In mid-September 2013, 10 professionals returning from multi-year career breaks walked into 270 Park Avenue in New York City to begin the J.P. Morgan ReEntry Program. Elsewhere on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse have recently initiated internship programs for return-to-work professionals. The Onramp Fellowship for returning lawyers, backed by four major law firms in 15 cities, opened for applications last month, and MetLife just announced a similar program to commence this spring.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Daydreaming has a bad reputation. Just think of any classroom scene on TV where a teacher is chiding a child for staring out the window during class. Traditionally, those kids have been thought of as slackers, but, according to a recent report on education and entrepreneurship for the UK parliament co-authored by my friend, Professor Andy Penaluna, they’re exhibiting the behavior of innovators. They’re engaging in “relaxed attention.”

During relaxed attention, a problem or challenge is taking up space in your brain, but it isn’t on the front burner. Relaxed attention lies somewhere between meditation, where you completely clear your mind, and the laser-like focus you apply when tackling a tough math problem. Our brains can make cognitive leaps when we’re not completely obsessed with a challenge, which is why good ideas sometimes come to us when we’re in the shower or talking a walk or on a long drive.

Image: http://www.linkedin.com 

Crowdfunding is exploding as a new way of attracting funding and financing for individuals, small businesses and entrepreneurs around the world. In 2013 alone the global crowdfunding industry was responsible for between $3 and $5 billion in funding. With the passage of the JOBS Act and the subsequent revision of 80-year-old US securities regulations, crowdfunding has become a formidable new source of funding for a variety of use cases. It’s truly one of those game-changing concepts that disrupts the traditional industries and players.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2014/03/34255-crowdfunding-fraud-big-threat/ 

Sometimes, it's the little things in life that make you happy.

Today is International Day of Happiness , an initive supported by the United Nation Foundation to create a happy world for people everywhere.

To celebrate, we asked Mashable employees what little things in life makes them happy. For some, a perfectly popped bag of popcorn or clothes fresh out of the dryer is more than enough to put a smile on their face.

Image: FLICKR, LIZ WEST 

Entrepreneurial MBAs are starting their own businesses sooner after graduation than ever before, according to a worldwide survey of business school alumni released this week by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

To all who ask, "Can entrepreneurship be taught?" MIT is here to say, "Yes." And who better to educate the masses than the school producing alumni and students collectively starting anywhere between 900 and 1,000 companies annually?

The Institute unveiled a new massive open online course on the MITx platform, called "Entrepreneurship 101: Who is Your Customer?" The class, now open for registration, is being taught by Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and already has a proven track record of success.

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Despite the benefits—too few entrepreneurs have one

Highlights

• Very few—6%—Canadian small and medium-sized businesses use an advisory board. 
• In fact, 57% of respondents without an advisory board felt that implementing one required too much work, time and effort. 
• Companies with an advisory board do better financially and get invaluable advice. 
• Companies that created an advisory board saw their sales grow almost three times faster in the following three years than in the previous three years.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Most of what the average person reads about entrepreneurship sustains the mystique. We revere the outstanding successes achieved by extreme entrepreneurs -- everyone from Edison to Jobs. Yet, reading about these giants colors our perception of entrepreneurship. We admire their achievements but consider them beyond reach. Their stories often sustain misleading myths about entrepreneurship that keep capable people from embracing an entrepreneurial career. People begin to believe that to travel down the entrepreneurial path, a person must be born with a particular mindset, take reckless risks to achieve high rewards, work all day, everyday and must fail to succeed. Don’t let these misconceptions scare you off. They couldn’t be further from the truth.

Image Courtesy of Victor Habbick / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It is once again time for the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament. The eventual champions will get to bask in the national spotlight. And sure, winning a basketball title is worth bragging about—but we all know the real champion is the institution of higher education that can charge the most tuition and still have enough students to keep its rejection letter printer warm. It's The Awl's annual NCAA bracket by tuition, using the college information resource Peterson's. (Where available, in-state tuition was used.) Since we first began March Madne$$ in 2009, the winning tuition has risen from $38,622 to $47,290.

Image: http://www.theawl.com/ 

“E-mail doesn’t really exist in our generation,” said Caitlin Cheng, a junior at Milton Academy.

Oh, just you wait, I thought, as I listened to a panel of Boston-area high-school students talk about how they use mobile devices. We keep hearing that e-mail is going away—kids don’t use it except for school—yet whenever a new generation hits the workforce, they seem to get sucked into the never-ending inbox vortex.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com 

We hear it all the time…

“The economy still sucks. I’ve sent 50 applications and haven’t gotten one call.”

In many industries and some locations in the US, it is true: the economy still sucks. However, the cold-hard truth is that if you’ve sent 50+ applications and have generated no interest in you as a potential employee, something else sucks more than the economy…

Your resume.

But it isn’t as simple as that.

Entrepreneurs, Gov. Pat McCrory wants you to know you have a cheerleader in Raleigh. McCrory, taking a break from his schedule on Thursday to chat all things entrepreneurship, tells me he’s waving the metaphorical pom-poms every chance he gets, touting North Carolina as an up-and-coming state for startups. It’s a mission that packs a bigger punch following a recent trip to Silicon Valley, which gave the governor several talking points to add to his collection.

Image: John West - Gov. Pat McCrory 

Starbucks Chief Operating Officer Troy Alstead in a phone interview with the Chicago Tribune that the restaurant chain would expand its light bites and night alcohol menu. The new menu would include Malbec wine and bacon wrapped dates. The new menu would be implemented in thousand of stores which is expected to help boost company sales after several years, said Alstead.

Maybe your company has figured out a way to connect refrigerators to smart phones to notify people when they're out of milk.

If so, your business is probably on the right track, and big time investors think so too. Venture capital money is flooding into the so-called Internet of Things, as well as wearable smart devices, and other hardware companies. Both the industry and investor interest are nascent, so if connecting light switches and ovens to the Internet is your thing, go for it now.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

When we talk about “professionalism,” it’s easy to fall back into the “I know it when I see it” argument.

For Emily Heaphy, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Boston University, and her colleagues, this isn’t a cop-out. The notion of being seen as professional may be central to how we define success in the U.S. — and, consequently, how and why certain people aren’t able to attain it, depending on how well they adhere to social norms. In particular, Heaphy and the other researchers set out to study “one potential culturally bounded workplace norm — that of minimizing references to one’s life outside of work.”

Image: http://blogs.hbr.org 

The recommendations of a European Research and Innovation Area Board (ERIAB) report on how to shape a more comprehensive and efficient research and innovation policy for the EU came under the spotlight at the Innovation Convention 2014 last week, in a panel discussion between ERIAB members, and representatives of two advisory groups, innovation for growth (i4g) and the European Forum of Forward Looking Activities (EFFLA).

Image: Prof. Luc Soete, Rector of Maastricht University, Chair of ERIAB, ©EC/CE 

In a period of massive change, franchises die and are born, previously unimagined models emerge, and incumbents that are too focused on “protecting share” find themselves closing their doors. The healthcare industry represents nearly a fifth of U.S. GDP and it is going through such a period of dramatic change as we speak.  The product companies that dominate the marketplace today find themselves cash rich but growth poor.  At the same time an army of inventors and visionaries in biotechnology, medical devices, diagnostics, health care services, healthcare IT, and consumer health fields are eager to provide a new model for the future.

Image: Kerry A. Dolan Forbes Staff 

One of the great memes out there in trying to diagnose persistently high unemployment and anemic job growth during what is still, I argue, the Great Recession is the so-called “skills gap”. The idea here is that the fact that there are millions of unfilled job openings at the same time millions of people can’t find work can be chalked up to a lack of a skills match between unemployed workers an open positions. To pick one random example out of many, here’s the way US News and World Report put it last year:

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

In a world perfumed by freshly popped popcorn and exhaust fumes, where sea breezes can mingle with the scents of sweet flowers or wet paint, new research has found that humans are capable of discriminating at least one trillion different odors. Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists determined that our sense of smell is prepared to recognize this vast olfactory palette after testing individuals’ ability to recognize differences between complex odors mixed in the laboratory.

Image Courtesy of Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This title is intentionally provocative; sorry about that.

It seems to go against conventional wisdom of all those Forbes and Harvard Business Review guys, right? We should be adding pleasure into our work so that we want to go to work every day and ultimately, be insanely successful entrepreneurs who rarely, if ever, fail. But alas, I would like to say that there are plenty of times that work is not what I want to do. It’s what I have to do. Allow me to explain.

Image: http://under30ceo.com/