Why do young people go to college? The straightforward question was posed to 11,113 high school students and 2,960 parents by The Princeton Review in 2021. For 43% of respondents, the answer was “getting a better job with higher income”, while only 25% correlated college with “education”.

Meanwhile, more studies show that 72% of high schoolers plan to start their own business one day, with 61% being specific about becoming entrepreneurs “right after college”. Turns out, the Princeton survey should’ve had one more checkmark: college as a pathway to entrepreneurship. …

According to the Forrester UX report, every $1 that a business invests into its User Experience (UX) gives a $100 return. But UX isn’t just about generating revenue. It’s also about preventing losses. With poor UX pushing as many as 70% of customers to abandon their purchases of a product or service, efforts invested into product development, marketing, and sales may end up just purging your company of dollars and clients.

What goes into making outstanding UX in digital products? How can you know if usability changes, new features, and specific customer wants are worth the trouble of urgent implementation…

Here’s a fun random fact from Merriam Webster: all the pre-digital definitions of the word “application” have to do with “practical use” or “putting something to practical use”. All, except for definition 1c: “assiduous attention”. This one’s not just about usage but its quality: attentiveness.

Coming back to the modern “app” and its application in the framework of simplifying usage, one thing which is certainly missing from many apps is their ability to foster “assiduous attention”. Too often, our fleeting attention spans blow up as we jump from one app to another. The result? …

Transformation is a big word. When we think of transformation in business, we also think in big images, like forces of nature. Business transformation is like a metaphorical earthquake that’s supposed to shake a company from head to toe and where colleagues, like the prophets of old, will suddenly come out renewed and with flames of burning inspiration above each other’s heads.

The reality of business transformation, however, is subtle and long-term. Like all change, it starts from the head of the company: either the entrepreneur(s) in charge, in the case of startups and smaller teams, or CEOs and senior…

“A spoonful of tar spoils a barrel of honey,” goes the old proverb. For most entrepreneurs, if there’s one date on the calendar that spoils the sweet month of April, it’s Income Tax Day. Enter 2021, when Income Tax Day falls in the middle of a global pandemic, and things seem pretty sour.

Unlike last year, when taxpayers got a break until July 15th to file their taxes due to the storm of COVID, this year the IRS has been a lot less compliant. …

On May 5, 1809, a Connecticut woman named Mary Keis made history. She became the first female inventor to secure a patent in the United States for her invention of weaving straw with silk and thread, thus laying grounds for cost-effective manufacture and paving the way for women inventors in the nineteenth century.

Over two hundred years later, as we celebrate Women’s History Month, women may have no trouble getting a patent, but we are still fighting to make our voice heard in the male-dominated leadership arena. The ice is broken. …

Business and economic experts project the future of business after COVID will be a different place than ever before. Yet within this future, the question of growing your brand and scaling business remains as poignant as ever.

The past year has hit small businesses in the non-digital space the hardest. From your favorite bakery next door to an event planner you hired for your kid’s graduation party, to niche lifestyle brands, the economic crisis leaves countless small business owners gasping for ways to grow their brand and scale business in the short and longterm.

What can these businesses and marketers…

Entrepreneurship is in many ways, a mirror to life — you start with a blank page and a head full of ideas. How you fill that page will depend on a lot of inner characteristics— vision, patience, perseverance, empathy, stubbornness. Plus, one external thing— “a dash of luck”.

This elusive “luck” is in many ways, “uncomfortable” things like privilege, background, family, connections, etc. Often enough, “luck” is the collective term for the things we don’t talk about, the things we shush.

For Black entrepreneurs, the above kind of “luck” has been so minimal — or even nonexistent — that historically…