaries in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. People may jump into the lifestyle to be their own boss, achieve great wealth, start a new trend, or all the above. The dilemma is that these goals are usually mutually exclusive.

Here are six invaluable pieces of wisdom and advice about the role of innovation in healthcare that executives from hospitals and health systems across the country have shared with Becker's Hospital Review this year:

Chris Coburn, chief innovation officer, Partners HealthCare System (Boston): "Innovation is not one breakthrough. Rather innovation is an expression of the organization's priorities and capabilities and realized through the creative actions of our gifted employees — hundreds of our Harvard faculty and administrative leaders. The job of our team is to help enable and then commercially act on this expression."

Twenty years ago, in 1999, Amazon was a 5-year-old kindergartner startup navigating the early ecommerce market.

But that didn't stop CEO Jeff Bezos from dreaming big. At the time, Amazon had just started to expand its offerings beyond books. But Bezos was already painting outlandish visions of his customer-first website becoming the one-stop marketplace for everything.

Image: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. AP Photo/Beth A. Keiser

Daina Trout first learned how to brew kombucha at Tufts University where she earned Masters’ degrees both in Nutrition and Public Health. After graduation, Trout moved to Los Angeles and in 2012, she co-founded Health-Ade Kombucha with her husband, Justin Trout, and best friend, Vanessa Dew.

As entrepreneurs, we’ve all been asked at one point if we will provide our services free of charge. This usually comes at the request of a nonprofit organization or another entrepreneur in the name of “exposure.” They'll often make promises about establishing key connections and the possibility of future business. So how do you decide when to say no? The first step in working for exposure without being exposed is to set clear boundaries, and here are four keys to doing just that.

Innovation consulting can be a lonely place for a woman to play, especially in a conventional, male-oriented, and competitive marketplace like Melbourne is today. Making networking a key way of enhancing my intellectual, emotional and social capital, consciousness and creativity.  Involving going out of my way to meet people with different business and life experiences, backgrounds and perspectives. Reflecting on my years of experience networking in a variety of diverse groups, communities, and associations, I realized that it’s one of the key ways people can experience the interplay between innovation, creativity, and consciousness, that emerges new ideas. That allowed me to explore and discover unknown territories, with people in similar and competing fields, with different and diverse worldviews, and levels of creativity and consciousness.

FOLLOWING ANOTHER YEAR of technological advancements and open competition with its Chinese counterpart, the United States is again among the top three most innovative nations in the world, according to the 2019 Global Innovation Index. The U.S. is also considered the No. 1 high-income economy for quality innovation.

Procrastination. Most of us struggle with it, at least to some degree and are eager to find an effective solution. Some people procrastinate so much that they’re willing to pay people to (nicely) force them to get stuff done.

But why is procrastination such a challenge to combat? Avoiding your to-do list is a common problem that seems like it should have a simple solution. After all, we just need to motivate ourselves to do whatever it is we’re putting off, right?

Connect, cultivate, and accelerate from ideation to implementation at the AURP International Conference (#AURPIC2019). In 2019, we're embracing change, building bridges, and advancing pathways of entrepreneurship and innovation to spur our university research park and innovation district community forward. As you enrich your core competencies at AURPIC2019, you expand your skillset, pioneer an innovative future for your institution and corporation and Accelerate Innovation.

For every complex problem,” H. L. Mencken said, “there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Then there are answers that aren’t even wrong, but merely irrelevant—for example, the notion that a weaker U.S. dollar exchange rate will create more U.S. manufacturing jobs. This notion has motivated Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to introduce legislation to compel the Federal Reserve to depress the dollar’s exchange rate to achieve current account balance. Under their “Competitive Dollar and Prosperity Act,” the Federal Reserve would be required to depress the dollar—for example, by taxing foreign investment in U.S. assets—and bring the U.S. current account into balance within five years.

My Twitter feed this week included tweets about incentives from two Democratic candidates for president. 

We need to align the environmental incentives with the financial incentives and make sure that people can actually make money off of new technologies. These need to be union jobs that cut workers in on the deal. @TimRyan

If we update our economic measurements to reflect the things Americans actually care about, then we can align corporations’ profit incentives with improving our citizens’ health and well-being. @andrewyang

There’s been a lot of concern, and a lot of misconceptions of late, about protecting intellectual property and helping businesses deal with so-called “patent trolls.” It’s important, first of all, to understand that “intellectual property” (IP) is an umbrella term for creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, and symbols, names and images used in commerce. Intellectual property “rights” refers to the assignment of property rights through patents, copyrights, designs, trademarks etc. These property rights allow the holder to exercise a monopoly on the use of the item for a specified period. When we are discussing national policy around intellectual property “rights,” we need to clarify the type of property right.

NASA moved its timeline up by four years. The new plan? Get humans back to the moon by 2024. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, wants in on that race and recently unveiled a life-size model of the spaceship he’s betting on. Can his spaceflight company, Blue Origin, win that race? Will Bezos be sending Prime packages to the moon in 2024?

From necessities like paper towels and groceries to a new television or furniture, you can find almost anything you need for your home on Amazon. What few may realize, however, is that that the online retailer not only sells household accessories, but actual homes, too.

For example, you can purchase this expandable container house for just $23,800 on Amazon, plus $1,000 in shipping costs — a fraction of the $227,700 median price for a house in the United States, according to Zillow.

Image: WZH Group

The gentleman's game has always been something that has captured my attention. The way our whole country worships cricket really makes you wish it was your product. Truth be told, the persistence cricketers show is something any entrepreneur can learn from. Right from working hard on our goals to taking care of our health; a good game of cricket can teach you a lot. The elements of this game can be emulated by every entrepreneur. Being precise, strict and disciplined are qualities that must be ingrained in you. When we plan, prepare and schedule our day in an efficient manner it brings us one step closer to our goals.

Just about everyone wants more creativity and innovation these days. But what’s the secret to getting it?

While most companies agree that innovation is vital, few actually spend time creating structures or devising rewards systems hinged on creativity. Many leaders also struggle with the fact that innovation comes from culture, something that’s hard to measure or manage.

SHENZHEN -- On a weekday morning in late June, children stand outside the entrance to their elementary school in Shenzhen, Hong Kong's mainland neighbor. A line of gates equipped with facial recognition technology keeps out intruders and notifies parents via smartphone that their kids have arrived.

The facial recognition system was developed by Shenzhen-based internet giant Tencent Holdings and is just one example of the company's push to incorporate artificial intelligence into education.

Marketing is everything these days. You can have the best technology, but if customers don’t know you exist, or they don’t know how your technology solves a real problem for them, your startup will fail. Yet I see many technology entrepreneurs that focus on the basics of marketing too little and too late.