Entrepreneurial

This weekend a horde of entrepreneurs and business leaders will lay siege to New York’s financial district as part of the Kairos Global Summit.

Over the next 48 hours, 350 student entrepreneurs will mingle with high-profile mentors in their field at the New York Stock Exchange, the United Nations (both partners of the summit) and the Rockefeller Estate in upstate New York to brainstorm practical solutions for a better future.

The event is the brainchild of 20-year-old Ankur Jain, founder of the non-profit Kairos Society that organizes the summit. Jain, who graduates from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania this year, started the society when he was a freshman in college. The thrust of the Kairos Society is to create companies that build a sustainable and good future. (Kairos is an ancient Greek word that means the opportune moment.)

“We’re all in college and everyone is so damn Wall Street focused, so I wanted to take all these really bright students and allow them to create their own destiny,” Jain said. “We need job creation and innovation right now and we are creating jobs and economic value while taking on world problems.”

Since its inception in 2008, the Kairos Society has acquired just under 700 fellows, including alumni. They come from 18 different colleges around the world including China, India and Europe. Past and present mentors include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former president Bill Clinton, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange Duncan Niederauer, Chairman of Cushman & Wakefield Bruce Mosler, CNBC host Maria Bartiromo and many more.

– Daniel Isenberg is Professor of Management Practice at Babson Global and founding executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project. Dr. Isenberg has been an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, consultant, and educator, having taught at Harvard, Columbia, Technion, INSEAD, and Reykjavik. –

The White House recently convened an unprecedented consortium of public and private entities to announce the launch of Startup America. The purpose was to galvanize a coordinated effort to define and implement President Obama’s vision and strategy to foster entrepreneurship and provide more push to the United States’ economic development.

Startup America has a lot going for it: a broad group of influential entrepreneurship stakeholders, real entrepreneurs at the heart of the dialogue, a sincerely committed president and an independent convening S.W.A.T. team who are making entrepreneurship a top priority and a powerful, well-connected, smart board with a smart-looking interim CEO. In my book, Startup America has gotten the basics right; I don’t take this lightly – my observations of more than two dozen countries is that very few have done even this.