As a long-time mentor and advisor to new business owners, I can attest to both the need for mentoring, and the satisfaction that comes from watching an aspiring but tentative entrepreneur grow into someone capable of changing the world. Business is not rocket science, and one-on-one guidance face-to-face, with a real project, trumps the classroom and mistakes every time.

Image: Image via Flickr by World Economic Forum 

They are artists and managers, drivers on call and professionals who are ready to hop a plane to lend their expertise at a moment’s notice. They are gig workers, independent contractors who have shucked the shackles of corporate life for the freedom to choose their own assignments on their own time.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST - Shares of Lyft (NASDAQ:LYFT) were still sagging days after the ride-hailing service had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. And that had Maryland Smith's David Kass offering some advice.

In what's poised to be a big year for big-name IPOs, Kass lists five reasons to ease up on the gas pedal and proceed with caution.

NASA picked three teams to share a $100,000 prize from a competition to make virtual Martian habitats. 

The 11 participating groups were tasked with making a full-scale habitat using modeling software, building on an earlier stage of the competition that required partial virtual modeling.

The teams were graded on their layout, programming, use of interior space, and their habitat's ability to be scaled to full size for construction, according to a NASA statement announcing the winners. The groups also received points for their aesthetic representation and realism. 

Image: One of the winning teams of a NASA competition to make a full-scale Mars habitat using modeling software, Team SEArch+/Apis Cor, designed this Martian abode, which is built from the upper part of a Hercules Single-Stage Reusable Vehicle.(Image: © Team SEArch+/Apis Cor)

With the cost of entry at an all-time low, and the odds of success equally low, more and more entrepreneurs are starting multiple companies concurrently. This “parallel entrepreneur” idea has been around since at least the days of Thomas Edison, and for the new generation of entrepreneurs, who have been multi-tasking since birth, it’s probably not even a stretch.

Image: Image via Flickr by watsonsinelgin 

Venture capitalists make decisions constantly about whether or not to invest in various startups. The majority of the time, the answer is no. There can be many reasons for this decision, including that the startup is not within the firm’s focus or stage of desired investment. But assuming the company is within the investment parameters of the fund, here are 15 key determining factors for whether a venture firm will or will not decide to invest in a startup that is seeking venture capital.

Innovate. Innovate. Innovate. That’s the common theme in today’s economy. Innovation stimulates entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurship creates net new jobs.

Driving innovation through collaboration to create jobs is the entire reason for being of the public-private consortium of the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST), the Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance (OMA), the Oklahoma State University New Product Development Center (NPDC), and i2E.

Maputo revealed to me how contemporary cities go beyond that absurd dichotomy of the “formal” and “informal” city. In Maputo, city managers talk of the separation between a “city of concrete”–the old colonial city, designed by the Portuguese–and the “city of reed”–the neighbourhoods, or barrios, where most of the population live. The latter often lack basic infrastructure such as water, sanitation, and electricity.

Image: Photo: Rohan Reddy/Unsplash

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A tech entrepreneur and his wife have made a very Silicon Valley donation to his San Francisco alma mater — $25 million, mostly in cryptocurrency.

The gift from Chris Larsen, founder of cryptocurrency company Ripple, and his wife Lyna Lam, to San Francisco State University is already giving officials an education in digital financial services.

Venesia Thompson-Ramsay, interim vice president for university advancement, said Friday the November donation came in as about 56 million XRP — one of thousands of digital-only currencies.

This week has seen Google pull the plug on two products it once had hight hopes for: Google Inbox and Google+. They now join the huge company’s cemetery of applications, services or hardware, which currently hosts 158 graves; not bad for a company that is barely 20 years old. Old timers like myself have grown weary of Google’s penchant for simply announcing that a service is finished, usually without giving any reasonable explanation as to why.

Companies, nations and even continents are all striving to facilitate digital innovation and power the transformation of their economies and fortunes. As a recent report from EU innovation agency EIT Digital reveals, digital transformation of industry promises to have a significant impact upon European society. It's a vision that is not being achieved at the moment however, and EIT Digital CEO Willem Jonker warns that Europe risks falling further and further behind the United States and China.

People often say that “failure is the mother of success.” This cliché might have some truth to it, but it does not tell us how to actually turn a loss into a win, says Emmanuel Manalo, a professor of educational psychology at Kyoto University in Japan. As a result, he says, “we know we shouldn't give up when we fail—but in reality, we do.”

Cats are notorious for their indifference to humans: Almost any owner will testify to how readily these animals ignore us when we call them. But according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports, domestic cats do recognize their own names—even if they walk away when they hear them.

Gaithersburg, April 5, 2019 – MIMETAS announces the opening of a brand-new office and laboratory in Gaithersburg, MD, USA. The new location provides MIMETAS with capacity for further growth in the USA and to strengthen local customer support, product development and sales of the OrganoPlate®, a versatile, high-throughput 3D microfluidic cell culture device.

A new HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” chronicles the rise and demise of Theranos, a health-tech company that claimed to have designed blood tests requiring a very small amount of blood. Its inexpensive tests could, it claimed, be administered and analyzed without a physician or a lab, thereby bringing healthcare closer to the consumer. Theranos received endorsements from a series of influential figures, including former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The company’s peak valuation reached $9 billion.

Recently my friends saw a cyclist coming down the local mountain in 20-degree weather. They thought it was crazy and commented on how and how they would never do such an insane thing. Though, this cyclist, whom I know personally, competes at a high level. Do you want to compete at a high level? Well, I sure do as a business owner, and I happen to be a cyclist as well, so this really hit home for me.

As societies and markets increasingly insist that corporations generate positive social impact alongside profit, investors have taken notice. The global impact investing market alone, for instance, doubled from $114 billion in 2017 to $228 billion in 2018, and will almost certainly continue to accelerate. 1

In the face of this encouraging trend, many entrepreneurs are starting for-profit companies with a social mission. But many find that the traditional corporate form, the C-Corporation, does not adequately protect a company's commitment to generating both profits and positive impact.

As head of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb has been outspoken about drug pricing, chiming in on an area that is typically tangential to the agency commissioner’s purview. In the first announcement of his next steps — made one day before he’s scheduled to officially end his shorter-than-expected tenure — Gottlieb says he’s returning to the American Enterprise Institute as a resident fellow focused on these exact issues.

The nation’s high-density central business districts of the major metropolitan areas have the largest shares of adults over the age of 25 with bachelor’s degrees or higher, which is consistent with popular perception. At the same time, because such a small percentage of people live in the central business districts, by far the most bachelors degree and higher adults live in the suburbs.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

The U.S. unemployment rate is near its 50-year low, but the portion of the population in the labor force is also near a 40-year low. Because business expansion is difficult during periods of extremely low unemployment, a key economic development question is how much the labor force participation rate may increase — bringing more potential employees to the job market and easing the hiring crunch for employers.