But refusing to contemplate failure may be a B-school grad’s biggest drawback Over the past two decades since liberalisation, a number of trends have begun converging and leading to a critical mass of the elements needed for a breakout in entrepreneurship.

First, of course, is the dramatic rise in the number of young people who have earned a good technical or business education.

Second is the phenomenal rise in the value of our market capitalisation, which provides the incentive to these young people to stay on in India and look for the payoff right here at home.

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In what may be a critical breakthrough for creating artificial organs, Harvard researchers say they have created tissue interlaced with blood vessels.

Using a custom-built four-head 3-D printer and a “disappearing” ink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewis and her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures. Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is the first made through 3-D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple, patterned cell types.

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Detroit — Michigan’s economy needs people who are willing to take risks and start a business — and that’s exactly what higher education needs, too, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman said Monday.

“The principles we teach our students about entrepreneurship are the exact same principles all of higher education needs to navigate in today’s economy,” Coleman told the Detroit Economic Club in an address at the Westin Book Cadillac. “It is time for higher education to become the innovators we are teaching our students to be.”

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If you read the business press, you probably think the answer is yes. The popular media is full of stories about start-ups like Facebook, Groupon, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, Yelp, and Zinga. American entrepreneurs are starting high tech companies at a feverish pace, the media experts say. Perhaps you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the popular press. Careful analysis of Census data outlined in new report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation shows that entrepreneurial activity in the high tech sector has declined substantially over the past decade.

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With all the technological advancements being made to cars both on the driver-facing and internal ends, it’s easy forget that the stuff we drive on is still a pretty low tech with the choices pretty much limited to asphalt or concrete.

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Have you noticed that more companies beg you to participate in their business today? It started with an email survey on your last stay at their hotel, but now includes requests for online product reviews, to social media input on the design of future products. They do it because engaged customers become loyal advocates and buyers. Welcome to the “Participation Age” of marketing.

Some say it’s happening today because it’s new, and technology makes it possible. Others say it stems from Intrinsic Motivation Theory, which asserts that people have always been motivated by a desire to join, share, take part, connect, and engage, and find that experience rewarding. In any case, your business needs it today to rise above the crowd and edge out competitors.

Entrepreneur, writer and academic Vivek Wadhwa, known for his work at Singularity University and writing on high skilled immigration, said it best in Moscow when he said “we don’t need governments to solve our problems anymore; we have entrepreneurs for that”.

This message set the tone for the first day of the Congress that focused on policy and programs that run up against age-old, intractable roadblocks for entrepreneurs in cities and communities around the globe. The example of Italy’s recent startup legislation overhaul, as outlined by Italy’s lead startup policy guru, Alessandro Fusacchia and Start-Up Chile founder Nicolás Shea, offered GEC delegates evidence that smart pro-entrepreneur policymaking is politically possible.

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When I was growing up, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the concept of “building relationships.” In high school, my friends were my classmates and teammates, and in college, it seemed like I met people everywhere I went.

While attending college, I never really had to think about building and maintaining relationships. They simply came about as a result of living on a college campus surrounded by 30,000 students. However, the working world is not a college campus.

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Your business can’t be all things to all people, and do everything well. Every entrepreneur and every business needs a strategy to keep them focused. In fact, in this new world of pervasive interactivity, it’s time to rethink even how to develop a strategy. Strategy used to come from the inside looking out, but now it must come from a dialogue and engagement with constituents.

When looking to grow business, many entrepreneurs begin hiring for quantity, not quality. But doing so can result in high turnover and hours and money wasted. Growth doesn’t happen in six months, a year or even two years; substantial growth happens five years from today, and is facilitated by quality employees.

Companies should be concerned with hiring intelligent people, people who can empathize with others and can cultivate and maintain meaningful client relationships. That means hiring for personality and culture fit rather than a skill set.

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CHICAGO — The most popular speaker at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was not a scientist but one of science’s most high-profile advocates: the actor and writer Alan Alda.

Best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the long-running television series “M*A*S*H,” Mr. Alda, 78, has a new mission: helping train scientists to communicate to a wider audience.

Success is something which rarely comes easily. If you examine the lives of some of our most successful CEOS and leaders, you’ll notice a common pattern. All of them, at some point in their personal and professional lives, have had to make sacrifices.

This isn’t to say that the act of sacrifice is what differentiates unsuccessful and successful people. Some entrepreneurs may have sacrificed their home life in order to spend more time at the office, but for others achieving success is a natural process which does not detract from their existing lifestyle. So if sacrifice isn’t the answer – what is?

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At Fueled, we believe that inspiration can come from the strangest places. But it can also be found exactly where you might expect it. If you’re an entrepreneur, who best to learn from than the enterprising men who brought prosperity to the United States? The Men Who Built America is a history docudrama spanning eight hours and four parts and it might teach you a few things about how to bring your ideas from conception to execution.

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Women have long fought for gender equality in the workplace, so one would imagine female entrepreneurs would naturally narrow the salary gap. Yet, a recent study by Babson College showed women are paid less, even when they write their own paycheck.

The study surveyed graduates of Goldman Sachs's Small Business Program and found the gender gap that exists in the workforce also exists amongst entrepreneurs. Women in the United States earn an average of 77 cents for every dollar paid to men.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

Europe has shown the world over the past half century how countries with centuries of conflict can finally cast aside their differences and work together. The European Union has created a single currency, a common patent office, a single public funding source for basic research, and a single legislative body for issues reaching across the continent.

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Obama’s plan to relinquish control of the Internet will enable foreign governments to crack down and limit Internet freedom, according to former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

Clinton joins a lengthy list of critics of the U.S. decision to give up oversight of ICANN, the non-profit organization responsible for managing Web domains and IP standards, Re/code reports. Speaking at Arizona State University, Clinton and Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales voice their doubts that such a change would be beneficial.

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We all intuitively know how important human connections are in business but for many people it’s like exercise or eating well – one of those things you keep meaning to get around to.

It reminds me of a line my wife and I often jokingly say to each other after seeing the awesome film “Notorious” about the life of Biggie Smalls

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At a glance these pictures may look like a photographs, but look closer.

Illustrator Jose Antonio Lopez Vergara spends about 20 hours over three days to draw super-realistic eyeballs. The 19-year-old's attention to detail allows his drawings to look like the real thing.

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Congratulations, you are an entrepreneur! You have a great idea, and are ready to launch your new business. You’re not alone. This year, according to the Small Business Administration, you are among the other 399,999 folks with a great idea poised to open their doors for business.

But don’t worry, there is room for success. The SBA states that you could be one of the two-thirds that survive more than two years or the 44 percent that make it four years.

Imagine a world in which the United States government — not the private sector — is the economy’s indispensable entrepreneur, innovating at the frontiers of science and technology, able and willing to take risks and to persevere through uncertainty.

That is the world depicted in “The Entrepreneurial State,” a recent book by Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at the University of Sussex who specializes in innovation. And it is, in fact, the way the United States has operated since World War II. Through the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies and departments, the government has for decades gone beyond financing research and creating the conditions for innovation to occur; it has also envisioned the future, engaged in the riskiest experimentation and overseen the commercialization process.

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