At every step in his career, Ayr Muir made the “right” choice: MIT, Harvard Business School and McKinsey - could there be a more ideal career path? Then Ayr decided to leave his high-paying consulting job to get a job flipping burgers.  

What Muir didn’t tell most people was his secret ambition - to build a health-conscious and environmentally-friendly fast food restaurant chain that will someday eclipse McDonalds in size. To achieve this, Ayr realized early on that his assumptions would almost always be wrong. and that he only way to succeed would be to take ego out of the equation.

Maybe this is heresy in the era of the entrepreneur, but the truth is you can have an exciting, fulfilling, and lucrative career by getting a real job and climbing the corporate ladder. Millions of people do. I did.

Not only that, but it's the best way I know to expose yourself to ideas and opportunities in whatever field you're passionate about, gain critical insights and lessons from a lot of really smart people, and learn how things work in the real world.

Look, I work with loads of entrepreneurs and small business owners and I'm sorry to say that most of them lack the practical knowledge and skills that are essential to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

My niece Sarah is one of the do-gooders with an entrepreneurial bent who's blurring nonprofit and for-profit activities.

Through micro-lending, Individual Development Accounts, creative marketing and a novel kind of stock offering, these disruptors are re-imagining charitable giving and re-purposing investment tools.

Now we need policies and financial instruments to catch up to the movement.

In two days, Ameya Kulkarni will stand before 200 potential investors and experienced entrepreneurs at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley. He'll pitch an idea he dreamed up in business school at Duke University, a start-up he believes transforms the way job searches happen.

Kulkarni feels a little pressure. He's a first-time company founder and just one month off the North Carolina graduation stage. But he's also confident in the skills he developed at Duke.

FOUNDER and CEO of US-based Chobani Greek Yogurt, which operates the largest yoghurt factory in the world, Hamdi Ulukaya, became the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 in Monte Carlo on Saturday night. He beat 48 country finalists to the title, including CEO of South African miner Exxaro, Sipho Nkosi.

Turkish-born Mr Ulukaya founded Chobani in upstate New York in 2005 and launched Chobani Greek Yogurt two years later. Less than six years after launch it is the best-selling yogurt brand in the US with annual sales approaching $1bn. Chobani has 3,000 employees and sells also its products to Australia and the UK.

The D.C. region is home to some 765,000 jobs that require knowledge in science, technology, engineering and math, representing 27 percent of the overall workforce, according to a report released Monday by the Brookings Institution. Only Silicon Valley ranked higher in percentage of STEM labor. Greater Washington has consistently ranked near or at the top of the nation in STEM job rankings, owing largely to the federal government and the contracting industry surrounding it, which grew rapidly following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The region also boasts a substantial cluster of commercial tech companies - many of them situated along the Dulles corridor and Interstate 270 - as well as a small but growing software startup scene.

Ever wondered why some companies get all the attention and others don’t? As society we have become obsessed with the flashy and the shiny. Developers want to build to that and companies innovate around it. This is not a bad thing. In Africa, the startup scene is becoming highly contested. But while there are five million startups only about one million of them are interesting and only half them are good but only a quarter will get funding and 10% will gain traction and only five percent will make it.

Germany's relatively strong economy has led to a proliferation of "minijobs," a special employment classification originally designed for stay-at-home mothers that allows people to earn up to 450 euros a month tax-free. About 7.4 million people, or nearly 1 in 5 working Germans, now hold these low-wage, part-time positions, which include restaurant and clinic work, says the Wall Street Journal. Proponents say minijobs give employers flexibility to adjust their workforces and keep wages low; opponents say they trap workers in marginal occupations.

When a professor from a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania decided to take on a massive research project two summers ago, he went through the usual, often futile, process of applying for federal and private grants. But when funds were short a year later, he went down a nontraditional route -- turning to the public and the Internet for help. In 50 days, Juniata College’s Chris Grant and his research partner, Gina Lamendella, raised $10,800 through a crowdfunding website called iAMscientist. The money was used to fund an ongoing project on the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on Pennsylvania’s stream ecosystems.

Company culture may form differently depending on the company.  Regardless of how it is formed, it can ultimately reflect the successful or not-so-successful nature of the company.  Founder of Invasion CEO Nick Steiert points out what to expect and what to look out for when introducing new employees to the company culture. 

Several years ago, I started working for a computer store near my home. My boss was a gentle giant of a man, smart, kind to a fault, hard working, uncomplaining and put in long hours to make his business work. He’d started the business in his early twenties, had loyal customers, made a decent living and had won some local small business awards.

He had a cloud hanging over his head though – a significant tax debt. He’d done his own books for years to save money, but small errors in accounting procedures and calculations had added up to a big mess. Eventually the tax office caught up with him – and it wasn’t fun. It cost him more than the original value of the taxes, and took him years to pay back. Years spent carrying the mental and emotional stress of that unnecessary debt.

Starting a new business is never as easy or as simple as one might think. Failure is a real probability with any new business, many within the first year. Other businesses take hold and grow into solid enterprises that bring economic stability for the owners. However, in order to succeed, business owners need to do much more than simply launch a business without considering the ramifications of operating a business on both a day-to-day and long-term basis.

Most patients who enter the gym of the San Mateo Medical Center in California are there to work with physical therapists. But a few who had knee replacements are being coached by a digital avatar instead.

The avatar, Molly, interviews them in Spanish or English about the levels of pain they feel as a video guides them through exercises, while the 3-D cameras of a Kinect device measure their movements. Because it’s a pilot project, Paul Carlisle, the director of rehabilitation services, looks on. But the ultimate goal is for the routine to be done from a patient’s home.

Putting together this publication’s annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, which comes out each spring, is a long and involved process. So I’m exceedingly curious about what other people come up with when they take on roughly the same question, which is “what are the most important technologies to watch in the coming years?” One such report is now out from researchers with the McKinsey consulting company who identify 12 technologies that they think will be the most “disruptive” over the next decade.

Investors recently chipped in $15 million to fund battery startup EOS Energy Storage, a company that says its batteries could eventually compete with natural-gas power plants to provide power during times of peak demand.

Cheap energy storage is becoming increasingly important as greater numbers of wind turbines and solar panels are added to the grid. If renewable energy is to replace the fossil fuels that dominate power supplies and serve to backup wind turbines and solar panels, very large-scale, inexpensive batteries like the ones EOS is developing will be needed (see “Wind Turbines, Battery Included, Can Keep Power Supplies Stable,” “Battery Could Provide a Cheap Way to Store Solar Power,” and “A Solution to Solar Power Intermittency”).

For more than a decade, young Swiss entrepreneurs have benefited from training aimed at helping them get off on the right foot in the business world. With appropriate coaching, they can reach the market faster and avoid costly mistakes. A pellet of dough in the top of the machine, press a button, and hey presto, a fresh, warm tortilla comes out the other side. If the founder of a Swiss start-up has his way, his innovation could be coming to a kitchen near you.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius opens Health Datapalooza IV with an emphatic introduction speech asking those in attendance to continue driving more ideas and innovation in data and information exchange to improve the future of the US health system.

The European Environment Agency today (5 June) predicted a rise in extreme weather events due to climate change as floods caused deaths and widespread property damage in Central Europe. Days of heavy rain over the past week have left parts of the Czech capital Prague, Austria and Germany under water, killing at least 11 people. More than 10,000 have been evacuated from their homes in Germany, with analysts predicting the spread of the floods to Slovakia and Hungary in the coming days.

If we take a look at some of the most prominent female leaders, we can see that many of them share similar traits that have helped get them to the top of their professions.

So what does it mean to be an effective female leader? And how does one get into a position of power?

I’ve examined the lives of some of the top women across many industries--from Arianna Huffington, president of the Huffington Post Media Group, to Maria Eitel, CEO of the Nike Foundation, to Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, and others. Here are the characteristics they all share.

Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., is the place where a good idea can often evolve into something new: a good idea with a budget and influential friends.

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News Now there’s a powerful new player at the base of Sand Hill Road, one that wants to work alongside venture capitalists and perhaps even offer them exits from some of their more promising medical-technology investments.

After opening up successful “innovation centers” in London and Boston, Johnson & Johnson has landed in Silicon Valley, moving investors, executives and clinical specialists into a locale that will put the company in direct contact with medical-technology startups and the venture firms that are frequently their financial engines.