People who can’t manage their own lives don’t make good entrepreneurs. Small businesses require multi-tasking, work prioritization, and decision-making, with no entourage of assistants and specialists. That’s why Fortune 500 executives usually don’t survive as startup CEOs.

First you have to learn to accept total responsibility for things that happen to your business, just like you are responsible for everything in your personal life. Maybe you are comfortable with having a spouse in control of your personal life, but couples running a business are high risk.

Multitasking — when you hear the word, do you think of something negative or positive?

Well, some recent studies show that the act of multitasking actually makes most people feel really good about themselves emotionally.

“There’s this myth among some people that multitasking makes them more productive,” study researcher Zheng Wang, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, said in a statement. “But they seem to be misperceiving the positive feelings they get from multitasking. They are not being more productive — they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work.”

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When you walk into SinglePlatform's office, you'll see customer testimonials lining the walls, inspirational quotes and artwork chalked onto a pillar painted with chalkboard paint, and Lego blocks towering over the desks of sales staff, each piece to indicate a goal that was met. The walls are plastered with printouts of customer testimonials praising the company for great service. In the hall, an employee takes three swings at a Wiffle ball in attempt to garner a ticket in the raffle.

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Ryan Caldbeck has plenty of reason to think crowdfunding can play well with the existing funding ecosystem. After all, he runs CircleUp, an equity crowdfunding platform focused on consumer and retail companies.

But his position at CircleUp, and previous 10 years in private equity, give him pretty good insight on just how crowdfunding will work with angels, VCs and private equity firms. He shares that insight in a post on Forbes and finds, perhaps not too surprisingly, that crowdfunders and existing players will actually play well together.

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By: Joesph P. Allen and Diane Palmintera

On May 20, 2013, the White House Lab-To-Market Inter-Agency Summit was held in Washington, D.C. The Summit was organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The purpose of the meeting was extraordinary: asking national experts outside of the federal agency system to recommend ways to increase the return-on-investment for the $140 billion annual taxpayer expenditure on federally-funded research and development.

The format for the meeting also was unusual. Research agencies nominated 20 national experts experienced in various phases of technology commercialization to participate in the Summit. The Administration placed no preconditions or limitations on the expert Panel and asked it to focus on “transformative” ideas. We were privileged to be asked to serve as the Summit’s co-chairs.

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At ShipWorks, corporate strategy and architectural design are elegantly aligned.

The company connects online sellers directly with shipping companies. They aim to make virtual retail transparent and seamless. Step into their new headquarters and you’re immediately greeted by an expanse of glass and white walls that disappears into views of iconic St. Louis landmarks: the Arch, Busch Stadium, the Mississippi. Friendly bursts of color take the form of an orange Saarinen womb chair or a bright pink wall. A door created by local steel artist John Beck displays pieces of ShipWorks’ source code handwritten on its wooden handle.

If you can’t deal with failure, then the entrepreneur lifestyle is not for you. Don’t believe that urban myth that all you need is a good idea, a little fun work, and the money will start rolling in. When you are pushing the limits, nobody gets it right the first time, or even maybe the tenth time. That’s why the term “pivot” was invented, so you don’t have to call every change a failure.

Thomas Edison called every failure an experiment (now it would be a pivot), and each one told him successfully what didn’t work. Mistakes are more insidious, and should be avoided at all costs (use your advisors and other resources). Mistakes are things you do on purpose, with negative consequences already known by many others, because you didn’t do your homework.

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Some startups that fail initially look like they'll be giant successes. That's because they're able to drum up a ton of traffic or users very quickly, and early adoption can be a sign of a lasting product. It's also easiest to attract investors when a company is in hyper-growth mode. Sometimes, those high traffic numbers are fleeting; they're uncontrollable gifts from a big source like Facebook that can be taken away. Other times, startups use tricks to inflate growth and attract investors, but they're usually unsustainable.

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If there’s one area of innovation in the airline industry right now that’s really taking off, it’s in building bigger and better first-class and business-class seats, as Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson writes.

In a rush to squeeze as much money as possible out of business travelers willing to pay thousands of dollars for a premium seat, the airlines have created a cottage R&D industry that fetishizes things such as the lie-flat seat. And it’s not just the biggest airline majors — even JetBlue is now breaking with its decade-long policy of full-coach seating to introduce it’s first-ever lie-flat seats.

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I recently took a test drive in one of Tesla’s luxurious Model S electric cars and toured its R&D labs, where it’s developing its battery and recharging technology. The experience left me believing that Tesla has an important edge over its competitors in the race to bring electric cars to the masses.

One of the hottest topics in business management today is open innovation. The concept uses an open business model for companies to “co-innovate” with their partners, suppliers, and customers – in order to accelerate the rewards of innovation. For example, a small or midsized company develops a game-changing new idea and works with a larger company to bring the product to market.

Through the collaborative relationship of open innovation, companies are able to leverage new ideas and products, and conduct experiments at lower risk levels. However, open innovation does bring up some concerns, like who owns rights to the intellectual property (IP). Open innovation should be conducted in a manner that promotes mutual trust and respect. It can be a double-edged sword when the larger company insists on owning the IP in exchange for their investment. The open innovation relationship can be a tricky one to navigate.

This gallery provides an abbreviated version of the E.A.T. (Entrepreneur Aptitude Test) survey developed by Tony Tjan, Richard Harrington and Tsan-Yun Hsieh. The questions will help you begin to understand your dominant traits, but for a full and comprehensive assessment visit HGL.com.

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There is one way to avoid outliving your money: Work longer, on your own terms.

You may not want to or be able to retire at 65 or 67, but so what. If you're doing work you enjoy in your own business, setting your own schedule, fulfilling goals you've set yourself -- it may not even feel like work. Pursuing their professional dreams while working for themselves has enabled many older self-employed workers to secure their financial future.

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Many people who work with startup companies say that entrepreneurs are among the healthiest people they know. The reason, they note, may relate to the disciplined and driven personalities required for entrepreneurship, along with the flexible work schedules self-employment allows.

But I know a different startup story. Most of my friends are men who graduated from Stanford in the past few years, which is to say, most of my friends are entrepreneurs. And many have dropped off the map for long stretches of time, only to resurface looking awful, with bags under their eyes and shoulders hunched under the weight of so much responsibility. I have long wondered if my friends were the exception or the rule.

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In 1985, about 250 college courses taught entrepreneurship, according to a paper published (PDF) this month by the Kauffman Foundation. In 2008, 5,000 such courses were on offer at two- and four-year institutions in the U.S. Today, nearly 400,000 students take college classes on entrepreneurship each year.

Despite that growth, or perhaps because of it, there’s a budding crisis in entrepreneurship education, says Bill Aulet, managing director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Too many courses take a storytelling approach, in which a successful entrepreneur tells students their secrets of success—“clapping for credit,” Aulet calls it. When the semester ends and students try to launch businesses, they don’t know where to start. Other courses focus on one idea—blue ocean strategy, say, or the lean startup model—to the exclusion of others.

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For those of you who find it too troublesome to paint your own bicycles, Pure Fix Cycles has designed a bicycle which glows in the dark to ensure your safety during night rides.

Called ‘The Kilo’, Pure Fix Cycles claims that it is the very first glow-in-the-dark bicycle—with highly reflective, glow-in-the-dark-paint that requires just an hour of sunlight to activate.

DreamIt Ventures' accelerator program debuted its 15 new graduates Wednesday in New York City. The 15 startups gathered for DreamIt's Demo Day to present their projects to media companies, venture capital firms, law firms, advisors, and other investors.

The startups represented a wide range of topics, from the recreational to the supremely functional. Video games, sustainable energy optimization, e-learning, and data aggregation platforms were all part of the program, and the startup founders were happy to share their wide range of backgrounds, interests, and life stories.

In this in-depth article Jackie Hutter, top IP Strategist and counselor to innovation driven organizations, writes about how to improve the ROI of innovation outcomes by including patent expertise in the front end of the innovation process. The article also includes managerial implications and guidelines for including patent experts in the front end of the innovation process.

While it's obvious that negative life changes lead to stress, psychologists have found the positive changes load up our stress levels as well. According to one well-known scale, experiencing outstanding personal achievement is more stressful than having trouble with your boss or taking on a mortgage.

Maybe that's why the entrepreneurial set is prone to panic attacks: Whether we're going through the trough of sorrow or peak experiences, the volatility we invite into our lives can be tough to deal with.

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About one year ago GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) set up a division to study the electrical impulses along the peripheral nervous system and develop technologies to read, change, or manipulate these impulses to treat acute and chronic diseases. Now it’s launched a $50 million venture capital fund to invest in companies with pioneering technology in this emerging field of bioelectronics, according to a company statement.

The Action Potential Venture Capital fund, which will be based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes its name from the electrical signals that pass along the nerves in the body. Problems with the patterns of these impulses are associated with a broad range of diseases.