Whether you’re on a plane traveling to your next meeting, taking vacation on the beach, or out on the prairie, there are five must-read books you need to bring with you. It’s a list of new bestsellers and old classics and, no matter the season, every entrepreneur should have a well-read, dog-eared copy of each on their shelf.

As people are trying to navigate away from the “corporate jungle” towards the land of supposed “entrepreneurial utopia,” a lot of misconceptions arise.  Perhaps this has to do with the media, advice they have received or what is heard through the grapevine but often these insights can derail a person from taking the plunge in the startup world. Or cause them to jump on the entrepreneurial bandwagon, when they have no business doing so.

While considerable attention has been heaped on the public health insurance exchanges over the year, private health insurance exchanges “are experiencing hyper-growth” and enrollment could exceed that of public exchanges by 2017, “if not sooner,” according to Accenture.

In a recent report, Accenture said employers, consumers and carriers alike are expressing enthusiasm for private exchanges, which are undergoing “an earlier-than-expected growth spurt.” More than 3 million individuals could enroll in health plans through private exchanges just during the 2014 benefit year, Accenture estimates.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

As the baby in my family, I have grown up watching those older than me graduate.

For as long as I can remember, I perceived this time to be nothing but egg-citing and even a relief for the graduates. For many of us, we have spent most of our childhood and adolescent years saying “I can’t wait to get into the working world”, “when I grow up I want be a scientist”, or “I can’t wait to never study again”.

Summer internships? No, thank you. Dozens of Wharton MBAs opted to build and run their own companies this summer, and Wharton made it easy: they offered the students free office space in Center City.

Last year was the first time that Wharton offered office space to MBA-led startups during the summer. Due to high demand, it was a “no-brainer” to do it again, said Renzo Weber, one of Wharton’s associate directors of student life. The summer office space may become a perk that MBAs come to expect, he added. The space will shut down for the summer this week to make space for new MBAs.

Image: Wharton MBA Lauren Raouf is the cofounder of My Best Friend's Weekend, a bachelorette party planning service. (Photo by Juliana Reyes)

MBA International, in its quest to supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, continues its successful collaboration with MSD, the global healthcare leader, and Industry Disruptors – Game Changers to offer up to 10 scholarships to applicants for the “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” Major of the Full-time program for the academic year 2014-2015.

Scholarships will be awarded to candidates with innovative ideas resulting from academic research with business development potential or to entrepreneurs in the first stages of designing or developing a scalable start-up venture. Candidates must show that with their ideas, knowledge, talent and drive they have the potential to become industry disruptors and game changers with global reach. The scholarships cover all tuition and other I-MBA fees.

You can tell a lot about a person's mental state just by looking at their body language. Are they laid back, or fidgety? Are they happy, or sad? Are they confident, or shy? But one thing you can't detect is whether he or she is smart or dumb, creative or an unimaginative lump. Or can you?

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

If you've ever brought a bike along on a flight or packed up the parts to ship across the country, you know that trying to move a bike around is expensive. It also tends to slightly offset some of the environmental benefits of riding, since a box holding a bulky frame takes up a lot of space on a delivery truck. That's why this new design concept shrinks down a bike so it fits in a backpack.

Image: Trying to move a bike around is expensive. That's why this bike fits into a backpack. - http://www.fastcoexist.com

I saw the massive line of interns long before I could see the venue. The young crowd waiting outside Broadway Studios in San Francisco on Tuesday chatted with friends and checked their phones, eagerly awaiting to get inside.

Image: Interns line up outside of Internapalooza - http://readwrite.com

Venture capital funding is at its highest level since 1999. Tech IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions are on the rise. Bidding wars are breaking out for top talent. Could we be floating into another tech bubble?

No -- or, at least, not yet. I don't see the frenzied pace of funding, startups, and public offerings evident during the infamous dot-com bubble. But things are getting frothier, and one area does worry me.

Image: http://www.informationweek.com

Finnish educator and scholar Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices. The author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?”and a former director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation, Sahlberg is now a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has written a number of important posts for this blog, including “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools,” and “What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.”

The startup world will perk up to hear that RockthePost and CoFoundersLab  recently merged to form Onevest. Together the two companies will provide a single source for startup founders to not only find investors but also find the right co-founders all online. A Bit of History First, there were two separate companies. Alejandro Cremades and Tanya Prive noticed a lack of structure in how startups secured early stage financing. If you live in Silicon Valley then sure, you technically had more access to investors than someone in say, Little Rock, Arkansas. But that made the playing field uneven. That doesn’t even take into account how much competition there is to get a single investor’s money.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com/

The hour of your big interview has arrived, and you know you’re going to nail it. You’ve done your research and memorized your talking points. At this point, you could talk about the company in your sleep — right down to where the interviewer attended undergrad and the exact number of Wall Street Journal mentions the company has had in the past six months.

But when the interviewer asks you to talk about yourself, you freeze, realizing with horror that you didn’t prepare enough to deliver your elevator pitch. You smile politely, shift in your chair and say, “well…um…” as your mind frantically struggles to string something together.

There are two types of people in the world: those who love the beach, and those who just don't get it.

Many want nothing more than to spend the entirety of their days sprawled out in the sand, as they craft a perfectly even tan. Others find the beach a salty, sand-infested nightmare that houses sea monsters, sunburns, and countless ways to be uncomfortable.

Image: IMGUR, MAINSTREETSTEVE

I was sitting with the founders of a company we’ve funded the other day talking about their competition. I love this product and I use it every day. It doesn’t yet have widespread adoption, but it as extremely actively used by the early adopters.

This company has several competitors – long time incumbents with somewhat stale, but useful products, and several new competitors, including well-funded and noisy ones. I use several of these products regularly in different situations and have encouraged the founders to use them also.

Image: http://sxc.hu

As an avid follower of Steve Blank’s lean startup methodology, I was thrilled to learn that he was going to do a fireside chat on customer discovery and validation, hosted by Professor Len Lodish, at the Wharton Entrepreneurship Annual Summer Reception at WhartonǀSan Francisco. I’ve read up on Blank’s methodologies in my own time and been exposed to them in Professor Ethan Mollick’s Entrepreneurship class, and I’m trying to incorporate his framework in developing my own venture. I’m currently in my second year of Wharton’s EMBA program and a member of Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program (VIP), Wharton’s incubator program for students pursuing entrepreneurial ventures.

Image: Steve Blank chatting with Wharton Professor Len Lodish. - http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

In the twenty-first century, the crucial element of a more-perfect society is innovation. Or so think tanks, urban planners, and entrepreneurs would have you believe. A recent report by the Brookings Institution confirms the dawn of “innovation districts,” a new urban strategy designed to maximize collaboration and creativity with the promise of launching us into the future. 

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

So you have the Big Idea. You have the passion. You have the business plan. You can see your future success. All you need now is money in the bank, right?

Probably nine out of 10 startups are where you are, in need of operating capital. There’s no question ample cash reserves make launching a new business considerably easier, yet it’s possible to bootstrap a product, even a company, without investors or a big credit line.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

With their widespread entrance into the workplace, millennials are bringing new requirements of employee engagement that include creativity, entrepreneurialism, and accelerated career growth. Research by Deloitte is projecting that millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025. They are supportive of--and engaged with--companies that care about more than a high-profit margin.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Whenever Baltimore-area companies sell themselves to out-of-state firms, economists and local leaders alike bemoan the loss. Another headquarters gone. Fewer corporate decision-makers here. Possible job cuts.

But Silicon Valley's deals for two Columbia firms — the planned Micros Systems acquisition, announced last week, and Sourcefire last year — strike local entrepreneurs in an entirely different way.

Image: Co-founders Guy Filippelli (left) and Renny McPherson are reflected on a board with names of team members at RedOwl Tuesday, Jun 24, 2014. (Karl Merton Ferron, Baltimore Sun / June 22, 2014)