Entrepreneurs have a lot to worry about - raising capital, securing patents and trademarks, being first to market, putting together the right team, holding it together, creating buzz, strain on family time -- do you really need to hear about one more area of concern?

A movement to instill invention, innovation and entrepreneurial skills in today’s students is growing across the nation.

The STEMIE Coalition aims to impact youth invention and entrepreneurship by acting as an umbrella organization for 600 K-12 youth groups across the U.S. and sharing best practices, evaluating programs and offering national data around invention and entrepreneurship efforts.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Office of Industrial Partnerships (OIP) has announced the creation of a new, interactive online platform that will help the University’s researchers collaborate better with industry, increase commercialization opportunities and obtain new funding sources for research projects.

The new platform, dubbed Innovation Gateway, will also provide a new, standardized way for faculty to present research approaches and possible solutions to industry challenges and problems.

Image: Penn State

Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson’s contention really is. Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

The headquarters of Alphabet’s X labs in Mountain View, California, is easy to miss. A simple yellow “X” marks the visitors’ entrance to the sprawling building that was once a large indoor shopping mall. But on a weekday in late May, the parking lot is bustling, filled with employees and visitors, as X’s pod-like driverless cars buzz about. Inside, various teams of mostly young people—the company won’t say just how many people are employed at the facility—work on “moon shots,” which Alphabet defines as transformative technologies that could have a huge impact on the world. Besides the driverless cars, publicly identified projects at X include Loon, an effort to use high-altitude balloons to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world; Wing, which is building self-navigating drones for delivering stuff; and Makani, which is developing odd flying wind turbines tethered to a ground station.

A new study on the amount of housework performed by women versus men across dozens of countries has found that, while women still put in vastly more time keeping the house together, the disparity in how much men contribute has gradually decreased in most nations over the past 50 years.

“There is a general movement in the direction of greater gender equality, but with significant country differences in both the level and the pace of convergence,” write the study’s authors, Oxford researchers Evrim Altintas and Oriel Sullivan.

Image: http://motto.time.com

The body is a good generator of heat, and retailers have figured out ingenious ways of trapping all that warmth with all sorts of coverings made from natural and synthetic materials.

But keeping the body cool without external help from fans and air conditioning units is a much bigger challenge. The problem is, any material that is porous enough to release the body’s thermal energy is generally transparent—not a helpful feature in clothing.

Not five years ago, an online retailer called FashionAndYou was considered a better bet than Flipkart. The one-year-old firm owned and operated by business incubator Smile Group had raised $40 million in October 2011, becoming the most well-funded startup in India's nascent online retail market. Overall, it had racked up $48 million from marquee Silicon Valley venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners as well as the investment arms of chipmaker Intel and Finnish phone maker Nokia. Flipkart, launched in 2007, had raised $30 million.

According to the United Nations, 75 percent of the earth’s population, an estimated 4 billion people, have no address. In regions where this is a particular problem – parts of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America – it can be difficult not only for mailing purposes, but for opening a bank account or reaching someone in an emergency.

Image: Monk's huts in Tigray, Ethiopia. (Credit: Rod Waddington/Flickr)

Brooklyn is getting yet another program that’s angling to propel its burgeoning hardware scene.

Meet the Urban Tech Hub, a partnership between the Navy Yard’s massive shared workspace New Lab and the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) that aims to support hardware companies addressing challenges such as transportation, energy and air quality.

Image: http://technical.ly/

Crowdfunding has unquestionably become a popular choice for start-ups and growing companies to raise investment. But what's behind the trend and what does the future hold for the model?

I think it’s important to start by looking at some crowdfunding facts. What first springs to mind is the recent, widely reported, raise from CrowdCube - one of the market leader’s in the UK.

Seedrs is the most active investor in private companies in the UK*, so my role as campaign development associate means that I meet with hundreds of business owners to discuss raising money through equity crowdfunding.

To separate the good entrepreneurs from the great, I often find myself asking these four questions before making a decision on whether they are right for the Seedrs platform, and equity crowdfunding.

The “internet of things” refers to a group of technology so vast the term is beginning to lose meaning.

The internet of things hints at a vision of a ubiquitous network of electronics: refrigerators pinging their owners’ smartphones if they’ve run out of eggs, wearable devices that can detect the tell-tale vibrations of nuclear testing, and cars slowing down based on proximity to other cars. The future of the internet of things is a rich web of sensors constantly amassing more data.

Many in the business community would be delighted to hear that the federal government, as part of its National Innovation and Science Agenda, is proposing to measure the practical ‘impact’ of academic research.

Universities will then be partially funded on their ability to demonstrate this impact in regular government research assessment exercises.

The idea of measuring research impact is based on the contemporary view that universities exist to create new knowledge and impart it to people for the benefit of the community’s wealth, health, security and well-being. They do this in two main ways.

In the light of the UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, this series of sponsored articles challenges experts to give their views on the policies that best support the development of solutions to societies’ greatest challenges and how enabling policy environments, including IP systems, influence the development and flow of new technologies and services in different sectors, fields of technology, and jurisdictions. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors. Below is an interview with Jennifer Dent, President, BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH).

DePaul University has always been ranked among the top entrepreneurship academic programs nationwide, but hasn't produced as many of the high profile startup success stories seen from other universities in the city.

Patrick Murphy (left) and Bruce... Now Bruce Leech, the new director of the Coleman Center for Entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship professor Patrick  Murphy are hoping to change that by focusing on the areas that DePaul students have traditionally been strong--startups that serve international communities, low tech businesses and social enterprise ventures--while connecting student entrepreneurs with incubators, coworking spaces and innovation hubs around the city to combine strong classroom work with experiential learning.

Image: http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co

It’s easy to glamorize the life of an entrepreneur. As the progenitor of a business, you have creative control, which means you get credit for the idea and you get to usher in a tangible enterprise that, in most cases, is entirely yours. You get to call the shots, direct your own efforts and eventually (if things go well) reap the profits of your hard work.

Once founders get their company off the ground, many begin to feel isolated. Developing a network that emphasizes funding, particularly if you are busy delivering your service or directly managing others, takes a back seat to revenue.

Some entrepreneurs find their way out of isolation by joining organizations geared to founders and senior executives. These organizations not only help founders refine their business model or sales pitch, but also can provide direct or indirect access to capital.

Romania has become a more attractive destination for expats than more developed countries such as U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Poland, according to the Expat Insider 2016 survey carried out by expat community network InterNations.

Romania moved up 11 places, from 27th to 16th, in this year’s ranking of the most attractive destinations for expats. It thus surpassed Germany, which dropped one place (from 16th to 17th) compared to last year, the U.S. (down from 13th to 26th), Switzerland (down from 14rh to 31st), Netherlands (down from 25th to 30th), and Poland (down from 15th to 24th).

David Burkus, author of Under New Management, explains why some companies are taking extreme measures to limit electronic communication. Burkus is also a professor at Oral Roberts University and host of the podcast Radio Free Leader.