Entrepreneurs generally love to learn. Whether it’s attending conferences, working with mentors or evaluating their own successes and failures, learning is a core function of any entrepreneurial venture. Some aim to learn on the go, while others prefer to gain specific skills in a more traditional educational setting. If you count yourself among the latter, here's a rundown of continuing education options that could benefit you as an entrepreneur. 

I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Gorode and Katie Witkin.

Adam is Co-Founder and CEO of AGW. Gorode co-leads AGW Group’s creative vision and growth, working with iconic brands that include Condé Nast, HBO, Red Bull, Armani Exchange, Mother New York, and ’47 among others. Under Gorode’s leadership, AGW has gained notoriety for their unique ability to engineer brands’ participation in elusive cultural circles earning the company over 13 awards in its lifetime, including a Webby and a Clio for its work with HBO, and a Mashable Mashie for its work with Target. Prior to founding AGW, Gorode worked with agencies and Fortune 500 companies to craft digital strategies that helped his clients adapt to the emergence of multichannel networks and shifting consumer behaviors. Gorode’s career started at Syracuse University, where he studied music business and moonlighted as a concert promoter booking Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, and several dozen acts to campus. Gorode recognized early on that social media and mobile technology would upend industries and expanded his focus beyond music to create a company equipped to take advantage of the new landscape, in pursuit of fostering richer exchanges between culture creators and brands.

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How many times have investors heard startups start their pitch by touting that their technology is “disruptive?” What entrepreneurs forget or don’t realize is that most customers are wary of all technology, educating the market on new technology is expensive, takes a long time, and people buy problem solutions rather than technology. Investors will likely wait for more traction.

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Crowdfunding has been around since 2008 with the launch of indiegogo, followed by Kickstarter which launched in 2009.

The early crowdfunding websites offered users free perks, and goods in exchange for funding their business venture. Most of these start-ups fizzled out after a few months but some of these were widely successful. One of the most notable success stories is the virtual reality headset Oculus which raised over $2.4 million on Kickstarter in a campaign that also caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg. Shortly thereafter Oculus was acquired by Facebook for $3B. This was a monumental acquisition for a start-up with a great vision and zero profits.

Wondering how to de-stress at work? Looking for de-stressing exercises at work? Stress from tight deadlines and high stakes can cause us to lose focus.

If we let stress get the best of us, it can reduce our unicorn ideas to donkey fodder.

But if we address it head on, we can stay productive and happy at work.

From Toronto to Tokyo, the challenges faced by cities today are often remarkably similar: climate change, rising housing costs, traffic, economic polarization, unemployment. To tackle these problems, new technology companies and industries have been sprouting and scaling up with innovative digital solutions like ride sharing and home sharing. Without a doubt, the city of the future must be digital. It must be smart. It must work for everyone.

Communities of users are shaping the industrial landscape and contributing to the innovations we use every day. The effects of user communities on firms, industries, and society will continue to grow. This article discusses the relationship between user communities and firms to shed light on avenues for future research in business strategy.

I set a goal for this summer’s series of columns to reflect on and write about my lessons learned during my past six years of immersion in entrepreneurship.

Our focus at i2E is on high-growth technology or life sciences businesses, but startups of every stripe are vital to Oklahoma’s future. In many regards, what is true for high-growth entrepreneurship is true for Main Street.

Empathy has conventionally been a sign of weakness in the traditional workplace.

Conventionally, society has conditioned us to conceal our emotions, to look and appear strong. While it has inspired an entire generation, it has also caught up in terms of high volumes of mental health issues which affect work productivity and quality.

The right innovation metrics and indicators are often difficult to find and apply. Not many CEOs would be able to show innovation dashboards with 3-5 simple KPIs.

The past 20 or more years of research in innovation management has brought up of metrics. In practical terms most of them are either unspecific, superficial, not relevant enough for your business or simply not available.

A Philadelphia online sports-betting firm, Sporttrade, and companies from the Ukraine, Canada and India are among a small group of firms participating in Comcast Corp.'s 13-week start-up incubator program at the Comcast tower. It’s the program’s second year.

“There is a heavy emphasis on female-founded companies and there is an emphasis on sports,” Sam Schwartz, Comcast’s chief business development officer, said on Friday.

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Home to the Research Triangle Park and top-tier research universities like Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area led all regions in per capita NIH funding in FY 2018 and placed sixth in total funding that year, according to a new analysis by SSTI. This edition of Useful Stats looks at all NIH awards at the regional level over the five-year period between FY 2014 and FY 2018. Boston led all regions in total NIH funding in FY 2018, while NIH funding in the Washington, D.C., region increased by the greatest percentage over the five-year period among major metropolitan areas.

Every startup lucky enough to get some traction gets to the point where they decide to hire some “regular employees” for sales, marketing, and administrative tasks. Then they are surprised to see productivity and creativity take a big dip. What they should be doing is hiring only “entrepreneurs,” meaning people who think and act as if this is their own business.

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There are more than 11.6 million businesses in the United States that are women-owned. Out of businesses that generate $1 million or more, 1 in 5 is owned by women. Being a female entrepreneur is looking better each and every day. But, with all of the progress that’s been made, there are still looming disparities.

Are you struggling to create your dream life or business? If so, you are probably distracted by the “how.” What you should be focused on instead is identifying your calling.

I know firsthand that nothing else matters if you aren’t following your soul’s purpose. Once you’ve found it, you can align all areas of your life to point in that direction. It is possible to do what you love and live in flow — you just need the right motivation and mindset, and to take the right action.

In the spring of 2018, three long-term Japan residents and friends decided to create a community of peers in Tokyo and tell their stories of living in the city while chasing their dreams.

American photographers Michael Holmes and Richard Lee  joined me, a Brit, to create Millennials of Tokyo (MoTKY), an online and offline global community focused on the lives of people from the city’s creative and innovative space.

Image: https://japan-forward.com

The future is now. Previously advanced fields like silicon chip technology and mobile technology have given way to newer cutting-edge ones like machine learning and quantum computing. This is the era of DeepTech, a field characterised by future-defining scientific advancement and engineering innovation.

A study of Global Human Capital Trends, undertaken by Deloitte, has revealed that alternative workforce models are steadily becoming the new-normal in South Africa’s job market.

While the trend has already transformed the way global corporations and small businesses achieve their operational goals, focus on the innately human aspects of production is beginning to take hold in South Africa. From traditional conglomerates to start-up enterprises, the concept of humanising workflow by optimising the employee’s experience has now entered the mainstream.

By nearly any measure, Richard Branson is at the top of the success-o-meter of life. The multibillionaire launched his first business as a teenager. By 20, he had started a mail-order record business and by 22 he was running a chain of record stores. He has since founded a slew of companies and conglomerates, including Virgin Records, Virgin Airlines, Virgin Express, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Hotels, Virgin Cruises and Virgin Galactic.

I have been reading the business plans of new ventures for more than 30 years, and while the presentations have become a lot slicker, I’m not sure the underlying propositions have improved much.

PowerPoint and the rise of venture-capital culture have a certain amount to answer for on that. In 2019, no one sends a business plan: instead they deliver a “pitch deck”. The founders know all the right financing terminology — from drag-along rights to anti-dilution provisions — but I’m not sure they always understand their customers.

Often I get the impression that their objective is to raise capital rather than generate sales and develop a profitable enterprise. I’m astonished when I read about would-be entrepreneurs celebrating a new round of finance, because that’s…