Always interesting to hear how others have made their way into entrepreneurship and continue to reinvent themselves:

When did your experience with entrepreneurism start?
During college I worked on a commercial fishing boat off the New Hampshire coast. I took a year off to start a fishing company called Same Day Fish Company. We sold fish to supermarkets in northern New England. The innovation was that we’d always deliver fish within 24 hours. It was completely fresh and the restaurants could keep the fish for longer.  It was a great business, but it was a brutal business. To get the fish to them within 24 hours basically meant working 24 hours a day.

After that, I worked at Time Inc. for Fortune magazine, and basically came up with ideas for new magazines. From there, I moved to U.S. News & World Report, where I kept coming up with new ideas.

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How do you know if your idea is any good?
The real test for me is if the idea builds momentum the more time you spend with it. I’m a big believer that you have to spend a lot of time with an idea. Good ideas get stronger the more you work on them. You begin to lose interest in weak ideas.

I’ve also gotten to the point where I view that ideas are relatively cheap. Having an idea alone is not what makes a successful company. You need to have a great idea, great timing, and the most important piece: sufficient capital. The idea will need multiple iterations, and that takes time and money.

Interesting look at education entrepreneurship:

But Scialom wasn’t at Wharton or any other business school. The business plan competition in which he and eight other finalists — from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations — competed on Thursday was held by Penn’s Graduate School of Education. Open to any education entrepreneur, the competition focused on bringing together new ideas in the education space with big-time players already in the market.

A focus on business plans and entrepreneurial education is new for Penn and for education schools in general, which have tended to defer to business schools on matters of the marketplace. But some education faculty members, notably Doug Lynch, vice dean at Penn’s education school and director of the business plan competition, are starting to argue that as the world of education continues to evolve, these programs have an important role in teaching and fostering entrepreneurship.

“There are a lot of ideas and a lot of money out there for education, but it’s a very complicated market,” Lynch said. “Ideas and money need a place to come together, and the university can be an honest broker in that process. It’s a safe and neutral place to play, and can provide the technical assistance that comes with higher education.”

Great example of how schools are beginning to increasingly interlink their entrepreneurship and innovative programs:

Mississippi State’s Entrepreneurship Center and Office of Technology Commercialization now are merged in a move designed to enhance the university’s relationships with business and industry.

The new Office of Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer continues efforts to boost efficiency and the land-grant institution’s efforts to capture, protect, manage, and accelerate the commercialization of university-owned and student-generated intellectual property. The property stems from new ideas, inventions, software, and creative works generated by research and other scholarly activities.

Up in Ontario, the Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (ACE) awarded Paulina Masson the 2011 Student Entrepreneur Ontario Champion:

Since 2010, Ms. Masson has owned and operated ContestMob, a community for people who enter online contests on a daily basis. The Google-based application provides a large sweepstakes database, extensive details about each contest and features a contest entries organizer. The business model uses virtual currency and digital goods, which monetize low-income users, as well as also encourages user-generated content and activity on the site.

“I am delighted that the effort I have put into ContestMob is being recognized. This gives me new confidence to continue to grow my business,” she says.

Here is some great entrepreneurship education news out of Ghana:

Sixteen young Ghanaian graduates Saturday graduated with diplomas from the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, East Legon in Accra, with the onerous, almost biblical commission to go and shine amongst men, believing in their capacity to be global winners.

Jorn Lyseggen, Founder and CEO of Meltwater Group, told the young entrepreneurs who had undergone the school’s two-year training programme in software entrepreneurship – programming, software development, business plans development and entrepreneurship skills -that success was possible from anywhere in the world, Ghana inclusive.

It is the reason they must take their destinies into their own hands and confront the world and in the process banish failure. Failure, he said, will come only if they fail to try.

“Today we are living in a wonderful world. Never has individual talent had greater opportunity to change the world. To create a software copy for example, all you need is a computer, a computer costing a few hundred dollars and after that, it’s up to you – your imagination, your drive and your conviction. We hope entrepreneurs being hatched from MEST will inspire generations; the young minds, perhaps in this neighbourhood. We hope that role models from MEST will inspire local youth to believe in themselves, to believe in their own abilities to start companies, to believe in their own abilities to go outside of Africa to compete internationally, to compete with anyone else out there as long as they put their heart and minds to it.

The Boulder area eSpace: The Center for Space Entrepreneurship program is paying dividends:

A $75,000 investment in a Boulder-based non-profit business incubator designed to train new aerospace employees has yielded $1.4 million in salaried jobs to the Colorado economy, according to a review of the program’s first six months.

Since its inception, 60 people have joined the ranks of aerospace workers and better than 70 companies have applied to participate.

Looks to be a great program. 

As always, a large portions of our audience will be made up of entrepreneurs and investors. This year’s event will also have the highest number of startups (speaker and attendees) XSITE has seen yet

Those in the West Michigan area should check it out:

Student teams will dive into the issues surrounding their business concepts, discover how teamwork is crucial in developing a successful idea and will be able to develop key business and communication skills.

The academy in Holland will run  9 a.m. to 3 p.m. July 11-15 at the Grand Valley Meijer campus, 515 S. Waverly Road.

Love, love, love that these types of programs are popping up around the country:

A-B Tech’s Center for Business and Technology Incubation is accepting applications for its two-day summer day camp for rising sixth- to eighth-grade students interested in business ownership.

“The idea behind the middle school camp is to introduce the students to the ideas of entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and fun, interactive activities to engage students,” said Christy Ramm of the A-B Tech Small Business Center. “The two-day camp will give them the foundation for ideas and concepts that will be expanded in the full week long high school camp.”

Students will learn how to apply for a business loan and about resources in their community. They will also gain an understanding of entrepreneurship as a viable career option and meet and learn from successful entrepreneurs.

India is doing work to promote entrepreneurship in Africa:

These exclusive centres devoted to entrepreneurship development would work towards:

•Identifying entrepreneurial potential

•Aiding development to facilitate setting up of small ventures

•Eradicating limiting constraints such as information asymmetry, knowledge gaps or fear of failure, which affect large parts of the population

•Motivating the young generation to consider self-employment and entrepreneurship as a career

•Contributing significantly to improving the health of existing enterprises through counselling and training interventions.

•Organizing courses for support systems like banks and industry promotion agencies, planners and policy-makers to create a fostering environment for the establishment of small and medium enterprises

•Ensuring sustainability of the project by organizing Trainers’ Training Programs who could in turn organize entrepreneurship development programs and extend out-reach of the program.

 

The Valley Girl Meets Dropbox, A Startup Going Head-To-Head With Google http://ow.ly/1BrPP – Great service, use it all the time

Wireless Entrepreneur Sees Opportunity In Haiti – forget about old system, build new robust one http://ow.ly/1rrk5

Barclays entrepreneur competition will award £500,000 in cash to each of the 10 freshest business ideas in the UK. http://ow.ly/1rril

Wes Creel twitter

Thanks!

4 start-up mistakes you must avoid – USATODAY.com http://ow.ly/1cXxY