Entrepreneurship. The mere mention of the word can send tingles up your spine. It seems like there has never been a time in human history where so many people dream of the glory and riches that come with entrepreneurship. It’s exciting. It’s lucrative. And it’s very sexy.

That’s what people think. But the truth is, entrepreneurship can suck sometimes. Actually, in the beginning, it sucks pretty much all of the time. And while it is worth it, and I certainly could not be doing anything else, there are a couple of hard truths that you need to know about entrepreneurship before you start your first business.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — In one corner of the first floor of this bright, open building with a modern industrial feel is a shop room. On the other end of a floor they call the "garage" are a series of small glass offices with white boards and 3D printers. The upper floors of University of Utah's new $45 million Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute are dorm rooms and open spaces with flat-screen TVs and picnic tables, each themed for students studying focused on careers in design, gaming or outdoor adventure.

The facility unveiled Thursday is designed to foster a creative environment to help students launch startup companies. The mantra adorns large banners around the building: "Live. Create. Launch."

Image: http://host.madison.com via Spenser Heaps/The Deseret News via AP

NEW DELHI: GE Healthcare, the USD 18-billion healthcare technology unit of GE, has announced USD 50-million funding aimed at improving services of healthcare startups in developing countries.

GE Healthcare has set up an accelerator -- five.eight -- that will work with global health startups working in areas of disruptive, low-cost technologies and digital applications, which will improve healthcare quality and accessibility in developing or low-resource settings.

Image: The four social impact investors include Acumen, Aavishkaar-Intellecap Group, Unitus Seed Fund and Villgro. 

To be competitive in our global economy, Canadian businesses need the right people and access to critical skills to deliver results quickly. Unfortunately, the battle for such talent is fierce and many employers in the Canadian startup and innovation space struggle to attract and retain key workers. In fact, the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) predicts that, by 2019, Canada will need an additional 182,000 skilled information and communications technology workers alone to meet the domestic needs of employers.

Image: http://betakit.com

IBM Corp. – the 105 year-old computing giant known for its cloud services, Watson analytics platform, and a decision to sell its personal computing division to Lenovo in 2005 – opened a startup incubator in the heart of downtown Toronto today.

The newly-launched IBM Innovation Space will be dedicated to helping tech startups take advantage of IBM’s wide range of technology, legal advice, and marketing expertise as they step into the global marketplace.

HEAD OF THE CLASS

Think about it: There are two primary reasons that you should care about crowdfunding: Either (A) because you’re considering tapping into this funding source or (B) you’re seeking information on general business trends (of which this is one). Whatever your motivation, you’d do well to check out a brief overview on how crowdfunding has done since it’s inception.

Have you ever wanted an out of body experience, sans meditation or drugs?

You may find it with the Carolina Reaper Madness chip, Paqui chips' latest deadly creation. It's literally the hottest chip in the world, and only one chip comes in a package – the package being a coffin-shaped box.

Do immigrants take jobs from Americans and lower their wages by working for less?

The answer, according to a report published on Wednesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is no, immigrants do not take American jobs — but with some caveats.

The question is at the heart of the furious debate over immigration that has divided the country and polarized the presidential race. Many American workers, struggling to recover from the recession, have said they feel squeezed out by immigrants.

It’s usually easier to look back after a business has failed and identify why than it is to save a business from failing in the first place.

However, it begs the question of what a business owner can do if their business is struggling? It’s their “baby” and they are convinced they’re onto a winner, even if it isn’t working out.

Image: http://anthillonline.com

A decade ago, I thought I understood big data. I had worked in information technology for more than a decade and had run a department that handled docs for some of Boston’s more infamous litigation. I remember having to order new drives and storage appliances to handle the gigabytes and gigabytes of documents and emails that our hapless associates had to search and read through. That was a lot of data… or so I thought.

Ninety percent of start-ups fail, some for reasons which were completely avoidable, others because of a lack of confidence, preparation or understanding of what was needed to be successful. I have experienced some of that failure myself. Afterward, there is always that feeling of regret for things that, in hindsight, you would differently if given the opportunity. Here are seven regrets of a failed Entrepreneur.

What do basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, actress Cloris Leachman and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have in common? Research conducted over the past 15 years or so has found that, across industries, jobs and fields of human endeavour, a small number of people are responsible for the vast majority of value creation. Whether we call it the 80/20 rule, the “1%” of the world’s wealthiest people, or use the formal statistical term “power curve”, whenever we measure the outcomes of human behaviour some version of this phenomenon seems to apply.

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

There are lots of problems with brainstorms, but the main one is they don’t go on for long enough. They usually stop when people have run out of ideas and you get those embarrassing silences. But those embarrassing silences are when your unconscious starts engaging on the problem and is a vital part to coming up with great ideas.

The IBM World of Watson 2016 conference kicks off in Las Vegas on October 24. IBM

THE FUTURE OF MEETINGS & EVENTS

The Convention Industry Council hosted its annual Conclave educational conference at the Hilton Baltimore last week. I was invited to moderate a panel on Millennial trends reshaping the meetings industry, based on my collaboration with Meetings Mean Business last year to produce the Skift Trends Report: What Millennials Want in Meetings.

Image: https://skift.com

U.S. research and development (R&D) performance rose to $477.7 billion in 2014 – an increase of $21.1 billion over 2013, according to a recent National Science Foundation (NSF) InfoBrief. When adjusted for inflation, growth in U.S. total R&D performance (1.2 percent annually between 2008 and 2014) matched the average pace of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Of the $477.7 billion in R&D funding, approximately 63 percent ($300.1 billion) went to experimental development with the remaining 37 percent supporting basic research ($84 billion) and applied research ($93.6 billion).

For the founders of Trace Genomics, strawberries are the low-hanging fruit.

The company's cofounders, Diane Wu and Poornima Parameswaran, are borrowing 23andMe's model and applying it to agriculture. For $199, growers—and the suppliers that sell fertilizers and seeds to them—can collect a sample of soil from their crops' roots using a special kit and send it back to Trace's lab for analysis. The company will then share the results of its pathogen panel, which tests the sample for tiny organisms like bacteria, viruses, and fungi that are associated with plant blight. For now, the offering is limited to some 30 diseases affecting strawberries and lettuce.

Image: Flickr user U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jennifer Aldridge

Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar’s startup Imbellus, a company designed to assess human potential and ultimately change the way we teach children. We led a $4 million investment along with Thrive Capital, GLG and Sound Ventures. The news blogs will cover the what, how and how much but I want to focus on the “why” and try to be instructive of what I think makes for a great A-round startup.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday China would promote economic development by opening up its economy more widely as experience showed closed door policies only brought stagnation.

"We will promote development through expanding, opening up," Li said in a speech to the annual United Nations General Assembly.

"China's experience in the past decades has proven that a closed-door policy only leads to stagnation and backwardness ... China will open its door even wider to the outside world."

Image: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a High Level Leaders meeting on Refugees on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York, U.S. September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Dundee Venture Capital, an investment firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, has raised $20 million for its third fund and is looking at St. Louis for potential deals.

The fund is expected to grow to $30 million, according to Dundee officials.

Enlarge The fund, according to a Dundee release, will be deployed into seed and early-stage investments targeting e-commerce, business-to-business Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and consumer-network focused startups in the Midwest region, including St. Louis, Denver, Omaha, Lincoln, Nebraska, Kansas City, Madison, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Chicago.

If there was an overriding message at last week’s Mayo Clinic Transform 2016 conference and what was arguably its highlight – the Think Big Challenge – it was that Mayo leaders are firmly committed to their recent entrepreneurial direction. For them, it’s now all about the transformation of medical innovations into market action.  

That ethos was on full display at Think Big Challenge held at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, where five startup CEOs were competing for a $50,000 seed investment from Mayo Clinic Ventures. The Challenge’s aim is to help match new health care technologies developed by clinicians with the right business partners. Mayo has a long list of potential health care innovations that are currently sitting on the shelf waiting for entrepreneurs to take them to market.