Can you quit being an entrepreneur? I’ve thought long and hard about this in the past few months.

It’s been sparked by some fascinating conversations with fellow entrepreneurs and reading Peter Shallard’s Why you should quit your business and get a real job.

I’m not announcing I’m quitting, far from it, but I do want to tell you I’ve thought about it more than once, in the past two years of having my online business.

Image Courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In an effort to offset some of the expected impact of the Affordable Care Act, the executives at Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA) – one of the largest healthcare systems in northwest Tennessee and southwest Virginia – knew they had to make a bold move. They chose to implement lean.

Made famous by Toyota as an efficiency process, lean has been increasingly used in healthcare to eliminate waste and reduce costs.

A new system for visualizing the brain during surgery is helping neurosurgeons more accurately diagnose and treat patients and is even allowing them to perform some procedures that until now have been extremely difficult or even impossible.

Neurosurgeons can use the imaging technology during surgeries that require small objects—biopsy needles, implants, or tubes to deliver drugs—to be placed at precise locations in the brain. The system provides live magnetic resonance images (MRI) that allow surgeons to monitor their progress during the operation.  

Across the country, schools are rushing to introduce entrepreneurship classes. Self-help books for business founders are topping the best-seller lists.

All of which is rekindling an age-old debate in the business world: Is entrepreneurship a skill that can be taught, or one you have to develop by doing?

Education proponents argue that if you can teach people general skills that are useful in business, you can instill lessons about running their own companies, too. What’s more, the proponents argue, research in the field of entrepreneurship has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, so educators can do much more to help entrepreneurs avoid common problems.

Image Courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Discipline may not be the first quality people associate with entrepreneurship. But according to Bill Aulet, senior lecturer and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, discipline is paramount when starting a firm. Moreover, he says, entrepreneurship is a discipline unto itself, and can be taught through a series of steps — many of them involving hands-on experimentation.

This is the approach to entrepreneurship Aulet emphasizes in his new book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” (Wiley), which is based on his teachings at MIT and more than 20 years of firsthand experience with startups.

Start-up accelerator and venture tech company Blue Chilli has launched a new subsidiary to take start-up methodologies and approaches into large corporates keen to tap into the excitement of nimble companies and their quick-to-market development.  

Blue Chilli X will be headed up by Steve Dunn, who has several decades of experience in large financial companies. Dunn launched the new venture at the IPQC Digital Financial Services conference today.  

Image Courtesy of cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There’s no question about it: Business incubators make all the difference for many startups. From low rent to educational opportunities and mentorship, the business incubator phenomenon is making business ownership possible for entrepreneurs who might otherwise never have been able to overcome the barriers to launch their ventures.

The great news for future entrepreneurs is that these days, business incubators are everywhere. Private incubators, government-funded and non-profit incubation facilities are popping up in nearly every city, offering a wide variety of services to businesses in the making.

Image Courtesy of jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

To see big wins in e-commerce today, entrepreneurs need to cover all of their bases, from organic SEO to mobile advertising.

Analytics tools can create a pretty detailed snapshot of where your business stands — too detailed, in some cases.

Curious about which metrics really matter, we asked a panel of successful e-commerce entrepreneurs which pieces of data they measure regularly and what it tells them about their overall strategy. Their best answers are below.

Image Courtesy of adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There's nothing quite like seeing Earth from space. Not only is it a humbling experience to picture oceans and continents scaled down to bite-size pixels; it's an opportunity to observe just how breathtaking our planet truly is.

NASA's Visible Earth collection contains thousands of snapshots from NASA's various satellites as well as observatories on Earth. The project captures photos from various sensors and cameras for countless facets of the planet through different lenses.

Image: NASA

Innovative technology and design consultancy Cambridge Design Partnership today announced the appointment of two new partners and a major investment to expand facilities at its Cambridge base.

The appointment of two new partners, James Baker and Ben Strutt will help build CDP’s management capability and commitment to quality to sustain the company’s future growth plans. The new partners also bring in-depth sector expertise in Cleantech and Consumer Goods to the management team.

Money knows no boundaries, the saying goes.  Apparently, no one bothered to tell venture capital.  Despite the fact that money can theoretically go almost anywhere in the world, venture capital to fuel growing companies is still strongly correlated to geography.  And most regions have little to none.

Why should that be so?  Why are free markets not so free?  And what are the lessons for new regions trying to create their own venture capital?

Image Courtesy of Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I sit on the sand.

The slight breeze brushes the most precarious of formations. One grain tumbles, nudging a few others, a recursive Fibonacci cascade dampening to zero as quickly as it began — an ant-sized, blink-lengthed avalanche. It’s happening everywhere, three times a second, in the corners of perception, yet never where I happen to be currently fixated.

What appeared to be a static scene morphs infinitesimally, perpetually, unpredictably.

Image Courtesy of Victor Habbick / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There has been a spate of articles about a new gadget for preserving wine called the Coravin. What’s not been widely commented on is the fact that the founders raised a lot of money, notably almost $11.5 million in the last round.

The company, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, raised these funds from 106 equity investors, including restaurateur Joe Bastianich who had tested the product–formerly known as the Wine Mosquito–at his restaurant, Del Posto. The CEO, Nicholas Lazaris, ran Keurig before and after it was sold to Green Mountain Coffee Rasters.

In the fashion world, building a business by bootstrapping often requires exceptional ingenuity. After my experience at CHANEL, Elie Tahari, and in the buying departments for global retailers, I bootstrapped my own business — right up until it became clear that we needed outside capital in order to keep growing and building the business.

If you’re thinking about raising capital for your own venture, here are seven insights into how it works — and how to ensure you succeed:

Image Courtesy of jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Venture capitalists have figured out a new way to rank their desirability among entrepreneurs: An auction. A group of 20 Silicon Valley VCs are taking bids for lunch dates, with proceeds going to Presidio Knolls School , a startup Chinese immersion school based in San Francisco. So it's really more about charity than narcissism, but there clearly are some bragging rights involved. And I wouldn't even be surprised if certain limited partners keep tabs on which VCs did (and didn't) garner high bids.

Image Courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

IT HAPPENED TO MICROSOFT WITH STEVE BALLMER; IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. IS YOUR COMPANY READY FOR THE SUDDEN DEPARTURE OF YOUR CEO? THINK PAST SHORT-TERM WINS. BY: ALAN GUARINO 0 COMMENTS EMAIL

The news that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who has held the position for nearly 13 years, will be stepping down in 12 months drove stock prices to jump nearly 7%, an anomaly to the standard. Yet, finding a suitable, long-term replacement for any organization can be challenging, especially in the midst of undergoing a major organizational change. Only time will tell how successful this transition will be for Microsoft, but it is further proof that boards should be making CEO succession and senior leader development a frequent standing agenda item.

Image Courtesy of dream designs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When Brian Muller and Blaine Sheldon took the elevator up to the ninth floor of the New York Times Building this April, they weren’t too sure what to expect. They had been selected as participants in the very first New York Times timeSpace incubator.

“You may call it an accelerator or an incubator; right now we are calling it an experiment,” their website reads.

Muller and Sheldon were representing OpBandit, a media software startup that can change your publication’s headlines and images in real time depending on which are performing best. They were the smallest startup in the program, working alongside Mahaya and Delve.

Private investor network The Ideas Factory (TIF) is to give 100 UK entrepreneurs a kick start through a £1m “incubator fund”.

The seven figure war-chest will be used to get people with good ideas to a stage where they can attract investors. Entrepreneurs will be provided with up to £20,000 of cash, consultancy and training to help them take a good idea and turn it into a viable business proposition.

Image Courtesy of Keattikorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Like a lot of people, I’ve been fascinated by the rapidity with which 3D printing has become more mainstream, whether in printing widgets or human tissue or, even directly useful stuff such as pizza in space.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gotten first-hand access to two such printers. (Neither is mine.) Later in the semester, I’ll post some more detailed reflections and how-to’s and so forth, but I thought I’d give a few first impressions.

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Organizations that are successful at innovation naturally develop a strong innovation culture. But supposing an innovation culture doesn’t yet exist in your organization. Then how can you develop it? 

Organizations that are successful at innovation naturally develop a strong innovation culture.  Such a culture is much appreciated by customers who say that the company is a genuine innovator, and it’s also known among the people inside the organization as a dynamic and innovation-friendly place to be.