Shauna Mei isn’t your typical MIT grad.

After graduating with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering, Mei dabbled in finance before transitioning to the world of luxury retail and design. She now serves as the CEO of AHAlife, a luxury e-commerce website that gives customers the opportunity to discover high-end items not commonly available online. Mei believes that her willingness to take risks with bold, dream-worthy products sets AHAlife apart from the crowd.

This model was developed by Smilor in 1987 by refining Campbell’s model (1985). Smilor created structure model via describing main incubator affiliates, support systems and description of main outcomes of the incubation process. He considers an incubator as a transformation mechanism that assist entrepreneur in building a venture. Even though the representation of the model doesn’t provide extensive information about particular services that business incubator  supplies to tenants, Smilor categorizes the benefits that business incubators provide to their tenants through four dimensions.

The autonomous vehicle industry has been given its first Federal blessing Friday morning. The Department of Transportation is recognizing that it must work alongside technology companies and carmakers if it wants regulations and laws to have a hope of keeping up with driverless cars. But the outstanding question still on every drivers' mind: are these vehicles actually legal? 

While not condoning the use of fully driverless cars, the DOT issued a non-binding policy statement to states, advising them to use driverless cars for testing only. The DOT also stressed that some forms of autonomy in vehicles can save lives, like speed adjustment, lane-centering and driver monitoring to watch for dangers like falling asleep at the wheel. 

Since it opened in May 2012, Chicago’s 1871 incubator and co-working space has been one of the most hyped and studied programs in the startup world.

The name refers to the year of Chicago’s Great Fire. Out of that disaster emerged a city that grew to be a hub of global commerce.

Businesses apply to 1871 and essentially receive an upscale co-working environment, with access to high-quality speakers, events and corporate sponsors.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the 86 teams that will travel to St. Petersburg, Russia, in July to compete in the 11th annual Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in pursuit of $1,000,000 in cash prizes and other awards. Each team’s innovative ideas, mastery of integrated technology and development of a strong business plan helped them compete in their country during the year, then rise above their peers for the opportunity to represent their country at Microsoft’s annual global student technology competition. Imagine Cup is part of the Microsoft YouthSpark initiative to create opportunities for millions of young people around the world.

More students competed in Imagine Cup worldwide this year than ever before, with a more than 70 percent increase from 2012. The best projects advanced to country-level competitions that determined the national teams, while additional teams advanced via a global online competition. Students could compete via Competitions as well as themed Challenges. Competitions are cornerstone events for Imagine Cup that require students to complete applications built on Microsoft technology aligned to three key focus areas: Innovation, World Citizenship and Games.

The older you are, the better your ability to innovate, says Tom Agan, co-founder and managing partner of Rivia and author of the recent New York Times article “Why Innovators Get Better with Age."

When you think of the face of innovation, what do you picture? Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook while at Harvard? The Stanford University students who created the explosively successful app Snapchat? Given the media’s focus on stories like these, you might think that innovation was a young person’s game.

The Affordable Care Act is expected to produce a sharp increase in entrepreneurship next year, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute and Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. The number of self-employed people is expected to rise by 1.5 million — a relative increase of more than 11 percent — as a direct result of the health care overhaul.

One major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States — beside the usual risks involved with starting a company — is that it has been difficult to get health insurance on the individual market. Those who do end up founding or joining a start-up are often able to do so because they have a spouse with employer-sponsored insurance, or because they are keeping a day job with a bigger company. (This was the case, for example, for most of the people involved with Leap2, a Kansas City start-up that I profiled last fall.)

Search the web for "innovation" and you'll see 395 million results -- from the sublime to the ridiculous -- including methods, books, gurus, motivational speakers and logo wear. Yes, there's probably an app for that.

However, the secret to actually doing innovation isn't in a corporate slogan on a mouse pad, a TED talk or book -- it's having guts; the good, old-fashioned courage to be a change maker, and avoid being a change breaker.

If you are the person who organises and manages an enterprise, especially a business with usually considerable initiative and risk, then you are an entrepreneur.  And just like the challenges of any endeavour, entrepreneurs also have theirs. As an entrepreneur, there are challenges you will have to overcome on your way to the top. Entrepreneurs are commonly known as businessmen because they take the financial risk of running businesses.

When a person decides to start or run his/her own business, there are a number of entrepreneurial challenges that are likely to be faced. Real entrepreneurs who love what they do don’t let these challenges stop them from starting or running the business of their dreams.

If you understand how you think and feel about money, you may be able to make more of it.

Financial decisions aren't just about dollars and cents. For most people, they're often rife with emotions and preconceived notions. By analyzing your attitudes about spending and saving, you may be able to make better financial decisions, according to Baltimore, Md.-based certified public accountant Tope Ganiyah Fajingbesi. She groups these attitudes into five financial personality types and assigned each one a color to make the concepts easier to understand. Here is a brief synopsis:

So many of the entrepreneurs I work and speak with are women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s with awesome business-building ideas and the intellectual and network capital to make it happen. Some are first-time entrepreneurs; others are serial entrepreneurs; others are transitioning from corporate roles to entrepreneurship or from being a CEO in one industry to a founder or C-level executive in another.

While many of the women ask me practical “how-to” questions directly related to commercializing their ideas or launching their businesses, all of the women talk about the challenges they face after they begin living as entrepreneurs.

Michigan’s University Research Corridor is proving to be a powerful business incubator for students and alumni, playing a dramatically increased role in nurturing start-up efforts and providing a boost to aspiring entrepreneurs, a new report shows.

Graduates of the three universities that make up the URC – Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University -- have started or acquired businesses at double the national average rate among college graduates since 1996, according to the Embracing Entrepreneurship report released May 30 by the URC at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference.

There's a chicken-and-egg aspect to the debate over how to stimulate angel and venture capital in Wisconsin, best captured by the question: What comes first, the strong company deals or the investors with dollars to support them?

Two recent reports suggest the answer is resoundingly "both."

The "egg" of emerging high-growth companies is becoming more evident in Wisconsin, where 2012 data collected by the Wisconsin Angel Network and state government showed rising numbers of young companies in the pipeline.

Innovation is a curious beast. We tend to think of it as a static concept – and how ironic is that? If one idea should be in constant flux it is the idea of innovation. Yet we are still drawn back to ideas like the innovator’s dilemma or open innovation.

I’m going to offer a different, more dynamic view at the AMPLIFY festival tomorrow and wanted to share that with you.

AngelList, a site that connects startups and early-stage investors, is rolling out a long-anticipated equity crowdfunding service to its users this week, according to Chief Executive Naval Ravikant. Dubbed AngelList Invest, the service has been available to a handful of companies, by invitation only, since December 2012. Eighteen startups, including Transcriptic Inc ., Double Robotics Inc. and Tred Inc., raised $6.7 million in funding commitments from 620 investors via AngelList during that test period

Ryan Blair was heading down a bad road as a teenager. A high school dropout and juvenile hall denizen, no one saw him on a path to running multimillion-dollar companies. With the guidance of a real estate entrepreneur, though, Blair turned his life around, a journey he’s recounted in his book “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain,” which hit No. 1 on the New York Times’s paperback how-to list.

WE ALL WISH THERE WERE MORE HOURS IN THE DAY. START USING THE TIME YOU HAVE MORE WISELY AND SEE HOW MUCH YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH IN LESS TIME.

In Gothenburg, Sweden, recently, officials proposed an experiment: Some chunk of government workers--now working seven-hour days--would cut their schedules to six hours. Would they be just as productive as their seven-hour colleagues if they left a little earlier?

Image Courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

That person whose face you can't place? He or she may just look like that donut you just ate.

A new photo series, Donut Double, pairs six people with donuts that look remarkably like them. For the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show, photographer Brandon Voges and ad agency The Marlin Network collaborated with Strange Donuts to create this human-donuts lookalike series.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com/ - That person whose face you can't place? He or she may just look like that donut you just ate. 

To advertisers, there is only one knock on the Science 2.0 audience; there are too many women.

Before we complain about the sexism of advertisers, we have to take the issue on its merits. When we think of technological innovation, we think of men. Is it because it's always been men due to a legacy culture or are men actually more innovative? Fashion designers don't advertise here because science is not their audience and technology companies don't advertise here because women are not their audience, yet we know women adopt technology. 

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

We don’t like to dwell too much on the decline of print media, because quite frankly it’s depressing. But every now and then a statistic or chart comes along that sums up the wrenching transformation that is going on in the newspaper business, and we’ve had two pop up recently that are worth noting. Both are aimed at the same fundamental issue: namely, the fact that the decline in print-advertising revenue — which has been in free-fall for years now — is not stopping, or even slowing down, any time soon. If anything, it is likely to accelerate.

Image: Flickr / Monik Markus