Widespread debate about how to reform the U.S. immigration system has become a major theme in this year’s presidential race. The growing awareness of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has sparked Republican candidate Donald Trump to promise that, if elected, he would round up all “illegal” immigrants and expel many of them from the United States upon taking office. Even scholars who reject such extreme measures as impractical and counter-productive argue that U.S. immigration policy needs to undergo significant reforms.

When it comes to workplace events that produce resentment and anxiety, few score higher than the big annual performance review. Calls to end this time-consuming and often unproductive practice have gone unheeded — until now. Recently, Adobe, Kelly Services, GE, Deloitte and PwC have ended them, and the rippling out to smaller firms and other sectors appears to be underway. To which many say: good riddance.

One of the first questions we ask clients is, “How do you own your family business?” Often the response is legalistic: “We are a limited liability company”  or “Our shares are held in trust.” This information is essential, of course, but it leaves unanswered the more fundamental questions: “In your family business system, who gets to be an owner? And what, precisely, does ownership mean to you?”

Image: https://hbr.org

Jyväskylä, Finland -- The 11th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship was held last week at this picturesque university town in the central Finnish “Lake District.”

9 ways to bend Windows 10 to your will Customize Windows 10 to your liking, not theirs. READ NOW Stanford University’s Henry Etzkovitz gave the opening keynote on “Triple Helix Innovation in a Crisis.”

Etzkovitz originated the concept of “Triple Helix,” for the combined efforts of government, industry, and academia in regional economic development. He declared that in the knowledge era, the academic strand of the helix is the critical component.

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Mark J. Kohler -- author of best-selling title The Tax and Legal Playbook -- goes over successful crowdfunding strategies. 

There are four rules that you must comply with as a business owner in order to crowdfund. Working with an SEC-approved portal, collecting the right formation and disclosure documents, supplying detailed expansions of the disclosure documents and ongoing compliance are the necessary steps to successful crowdfunding, Kohler says. 

For the first time in 80 years, thanks to Regulation Crowdfunding, startups and small businesses can raise up to $1 million from friends, family, customers and non-accredited investors. As of May 16, 2016, the JOBS Act’s Title III Regulation Crowdfunding exemption enables capital-raising via Securities and Exchange Commission-registered websites.

Prior to this SEC provision, entrepreneurs’ financing options came down to personal savings, credit cards, banks (if they could qualify) and angels or VCs (if they were among the lucky few). While most media attention about this new opportunity has focused on an entrepreneur’s ability to sell shares (equity) in his or her high-growth-potential company, a real (and neglected) opportunity is for Main Street businesses to raise debt capital through crowdfunding.

Paul Freedman was having lunch at Delmonico’s — not the original, which opened in the early 19th century, but a relic of it in the financial district. Lobster Newburg was still on the menu, the meat napped with a brandy-spiked butter.

“But the sauce used to have much, much more brandy in it,” Mr. Freedman said. “The style now is less severe.”

Even surfing can teach you how to be a better entrepreneur. 

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Bryan Elliott meets with professional surfer Tia Blanco to discover what she likes most about her career. 

Blanco doesn't surf for the fame, she surfs because it's what she loves to do. She says she thinks it's important for people to do what they love -- in both business and life. Surfing keeps her humble, happy and surrounded by people she cares about.

For those who are familiar with the principles of social entrepreneurship, the dividends they create for society are obvious, and the case for encouraging more of this kind of enterprise development is intuitive. As Thulsi Ravilla, the Executive Director of the highly acclaimed social enterprise Aravind in India put it, “Whether you are talking about cardiac care or education, the fundamental question is: ‘How do you provide it for everyone?’”

Dan Lyons knew his book would put him at risk. A former tech journalist and author, he’d written plenty of things that had made people angry at him — this was the guy, after all, who famously authored a blog that mocked Steve Jobs  — but this was the first time he’d do something that had the power to really change his own prospects.

Yesterday, Deputy Secretary of Commerce Bruce Andrews addressed the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Conference about the success of this national public-private partnership in catalyzing U.S. manufacturing and evolving to better support manufacturers. The Deputy Secretary referenced his own experience at Ford to speak about the recovery in American manufacturing since the financial crisis, and particularly the recent successes of the auto industry.

Image: http://nistmep.blogs.govdelivery.com

Good news, not so good news... On the positive side, governments have launched a series of significant new initiatives designed to inject capital into the Middle East’s entrepreneurial sector. To cite two examples, Saudi Arabia will establish a $1.1 billion fund to develop its venture capital industry, and Dubai will invest over $270 million in a program for enabling rapid development of transformative technologies. Across the region, we are seeing a welcome commitment by governments and private investors to encourage and fund entrepreneurship. The goal is simple: to spur innovation and economic development.

Image: http://www.forbesmiddleeast.com 

We picked a peck of pickle pictures to show you how helpful bacteria and salt transform this cucumber into a tangy treat.

Elon Musk’s rocket-building company SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos’s similar Blue Origins have grabbed the headlines in the space race. But there is a fascinating backstory about how the private space industry came into being. It is the tale of a renegade entrepreneur, Peter Diamandis, who founded the XPrize Foundation to encourage rocket-building in order to find a way into space himself.

Image: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., last December. (Reuters) 

The candidates for president have responded to America's Top 20 Science, Engineering, Tech, Health & Environmental Issues in 2016. These key issues affect voters’ lives as much as the foreign policy, economic policy, and faith and values views that candidates traditionally share with journalists on the campaign trail. Several of America’s leading science and engineering organizations are urging the candidates and the press to give them equal priority in the national dialogue. For three cycles, presidential candidates have chosen to share their views here, as the Democratic and Republican candidates did in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, we also invited the Green and Libertarian candidates.

Image: http://sciencedebate.org 

Bloomberg has upped its managing editor of Bloomberg Digital, Michael Shane, to the new role of global head of digital innovation.

Shane will remain based in New York but will spend time in each region looking at new opportunities to grow audience, engagement, and revenue – focusing on six months to two-years or more into the future.

The New York Times business bestseller Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle which explores the roots of Israeli innovation has garnered global attention and won its co-authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer worldwide fame overnight. In a recent interview with Global Times reporter Zhang Ni (GT) in Beijing, Singer (S), who served as an adviser to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee before moving to Israel in 1994, said he believes China is more innovative than people think. He suggested that China is ahead of the US in some aspects, as Facebook is now trying to copy China's WeChat.

Image: Courtesy of Saul Singer

The internal organization that manages a company’s M&A processes has always been a major contributor to the success of its deals. Today, as companies increasingly choose to manage their M&A processes internally, without the support of financial advisers,1 it’s all the more important to have the right team in place. This team must not only be skilled at screening acquisition targets, conducting due diligence, and integrating acquired businesses but also have the size, structure, and credibility to influence the rest of the company.

Since I’ve started working in the entrepreneurship space, women founders have slowly but surely started breaking into the tech space. While it’s not nearly equivalent to the number of men, the number of women who are co-founding or founding companies has nearly doubled from 9.5 percent of startups in 2009 to 18 percent in 2014.

But what hasn’t increased at the same time are the number of women investors. You may ask yourself why that should matter – don’t all investors just want to make the best deals? Does the female/male ratio really matter?

If the UN Secretary General and the members of his “High Level Panel on Access to Medicines” thought the State Department was bluffing when it warned against their attempt to make intellectual property the fall guy for the lack of health care in poor countries, they were rudely awakened Friday afternoon. Disdaining diplomatic niceties, less than two days after the UN report issued, State bluntly replied in a statement titled “U.S. Disappointed Over Fundamentally Flawed Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines.” Compounding the pain, the same day five prominent university associations issued a joint paper taking the report apart. Being directly and publicly rebuked in this manner is a new experience for the Secretary General and his minions– but one they richly deserve.